Now.

Carl threw the door open and found himself facing the two of them across a tiny living room laid with brightly colored rugs. Gray was half turned away, looming over a flinching Gaby, who had backed up and knocked over a tall potted plant by the front door. The reddened handprint was still visible on her face where he’d slapped her. More plants around the room, cheap painted ceramics and Pachamama icons on shelves, a small statue of some saint or other on a shelf, and a Spanish prayer in a frame on one wall. They were in Gaby’s house.

He pitched his voice hard and calm.

“That’s it, Frank. Game over.”

Gray turned slowly, deliberately and, fuck, yes, he had a weapon, a big black cannon of a handgun that seemed welded in the fist at the end of his right hand. A tiny part of Carl, a subroutine immune to the mesh and the betamyeline flooding the rest of his system, identified it as the murder weapon, the ’61 Smith caseless. Better than forty years old, but they said you could lockvoid that gun in orbit, swing around, pick it back up, and it’d still kill things like it just came out of the factory. For the first time in quite a while, he was grateful for the chilly bulk of the Haag in his own hand.

It didn’t help when Gray smiled at him.

“Hello there, UN man.”

Carl nodded. “Put the gun down, Frank. It’s over.”

Gray frowned as if seriously considering it. “Who sent you? Jesusland?”

“Brussels. Put the gun down, Frank.”

But the other man didn’t move at all. He could have been a holoshot on pause. Even the frown stayed on his face. Maybe deepened a little, as if Gray was trying to work out how the hell it had all come to this. “I know you, don’t I,” he said suddenly. “Marceau, right? The lottery guy?”

Keep him talking.