‘That’s not what we hear,’ growled Reyes.
‘So what do you hear, exactly?’
‘Why don’t you tell us, pendejo?’
Gutierrez cocked his head on one side. ‘Why don’t I tell you what you’ve just heard? What am I, telepathic now?’
‘Listen, fuckwit…’
Marsalis groaned, a little theatrical exasperation of his own. It was hard for Sevgi not to sympathise. Colony were fucking it up beyond belief.
They sat it out, nonetheless. The interrogation cycled a couple more times, reasonable to third degree and back again, but spiralling downward all the way. Gutierrez drew gill fumes and strength in the soft spells, weathered Reyes’ brutality when it came round. He didn’t give a millimetre. They took him out limping, broken-mouthed and bruised around one eye, nursing a sprained wrist. He gave one of the cameras a bloodied smile as he was led away. The vital signs monitors collapsed as he left the room, the ranking officer signed off formally. Fade to black.
Marsalis sighed. ‘Happy now?’
‘I will be when you tell me what you think.’
‘What do I think? I think short of professional torture with electrodes and psychotropics, Gutierrez isn’t going to tell Colony anything worth knowing. How long ago did this happen?’
‘Couple of days. Norton put in the arrest order the night we flew out to Istanbul.’
‘They worked on him since?’
‘I don’t think so. This is all we have. I don’t think they’ll go to the next level with him until they’ve got something solid from us.’
‘Yeah, and they’ll probably still be wasting their time. Earth or Mars, the familias have too much invested in guys like this. They get in early on with the good ones, give them the same synaptic conditioning you see in covert ops biotech. Stuff where the brain’ll turn to warm porridge sooner than give up proscribed information.’
‘You think he’d really be wearing something like that?’ Rovayo asked, slightly wide-eyed.
‘If I were running him, I’d have had it built in years ago.’ Marsalis yawned and stretched in his seat. ‘Plus, you want to remember Gutierrez is a datahawk. Those guys live for the virtual, they spend their whole lives switching off exactly the kind of physical realities torture involves. If they’re good at one thing, it’s distancing themselves from their own bodies. Back in the early days, back when the technology was fresh and the hook-ups were a lot more jack-and-pray than they are now, lot of ’hawks died from stupid shit like dehydration or burning to death because they missed a fire alarm. I remember Gutierrez telling me once hey, pain, that’s just your body letting you know what the thing you’re doing is going to cost – just got to get in there and pay the bill, soak. At that level, he’s as tough a motherfucker as you’ll ever see walk into an interrogation chamber. And with the familias behind him, he’s not much scared of physical damage either, because he knows it can be repaired.’
‘Scared of dying though, I guess,’ Sevgi said snappishly.
‘Yeah, and that’s part of your problem. See, Colony are a real bunch of thugs, but they can’t actually kill you, except maybe by accident. But the people Gutierrez works for, the familias – now that’s a whole other skyline. If they think he’s talked, or even that he might talk, then they got no problem putting him away. None at all, and he knows that. So yeah, Gutierrez is scared of dying, just like anybody else. But you’ve got to be able to deliver the threat.’
They sat for a couple of moments, facing the dead LCLS screen. Sevgi looked across at Rovayo.
‘You mind giving us a couple of minutes?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said, as soon as they were alone.
‘I’m not saying—’
‘I know exactly what you’re saying, and you can just fucking forget it. They’re on Mars, Ertekin. You saw the footage. You think I can scare Gutierrez any worse than that from two hundred and fifty million kilometres out?’
‘Yes,’ she said steadily. ‘I think you can.’
He shook his head. Voice creased with irritation. ‘Oh, based on what?’
‘Based on the fact you and Gutierrez have history. I’m a cop, Marsalis. Eleven years in, so give me some fucking credit, why don’t you. I saw the way you were when his name popped out of the n-djinn scan. I saw the way you watched him up on that screen just now.’ She drew a deep breath, let it go. ‘Gutierrez wired you to wake up midway home on Felipe Souza, didn’t he?’
‘Did he?’ Now there was nothing in his voice at all.
‘Yeah, he did.’ Gathering certainty, the way he sat like stone. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence, you and Merrin. The way I figure it, you did some kind of deal with Gutierrez for the lottery win, but Gutierrez didn’t like his end when it paid off. He sent you home with a little farewell kick. Fuck with your head, wake you up out there and hope you maybe go insane before recovery can get to you. That how it was?’
He rolled his head towards her on the back of the seat, looked at her and suddenly, for the first time in days, she was afraid of him again.
‘Well you’re the cop,’ he said tonelessly. ‘You got it all worked out, what do you need me for?’
She threw herself to her feet, paced towards the screen and turned to look back at him. Told herself it was not a retreat.
‘What I need you for is to look at Gutierrez like you just looked at me. Look him in the eye and tell him you’ll kill him if he doesn’t tell us what we need to know.’
‘That standard operating procedure for the NYPD these days, is it?’
She was back in the field, upstate New York at dawn and the gagging stench of disinterred flesh. The speculative stare of the IA detectives.
‘Fuck you.’
‘See. I can’t even scare you. And you’re right here in the room with me. How am I going to scare Gutierrez on Mars?’
‘You know what I’m talking about.’
He sighed. ‘Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. Talking about the mythos, right? You think that because Gutierrez was a thirteen aficionado he bought into this whole implacable gene-warrior bullshit that goes with it. But it’s Mars, Sevgi. It’s hundreds of millions of kilometres of empty fucking space and no way to cross it without a licence. Don’t you understand what that does to all those fucking human imperatives Jacobsen goes on about? What it does to love and loyalty, and trust, and revenge? Mars isn’t just another world, it’s another fucking life. What happens there, stays there. You come back, you leave it behind. It’s like a dream you wake up from. Gutierrez helped send me home. He isn’t going to believe in a million years that I’d go back there just to kill him for what he did, let alone just to shake him down for you people.’
‘He might believe you’d order it done. Pay for someone else to do it at the other end.’
‘Someone who isn’t scared of the familias?’
She hesitated a beat. ‘There are options that—’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know. I don’t doubt COLIN could rustle up a hit squad for me if your pal Norton makes the right calls. But I do my own killing, and Gutierrez knows that. I can’t fake him out on that one. And Sevgi, you know what? Even if I thought I could do it, I won’t.’