Altered Carbon (32 page)

Ortega
dragged Kadmin up by the hair, the cigarette in her hand replaced by a
vicious-looking blackjack courtesy of the same system magic that had eliminated
the table.

“I
hear you right?” she hissed. “You making threats, rackhead?”

Kadmin
bared his teeth in a bloodstained grin.

“Police
brutal—”

“That’s
right, motherfucker.” Ortega hit him across the cheek with the blackjack.
The skin split. “Police brutality in a monitored police virtuality. Sandy
Kim and WorldWeb One would have a field day, wouldn’t they? But you know
what? I reckon your lawyers aren’t going to want to run this particular
tape.”

“Leave
him alone, Ortega.”

She seemed
to remember herself then, and stepped back.

Her face
twitched and she drew a deep breath. The table blinked back and Kadmin was
suddenly sitting upright again, mouth undamaged.

“You
too,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,
sure.” There was contempt in Ortega’s voice, at least half of it
directed at herself I guessed. She made a second effort to bring her breathing
back under control, rearranged her clothing unnecessarily. “Like I said,
going to be a cold day in hell by the time you get the chance. Maybe I’ll
wait for you.”

“Whoever
sent you worth this much, Kadmin?” I wondered softly. “You going
down silent out of contractual loyalty, or are you just scared shitless?”

For answer,
the composite man folded his arms across his chest and stared through me.

“You
through, Kovacs?” asked Ortega.

I tried to
meet Kadmin’s distant gaze. “Kadmin, the man I work for has a lot
of influence. This could be your last chance to cut a deal.”

Nothing. He
didn’t even blink.

I shrugged.
“I’m through.”

“Good,”
said Ortega grimly. “Because sitting downwind of this piece of shit is
beginning to eat away at my usually tolerant nature.” She waggled her
fingers in front of his eyes. “Be seeing you, fuckhead.”

At that,
Kadmin’s eyes turned up to meet hers, and a small, peculiarly unpleasant
smile twisted his lips.

We left.

Back on the
fourth floor, the walls of Ortega’s office had reverted to a dazzling
high noon over beaches of white sand. I screwed up my eyes against the glare
while Ortega trawled through a desk drawer and came up with her own and a spare
pair of sunglasses.

“So
what did you learn from that?”

I fitted
the lenses uncomfortably over the bridge of my nose. They were too small.
“Not much, except that little gem about not having orders to wipe me.
Someone wanted to talk to me. I’d pretty much guessed that anyway, else
he could have just blown my stack out all over the lobby of the Hendrix. Still,
means someone wanted to cut a deal of their own, outside of Bancroft.”

“Or
someone wanted to interrogate the guts out of you.”

I shook my
head. “About what? I’d only just arrived. Doesn’t make any
sense.”

“The
Corps? Unfinished business?” Ortega made little flicking motions with her
hand as if she were dealing me the suggestions. “Maybe a grudge
match?”

“No.
We went through this one when we were yelling at each other the other night.
There are people who’d like to see me wiped, but none of them live on
Earth, and none of them swing the kind of influence to go interstellar. And
there’s nothing I know about the Corps that isn’t in a low-wall
datastack somewhere. And anyway, it’s just too much of a fucking
coincidence. No, this is about Bancroft. Someone wanted in on the
program.”

“Whoever
had him killed?”

I tipped my
head down to look at her directly over the sun lenses. “You believe me,
then.”

“Not
entirely.”

“Oh,
come
on
.”

But Ortega
wasn’t listening. “What I want to know,” she brooded,
“is why he rewrote his codes at the end. You know, we’ve sweated
him nearly a dozen times since we downloaded him Sunday night. That’s the
first time he’s come close to even admitting he was there.”

“Even
to his lawyers?”

“We
don’t know what he says to them. They’re big-time sharks, out of
Ulan Bator and New York. That kind of money carries a scrambler into all privy
virtual interviews. We get nothing on tape but static.”

I raised a
mental eyebrow. On Harlan’s World, all virtual custody was monitored as a
matter of course. Scramblers were not permitted, no matter how much money you
were worth.

“Speaking
of lawyers, are Kadmin’s here in Bay City?”

“Physically,
you mean? Yeah, they’ve got a deal with a Marin County practice. One of
their partners is renting a sleeve here for the duration.” Ortega’s
lip curled. “Physical meetings are considered a touch of class these
days. Only the cheap firms do business down the wires.”

“What’s
this suit’s name?”

There was a
brief pause while she hung onto the name. “Kadmin’s a spinning item
right now. I’m not sure we go this far.”

“Ortega,
we go all the way. That was the deal. Otherwise I’m back to risking
Elias’s fine features with some more maximal push investigation.”

She was
silent for a while.

“Rutherford,”
she said finally. “You want to talk to Rutherford?”

“Right
now, I want to talk to anyone. Maybe I didn’t make things clear earlier.
I’m working cold here. Bancroft waited a month and a half before he
brought me in. Kadmin’s all I’ve got.”

“Keith
Rutherford’s a handful of engine grease. You won’t get any more out
of him than you did Kadmin downstairs. And anyway, how the fuck am I supposed
to introduce you, Kovacs? Hi, Keith, this is the ex-Envoy loose cannon your
client tried to wipe on Sunday. He’d like to ask you a few questions.
He’ll close up faster than an unpaid hooker’s hole.”

She had a
point. I thought about it for a moment, staring out to sea.

“All
right,” I said slowly. “All I need is a couple of minutes’
conversation. How about you tell him I’m Elias Ryker, your partner from
Organic Damage? I practically am, after all.”

Ortega took
off her lenses and stared at me.

“Are
you trying to be funny?”

“No.
I’m trying to be practical. Rutherford’s sleeving in from Ulan
Bator, right?”

“New
York,” she said tightly.

“New
York. Right. So he probably doesn’t know anything about you or
Ryker.”

“Probably
not.”

“So
what’s the problem?”

“The
problem is, Kovacs, that I don’t like it.”

There was
more silence. I dropped my gaze into my lap and let out a sigh that was only
partially manufactured. Then I took off my own sunglasses and looked up at her.
It was all there on plain display. The naked fear of sleeving and all that it
entailed; paranoid essentialism with its back to the wall.

“Ortega,”
I said gently. “I’m not him. I’m not trying to be
hi—”

“You
couldn’t even come close,” she snapped.

“All
we’re talking about is a couple of hours’ make-believe.”

“Is
that all?”

She said it
in a voice like iron, and she put her sunglasses back on with such brusque
efficiency that I didn’t need to see the tears welling up in the eyes
behind the mirror lenses.

“All
right,” she said finally, clearing her throat. ”I’ll get you
in. I don’t see the point, but I’ll do it. Then what?”

“That’s
a little difficult to say. I’ll have to improvise.”

“Like
you did at the Wei Clinic?”

I shrugged
noncommittally. “Envoy techniques are largely reactive. I can’t
react to something until it happens.”

“I
don’t want another bloodbath, Kovacs. It looks bad on the city
stats.”

“If
there’s violence, it won’t be me that starts it.”

“That’s
not much of a guarantee. Haven’t you got
any
idea what you’re
going to do?”

“I’m
going to talk.”

“Just talk?” She
looked at me disbelievingly. “That’s all?” I jammed my
ill-fitting sunglasses back on my face. “Sometimes that’s all it
takes.” I said.

I met my first lawyer when I was
fifteen. He was a harried-looking juvenile affray expert who defended me, not
unhandily, in a minor organic damage suit involving a Newpest police officer.
He bargained them down with a kind of myopic patience to Conditional Release
and eleven minutes of virtual psychiatric counselling. In the hall outside the
juvenile court, he looked into my probably infuriatingly smug face and nodded
as if his worst fears about the meaning of his life were being confirmed. Then
he turned on his heel and walked away. I forget his name.

My entry
into the Newpest gang scene shortly afterwards precluded any more such legal
encounters. The gangs were web-smart, wired up and already writing their own
intrusion programmes or buying them from kids half their age in return for
low-grade virtual porn ripped off the networks. They didn’t get caught
easily, and in return for this favour the Newpest heat tended to leave them
alone. Inter-gang violence was largely ritualised and excluded other players
most of the time. On the odd occasion that it spilled over and affected
civilians, there would be a rapid and brutal series of punitive raids that left
a couple of lead gang heroes in the store and the rest of us with extensive
bruising. Fortunately I never worked my way up the chain of command far enough
to get put away, so the next time I saw the inside of a courtroom was the
Innenin inquiry.

The lawyers
I saw there had about as much in common with the man who had defended me at
fifteen as automated machine rifle fire has with farting. They were cold,
professionally polished and well on their way up a career ladder which would
ensure that despite the uniforms they wore, they would never have to come
within a thousand kilometres of a genuine firefight. The only problem they had,
as they cruised sharkishly back and forth across the cool marble floor of the
court, was in drawing the fine differences between war (mass murder of people
wearing a uniform not your own), justifiable loss (mass murder of your own
troops, but with substantial gains) and criminal negligence (mass murder of
your own troops, without appreciable benefit). I sat in that courtroom for
three weeks listening to them dress it like a variety of salads, and with every
passing hour the distinctions, which at one point I’d been pretty clear
on, grew increasingly vague. I suppose that proves how good they were.

After that,
straightforward criminality came as something of a relief.

“Something
bothering you?” Ortega glanced sideways at me as she brought the unmarked
cruiser down on a shelving pebble beach below the split-level, glass-fronted
offices of Prendergast Sanchez, attorneys-at-law.

“Just
thinking.”

“Try
cold showers and alcohol. Works for me.”

I nodded
and held up the minuscule bead of metal I had been rolling between my finger
and thumb. “Is this legal?”

Ortega
reached up and killed the primaries. “More or less. No one’s going
to complain.”

“Good.
Now, I’m going to need verbal cover to start with. You do the talking,
I’ll just shut up and listen. Take it from there.”

“Fine.
Ryker was like that, anyway. Never used two words if one would do it. Most of
the time with the scumbags, he’d just look at them.”

“Sort
of Micky Nozawa-type, huh?”

“
Who
?”

“Never
mind.” The rattle of upthrown pebbles on the hull died away as Ortega cut
the engines to idle. I stretched in my seat and threw open my side of the
hatch. Climbing out, I saw an over-burly figure coming down the meandering set
of wooden steps from the split level. Looked like grafting. A blunt-looking gun
was slung over his shoulder and he wore gloves. Probably not a lawyer.

“Go
easy,” said Ortega, suddenly at my shoulder. “We have jurisdiction
here. He isn’t going to start anything.”

She flashed
her badge as the muscle jumped the last step to the beach and landed on flexed
legs. You could see the disappointment on his face as he saw it.

“Bay
City police. We’re here to see Rutherford.”

“You
can’t park that here.”

“I
already have,” Ortega told him evenly. “Are we going to keep
Mr.Rutherford waiting?”

There was a
prickly silence, but she’d gauged him correctly. Contenting himself with
a grunt, the muscle gestured us up the staircase and followed at prudent
shepherding distance. It took a while to get to the top, and I was pleased to
see when we arrived that Ortega was considerably more out of breath than I was.
We went across a modest sundeck made from the same wood as the stairs and
through two sets of automatic plate glass doors into a reception area styled to
look like someone’s lounge. There were rugs on the floor, knitted in the
same patterns as my jacket, and Empathist prints on the walls. Five single
armchairs provided parking.