Black Man (33 page)

Back at the apartment, he did it again, this time on the bed where he’d seen her asleep that morning.

Pulled up close to breathe her scent, one hand raising the cushion of her buttocks up so the lips of her cunt met his mouth like a mismatched kiss, the fingers of his other hand deep inside her and the breadth of his tongue lapping up against the rubbery switch of her clit. He felt a carnivore itch rising in him, a deep thirst that was only partly slaked when she bucked and flexed across the bed and clamped hands and thighs around his head as if she could push him by sheer force inside her.

She flopped, panting, face rolled sideways, eyes closed, gone, and he gathered her under him and slid into her to the hilt of his newly swollen-tight erection. Her eyes flew open, and she said
oh,
just that single sound, lightly, delightedly, fresh hunger rolling on the edge of the syllable.

And then it was like the hard evercrete steps they’d taken up to Moda, steep and stiff breathing and no speech at all on the long, steady climb together to the top.

“He did
what
?”

Norton glowered out of the screen at her, disbelief and anger struggling for the upper hand on his face.

“Ended up in a fight with Nevant,” said Sevgi patiently. “Relax, Tom, it’s already happened. There’s nothing anybody could have done.”

“Yes there is. You could have refused to let him have his way.”

“Let him have his way?” She felt the faint stain of a blush start in her neck. All the places Marsalis had bitten softly into her flesh were suddenly warm again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means Marsalis suddenly decides he needs to fly out to the other side of the globe, and you just lie down for it. Our cannibal friend is killing people in America, not Europe. I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that Marsalis is looking for a way to get home without fulfilling his contract.”

“Yes, that occurred to me, Tom. Quite awhile ago in fact, back when you were happy to stick him in an unguarded New York hotel for the night.”

Pause. “As I recall, I was going to put him up at my place.”

“Whatever, Tom. The point is, we hired Marsalis to do a job. If we aren’t going to trust him to do it, then why did we bother springing him in the first place?”

Norton opened his mouth, then evidently thought better of what he was going to say. He nodded. “All right. So having beaten up Nevant, what does our resident expert want to do now?”

“He’s talking about Peru.”

“Peru?”

“Yes, Peru.
Familias andinas,
remember. He got leads from Nevant that point back to the altiplano, so that’s where we need to go.”

“Right.” He cleared his throat. “So, Sevgi, you think we’re actually going to do any investigating at all in the places the crimes are being committed? You know, I was never a cop, but—”

“Fuck it, Tom.” She leaned into the screen. “What’s wrong with you? This is the twenty-second century. You know, global interconnection? The integrated human domain? We can be in Lima in forty-five minutes. Cuzco a couple of hours later at worst. And back in New York before the end of the day.”

“It is the end of the day,” said Norton drily. “It’s past midnight here.”

“Hey, you called me.”

“Yeah, because I was getting kind of alarmed at the silent running, Sev. You’ve been gone two days without a word.”

“Day and a half.” The retort was automatic, but in fact she wasn’t sure who was closer. Her sense of time was shot. Crossing the Bosphorus seemed weeks in the past, New York and Florida months before that.

Norton didn’t seem disposed to argue the toss, either. He glanced at his watch, shrugged.

“Fact remains. You stay gone much longer, Nicholson and Roth are going to start barking.”

She grinned. “So that’s what you’re pissed about. Come on, Tom. You can handle them. I saw the press conference. You played Meredith and Hanitty like a pair of cretins.”

“Meredith and Hanitty
are
a pair of cretins, Sev. That’s the point. Whatever you say about Nicholson, he’s not stupid, and he’s our boss, and that goes double for Roth. They won’t wear this for long. Not without more payback than your new playmate’s hunches.” Norton’s gaze flickered across the quadrants of the screen, scanning the space over her shoulders. “Where is wonderboy, anyway?”

“Asleep”—she caught herself—“I’d guess. It’s a pretty antisocial hour here as well, you know.”

In fact, when the phone rang, she’d rolled over in the bed and felt a shivery delight as she found the bulk of him there at her side. The frisson turned into a jolt as she saw, at a distance of about ten centimeters, that he was awake, eyes open and watching her. He nodded in the direction of the ringing.
COLIN

apartment,
he said,
I figure that’s for you
. She nodded in turn, groped over the side of the bed for her T-shirt, and sat up to pull it over her head. She could feel his eyes on her, on the heavy swing of her breasts as she completed the move, and it sent another quiver of jellied warmth through her. The feeling stayed as she blundered out to the phone.

“On COLIN’s endeavor, the sun never sets,”
quoted Norton, deadpan. “Anyway, if you’re going to Peru, you’ll need an early start.”

“Have you talked to Ortiz?”

He grew somber. “Yeah, earlier today. They put him through to a v-format for about ten minutes.

Doctors won’t run it for longer than that, they say the mental strain’s the last thing he needs. They’ve got nanorepair fixing the organ damage, but the slugs were dirty, some kind of trace carcinogen, and it’s fucking up the new cell growth.”

“Is he going to die?”

“We’re all going to die, Sev. But from this, no, he won’t. They’ve got him stabilized. Still a long road out, but he’ll make it.”

“So what did he say, in the virtual?”

A grimace. “He told me to trust your instincts.”

They got a late-morning suborb to La Paz—like most nations aligned with the Western Nations Colony Initiative, Turkey ran connections to the altiplano hubs every couple of hours. Sevgi had the COLIN limo pick them up at the door. No leisure to ride the ferries this time around.

“We could have waited for the Lima hook,” Marsalis pointed out as they neared the airport at smooth, priority-lane speed. “Less rush that way. I’d have time to buy those clothes you were bitching about.”

“I’m under instructions to rush,” she told him.

“Yeah, but you know there’s a good chance Bambarén might be in Lima, anyway. He does a lot of business down the coast.”

“In that case, we’ll go there.”

“That’ll take some time.”

She gave him a superior grin. “No, it won’t. You’re working for COLIN now. This is our backyard.”

To underline the point, she had a reception detachment meet them at the other end. Three unsmiling
indigenas,
one male, two female, who brought them out of the terminal with hardened, watchful care to where an armored Land Rover waited under harsh lighting in the no-parking zone. Beyond was soft darkness, a smog-blurred moon and the vague bulk of mountains rising in the distance. As soon as they were all inside the Land Rover, the female operative gave her a gun—a Beretta Marstech, with two clips and a soft leather shoulder holster. She hadn’t requested it.
Welcome to La Paz,
the woman said, with or without irony Sevgi could not decide. Then they were in motion again, shuttled smoothly through the sleeping streets to a dedicated suite in the new Hilton Acantilado, with views out across the bowl of the city, and Marstech-level security systems. A beautifully styled Bang & Olufsen data/coms portal sat unobtrusively in
the corner of every section but the bathroom, which had its own phone. The beds were vast, begging to be used.

They stood at opposite ends of the floor-to-ceiling window and stared out. It was, once again, obscenely early in the morning—they’d outrun the sun, dumping it scornfully behind them as the suborbital bounced off its trajectory peak and plunged back down to Earth. Now the predawn darkness beyond the windows jarred, and the inverted starscape bowl of city lights below them whispered up a weightless sense of the unreal. It all felt like too much time in virtual. Thin air and hunger just added to the load.

Sevgi could feel herself getting vague.

“Want to eat?” she asked.

He shot her a glance she recognized. “Don’t tempt me.”

“Food,” she said primly. “All I’ve eaten in the past day is that
simit
.”

“Price of progress. On a flatline flight, they would have fed us twice at least. The untold downside of the suborb-traveler lifestyle.”

“Do you want to eat or not?”

“Sure. Whatever they’ve got.” He went to the Bang & Olufsen, checked the welcome-screen protocol, and fired the system up. She shook her head, took a last look at the view, and went to order from the next room.

Midway through scanning the services menu, she accidentally brought up the health section. Her eye caught on the subheading tab stimulants and synaptic enhancers, and she realized with a slight jolt that she hadn’t taken any syn for the best part of twenty-four hours.

Hadn’t wanted any.

The first time Carl wanted Manco Bambarén’s attention, three years back, he’d gotten it by the simple expedient of sounding out the
tayta
’s business interests and then doing them as much rapid damage as he easily could. It was an old Osprey tactic from the Central Asian theater, and it transferred without too much trouble.

Bambarén’s particular limb of the
familias
were moving exotic fabric out of prep camp warehouses in quantities small enough not to trigger a COLIN response, amassing the scavenged gear in isolated village locations and then trucking it down to Lima to feed the insatiable maw of the Marstech black market. It wasn’t hard to get detail on this—pretty much everyone knew about it, but bribes and kickbacks kept the much-vaunted but badly paid Peruvian security forces out of the equation, and Bambarén was smart enough to limit his pilfering to relatively commonplace tech items no longer sensitive at a patent level. The corporations claimed on their insurance, made the right noises but no great effort otherwise to plug the leaks. In tacit quid pro quo, Bambarén stayed out of their hair on the more vexing issue of local labor relations, where the
familias
had a traditional influence that could have been problematic if it were ever
deployed. Local loyalties and Bambarén’s ferocious Cuzco slum street rep did the rest. It was a sweet-running system, and since it kept everyone happy, it showed potential to run that way for a long time to come.

Carl had entered the equation with no local ax to grind and nothing to lose but his bounty for Stefan Nevant. For two quiet weeks, he’d done his research, and then one night he held up one of
tayta
Manco’s trucks on the precipitous, winding highway down from Cuzco to Nazca and the coast. The armed muscle in the passenger seat took exception, which from a logistical point of view was a blessing in disguise. Carl shot him dead, then gave the driver the option of either joining his companion in the white powdered dirt by the side of the road or helping Carl roll the vehicle over the edge with an incendiary grenade—Peruvian army stock, he’d bought it from a friendly grunt—taped to its fuel tank. The driver proved cooperative, and the hardware worked. The truck exploded spectacularly on its first cartwheeling bounce, trailed flame and debris down into the canyon below, and burned there merrily for an hour or so, releasing enough exotic long-chain
pollutants into the atmosphere to attract the attention of an environmental monitoring satellite. Not many things burned with that signature, and the things that did had no business being on fire outside of COLIN jurisdiction. Helicopters gathered in the night, like big moths around a campfire. With them came the inevitable journalists, and not far behind
them
a sprinkling of local politicians, environmental experts, and Earth First reps, all keen to get some media profile.

Presently, an official recovery team made its painstaking way down into the ravine, but not before a lot of embarrassing spectrographics had been shot and a lot of equally embarrassing questions sharpened to a fine edge on the whetstone of starved journalistic speculation.

By then, Carl was long gone. He’d given the truck driver a lift down to Nazca and a message to hand on to
tayta
Manco with a number to call. Bambarén, who was no fool, called the next day, and after a certain amount of male display rage asked what exactly the
fuck
Carl wanted, motherfucker. Carl told him. Thirty-six hours after that, Stefan Nevant walked back into his Arequipa hotel room and found himself looking down the barrel of the Haag gun.

Subtlety, Carl had discovered, was a much overrated tool where organized crime was concerned.

In the Bolivian predawn, he dialed accordingly.

“This had better be life or fucking death,” Greta Jurgens said coldly when she finally answered. The screen showed her settling in front of the phone, pulling a gray silk dressing gown closer about her. Her face was puffy. “Do you know what time it is?”

Carl made a show of consulting his watch.

“Yeah, it’s October. I figure that gives me another couple of weeks before it’s your bedtime. How’s things, Greta?”

The hibernoid squinted at the screen, and her face lost all expression. “Well, well. Marsalis, right? The bogeyman.”

“The very same.”

“What do you want?”

“That’s what I like about you, Greta. Charming small talk.” Carl floated a casual, open-handed gesture.

“It’s nothing much. Wanted to talk to Manco. Strictly a chat, old-times stuff.”

“Manco’s not in town right now.”

“But you know how to get hold of him.”

Jurgens said nothing. Her face wasn’t just puffy, it was rounder than he remembered it, smooth-skinned and chubby with late-cycle subcutaneous fat uptake. He guessed her thinking was groggier than usual, too—silence was the safe option.

Carl grinned. “Look, we can do this one of two ways. Either you can tell Manco I want a word and we arrange a friendly sitdown, or I can start making your lives difficult again. What’s it going to be?”

“You might find that a little harder to do these days.”

“Really? Made some new Initiative friends, have we?” He read the confirmation in the hibernoid’s face.

“Do yourself and Manco both a favor, Greta. Trace this call and find out whose wafer I’m running on.

Then decide whether you want to piss me off.”

He killed the line and Greta Jurgens blinked out in midretort.

Carl got up and went to stare down at the lights of La Paz. A couple of hours at worst, he reckoned.

Jurgens had specialists a phone call away who could run the trace, and it wouldn’t take them very long to nail it to COLIN’s dedicated Hilton suite. Marstech-level systems showed up in the dataflow like implanted metal on an X-ray plate. The
familia
datahawks probably wouldn’t be able to get past the tech; Jurgens in any case probably wouldn’t ask them to. But it would still be pretty fucking clear what they were looking at, thank you very much. Say an hour to do all that. Then, allow that Jurgens had been telling the truth and Manco Bambarén wasn’t with her in Arequipa. Wherever he was, he could be reached, and that wouldn’t take long, either. And with what Jurgens had to tell him, he’d call back.

Ertekin came back through from the other room. She’d changed into the NYPD T-shirt and a pair of running sweats.

“Food’s here,” she said.

In the buffered quiet of the suite, he hadn’t heard it arrive. He nodded. “Shouldn’t eat too much at this altitude. Your body’s working hard enough as it is.”

“Yeah, Marsalis.” She gave him a hands-on-hips sort of look. “I have been on the altiplano a couple of times before. COLIN employee, you know?”

“That’s not what it says on your chest,” he told her, looking there pointedly.

“This?” She pressed a hand to one breast and tapped the nypd logo with her fingertips. A grin crept into the corner of her mouth “You got a problem with me wearing this?”

He grinned back. “Not if you let me take it off you after breakfast.”

“We’ll see,” she said, unconvincingly.

But after breakfast, there was no time. The phone chimed while they were still talking, sitting with the big clay mugs of
mate de coca
cupped in both hands.
Outside call,
the system announced in smooth female tones. Carl took his mug through to the next room to answer. He dropped into the chair in front of the Bang & Olufsen and thumbed the accept button.

“Yeah?”

Manco Bambarén’s weather-blasted Inca features stared out at him from the screen. His face was impassive, but there was a slow smoking anger in the dark eyes. He spoke harsh, bite-accented English.

“So, black man. You return to plague us.”

“Well, historically, that ought to be a change for you guys.” Carl sipped the thin-tasting tea, met the other man’s eyes through rising steam. “Better than being plagued by the white man, right?”

“Don’t play word games with me, twist. What do you want?”

Carl slipped into Quechua. “I’m only quoting your oaths of unity there.
Indigenous union, from the ashes of racial oppression,
all that shit. What do I want? I want to talk to you. Face-to-face. Take a couple of hours at most.”

Bambarén leaned into the screen. “I no longer concern myself with your scurrying escapee brothers and their bolt-holes. I have nothing to tell you.”

“Yeah, Greta said you’d gone up in the world. No more fake-ID work, huh? No more low-level Marstech pilfering. I guess you’re a respectable criminal these days.” Carl let his voice harden. “Makes no difference. I want to talk anyway. Pick a place.”

There was a long pause while Bambarén tried to stare him down. Carl inhaled the tea steam, took down the damp, green-leaf odor of it, and waited.

“You still speak my language like a drunken peasant laborer,” said the
familia
chief sourly. “And act as if it were an accomplishment.”

Carl shrugged. “Well, I learned it among peasant laborers, and we were often drunk. My apologies if it offends. Now pick a fucking place to meet.”

More silence. Bambarén glowered. “I am in Cuzco,” he said. Even in the lilting altiplano Quechua, the words sounded bitten off. “I’ll see you out at Sacsayhuamán at one this afternoon.”

“Make it three,” Carl told him lazily. “I’ve got a few other things I want to do first.”