Black Man / Thirteen

The Land Rover came to a halt at the edge of the crime scene, with scant regard for the incident barriers the NYPD had strung. One armor-swollen corner of its bodywork broke the bright yellow beams and set off the alarm. Police uniforms came ru

“Subtle,” said Marsalis.

The Land Rover’s forward passenger door cracked, swung open at a narrow angle. Tom Norton stood up on the ru

“Sev?”

“Over here.” She waved from the steps of the building, and Norton spotted her. He swung his door wider, stepped down, and closed it again. Brief words with the uniforms in his way, a display of badges, and they opened a path for him. Someone went to shut off the barrier breach alarm, and quiet soaked back into the street. The Land Rover backed up a couple of meters and sat there rumbling like the elegant tank it essentially was. The driver did not emerge.

“Overreacting a bit, aren’t we?” Sevgi asked as Norton reached them.

He grimaced. “Tell that to Ortiz.”

“Is he okay?”

“Relative to what? He isn’t dead, if that’s what you mean. They’ve got him hooked up to half the life-support machines available over at Weill Cornell. Major organ damage, but he’ll have ready stock cultured somewhere. Family’ve been notified.” Norton looked sick as he stared around at the shrink-wrapped corpses. “What the fuck was he doing over here anyway, Sev?”

She shook her head.

“I think he was here to see me,” said Marsalis, rising to his feet for the first time since the assault. He yawned cavernously.

Norton eyed him with dislike. “All about you, huh?”

“NYPD are all over him, Tom,” said Sevgi, defusing. “Detective in charge hardly gave a shit about Ortiz, all he wanted to talk about was how come we’d got an unlicensed thirteen on the streets.”

“Right.” Norton sharpened on the new task. “What’s this detective’s name?”

“Williamson. Out of the Twenty-eighth.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“He’s already been talked to. That’s not what I meant. I think it might play better if we let this look like an attempt on Ortiz.”

“You think it wasn’t?” Norton blinked. He gestured at one of the dead assassins. “Skater crew, Sev. Track the limo through traffic, that’s standard gang operating procedure. Ten, twelve city murders a year the exact same way. What else are you going to make of this?”

Sevgi nodded at Marsalis.

“Oh come on. Sev, you’ve got to be kidding me. We’ve been in town less than a day. Who knew we were here?”

“Makes no sense the other way around, either, Tom. These guys were street. A real ground-level hit squad. What are they doing coming after someone fiftieth-floor like Ortiz? Man wouldn’t know street if it bit him in the ass.”

“It just did,” Marsalis said, deadpan.

Norton spared him a hard look. Sevgi stepped in.

“Look, whatever just went down here, we had more than enough publicity we didn’t need in Florida. Let’s not have a repeat performance. Ask the cops to kill the thirteen angle, make sure the media don’t run it. For public consumption purposes, Marsalis here can be just another heroic COLIN bodyguard, identity protected so that he can continue his good work.”

“Yes,” said Norton sourly. “As opposed to being a dangerous sociopath who hasn’t actually done any work for us at all yet.”

“Tom—”

Marsalis gri

“As far as I can see you saved your own skin, with some collateral benefits. Sevgi, if this Williamson is going to raise a stink about our friend here, we need to get you both out of here.”

“Now, there’s an idea.”

Marsalis’s voice was amiable, but something at the bottom of it made Sevgi look at him. She recalled the way he’d stared after the escaped assassin, the flat sound his voice made then as he told her Right after the meat van gets here, I think you’d better take me in to COLIN so we can start work. There was a finality to the way he’d said it that was like the silence following a single gunshot. And now, suddenly, she was afraid for Tom Norton and his dismissive flippancy.

“Sounds good to me, too,” she said hurriedly. “Tom, can we wire up the n-dji

Norton looked at her curiously, let his gaze slip to the black man at her shoulder and then back again. He shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose we could. But what the hell for? MIT already handed down the transcripts.” He addressed himself directly to Marsalis. “They’re on file at the office. You can go over them if you want.”

“But I don’t want.” Marsalis was smiling gently. A small chill blew down Sevgi’s spine at the sight. “What I want, Tom, is to talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-dji

Norton stiffened. “So now suddenly you’re an expert on the psychology of artificial intelligence?”

“No, I’m an expert on the hunting and killing of variant thirteens. Which is why you hired me. Remember?”

“Yeah, and don’t you think that precious expertise might be—”

“Tom!”

“—better deployed going over the scenes of the crimes we’re trying to bring an end to?”

Still the black man smiled. Still he stood relaxed, at a distance that Sevgi abruptly realized was just outside Norton’s easy reach.

“No, I don’t.”

“Tom, that’s enough. What the fuck is wrong with you this mor—”

“What’s wrong with me Sev, is that—”

Two-tone rasp—a throat being ostentatiously cleared. They both stopped, switched their gazes back to Marsalis.

“You don’t understand,” he said quietly.

They were silent. The call for attention hung off the end of his words like a spoken command.

“You don’t understand what you’re up against.” The smile came back, fleeting, as if driven by memory. “You think because Merrin’s killed a couple of dozen people, he’s some kind of serial killer writ large? That’s not what this is about. Serial killers are damaged humans. You know this, Sevgi, even if Tom here doesn’t. They leave a trail, they leave clues, they get caught. And that’s because in the end, consciously or subconsciously, they want to be caught. Calculated murder is an antisocial act, it’s hard for humans to do, and it takes special circumstances at either a personal or a social level to enable the capacity. But that’s you people. It’s not me, and it’s not Merrin, and it’s not any variant thirteen. We’re not like you. We’re the witches. We’re the violent exiles, the lone-wolf nomads that you bred out of the race back when growing crops and living in one place got so popular. We don’t have, we don’t need a social context. You have to understand this: there is nothing wrong with Merrin. He’s not damaged. He’s not killing these people as an expression of some childhood psychosis, he’s not doing it because he’s identified them as some dehumanized, segregated extratribal group. He’s just carrying out a plan of action, and he is comfortable with it. And he won’t get caught doing it—unless you can put me next to him.”

Norton shook his head. “You say Merrin’s not damaged? You weren’t there when they cracked the hull on Horkan’s Pride. You didn’t see the mess he left.”

“I know he fed off the passengers.”

“No. He didn’t just feed off them, Marsalis. He ripped them apart, gouged out their eyes and scattered the fucking pieces from one end of the crew section to the other. That’s what he did.” Norton took a steadying breath. “You want to call that a plan of action, go right ahead. To me, it sounds like good old-fashioned insanity.”

It was a fractional pause, but Sevgi saw how the news stopped Marsalis dead.

“Well, you’ll need to show me footage of that,” he said finally. “But my guess is there was a reason for whatever he did.”