‘You were asking me for a reason. Tell di Palma this is what happens when you run your licensed operatives on a no win/no fee bounty and a three-month delay on expense reimbursement. They start to have loyalty issues.’
The UNGLA man hesitated. He glanced back at the door. Carl stood up.
‘Don’t let’s force this, Mehmet,’ he said easily.
Sevgi found him later, seated in the ground floor waiting area watching some low-grade global music show on an overhead screen. A miked-up and dyed blonde pranced back and forth on stage in clothing that wasn’t much more than slashed ribbons, stances and motion designed to maximise the display of the tanned flesh beneath. A dance troupe of young men and women, similarly unclad, followed her in mindless body echo. The song wittered on, backed by instruments you couldn’t see being played.
‘See anything you like?’ she asked.
‘It’s better than what I was watching earlier.’ He glanced past her. ‘What did you do with Névant?’
‘He’s coming down.’
‘Right.’ Marsalis’s eyes drifted back to the screen. ‘Got to hand it to you people, this is something you do really well.’
‘You people?’
‘Humans. Look at that.’ He waved his bandaged hand up at the gaily coloured images. ‘Perfect lockstep. Group mind. No wonder you guys make such good soldiers.’
‘Kind of ironic, coming from you,’ she said waspishly. ‘Compliments from the state-of-the-art gene warrior.’
He smiled. ‘Ertekin, you don’t want to believe everything they tell you on the feeds.’
The elevator chimed, and Battal Yavuz exited, shepherding Névant. The pale thirteen wore a mask of bandaging across the middle of his face and a similar wrapping on his broken hand. He seemed in good spirits.
‘See you again,’ he said to Marsalis. He lifted the damaged hand. ‘When this is back to functional, maybe.’
‘Sure. You know where I live. Look me up soon as you get out.’
Yavuz looked sheepish. ‘Sorry about this, Carl. If I’d known he was going to—’
‘Skip it. No harm done.’ Carl got up and clapped the Turk on the shoulder. ‘Thanks for coming out. Been good to see you.’
Sevgi hovered, watching Névant peripherally.
‘You want me to come with you to the heliport?’ she asked Yavuz
He shook his head. ‘No need.’
‘But if—’
Marsalis grinned. ‘Show her your ankle, Stéphane.’
As if they were all sharing a joke, the Frenchman pulled up the left leg of his trousers. Tight at the bottom of his shin, a slim band of shiny, pored black fibre wrapped around. It wasn’t much larger than a man’s watch, but a tiny green light winked tirelessly on and off at one edge. She shouldn’t really have been surprised, but her breath still hitched to a halt for a moment as she saw.
‘Excursion restraint,’ said Yavuz. ‘No one comes off the tract without one. Stéphane here’s not going to give me any trouble.’
‘And if he slips it? Finds a way to cut it loose ‘
‘It’s anti-tamper,’ said Névant, curiously gentle. ‘Wolf-trap formatted. Any interference, it triggers. Want to know what happens then?’
She already knew. The wolf-trap cuffs had a long and unpleasant history, made worse in her case by close personal connection. News stories of mutilated Muslim prisoners of war in American custody had dogged her father in his choice of émigré destination – his mail in the last weeks before he left Istanbul for good had been sprinkled with badly spelled death threats. Controversy raged in the feeds, cheap and violent vitriol overshadowing Murat’s personal struggle with culture and conscience – western pundits retorted angrily to the war crime accusations with detail on modified cuff use for shari’ah punishments in numerous of the self-declared Islamic republics, a rebuttal that stood for a while, then rang increasingly hollow as it became apparent who was selling the Islamic purists their mutilative technology. Murat, tasting a sour expedient hypocrisy whichever fruit he bit into, stormed out of Turkey anyway, and never looked back.
But later, as if they were some kind of family curse, Sevgi ran across the wolf-trap cuffs herself.
‘She’s a cop, Stéphane.’ Marsalis, there at her shoulder, filling in for her sudden drop into silence. ‘I reckon she’ll be familiar with the hardware.’
She had been a cop, but only just, less than two years in, when she developed her familiarity with the hardware. Internal Affairs landed on the hundred eighth like a bomb, brought a case against a group of detectives she knew who’d used the cuffs on hardcore suspects, apparently – but who the fuck could really fathom the logic of it? – in an attempt to scare up a useable confession. During the interrogation the pressure got cranked up a little too high. A young Sevgi Ertekin got dragged into the mix by association, was rapidly cleared, but still had had to stand in a field in upstate New York at dawn, watching mist cling just above the fallow earth, listening to the precise scrape/crunch rhythm of machine spadework, and, finally, gagging as the IA digging robot gently exhumed the three nine-week-old corpses and their cuff-severed hands.
Welcome to NYPD.
Small consolation – look at it this way, Sev, an uninvolved brother officer suggested at the time – that the cuffs, long outlawed in the Union, had come surreptitiously to the hundred eighth via a Jesusland brother-in-law to one of the convicted detectives, a senior officer for a private policing outfit in Alabama, Republican law enforcement – of course – still making widespread use of the cuffs in defiance of three international treaties and a nominal federal ruling yet to be ratified anywhere except Illinois.
Look at it this way Sev.
IA backed off from her speedily enough to avoid Officer Ertekin being tarred as a collaborator; better yet, her exemplary balancing act between loyalty to her fellow officers and duty to her calling was noticed by senior heads who would, years down the line, smooth her entry into midtown homicide.
Look at it this way, Sev.
The dead men in the field would not be much missed – all three had prior convictions as cross-border sex traffickers, hoodwinking young women from the Republic with promises of lucrative casual labour among the bright lights, then disciplining them via rape and battery until most went numbly to work providing orifices for New York’s low-end paying males.
She looked to the small consolations, as advised. All that spring she looked at it that way, but in the end it still came down to the remembered reek of decomposed human flesh in the early morning mist. Something changed in her that day – she saw the recognition of it in Murat’s eyes when she came home to him afterwards. It was the day he stopped trying to persuade her there were better career paths than the police, perhaps because he saw that if she didn’t quit for this then she never would.
Névant dropped his trouser leg over the cuff, and she blinked back to the present. A small bubble of quiet expanded in the waiting area.
‘I thought those were illegal in Europe,’ she said, to break the silence.
‘On humans,’ agreed Névant, darting a glance at Marsalis. ‘With thirteens though, well, you can’t be too careful. Isn’t that right, Mars man?’
The black man shrugged. ‘Depends how bright they are, I’d say.’
He watched Yavuz take the Frenchman out and put him in the dedicated UN teardrop without speaking again, or moving. His face could have been carved from anthracite. Only when the vehicle pulled softly away did he glance up at the dance troupe on the screen above his head, and something happened in the lines around his eyes. Sevgi made it for disgust, but she couldn’t have said with any certainty at what or whom it was aimed, and she wondered if Marsalis could either.