Altered Carbon (30 page)

“And
Jerry’s?”

A shrug.
“The same. With the proprietor dead, a managing interest has stepped
in.”

“Very
tidy.”

“I’m
glad you appreciate it.” Bancroft got to his feet. “As I said, it
has been a busy morning, and negotiations are by no means at an end. I would be
grateful if you could limit your depredations somewhat in future. It has been
costly.”

Getting to
my feet, just for a moment I had the traceries of fire at Innenin across the
back of my vision, the screaming deaths heard at a level that was bone deep,
and suddenly Bancroft’s elegant understatement rang sickly and grotesque,
like the antiseptic words of General MacIntyre’s damage reports …
for
securing the Innenin beachhead, a price well worth paying
… Like
Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he
talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing.

Someone else was paying.

The Fell Street station was an
unassuming block done out in a style I assumed must be Martian Baroque. Whether
it had been planned that way, as a police station, or taken over after the fact
was difficult to decide. The place was, potentially, a fortress. The
mock-eroded rubystone facings and hooded buttresses provided a series of natural
niches in which were set high, stained glass windows edged by the unobtrusive
nubs of shield generators. Below the windows, the abrasive red surface of the
stonework was sculpted into jagged obstructions that caught the morning light
and turned it bloody. I couldn’t tell whether the steps up to the arched
entrance were deliberately uneven or just well worn.

Inside,
stained light from a window and a peculiar calm fell on me simultaneously.
Subsonics, I guessed, casting a glance around at the human flotsam waiting
submissively on the benches. If these were arrested suspects, they had been
rendered remarkably unconcerned by something and I doubted it would be the Zen
Populist murals that someone had commissioned for the hall. I crossed the patch
of coloured light cast by the window, picked my way through small knots of
people conversing in lowered tones more appropriate to a library than a holding
centre, and found myself at a reception counter. A uniformed cop, presumably
the desk sergeant, blinked kindly back at me
—the subsonics were obviously getting to him as well.

“Lieutenant
Ortega,” I told him. “Organic Damage.”

“Who
shall I say it is?”

“Tell
her it’s Elias Ryker.”

Out of the
corner of my eye, I saw another uniform turn at the sound of the name, but
nothing was said. The desk sergeant spoke into his phone, listened then turned
back to me.

“She’s
sending someone down. Are you armed?”

I nodded
and reached under my jacket for the Nemex.

“Please
surrender the weapon carefully,” he added with a gentle smile. “Our
security software is a little touchy, and it’s apt to stun you if you
look like you’re pulling something.”

I slowed my
movements to frame advance, dumped the Nemex on the desk and set about
unstrapping the Tebbit knife from my arm. When I was finished, the sergeant
beamed beatifically at me.

“Thank
you. It’ll all be returned to you when you leave the building.”

The words
were barely out of his mouth when two of the mohicans appeared through a door
at the back of the hall and directed themselves rapidly towards me. Their faces
were painted with identical glowers which the subsonics apparently made little
impact on in the short time it took them to reach me. They went for an arm
apiece.

“I
wouldn’t,” I told them.

“Hey,
he’s not under arrest, you know,” said the desk sergeant
pacifically. One of the mohicans jerked a glance at him and snorted in
exasperation. The other one just stared at me the whole time as if he
hadn’t eaten red meat recently. I met the stare with a smile. Following
the meeting with Bancroft I had gone back to the Hendrix and slept for almost
twenty hours. I was rested, neurachemically alert and feeling a cordial dislike
of authority of which Quell herself would have been proud.

It must
have shown. The mohicans abandoned their attempts to paw me and the three of us
rode up four floors in silence broken only by the creak of the ancient
elevator.

Ortega’s
office had one of the stained glass windows, or more precisely the bottom half
of one, before it was bisected horizontally by the ceiling. Presumably the
remainder rose missile-like from the floor of the office above. I began to see
some evidence for the original building having been converted to its present
use. The other walls of the office were environment-formatted with a tropical
sunset over water and islands. The combination of stained glass and sunset
meant that the office was filled with a soft orange light in which you could
see the drifting of dust motes.

The
lieutenant was seated behind a heavy wooden desk as if caged there. Chin propped
on one cupped hand, one shin and knee pressed hard against the edge of the
desk, she was brooding over the scrolldown of an antique laptop when we came
through the door. Aside from the machine, the only items on the desktop were a
battered-looking heavy-calibre Smith & Wesson and a plastic cup of coffee,
heating tab still unpulled. She dismissed the mohicans with a nod.

“Sit
down, Kovacs.”

I glanced
around, saw a frame chair under the window and hooked it up to the desk. The
late afternoon light in the office was disorientating.

“You
work the night shift?”

Her eyes
flared. “What kind of crack is that?”

“Hey,
nothing.” I held up my hands and gestured at the low light. “I just
thought you might have cycled the walls for it. You know it’s ten
o’clock in the morning outside.”

“Oh,
that.” Ortega grunted and her eyes swivelled back down to the screen
display. It was hard to tell in the tropical sunset, but I thought they might
be grey/green, like the sea around the maelstrom. “It’s out of
synch. The department got it cheap from some place in El Paso Juarez. Jams up
completely sometimes.”

“That’s
tough.”

“Yeah,
sometimes I’ll just turn it off but the neons are—” She
looked up abruptly. “What the fuck am I—Kovacs, do you know how
close you are to a storage rack right now?”

I made a
span of my right index finger and thumb, and looked at her through it.

“About
the width of a testimony from the Wei Clinic, was what I heard.”

“We
can put you there, Kovacs. Seven forty-three yesterday morning, walking out the
front door larger than life.”

I shrugged.

“And
don’t think your Meth connections are going to keep you organic forever.
There’s a Wei Clinic limo driver telling interesting stories about hijack
and Real Death. Maybe he’ll have something to say about you.”

“Impound
his vehicle did you?” I asked casually. “Or did Wei reclaim it
before you could run tests?”

Ortega’s
mouth compressed into a hard line.

I nodded.
“Thought so. And the driver will say precisely zero until Wei spring him,
I imagine.”

“Listen,
Kovacs. I keep pushing, something’s got to give. It’s a matter of
time, motherfucker. Strictly that.”

“Admirable
tenacity,” I said. “Shame you didn’t have some of that for
the Bancroft case.”

“
There
is no fucking Bancroft case
.”

Ortega was
on her feet, palms hard down on the desktop, eyes slitted in rage and disgust.
I waited, nerves sprung in case Bay City police stations were as prone to
accidental suspect injury as some others I had known. Finally, the lieutenant
drew a deep breath, and lowered herself joint by joint back into her seat. The
anger had smoothed off her face, but the disgust was still there, caught in the
fine lines at the corners of her eyes and the set of her wide mouth. She looked
at her nails.

“Do
you know what we found at the Wei Clinic yesterday?”

“Black
market spare parts? Virtual torture programmes? Or didn’t they let you
stay that long?”

“We
found seventeen bodies with their cortical stacks burnt out. Unarmed. Seventeen
dead people. Really dead.”

She looked
up at me again, the disgust still there.

“You’ll
have to pardon my lack of reaction,” I said coldly. “I saw a lot
worse when I was in uniform. In fact, I
did
a lot worse when I was
righting the Protectorate’s battles for them.”

“That
was war.”

“Oh,
please
.”

She said
nothing. I leaned forward across the desk.

“And
don’t tell me those seventeen bodies are what you’re on fire about,
either.” I gestured at my own face. “This is your problem. You
don’t like the idea of someone carving this up.”

She sat
silent for a moment, thinking, then reached into a drawer of the desk and took
out a packet of cigarettes. She offered them to me automatically and I shook my
head with clenched determination.

“I
quit.”

“Did
you?” There was genuine surprise in her voice, as she fed herself a
cigarette and lit it. “Good for you. I’m impressed.”

“Yeah,
Ryker should be pleased too, when he gets off stack.”

She paused
behind the veil of smoke, then dropped the packet back into the drawer and
palm-heeled it shut.

“What
do you want?” she asked flatly.

The holding
racks were five floors down in a double-storey basement where it was easier to
regulate temperatures. Compared to PsychaSec, it was a toilet.

“I
don’t see that this is going to change anything,” said Ortega as we
followed a yawning technician along the steel gantry to slot 3089b.
“What’s Kadmin going to tell you that he hasn’t told
us?”

“
Look
.”
I stopped and turned to face her, hands spread and held low. On the narrow
gantry we were uncomfortably close. Something chemical happened, and the
geometries of Ortega’s stance seemed suddenly fluid, dangerously tactile.
I felt my mouth dry up.

“I—”
she said.

“3089b,”
called the technician, hefting the big, thirty-centimetre disc out of its slot.
“This the one you wanted, lieutenant?”

Ortega
pushed hurriedly past me. “That’s it, Micky. Can you set us up with
a virtual?”

“Sure.”
Micky jerked a thumb at one of the spiral staircases collared in at intervals
along the gantry. “You want to go down to Five, slap on the trodes. Take
about five minutes.”

“The
point is,” I said, as the three of us clattered down the steel steps,
“you’re the Sia. Kadmin knows you, he’s been dealing with you
all his professional life. It’s part of what he does. I’m an
unknown. If he’s never been extra-system, the chances are he’s
never met an Envoy before. And they tell nasty stories about the Corps most
places I’ve been.”

Ortega gave
me a sceptical look over her shoulder. “You’re going to
frighten
him into a statement? Dimitri Kadmin? I don’t think so.”

“He’ll
be off balance, and when people are off balance they give things away.
Don’t forget, this guy’s working for someone who wants me dead.
Someone who
is
scared of me, at least superficially. Some of that may
rub off on Kadmin.”

“And
this is supposed to convince me that someone murdered Bancroft after all?”

“Ortega,
it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not. We’ve been through
this already. You want Ryker’s sleeve back in the tank asap, out of
harm’s way. The sooner we get to whatever bottom there is to
Bancroft’s death, the sooner that happens. And I’m a lot less
likely to incur substantial organic damage if I’m not stumbling around in
the dark. If I have your help, in fact. You don’t want this sleeve to get
written off in another firefight, do you?”

“
Another
firefight?” It had taken nearly half an hour of heated discussion to
hammer the sense of the new relationship into Ortega, and the policewoman in
her still hadn’t gone to sleep on me.

“Yeah,
after the Hendrix,” I improvised rapidly, cursing the face-to-face
chemical interlock that had put: me off balance. “I picked up some bad
bruising there. Could have been a lot worse.”

She shot me
another, longer glance over her shoulder.

The virtual
interrogation system was housed in a series of bubblefab cabins at one side of
the basement floor. Micky settled both of us onto weary-looking automould
couches that were slow to respond to our forms, applied the electrodes and
hypnophones, then kicked in the power with a concert pianist’s sweep of
one arm across two of the utilitarian consoles. He studied the screens as they
blinked on.

“Traffic,”
he said, and hawked congestion into the back of his throat with disgust.
“Commissioner’s hooked in with some kind of conference environment
and it’s soaking up half the system. Got to wait till someone else gets off.”
He glanced back at Ortega. “Hey, that the Mary Lou Hinchley thing?”