Authors: Richard Morgan
Go
primitive
.
Well, you don’t get much more primitive than climbing out of hotel
windows in the middle of the night.
Hoping the
roof was as solid as it looked, I let go.
I hit the
sloping surface in approved fashion, rolled to one side and abruptly found my
legs hanging out into space once more. The surface was firm, but as slippery as
fresh belaweed and I was slithering rapidly towards the edge. I ground my
elbows down for purchase, found none and just managed to grab the sharp edge of
the roof in one hand as I went over.
Ten-metres
to the street. With the roof edge slicing into my palm, I dangled by one arm
for a moment, trying to identify possible obstacles to my fall, like trash bins
or parked vehicles, then gave up and dropped anyway. The paving beneath came up
and smacked me hard, but there was nothing sharp to compound the impact and
when I rolled it was not into the feared assembly of trash bins. I got up and
made for the nearest shadows.
Ten minutes
and a random sampling of streets later, I came upon a rank of idling autocabs,
stepped swiftly out from my current piece of overhead cover and got into the
fifth in line. I recited Ortega’s discreet code as we lifted into the
air.
“Coding
noted. Approximate arrival time, thirty-five minutes.”
We headed
out across the Bay, and then out to sea.
Too many edges.
The
fragmented contents of the previous night bubbled in my brain like a carelessly
made fish stew. Indigestible chunks appeared on the surface, wobbled in the
currents of memory and sank again. Trepp jacked into the bar at Cable, Jimmy de
Soto washing his blood-encrusted hands, Ryker’s face staring back at me
from the spreadeagled star of mirror. Kawahara was in there somewhere, claiming
Bancroft’s death as suicide but wanting an end to the investigation, just
like Ortega and the Bay City police. Kawahara, who knew things about my contact
with Miriam Bancroft, knew things about Laurens Bancroft, about Kadmin.
The tail
end of my hangover twitched, scorpion-like, fighting the slow-gathering weight
of Trepp’s painkillers. Trepp, the apologetic Zen killer whom I’d
killed and who’d apparently come back with no hard feelings because she
couldn’t remember it; because, in her terms, it hadn’t happened to
her.
If
anybody can convince Laurens Bancroft that he died by his own hand, it is you
.
Trepp,
jacked in at Cable.
Viral
Strike. Recall that mother, do you
?
Bancroft’s
eyes boring into mine on the balcony at Suntouch House.
I am not the kind
of man to take my own life, and
even if I were,
I would not have
bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you mould not
be talking to me now
.
And then,
blindingly, I knew what I was going to do.
The cab
started downward.
“Footing
is unstable,” said the machine redundantly, as we touched down on a
rolling deck. “Please take care.”
I fed
currency to the slot and the hatch hinged up on Ortega’s safe location. A
brief expanse of gunmetal landing pad, railings of cabled steel, and the sea
beyond, all shifting black shoulders of water beneath a night sky clogged with
cloud and hard drizzle. I climbed out warily and clung to the nearest railing
while the cab lifted away and was quickly swallowed by the drifting veils of
rain. As the navigation lights faded, I turned my attention to the vessel I was
standing on.
The landing
pad was situated at the stern, and from where I clung to the railing I could
see the whole length of the ship laid out. She looked to be about twenty
metres, something like two thirds the size of a Millsport trawler, but much
leaner in the beam. The deck modules had the smooth, self-sealing configuration
of storm survival design, but despite the general businesslike appearance, no
one would ever take this for a working vessel. Delicate telescopic masts rose
to what looked like only half height at two points along the deck and there was
a sharp bowsprit stabbing ahead of the slimly tapered prow. This was a yacht. A
rich man’s floating home.
Light
spilled out of a hatchway on the rear deck and Ortega emerged far enough to
beckon me down from the landing pad. Hooking my fingers firmly on the rail, I
braced myself against the pitch and sway of the vessel and picked my way down a
short flight of steps at one side of the pad, then across the rear deck to the
hatch. Swirls of drizzle swept across the ship, hurrying me along against my
will. In the well of light from the open hatch I saw another, steeper set of
steps and handed my way down the narrow companionway into the offered warmth.
Over my head, the hatch hummed smoothly shut.
“Where
the fuck have you been?” snapped Ortega.
I took a
moment to rub some of the water out of my hair and looked around. If this was a
rich man’s floating home, the rich man in question hadn’t been home
in a while. Furniture was stowed at the sides of the room I had descended into,
sheeted over in semi-opaque plastic, and the shelves of the small niche bar
were empty. The hatches over the windows were all battened down. Doors at
either end of the room were open onto what seemed to be similarly mothballed
spaces.
For all
that, the yacht reeked of the wealth that had spawned it. The chairs and tables
beneath the plastic were darkly polished wood, as was the panelling of the
bulkheads and doors, and there were rugs on the waxed boards beneath my feet.
The remainder of the décor was similarly sombre in tone, with what looked
like original artwork on the bulkhead walls. One from the Empathist school, the
skeletal ruins of a Martian shipyard at sunset, the other an abstract that I
didn’t have the cultural background to read.
Ortega
stood in the middle of it all, tousle-haired and scowling in a raw silk kimono
that I assumed had come out of an onboard wardrobe.
“It’s
a long story.” I moved past her to peer through the nearest door.
“I could use a coffee, if the galley’s open.”
Bedroom. A
big, oval bed set amidst less than wholly tasteful mirrors, quilt tangled and
thrown aside in haste. I was moving back towards the other door when she
slapped me.
I reeled
sideways. It wasn’t as hard a blow as I’d given Sullivan in the
noodle house, but it was delivered from standing with a lot more swing and
there was the tilt of the deck to contend with. The cocktail of hangover and
painkillers didn’t help. I didn’t quite go down, but it was a near
thing. Stumbling back into balance, I raised a hand to my cheek and stared at
Ortega, who was glaring back at me with twin spots of colour burning high on
each cheekbone.
“Look,
I’m sorry if I woke you up, but—”
“You
piece of shit,” she hissed at me. “You lying piece of shit.”
“I’m
not sure I—”
“I
should have you fucking arrested, Kovacs. I should have you fucking stacked for
what you’ve done.”
I started
to lose my temper. “Done
what
? Will you get a fucking grip,
Ortega, and tell me what’s going on.”
“We
accessed the Hendrix’s memory today,” Ortega said coldly.
“Preliminary warrant went through at noon. Everything for the last week.
I’ve been reviewing it.”
The rapidly
flaring, irritable rage shrank back to nothing inside me as the words left her
mouth. It was as if she’d emptied a bucket of seawater over my head.
“Oh.”
“Yes,
there wasn’t much.” Ortega turned away, hugging her own shoulders
in the kimono, and moved past me to the unexplored doorway. “You’re
the only guest there at the moment. So it’s just been you. And your
visitors.”
I followed
her through into a second, carpeted room where two steps led down to a narrow
sunken galley behind a low, wood-panelled partition at one side. The other
walls held similarly covered items of furniture to the first room, except for
the far corner, where the plastic sheeting had been pulled off a metre-square
video screen and attendant receiver/playback modules. A single, straight-backed
chair was positioned in front of the screen on which was frozen the
unmistakable image of Elias Ryker’s face delving between Miriam
Bancroft’s widespread thighs.
“There’s
a remote on the chair,” said Ortega, herself remote. “Why
don’t you watch some of it while I make you a coffee? Refresh your
memory. Then you can do some explaining.”
She
disappeared into the galley without giving me the chance to reply. I advanced
on the frozen video screen, feeling a small liquid slide in my guts as the
image brought back memories tinged with Merge Nine. In the sleepless, chaotic
whirl of the last day and a half, I had all but forgotten Miriam Bancroft, but
now she came back to me in the flesh, overpowering and intoxicating as she had
been that night. I’d also forgotten Rodrigo Bautista’s claim that
they were almost through the legal wrangles with the Hendrix’s lawyers.
My foot
knocked against something and I looked down at the carpet. There was a coffee
mug on the floor next to the chair, still a third full. I wondered how much of
the hotel’s memory Ortega had gone through. I glanced at the image on
screen. Was this as far as she’d got? What else had she seen? How to play
this, then? I picked up the remote and turned it over in my hands.
Ortega’s cooperation had been an integral part of my planning so far. If
I was going to lose her now, I was in trouble.
Scratching
around inside me was something else. An emotional upwelling that I didn’t
want to acknowledge, because to acknowledge it would be a clinical absurdity. A
feeling that, despite my preoccupation with later factors in the hotel’s
memory, was tied intimately to the image currently on screen.
Embarrassment.
Shame.
Absurd. I
shook my head. Fucking
stupid
.
“You’re
not watching.”
I turned
back and saw Ortega with a steaming mug in each hand. An aroma of mingled
coffee and rum wafted towards me.
“Thanks.”
I took one of the mugs from her and sipped at it, playing for time. She leaned
away from me and folded her arms.
“So.
Half a hundred reasons why Miriam Bancroft doesn’t fit the bill.”
She jerked her head at the screen. “How many of them is that?”
“Ortega,
this is nothing to do—”
“I
buy Miriam Bancroft as scary, you told me.” She shook her head judicially
and sipped from her coffee. “I don’t know, that doesn’t look
like fear on your face, exactly.”
“Ortega—”
“
‘I want you to stop,’ she says. She actually says it, look wind it
back if you don’t rememb—”
I pulled
the remote out of her reach. “I remember what she said.”
“Then
you also remember the sweet little deal she offered you to shut down the case,
the multiple—”
“Ortega,
you didn’t want me on the case either, remember. Open and shut suicide,
you said. That doesn’t mean you killed him, does—”
“Shut
up.” Ortega circled me as if we were holding knives, not coffee mugs.
“You’ve been covering for her. All this fucking time, you’ve
had your nose buried in her crotch like a faithful fucking d—”
“If
you’ve seen the rest of it, you know that isn’t true.” I
tried for an even tone that Ryker’s hormones would not let me have.
“I told Curtis I wasn’t interested. I fucking told him that two
days ago.”
“Do
you have any idea what a prosecutor will do with this footage? Miriam Bancroft
trying to buy off her husband’s investigator with illegal sexual favours.
Oh yes, admission of multiple sleeving, even unproven, can be made to look very
bad in court.”
“She’ll
beat the rap. You know she will.”
“If
her Meth husband wants to weigh in on her side. Which maybe he won’t when
he sees this. This isn’t Leila Begin again, you know. The moral
boot’s on the other foot this time around.”
The
allusion to morality went ripping through the outer borders of the argument,
but as it passed I grasped the uncomfortable fact that actually it was central
to what was going on here. I remembered Bancroft’s critical assessment of
Earth’s moral culture, and wondered if he could really watch my head
between his wife’s thighs and not feel betrayed.
I was still
trying to work out what I felt on the same subject.
“And
while we’re on the subject of prosecution, Kovacs, that severed head you
brought back from the Wei Clinic isn’t going to win you any remissions
either. Illegal retention of a d.h. personality carries fifty to a hundred on
Earth, more if we can prove you torched the head off in the first place.”
“I
was going to tell you about that.”
“No,
you fucking weren’t,” Ortega snarled. “You weren’t
going to fucking tell me any single thing you didn’t need to.”
“Look,
the clinic won’t dare prosecute anyway. They’ve got too much
to—”
“You
arrogant motherfucker.” The coffee cup thumped dully to the carpet, and
her fists clenched. Now there was real fury in her eyes. “You’re
just like him, you’re just
fucking
like him. You think we need
the nicking clinic, with footage of you putting a severed head in a hotel
freezer. Isn’t that a crime where you come from, Kovacs? Summary
decapitation—”