Black Man / Thirteen

They arrived.

“That’s it, motherfucker.” Yavuz, in English. Voice shocked hoarse, pistol jammed in Nevant’s ear. “Game over.”

Nevant swaying, one hand clutched to his face, blood dripping between fingers from a nose that had to be broken. Coughing, bubbling, but through it came laughter. Marsalis grunted and tugged himself out from beneath, folded a leg, and shoved the Frenchman sideways with his knee. Nevant went halfway to collapsing, still clutching his face. Still chuckling. The hand he was using was the same one he’d just broken on the concrete.

“Going to have to.” He sucked a breath, wetly. “Buy my own cigarettes after all.”

“Looks like it, yeah.” Marsalis rolled to his feet, one smooth coiling motion. He was checking himself for cuts from the glass.

“I did warn you.”

“Yeah, and you made a real pig’s ear of palming that cutlery knife as well.” The black man’s tone was absent. He turned his right hand, frowning, and Sevgi saw tear-track ribbons of blood in the cup of it. Marsalis lifted the hand to eye level, twisted it palm-outward, and pulled back his sleeve. He grimaced. There was a long cut, narrow sliver of glass still embedded, in the flesh on the outer edge of his palm.

“You stay there, you fuck,” Yavuz was telling Nevant shakily. The pistol muzzle floated about close to the pale thirteen’s forehead. “You sit there, and you don’t fucking move.”

He fished in his jacket with his spare hand, brought out a phone, and punched a speed-dial number. Beyond, in the cave made by the hole through the window, people stood about and gaped at the tumbled chairs and table. Waiters hovered, uncertain. A big downward-jagged triangular chunk of glass dropped suddenly from among its fellows in the top of the frame and broke undramatically in three pieces on the ground.

At the apex of the narrowest fragment, as if indicated by an arrowhead of glass, Sevgi saw the glint of the cutlery knife where Nevant had dropped it. The words the two thirteens had just traded caught up with her. She stared at Marsalis.

“You. Knew he was going to do this?”

The black man pinched the glass sliver between finger and thumb and tugged slowly until it emerged whole from the wound. He turned it curiously this way and that in the dim light for a moment, then dropped it.

“Well.” He flexed the injured hand and grimaced again. “There was always a risk he’d get genetic about it, yeah.”

“You told us the two of you were friends.”

Choked chortle from Nevant where he now sat with his back to the undamaged neighboring window panel. Marsalis looked at Sevgi levelly over his wound.

“I think I said we got on okay.”

Sevgi grew aware of the thuttering in her chest and temples. She took a long breath, took stock. Gestured around her.

“And you call this okay?”

Marsalis shrugged. “Hey, what can I say? Blame the wiring.”

On the floor, Nevant chuckled again, through blood and broken bone.

CHAPTER 27

His hand needed glue, and there were still minute fragments of glass in the wound. He sat in a UN medical unit in Fenerbahçe and waited patiently while a nurse cleaned him up. Glare of overhead lighting and—something he could have lived without—a screen in one corner with a microscopic blowup of the wound as it was treated. He looked fixedly elsewhere.

Ertekin had wanted the COLIN facilities on the European side instead, but couldn’t argue with the immediacy of the UN hospital’s location. It took them less than five minutes in a taxi—the bloodied promenade and gathering, gawping crowds dumped for the quiet residential streets of Fenerbahçe and the welcome-beacon lamps out front at the medical center’s modestly appointed nanobuild façade. Now Ertekin was gone, along with Battal Yavuz and Nevant, down the corridor to wherever they were treating the Frenchman’s injuries. He guessed she wanted a shot at hearing the other thirteen’s side of the story. He also judged she was still a little numb from the action, and couldn’t blame her much. The strain of the encounter with Nevant still twanged in his own blood, more than he showed.

The door opened and a Turk in a suit slipped in, yawning. Grizzled hair and matching, close-clipped mustache, not quite clean-shaven slate-gray chin. The suit was expensive and came with a carefully knotted silk tie. Only the sleep-swollen eyes and the yawn suggested the bed he’d been called out of. The sleepy gaze calibrated Carl for a moment, then the newcomer murmured something to the nurse, who immediately laid down his microcam-enhanced tools and excused himself. The door shut quietly behind him. Carl raised an eyebrow.

“Am I going to have to pay for this?”

The Turk smiled dutifully. “Very droll, Mr. Marsalis. Of course, as a licensed UNGLA accountant, you have a health plan with us. That’s not why I’m here.”

He came forward and offered his hand. “I am Mehmet Tuzcu, UNGLA special liaison.”

Carl took the hand, careful of his wound. He stayed seated. “And what can I do for you, Mehmet bey?”

“Your Colony Initiative escort is on the next floor.” Tuzcu’s gaze flicked toward the ceiling. “There is transport waiting for you in the street at the back of this building. We will leave by the bulk elevator, unseen. In half an hour we can have you on a suborbital to London, but”—a glance at a heavy steel watch—“we will have to hurry.”

“You’re. Rescuing me?”

“If you like.” The patient smile again. “They expected you in New York, but events seem to have overtaken us. Now we really must—”

“I, uhm.” Carl gestured with his nearly repaired hand. “I don’t really need rescuing. COLIN aren’t holding me under any kind of duress.”

The smile paled out. “Nevertheless, you are part of an unauthorized retrieval operation. COLIN are in breach of the Munich Accords by employing you in this capacity.”

“I’ll mention it to them.”

Tuzcu frowned. “You are refusing to come with me?”

“Yeah.”

“May I ask why?”

Ask away, he was tempted to say. Been asking myself the same thing, don’t have an intelligent answer yet.

“Do you know Gianfranco di Palma?”

Tuzcu’s eyes were careful. “Yes. I have met Signor di Palma a number of times.”

“Slimy piece of shit, isn’t he?”

“What is your point, please?”

“You were asking me for a reason. Tell di Palma this is what happens when you run your licensed operatives on a no-win/no-fee bounty and a three-month delay on expense reimbursement. They start to have loyalty issues.”

The UNGLA man hesitated. He glanced back at the door. Carl stood up.

“Don’t let’s force this, Mehmet,” he said easily.

Sevgi found him later, seated in the ground-floor waiting area watching some low-grade global music show on an overhead screen. A miked-up and dyed blonde pranced back and forth on stage in clothing that wasn’t much more than slashed ribbons, stances, and motion designed to maximize the display of the ta

“See anything you like?” she asked.

“It’s better than what I was watching earlier.” He glanced past her. “What did you do with Nevant?”

“He’s coming down.”

“Right.” Marsalis’s eyes drifted back to the screen. “Got to hand it to you people, this is something you do really well.”

“You people?”

“Humans. Look at that.” He waved his bandaged hand up at the gaily colored images. “Perfect lockstep. Group mind. No wonder you guys make such good soldiers.”

“Kind of ironic, coming from you,” she said waspishly. “Compliments from the state-of-the-art gene warrior.”

He smiled. “Ertekin, you don’t want to believe everything they tell you on the feeds.”