The ' face had left him to his chair- a colliding geometry of comet trail lines and nebula gas upholstery, spun up out of the night sky as if flung at him- and disappeared into the dwindling perspectives of the wind that blew continually through its body. Something else blew back in its place- at first a tiny rectangular panel like an antique holographic postage stamp Carl had once seen in a London museum, fluttering stiff-cornered and growing in size as it approached until it slammed to a silent halt, three meters tall, two broad, and angled slightly backward at the base a handful of paces in front of where he sat. It was a cascade of images like the curtain where he' d seen his own face fall from the djinn' s upheld arm.

Silent and discoherent with the n-djinn' s unhuman associative processes.

He saw Merrin wake from the beta capsule in the crew section, groggy from the revival but already moving with a recognizable focused economy. Saw him pacing the dorsal corridor of Horkan' s Pride, face unreadable.

Saw him clean Helena Larsen' s meat from between his teeth with a micro-gauge manual screwdriver from the maintenance lockers.

Saw him request a lateral vision port unshuttered, the ships' interior lighting killed. Saw him brace his arms on either side of the glass and stare out like a sick man into a mirror.

Saw him scream, jaw yawning wide, but silent, silent.

Saw him cut the throat of a limbless body as it revived, splayed palm held to block the arterial spray. Saw him gouge out the eyes, carefully, thoughtfully, one at a time, and smear them off his fingers against the matte-textured metal of a bulkhead.

Saw him talking to someone who wasn' t there.

Saw him turn, once, in the corridor and look up at the camera, as if he knew Carl was watching him. He smiled, then, and Carl felt how it chilled him as his own facial muscles responded.

There was more, a lot more, even in the scant time it took the n-djinn to run the Tjaden/Wasson. The images juddered and flashed and were eaten over by other screen effects. He wasn' t sure why the machine was showing it to him or what criteria it was using to select. It was the same sensation he knew from his time aboard Felipe Souza, the irritable feeling of trying to second-guess a capricious god he' d been assured- no really, it' s true, it' s in the programming- was watching over him. The feeling of sense just out of reach.

Maybe the djinn read something in him he wasn' t aware of letting show, a need he didn' t know he had.

Maybe it thought this was what he wanted.

Maybe it was what he wanted. He wasn' t sure.

He wasn' t sure why he stayed there watching. But he was glad when it was over.

The floating blue shredded figure returned.

There is this," it told him, and raised one restless, rippling arm like a wing. On the screen beneath, Merrin walked behind the automated gurney as it took Helena Larsen on her short journey from the cryocap chamber to the autosurgeon. The second trip for her- just below the line of her leotard, her right thigh already ended in a neatly bandaged stump. She was mumbling to herself in postrevival semi-wakefulness, barely audible, but the n-djinn compensated and dragged in the sound.

... not again," she pleaded vaguely.

Merrin leaned in to catch the murmur of her voice, but not by much. His hearing would be preternaturally sharp, Carl knew, tuned up by now in the endless smothering stillness aboard the vessel as it fell homeward, honed in the dark aural shadow of the emptiness outside, where the abruptly deepened hum of a power web upping capacity in the walls would be enough to jerk you from sleep, and the sound of a dropped kitchen utensil seemed to clang from one end of the ship to the other. Your footfalls went muffled in spacedeck slippers designed not to scratch or scrape, and after a while you found yourself trying almost superstitiously not to break the hush in other ways as well. Speaking- to yourself, for sanity' s sake, to the sentient and semi-sentient machines that kept you alive, to the dreaming visages behind the cryocap faceplates, to anyone or anything else you thought might be listening- speaking became an act of obscure defiance, a reckless violation of the silence.

Again, yes," Merrin told the woman he was feeding off. The cormorant' s legacy."

The image froze.

Cormorant," said Carl, memory flexing awake.

Merrin uses the same word, out of context, on several occasions," said the djinn. An association suggests itself. According to data from Wells region work camp rotations on Mars, both you and Merrin were acquainted with Robert P. Danvers, sin 84437hp3535. Yaroshanko-form extrapolation from this connects you both through Danvers to the Martian familias andinas, and, integrating with the term cormorant used here, with high probability to the sin-disputed identity Franklin Gutierrez."

Carl sat quietly for a while. The memories came thick and fast, the emotions he thought he' d discarded half a decade ago. He felt his fingers crook like talons at his sides.

Well, well, well," he said at last. Gutierrez."

CHAPTER 21.

" N ever heard of him."

Norton, preparing to be unimpressed. He was standing, close enough to Carl for it to be a challenge.

No, you wouldn' t have," Carl agreed. He brushed past Norton, went to the office window, and stared out at the view. Smashed autumn sunlight lay across the East River in metallic patches, like some kind of chemical slick. Franklin Gutierrez used to be a datahawk in Lima back in the mideighties. One of the best, by all accounts. In ' 86, he cracked Serbanco for upward of half a billion soles. Immaculate execution. It took them nearly a month to even realize he' d done it."

Norton grunted. Couldn' t have been that immaculate, if he ended up on Mars."

Carl fought down a sudden urge to remove Norton' s vocal cords with his bare hands. He summoned patience from within, Sutherland style. Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead. He focused on the details of the view below. COLIN New York, perhaps in conscious locational echo of the UN territory, stood a couple of long blocks south of Jefferson Park, vaulted and cantilevered over FDR Drive and looking out across the river. It was a fractal tumbling of structure that recalled nothing so much as a handful of abandoned segments from a huge peeled orange. Thin white nanocarb spidered over curves and angles of smoked amber glass, then swept down to brace elegantly amid the multi-level array of carefully tended walkways, paths, and gardens that linked each section into the whole site. You could stand here in the vaulted open-plan office suite Ertekin and Norton shared and look down across the whole thing, the gardens, the jutting edge of the mezzanine, and the river beyond. Carl' s gaze reeled back out to the water, and he suffered a sudden resurgence of a feeling from his first days back on Earth eight years ago, a time when the sight of any large body of water came as an abrupt, visceral shock.

Time with the Horkan' s Pride n-djinn had stirred him up, left him choppy and bleak with old memories.

So much for looking beyond.

Yeah, they caught up with Gutierrez," he said neutrally. But they caught him spending the money, not stealing it. Keep that in mind. This guy had his weak points, but getting away with the game wasn' t one of them."

So they offered him resettlement?" Ertekin asked.

Yeah, and he took it. You ever seen the inside of a Peruvian jail?" Carl left the broad roofward sweep of the window, turned back into the office and his new colleagues. He ended up in Wells, running atmospheric balance systems for the Uplands Initiative. When he wasn' t doing that, he handled datacrime for the Martian familias andinas. I think it paid better than the day job."

Norton shook his head. If this Gutierrez has links with Mars organized crime, then we' ve already run him and his association with Merrin."

No, you haven' t."

A swapped glance between Norton and Sevgi Ertekin. Norton sighed. Look, Marsalis. One of the first things this investigation did was to- "

Contact the Colony police, and ask them to run a list of associates for Merrin on Mars. Right." Carl nodded. Yeah. Makes sense, I' d have done the same. Just that it wouldn' t do any good. If Gutierrez had dealings with Merrin, they' re gone now, wiped off the flow like shit off a baby' s arse. Al you' l be left with is some minor association with a low-level middleman like Danvers. And men like Danvers rub shoulders with practically everyone who' s ever worked the Wells camps anyway. In other words, your business transaction is invisible. That' s how it works when Gutierrez does something for you."

And you know this how?"

He shrugged. How do you think?"

Gutierrez did something for you," Ertekin said quietly. What was it?"

Something I' m not going to talk to you about. The point is, in dataflow terms, my connection with Gutierrez no longer exists, and neither does Merrin' s. Any associative search Colony ran on Merrin would have stopped at Danvers. The Horkan' s Pride n-djinn only went farther because it didn' t like the coincidence of two thirteens both making it back from Mars under uncommon circumstances and both having a separate, unrelated connection with a low-grade fence like Danvers. That' s Yaroshanko intuition for you. Very powerful when it works, but it needs something to triangulate off."

I still don' t see," said Norton irritably, how that gives you this Gutierrez."

On its own, it doesn' t. But the recollections the n-djinn has of Merrin include a couple of references to a cormorant."

Norton nodded. Yeah, we saw that first time around. The cormorant legacy, leavings of the cormorant, wring that fucking cormorant' s neck. We had our own reference n-djinns go over it. Checked out Martian slang, and got nothing- "

No, it' s not a Martian term."

Might be now," Ertekin pointed out. You' ve been back awhile. Anyway, we backed up into Project Lawman usage and thirteen argot in general. We stil got nothing."

It' s Limeno."

Norton blinked. Excuse me?"

It' s a Lima underground term. Pretty obscure, and old. Your n-djinn probably would have discounted it as irrelevant. Goes back to the early seventies, which is when Gutierrez was a young gun on the Andes coast datahawk circuit. Have you heard of ukai?"

Blank looks.

Okay, ukai is a form of fishing where you use trained cormorants to bring up your fish. It' s originally from Japan, but it got big in the Peruvian Japanese community about fifty years back when the whole designer-breeding thing really took off. Ukai is done at night, and the cormorants dive with a ring on their throat that stops them from swallowing the fish. They get fed when they bring the catch back to their handler. See the imagery?"

Contracted datahawking." Ertekin' s eyes lit up with the connection. The familias andinas."

Yeah. In those days the familias here on Earth were still a force to be reckoned with. Anyone starting out as a hawk on the South Pacific coast worked for the familias, or they didn' t work at all. You might end up a big-name halcon de datos. But you started life as a cormoran."

Ertekin was nodding now. Including Gutierrez."

Including Gutierrez," he agreed, and something sparked between them as he echoed her words. Later he got his rep, got his own gigs. Got caught."

And when he got to Mars, he found the familias waiting for him all over again."

Right. It' s like stepping back in time half a century there. The familias have a hold they haven' t had on Earth for decades. Apparently Gutierrez had to go right back into ukai work. Back to being a cormorant."

Carl spread his hands, case-closed style. He bitched to me about it all the time."

That doesn' t necessarily mean he' d do the same with Merrin," Norton said.

Yeah, it does. Gutierrez had a thing about thirteens. A lot of people do on Mars, there' s a whole fetish subculture dedicated to it. It' s like the bonobo fan clubs here. Gutierrez was a fully paid-up member, fascinated by the whole thing. He had this pet analogy he liked to draw, between the thirteens and the Lima datahawks. Both supermen in their own right, both feared and hated by the herd because of it."

Norton snorted. Supermen. Right."

Well, it was his theory," Carl said evenly. Not mine. Point is, he went on and on about being reduced back to ukai status, about how I could understand that shit because of who I was, because of what I was.

And he would have laid exactly the same line off on Merrin."

So." Norton broke it up, stepped into the flood of light. We call Colony, tel them to bring Gutierrez in and lean on him."

Carl snorted. Yeah, lean on him from a couple of hundred mil ion kilometers away. Ten-minute coms lag each way. That interrogation, I want to watch."

I didn' t say we' d lean on him, I said Colony would."

Colony couldn' t lean on a fucking wal . Forget it. What happens on Mars doesn' t play this end. It' s not a human distance."

Ertekin sank deeper into her chair, bridged her hands, and stared across the office. Light from the tall window fell in on her like the luminous sifting sunset rains on Mars. Carl' s woken memories came and kicked him in the chest again.

If the familias andinas helped get Merrin out of Mars," she said slowly, and mostly to herself, then they could be helping him at this end as wel ."

Not the South American chapters," Carl observed. They' ve had a war with the Martian familias for decades. Well, a state of war anyway. They wouldn' t be cooperating with anything at the Mars end."

Ertekin shook her head. They wouldn' t have to be. I' m thinking about the Jesusland familias, and what'

s left of them in the Rim. They pay lip service to the altiplano heritage, but that' s about it. This far north, they run their own game, and a lot of it' s human-traffic-related. I mean, the Rim squashed them pretty fucking flat after Secession, ripped their markets with the drug law changes, the open biotech policies.

Sex slaves and fence-hopping' s about al they had to fall back on. But they' re still out there, just like they' re still here. And in between, in the Republic, they stil swing a hell of a lot of old-time weight."

She brooded for a while.

Yeah, okay. They' ve got the human-traffic software Merrin would have needed to get in and out of the Rim like that. Maybe they' ve got something going on with the Martian chapters, some kind of deal that gets them this Gutierrez' s services. The question is why? What' s their end of something like this?

Where' s the benefit?"

You think," Norton ventured, these are familia-sanctioned hits he' s carrying out?"

They bring a thirteen al the way back from Mars to do their contract kil ing for them?" Ertekin scowled.

Doesn' t make much sense. Sicarios are a dol ar a dozen in every major Republican city. Prisons are full of them."

Norton flickered a glance at Carl. Well, that' s true."

No, this has to be something else." Ertekin looked up at Carl. You said this Gutierrez did something for you on Mars. Can we assume you had a working relationship with the familias as well?"

I dealt with them on and off, yeah."

Care to speculate on why they' d do this?" She was still looking. Tawny flakes in the iris of her eyes.

Carl shrugged. Under any normal circumstances, I' d say they wouldn' t. The familias run an old-time macho, conservative setup, here and on Mars. They' ve got al the standard prejudices against people like me."

But?"

But. Several years ago, I ran into a thirteen who tried to forge an al iance with what' s left of the altiplano chapters. Guy called Nevant, French, ex Department Eight Special Insertion Unit. Very smart guy, he was an insurrection specialist in Central Asia. Warlord liaison, counterintelligence, all that shit. Given time, he might have gotten something working up there, too."

Might have," drawled Norton. So it' s safe to say he wasn' t given time."

No. He wasn' t."

What happened to him?"

Carl smiled bleakly. I happened to him."

Did you kil him?" Ertekin asked sharply.

No. I tracked him to some friends he had in Arequipa, pulled the Haag gun on him, and he put his hands in the air sooner than die."

Bit unusual for a thirteen, isn' t it?" Norton cranked an eyebrow. Giving up like that?"

Carl matched the raised brow, deadpan. Like I said, he' s a smart guy."