Black Man / Thirteen

Norton was on the money about going home, if nothing else. It took the rest of the day to get clearance, and when it finally came, the crowds were still at the gate. Someone had set up big portable LCLS panels along the road, jacked into car batteries or run off their own integral power packs. From the tower, it looked like a bizarre outdoor art gallery, little knots of figures gathered in front of each panel, or walking between. The chanting had died down with the onset of night and the eventual arrival of three cherry-topped state police teardrops. They were parked now in among the other vehicles, but if the officers they’d brought were doing any crowd control, they were keeping a low profile while they did it. And the media had apparently all gone home.

“Seen it before,” said the tower guard, a slim Hispanic just on for the graveyard shift. “Staties usually chase them off, so there’s no adverse coverage if the shit hits the fan. Shit does hit the fan, everyone runs the same sanitized broadcast the next morning. Tallahassee got deals with most of the networks, privileged access to legislature and like that. No one breaks ranks.”

“Yeah,” rumbled Marsalis. “Responsible Reporting. I’m going to miss that.”

The night wind coming off the sea was cool and faintly sewn with salt. Sevgi felt it stir strands of hair on her cheek, felt cop instinct twitch awake inside her at the same moment. She kept herself from turning to look at him, kept her tone casual. “Going to miss it? Where you going then?”

He did turn. She offered him a sideways glance, clashed gazes.

“New York, right?” he said easily. “North Atlantic Union territory, proud home of the free American press?”

She looked again, locked stares this time. “Are you trying to piss me off, Marsalis?”

“Hey, I’m just quoting the tourist guide here. Union’s the only place they got Lindley versus NSA still in force, right? Still got their statue of Lindley up in Battery Park, defender of truth chiseled on the base? Most places I’ve been in the Republic, they’ve pulled those statues down.”

She let it go, let the cop twitch slide out of view for the time being, tagged for later attention. For the rest, she didn’t know if she’d misread the irony in his voice or not. She was irritable enough to have done so; maybe he was irritable enough to have meant it. She couldn’t be bothered to call it either way. After a full day of waiting, none of them was in the best of moods.

She shifted to the other side of the tower, swapped her view. Out at the far side of the complex, partially occluded by the towering bulk of the rack, the landing strip lights burned luminous green. They were far enough off for the distance to make them wink, as if they were embers the sea wind kept blowing on. COLIN were sending a dedicated transport, flatline flight so they’d be waiting awhile longer, but it was on its way and home was only a matter of hours away. She could almost feel the rough cotton sheets on her bed against her skin.

Marsalis, she’d worry about later.

After a couple of minutes, he left the tower top without comment and clattered back down the caged stairs to the ground. She watched him walk away in the flare of ground lighting, off toward the shore again. Casual lope, almost an amble but for the barely perceptible poise in the way he moved. He didn’t look back. The darkness down to the beach swallowed him up. She frowned.

Later. Worry about it later, Sev.

She let her mind coast in neutral, watched the lights.

And presently, the COLIN jet whispered down from the cloud base toward them, studded sparsely with landing lights of its own. It kissed the ground, silent with distance, and taxied in like a jeweled shadow.

She yawned and went to fetch her stuff.

In flight, she dozed off and dreamed about the Lindley statue. Murat stood with her in winter sunlight—as he had when she was about eleven, but in the dream she was an adult—and pointed at the chiseled legend in the base. From the discomfort of truth there is only one refuge and that is ignorance. I do not need to be comfortable, and I will not take refuge. I demand to know.

See, he was saying. It only takes one woman like this.

But when she looked up at the statue of Lindley, it had transformed into the black-sketched perpetrator from the Montes CSI construct, and it leapt off the base at her, fist raised.

She fell back and grappled, one from the manual, cross-block and grab. The figure’s arm was slick in her grasp and now ended, she saw, not in a fist but a Greek theater mask cut out of metal. As she wrestled with the sketch, she understood with the flash logic of dreams that her opponent intended to press the mask onto her face and that once it was done, there would be no way to get it off.

Across the park, a mother pushed a baby in a stroller. Two kids sat in the grass and dueled their glinting micro-fighter models high overhead, fingers frantic on the controls in their laps, heads tilting wildly beneath the blank-faced headsets. Her own fight went slower, sluggish, like drowning in mud. The construct murderer was stronger than she was, but seemed disinclined to tactics. Every move she made bought her time, but she could do no damage, could not break the clinch.

The mask began to block out the sun on her face.

I have done everything I can, said Murat wearily, and she wanted to cry but couldn’t. Her breath came hard now, hurting her throat. Her father was walking away from her, across the park toward the railings and the water. She had to twist her neck to keep him in sight. She would have called after him, but her throat hurt too much, and anyway she knew it wouldn’t do any good. The fight started to drain out of her, tiny increments heralding the eventual evaporation of her strength. Even the sun was turning cold. She struggled mechanically, bitterly, and overhead, the mask—

The plane banked and woke her.

Someone had lowered the cabin lights while she slept, and the plane’s interior was sunk in gloom. She leaned across the seat to the window and peered out. Towers of crystalline light slid beyond the glass, red-studded with navigation flash. Then the long dark absence of the East River, banded with bridges like jeweled rings on a slim and slightly crooked finger. She sighed and sank back in her seat.

Home. For what it was worth.

The plane straightened out. Marsalis came through from the forward section, presumably on his way to the toilet. He nodded down at her.

“Sleep well?”

She shrugged and lied.

CHAPTER 17

By the time they disembarked and came through the deserted environs of the private-carrier terminal at JFK, it was nearly 3 am. Norton left them standing just inside the endless row of glass doors onto the pickup zone and went to get his car out of parking. The whole place was full of a glaring, white-lit quiet that seemed to whine just at the edge of audibility.

“So what’s the plan?” Marsalis asked her.

“The plan is get some sleep. Tomorrow I’ll take you over to Jefferson Park and get you hooked up with our chain of command. Roth, Ortiz, and Nicholson are all going to want to meet you. Then we’ll look at Montes. If your theory checks out, there’ll be some trace of a previous identity somewhere in the data record.”

“You hope.”

“No, I know,” she said irritably. “No one disappears for real anymore, not even in the Angeline Freeport.”

“Merrin seems to be managing.”

“Merrin’s strictly a temporary phenomenon.”

They went back to staring averted angles around the terminal space until Norton rolled up in the snarl-grilled Cadillac. He’d held off putting the top up until a couple of weeks ago, but there was no way to avoid it now. The early-hours air beyond the terminal doors had a snap in it that promised the raw cold of the winter ahead.