Authors: Richard Morgan
“Can
I help you?”
This was a
lawyer, no question about it. A smoothly groomed blonde woman in a loose skirt
and jacket tailored to fit the room, hands resting comfortably in her pockets.
“Bay
City police. Where’s Rutherford?”
The woman
flickered a glance sideways at our escort and having received the nod did not
bother to demand identification.
“I’m
afraid Keith is occupied at the moment. He’s in virtual with New
York.”
“Well
get him out of virtual then,” said Ortega with dangerous mildness.
“And tell him the officer who arrested his client is here to see him.
I’m sure he’ll be interested.”
“That
may take some time, officer.”
“No,
it won’t.”
The two
women locked gazes for a moment, and then the lawyer looked away. She nodded to
the muscle, who went back outside, still looking disappointed.
“I’ll
see what I can do,” she said glacially. “Please wait here.”
We waited,
Ortega at the floor-to-ceiling window, staring down at the beach with her back
to the room and myself prowling the artwork. Some of it was quite good. With
the separately ingrained habits of working in monitored environments, neither
of us said anything for the ten minutes it took to produce Rutherford from the
inner sanctum.
“Lieutenant
Ortega.” The modulated voice reminded me of Miller’s at the clinic,
and when I looked up from a print over the fireplace, I saw much the same kind
of sleeve. Maybe a little older, with slightly craggier patriarchal features
designed to inspire instant respect in jurors and judges alike, but the same
athletic frame and off-the-rack good looks. “To what do I owe this unexpected
visit? Not more harassment, I hope.”
Ortega
ignored the allegation. “Detective Sergeant Elias Ryker,” she said,
nodding at me. “Your client just admitted to one count of abduction, and
made a first degree organic damage threat under monitor. Care to see the footage?”
“Not
particularly. Care to tell me why you’re here?”
Rutherford
was good. He’d barely reacted; barely, but enough to catch it out of the
corner of my eye. My mind went into overdrive.
Ortega
leaned on the back of an armchair. “For a man defending a mandatory
erasure case, you’re showing a real lack of imagination.”
Rutherford
sighed theatrically. “You have called me away from an important link. I
assume you do have something to say.”
“Do
you know what third party retro-associative complicity is?” I asked the
question without turning from the print, and when I did lookup, I had
Rutherford’s complete attention.
“I do
not,” he said stiffly.
“That’s
a pity, because you and the other partners of Prendergast Sanchez are right in
the firing line if Kadmin rolls over. But of course, if that happens
—” I spread my hands and shrugged
“—it’ll be open season. In fact, it may already be.”
“All
right, that’s enough.” Rutherford’s hand rose decisively to a
remote summons emitter pinned to his lapel. Our escort was on his way. “I
don’t have time to play games with you. There is no statute by that name,
and this is getting perilously close to harassment.”
I raised my
voice. “Just wanted to know which side you want to be on when the program
crashes, Rutherford. There is a statute. UN indictable offence, last handed
down 4th May 2207. Look it up. I had to go back a long way to dig this one up,
but it’ll take all of you down in the end. Kadmin knows it, that’s
why he’s cracking.”
Rutherford
smiled. “I don’t think so, detective.”
I repeated
my shrug. “Shame. Like I said, look it up. Then decide which side you
want to play for. We’re going to need inside corroboration, and
we’re prepared to pay for it. If it isn’t you, Ulan Bator’s
stuffed with lawyers who’ll give blow jobs for the chance.”
The smile
wavered fractionally.
“That’s
right, think about it.” I nodded at Ortega. “You can get me at Fell
Street, same as the lieutenant here. Elias Ryker, offworld liaison. I’m
promising you, this is going to go down, whatever happens, and when it does,
I’ll be a good person to know.”
Ortega took
the cue like she’d been doing it all her life. Like Sarah would have
done. She unleaned herself from the chairback and made for the door.
“Be
seeing you, Rutherford,” she said laconically, as we stepped back out
onto the deck. The muscle was there, grinning widely and flexing his hands at
his sides. “And you, don’t even think about it.”
I contented
myself with the silent look that I had been told Ryker used to such great
effect and followed my partner down the stairs.
Back in the
cruiser, Ortega snapped on a screen and watched identity data from the bug
scroll down.
“Where’d
you put it?”
“Print
over the fireplace. Corner of the frame.”
She
grunted. “They’ll sweep it out of there in nothing flat, you know.
And none of it’s admissible as evidence, anyway.”
“I
know. You’ve told me that twice already. That’s not the point. If
Rutherford’s rattled, he’ll jump first.”
“You
think he’s rattled?”
“A
little.”
“Yeah.”
She glanced curiously at me. “So what the fuck is third party
retro-associative complicity?”
“No
idea. I made it up.”
Her eyebrow
went up. “No shit?”
“Convinced
you, huh? Know what, you could have given me a polygraph test while I was
spinning it, and I would have convinced that too. Basic Envoy tricks. Course,
Rutherford will know that as soon as he looks it up, but it’s already
served its purpose.”
“Which
is what?”
“Provide
the arena. Tell lies, you keep your opponent off balance. It’s like
fighting on unfamiliar ground. Rutherford was rattled, but he smiled when I
told him this stuff was why Kadmin was acting up.” I looked up through
the windscreen at the house above, formulating the scrapings of intuition into
understanding. “He was fucking relieved when I said that. I don’t
suppose normally he would have given that much away, but the bluff had him
running scared, and him knowing better than me about something was that little
ray of stability he needed. And that means he knows another reason why Kadmin
changed behaviour. He knows the real reason.”
Ortega
grunted approvingly. “Pretty good, Kovacs. You should have been a cop.
You notice his reaction when I told him the good news about what Kadmin had
done? He wasn’t surprised at all.”
“No.
He was expecting it. Or something like it.”
“Yeah.”
She paused. “This really what you used to do for a living?”
“Sometimes.
Diplomatic missions, or deep-cover stuff. It wasn’t—”
I fell
silent as she elbowed me in the ribs. On the screen, a series of coded
sequences were unwinding like snakes of blue fire.
“Here
we go. Simultaneous calls, he must be doing this in virtual to save time. One,
two, three—that one’s New York, must be to update the senior
partners, and oops.”
The screen
flared and went abruptly dark.
“They
found it,” I said.
“They
did. The New York line probably has a sweeper attached, flushes out the call
vicinity on connection.”
“Or
one of the others does.”
“Yeah.”
Ortega punched up the screen’s memory and stared at the call codes.
“They’re all three routed through discreet clearing. Take us a
while to locate them. You want to eat?”
Homesickness
isn’t something a veteran Envoy should confess to. If the conditioning
hasn’t already ironed it out of you, the years of sleeving back and forth
across the Protectorate should have done. Envoys are citizens of that elusive
state, Here-and-Now, a state that jealously admits of no dual nationalities.
The past is relevant only as data.
Homesickness
was what I felt as we stepped past the kitchen area of the Flying Fish and the
aroma of sauces I had last tasted in Millsport hit me like a friendly tentacle.
Teriyaki,
frying tempura and the undercurrent of miso. I stood wrapped in it for a
moment, remembering that time. A ramen bar Sarah and I had skulked in while the
heat from the Gemini Biosys gig died down, eyes hooked to newsnet broadcasts
and a corner videophone with a smashed screen that was supposed to ring, any
time now. Steam on the windows and the company of taciturn Millsport skippers.
And back
beyond that, I remembered the moth-battered paper lanterns outside
Watanabe’s on a Newpest Friday night. My teenage skin slick with sweat
from the jungle wind blowing out of the south and my eyes glittering with
tetrameth in one of the big windchime mirrors. Talk, cheaper than the big bowls
of ramen, about big scores and yakuza connections, tickets north and beyond,
new sleeves and new worlds. Old Watanabe had sat out on the deck with us,
listening to it all but never commenting, just smoking his pipes and glancing
from time to time in the mirror at his own Caucasian features—always with
mild surprise, it seemed to me.
He never
told us how he’d got that sleeve, just as he never denied or confirmed
the rumours about his escapades with the marine corps, the Quell Memorial
Brigade, the Envoys, whatever. An older gang member once told us he’d
seen Watanabe face down a roomful of Seven Per Cent Angels with nothing but his
pipe in his hands, and some kid from the swamp towns once came up with a fuzzy
slice of newsreel footage he claimed was from the Settlement wars. It was only
two-d, hurriedly shot just before an assault team went over the top, but the
sergeant being interviewed was subtitled Watanabe, Y and there was something
about the way he tilted his head when questioned that had us all crowing
recognition at the screen. But then Watanabe was a common enough name, and come
to that, the guy who said he’d seen the Angels facedown was also fond of
telling us how he’d slept with a Harlan family heiress when she came
slumming, and none of us believed
that
.
Once, on a rare
evening when I was both straight and alone at Watanabe’s, I swallowed
enough of my adolescent pride to ask the old man for his advice. I’d been
reading UN armed forces promotional literature for weeks, and I needed someone
to push me one way or the other.
Watanabe
just grinned at me around the stem of his pipe. “I should advise
you?” he asked. “Share with you the wisdom that brought me to
this?”
We both
looked around the little bar and the fields beyond the deck.
“Well,
uh, yes.”
“Well,
uh,
no
,” he said firmly, and resumed his pipe.
“Kovacs?”
I blinked
and found Ortega in front of me, looking curiously into my eyes.
“Something
I need to know about?”
I smiled
faintly and glanced around at the kitchen’s shining steel counters.
“Not really.”
“It’s
good food,” she said, misinterpreting the look.
“Well,
let’s get some, then.”
She led me
out of the steam and onto one of the restaurant’s gantries. The Flying
Fish was, according to Ortega, a decommissioned aerial minesweeper that some
oceanographic institute had bought up. The institute was now either defunct or
had moved on and the bayward-facing facility had been gutted, but someone had
stripped the Flying Fish, rerigged her as a restaurant and cabled her five
hundred metres above the decaying facility buildings. Periodically the whole
vessel was reeled gently back down to earth to disgorge its sated customers and
take on fresh. There was a queue around two sides of the docking hangar when we
arrived but Ortega jumped it with her badge, and when the airship came floating
down through the open roof of the hangar, we were the first aboard.
I settled
cross-legged onto cushions at a table that was secured to the blimp’s
hull on a metal arm and thus did not touch the gantry at all. The gantry itself
was cordoned with the faint haze of a power screen that kept the temperature
decent and the gusting wind to a pleasant breeze. Around me the hexagonal
grating floor allowed me an almost uninterrupted view past the edge of the
cushions to the sea a kilometre below. I shifted uneasily. Heights had never
been my strong point.
“Used
to use it for tracking whales and stuff,” said Ortega, gesturing sideways
at the hull. “Back before places like this could afford the satellite
time. ‘Course, with Understanding Day, the whales were suddenly big money
for anyone who could talk to them. You know they’ve told us almost as
much about the Martians as four centuries of archaeologues on Mars itself.
Christ, they remember them coming here. Race memory, that is.”
She paused.
“I was born on Understanding Day,” she added inconsequentially.
“Really?”
“Yep.
January 9th. They named me Kristin after some whale scientist in Australia,
worked on the original translation team.”
“Nice.”
Who she was
really talking to caught up with her. She shrugged, abruptly dismissive.
“When you’re a kid you don’t see it that way. I wanted to be
called Maria.”