Authors: Richard Morgan
“The
evidence is she got caught,” observed Kawahara tartly. “I’ve
got plenty of people can do this for you. Top line intrusion specialists. You
don’t need—”
“Kawahara.”
I kept my temper with an effort, but heard some of it in the tightness in my
voice. “This is my gig, remember. I don’t want your people climbing
all over it. If you unstack Elliott, she’ll be loyal. Get her her own
body back and she’ll be ours for life. That’s the way I want to do
it, so that’s the way it’s going down.”
I waited.
Kawahara stayed expressionless for a moment, then bestowed on me another
carefully calibrated smile.
“Very
well. We will do it your way. I’m sure you’re aware of the risks
you are taking, and what will happen if you fail. I shall contact you at the
Hendrix later today.”
“What’s
the word on Kadmin?”
“Of
Kadmin, there is no word.” Kawahara smiled once more, and the connection
broke.
I sat
staring at the standby screen for a moment, reviewing the scam as I’d
laid it out. I had the uneasy feeling that I’d been telling the truth in
the midst of all the deceit. Or, more, that my carefully spun lies were
treading in the tracks of the truth, following the same path. A good lie should
shadow the truth closely enough to draw substance from it, but this was
something else, something altogether more unnerving. I felt like a hunter who
has tracked a swamp panther a little too close for comfort, and expects at any
moment to see it rear up out of the swamp in all its fanged and tendril-maned
horror. The truth was here, somewhere.
It was a
hard feeling to shake.
I got up
and went into the kitchen, where Ortega was foraging through the almost empty
fridge unit. Light from within cast her features in a way I hadn’t seen
before and below one raised arm her right breast filled the slack of her
T-shirt like fruit, like water. The desire to touch her was an itching in my
hands.
She glanced
up. “Don’t you cook?”
“Hotel
does it all for you. Comes up in the hatch. What do you want?”
“I
want to
cook
something.” She gave up looking through the fridge
and closed the door of the unit. “Get what you wanted?”
“Think
so. Give the hotel a list of ingredients. There are pans and things in that
rack down there, I think. Anything else you need, ask the hotel. I’m
going to go through the list. Oh, and Kristin.”
She looked
round from the rack I’d indicated.
“Miller’s
head isn’t in here. I put it next door.”
Her mouth
tightened a little. “I know where you put Miller’s head,” she
said. “I wasn’t looking for it.”
A couple of
minutes later, seated on the window shelf with the hardcopy unfolding away to
the floor, I heard the low tones of Ortega conversing with the Hendrix. There
was some banging about, more muted conversation, and then the sound of oil
frying gently. I fought off the urge for a cigarette and bent my head to the
hardcopy.
I was
looking for something that I’d seen every day of my young life in
Newpest; the places I’d spent my teenage years, the narrow accessways of
tiny properties sporting cheap holos that promised things like
Better than
the Real Thing, Wide Range of Scenarios
and
Dreams Come True
. It
didn’t take much to set up a virtual brothel. You just needed frontage
and space for the client coffins stacked upright. The software varied in price,
depending on how-elaborate and original it was, but the machines to run it
could usually be bought out of military surplus at basement rates.
If Bancroft
could spend time and money in Jerry’s biocabins, he’d be at home in
one of these.
I was two
thirds of my way through the list, more and more of my attention sifting away
to the aromas issuing from the kitchen, when my eyes fell on a familiar entry
and I grew abruptly still.
I saw a
woman with long, straight black hair and crimson lips
I heard
Trepp’s voice
…
head
in the clouds. I want to be there before midnight
.
And the
bar-coded chauffeur
No
problem. Coastal’s running light tonight
.
And the
crimson-lipped woman
Head in
the clouds. This is what it’s like. Maybe you can’t afford to come
up here
.
A choir in
climax
from
the Houses, from the Houses, from the Houses
…
And the
businesslike printout in my hands
Head in
the Clouds: accredited West Coast House, real and virtual product, mobile
aerial site outside coastal limit
…
I scanned
through the notes, head ringing as if it were crystal that had been delicately
struck with a hammer.
Navigational
beams and beaconing system locked to Bay City and Seattle. Discreet membership
coding. Routine searches, NR. No convictions. Operated under licence from Third
Eye Holdings Inc
.
I sat
still, thinking.
There were
pieces missing. It was like the mirror, wedged into place on jagged edges,
enough to hold an image, but not the whole. I was peering hard at the irregular
limits of what I had, trying to see round the edges, to get the backdrop. Trepp
had been taking me to see Ray—Reileen—at Head in the Clouds. Not
Europe, Europe was a blind, the sombre weight of the basilica designed to numb
me to what should have been obvious. If Kawahara was involved in this thing,
she wouldn’t be overseeing it from half a globe away. Kawahara was on
Head in the Clouds, and …
And what?
Envoy
intuition was a form of subliminal recognition, an enhanced awareness of
pattern that the real world too often abraded with its demand for detailed
focus. Given enough traces of continuity, you could make a leap that enabled
you to see the whole as a kind of premonition of real knowledge. Working from
that model, you could fill in the bits later. But there was a certain minimum
you needed to get airborne. Like old-style linear prop aircraft, you needed a
run up, and I didn’t have it. I could feel myself bumping along the
ground, clawing at the air and falling back. Not enough.
“Kovacs?”
I glanced
up, and saw it. Like a head-up display coming on line, like airlock bolts
slamming back in my head.
Ortega
stood before me, a stirring implement in one hand, hair gathered back in a
loose knot. Her T-shirt blazoned at me.
RESOLUTION
653. Yes or No, depending.
Oumou
Prescott
Mr.Bancroft
has an undeclared influence in the UN Court
.
Jerry
Sedaka
Old
Anenome’s Catholic … We take on a lot like that. Real convenient
sometimes
.
My thoughts
ran like a combustion fuse, flaming up the line of association.
Tennis
court
Nalan
Ertekin, Chief Justice of the UN Supreme Court
Joseph
Phiri, the Commission of Human Rights
My own
words
You’re
here to discuss Resolution 653, I imagine
.
An
undeclared influence
…
Miriam
Bancroft
I’ll
need
some
help keeping Marco off
Nalan’s back. He’s fuming, by the way
.
And
Bancroft
The way
he played today, I’m not surprised
.
Resolution
653. Catholics.
My mind
spewed the data back at me like a demented file search, scrolling down.
Sedaka,
gloating
Sworn
affidavit on disc, full Vow of Abstention filed with the Vatican
.
Real
convenient sometimes
.
Ortega
Barred
by Reasons of Conscience decals
.
Mary
Lou Hinchley
.
Last
year the Coastals fished some kid out of the ocean
.
Not
much left of the body, but they got the stack
.
Barred
by Reasons of Conscience
.
Out of
the ocean
.
Coastals
.
Mobile
aerial site outside coastal limit
…
Head in
the Clouds
.
It was a
process that could not be braked, a kind of mental avalanche. Chunks of reality
splintering away and tumbling downward, except that instead of chaos they were
falling into something that had form, a kind of restructured whole whose final
shape I still couldn’t make out.
Beaconing
system locked to Bay City
—
—and
Seattle
Bautista.
See, it
all went down in a black clinic up in Seattle
.
The
intacts ditched in the Pacific
.
Ortega’s
theory was that Ryker was set up
.
“What’re
you looking at?”
The words
hung in the air for a moment like a hinge in time, and suddenly time hinged
back and in the doorway behind, Sarah was just waking up in the Millsport hotel
bed, with the rolling thunder of an orbital discharge rattling the loose
windows in their frames and behind that, rotorblades against the night, and our
own deaths waiting just up around the bend.
“What’re
you looking at?”
I blinked
and I was still staring at Ortega’s T-shirt, at the soft mounds she made
in it and the legend printed across the chest. There was a slight smile on her
face, but it was beginning to bleach out with concern.
“Kovacs?”
I blinked
again and tried to reel in the metres of mental spillage that the T-shirt had
set off. The looming truth of Head in the Clouds.
“Are
you OK?”
“Yeah.”
“Want
to eat?”
“Ortega,
what if—” I found I had to clear my throat, swallow and start
again. I didn’t want to say this, my body didn’t want me to say it.
“What if I can get Ryker off the stack? Permanently, I mean. Clear him of
the charges, prove Seattle was a set-up. What’s that worth to you?”
For a
moment, she looked at me as if I was speaking a language she didn’t
understand. Then she moved to the window shelf and seated herself carefully on
the edge, facing me. She was silent for a while, but I had already seen the
answer in her eyes.
“Are
you feeling guilty?” she asked me finally.
“About?”
“About
us.”
I nearly
laughed out loud, but there was just enough underlying pain to stop the reflex
in my throat. The urge to touch her had not stopped. Over the last day it had
ebbed and flowed in waves, but it had never wholly gone. When I looked at the
curve of her hips and thighs on the window shelf, I could feel the way she had
writhed back against me so clearly it was almost virtual. My palm recalled the
weight and shape of her breast as if holding it had been this sleeve’s
life’s work. As I looked at her, my fingers wanted to trace the geometry
of her face. There was no room in me for guilt, no room for anything but this
feeling.
“Envoys
don’t feel guilt,” I said shortly. “I’m serious. It’s
likely, no it’s almost certain in fact that Kawahara had Ryker set up
because he was heating up the Mary Lou Hinchley case too much. Do you remember
anything about her employment records?”
Ortega
thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “She ran away from home to
be with the boyfriend. Mostly unregistered stuff, anything to bring the rent
in. Boyfriend was a piece of shit, got a record goes back to age fifteen. He
dealt a little Stiff, crashed a few easy datastacks, mostly lived off his
women.”
“Would
he have let her work the Meat Rack? Or the cabins?”
“Oh,
yeah.” Ortega nodded, face stony. “Soon as spit.”
“If
someone was recruiting for a snuff house, Catholics would be the ideal
candidates, wouldn’t they? They’re not going to tell any tales after
the event, after all. By reasons of conscience.”
“Snuff.”
If Ortega’s face had been stony before, it was weathered granite now.
“Most of the snuff victims around here just get a bolt through the stack
when it’s over. They don’t tell any tales.”
“Right.
But what if something went wrong. Specifically, what if Mary Lou Hinchley was
going to be used as a snuff whore, so she tried to escape and fell out of an
aerial whorehouse called Head in the Clouds. That would make her Catholicism
very convenient, wouldn’t it?”
“Head
in the Clouds? Are you serious?”