‘Yeah. For anyone with major male tendency, you just described the perfect object of desire.’ Carl drew on the collateral detail like dying embers in a fire, huddling to the warmth and distraction it offered. ‘Haag gun’s infinitely attractive to anyone even remotely enamoured of weaponry. Guy I knew in Texas once offered me half a million dollars for mine. Cash in a suitcase.’
‘Okay, look.’ The COLIN exec rubbed hands over his face. Dragged his head up through his fingers. ‘Say this guy, this Onbekend, he somehow gets hold of a Haag gun because it makes his dick hard. He carries it into a situation where he runs the risk of arrest or a shoot-out with RimSec, and just before the action starts, he leaves the damn thing in the car? There’s no sense in that.’
‘Yes, there is.’ He’d had the whole night to think it through, sitting in a chair outside the intensive care unit and fitting together the irreversible march of events that put Sevgi Ertekin in a support cocoon on the other side of the bio-sealed doors. He had his solution before dawn, and it stared him in the face like a skull, drove him out of the cleanly kept corridors and away, down into the gardens and their greying light. ‘Onbekend brought the Haag gun for me, because he thought he was going to have to walk me out of the hotel and get me somewhere they could fake my suicide. They couldn’t afford a murder, they’re trying to run silent right now. And Onbekend couldn’t afford to sedate me, because it might show up in an autopsy. He was looking to back me up and push me around fully conscious, and that’s a tricky thing to do with a thirteen. We don’t scare easily, and we’re generally not that afraid of dying. But there are ways and ways to die. I might have tried to jump almost any ordinary weapon, even against the odds. Not the Haag gun.’
‘He told you that. That he was planning to fake your suicide?’
‘Yeah, he told me.’ Carl stared back into the memories. ‘Above and beyond anything he was hired to do, Onbekend hated me. I’m used to that from other thirteens, it’s standard. But this was a little more. He wanted me stripped down before I died. Wanted me to know how stupid I’d been, how far ahead and above me he was. How pitiful I was going to look with my brains blown out by my own hand somewhere.’
‘But they shelved the suicide.’
‘Yeah.’ Carl drew another hard breath. Onbekend’s remembered scorn cut through him. ‘They didn’t need it. I went walkabout and the plan changed, it was going to be enough to fake a street death instead. No need for the Haag as a threat, and it would have been entirely the wrong weapon to actually kill me with. Onbekend left it in the teardrop, only used it on Sevgi because he didn’t have anything else to hand.’
Norton stared at him. ‘I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort to her.’
Carl looked tiredly back at him. ‘You want to blame me for this, Norton? Need a target for your impotent male rage. Go right ahead, hate me. I’m used to it, I’m not going to notice the extra weight. Just don’t push your luck, because I’m tired and I will break you in half if you cross the line.’
‘If you hadn’t—’
‘If I hadn’t gone out, it would have been different. I know. They would have taken me in the hotel, walked me out and Sevgi Ertekin would still have been there when it happened because, Norton, she was coming to see me anyway. Maybe that’s what’s really eating you, huh?’
‘Oh, fuck you.’ But it was said wearily, and he looked away.
‘You want to know the truth, Norton? Why she was coming to see me?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘She was coming to clear your name.’
The COLIN exec looked back at him, as if Carl had just slapped him.
‘What?’
‘I didn’t trust you, Norton, any more than a Jesusland Presidential address. Those skaters outside Sevgi’s place that morning, and you were the only one who knew where I was. I figured you had some agenda that involved wiping me off the landscape.’
‘What? I fucking got you out of jail in the first place, Marsalis. It was my call, my initiative. Why the hell would I—’
‘Hey, call it thirteen paranoia.’ Carl sighed. ‘Anyway, seems last night Sevgi got a call from NYPD, they’d picked up the third skater and he talked. I was never the target. Ortiz was. Sevgi was coming to tell me that, because she couldn’t bear the idea of your name being smeared.’
Norton said nothing.
‘Feel any better now?’
‘No.’ It was a whisper.
‘She never wore it as a theory anyway. Slapped me down when I tried to sell it to her. I don’t know if you guys were ever an item—’
‘We weren’t.’ Snapped out, brittle and harsh.
‘No, well whatever you had, it still went pretty deep, apparently.’
Long silence. Norton looked about the garden as if he might see some kind of explanation hanging up in a shrub, sparkling there in the fountain.
‘She was a cop,’ he muttered finally. ‘Two years in COLIN, but I don’t think she ever really changed.’
‘Yeah. She was a cop. That’s why she backed you, her partner, against anything I could sell her. And that’s why she went out into the street after Onbekend, and that’s why she got shot.’
More quiet. Direct sunlight reached the bottom of the buildings, gilded the gravel. There was some real warmth seeping into the day now. A group of students went past in a hurry, late for something. A woman in a blue doctor’s tunic came towards them from the acute unit block.
‘Which of you is Marsalis?’ she asked peremptorily. Under close-cropped black hair, her Chinese features were smudged with tiredness.
Carl raised his hand. The doctor nodded.
‘You’d better come in. She’s asking for you.’
Norton looked away.
The v-format was state of the art and took less time than he’d expected to cajole his thirteen nervous system into relaxing and accepting the illusion. He blinked in behind floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors. On the other side there was a garden, less arid and stylised than the one he’d been sitting in back in the real world. Here, there was a border of lush growth around the well-kept lawn, nodding ferns and draped foliage, tall, straight trees beyond. A pair of wooden easy chairs were set out in the centre.
Sevgi Ertekin sat in one of them, loosely robed in a slate and blue kimono with Arab characters embroidered, waiting. There was a book in her lap, but she held it closed, fingers loosely inserted between the pages and her head was lifted, as if listening. She was staring at something else, as if someone already stood there on the other side of the garden, waiting as well.
The glass slid back soundlessly, and he stepped through. The motion caught her eye, or the system was wired to chime the arrival of visitors. She saw him, lifted an arm in greeting.
‘Nice, isn’t it,’ she called out. ‘No expense spared for dying COLIN executives, you know.’
‘So I see.’ He walked to her, stood looking down into her face. The system had allowed no trace of her illness into its imaging.
She gestured. ‘Come on, then. Sit down, soak it up.’
He sat.
‘I guess I’m looking a lot better in here than I do for real,’ she said brightly, treading on the heels of his own thoughts with an accuracy that made him blink. ‘Right?’
‘I don’t know. They haven’t let me in to see you yet.’
‘Well, they haven’t shown me a mirror yet either. Then again, I haven’t asked. I figure the idea is to make you feel as good about yourself as possible, hope that kicks your will to live into high gear, boosts your immune system, and gets you out of their expensive acute-care unit as soon as humanly possible.’ She stopped abruptly, as if unplugged, and he saw for the first time how scared she really was. She licked her lips. ‘Of course, that’s not a dynamic that applies to me.’