‘We’ll go back to Ward,’ Rovayo said quickly. She’d stepped subtly into the space between the two men, body language a blend of backing Coyle up and defusing the situation. Sevgi made it as instinctive – you couldn’t brawl in a virtuality, but Rovayo seemed to have forgotten where they were. ‘We’ll change the protocols, maybe run it through a different n-djinn. We’ll go deeper until we find the link. Now, it’s a given that they knew each other. So it’s probably a safe bet that Ward went out there with the specific intention of bringing Merrin back.’
Coyle nodded. ‘Only Merrin won’t play ball. He doesn’t show; after what’s happened to him in transit from Mars, he doesn’t trust Ward, or anybody else who’s in on this thing. And Ward has got a limited window before Filigree Steel show up, he hasn’t got the time to search the hull for the guy he’s supposed to be collecting.’
‘Or,’ offered Rovayo, ‘Ward climbs down into the hull and when he sees the mess, he freaks and runs.’
‘Yeah, could work that way too.’ Coyle grimaced. ‘Either way, Merrin finds his own way out, then goes looking for Ward anyway. You know what that sounds like to me? Revenge.’
Sevgi turned to look at Marsalis. ‘That make sense to you?’
‘Well, you know us thirteens.’ Marsalis glanced across at Coyle. He burlesqued a caricature Jesusland drawl. ‘We’re all real irrational when someone pisses us off.’
Coyle shrugged it off. ‘Yeah. What I heard.’
‘Merrin’s just endured seven months in transit,’ Norton pointed out. ‘He’s had to resort to cannibalism to survive. All because someone messed up his cryocap thaw. If he blamed Ward for that—’
‘Or if Alicia here is right, and Ward did freak and run.’ Coyle gestured. ‘Come on, however you look at it, this twi… this guy isn’t going to be in the most forgiving of moods. This is payback, pure and simple.’
‘Marsalis.’ Sevgi tried again. ‘I asked you what you think. You want to answer my question?’
He met her eyes. Face unreadable. ‘What do I think? I think we’re wasting our time here.’
Coyle snorted. Rovayo laid a hand on his arm. The black man barely looked in their direction. He took a step across the virtual apartment, faced the screen where Merrin was locked in freeze frame walking away, slipping out of the security camera’s angle of capture.
‘He was clear,’ he said slowly. ‘He’d beaten your half-arsed private-sector security effort, he’d left them puking their guts up exactly as planned. He’d run rings round them, misdirected everyone’s attention and then disappeared into local population, just the way he was trained. Going back for Ward meant exposing himself, coming out into the open again.’ A long, speculative stare across at Coyle. ‘When you’re operational in enemy territory, you don’t take risks like that for some kind of revenge kick.’
‘Sure,’ said Coyle. ‘Your kind, you’d just let that be. Let the people who abandoned you out there in space get away with it.’
‘Who said anything about getting away with it?’ Marsalis grinned unpleasantly. ‘My kind know how to wait, cudlip. My kind would let the people who did this live with the knowledge that we’re coming, let them wake up every day knowing—’
‘What did you call me?’ It had taken Coyle a moment or two to grasp the unfamiliar insult he’d just been handed.
‘You heard me.’
‘Will you two knock it off?’ snapped Sevgi. ‘Marsalis, you’re saying this isn’t revenge. Then what is it?’
‘I don’t know what it is,’ the black man said irritably. ‘I’m not Merrin, and contrary to what our friend here thinks, not everyone with a variant thirteen geneprint thinks exactly alike.’
Norton stepped into the breach. ‘No, but you were trained similarly, and that must count for something. You say his training wouldn’t allow an impulse of revenge. What would it dictate in this situation?’
‘Maybe he just needed to shut Ward up.’ Rovayo said ‘Cover his retreat. If Ward talked—’
Sevgi shook her head. ‘Doesn’t fit. Ward isn’t far enough up the chain of command. Self-made biosupply magnates don’t swing the weight to get things done on Mars, even in California. If Ward was a part of this, he was a small cog. They hired him to fish Merrin out of the Pacific and hand him on. End of function. He didn’t know anything that he hadn’t already been told.’
‘Right,’ said Coyle slowly. ‘But he must have known his chain of command, or at least his nearest contact. We’re looking at this the wrong way round. Merrin didn’t go to Ward to shut him up, he went to make him talk. To get the names of the people who were giving the orders.’
Norton looked suddenly hopeful. ‘You think Merrin got his hit list out of Ward?’
‘Unlikely.’ Marsalis prowled the virtual apartment like someone looking for a hidden exit somewhere high up. ‘The way Merrin’s been hopping the border back and forth, he’s working off either partial or sequential knowledge. Whatever he got out of Ward, it wasn’t his hit list.’
‘Or maybe just not the whole list,’ said Norton hopefully. ‘Maybe Ward had the first couple of names.’
‘There are no links from Ward to Whitlock,’ Rovayo pointed out.
‘Or Montes,’ said Coyle.
Norton sighed. ‘Right. Or any of the Jesusland kills, as far as we can tell. Shame, it would have been nice to find ourselves getting somewhere for a change.’
‘Yeah, well for that you’ve got to be looking in the right place.’ Marsalis gestured around the apartment. ‘And like I said before, we’re wasting our time here.’
Coyle’s lip curled. ‘Then perhaps you’d care to tell us how we could more profitably employ that time.’
‘Outside of going back to the altiplano and coming down hard on Manco Bambaren?’ A shrug. Marsalis caught Sevgi’s eye, clashed gazes like swords. ‘Well, you could start by asking yourselves why this corpse shows up now, all of a sudden, just as we’re cracking the ice off the familias. You could wonder why it’s taken nearly six months for someone to go sniffing around the aquaculture environs of the crash site—’
‘Who the fuck is Bambaren?’ Rovayo wanted to know. She shuttled a glance between Norton and Sevgi. Sevgi shook her head wearily. Don’t ask.
Meanwhile, Coyle’s sneer had made it to a full blown grin. ‘The reason it’s taken five months to find this corpse – fucked-up, gene-enhanced paranoia aside – is that the outfit who run routine maintenance on Ward Biosupply’s deep-water platforms are mobile contractors with a bi-annual contract. Daskeen Azul. They’re based out of a co-op factory raft called Bulgakov’s Cat, and they come by here just about every six months to do the work. They just got here.’
‘You think I’m paranoid?’ asked Marsalis, with the same gentle smile he’d used on Coyle earlier.
The big Rim cop snorted. ‘Are you shitting me? You people were fucking designed paranoid, Marsalis.’
Norton cleared his throat. ‘I think—’
‘Nah, let’s just lay this out where we can all see it.’ Coyle jabbed a finger at the thirteen. ‘In case you missed it, Marsalis, I don’t like your kind. I don’t like what you are, and I don’t think you should be walking around in public without a wolf-trap cuff on. But that’s not my call.’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Norton. ‘So why don’t we—’
‘I’m not done yet.’
Marsalis watched the Rim cop quietly. Measuring, Sevgi realised. He was measuring the other man.
‘This is a Rim States police investigation,’ Coyle said. ‘Not some black ops slaughter-ground out in the Middle East. We’re in the business of catching criminals, not murdering them—’