Black Man / Thirteen

Then Tom Norton was in his way. Restraining hands on him, pushing him back.

“That’s enough,” the COLIN exec said.

Carl nailed him with a look. “Get your hands off me.”

“I said that’s enough. We need him conscious.”

At their feet, Jeff huddled away from the blows, curled up fetally on the floor space between coffee table and sofa. Carl stared at Norton a moment longer, then jerked a nod. He dragged the Human Cost director back to the sofa and dumped him there. Bent so he was eye-to-eye with him.

“I told you not to make me guess again,” he said evenly. “Now what happened to the Wyoming camp when Scorpion folded?”

“All right.” The words burst out of Jeff Norton like a dam breaking. His nose had started bleeding again, was leaking into his cupped hands. “We torched it, we fucking torched it, all right? Scorpion went in, they killed everyone, the subjects and the hired staff. Then they mined it, blew it up, and burned everything to the ground. Left nothing but the ashes.”

In his mind, Carl saw how it would be, the sporadic clatter of small arms, the wailing panic and truncated shrieks, dying away to quiet and the crackle of flames. The ripcord string of crunch-thump explosions through the camp as the placed charges went up. And later, walking away, the fire on the darkened skyline in the distance when you turned to look back. Like Ahvaz, like Tashkent, like the hotels in Dubai. The age-old signal. The beast is out.

“And no one said anything?” Norton asked, disbelieving.

“Oh Jesus, Tom, have you been listening to any fucking thing I’ve said?” Jeff sobbed out a snot-thickened laugh. “This is the Republic you’re talking about. You know, Guantanamo syndrome? Do it far enough away and no one gives a shit.”

Carl moved back to the desk and leaned against its edge. It wasn’t interrogation procedure; he should keep proximity, keep up the pressure. But he didn’t trust himself within arm’s reach of Jeff Norton.

“Okay,” he said grimly. “Scorpion Response ties all these people together, gives them a dirty little secret to keep, and Scorpion Response buries their details so there are no links left on the flow. None of that explains killing them all now, fourteen, fifteen years later. Someone’s cleaning house again. So why now?”

The Human Cost director lifted his bloodied face and bared his teeth in a stained grin. He seemed to be shaking, coming apart with something that was almost laughter.

“Career fucking progression,” he said bitterly. “Ortiz.”

CHAPTER 50

They caught a crack-of-dawn Cathay Pacific bounce to New York the following morning. Carl would have preferred not to wait, but he needed time to make a couple of calls and plan. Also, he wanted Tom Norton to sleep on his choices—if he could sleep at all—and face the whole thing in the cold light of a new day. All things considered, he was playing with better cards than he’d expected, but Norton was still an unknown quantity, all the more so for the way things had finally boiled down at the Human Cost Foundation.

At the airport, Norton’s COLIN credentials got them fast-tracked through security and aboard before anyone else. Carl sat in a preferential window seat, waiting for the shuttle to fill, and stared out at an evercrete parking apron whipped by skirling curtains of wind-driven rain. Past the outlines of the terminal buildings, a pale, morose light was leaking across the sky between thick gunmetal cloud. The bad weather had blown in overnight and looked set to stick around.

Forecasts for New York said cold, dry, and clear. The thoughts in his head were a match.

The suborb shuttle shifted a little on its landing gear, then started to back out. Carl flexed his right hand, then held it cupped. Remembered the smooth glass weight of the ornament from the Human Cost director’s desk. He glanced across at Tom Norton in the seat next to him. The COLIN exec caught his eye—face haggard with the demons that had kept him from sleep.

“What?”

Carl shook his head. “Nothing. Just glad you’re along.”

“Leave me the fuck alone, Marsalis. I made a promise. I’ll keep it. I don’t need your combat bonding rituals.”

“Not about bonding,” Carl looked back at the window. “I’m glad you’re here because this would have been about a hundred times harder to do without you.”

Brief quiet. In the window, the terminal building slid out of view as the shuttle turned to taxi. He could feel Norton hesitate.

“That wouldn’t have stopped you, though,” he said finally. “Would it?”

Carl rolled his head to face front, pressed back into the seat’s cushioning. He hadn’t had a lot of sleep, either. Elena Aguirre had sat in the darkened corners of his hotel room on and off all night, pretending to be Sevgi Ertekin and not quite pulling it off.

“Not in the end, no.”

“Is that how you do it?” Norton asked him.

“Do what?”

“Become a thirteen. Is that what it’s about, just not letting yourself be stopped?”

Carl shot him a surprised look. “No. It’s about genetic wiring. Why, you feeling left out?”

“No.” Norton sank back in his seat as well. “Just trying to understand.”

The shuttle trundled steadily out toward the runway. Rain swept the windowpane, smeared diagonal with the wind. Soft chime—the fasten webbing sign lit on the LCLS panel above their heads, complete with animated instructions. They busied themselves with the thick, padded tongues of fabric. Like the siren-song lull of v-format prep, Carl usually had a hard time with how it felt once the webbing had him in its grip—it triggered tiny escape impulses across his body that he had to consciously hold down with Osprey-trained calm. But this time, he finished smoothing the cross-folds over one another, drew a deep breath, and found, with a shock like trying to walk up a step that wasn’t there, that he felt nothing at all. Only the sense of anchored purpose, soaking coldly through him like the woken mesh.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the man at his side. “About your brother. I’m sorry it had to work out this way.”

Norton said nothing.

Across the aisle and back, a soft but urgent chiming signaled that some idiot had failed to web up correctly. An attendant appeared and hurried down past them to help out. The shuttle’s motors picked up their idling whine, began to build force. On the LCLS panel, soft purple lettering in Chinese, then English, then Spanish, then Arabic, swelling forward, fading out. On station.

Carl glanced at the silent COLIN exec. “That’s part of the reason you’re here, right?”

“Sevgi’s the reason I’m here.” Norton’s voice came out tight.

The engines outside reached shrieking pitch; the shuttle unstuck and hurled itself down the runway. Carl felt himself pressed back into the cushioning once more, this time with outside force beyond his own strength.

He closed his eyes and gave himself up to it.

They hit the sky on screaming turbines. The suborbital fuel lit and kicked them up around the curve of the world. The webbing hugged them tight and close.

“Fucking Ortiz,” said Norton loudly, beside him.

In the judder and thrum of the trajectory, it wasn’t clear if he was talking to the man or just about him. And this time his tone was loose and hard to define, but somewhere at the bottom of it Carl thought he could hear something like despair.

Norton hadn’t really been surprised when Jeff spat the name out, but not because it wasn’t a shock. Simply, surprise wasn’t an option anymore: the glandular wiring that would have supplied it was ru

Somehow it did.