‘Yeah, I guess that’s why we caught him so easily.’
Rovayo blinked. ‘I see you’re in a great mood.’
‘Sorry. Haven’t had much sleep.’ He glanced back at the closed door of Sevgi’s room. ‘You want to get a coffee downstairs?’
‘Sure.’
Across the scarred plastic table top in the cafeteria downstairs, he asked mechanically after the Bulgakov’s Cat bust. There wasn’t much. Daskeen Azul weren’t shifting from their position. Merrin, Ren and the others were employees who had usurped company policy and practice for their own illicit ends. Any attempt to incriminate owners or management would be fought right into court and out the other side. Warrants resisted, bail set and paid, legal battle joined.
‘And we’ll probably lose,’ was Rovayo’s sour assessment. ‘Same day we made the arrests, some very heavy legal muscle showed up from the Freeport. Tsai’s going to take them on anyway, he’s pissed about the whole thing. But no one’s talking, they’re all either too scared or too confident. Unless someone in this crew rolls over for us, and fast, we’re going to end up dead in the water.’
‘Right.’ It came out slack. He couldn’t make himself care.
Rovayo sipped her coffee, eyed him grimly across the table and said: ‘I’m only going to ask this once, because I know it’s stupid. But are they sure they can’t beat this thing she’s got?’
‘Yeah, they’re sure. The viral shift moves too fast, we’re just playing catch-up. There isn’t an n-djinn built that has the chaos-modelling capacity to beat this. Haag system’s designed to take down a thirteen, and my immune system’s about twice as efficient as yours, so they had to come up with something pretty unstoppable.’
Rovayo grunted. ‘Nothing ever fucking changes, huh?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Arms industry, making a living scaring us all. You know a couple of hundred years ago, they built a whole new type of bullet because they thought ordinary slugs wouldn’t take down a black man with cocaine in his blood?’
‘Black man?’
‘Yeah, black. Black-skinned, like you and me. First they tie cocaine use to the black community, make it a race-based issue. Then they reckon they need a bigger bang to put us down, because we’re all coked up.’ The Rim cop made an ironic gesture of presentation. ‘Welcome to the .357 magnum round.’
Carl frowned. The terminology was only vaguely familiar. ‘You’re talking about some Jesusland thing, right?’
‘Wasn’t called Jesusland then. This is a cased round I’m talking about. Two hundred years ago, I did say.’
He nodded and rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger. ‘Yeah, sorry. You did. I forgot.’
‘Same thing happened another couple of hundred years before that. Automatic fire this time.’ Rovayo sipped at her coffee. ‘Guy called Puckle patented a crank-action-mounted machine gun designed to fire square bullets at the advancing Turkish hordes.’
Carl sat back. ‘You’re winding me up.’
‘No. Thing was supposed to fire round bullets if you were fighting Christians, square if you were killing heathens.’
‘Come on! There’s no fucking way they could build something like that back then.’
‘No, of course they couldn’t. It didn’t work.’ The Rim cop’s voice tinged grim. ‘But the .357 magnum did. And so does Haag.’
‘Monsters, huh,’ said Carl quietly. ‘How come you know all this stuff, Rovayo?’
‘I read a lot of history,’ said the black woman. ‘Way I see it, you don’t know anything about the past, you got no future.’
They aspirate her lungs, try to bring her breathing back up. She just lies there while they do it, before, during and after, puddled on the bed in her own lack of strength. The whole process feels like the kicks of a mid-term pregnancy, but higher up and much more frequent, as if in tiny, hysterical rage.
Memory brings tears, but they leak out of her eyes so slowly she runs out of actual feeling before they stop. She doesn’t have a lot of fluid to spare.
Her mouth is parched. Her skin is papery dry.
Her hands and feet feel swollen, and increasingly numb.
When the endorphins they give her wear thin, she can track the passage of her urine by the tiny scraping pains it makes on its way to the catheter.
Her stomach aches from emptiness. She feels sick to its pit.
When the endorphins come on, it feels like going back to the garden, or the night-time ride of the ferries across the Bosphorus to the Asian side. Black water and merry city lights. She hallucinates once, very clearly, coming into the dock at Kadikoy and seeing Marsalis waiting for her there. Dark and quiet under the LCLS overheads.
Reaching out his hand.
Surfacing from the dosage is pain, dragging her back like rusty wires, and sudden, sick-making fear as she remembers where she is. Lying drained, and seeping slowly in and out of bags. Stale sheets and the gaunt sentinels of the machines around her. And through it all, a racking, overarching, frustrated fury with the body she’s still wired and tied and bedded down into.
He tried to work.
Sevgi was out on the swells of endorphin a lot of the time, drifting there in something that approximated peace. He found he could step out and leave her in these periods, and he conversed with Norton in low tones, sitting in waiting rooms or leaned against walls in the night-quiet hospital corridors.
‘I remembered something this afternoon,’ he told the COLIN exec. ‘Sitting in there, shit going through my head. When Sevgi and I went to talk to Manco Bambaren, he recognised this jacket.’
Norton peered at the arm Carl held out to him, the orange chevrons flashed along the sleeve.
‘Yeah? Standard Republican jail-wear, I guess any criminal in the western hemisphere’s got to know what that looks like.’
‘It’s not quite standard.’ Carl twisted to show Norton the lettering on the back. The COLIN exec shrugged.
‘Sigma. Right. You know how many prison contracts those guys have in Jesusland? They’ve got to be the second or third biggest corporate player the incarceration industry has. They’re even bidding on stuff out here on the coast these days.’
‘Yeah, but Manco told me he had a cousin who did time specifically in South Florida State. Now maybe we can’t hack the datafog around Isabela Gayoso so easily, but we ought to be able to chase prison records and maybe dig this guy up. Maybe he’ll tell us something we can use.’
Norton nodded and rubbed at his eyes. ‘All right, we can look. God knows, I could use the distraction right now. You get a name?’
‘No. Bambaren, maybe, but I doubt it. The way Manco was talking, this wasn’t anyone that close to home.’
‘And we don’t know when he did time?’
‘No, but I’d guess recently. Sigma haven’t held the SFS contract more than five or six years max. Sigma jacket, you’ve got to be looking at that time frame.’
‘Or Bambaren misremembered, and his cousin did time in some other Sigma joint, somewhere else in the Republic.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Manco Bambaren’s memory. Those guys aren’t big on forgive and forget, especially not when it’s down to family.’
‘All right, leave it with me.’ Norton glanced back down the corridor towards Sevgi’s room. ‘Listen, I’ve been up since yesterday morning. I’ve got to get some sleep. Can you stay with her?’
‘Sure. That’s why I’m here.’