Authors: Richard Morgan
“And
it’d make the owners of Head in the Clouds very anxious to stop
Resolution 653 dead in its tracks, wouldn’t it?”
“Kovacs.”
Ortega was making slow-down gestures with both palms. “Kovacs, Head in
the Clouds is one of the Houses. Class prostitution. I don’t like those
places, they make me want to vomit just as bad as the cabins, but they’re
clean. They cater for elevated society and they don’t run scams like
snuff—”
“You
don’t think the upper echelons go in for sadism and necrophilia, then.
That’s strictly a lower-class thing, is it?”
“No,
it isn’t,” said Ortega evenly. “But if anyone with money
wants to play at torturer, they can afford to do it in virtual. Some of the
Houses run virtual snuff, but they run it because it’s
legal
,
and there’s nothing we can do about it. And that’s the way they
like it.”
I drew a
deep breath. “Kristin, someone was taking me to see Kawahara on board
Head in the Clouds. Someone from the Wei Clinic. And if Kawahara is involved in
the West Coast Houses, then they will do anything that turns a profit, because
she will do anything, anything at all. You wanted a big bad Meth to believe in?
Forget Bancroft, he’s practically a priest in comparison. Kawahara grew
up in Fission City, dealing anti-radiation drugs to the families of fuel rod
workers. Do you know what a water carrier is?”
She shook
her head.
“In
Fission City it’s what they used to call the gang enforcers. See, if
someone refused to pay protection, or informed to the police, or just
didn’t jump fast enough when the local yakuza boss said frog, the
standard punishment was to drink contaminated water. The enforcers used to
carry it around in shielded flasks, siphoned off low-grade reactor cooling
systems. They’d turn up at the offender’s house one night and tell
him how much he had to drink. His family would be made to watch. If he
didn’t drink, they’d start cutting his family one by one until he
did. You want to know how I know that delightful piece of Earth history
trivia?”
Ortega said
nothing, but her mouth was tight with disgust.
“I
know because Kawahara told me. That’s what she used to do when she was a
kid. She was a water carrier. And she’s proud of it.”
The phone
chimed.
I waved
back Ortega out of range and went to answer it.
“Kovacs?”
It was Rodrigo Bautista. “Is Ortega with you?”
“No.”
I lied automatically. “Haven’t seen her for a couple of days. Is
there a problem?”
“Ah,
probably not. She’s vanished off the face of the planet again. Well, if
you do see her, tell her she missed a squad assembly this afternoon and Captain
Murawa wasn’t impressed.”
“Should
I expect to see her?”
“With
Ortega, who fucking knows?” Bautista spread his hands. “Look,
I’ve got to go. See you around.”
“See
you.” I watched as the screen blanked, and Ortega came back from her
place by the wall. “Did you get that?”
“Yeah.
I was supposed to turn the Hendrix memory discs over this morning. Murawa will
probably want to know why I took them out of Fell Street in the first
place.”
“It’s
your case, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,
but there are norms.” Ortega looked suddenly tired. “I can’t
stall them for long, Kovacs. I’m already getting a lot of funny looks for
working with you. Pretty soon someone’s going to get seriously
suspicions. You’ve got a few days to run this scam on Bancroft, but after
that…”
She raised
her hands eloquently.
“Can’t
you say you were held up? That Kadmin took the discs off you?”
“They’ll
polygraph me—”
“Not
immediately.”
“Kovacs,
this is my career we’re flushing clown the toilet here, not yours. I don’t
do this job for fun, it’s taken me—”
“Kristin,
listen to me.” I went to her and took her hands in mine. “Do you
want Ryker back, or not?”
She tried
to turn away from me, but I held on.
“Kristin.
Do you believe he was set up?”
She
swallowed. “Yes.”
“Then
why not believe it was Kawahara? The cruiser he tried to shoot down in Seattle
was heading out over the ocean when it crashed. You extrapolate that heading
and see where it takes you. You plot the point that the Coastals fished Mary
Lou Hinchley out of the sea. Then put Head in the Clouds on the map and see if
it all adds up to anything.”
Ortega
pulled away from me with a strange look in her eyes.
“You
want this to be true, don’t you? You want the excuse to go after
Kawahara, no matter what. It’s just hate with you, isn’t it?
Another score to settle. You don’t care about Ryker. You don’t even
care about your friend, Sarah any—”
“Say
that again,” I told her coldly, “and I’ll deck you. For your
information, nothing that we’ve just discussed matters more to me than
Sarah’s life. And nothing I’ve said means I have any option other
than to do exactly what Kawahara wants.”
“Then
what’s the fucking point?”
I wanted to
reach out for her. Instead, I turned the yearning into a displacement gesture
with both hands chopping gently at the air.
“I
don’t know. Not yet. But if I can get Sarah clear, there might be a way
to bring Kawahara down afterwards. And there might be a way to clear Ryker too.
That’s all I’m saying.”
She stayed
looking at me for a moment, then turned and swept up her jacket from the arm of
the chair where she had draped it when we arrived.
“I’m
going out for a while,” she said quietly.
“Fine.”
I stayed equally quiet. This was not a moment for pressure. “I’ll
be here, or I’ll leave a message for you if I have to go out.”
“Yes,
do that.”
There was
nothing in her voice to indicate whether she was really coming back or not.
After she
had gone, I sat thinking for a while longer, trying to flesh out the glimpse of
structure that the Envoy intuition had given me. When the phone chimed again, I
had evidently given up, because the chime caught me staring out of the window,
wondering where in Bay City Ortega had gone.
This time,
it was Kawahara.
“I
have what you want,” she said off-handedly. “A dormant version of
the Rawling virus will be delivered to SilSet Holdings tomorrow morning after
eight o’clock. Address 1187 Sacramento. They’ll know you’re
coming.”
“And
the activator codes?”
“Delivery
under separate cover. Trepp will contact you.”
I nodded.
UN law governing transfer and ownership of war viruses was clear to the point
of bluntness. Inert viral forms could be owned as subjects for study, or even,
as one bizarre test case had proved, private trophies. Ownership or sale of an
active military virus, or the codes whereby a dormant virus could be activated,
was a UN indictable offence, punishable with anything between a hundred and two
hundred years’ storage. In the event of the virus actually being
deployed, the sentence could be upped to erasure. Naturally these penalties
were only applicable to private citizens, not military commanders or government
executives. The powerful are jealous of their toys.
“Just
make sure she contacts me soon,” I said briefly. “I don’t
want to use up any more of my ten days than I have to.”
“I
understand.” Kawahara made a sympathetic face, for all the world as if
the threats against Sarah were being made by some malignant force of nature
over which neither of us had control. “I will have Irene Elliott
re-sleeved by tomorrow evening. Nominally, she is being bought out of storage
by JacSol SA, one of my communications interface companies. You’ll be
able to collect her from Bay City Central around ten o’clock. I have you
temporarily accredited as a security consultant for JacSol Division West. Name,
Martin Anderson.”
“Got
it.” This was Kawahara’s way of telling me that if anything went
wrong, I was tied to her and would go down first. “That’s going to
clash with Ryker’s gene signature. He’ll be a live file at Bay City
Central as long as the body’s decanted.”
Kawahara
nodded. “Dealt with. Your accreditation will be routed through JacSol
corporate channels before any individual genetic search. A punch-in code.
Within JacSol, your gene print will be recorded as Anderson’s. Any other
problems?”
“What
if I bump into Sullivan?”
“Warden
Sullivan has gone on extended leave. Some kind of psychological problem. He is
spending some time in virtual. You will not be seeing him again.”
Despite
myself, I felt a cold shiver as I looked at Kawahara’s composed features.
I cleared my throat.
“And
the sleeve repurchase?”
“No.”
Kawahara smiled faintly. “I checked the specs. Irene Elliott’s
sleeve has no biotech augmentation to justify the cost of retrieving it.”
“I
didn’t say it had. This isn’t about technical capacity, it’s
about motivation. She’ll be more loyal if—”
Kawahara
leant forward in the screen. “I can be pushed so far, Kovacs. And then it
stops. Elliott’s getting a compatible sleeve, she should be thankful for
that. You wanted her, any loyalty problems you have with her are going to be
your problems exclusively. I don’t want to hear about it.”
“She’ll
take longer to adjust,” I said doggedly. “In a new sleeve,
she’ll be slower, less resp—”
“Also
your problem. I offered you the best intrusion experts money can buy, and you
turned them down. You’ve got to learn to live with the consequences of
your actions, Kovacs.” She paused and sat back with another faint smile.
“I had a check run on Elliott. Who she is, who her family are, what the
connection is. Why you wanted her off stack. It’s a nice thought, Kovacs,
but I’m afraid you’re going to have to support your own Good
Samaritan gestures without my help. I’m not running a charity
here.”
“No.”
I said flatly. “I suppose not.”
“No.
And I think we can also suppose that this will be the last direct contact
between us until this matter is resolved.”
“Yes.”
“Well,
inappropriate though it may seem, good luck, Kovacs.”
The screen
blanked, leaving the words hanging in the air. I sat for what seemed like a
long time, hearing them, staring at an imagined afterimage on screen that my
hate made almost real. When I spoke, Ryker’s voice sounded alien in my
ears, as if someone or something else was speaking through me.
“Inappropriate
is right,” it said into the quiet room. “Motherfucker.”
Ortega did not come back,
but the aroma of what she had cooked curled through the apartment and my
stomach flexed in sympathy. I waited some more, still trying to assemble all
the jagged edges of the puzzle in my mind, but either my heart was not in it or
there was still something major missing. Finally, I forced down the coppery
taste of the hate and frustration, and went to eat.
Kawahara’s groundwork was
flawless.
An
automated limo with JacSol insignia lightning-flashed onto its flanks turned up
outside the Hendrix at eight the next morning. I went down to meet it and found
the rear cabin stacked with Chinese designer-label boxes.
Opened back
in my room, the boxes yielded a line of high quality corporate props that
Serenity Carlyle would have gone wild for: two blocky, sand-coloured suits, cut
to Ryker’s size, a half dozen handmade shirts with the JacSol logo
embroidered on each wing collar, formal shoes in real leather, a midnight blue
raincoat, a JacSol dedicated mobile phone and a small black disc with a
thumbprint DNA encoding pad.
I showered
and shaved, dressed and ran the disc. Kawahara blinked up on the screen,
construct-perfect.
“Good
morning, Takeshi-san, and welcome to JacSol Communications. The DNA coding on
this disc is now webbed into a line of credit in the name Martin James
Anderson. As I mentioned earlier, the punch-in corporate prefix for JacSol will
negate any clash with Ryker’s genetic records or the account set up for
you by Bancroft. Please note the coding below.”
I read off
the string of digits in a single sweep, and went back to watching
Kawahara’s face.
“The
JacSol account will bear all reasonable expenses and is programmed to expire at
the end of our ten-day agreement. Should you wish to dissolve the account
earlier than this, double punch the code, apply the gene trace and double punch
again.
“Trepp
will contact you via the corporate mobile some time today, so keep the unit
with you at all times. Irene Elliott will be downloaded at 21.45 West Coast
time. Processing should take about forty-five minutes. And by the time you
receive this message, SilSet Holdings will have your package. After
consultation with my own experts, I have appended a list of the likely hardware
Elliott will need, and a number of suppliers who can be trusted to acquire it
discreetly. Charge everything through the JacSol account. The list will print
out in hardcopy momentarily.