‘Am I keeping you up?’
‘Fuck off. You want to ask me questions, ask me. Then get the fuck out.’
‘You talk to Manco today?’
‘No.’
He seated himself on the edge of the desk. ‘Yesterday?’
‘Before he went to meet you. Not since.’
‘Why would he use the army and not familia talent?’
‘You’re assuming it was him.’
‘He came close to greasing me himself, up at Sacsayhuaman. Yeah, I’m assuming this was him.’
‘You got no other enemies?’
‘I think we agreed I was asking the questions.’
She shrugged. Waited.
‘Manco got any interests up in Jesusland?’
‘That I know of? No.’
‘The Rim?’
‘No.’
‘He had a cousin did jail-time in Florida. Wore a jacket just like this one, apparently. Know anything about that?’
‘No.’
‘You guys move medical tech at all?’
She held down another yawn. ‘If it pays.’
‘Heard of a guy called Eddie Tanaka?’
‘No.’
‘Texan. Strictly small-time.’
‘I said no.’
‘What about Jasper Whitlock?’
‘No.’
‘Toni Montes?’
‘No.’
‘Allen Merrin?’
She threw up her hands. ‘Marsalis, what the fuck is this? Gone Walkabout? Do I look like Shannon Doukoure to you? We’re not a fucking missing persons agency.’
‘So you don’t know Merrin?’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘What about Ulysses Ward?’
She sat back in the chair. Sighed. ‘No.’
‘Manco treat you okay, Greta?’
She flared again, for real this time. ‘That’s none of your motherfucking business.’
‘Hey, I’m just wondering here.’ He gestured. ‘I mean, you’re good-looking and all, but in the end you’re a twist, just like me, and—’
‘I am nothing like you, unluck,’ she said coldly.
‘—we all know how the familias feel about twists. I don’t imagine Manco’s any different to the other taytas. Must be tough for you.’
Greta said nothing.
‘Well?’
‘I didn’t hear you ask me a question.’
‘Didn’t you?’ He grinned mirthlessly. ‘My question, Greta, was how does a gringa hib twist like yourself end up working front office for the familias?’
‘I don’t know, Marsalis. Maybe it’s because some of us twists can transcend what it says in our genes and just get on and do the work. Ever think of that?’
‘Greta, you’re asleep four months out of every twelve. That’s going to put a serious dent in anyone’s productivity. Add to that you’re white, you’re a woman and you’re not from here. The familias aren’t known for their progressive attitudes. So I don’t see any way this works, unless my sources are right and you’re fucking the boss.’
Across the room, Isaac’s eyes widened with disbelieving fury. She caught his gaze and shook her head, then fixed Marsalis with a stare.
‘Is that what you’d like to believe?’
‘No, it’s what Stéphane Névant tells me.’
‘Névant?’ Greta sneered. ‘That shithead? Fucking wannabe pistaco, too stupid to realise—’
She stopped, sat silent.
Fucking end of cycle slippage, she knew dismally. Fucking traitorous genetic bullshit modifi-
Marsalis nodded. ‘Too stupid to realise what?’
‘To realise. That he needed us, and we didn’t need him at all.’
‘That’s not what you were going to say.’
‘Oh, so now you’re a fucking telepath?’
He got off the edge of the desk. ‘Let’s not make this more unpleasant than it’s got to be, Greta.’
‘I agree. In fact, let’s stop this shit right now.’
The new voice held them both frozen for a pair of seconds. Greta locked onto the figure in the doorway, then looked back just in time to see Marsalis’s face slacken into resignation. His lips formed a word, a name, she realised, and realised at the same moment, confusedly but surely, that it was all over.
Sevgi Ertekin stepped into the room, Marstech Beretta in hand.
In the taxi, they sat with a frigid thirty centimetres of plastic seat between them and stared out of opposite side windows at the passing frontages. Outside, the sun was on its way up into a sky of flawless blue, striking the early morning chill out of the air and lighting the white volcanic stonework of the old town almost incandescent. Traffic already clogged the main streets, slowed passage to a jerky crawl.
‘We’re going to miss our fucking flight,’ she said grimly.
‘Ertekin, this place has a dozen flights a day to Lima. We’ve got no problem getting out of here.’
‘No, but we’ve got a big fucking problem making the Oakland suborbital out of Lima if we miss this flight.’
He shrugged. ‘So we wait in Lima, catch a later bounce to Oakland. This guy they’ve found is dead, right? He’s not in a hurry.’
She swung on him. ‘What the fuck were you doing back there?’
‘Working a source, what did it look like?’
‘To me? Looked like you were winding up to beat a confession out of her.’
‘I wasn’t looking for a confession. I don’t think she knows about our little reception committee last night.’
‘Shame you didn’t think to find that out before you cut loose on the hired help.’
Carl shrugged. ‘They’ll live.’
‘The one out in the courtyard may not. I checked him on my way in. At a guess I’d say you fractured his skull.’
‘That’s hardly the point.’
‘No, the point is that I told you we were done here. I told you we were going stay put in the hotel until we were ready to fly out. The point is that you told me you would.’
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
She said something in Turkish, under her breath. He wondered whether to tell her the truth, that he had slept, but not for very long. Had stung himself awake with dreams of Elena Aguirre muttering behind him in the gloom of Felipe Souza’s cargo section, had thought for one icy moment that she stood there beside the bed in the darkened hotel suite, staring down at him glitter-eyed. He’d dressed and gone out, itching to do violence, to do anything that would chase out the remembered powerlessness.
Instead he told her:
‘She knows Merrin.’
Momentary stillness, a barely perceptible stiffening, then the scant shift of her profile from the window, a single, sidelong glance.
‘Yeah, right.’
‘I ran a long list of names on her, mostly victims from your list. Merrin’s was the only one that got a reaction. And when I moved on to the next name, she relaxed right back down again. Either she knew him before he went to Mars, or she knows him now.’
‘Or she knows someone else with that name, or did once.’ She’d gone back to looking out of the window. ‘Or it sounded like something or someone she knew, or you’re mistaken about the way she reacted. You’re chasing shadows, and you know it.’
‘Someone tried to kill us last night.’
‘Yeah, and on your own admission Jurgens knows nothing about it.’
‘I said she didn’t seem to.’
‘Like she seemed to know Merrin, you mean?’ She looked at him again, but this time there was no hostility. She just looked tired. ‘Look, Marsalis, you can’t have it both ways. Either we trust your instincts or we don’t.’