The smile slipped out before she could stop it. His mouth quirked response. He moved the chair a little, sat down again.

“Saw that, did you? We get the reruns in here all the time. Faith-based rehab, you know.”

Quit grinning at him like a fucking news ’face, Sev. Get a grip.

“You don’t recognize him, then?”

A curious, tilted look. “Why would I?”

“You were in Iran.”

“Wasn’t everybody.” When she just waited, he sighed. “Yeah, we heard about the Lawmen. Saw them at a distance a few times in Iran, down around Ahvaz. But from what you’ve got there, it doesn’t look like this Merrin ever got up that far north.”

“He could have.” Sevgi nodded toward the screen. “I’ll be honest with you, this is a pretty loose summary. Once you get into the mission records, it’s a whole lot less defined. Covert deployments, so-called lost documentation, rumor and hearsay, subject is understood to have, that sort of shit. Executive denial and cover-ups around practically every corner. Plus, you’ve got a whole fucking hero mythology going on around this guy. I’ve seen data that puts Merrin in combat zones hundreds of kilometers apart on the same day, eyewitness 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 are true. 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.” Her disgust bubbled over. “I’m telling you, the guy’s a fucking ghost.”

He smiled, a little sadly she thought.

“We all were, back then,” he said. “Ghosts, I mean. We had our own British version of Project Lawman, minus the delusional name, of course. We called it Osprey. The French preferred Department Eight. But none of us ever officially existed. What you’ve got to remember, Ms. Ertekin, is that back in the eighties the whole thirteen thing was fresh out of the can. Everyone knew the technology was out there, and everybody was busy denying they’d ever have anything to do with it. UNGLA didn’t even exist back then, not as an agency in its own right. It was still part of the Human Rights Commission. And no one was very keen on letting anybody else get a close look at their new genetic warriors. The whole Middle East was a testing ground for all sorts of cutting-edge nastiness, and all of it was operating on full deniability. You know how that shit works, right?”

She blinked. “What shit?”

“Deniability. You work for COLIN, right?”

“I’ve been with COLIN two and a half years,” she said stiffly. “Before that I was a New York police detective.”

He grinned again, a little more genuine humor in it this time. “Getting the hang of it, though, aren’t you. This is a completely confidential matter, we want it to stay that way. That’s very COLIN.”

“It’s not a question of that.” She tried without much success to get the stiffness out of her voice. “We don’t want a panic on our hands.”

“How many has he killed so far? Here on the ground, I mean.”

“We think it’s in the region of twenty. Some of those are unconfirmed, but the circumstantial evidence points to a connection. In seventeen cases, we’ve recovered genetic trace material that clinches it.”

Marsalis grimaced. “Busy little fucker. Is this all in the Rim States?”

“No. The initial deaths were in the San Francisco Bay Area, but later they spread over the whole of continental North America.”

“So he’s mobile.”

“Yes. Mobile and apparently a very competent systems intrusion specialist. He murdered two men at the same location in the Bay Area on the night of June 13th and a man in southeastern Texas less than a week later. There’s no trace anywhere in the flight records for that period, and nothing from Rim Border Control, either. We had an n-djinn run face recognition checks on every cross-border flight and surface exit into the Republic for that week and got nothing.”

“He could have had his face changed.”

“In less than a week? With matching documentation? Rim States fenceline is the toughest frontier anywhere in the world. Anyway the same n-djinn we used for the face recog had instructions to flag anyone with bandaging or other traces of recent surgical procedure to the face. All we got was a bunch of rich brats coming home from West Coast cosmetic therapy, and a couple of over-the-hill erotica stars.”

She saw him hold back all but the corner of a grin. It was irritatingly infectious. She concentrated on the dataslate.

“The only options we are seriously entertaining are that either he was able to contact professional frontier busters within days of coming ashore, or he left the Rim for some other, intermediate destination before flying back into the Republic. It would be a tight time frame that way, but still doable. Of course once it goes global like that, there’s no way to run a comprehensive face recog. Too many places that refuse to let the n-djinns into their datasystems.”

“I take it these are both confirmed kills, Bay Area and then Texas?”

“Yes. Genetic trace material recovered at both locations.”

His gaze went back to the dataslate display. “What do Fort Benning have to say about it?”

“That Merrin was never provided with substantial datasystems training. He could run a battlefield deck—anybody in covert ops could. But that’s it. We’re assuming he upskilled on Mars.”

“Yeah. Or someone’s doing it for him.”

“There is that.”

He looked at her. “If he had systems help getting aboard Horkan’s Pride, and he’s still getting it now, then this is bigger than just some thirteen bailing out of Mars because he doesn’t like all the red rocks.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re out of leads.”

It wasn’t a question.

She sat back and spread her hands. “Without access to the UNGLA databases, we’re in a hole. We’ve done everything we know how to do, and it isn’t enough. The deaths keep coming, they’re steady but unpredictable. There’s no crescendo effect—”

“No, there wouldn’t be.”

“—but he’s not stopping. He’s not making any mistakes big enough to nail him or give us a working angle. Our inquiries on Mars have hit a wall—he obviously covered his tracks there, or, as you say, someone did it for him.”

“And down here?”

She nodded. “Down here, as you’ve also so eloquently pointed out, we are not on hugely cooperative terms with UNGLA, or the UN in general.”

“Well, I guess you can hardly blame them for that.” He widened his eyes at her, grinned. It’s not like you’ve been overly cooperative yourselves for the last decade.”

“Look, Munich was not—”

The grin faded to a grimace. “I wasn’t really talking about the Accords. I was thinking more of the reception we get in the prep camps every time we have to operate in them. You know we’re about as welcome down there as evolutionary science in Texas.”

She felt herself flush a little. “Individual corporate partners in the Colony effort do not necessarily—”

“Yeah, skip it.” A frown. “Still, UNGLA have a mandate requirement in circumstances like this. You report a loose thirteen, they pretty much have to show up.”

“We don’t really want them to show up, Mr. Marsalis.”

“Ah.”

“We need access to their datastacks, or failing that someone like you to talk to our profiling n-djinns. But that’s all. In the end, this is a COLIN matter, and we’ll clean our own house.”

Listen to you, Sevgi. Cop to corporate mouthpiece in one easy, well-paid move.

Marsalis watched her for a couple of moments. He shifted slightly in the chair, seemed to be considering something.

“Are you running this gig out of New York?”

“Yes. We’ve got borrowed space at RimSec’s Alcatraz complex, liaison with their detectives. But since this thing went continental, we’re back in the New York offices. Why?”