Ertekin reached his side.
‘You okay?’ he asked her absently.
‘Yeah. Marsalis, you’ve got blood—’
‘Not mine. Can I see that Marstech piece of yours for a second?’
‘Uh. Sure.’
She handed the weapon to him, took the Imbel as he offered it over in return. He weighed the Beretta for a moment, checked the safety and the load display. Then he raised it and shot the young soldier through the face. The boy’s head jerked back. Lolled. He knocked the safety back on, palmed the warmth of the barrel and handed the pistol back to Ertekin.
She didn’t take it. Her voice, when it came, was leashed tight with anger.
‘What the fuck did you do that for?’
He shrugged. ‘Because he wasn’t dead.’
‘So you had to make him that way?’ Now the anger started to bleed through. Suddenly she was shouting. ‘Look at him, Marsalis. He was no threat, he was injured—’
‘Yeah.’ Carl gestured around at the deserted road and the empty landscape beyond. ‘You see a hospital out there anywhere?’
‘In Arequipa—’
‘In Arequipa, he’d have been a fucking liability.’ Running a little anger of his own now. ‘Ertekin, we need to hit Greta Jurgens fast, before she finds out what went down here tonight. We don’t have time for hospital visits. This isn’t a… what?’
Ertekin was frowning, anger shelved momentarily as she reached into her jacket pocket. She fished out her phone, which was vibrating quietly on and off, pulsing along its edges with pale crystalline light.
‘Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’ Carl looked away down the perspectives of the road in exasperated disbelief. ‘At this time of night?’
‘Rang before,’ she said, putting the device to her ear. ‘Just before the fireworks kicked off. Didn’t have time to pick up. Ertekin.’
Then she listened quietly. Made monosyllabic agreement a couple of times. Hung up, and put the phone away again, face gone calm and thoughtful.
‘Norton,’ he guessed.
‘Yeah. Time to go home.’
He gaped at her. ‘What?’
‘That’s right.’ She met his eye, something harder edging the calm. ‘RimSec called. They’ve got a body. We’ve got to go back.’
Carl shook his head. Twinges of the firefight backed up in his nerves, fake-fired the mesh. ‘So they’ve got a body. Another body. Big fucking deal. You going to pull out now, just when we’re getting somewhere?’
Ertekin gazed around at the carnage. ‘You call this getting somewhere?’
‘They tried to stop us, Sevgi. They tried to kill us.’
‘They tried to kill us in New York as well. You want to go back there? Come to that, Névant tried to kill you in Istanbul. Violence follows you around, Marsalis. Just like Merrin, just like—’
She clamped her lips.
Carl looked at her and felt the old weariness seeping in. He cranked up the rind of a smile for cover.
‘Go ahead, Sevgi, say it. Just like Ethan.’ He gestured. ‘Go on, get it off that gorgeous chest of yours. It’s what you’re thinking anyway.’
‘You have no fucking right to assume—’
‘No?’ He paused for effect. ‘Oh, yeah, I forgot. You get some kind of perverse thrill out of fucking unlucks, and that makes you think you don’t see us the same way the rest of the whole fucking human race does. Well it takes more than a Cuban wank and a few sheet stains to—’
Abruptly, he was on the ground.
He lay there on his back in the road dust, staring up while she stood over him, clutching her right fist in her left hand.
‘Motherfucker,’ she said wonderingly.
She’d stepped in before she threw the punch, he realised. Right hook, or an uppercut, he couldn’t work out which. He never saw it coming.
‘You think I haven’t been where you are now, Marsalis?’
He propped himself up on an elbow. ‘What, flat on the your back in the road?’
‘Shut up.’ She was trembling visibly. Maybe with comedown from the firefight. Maybe not. ‘You think I don’t know what it’s like? Think again, fuckwit. Try growing up Muslim in the West, while the Middle East catches fire again. Trying growing up a woman in a western Muslim culture fighting off siege mentality fundamentalism again. Try being one of only three Turkish-American patrolwomen in a New York precinct dominated by male Greek-American detectives. Hey, try sleeping with a thirteen, you’ll get almost as much shit as being one, not least from members of your own fucking family. Yeah. People are stupid, Marsalis. You think I need lessons in that?’
‘I don’t know what you need, Ertekin.’
‘No, that’s right, you don’t. And listen – you got some fucking problem with what we did back in Istanbul, then deal with it however you need to. But don’t you ever, ever call into question my relationship with Ethan Conrad again. Because the next time I swear I will put a fucking bullet in you.’
Carl rubbed at his jaw. Flexed it experimentally left and right.
‘Mind if I get up now?’
‘Do what you fucking like.’
She stood away from him, staring off somewhere beyond the corpses and the arid landscape. He climbed carefully to his feet.
‘Ertekin, just listen to me for a moment. Look around you. Look at this mess.’
‘I am looking at it.’
‘Right. So it’s got to mean something, right?’
Still she didn’t look at his face. ‘Yeah, what it probably means is that Manco Bambaren’s tired of you pushing him around in his own backyard.’
‘Oh, come on Ertekin. You’re a cop, for fuck’s sake.’
‘That’s right, I’m a cop.’ Suddenly, she whipped round on him. Fast enough to halfway trip a block reflex. ‘And right now, while I get dragged around the globe watching you fulfil your genetic potential for wholesale slaughter, other cops elsewhere are doing real police work and getting somewhere with it. Norton was right about this, we’re wasting our time. We are going back.’
‘You’re making a mistake.’
‘No.’ She shook her head, decision taken. ‘I made a mistake in Istanbul. Now I’m going to put it right.’
PART IV
Out to Sea
‘We must at all times guard against any illusory sense of final achievement. To recommend change, as this report does, is not to suggest that the problems we address will disappear or no longer require attention. At most they will disappear from view, and this may very well be a counterproductive outcome, since it cannot fail to encourage a complacency we can ill-afford.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Greta Jurgens came to work early, shuffling across the deserted white stone courtyards just off the Plaza de Armas before the sun got high enough to make them blaze. Still, she wore heavy-framed sunglasses against the light, and her pace was sluggish enough for summer heat or a woman twice her age. She wasn’t small-boned, or even especially pale given her Germanic ancestry, but the tanned, muscle-freighted bulk of the two Samoan bodyguards detailed to escort her from the limousine each day made her seem delicate and ill by comparison. And as she reached the cloistered edge of the courtyard where her office was, stepped under the cloister’s stone roof and up to the office door, she shivered, harder than most humans would. October was a knowledge, a cold creeping tide in her blood. Darker, colder days, coming in.