‘Again, yes,’ Merrin told the woman he was feeding off. ‘The cormorant’s legacy.’
The image froze.
‘Cormorant,’ said Carl, memory flexing awake.
‘Merrin uses the same word, out of context, on several occasions,’ said the djinn. ‘An association suggests itself. According to data from Wells region work camp rotas on Mars, both you and Merrin were acquainted with Robert P. Danvers, sin 84437hp3535. Yaroshanko-form extrapolation from this connects you both through Danvers to the Martian familias andinas, and, integrating with the term cormorant used here, with high probability to the sin-disputed identity Franklin Gutierrez.’
Carl sat quietly for a while. The memories came thick and fast, the emotions he thought he’d discarded half a decade ago. He felt his fingers crook like talons at his sides
‘Well, well, well,’ he said at last. ‘Gutierrez.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘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 mid eighties. One of the best, by all accounts. In eighty-six, he cracked Serbanco for upward of half a billion soles. Immaculate execution, it took them nearly a month to even realise 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 Franklin D. Roosevelt 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 amidst 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 seven 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-djinn had stirred him up, left him choppy and bleak with old memories.
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, running atmospheric balance systems for the Uplands Initiative. When he wasn’t doing that, he handled datacrime for the Martian familias andinas. I think it paid better than the day job.’
Norton shook his head. ‘If this Gutierrez has links with Mars organised 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 middle man 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 connection with Gutierrez no longer exists, and nor does Merrin’s. Any associative search Colony ran on Merrin would have stopped at Danvers. The Horkan’s Pride n-djinn only went further 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 a while. 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 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.’