‘Catching rats.’ Carl nodded slowly. ‘Right. So I’m looking at this map, we’ve got southeast Texas, north Texas, western Oklahoma, then two in Colorado, one suspected in Iowa, Kansas one suspected one dead cert, Ohio, Michigan, two in Illinois, South Carolina suspected, Maryland suspected, Louisiana, Georgia and northern Florida. Have you got any ties between any of these victims? Anything that gels at all?’
The look on Ertekin’s face was answer enough. She was staring at the map too, and the scattered faces of the dead.
‘He could be getting them out of the phone book for all we know,’ said Norton soberly.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The sounds of shouting dragged her awake.
For a confused moment, she thought it was a theft or some excessive haggling down in the market. Then the rhythmic element in the voices made it through the wrap of sleep and she remembered where she was. She sat up sharply in the narrow barrack-room bed. The inside of her head felt grimy with the lack of syn. On the other side of the room, dawn was seeping through at the edges of the moth-eaten varipolara curtain; pearl grey light lay across the ceiling and down the far wall in blurred stripes. She looked at her watch and groaned. The chanting outside was too muffled to make sense of, but she didn’t need to hear the words.
On the table beside the bed, her phone rang.
‘Yeah?’
Norton’s voice filtered into her ear. ‘Hear the fans?’
‘I’m awake, aren’t I?’
‘Good call, Sev. If we’d stayed in town, we’d be fucked. That nasty cop mind of yours saves the day again.’
‘So.’ She flapped back the sheet, swung her legs out of bed to the floor. The skin on her thighs goosefleshed in the cool air. ‘Parris has friends in Tallahassee after all.’
‘Better than that.’ There was a sour grin in Norton’s voice. ‘He went to the media feeds. We’re all over Good Morning South.’
‘Ah, fuck.’ Groping around on the floor with her free hand for clothes. ‘You think we can still get out of here okay?’
‘Well, not by suborb, that’s for sure. Whatever was keeping the lid on Marsalis’s genetic secrets at South Florida State is long gone now. He’s blown. Either Parris talked, or somebody leaked higher up.’
‘Got to be Parris.’
‘Yeah, well in any case, now you got Jesuslanders fifty deep outside both gates and backing up down the access road for a couple of klicks at least. Real Die-for-the-Lord types by the look of it. I just got off the phone to our press liaison in Miami and she tells me there are bible-thumpers lining up for airtime from here to Alaska.’ She could hear him grinning again. ‘We’re not just trying to evade Republican justice any more, Sev. We’re harbouring an abomination before the Lord.’
‘Great. So what do we do?’ Sevgi stuck an arm into a shirt sleeve. ‘Fly home the old-fashioned way? COLIN’s got to have a couple of flatline Lears down here, right? For short-hop VIPs.’
‘I would think so, yes.’
‘And they’re not going to shoot us out of the sky when we hit Republic air-space, are they?’
Norton said nothing. Sevgi remembered her profiler cups halfway through seaming her shirt shut. She split the seam back open, peered around on the floor.
‘Come on, Tom. You can’t seriously think—’
‘Okay, no, they probably won’t shoot us down. But they might force the pilot back to a landing at Miami International and take us off the plane there. We’re not popular in these parts, Sev.’
‘Not fucking popular anywhere,’ she muttered. She caught the translucent gleam of a p-cup at the foot of the bed. She fished it up between two fingers and pressed it up under the weight of her right breast. ‘All right, Tom. What do you want to do?’
‘Let me talk to Nicholson.’ He rode out her snort. ‘Sev, he may be an asshole, but he’s still responsible for operations. It doesn’t look any better for him than for us if we end up slammed in some Miami jail.’
Sevgi prowled the darkened room looking for the other p-cup. ‘Nicholson won’t get in a fight at State legislature level, Tom, and you know it. He’s too much of a political animal to upset people with that much clout. If Tallahassee gets in line behind this thing, we’re going to be left twisting in the wind down here.’
Another hesitation. Outside, the sounds of the crowd surged like distant surf. Sevgi found the cup under the bed, dug it out and fitted it awkwardly, left-handed under her left breast. She sat on the edge of the bed and started seaming her shirt shut again.
‘Tell me I’m wrong, Tom.’
‘I think you are wrong, Sev. Nicholson is going to see this as interference with his COLIN security brief, and at a minimum it’s going to make him look bad. Even if he doesn’t take on Tallahassee directly himself, he’ll kick it upstairs with an urgent action label attached.’
‘And meanwhile what? We sit tight here?’
‘There are more unpleasant places to be stranded, Sev.’ He sighed. ‘Look. Worst-case scenario, you get to spend the day on the beach with your new pal.’
‘My new…’ Sevgi took the phone away from her ear and stared at it. The little screen was an innocent matt grey. Norton hadn’t enabled the v-feed. ‘Fuck you, Tom.’
‘It was a joke, Sev.’
‘Yeah? Well next time you’re down on Fifth Avenue, get yourself a new fucking sense of humour.’
She killed the call.
From the landward observation tower, it didn’t look like much. Several hundred variously dressed men and women milling about in front of the facility gate, while off to the left a suited, white-haired figure declaimed from behind a portable plastic ampbox podium. A couple of amateurish, hastily scrawled holo placards tilted about in the air above the crowd. Teardrops and a few old style IC vehicles were parked back along the access road, and people leaned against their flanks in ones and twos. Early morning sunlight winked and glinted off glass and alloy surfaces. A couple of helicopters danced in the sky overhead, media platforms by the look of their livery.
It didn’t look like much, but they were a good two hundred metres back from the gate here, the noise was faint and detail hard to see. Sevgi had worked crowd control a few time as a patrol officer and she’d learnt not to make snap judgements about situations involving massed humanity. She knew how quickly it could turn. ‘…may have the form of a man, but do not be deceived by his form.’ The words rinsed up from the podium sound system, still relatively unhysterical. Whoever the preacher was, he was building up slowly. ‘Man is made in the image and love of God. This. Creature. Was made by arrogant sinners, by shattering the seed God gave us in His wisdom. The Bible tells us…’
She tuned it out. Squinted up at one of the helicopters as it banked.
‘No sign of the state police?’ she asked the tower guard.
He shook his head. ‘They’ll show up if those clowns start charging the gate, not before. And only then because they know we’re authorised to use lethal force if there’s a line breach.’
His face was impassive, but the sour edge in his voice was unmistakable. The name on his chest tag read Kim, but Sevgi guessed Korean American was close enough to Chinese for a common bitterness to find roots. Back before secession, the Zhang fever mobs hadn’t been all that selective in their lynchings.
‘I doubt it’ll come to that.’ She faked a breezy confidence. ‘We’ll be out of your hair before lunchtime. They’ll all go home after that.’