‘Well, she said that you tipped UNGLA off about Conrad’s thirteen status because you were jealous that he’d left you, and that you then tried to call and warn him at the last minute. But were too late, obviously. Now—’
‘That fucking bitch!’ But even in the low light, he could see that Amy Westhoff’s face had gone ashen.
‘You’d deny that then, I assume.’
Westhoff lifted a trembling finger. ‘You go back to that raghead bitch, and you tell her from me—’
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Sevgi Ertekin is dead. But she did give me a message for you, something she meant to do but couldn’t manage.’
The blonde woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘What message?’
Then she flinched, yelped, reared back in the booth and looked down at her trouser leg. She pressed on her thigh with both hands.
‘What the fuck was that?’
‘That was a genetically modified curare flechette,’ Carl said coldly. ‘It’s going to paralyse your skeletal muscle system so you can’t breathe or call for help.’
Westhoff stared at him. Tried to get up from the table, made a muffled grunting sound instead and dropped back into her seat, still staring at him.
‘It’s a vastly improved variant on natural curare,’ he went on. ‘You might call it the thirteen of poisons. I think you’ll last about seven or eight minutes. Enjoy.’
He slid the Red Stripe over so it stood in front of her. Westhoff’s mouth twitched, and she slumped against the wall. Carl got up to go. He leaned in close.
‘Sevgi Ertekin wanted you dead,’ he told her softly. ‘And now you are.’
Then he eased out of the booth and headed for the door. On the way out, he looked across at the bar, where the waitress sat on a stool, fiddling with some aspect of her phone. As she glanced up at him, Carl fielded her gaze, rolled his eyes expressively, put on jilted, hurt and weary look. The girl pulled a sympathetic face, smiled at him and went back to her phone. He reached the door, pushed it open and let himself back out into the late afternoon chill.
He dropped the flechette gun down a grate on Wall Street, a little sad to see it go after the trouble Matthew had gone to in tracking down a suitably disreputable dealer for him, and the price the suitably disreputable dealer had screwed out of him when it became clear that Carl was in a hurry.
Then again, it had served its purpose.
Hope that was what you wanted, Sevgi.
He called Norton from a cab on the way to JFK.
‘Can you talk?’
‘Yeah, I’m back at Jefferson Park. Where are you?’
‘Brooklyn Bridge. On my way to the airport.’
‘You’re still here, in town?’ Norton’s voice punched out of the phone. ‘What the fuck are you playing at, Marsalis?’
‘I had a couple of things to do. Am I still safe to fly?’
Norton blew out a long breath. ‘Yeah, should be. I’ve got the NYPD hammering on my door and Weill Cornell screaming about lawsuits, but so far the COLIN brief is holding. Always knew there was some reason I took this job.’
‘That old-time corporate power, huh?’ Carl grew serious. ‘Think they’ll try and nail you though?’
‘Well, for now it’s my train set, so I’m fine. And anyway, I was in the bathroom, remember. No idea what was going on ’til you called me and there’s Ortiz, dead in his chair.’
‘Sounds kind of thin.’
‘It is kind of thin. But this is the most powerful non-governmental body on the planet we’re talking about, and right now they’ve got my back. Quit worrying about me, Marsalis. You want to help, just get your ass out of Union jurisdiction right now.’
‘On my way.’
He hung up, and looked out of the taxi window. Ribbed light blipped through the steel lattices of the bridge structure as they headed out over the span, strobed across his face and turned the air in the cab alternately dusty and dimmed. Back across the East River, Manhattan made its block graph skyline against a cold, perfect blue. The sun glowed and dripped like broken yolk off the top and down the side of one of the new black nanobuild towers. Departure clung to the shrinking scene like mist.
The same obscure desire he’d felt staring at the Marin headland two nights ago came and stabbed him in the heart all over again. He could not pin down what it meant, could only give it a name.
Sevgi.
CODA
Pistaco
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
The path down into Colca was a foot-pounded dusty white, in places barely an improvement over the loose scree and scrub it cut through. Initially, it straggled and twisted along the rim of the canyon like a recently unwound length of cable with the worst of the kinks still not out. It headed out of the village in a relatively straight line, followed the line of the canyon more or less, brushed up to the edge now and then, close enough to offer a dizzying view downward, then slid away again as if unnerved by the drop. A couple of kilometres out of town, the path skirted a desolate cleared space with a paint-peeled rusting goal iron at either end. It kinked a couple more times and then found and dropped into a wide basin-shaped bite in the canyon wall, riding the curve around and down like the track of a roulette ball made visible on its fall towards the luck of the numbers. Thereafter, it fell abruptly off the edge of the canyon, spilled down the flank of the valley in a concertina of hairpin turns that made grudging concession to the steep angle of descent, and arrived at last, in dust and sliding pebbles, at an ancient wooden suspension bridge across the pale greenish flow of the river.
The bridge was not much more user-friendly than the path that led to it. The materials used in its construction didn’t look to have been renewed in decades, and where the planking had cracked and holed, the locals had placed rocks so there was no downward view into the water that might scare the mules which were still the only viable means of heavy transport down from the towns on the canyon rim. Infrastructural neglect was a general feature of the region – significant distance from the nearest prep camps meant no possible return on corporate funds deployed here, tourism was the only staple and the tourists liked their squalor picturesque – but here the process had been allowed to run a little further than elsewhere. Here visitors other than known locals were not encouraged, and tour companies had been persuaded to route their itineraries away, to other sections of the canyon. Here, comings and goings on the path were watched by men carrying weapons whose black and metal angles gleamed new and hi-tech in the harsh, altiplano sun. Here, it was rumoured, there lived a witch who, lacking the normal human capacity to survive the whole of the dry season awake, must fall into an enchanted sleep before the end of each year and could only be roused when the rains came, and only then by the call and ministrations of her pistaco lover.
‘You cannot seriously be planning to go down there now.’ Norton was shaking his head, but his tone carried less disbelief than weary resignation. He seemed to have lost all capacity for shock over the previous few days.
‘Better now than later,’ Carl told him soberly. ‘The more the dust settles, the more chance Bambaren and Onbekend have to take stock, and for them I’m a big black mark in the negative asset column. They don’t know about Sevgi, but they know the work I do for UNGLA, and they know I know about Onbekend. And they’re both cautious men. Leave it long enough, they’re going to start wondering where I am, and what I’m doing. But right now, they figure I’m scrambling for cover just like everybody else.’