“Monsters, scapegoats.” The words dropped off his tongue like cards he was dealing. His voice was suddenly jeering. “Angels and demons, heaven and hell, God, morality, law and language. Sutherland’s right, it’s all metaphor. Scaffolding to handle the areas where base reality won’t cut it for you guys, where it’s too cold for humans to live without something made up. We codify our hopes and fears and wants, and then build whole societies on the code. And then forget it ever was code and treat it like fact. Act like the universe gives a shit about it. Go to war over it, string men and women up by the neck for it. Firebomb trains and skyscrapers in the name of it.”

“If you’re talking about Dubai again—”

“Dubai, Kabul, Tashkent, and the whole of fucking Jesusland for that matter. It doesn’t matter where you look, it’s the same fucking game, it’s humans. It’s—”

He stopped abruptly, still staring into the blue-lit displays, but this time with a narrowed focus.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. We’re slowing down.”

She twisted in her seat to look through the rear windows. No sign of an autohauler they might be blocking. And no jarring red flashes anywhere on the display to signify a hardware problem. Still the jeep bled speed.

“We’ve been hacked,” Marsalis said grimly.

Sevgi peered out of the side windows. No road lighting anywhere, but a miserly crescent moon showed her a bleached, sloping landscape of rock and scrub, mountain wall to the right, and across on the far side of the highway what looked like a steep drop into a ravine. The road curved around the flank of the mountain, and they were down to a single lane each way. The median had shrunk to a meter-wide luminous guidance marker painted on the evercrete for the autohaulers. No lights or sign of human habitation anywhere. No traffic.

“You’re sure?”

“How sure do you need me to be?” He took the wheel and tried to engage the manual option. The system locked him out with a smug triple chime and pulsing orange nodes in among the blue. The jeep trundled sluggishly on down the gradient. He threw up his hands and kicked the pedals under his feet. “See? Motherfucker.”

It wasn’t clear if he was talking to the machine or to whoever was reeling them in. Sevgi reached for her pistol, freed it from the shoulder holster, and cleared the safety. Marsalis heard the click, fixed on the gun in her hands for a moment. Then he leaned across the dashboard and hit the emergency shutdown stud. The display lit red across, and the brakes bit. They still had solid coasting velocity. The jeep’s tires yelped at the abuse and locked. They slewed, but not far. Jerked to a tooth-snapping halt.

Silence—and the blink, click of the hazard lights on automatic. Cherry-red glow pooled at each corner of the jeep, vanished. Pooled, vanished. Pooled, vanished.

“Right.”

He fumbled the mechanism of his seat so it sank and allowed him access to the back of the jeep. Dived over and hung from the seat back by his hips, groping around. His voice tightened up with the pressure on his stomach muscles. “Seen this before in the Zagros. Mostly from the other side of the scam. We used to flag down the Iranian troop carriers like this for ambush. Hook them well before they could see you.” A blanket rose and fell in his hand, tossed away. “Once you’ve cracked the pilot protocols, you can do pretty much what you like with them.” Rattle of something plastic spilling. He reached harder. “Crash them into each other, drive them off the edge of a cliff, if there is one. Or over a carefully placed mine fuck.”

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for a weapon. I figure you’re not going to share that Beretta with me, right? Contractual obligations and all that.” He bounced back into the seat, teeth tight in frustration, glared around him, and then threw open the door. He ran around to the back of the jeep. Road dust from the emergency stop caught on a soft breeze and blew forward over and around them in a cloud. It floated away, ghostly quiet and intermittently lit up red by the hazard lights. Sevgi looked back and saw Marsalis working to loosen something from the rear hatch. The jeep rocked on its suspension with every tug. The flashing lights lit him amid the dust, turning his face demonic with tension and focused effort. She thought she heard him grunt. Something clanked loose.

He came back to the door, hefting a collapsible shovel.

“All right, listen,” he said, suddenly calm. “If we’re lucky, these are local thugs, used to flagging down easy-mark trucks and the odd tour bus. If they are, I’m guessing we’ve got a couple more minutes before they realize what we’ve done. Maybe another three or four minutes after that for them to mount up and come find us. Not long, however you look at it. So, textbook response, we need to get out of the vehicle and find some cover, fast.”

Sevgi nodded mutely, suddenly aware of how dry her mouth was. She snapped the slide on the Beretta, textbook style, tilting it to the horizontal so she could read the load display on the side. Thirty-three, and one in the pipe. The Marstech guns took state-of-the-art expansion slugs, pencil-slim, accurate at long range, and explosive on impact. She cleared her throat and lifted the Beretta.

“You think we’ll be able to chase them off?”

He stared at her. The hazards painted him red, dark, red, dark, red, dark. He looked down at the folded shovel in his hands. Snapped the blade out into the functional position. Then he looked up at her again, hands tightening the locking mechanism in place, and his voice was almost gentle.

“Sevgi, we’re going to have to kill these guys.”

There were seven of them.

From his limited vantage point, Carl made them for Peruvian regulars and relaxed a little. Familia hit men would have been worse. He let the mesh come on, felt it seep into his muscles like rage. His vision sharpened on the lead soldiers. They were walking three-abreast on the opposite lane, ten paces ahead of a slow-crawling open army jeep that carried the other four and a mounted machine gun. The vehicle moved with the main lights doused—that much, at least, they were doing right—and the vanguard party held their assault rifles ready for use. A gawky tension in the way they moved screamed conscript nerves. These guys could have been the same easy-grin, soccer-talking uniforms he’d blagged a ride from months back on his way to kill Gray. With luck, they’d be as young and unprepared.

They came to a halt twenty meters from the red hazard flash pooling and fading at each corner of the stranded COLIN jeep. Muttered Spanish, too far off to catch. The curve on the road was gentle—they’d have been able to see the lights for the last hundred meters at least, but they’d chosen now to stop and discuss tactics. Carl smiled to himself and gripped the shaft of the shovel. The eroded metal edge of the blade touched his face, cold and notched with use against his cheek.

The jeep backed up a little. The vanguard soldiers crossed the luminous median, looking both ways like well-trained children. Carl thought he could hear the distant drone of an autohauler somewhere in the night, impossible to tell how far off or which direction it was headed. Otherwise there was nothing but thin moonlight on porous rock and jagged mountain backdrop. Stars shingled across the sky, almost as clear as on Mars. It was quiet enough to hear the scuff of booted feet across the evercrete now that they were close, the follow-up grumble of the jeep’s antique engine.

Fucking seven of them. Christ, I hope you’re up for this, Ertekin.

He’d asked her if she knew how to kill someone with the matte-gray Beretta, if she’d ever shot anyone dead. Half hoping she’d crumble and give him the weapon. The look he got in return was enough. But she hadn’t answered his question and he still didn’t know.