Black Man / Thirteen

Garcia took the phone as if it might bite him, held it gingerly to his ear. You couldn’t hear what Parris said to him—it was a good phone, and the projection cone was tight. But his face flushed as he listened. His eyes switched from Carl to Norton and back like they were two parts of a puzzle that didn’t fit. He tried to say Yes, but a couple of times, jarred to a halt on each attempt. Parris, it was clear, wasn’t in the mood for debate. When Garcia finally got to speak, it was a clenched Yes, sir, and he lowered the phone immediately after. Norton held out a hand for it and Garcia, still flushing, slung it under the other man’s reach onto the surface of the table. It made almost no sound on impact, slid a bare five centimeters from where it landed. A very good phone, then. Garcia glared at it, perplexed maybe by his failure to skid the thing off the edge of the table onto the floor. Norton picked the little sliver of hardware up and stowed it.

“Thank you.”

Garcia stood there for a moment, wordless, staring at Norton. The other CO murmured something to him, put a hand on his arm, was propelling him out when Garcia shook off the grip and stabbed a finger at Carl.

“This man is dangerous,” he said tightly. “If you can’t see that, then you deserve everything you get.”

The other CO ushered him out and closed the door.

Norton gave it a moment, then seated himself adjacent to Carl. Pale blue eyes leveled across the space. The smile was gone.

“So,” Norton said. “Are you dangerous, Mr. Marsalis?”

“Who wants to know?”

A shrug. “In point of fact, no one. It was rhetorical. We’ve accessed your records. You are, let’s say, quite sufficiently dangerous for our purposes. But I’m interested to know what your perceptions are on the subject.”

Carl stared at him. “Have you ever done time?”

“Happily, no. But even if I had, I doubt it would approximate your experiences here. I’m not a citizen of the Confederated Republic.”

Light trace of contempt in the last two words. Carl hazarded a guess.

“You’re Canadian?”

The corner of Norton’s mouth quirked. “North Atlantic Union. I’m here, Mr. Marsalis, at the behest of the Western Nations Colony Initiative. We would like to offer you a job.”

CHAPTER 12

As soon as he walked through the door, Sevgi knew she was in trouble.

It was there in the looseness as he moved, in the balance of stance as he paused behind the chair, in the way he hooked it out and sat down. It smoked off the body beneath the shapeless blue prison coveralls like music cutting through radio interference. It looked back at her through his eyes as he settled into the chair, and it soaked out through the powerful quiet he’d carried into the room with him. It wasn’t Ethan—Marsalis had skin far darker than Ethan’s, and there was no real similarity in the features. Ethan had been stockier, too, heavier-muscled.

Ethan had died younger.

It didn’t matter. It was there just the same.

Thirteen.

“Mr. Marsalis?”

He nodded. Waited.

“I’m Sevgi Ertekin, COLIN Security. You’ve already met my partner, Tom Norton. There are a number of things we need to clarify before—”

“I’ll do it.” His voice was deep and modulated. The English accent tripped her.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Whatever it is you need me to do. I’ll do it. At cost. I already told your partner. I’ll take the job in return for unconditional immunity to all charges pending against me, immediate release from Republican custody, and any expenses I’m likely to incur while I’m doing your dirty work.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That’s quite an assumption you’re making there, Mr. Marsalis.”

“Is it?” He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not known for my flower arranging. But let’s see if I’m assuming wrong, shall we? At a guess you want someone tracked down. Someone like me. That’s fine, that’s what I do. The only part I’m unclear on is if you want me to bring him in alive or not.”

“We are not assassins, Mr. Marsalis.”

“Speak for yourself.”

She felt the old anger flare. “You’re proud of that, are you?”

“You’re upset by it?”

She looked down at the unfolded dataslate and the text printed there. “In Peru, you shot an unarmed and injured woman in the back of the head. You executed her. Are you proud of that, too?”

Long pause. She picked up his stare and held it. For a moment, she thought he would get up and walk out. Half of her, she realized, hoped he would.

Instead, he switched his gaze abruptly to one of the high-placed windows in the waiting room. A small smile touched his lips. Went away. He cleared his throat.

“Ms. Ertekin, do you know what a Haag gun is?”

“I’ve read about them.” In NYPD communiqués, urging City Hall to issue tighter gun control guidelines before the new threat hit the streets. Scary enough that the initiatives passed almost without dispute. “It’s a bioload weapon.”

“It’s a little more than that, actually.” He opened his right hand loosely, tipped his head to look at it as if he could see the gun weighed there in the cup of his palm. “It’s a delivery system for an engineered immune deficiency viral complex called Falwell Seven. There are other loads, but they don’t get a lot of use. Falwell is virulent, and very unpleasant. There is no cure. Have you ever watched someone die from a collapsed immune system, Ms. Ertekin?”

In fact, she had. Nalan, a cousin from Hakkari, a onetime party girl in the frontier bases where Turkey did its proud European duty and buffered the mess farther east. Something she caught from a UN soldier. Nalan’s family, who prided themselves on their righteousness, threw her out. Sevgi’s father spat and found a way to bring her to New York, where he had clout in one of the new Midtown research clinics. Relations with family in Turkey, already strained, snapped for good. He never spoke to his brother again. Sevgi, only fourteen at the time, went with him to meet a sallow, big-eyed girl at the airport, older than her by what seemed like a gulf of years but reassuringly unversed in urban teen sophistication. She still remembered the look on Nalan’s face when they all went into the Skill-man Avenue mosque through the same door.

Murat Ertekin did everything he could. He enrolled Nalan in experimental treatment lists at the hospital, fed her vitamin supplements and tracker anti-virals at home. He painted the spare room for her, sun-bright and green like the park. He prayed, five times a day for the first time in years. Finally, he wept.

Nalan died anyway.

Sevgi blinked away the memory; fever-stained sheets and pleading, hollow eyes.

“You’re saying you did this woman a favor?”

“I’m saying I got her quickly and painlessly where she was going anyway.”

“Don’t you think that should have been her choice?”

He shrugged. “She made her choice when she tried to jump me.”

If she’d doubted what he was at all, she no longer did. It was the same unshakable calm she’d seen in Ethan, and the same psychic bulk. He sat in the chair like something carved out of black stone, watching her. She felt something tiny shift in her chest.

She tapped a key on the dataslate. A new page slid up on the display.

“You were recently involved in prison violence. A fight in the F wing shower block. Four men hospitalized. Three of them by you.”

Pause. Silence.

“You want to tell me your side of that?”

He stirred. “I would think the details speak for themselves. Three white men, one black man. It was an Aryan Command punishment beating.”

“Which prison staff did nothing to prevent?”

“Surveillance in the showers can be compromised by steamy conditions. Quote unquote.” His lip curled fractionally. “Or soap jammed over lenses. Response time can be delayed. By extraneous factors, quote unquote.”