‘You’re looking in all the wrong places, thirteen.’
The voice sent him spinning about, combat stance, gripping the phone in his hand as if it could possibly serve him as a weapon.
She stood at the borders of the trees, and he knew the shiver of alarm he’d picked up earlier was the sensation of her watching him. She came forward, arms spread, hands open, palms turned upward with nothing on them. He knew the poise, knew the voice. Looked for the face paint and saw that this time she hadn’t bothered.
‘Hello, Ren.’
‘Good evening, Mr Marsalis.’
Carmen Ren came to a halt about three metres away. Feet set apart on the evercrete in cleated boots that promised steel beneath the curve of the toes. Black pilot-style trousers with thigh pockets sealed shut, plain grey zipped jacket with a high collar that pointed up the elevated planes of her face, hair gathered simply back off the pale narrow face. He looked her up and down for weaponry, saw none she could access in a hurry.
He straightened out of the fighting crouch.
‘Very wise,’ she said. ‘I’m here to help.’
‘So help. Sit down cross-legged with your hands on your head and don’t move while I call RimSec.’
She peeled him a brief smile. ‘I’m afraid I’m not feeling that generous.’
‘I didn’t say you had a choice.’
Something moved in her eyes, the way she breathed. The smile floated back onto her face, but this time it was the adrenal veil, the prelude to fight-or-flight. She telegraphed it to him with an odd, careless abandon that was curiously like the offer of open arms. Abruptly he wasn’t very sure that he’d be able to take her.
He cleared his throat. ‘That’s very good. How’d you do that?’
‘Practice.’ The smile went away again, pocketed for later use. ‘Are we going to talk, or are you going get all genetic on me?’
He thought back to Névant. Broken glass and blood. The night time streets of Istanbul, walking back to Moda and–
He put a tourniquet on it, twisted hard. Grimaced. ‘What do you want to talk about?’
‘How about I hand you this case in a bento box?’
‘I told you already I’m not a cop. And anyway, why would you do that? Last time I checked, you were playing on Manco Bambaren’s team.’
He was watching her face. No flicker on the name.
‘The people I work for hung me out to dry,’ she said. ‘You want to ask yourself why I left you and Merrin to fight it out?’
He shrugged. ‘Off the sinking ship in your little rat life-vest, I assume.’
‘You assume wrong.’
‘Want to back that up? You know, with evidence?’
‘Right here.’ She patted her jacket pocket. ‘We’ll get it in a moment. First, why don’t you play back the fight in starboard loading for me. Think it through.’
‘I think I’d rather just see this evidence.’
A thin smile. ‘You knock me down, take the others back inside and use their numbers against them.’ She mimed a pistol grip. ‘You take Huang’s sharkpunch, use it on him and Scotty, that’s Osborne to you, the Jesusland kid. So I hear both of them go down while I’m still on the floor, but that’s all it takes me to get back on my feet and there you are, mixing it up with Merrin and all that Mars-side tanindo shit. Now you really think I didn’t have time to swing back in there and pull you off him? Come on, Marsalis. Work the grey matter. I had all the time in the world, and keeping Merrin alive was my job.’
Hairline crack of unease. ‘Keeping Merrin alive?’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘Someone paid you to shadow him?’
‘Shadow him?’ She raised an elegant eyebrow. ‘No, just get him aboard the Cat. Hook up with Daskeen Azul and keep him there, look after him until further notice.’
The crack ran out, split wide, from unease to splintering confusion.
‘You’re saying… you’re telling me Merrin’s been locked down on Bulgakov’s Cat the last four months? He hasn’t been anywhere else?’
‘Sure. Took us about a week to get him there from Ward’s place, but since then? Yeah. Just a handling gig. Why?’
The quarry face of what he knew blew up. Detonated from within, multiple blasts in the thin Martian air and the building roar after, rock shattering and slumping, sliding down itself into rubble and dust. He glimpsed the new face of what was behind, the new surface exposed.
Onbekend’s face.
The trace familiarity about the features, the certainty he knew them from somewhere, had seen them before or features very like them.
Rovayo’s voice floated back through his head. This Onbekend must have been greased up pretty good.
Yeah, he was. You could see it in the light, shining in his hair pretty fucking thick as well. No way he was going to be leaving trace material for the CSI guys.
Right. Makes you wonder why Merrin didn’t do the same thing. Instead of leaving his fucking trace all over everything for us to track him with.
The enormity of it towered above him like the sky.
I’ve seen data, said Sevgi, the first day he met her, that puts Merrin in combat zones hundreds of kilometres apart on the same day, eye-witness accounts that say he took wounds we can’t find any medical records to confirm, some of them wounds he couldn’t possibly have survived if the stories were true. Sevgi in the prison interview room. He remembered the scent of her as she spoke and his throat locked up. Her voice ran on, wouldn’t get out of his head. Even that South American deployment has too much overlap to be wholly accurate. He was in Tajikistan, no he wasn’t, he was still in Bolivia; he was solo deployed, no, he was leading a Lawman platoon in Kuwait City.
The idiot pattern of the murders. Death in the Bay Area, then Texas and beyond, and then back to the Rim all over again, months later. No sense to the double back, unless…
Unless…
‘Onbekend,’ he said tightly. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Heard the name.’ Amused quirk in the corner of her mouth. ‘But it means—’
‘I know what it means. Are you working with anyone who has that name?’
‘No. I was working with a guy called Emil Nocera, and with Ulysses Ward, before Merrin went genetic and slaughtered them both. After that, I used Scotty to ride shotgun and pulled some contacts elsewhere. ’
‘What contacts?’
‘Just contacts. No one I see any reason to hand over to you. They’re peripheral, they don’t count. Rimside plug-ins for the people who hired me.’
Carl thought back to the boy with the machete, the gibbering religious abuse.
‘You sold Osborne some story about me?’
‘Not as such.’ Ren looked suddenly tired. ‘I told him Merrin was the, what you call it, the Second Coming? Christ returned and hiding because a black man was out there, coming to do him harm. Mix and match imagery, cooked it up from what I knew about Jesusland ideology and the way Osborne was rambling.’
Very Christlike, he remembered saying when he saw Merrin’s file photo. Very Faith Satellite channel.
He nodded. ‘I can see how that would work.’
‘Yeah, well. Jesuslander, you know. Seemed like a nice enough kid deep down, but you know what that old-time religion will do. Wasn’t hard to sell him the concept, half those people live their whole fucking lives waiting for their saviour to show up. They’d jump at the chance for a walk-on role.’ She shrugged, perfectly. ‘Plus, he was hot for me and concussed from a smack in the head he got from Merrin in the fight at Ward’s place. Poor little fucker never stood a chance.’