Black Man / Thirteen

Like unhuman monsters, home from Mars.

It was the dynamic Ortiz had built his whole cover-up effort around. A monster stalks us! All hands to the palisades and the torches! Don’t ask, don’t ever ask who’s really making all this happen.

A head poked up from down near the river. Carl let him have a good look around, then fired off another burst. Stone chips and dust leapt in the air; the head jerked back down.

Just so they’re clear on the situation.

“Marsalis?”

Manco Bambarén’s voice. Carl got his back to the side of the window space, stayed in the shadows, and edged an eye around. Steep early-afternoon sunlight flooded down into the canyon. If you crouched and peered upward, you could just see the rich angled fall of it past the rim, and a restful blue gloom beneath where the higher parts of the valley wall were cast in shadow. It was very quiet now that the helicopters were gone—the whirring scrape of crickets, and the buzzing of flies on the bodies outside.

“Black man, is that you?”

“Good guess,” he shouted back, dumping Bambarén’s Spanish for Quechua. “What do you want?”

Brief hesitation. Carl wondered if Onbekend maybe couldn’t follow a conversation in Quechua—there was no guarantee he’d have learned it in his time living hidden up on the altiplano. He’d get by easily enough with Spanish and English. And as Bambarén’s pet pistaco, he’d have no need to integrate with the locals. Standard thirteen isolation would work like a dream.

Sure enough, Bambarén stayed in Spanish. “It’s really about what you want, Marsalis. Can we talk?”

“Sure. Come on in.”

“You guarantee not to shoot me before you’ve heard what I have to say?”

Carl gri

“Yes. I will.”

“Then come on across. No weapons, no body armor, hands where I can see them.” Carl paused. “Oh yeah, and bring your brother with you.”

Long, long silence. The crickets scraped in the heated air outside.

“What’s the matter, Manco? You not been watching the feeds? It’s all burned down now, didn’t you know? Ortiz is gone, COLIN are cleaning house. We know all about Onbekend. So let’s see both of you.”

It took a couple of minutes, but then the two figures emerged from the cover down by the path and walked steadily up toward the lodge, hands clasped over their heads. Carl watched them over the Steyr’s sight. Onbekend was holding one arm lopsided, as if it hurt to lift. Carl remembered Sevgi in the Bayview bar—Hit him a couple of times, but not enough to put him down. Thirteens, huh.

Yeah, we’re tough motherfuckers.

He lined up on Onbekend’s face, flexed his trigger finger a couple of times, took up the tension. Then let it go, put the gun aside impatiently. He picked up a handgun, another Glock, from the pile on the floor, checked the load, and snapped the slide. As Bambarén and Onbekend reached the doorway, he stepped back, mindful of sniping angles through the picture window, and wagged the pistol at them.

“Come on in.”

Onbekend stared at him, spat out English. “Where is she, Marsalis?”

“Not so hasty. Back there to the table in the alcove, both of you. Hands on your head at all times. I’m not going to mess about patting you down, so if either of you do move a hand anywhere near your body without my permission, I’ll just make the assumption and kill you. Got that?”

Bambarén pivoted back and forth slightly, eyes sweeping the open-plan space inside the lodge. Understanding widened his eyes.

“You came here alone?”

“Go to the table. Sit down in the two chairs I’ve pulled out. Keep your hands on your heads until you’re seated, and then put them on the table in front of you. No sudden moves. Sudden movement will get you dead.”

He tugged the door closed, pulled it until the latch whined over into lock.

“Marsalis, I have fifteen men out there.” Bambarén’s voice was low and conversational as he walked to the table. He’d shifted into English as well. “You’re sealed in. Let’s talk about this.”

“We’re going to talk about it. But you’re going to be sitting down when we do. Hands where I can see them, and then flat on the table in front of you.”

They seated themselves, awkward with the need to keep their hands lifted. Bambarén took the head of the table, Onbekend the seat adjacent. This far back in the open-plan space, the lodge made inroads into the cliff face and it was cool and dim, so the two men looked like part of some arcane spiritualist gathering, stiff-backed in the chairs, palms down on the wood, expressions taut. Carl pulled out a chair opposite Onbekend and sat in it, well back from the edge of the table. He floated the Glock on his knee.

“And now what?” the other thirteen asked evenly.

“Now we talk about why I shouldn’t kill you both. Any ideas?”

“Are you so anxious to die, black man?” Bambarén asked.

Carl gave him a faint smile. “Well, fifteen-to-one is long odds, it’s true. But then again, eight-to-one didn’t look good, either, and there they all are, out there for the flies.”

“Have you learned nothing?” Onbekend was looking at him with the same contempt he’d given off in the Bayview bar. “Are you still nothing better than a soldier for the cudlips?”

Bambarén stiffened. Carl put a small smile together.

“Want to be careful who you use that word around, brother. It’s not Manco here’s fault he didn’t get an upgraded limbic system and a beefed-up area thirteen out of Isabela’s raw materials.”

Onbekend barely flickered a glance at Bambarén. “I’m not talking about Manco, and he knows it. I’m talking about the men at the UN you sold your soul to.”

“I’m not here for them.”

Onbekend’s eyes narrowed. “Then why did you come?”

“Because you killed a friend of mine.”

“If you have friends, hired man, then I don’t know them. Who have I killed?”

“You shot a woman called Sevgi Ertekin, a police officer, when she chased you out into the street in Bayview. You shot her with a Haag pistol, and she died.”

“Were you fucking her?”

“Yeah, we were fucking each other. Rather like you and Jurgens.”

Onbekend’s face whitened as he saw the corollary. He cleared his throat.

“It was a firefight,” he said quietly. “Not personal. You would have done the same in my place.”

Carl thought of Garrod Horkan camp and Gaby. The Haag shells knocking her down.

“That’s not the issue.”

“Then what is?”

Carl stared at the other thirteen. “Payment.”

“Listen to me, Marsalis.” Manco Bambarén, misunderstanding what he’d heard. “Whatever you think you’re owed, we can come to an agreement.”

“Manco, shut up.” The tayta looked at Onbekend as if the thirteen had slapped him. Onbekend ignored him, maybe didn’t even notice. His eyes had never left Carl’s face. “You want me to buy Greta’s life with my own?”

“Why not? It’s the same deal you offered Toni Montes in the Freeport, isn’t it? Her life for her children.”

Onbekend looked down at his hands. “If you knew what Toni Montes had done with her life before she acquired that name, had done with other children before she acquired her own, you would perhaps not judge me so harshly.”

“I don’t judge you at all. I just want you dead.”

“If you kill him, black man, you’ll have to kill me as well.” There was a quiet determination in Bambarén’s voice. “And then my men will cut you down like a rabid dog.”

Carl threw him a glance. He smiled, shook his head a little.

“You’re really enjoying having a younger brother all over again, aren’t you, Manco. Well, I don’t suppose I can blame you. But do you want to know something about this brother of yours?” He nodded at Onbekend. “This brother of yours is a twin. You’ve actually got two younger brothers by way of your mother’s rather desperate attempts to stay afloat in Peru’s new corporate dream. The other one’s called Allen Merrin. Unfortunately, he’s dead. Do you want to know why?”