“You heard me.”
“Will you two knock it off,” snapped Sevgi. “Marsalis, you’re saying this isn’t revenge. Then what is it?”
“I don’t know what it is,” the black man said irritably. “I’m not Merrin, and contrary to what our friend here thinks, not everyone with a variant thirteen geneprint thinks exactly alike.”
Norton stepped into the breach. “No, but you were trained similarly, and that must count for something. You say his training wouldn’t allow an impulse of revenge. What would it dictate in this situation?”
“Maybe he just needed to shut Ward up,” Rovayo said. “Cover his retreat. If Ward talked—”
Sevgi shook her head. “Doesn’t fit. Ward isn’t far enough up the chain of command. Self-made biosupply magnates don’t swing the weight to get things done on Mars, even in California. If Ward was a part of this, he was a small cog. They hired him to fish Merrin out of the Pacific and hand him on. End of function. He didn’t know anything that he hadn’t already been told.”
“Right,” said Coyle slowly. “But he must have known his chain of command, or at least his nearest contact. We’re looking at this the wrong way around. Merrin didn’t go to Ward to shut him up, he went to make him talk. To get the names of the people who were giving the orders.”
Norton looked suddenly hopeful. “You think Merrin got his hit list out of Ward?”
“Unlikely.” Marsalis prowled the virtual apartment like someone looking for a hidden exit somewhere high up. “The way Merrin’s been hopping the border back and forth, he’s working off either partial or sequential knowledge. Whatever he got out of Ward, it wasn’t his hit list.”
“Or maybe just not the whole list,” said Norton hopefully. “Maybe Ward had the first couple of names.”
“There are no links from Ward to Whitlock,” Rovayo pointed out.
“Or Montes,” said Coyle.
Norton sighed. “Right. Or any of the Jesusland kills, as far as we can tell. Shame, it would have been nice to find ourselves getting somewhere for a change.”
“Yeah, well, for that you’ve got to be looking in the right place.” Marsalis gestured around the apartment. “And like I said before, we’re wasting our time here.”
Coyle’s lip curled. “Then perhaps you’d care to tell us how we could more profitably employ that time.”
“Outside of going back to the altiplano and coming down hard on Manco Bambarén?” A shrug. Marsalis caught Sevgi’s eye, clashed gazes like swords. “Well, you could start by asking yourselves why this corpse shows up now, all of a sudden, just as we’re cracking the ice off the familias. You could wonder why it’s taken nearly six months for someone to go sniffing around the aquaculture environs of the crash site—”
“Who the fuck is Bambarén?” Rovayo wanted to know. She shuttled a glance between Norton and Sevgi. Sevgi shook her head wearily. Don’t ask.
Meanwhile, Coyle’s sneer had made it to a full-blown grin. “The reason it’s taken four months to find this corpse—fucked-up, gene-enhanced paranoia aside—is that the outfit that run routine maintenance on Ward BioSupply’s deep-water platforms are mobile contractors with a biannual contract. Daskeen Azul. They’re based out of a co-op factory raft called Bulgakov’s Cat, and they come by here just about every six months to do the work. They just got here.”
“You think I’m paranoid?” asked Marsalis, with the same gentle smile he’d used on Coyle earlier.
The big Rim cop snorted. “Are you shitting me? You people were fucking designed paranoid, Marsalis.”
Norton cleared his throat. “I think—”
“Nah, let’s just lay this out where we can all see it.” Coyle jabbed a finger at the thirteen. “In case you missed it, Marsalis, I don’t like your kind. I don’t like what you are, and I don’t think you should be walking around in public without a wolf-trap cuff on. But that’s not my call.”
“No, it’s not,” said Norton. “So why don’t we—”
“I’m not done yet.”
Marsalis watched the Rim cop quietly. Measuring, Sevgi realized. He was measuring the other man.
“This is a Rim States police investigation,” Coyle said. “Not some black ops slaughter ground out in the Middle East. We’re in the business of catching criminals, not murdering them—”
“Yes. You don’t seem to have caught Merrin yet, though, do you?”
Coyle bared his teeth. “Cute. No, we haven’t caught this one yet. But we will. And when we do—”
“Roy.” It was the first time Sevgi could remember hearing Rovayo use her partner’s first name. “Crank it down, huh?”
“No, Al, I’m sick of the assumptions here. This has got to be said.” Coyle looked pointedly at Sevgi and Norton on his way back to staring down the thirteen. “If your COLIN masters here decide they want Merrin summarily executed when we’ve done our job and brought him in, well then I guess we’ll come to you for your professional expertise. Meantime, why don’t you just curb your fucking twi…gene-enhanced tendencies and let us work?”
Wall of silence. The last of the words seemed to hit it like pebbles off evercrete. It was a space, Sevgi realized with syn-sharpened surety, that outside virtual would have filled with violence the way blood rises to fill a wound. Marsalis and the Rim cop were wired eye-to-eye, like nothing else existed around them. She caught something in Rovayo’s face she couldn’t define. The other woman seemed locked up, an impossible step away from doing something. Norton wavered, helpless exasperation in the way he twitched. And she, Sevgi, watching the situation decay like—
“Okay,” said Marsalis, very softly.
Sevgi thought he’d finished. She opened her mouth, but the black man went on speaking.
“A couple of things.” Still soft, like the touch of cotton-wool wadding on fingertips. “First, if you think you’ll bring Allen Merrin down in any condition other than dead, then you’re not living in the real world. None of you are. And second, Roy, if you ever speak to me like that again, in the real world, I’ll put you in intensive care.”
The Rim cop flared up. “Hey, you want to fucking step outside with me?”
“Very much, yes.” But Sevgi had the curious sensation that Marsalis was imperceptibly shaking his head as he said it. “But it isn’t going to happen. I want you to remember a name, Roy. Sutherland. Isaac Sutherland. He saved your life today.”
Then he was gone.
Scribbled out in a flicker of virtual light as he left them to the empty virtual apartment, Merrin’s viewpatch freeze-frame portrait walking away, and the hundred red glow traces of his forensic passing.
CHAPTER 34
Oddly enough, it was Rovayo who came looking for him. By the time she tracked him down, he’d stopped prowling angrily about the Alcatraz station and drifted instead to an irritable halt on an outside gallery at the western end of the complex. She found him leaning on the rail, staring across the silver-glinting chop of the sea toward the mouth of the bay and the rust-colored suspension span that bridged it. There was a towering bank of fog rolling in against the blue of the sky, like a pale cotton-candy wave about to break.
“Enough water for you?” she asked.
Carl shot her a curious glance. “I’ve been back a long time.”
“Yeah, I know.” Rovayo joined him at the rail. “I got this cousin down in the Freeport, he did six years on Mars when he was younger. Soil engineer. Two three-year qualpro stints back-to-back. He told me you never get used to the size of the water again, doesn’t matter how long ago you went.”
“Well, that’s him. Everyone handles it differently.”
“You ever miss it?”
He looked at her again. “What do you want, Rovayo?”
“Says he misses the sky,” she went on neutrally, as if Carl hadn’t spoken. “Sky at night, you know. All that landscape on that tiny horizon, says it looks like furniture crammed into a storeroom that’s too small for everything to fit. And all the stars. He says it was like you were all camping out together, like you were all part of the same army or something. You and every other human being you knew was on the planet with you, all with the same reason for being there, like you were all doing something that mattered.”