Altered Carbon (39 page)

“Animal
abandonment,” she said finally. “And then abject gratitude. And I
stopped feeling them both as soon as he stopped paying me.”

“And
what do you feel now?”

“Now?”
Leila Begin looked out to sea, as if testing the temperature of the breeze
against what was inside her. “Now I feel nothing, Mr.Kovacs.”

“You
agreed to talk to me. You must have had a reason.”

Begin made
a dismissive gesture. “The lieutenant asked me to.”

“Very
public-spirited of you.”

The
woman’s gaze came back to me. “You know what happened after my
miscarriage?”

“I
heard you were paid off.”

“Yes.
Unpleasant-sounding, isn’t it? But that’s what happened. I took
Bancroft’s money and I shut up. It was a lot of money. But I didn’t
forget where I came from. I still get back to Oakland two or three times a
year, I know the girls who work the Rack now. Lieutenant Ortega has a good name
there. Many of the girls owe her. You might say I am paying off some
favours.”

“And
revenge on Miriam Bancroft doesn’t come into it?”

“What
revenge?” Leila Begin laughed her hard little laugh again. “I am
giving you information because the lieutenant has asked me to. You won’t
be able to do anything to Miriam Bancroft. She is a Meth. She is
untouchable.”

“No
one’s untouchable. Not even Meths.”

Begin
looked at me sadly.

“You
are not from here,” she said. “And it shows.”

Begin’s
call had been routed through a Caribbean linkage broker, and the virtual time
rented out of a Chinatown forum provider.
Cheap
, Ortega told me on the
way in,
and probably as secure as anywhere. Bancroft wants privacy, he
spends half a million on discretion systems. Me, I just go talk where no
one’s listening
.

It was also
cramped. Slotted in between a pagoda-shaped bank and a steamy-windowed
restaurant frontage, space was at a premium. The reception area was reached by
filing up a narrow steel staircase and along a gantry pinned to one wing of the
pagoda’s middle tier. A lavish seven or eight square metres of fused sand
flooring under a cheap glass viewdome provided prospective clients with a
waiting area, natural light and two pairs of seats that looked as if they had
been torn out of a decommissioned jetliner. Adjacent to the seats, an ancient
Asian woman sat behind a battery of secretarial equipment, most of which
appeared to be switched off, and guarded a flight of access steps into the
bowels of the building. Down below, it was all hairpin corridors racked with
cable conduits and piping. Each length of corridor was lined with the doors of
the service cubicles. The trode couches were set into the cubicles at a sharp
upright angle to economise on floor space and surrounded on all sides by
blinking, dusty-faced instrument panels. You strapped yourself in, traded up
and then tapped the code number given to you at reception into the arm of the
couch. Then the machine came and got your mind.

Returning
from the wide open horizon of the beach virtuality was a shock. Opening my eyes
on the banks of instrumentation just above my head, I suffered a momentary
flashback to Harlan’s World. Thirteen years old and waking up in a
virtual arcade after my first porn format. A low-ratio forum where two minutes
of real time got me an experiential hour and a half in the company of two
pneumatically-breasted playmates whose bodies bore more resemblance to cartoons
than real women. The scenario had been a candy-scented room of pink cushions
and fake fur rugs with windows that gave poor resolution onto a night-time
cityscape. When I started running with the gangs and making more money, the
ratio and resolution went up, and the scenarios got more imaginative, but the
thing that never changed was the stale smell and the tackiness of the trodes on
your skin when you surfaced afterwards between the cramped walls of the coffin.

“Kovacs?”

I blinked
and reached for the straps. Shouldering my way out of the cubicle, I found
Ortega already waiting in the pipe-lined corridor.

“So
what do you think?”

“I
think she’s full of shit.” I raised my hands to forestall
Ortega’s outburst. “No, listen, I buy Miriam Bancroft as scary.
I’ve got no argument with that. But there are about half a hundred reasons
why she doesn’t fit the bill. Ortega, you polygraphed her for
fuck’s sake.”

“Yeah,
I know.” Ortega followed me down the corridor. “But that’s
what I’ve been thinking about. You know, she volunteered to take that
test. I mean, it’s witness-mandatory anyway, but she was demanding it
practically as soon as I got to the scene. No weeping partner shit, not even a
tear, she just slammed into the incident cruiser and asked for the
wires.”

“So?”

“So
I’m thinking about that stuff you pulled with Rutherford. You said if
they polygraphed you while you were doing that, you wouldn’t register,
now—”

“Ortega,
that’s Envoy conditioning. Pure mind discipline. It’s not physical.
You can’t buy stuff like that off the rack at SleeveMart.”

“Miriam
Bancroft wears state-of-the-art Nakamura. They use her face and body to sell
the stuff—”

“Do
Nakamura do something that’ll beat a police polygraph?”

“Not
officially.”

“Well
there you—”

“Don’t
be so fucking obtuse. You never heard of custom biochem?”

I paused at
the foot of the stairs up to reception and shook my head. “I don’t
buy it. Torch her husband with a weapon only she and he have access to. No
one’s that stupid.”

We went
upstairs, Ortega at my heels.

“Think
about it, Kovacs. I’m not saying it was premeditated—”

“And
what about the remote storage? It was a pointless crime—”

“—not
saying it was even rational, but you’ve got to—”

“—got
to be someone who didn’t know—

“Fuck!
Kovacs!”

Ortega’s
voice, up a full octave.

We were
into the reception zone by now. Still two clients waiting on the left, a man
and a woman deep in discussion of a large paper-wrapped package. On the right a
peripheral flicker of crimson where there should have been none. I was looking
at blood.

The ancient
Asian receptionist was dead, throat cut with something that glinted metallic
deep within the wound around her neck. Her head rested in a shiny pool of her
own blood on the desk in front of her.

My hand
leapt for the Nemex. Beside me, I heard the snap as Ortega chambered the first
slug in her Smith & Wesson. I swung towards the two waiting clients and
their paper-wrapped package.

Time turned
dreamlike. The neurachem made everything impossibly slow, separate images
drifting to the floor of my vision like autumn leaves.

The package
had fallen apart. The woman was holding a compact Sunjet, the man a machine
pistol. I cleared the Nemex and started firing from the hip.

The door to
the gantry burst open and another figure stood in the opening, brandishing a
pistol in each fist.

Beside me,
Ortega’s Smith & Wesson boomed and blew the new arrival back through
the door like a reversed film sequence of his entrance.

My first
shot ruptured the headrest of the woman’s seat, showering her with white
padding. The Sunjet sizzled, the beam went wide. The second slug exploded her
head and turned the drifting white flecks red.

Ortega
yelled in fury. She was still firing, upward my peripheral sense told me.
Somewhere above us, her shots splintered glass.

The machine
gunner had struggled to his feet. I registered the bland features of a synth
and put a pair of slugs into him. He staggered back against the wall, still
raising the gun. I dived for the floor.

The dome
above our heads smashed inward. Ortega yelled something and I rolled sideways.
A body tumbled bonelessly head over feet onto the ground next to me.

The machine
pistol cut loose, aimless. Ortega yelled again and flattened herself on the
floor. I rolled upright on the lap of the dead woman and shot the synthetic
again, three times in rapid succession. The gunfire choked off.

Silence.

I swung the
Nemex left and right, covering the corners of the room and the front door. The
jagged edges of the smashed dome above. Nothing.

“Ortega?”

“Yeah,
fine.” She was sprawled on the other side of the room, propping herself
up on one elbow. There was a tightness in her voice that belied her words. I
swayed to my feet and made my way across to her, footsteps crunching on broken
glass.

“Where’s
it hurt?” I demanded, crouching to help her sit up.

“Shoulder.
Fucking bitch got me with the Sunjet.”

I stowed
the Nemex and looked at the wound. The beam had carved a long diagonal furrow
across the back of Ortega’s jacket and clipped through the left shoulder
pad at the top. The meat beneath the pad was cooked, seared down to the bone in
a narrow line at the centre.

“Lucky,”
I said with forced lightness. “You hadn’t ducked, it would have
been your head.”

“I
wasn’t ducking, I was fucking falling over.”

“Good
enough. You want to stand up?”

“What
do you think?” Ortega levered herself to her knees on her uninjured arm
and then stood. She grimaced at the movement of her jacket against the wound.
“
Fuck
, that stings.”

“I
think that’s what the guy in the doorway said. ”

Leaning on
me, she turned to stare, eyes centimetres away. I deadpanned it, and the
laughter broke across her face like a sunrise. She shook her head.

“Jesus,
Kovacs, you are one sick motherfucker. They teach you to tell post-firefight
jokes in the Corps or is it just you?”

I guided
her towards the exit. “Just me. Come on, let’s get you some fresh
air.”

Behind us,
there was a sudden flailing sound. I jerked around and saw the synthetic sleeve
staggering upright. Its head was smashed and disfigured where my last shot had
torn the side of the skull off, and the gun hand was spasmed open at the end of
a stiff, blood-streaked right arm, but the other arm was flexing, hand curling
into a fist. The synth stumbled against the chair, righted itself and came
towards us, dragging its right leg.

I drew the
Nemex and pointed it.

“Fight’s
over,” I advised.

The slack
face grinned at me. Another halting step. I frowned.

“For
Christ’s sake, Kovacs,” Ortega was fumbling for her own weapon.
“Get it over with.”

I snapped
off a shot and the shell punched the synth backwards onto the glass-strewn
floor. It twisted a couple of times, then lay still but breathing sluggishly.
As I watched it, fascinated, a gurgling laugh arose from its mouth.

“That’s
fucking enough,” it coughed, and laughed again. “Eh, Kovacs?
That’s fucking enough.”

The words
held me in shock for the space of a heartbeat, then I wheeled and made for the
door, dragging Ortega with me.

“Wha—”

“Out.
Get the fuck out.” I thrust her through the door ahead of me and grabbed
the railing outside. The dead pistoleer lay twisted on the walkway ahead. I
shoved Ortega again and she vaulted the body awkwardly. Slamming the door after
me, I followed her at a run.

We were almost to the end of
the gantry when the dome behind us detonated in a geyser of glass and steel. I
distinctly heard the door come off its hinges behind us, and then the blast
picked us both up like discarded coats and threw us down the stairs into the
street.

The police are more impressive by night.

First of
all you’ve got the flashing lights casting dramatic colour into
everyone’s faces, grim expressions steeped alternately in criminal red
and smoky blue. Then there’s the sound of the sirens on the night, like
an elevator ratcheting down the levels of the city, the crackling voices of the
comsets, somehow brisk and mysterious at the same time, the coming and going of
dimly lit bulky figures and snatches of cryptic conversation, the deployed
technology of law enforcement for wakened bystanders to gape at, the lack of
anything else going on to provide a vacuum backdrop. There can be absolutely
nothing to see beyond this and people will still watch for hours.

Nine
o’clock on a workday morning it’s a different matter. A couple of
cruisers turned up in response to Ortega’s call in but their lights and
sirens were barely noticeable above the general racket of the city. The
uniformed crews strung incident barriers at either end of the street and
shepherded customers out of the neighbouring businesses, while Ortega persuaded
the bank’s private security not to arrest me as a possible accessory to
the bombing. There was a bounty on terrorists, apparently. A crowd of sorts developed
beyond the almost invisible hazing of the barriers, but it seemed mostly
composed of irate pedestrians trying to get past.