Black Man / Thirteen

CHAPTER 21

“Never heard of him.”

Norton, preparing to be unimpressed. He was standing, close enough to Carl for it to be a challenge.

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Carl agreed. He brushed past Norton, went to the office window, and stared out at the view. Smashed autumn sunlight lay across the East River in metallic patches, like some kind of chemical slick. “Franklin Gutierrez used to be a datahawk in Lima back in the mideighties. One of the best, by all accounts. In ’86, he cracked Serbanco for upward of half a billion soles. Immaculate execution. It took them nearly a month to even realize he’d done it.”

Norton grunted. “Couldn’t have been that immaculate, if he ended up on Mars.”

Carl fought down a sudden urge to remove Norton’s vocal cords with his bare hands. He summoned patience from within, Sutherland style. Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead. He focused on the details of the view below. COLIN New York, perhaps in conscious locational echo of the UN territory, stood a couple of long blocks south of Jefferson Park, vaulted and cantilevered over FDR Drive and looking out across the river. It was a fractal tumbling of structure that recalled nothing so much as a handful of abandoned segments from a huge peeled orange. Thin white nanocarb spidered over curves and angles of smoked amber glass, then swept down to brace elegantly amid the multi-level array of carefully tended walkways, paths, and gardens that linked each section into the whole site. You could stand here in the vaulted open-plan office suite Ertekin and Norton shared and look down across the whole thing, the gardens, the jutting edge of the mezzanine, and the river beyond. Carl’s gaze reeled back out to the water, and he suffered a sudden resurgence of a feeling from his first days back on Earth eight years ago, a time when the sight of any large body of water came as an abrupt, visceral shock.

Time with the Horkan’s Pride n-dji

So much for looking beyond.

“Yeah, they caught up with Gutierrez,” he said neutrally. “But they caught him spending the money, not stealing it. Keep that in mind. This guy had his weak points, but getting away with the game wasn’t one of them.”

“So they offered him resettlement?” Ertekin asked.

“Yeah, and he took it. You ever seen the inside of a Peruvian jail?” Carl left the broad roofward sweep of the window, turned back into the office and his new colleagues. “He ended up in Wells, ru

Norton shook his head. “If this Gutierrez has links with Mars organized crime, then we’ve already run him and his association with Merrin.”

“No, you haven’t.”

A swapped glance between Norton and Sevgi Ertekin. Norton sighed. “Look, Marsalis. One of the first things this investigation did was to—”

“Contact the Colony police, and ask them to run a list of associates for Merrin on Mars. Right.” Carl nodded. “Yeah. Makes sense, I’d have done the same. Just that it wouldn’t do any good. If Gutierrez had dealings with Merrin, they’re gone now, wiped off the flow like shit off a baby’s arse. All you’ll be left with is some minor association with a low-level middleman like Danvers. And men like Danvers rub shoulders with practically everyone who’s ever worked the Wells camps anyway. In other words, your business transaction is invisible. That’s how it works when Gutierrez does something for you.”

“And you know this how?”

He shrugged. “How do you think?”

“Gutierrez did something for you,” Ertekin said quietly. “What was it?”

“Something I’m not going to talk to you about. The point is, in dataflow terms, my co

“I still don’t see,” said Norton irritably, “how that gives you this Gutierrez.”

“On its own, it doesn’t. But the recollections the n-dji

Norton nodded. “Yeah, we saw that first time around. The cormorant legacy, leavings of the cormorant, wring that fucking cormorant’s neck. We had our own reference n-dji

“No, it’s not a Martian term.”

“Might be now,” Ertekin pointed out. “You’ve been back awhile. Anyway, we backed up into Project Lawman usage and thirteen argot in general. We still got nothing.”

“It’s Limeño.”

Norton blinked. “Excuse me?”

“It’s a Lima underground term. Pretty obscure, and old. Your n-dji

Blank looks.

“Okay, ukai is a form of fishing where you use trained cormorants to bring up your fish. It’s originally from Japan, but it got big in the Peruvian Japanese community about fifty years back when the whole designer-breeding thing really took off. Ukai is done at night, and the cormorants dive with a ring on their throat that stops them from swallowing the fish. They get fed when they bring the catch back to their handler. See the imagery?”

“Contracted datahawking.” Ertekin’s eyes lit up with the co

“Yeah. In those days the familias here on Earth were still a force to be reckoned with. Anyone starting out as a hawk on the South Pacific coast worked for the familias, or they didn’t work at all. You might end up a big-name halcon de datos. But you started life as a cormoran.”

Ertekin was nodding now. “Including Gutierrez.”

“Including Gutierrez,” he agreed, and something sparked between them as he echoed her words. “Later he got his rep, got his own gigs. Got caught.”

“And when he got to Mars, he found the familias waiting for him all over again.”

“Right. It’s like stepping back in time half a century there. The familias have a hold they haven’t had on Earth for decades. Apparently Gutierrez had to go right back into ukai work. Back to being a cormorant.” Carl spread his hands, case-closed style. “He bitched to me about it all the time.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean he’d do the same with Merrin,” Norton said.

“Yeah, it does. Gutierrez had a thing about thirteens. A lot of people do on Mars, there’s a whole fetish subculture dedicated to it. It’s like the bonobo fan clubs here. Gutierrez was a fully paid-up member, fascinated by the whole thing. He had this pet analogy he liked to draw, between the thirteens and the Lima datahawks. Both supermen in their own right, both feared and hated by the herd because of it.”

Norton snorted. “Supermen. Right.”

“Well, it was his theory,” Carl said evenly. “Not mine. Point is, he went on and on about being reduced back to ukai status, about how I could understand that shit because of who I was, because of what I was. And he would have laid exactly the same line off on Merrin.”

“So.” Norton broke it up, stepped into the flood of light. “We call Colony, tell them to bring Gutierrez in and lean on him.”