“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 connection with Gutierrez no longer exists, and neither does Merrin’s. Any associative search Colony ran on Merrin would have stopped at Danvers. The Horkan’s Pride n-djinn only went farther because it didn’t like the coincidence of two thirteens both making it back from Mars under uncommon circumstances and both having a separate, unrelated connection with a low-grade fence like Danvers. That’s Yaroshanko intuition for you. Very powerful when it works, but it needs something to triangulate off.”
“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-djinn has of Merrin include a couple of references to a cormorant.”
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-djinns go over it. Checked out Martian slang, and got nothing—”
“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-djinn probably would have discounted it as irrelevant. Goes back to the early seventies, which is when Gutierrez was a young gun on the Andes coast datahawk circuit. Have you heard of ukai?”
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 connection. “The familias andinas.”
“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.”
Carl snorted. “Yeah, lean on him from a couple of hundred million kilometers away. Ten-minute coms lag each way. That interrogation, I want to watch.”
“I didn’t say we’d lean on him, I said Colony would.”
“Colony couldn’t lean on a fucking wall. Forget it. What happens on Mars doesn’t play this end. It’s not a human distance.”
Ertekin sank deeper into her chair, bridged her hands, and stared across the office. Light from the tall window fell in on her like the luminous sifting sunset rains on Mars. Carl’s woken memories came and kicked him in the chest again.
“If the familias andinas helped get Merrin out of Mars,” she said slowly, and mostly to herself, “then they could be helping him at this end as well.”
“Not the South American chapters,” Carl observed. “They’ve had a war with the Martian familias for decades. Well, a state of war anyway. They wouldn’t be cooperating with anything at the Mars end.”
Ertekin shook her head. “They wouldn’t have to be. I’m thinking about the Jesusland familias, and what’s left of them in the Rim. They pay lip service to the altiplano heritage, but that’s about it. This far north, they run their own game, and a lot of it’s human-traffic-related. I mean, the Rim squashed them pretty fucking flat after Secession, ripped their markets with the drug law changes, the open biotech policies. Sex slaves and fence-hopping’s about all they had to fall back on. But they’re still out there, just like they’re still here. And in between, in the Republic, they still swing a hell of a lot of old-time weight.”
She brooded for a while.
“Yeah, okay. They’ve got the human-traffic software Merrin would have needed to get in and out of the Rim like that. Maybe they’ve got something going on with the Martian chapters, some kind of deal that gets them this Gutierrez’s services. The question is why? What’s their end of something like this? Where’s the benefit?”
“You think,” Norton ventured, “these are familia-sanctioned hits he’s carrying out?”
“They bring a thirteen all the way back from Mars to do their contract killing for them?” Ertekin scowled. “Doesn’t make much sense. Sicarios are a dollar a dozen in every major Republican city. Prisons are full of them.”
Norton flickered a glance at Carl. “Well, that’s true.”
“No, this has to be something else.” Ertekin looked up at Carl. “You said this Gutierrez did something for you on Mars. Can we assume you had a working relationship with the familias as well?”
“I dealt with them on and off, yeah.”
“Care to speculate on why they’d do this?” She was still looking. Tawny flakes in the iris of her eyes.
Carl shrugged. “Under any normal circumstances, I’d say they wouldn’t. The familias run an old-time macho, conservative setup, here and on Mars. They’ve got all the standard prejudices against people like me.”
“But?”
“But. Several years ago, I ran into a thirteen who tried to forge an alliance with what’s left of the altiplano chapters. Guy called Nevant, French, ex—Department Eight Special Insertion Unit. Very smart guy, he was an insurrection specialist in Central Asia. Warlord liaison, counterintelligence, all that shit. Given time, he might have gotten something working up there, too.”
“Might have,” drawled Norton. “So it’s safe to say he wasn’t given time.”
“No. He wasn’t.”
“What happened to him?”
Carl smiled bleakly. “I happened to him.”