‘You think I should let you back across the Atlantic at this point?’
Carl shrugged. ‘Do what you like. You want to pursue another line of enquiry, be my guest and dig one up. But Névant’s the obvious lead, and I don’t think he’ll talk to me in virtual, because a virtual identity can be faked. Tell the truth, I wouldn’t trust it in his place either. Us genetic throwbacks don’t like advanced technology, you know.’
He caught the momentary twitch of her mouth, before she locked the smile reflex down. Norton came back from the phone call, and the moment slid away. The COLIN exec’s face was grim.
‘Want to guess?’ he asked.
‘Merrin’s holed up in the UN building with a nuclear device,’ suggested Carl brightly. ‘And enough delegates held hostage to eat his way through to Christmas.’
Norton nodded. ‘I’m glad you’re having a good time. Wrong guess. You’re all over the feeds. Thirteen saves COLIN director, slaughters two.’
‘Oh fuck.’ Ertekin’s shoulders slumped. ‘All we needed. How the hell did that happen?’
‘Apparently, some anal little geek at one of the city feeds had a fit of total recall. Got our friend here’s face off the crime-scene footage, face reminded him of something, he matched it with the trouble down in Florida.’ Norton pointed. ‘Or maybe it was that jacket. Hard to miss, and it’s not exactly high fashion. Anyway, the geek rings up the twenty-eighth precinct and asks some leading questions. Evidently he got lucky. He either talked to someone really co-operative or someone really dumb.’
‘Fucking Williamson.’
Norton shrugged. ‘Yeah, or whoever. You’ve got to bet half an hour after Williamson got back to the twenty-eighth, every cop in the precinct house knew they had a thirteen walking the streets. And probably saw no reason on Earth to shut up about it. In their eyes, it’s a basic public safety issue. They know they’ve got no leverage with us, they’d be more than happy to let the feeds do their demonising for them.’
‘Demonise?’ Carl grinned. ‘I thought I was up there for saving Ortiz.’
‘And slaughtering two,’ said Ertekin wearily. ‘Don’t forget that part.’
‘They’re asking for a statement, Sev. Nicholson says he figures you’re it. Former NYPD detective and all that, should make it easier to play down any anti-COLIN feeling the twenty-eighth may have stirred up.’
‘Oh thanks, Tom.’ Ertekin threw herself back into her chair and glared up at Norton. ‘A fucking press conference? You think I haven’t got anything better to do than talk to the fucking media?’
Norton spread his hands. ‘It isn’t me, Sev. It’s Nicholson. And the way he sees it, no, you don’t have anything better to do right now. What do you want me to do, tell him you had to go out of town?’
Carl met her eyes across the room. He grinned.
PART III
Away from It All
‘The limited brief of this report notwithstanding, it is imperative to acknowledge that we are dealing here with actual human beings and not some theoretical model of human behaviour. We should not then be surprised to encounter a complex and potentially confusing mass of emotional factors and interactions, nor should it perplex us to discover that any genuine solution may well need to be sought beyond the current scope of our enquiry.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
COLIN Istanbul was on the European side, up near Taksim Square and nestled in amongst a forest of similar purple or bronze glass towers inhabited mostly by banks. At night, a skeleton security staff and automated guns kept the base levels open, lit in pools of soft blue, for whatever business might crop up. The Colony Initiative, to paraphrase its own advertising hype, was an enterprise on which the sun never set. You never knew when or where it might need to flex itself fully awake and deploy some geopolitical muscle. Best always to remain at standby. Sevgi, who associated Taksim primarily with the murder of her grandfather and great uncle by overzealous Turkish security forces, stopped in just long enough to collect keytabs for one of the COLIN-owned apartments across the Bosphorus in Kadikoy. Pretty much anything else she needed, she could access through her dataslate. Talking to Stéphane Névant was in any case not going to be a COLIN gig.
The less official presence he can smell on you, the better, Marsalis told her. Névant’s special, he’s one of the few thirteens I know who’s come to an accommodation with external authority. He’s emptied out his rage. But that doesn’t mean he feels good about it. Be best if we don’t poke a finger in that particular blister.
The same limo that had collected them from the airport rolled them down to the Karakoy terminal, where the ferries to the Asian side ran all night. Sevgi shrugged off the driver’s protests about security. Riding round via the bridge was going to take as long or longer than waiting for the ferry, and she needed to clear her head. She hadn’t wanted to come here, wanted still less to be here with Marsalis. She was beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t have folded and taken the press conference after all.
They’d watched it broadcast on New England Net, while the mid-afternoon THY suborb spun them up from JFK and dropped them on the other side of the globe. Norton, looking sober and imposing in his media suit. TV audiences still loved a solid pair of shoulders and a good head of hair above pretty much anything they’d actually hear coming out of a speaker’s mouth, and Tom Norton excelled in both areas. He really could, Sevgi was convinced, have run for office of some sort. He fielded the questions with exactly the right measure of patrician confidence and downhome good humour.
Dan Meredith, Republic Today. Is it true COLIN are now employing hypermales as security?
No, Dan. Not only is it not true, it’s also deeply flawed as an assumption. Inclusive gesture to the whole room. I think we’re all aware what a hypermale would look like, if anyone was actually criminally stupid enough to breed one.
Ripple of muttering among the gathered journalists. Norton gave it just long enough, then squashed it.
Hypermale genetic tendency is, to put not too fine a point to it, autism. A hypermale would make a pretty poor security guard, Dan. Not only would he likely not recognise signs of an impending attack from another human being, he’d probably be too busy counting the bullets in his gun to actually fire them at anything.
Laughter. The footage swung momentarily to Meredith’s face in the crowd. He offered a thin smile. Ladled urbane southern irony into his voice.
I’m sorry, Tom. Leaving aside the fact we all know the Chinese have bred super-autists for their n-djinn interface programmes, that’s not what I meant. I was referring to variant thirteens, which most normal Americans would call hypermales. Hypermales like the one you admit was present at today’s attempt on Alvaro Ortiz’s life. Are you employing any of those as security guards?
No, we’re not.
Then-
But Norton had already raised his head to scan the crowd, already signalled for the next question.
Sally Asher, New York Times. You’ve described this variant thirteen, Carl Marsalis, as a consultant. Can you please tell us what exactly he is consulting on?
I’m sorry, Sally, I’m not currently at liberty to say. All I can tell you is that it has nothing to do with the tragic events of this morning. Mr Marsalis was simply a bystander who took the action any good citizen with the opportunity might.