Black Man (58 page)

“Scorpion Response,” he told them.

Carl nodded. “Claw Control. Right. You’re still using the call signs, you sad fuck. What were you, Jeff, backroom support? You sure as fuck weren’t the front end of anything as nasty as Scorpion.”

“You’ve heard of these guys?” Norton asked him.

“On the grapevine, yeah. Ghost squad in the Pacific Rim theaters, supposed to be one of the last covert initiatives before the Secession.” Carl looked speculatively down at Jeff Norton. “So let’s hear it, Jeff.

What was your end?”

“Logistics,” the Human Cost director said sulkily. “I was the operations coordinator.”

“Right.”

“When the fuck was this?” Norton stared at his brother. “You didn’t even move out here until ’94. You were in New York.”

Jeff Norton shook his head wearily. “I was out here all the time, Tom. Back and forth, Union to the Rim, Rim to Southeast Asia. We had offices all over. Half the time, I wasn’t home more than one weekend in five.” He took the blood-clotted tissues away from his nose, dumped them on the coffee table, and grimaced. “Anyway, how would you have known? We saw you what, once a month, if that?”

“I was busy,” said Norton numbly.

“The way I heard it,” Carl said. “Secession should have been the end of Scorpion Response. Supposed to have been wound up like all the other dirty little bags of deniability the American public didn’t need to be told about. That’s the official version, anyway. But this is the seventies, a good few years before they would have been employing you, Jeff. So what happened? They go private?”

Jeff shot him a startled look. “You heard that?”

“No. But it wouldn’t be the first time a bunch of sneak op thugs couldn’t face early retirement and went to the market instead. That what happened?”

“Scorpion Response were retained.” Jeff was still sulking. More tissues, tugged up from the box on the table. Carl watched him impassively.

“Retained by who?”

Norton had the answer for that already. “The Rim States. Got to be. They’ve just cut loose, the Pacific arena’s their future. Anything that gave them an edge had to be worth hanging on to, right?”

“That’s right, little brother.” Jeff moved the tissues from his nose long enough to knock back a chunk of the cognac. “Starting to see the big picture now?”

“Toni Montes,” Carl said. “Jasper Whitlock, Ulysses Ward, Eddie Tanaka. The rest of them. All Scorpion personnel?”

“Yeah. Not those names, but yeah.”

“And Onbekend.”

“Yeah.” Jeff Norton’s voice shaded with something. Carl thought it might be fear. “Him, too. Some of the time. He came and went, you know. On secondment.”

“But not Merrin?”

The Human Cost director sneered. “Onbekend
was
Merrin to us. We didn’t know about the other one, no one knew there were two.” He looked down into his glass. “Not until now.”

Carl paced across the office to the bar. He stared down at the assembly of bottles and glasses. The Bayview tavern mapped itself onto his vision, drinking with Sevgi Ertekin, stolen whiskey from behind the bar, and the stink of gunfire still hanging in the air. He felt the swift skid of anger in his guts, wanted to smash everything in the cabinet, take one shattered bottle by the neck, go back to Jeff Norton with it and—

“N-djinn search on the victims turned up no connections among them,” he said tonelessly. “Which means you must have used some very high-powered Rim n-djinn capacity of your own to bury these people in their new lives. Now, I can only see one reason why anybody would bother to do that.”

“You were winding up.” Realization etching wonder into Tom Norton’s tone. “Shutting the whole operation down and scattering.”

Carl turned back to face the sofa, empty-handed.

“When, Jeff? When, and why?”

Jeff Norton glanced across at his brother. “I’d have thought you’d be able to work that one out for yourself, Tom.”

The COLIN exec nodded. “You came out here, took up the Human Cost job in ’94. They were burying you, too. Had to be sometime around then.”

Jeff put down his latest clump of bloodied tissue, reached for more. There was a thin smile playing about his lips. A little more blood trickled down into the grin before he could soak it up.

“Little earlier in fact,” he said. “Thing like that has quite a momentum once it’s rolling, it takes awhile to brake. Say ’92 for the decision, early ’93 to cease operations. And we were all gone by the following year.”

Carl stepped closer. “I asked you why.”

The Human Cost director stared back up at him, dabbing at his nose. He seemed still to be smiling.

“Can’t you guess?”

“Jacobsen.”

The name fell off his lips, dropped into the room like an invocation. The era, ’89 to ’94, blazed across his memory in feed-footage flicker. Riots, the surging crowds and lines of armored police, the vehicles in flames. Pontificating holy men and ranting political pundits, UNGLA communiqués and speeches, and behind it all the quiet, balding figure of the Swedish commissioner, reading from his report in the measured tones of the career diplomat, like a man trying to deploy an umbrella in a hurricane. Words swept away, badly summarized, quoted, misquoted, taken out of context, used and abused for political capital. The awful, creeping sense that it did, after all, have something to do with him, Carl Marsalis, Osprey’s finest; that, impossible though it had once seemed, some idiot wave of opinion among the grazing cudlips really did matter now, and his life would be affected after all.

Jacobsen.

Oh yes, affected after all.

Covert heroes to paraded monsters in less than five years. The bleak pronouncements, the bleaker choices; the tracts, or the long sleep and exile to the endless tract of Mars, jostled toward one or the other by the idiot mob, like a condemned man swept forward toward a choice of gallows.

And the cryocap, chilly and constraining, filling slowly with gel as the sedatives took his impulse to panic away from him, the same way they’d taken his discarded combat gear at demob. The long sleep, falling over him like the shadow of a building a thousand stories tall, blotting out the sun.

Jacobsen.

Jeff Norton leaned forward for his glass again. “That’s right, Jacobsen. We weren’t sure what the Accords would actually look like in ’92; it was all still at a draft stage. But the writing was pretty fucking clearly on the wall. Didn’t take a genius to see the way things were going to fall.”

“But.” Tom Norton, shaking his head. “What’s that got to do with anything? Okay, you had Onbekend.

But all these other people—Montes, Tanaka, and the rest. They weren’t variants, they were ordinary humans. You were an ordinary human. Why should Jacobsen have mattered?”

Carl stood over the Human Cost director and saw, vaguely, the shape of what was coming.

“It mattered,” he said evenly, “because of what they were doing. Right, Jeff? It wasn’t the personnel, was it? It was what Scorpion Response did. What was your purview, Jeff? And don’t ask me to guess again, because I will hurt you if you do.”

Jeff Norton shrugged and drained his cognac.

“Breeding,” he said.

His brother blinked. “Breeding what?”

“Oh for
fuck’s sake, Tom, what do you think?
“ Jeff gestured violently, nearly knocked over the bottle.

The cognac seemed to have gone to his head. “Breeding
fucking variants
. Like your friend here, like Nuying. Like everything we could lay our hands on over there.”

“Over there?” Carl asked from the depths of an immense, rushing calm. “You’re talking about the Chinese mainland?”

“Yeah.” Jeff kept the tissues loosely pressed to his nose, worked the cork on the bottle one-handed, poured himself another tumblerful. “Scorpion Response had been running covert operations into Southeast Asia and China since the middle of last century. It was their playground, they got in and out of there like a greased dick. The new mandate just meant going in and getting what looked like promising material. Pre-Jacobsen, variant science still looked like the way to go. The Chinese were still doing it full-on, no human rights protest to get in the way, they were getting ahead of the game. We aimed to even up the race.”

Carl saw the way Tom Norton was looking around the office, dazed, stark disbelief smashed through with understanding.

“Human Cost. Promising material. You’re talking about people? Jesus Christ, Jeff, you’re talking about fucking
people
?”

His brother shrugged and drank. “Sure. People, live tissue culture, cryocapped embryos, lab notes, you name it. Small-scale, but we were into everything. We were a big unit, Tom. Lot of backing, lot of resources.”

“This is not possible.” Norton made a two-handed gesture as if pushing something away. “You’re telling us Human Cost was… you
ran
Human Cost as a, as some kind of pirate genetic testing program?”

“Not exactly, no. Human Cost was the back end, shell charity to cover the operation here in the Rim. It was a lot smaller then, back before we had official state funding, before I came out here to run it officially. Back then it was a guerrilla outfit. Couple of transit houses here and there, some waterfront industrial units down in San Diego. Scorpion Response were the sharp end, gathering the intelligence, going in and getting the goods.” Jeff stared through his brother at something else. “Setting up the actual labs and the camps.”

“Camps,” Norton repeated sickly. “Black labs, here in the Rim? I don’t believe you. Where?”

“Where do you think, little brother? Where do the Rim stick anything they don’t like the smell of?”

“Jesusland.” Carl nodded to himself. “Sure, why not? Just preempting Cimarron and Tanana, after all.

Where’d you set up shop? Nevada? That’s nice and close to the fenceline. Utah, maybe?”

Jeff shook his head. “Wyoming. Big place, barely any population. No one to see what’s going on, no one to care, and state legislature in that part of the world will take your hand right off at the wrist if you offer good money for use of the land. We just told them it was another gene-modified crop project.” Still, the glassy, through-everything stare. “I guess that’s even the truth when you get right down to it, right? So.

We took a couple of hundred square kilometers, power-fenced it in. Minefields and scanners, big corporate keep out notices.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I saw it once. I saw it working, all working perfectly, and no one out there knew or cared.”

“What happened to it all when you folded?” Carl asked quietly.

“Can’t you guess?”

The black man kicked out, smashed into Jeff Norton’s shin just below the knee. The Human Cost director yelped and hunched over. Carl grabbed his head by the hair and smashed his face down on the coffee table. Pulled back, smashed again—Then Tom Norton was in his way. Restraining hands on him, pushing him back.

“That’s enough,” the COLIN exec said.

Carl nailed him with a look. “Get your hands off me.”

“I said that’s enough. We need him conscious.”

At their feet, Jeff huddled away from the blows, curled up fetally on the floor space between coffee table and sofa. Carl stared at Norton a moment longer, then jerked a nod. He dragged the Human Cost director back to the sofa and dumped him there. Bent so he was eye-to-eye with him.

“I told you not to make me guess again,” he said evenly. “Now what happened to the Wyoming camp when Scorpion folded?”

“All right.” The words burst out of Jeff Norton like a dam breaking. His nose had started bleeding again, was leaking into his cupped hands. “We torched it, we fucking torched it, all right? Scorpion went in, they killed everyone, the subjects and the hired staff. Then they mined it, blew it up, and burned everything to the ground. Left nothing but the ashes.”

In his mind, Carl saw how it would be, the sporadic clatter of small arms, the wailing panic and truncated shrieks, dying away to quiet and the crackle of flames. The ripcord string of crunch-thump explosions through the camp as the placed charges went up. And later, walking away, the fire on the darkened skyline in the distance when you turned to look back. Like Ahvaz, like Tashkent, like the hotels in Dubai. The age-old signal. The beast is out.

“And no one said anything?” Norton asked, disbelieving.

“Oh Jesus, Tom, have you been listening to any fucking thing I’ve said?” Jeff sobbed out a snot-thickened laugh. “This is the
Republic
you’re talking about. You know, Guantanamo syndrome? Do it far enough away and
no one gives a shit
.”

Carl moved back to the desk and leaned against its edge. It wasn’t interrogation procedure; he should keep proximity, keep up the pressure. But he didn’t trust himself within arm’s reach of Jeff Norton.

“Okay,” he said grimly. “Scorpion Response ties all these people together, gives them a dirty little secret to keep, and Scorpion Response buries their details so there are no links left on the flow. None of that explains killing them all now, fourteen, fifteen years later. Someone’s cleaning house again. So why now?”

The Human Cost director lifted his bloodied face and bared his teeth in a stained grin. He seemed to be shaking, coming apart with something that was almost laughter.

“Career fucking progression,” he said bitterly. “Ortiz.”

They caught a crack-of-dawn Cathay Pacific bounce to New York the following morning. Carl would have preferred not to wait, but he needed time to make a couple of calls and plan. Also, he wanted Tom Norton to sleep on his choices—if he could sleep at all—and face the whole thing in the cold light of a new day. All things considered, he was playing with better cards than he’d expected, but Norton was still an unknown quantity, all the more so for the way things had finally boiled down at the Human Cost Foundation.

At the airport, Norton’s COLIN credentials got them fast-tracked through security and aboard before anyone else. Carl sat in a preferential window seat, waiting for the shuttle to fill, and stared out at an evercrete parking apron whipped by skirling curtains of wind-driven rain. Past the outlines of the terminal buildings, a pale, morose light was leaking across the sky between thick gunmetal cloud. The bad weather had blown in overnight and looked set to stick around.

Forecasts for New York said cold, dry, and clear. The thoughts in his head were a match.

The suborb shuttle shifted a little on its landing gear, then started to back out. Carl flexed his right hand, then held it cupped. Remembered the smooth glass weight of the ornament from the Human Cost director’s desk. He glanced across at Tom Norton in the seat next to him. The COLIN exec caught his eye—face haggard with the demons that had kept him from sleep.

“What?”

Carl shook his head. “Nothing. Just glad you’re along.”

“Leave me the fuck alone, Marsalis. I made a promise. I’ll keep it. I don’t need your combat bonding rituals.”

“Not about bonding,” Carl looked back at the window. “I’m glad you’re here because this would have been about a hundred times harder to do without you.”

Brief quiet. In the window, the terminal building slid out of view as the shuttle turned to taxi. He could feel Norton hesitate.

“That wouldn’t have stopped you, though,” he said finally. “Would it?”

Carl rolled his head to face front, pressed back into the seat’s cushioning. He hadn’t had a lot of sleep, either. Elena Aguirre had sat in the darkened corners of his hotel room on and off all night, pretending to be Sevgi Ertekin and not quite pulling it off.

“Not in the end, no.”

“Is that how you do it?” Norton asked him.

“Do what?”

“Become a thirteen. Is that what it’s about, just not letting yourself be stopped?”

Carl shot him a surprised look. “No. It’s about genetic wiring. Why, you feeling left out?”

“No.” Norton sank back in his seat as well. “Just trying to understand.”

The shuttle trundled steadily out toward the runway. Rain swept the windowpane, smeared diagonal with the wind. Soft chime—the fasten webbing sign lit on the LCLS panel above their heads, complete with animated instructions. They busied themselves with the thick, padded tongues of fabric. Like the siren-song lull of v-format prep, Carl usually had a hard time with how it felt once the webbing had him in its grip—it triggered tiny escape impulses across his body that he had to consciously hold down with Osprey-trained calm. But this time, he finished smoothing the cross-folds over one another, drew a deep breath, and found, with a shock like trying to walk up a step that wasn’t there, that he felt nothing at all.

Only the sense of anchored purpose, soaking coldly through him like the woken mesh.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the man at his side. “About your brother. I’m sorry it had to work out this way.”

Norton said nothing.

Across the aisle and back, a soft but urgent chiming signaled that some idiot had failed to web up correctly. An attendant appeared and hurried down past them to help out. The shuttle’s motors picked up their idling whine, began to build force. On the LCLS panel, soft purple lettering in Chinese, then English, then Spanish, then Arabic, swelling forward, fading out. On station.

Carl glanced at the silent COLIN exec. “That’s part of the reason you’re here, right?”

“Sevgi’s the reason I’m here.” Norton’s voice came out tight.

The engines outside reached shrieking pitch; the shuttle unstuck and hurled itself down the runway. Carl felt himself pressed back into the cushioning once more, this time with outside force beyond his own strength.

He closed his eyes and gave himself up to it.

They hit the sky on screaming turbines. The suborbital fuel lit and kicked them up around the curve of the world. The webbing hugged them tight and close.

“Fucking Ortiz,” said Norton loudly, beside him.

In the judder and thrum of the trajectory, it wasn’t clear if he was talking to the man or just about him.

And this time his tone was loose and hard to define, but somewhere at the bottom of it Carl thought he could hear something like despair.