Black Man / Thirteen

“And you’re basing this on what?”

“Initially, instinct.” He held up a hand to forestall her protest. “Ertekin, this isn’t some fucked-in-the-head serial killer we’re talking about. Merrin came all the way to the Freeport just to kill this woman. That has to make her something special.”

“Maybe so. But it doesn’t make her a combat specialist.”

“No. But her hands do.” He raised both his own hands now, palms toward his face, fingers loosely curled, halfway to a double fist guard. “There’s bone alloy marbling across the knuckles, you can feel it under the skin. Probably calcicrete. That’s combat tech.”

“Or part of a menopausal support regime.”

“At forty-four?”

Ertekin shook her head stubbornly. “I looked through the file last night. There’s nothing about combat training there. And anyway, it doesn’t gel with the genetic trace material under her fingernails. You really think a combat pro would bother scratching her attacker?”

“No. I think she did that when she’d already given up. When she’d already made the decision to let him kill her.”

“Why would…”

He saw the way it dawned on her, the way her brow smoothed out and the heavy-lidded eyes widened slightly. In the Arizona construct sunlight, he realized suddenly that they were irised in flecked amber.

“She knew we’d find it,” she said.

“Yeah.” He looked somberly down at the datahomes again. “Toni here was gathering evidence for us. Just think about that for a moment. This is a woman who knows she’s about to die. A minute or less off her own death, she’s calculating how to take this guy down posthumously. Now, that is either psychotic force of will, or training. Or a bit of both.”

They both stood in silence for a while. He glanced at her again and saw how the wind twitched her hair around the lines of her jaw. Tiny motion, barely there at all, but something about it set off an itching in the pit of his stomach. She must have felt some of it, too, because she turned and caught him looking. He got the full sunlit force of the tiger eyes for a moment, then she looked hurriedly away.

“Gene analysis says no enhancement,” she said. “Standard chromosome set, twenty-three pairs, no anomalies.”

“I didn’t say there would be.” He sighed. “That’s the fucking problem these days. Anything extraordinary shows up in anyone, we all go ru

“That’s because these days it mostly isn’t.”

“Yeah, don’t fucking remind me. Anyone wins anything these days, they’re up there plugging some gene frame consortium as soon as the cameras roll.” Carl lifted his arms in acceptance-speech burlesque. “I’d just like to say I couldn’t have done it without the good people at Amino Solutions. They truly made me what I am today. Yeah, fuck off.”

She was giving him an odd look, he knew.

“What?”

“Nothing. Seems like an odd stance for you to be taking, that’s all.”

“Oh, because I’m a thirteen I’ve got to like this pay-and-load excellence we’re all living with. Listen, Ertekin, they rolled the dice with me just like with you. No one dumped an artificial chromosome into me in vitro. I got twenty-three pairs, just like you, and what I am is written all over them. There’s no optional discard for shit like mine. No knockout sequencer in a hypo they can shoot me up with and make me safe to breed.”

“In which case,” she said quietly, “I’d have thought you’d see the Xtrasomes as a step forward. For the next generation at least.”

For a moment, he could feel the rolling weight of his own pointless anger, back and forth through his chest cavity like a punching bag left swinging. Images from the past four wasted months flickered jaggedly through his head.

He put a clamp on it.

“I’m a little short on that kind of outlook right now. But let’s stick with Montes, shall we? I’ll bet you this much: she’s got a combat history, at a minimum a combat training history. If it doesn’t show up in the prior record, then she hid it for some reason. She wouldn’t be the first person to wind up in the Angeline Freeport wearing a brand-new identity. Wouldn’t be the first person to marry someone who knows nothing about who she used to be, either, so you’re probably wasting your time talking to the husband.”

“Yeah. Usually the way.”

“How old were the kids?”

“Four and seven.”

“His?”

“I don’t know.” Ertekin reached up and made a gesture that split the virtuality open. She tugged down a data scroll, gently glowing text written on the air like some angelic missive. She paged down with delicate middle-and ring-finger motions while the index finger kept the scroll open. “Yeah. First birth’s Republic-registered, looks like they moved to the Freeport shortly after. Second child was born there.”

“So she’s from the Republic, too.”

“Looks like it, yeah. You think that’s relevant?”

“Might be.” Carl hesitated, trying to put the rest of it into words, the vague intimations he’d had while he watched the replay death of Toni Montes. “There’s something else. The children were the obvious leverage, the reason she let him kill her.”

Ertekin made a gesture of distaste. “Yeah, so you said.”

“Yeah, so the question has to be why did she believe him. He could have killed her and then still waited around and murdered the rest of her family. Why trust him to keep his word?”

“You think a mother put in that situation has a choice? You think—”

“Ertekin, she was making choices all the time. Remember the genetic trace under the nails? This isn’t a civilian we’re talking about, this is a competent woman making a series of very cold, very hard calculations. And one of those calculations was to trust the man who put a bullet through her head. Now, what does that say to you?”

She grimaced. The words came reluctantly.

“That she knew him.”

He nodded. “Yeah. She knew him well. Well enough to know she could trust his word. Now, where does your suburban housewife mother of two part-time real estate saleslady make friends like that?”

He went and sat in one of the hammocks while she thought about it.

CHAPTER 16

Norton was waiting for them when they surfaced.

Sevgi blinked back to local awareness and saw him watching her through the glass panel on the couch cover. It felt a little like staring up at someone from underwater. She thumbed the release catch at her side, propped herself up on her elbows as the hood hinged up.

“Any progress?” Her voice sounded dull in her own ears—hearing thickened with the residual hum of the soundproofing.

Norton nodded. “Yes. Of the slow variety.”

“Do we get to go home?”

“Maybe tonight. Nicholson pulled in Roth and there’s a full-scale diplomatic war in the making.” He crimped a grin. “Roth is demanding a fully armed motorcade escort to Miami International, and fighter cover until we’re out of Republican airspace. Really wants to rub their faces in it.”

“That’s our Andrea.” Sevgi hauled herself off the couch and upright, groggy from the time in virtual and lack of k37. Despite herself, she felt a flicker of warmth for Andrea Walker Roth and the arrayed might of COLIN’s diplomatic muscle. She didn’t really like the woman, not any more than the rest of the policy board; she knew Roth was, like all of them, first and foremost a power broker. But—

But sometimes, Sev, it’s good to have the big battalions standing behind you.

“Yeah, well, my guess is the real pressure’s coming from Ortiz.” Norton gestured at the other couch, where Carl Marsalis was just sitting up. “Secretary general nomination in the wind and all. He’s going to be full of UN-friendly gestures for the next eight months. Luck and a following wind, he could be your boss next year, Marsalis.”