‘I could stop you.’
‘No, you couldn’t. First sign of trouble from you, I’m on a UNGLA bounce out of here. They practically tried to drag me onto the shuttle last week. They’ll jump at the chance if I call them. Then I’ll just double back to Peru on my own ticket.’
‘COLIN could still make your life very tough down there.’
‘Yeah, they usually do. Occupational hazard. It never stopped me before.’
‘Hard man, huh?’
‘Thirteen.’ Carl looked at him levelly. ‘Norton, this is what’s wired into me, it’s what my body chemistry’s good for. I am going to build a memorial to Sevgi Ertekin out of Onbekend’s blood, and I will cut down anyone who gets in my way. Including you, if you make me.’
Norton sank back onto the bench.
‘You think that’s just you?’ he muttered. ‘You think we don’t all feel that way right now?’
‘I wouldn’t know. But feeling and doing are two very different things. In fact, there’s a guy back on Mars called Sutherland who tells me humans have built their entire civilisation in the gap between the two. I wouldn’t know about that either. What I do know is that an hour ago in there,’ Carl gestured towards the hospital, ‘Murat Ertekin felt he wanted to put his daughter out of her misery. But he couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. I won’t judge him for that, just like I won’t judge you for not coming with me, if that’s the choice you make. Maybe this stuff just isn’t wired into you people as deep. That’s what they told us at Osprey, anyway. That we were special because we were able to do what the society that created us no longer had the stomach for.’
‘Right,’ Norton said bitterly. ‘Believe everything the recruiting poster says, why don’t you.’
‘I didn’t say I did, I said that’s what they told us. I don’t necessarily think they were right. This much is true – it certainly didn’t work out well, not for us or for you people.’ Carl sighed. ‘Look, I don’t know, Norton. Maybe the fact you don’t have the stomach for single-minded slaughter any more, the fact you’re forgetting how to do it – maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it makes you a better human being than me, a better member of society, a better man even. I wouldn’t know, and I don’t care because for me it isn’t relevant. I am going to destroy Onbekend, I am going to destroy anyone who stands in my way. Now are you coming with me or not?’
In the hotel, he found mundane things to do. The last four days of Sevgi’s life had frozen his own existence in its tracks, he’d done nothing awake but sit by her and wait. He’d been in the same set of clothes since the night she was shot, and even the Marstech fabrics were starting to look shabby. He bundled them up and sent them for cleaning. Ordered something similar from the hotel catalogue and wore it out into the street when he went looking for a phone. He supposed that he could have got phones easily enough from the hotel along with the clothing, but a habitual caution stopped him. And besides, he needed to walk. Away from or towards what, he wasn’t quite sure, but the need sat in the pit of his empty stomach like tiny bubbles, like frustration rising.
‘Bambaren’s cousin’s a bust,’ Norton had told him on their way back into town. The COLIN exec slumped in the back of the autocab as if broken at the joints. ‘So if you’re looking for a way in, that isn’t it. We got a name, Suerte Ferrer, street hook Maldicion, string of small-time stuff on the fringes of the Jesusland familias. Did his three years in South Florida for gang-related, but he’s out right now and he’s dropped right off the scope.’
‘The n-djinns can’t find him?’
‘He’s gone to ground somewhere in the Republic, and I can’t get an n-djinn search in there without causing a major diplomatic incident. We’re not exactly flavour of the month since we sprung you from South Florida State.’
‘You don’t think you can get local PD to co-operate?’
‘Which local PD?’ Norton stared emptily out of the window. ‘As far as our information goes, Ferrer could be in any of about a dozen different states. And besides, Jesusland PD don’t have the budget to run their own n-djinns.’
‘So they hire one out of the Rim.’
‘Yeah, they do that. But you’re talking about major expenditure and half these departments are struggling just to make payroll and keep their tactical equipment up to date. You’re looking at decades of slash-and-burn tax cuts in public services across the board. There is no way, in that climate, I can start ringing up senior detectives across the Republic and asking them to buy n-djinn time to track down some minor league gangbanger they’ve never heard of with no warrant out and no suspicion of anything other than being related to someone we don’t like.’
Carl nodded. Since leaving the hospital, he’d found himself thinking with a faintly adrenalised clarity that was like a synadrive hit. Sevgi was gone now, shelved in some space he could access later when he’d need the rage, and in her absence he was serene with vectored purpose. He looked back down the chain of association to Ferrer and saw the angle he needed.
‘Norton.’
The COLIN exec grunted.
‘How easy would it be for you to get access to unreleased Marstech?’
On the northern fringes of Chinatown, more or less at random, he found an unassuming frontage with the simple words Clean Phone picked out on the glass in green LCLS lozenges. He went inside and bought a pack of one-shot audiophones, walked out again and found himself standing in the cold evening air, abruptly alone. In the time he’d been in the shop, everyone else seemed to have suddenly found pressing reasons to get off the street. He suffered an overpowering sense of unreality, and a sudden urge of his own, to go back into the shop and see if the woman who’d served him had also disappeared, or had maybe ceded her place behind the counter to a grinning Elena Aguirre.
He grimaced and glanced around, picked out Telegraph Hill and the blunt finger of the Coit Tower on the skyline. He started walking towards it. The smoky evening light darkened and lights began to glimmer on across the vistas of the city. He reached Columbus Avenue and it was as if the city had suddenly jerked back to life around him. Teardrops zipped past in both direction, the muted chunter of their motors filled his ears. He joined other human beings at the crossing point, waited with them for a space in the traffic flow, hurried with them when it came, across to Washington Square. More life here, more lives being lived. There was a softball match just packing up in the centre of the grass, people headed home from under the spread of the trees. A tall, gaunt man dressed in ragged black stopped him and held out a begging bowl in hands that spasmed and shook. There was a sign in Chinese characters pinned to his shirt. Carl shot him a standard issue get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way look, but it didn’t work.
‘Bearliunt,’ the man said in a hoarse voice, pushing the bowl at him. ‘Bearliunt.’
He met hollowed-out eyes in a stretched parchment face. He held down the easy-access fury with an effort.
‘I don’t understand you,’ he told the derelict evenly. He jabbed a finger at the Chinese script. ‘I can’t read this.’
‘Bearliunt. Rike you. Needy Nero.’
The eyes were dark and intelligent, but they darted about. It was like being watched by something avian. The bowl came back, prodding.