Altered Carbon (6 page)

Bancroft
had remained on the balcony. I looked up at his silhouetted face. “This
is the only sign of gunfire in the room?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing
else was damaged, broken or disturbed in any way?”

“No.
Nothing.” It was clear that he wanted to say more, but he was keeping
quiet until I’d finished.

“And
the police found the weapon beside you?”

“Yes.”

“Do
you own a weapon that would do this?”

“Yes.
It was mine. I keep it in a safe under the desk. Handprint coded. They found
the safe open, nothing else removed. Do you want to see inside it?”

“Not
at the moment, thank you.” I knew from experience how difficult
mirrorwood furniture is to shift. I turned up one corner of the woven rug under
the desk. There was an almost invisible seam in the floor beneath. “Whose
prints will open this?”

“Miriam’s
and my own.”

There was a
significant pause. Bancroft sighed, loud enough to carry across the room.
“Go on, Kovacs. Say it. Everyone else has. Either I committed suicide or
my wife murdered me. There’s just no other reasonable explanation.
I’ve been hearing it since they pulled me out of the tank at
Alcatraz.”

I looked
elaborately round the room before I met his eyes.

“Well,
you’ll admit it makes for easier police work,” I said.
“It’s nice and neat.”

He snorted,
but there was a laugh in it. I found myself beginning to like this man despite
myself. I went back up, stepped out onto the balcony and leaned on the rail. Outside
a black-clad figure prowled back and forth across the lawn below, weapon slung
at port. In the distance the power fence shimmered. I stared in that direction
for a while.

“It’s
asking a lot to believe that someone got in here, past all the security, broke
into a safe only you and your wife had access to and murdered you, without
causing any disturbance. You’re an intelligent man, you must have some
reason for believing it.”

“Oh,
I do. Several.”

“Reasons
the police chose to ignore.”

“Yes.”

I turned to
face him. “All right. Let’s hear it.”

“You’re
looking at it, Mr.Kovacs.” He stood there in front of me.
“I’m here. I’m back. You can’t kill me just by wiping
out my cortical stack.”

“You’ve
got remote storage. Obviously, or you wouldn’t be here. How regular is
the update?”

Bancroft
smiled. “Every forty-eight hours.” He tapped the back of his neck.
“Direct needlecast from here into a shielded stack over at the PsychaSec
installation at Alcatraz. I don’t even have to think about it.”

“And
they keep your clones on ice there as well.”

“Yes.
Multiple units.”

Guaranteed
immortality. I sat there thinking about that for a while, wondering how
I’d like it. Wondering
if
I’d like it.

“Must
be expensive,” I said at last.

“Not
really. I own PsychaSec.”

“Oh.”

“So you
see, Kovacs, neither I nor my wife could have pulled that trigger. We both knew
it wouldn’t be enough to kill me. No matter how unlikely it seems, it
had
to be a stranger. Someone who didn’t know about the remote.”

I nodded.
“All right, who else
did
know about It? Let’s narrow the
field.”

“Apart
from my family?” Bancroft shrugged. “My lawyer, Oumou Prescott. A
couple of her legal aides. The director at PsychaSec. That’s about
it.”

“Of
course,” I said, “suicide is rarely a rational act.”

“Yes,
that’s what the police said. They used it to explain all the other minor
inconveniences in their theory as well.”

“Which
were?”

This was
what Bancroft had wanted to reveal earlier. It came out in a rush. “Which
were that I should choose to walk the last two kilometres home, and let myself
into the grounds on foot, then apparently readjust my internal clock before I
killed myself.”

I blinked.
“I’m sorry?”

“The
police found traces of a cruiser landing in a field two kilometres from the
perimeter of Suntouch House, which conveniently enough is just outside the
pick-up range of the house security surveillance. Equally conveniently, there
was apparently no satellite cover overhead at that precise time.”

“Did
they check taxi datastacks?”

Bancroft
nodded. “For what it’s worth, they did, yes. West Coast law does
not require taxi companies to keep records of their fleets’ whereabouts
at any given time. Some of the more reputable firms do, of course, but there
are others that don’t. Some even make a selling point of it. Client confidentiality,
that sort of thing.” A momentary hunted look crossed Bancroft’s
face. “For some clients, in some cases, that would be a distinct
advantage.”

“Have
you used these firms in the past?”

“On
occasion, yes.”

The logical
next question hung in the air between us. I left it unasked, and waited. If
Bancroft wasn’t going to share his reasons for wanting confidential
transport, I wasn’t going to press him until I had a few other landmarks
locked down.

Bancroft
cleared his throat. “There is, in any case, some evidence to suggest that
the vehicle in question might not have been a taxi. Field effect distribution,
the police say. A pattern more in keeping with a larger vehicle.”

“That
depends on how hard it landed.”

“I
know. In any case, my tracks lead from the landing site, and apparently the
condition of my shoes was in keeping with a two-kilometre trek across country.
And then, finally, there was a call placed from this room shortly after three
a.m. the night I was killed. A time check. There’s no voice on the line,
only the sound of someone breathing.”

“And
the police know this too?”

“Of
course they do.”

“How
did they explain it?”

Bancroft
smiled thinly. “They didn’t. They thought the solitary walk through
the rain was very much in keeping with the act of suicide, and apparently they
couldn’t see any inconsistency in a man wanting to check his internal
chronochip before he blows his own head off. As you say, suicide is not a
rational act. They have case histories of this sort of thing. Apparently, the
world is full of incompetents who kill themselves and wake up in a new sleeve
the next day. I’ve had it explained to me. They forget they’re
wearing a stack, or it doesn’t seem important at the moment of the act.
Our beloved medical welfare system brings them right back, suicide notes and
requests notwithstanding. Curious abuse of rights, that. Is it the same system
on Harlan’s World?”

I shrugged.
“More or less. If the request is legally witnessed, then they have to let
them go. Otherwise, failure to revive is a storage offence.”

“I
suppose that’s a wise precaution.”

“Yes.
It stops murderers passing their work off as suicide.”

Bancroft
leaned forward on the rail and locked gazes with me. “Mr.Kovacs, I am
three hundred and fifty-seven years old. I have lived through a corporate war,
the subsequent collapse of my industrial and trading interests, the real deaths
of two of my children, at least three major economic crises, and I am still
here. 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 would not be talking to me now. Is that clear?”

I looked
back at him, back at those hard dark eyes. “Yes. Very clear.”

“That’s
good.” He unpinned his stare. “Shall we continue?”

“Yes.
The police. They don’t like you very much, do they?”

Bancroft
smiled without much humour. “The police and I have a perspective
problem.”

“Perspective?”

“That’s
right.” He moved along the balcony. “Come here, I’ll show you
what I mean.”

I followed
him along the rail, catching the telescope with my arm as I did and knocking
the barrel upright. The download shakes were beginning to demand their dues.
The telescope’s positional motor whined crabbily and returned the
instrument to its original shallow angle. Elevation and range focus ticked over
on the ancient digital memory display. I paused to watch the thing realign
itself. The fingermarks on the keypad were smudged in years of dust.

Bancroft
had either not noticed my ineptitude or was being polite about it.

“Yours?”
I asked him, jerking a thumb at the instrument. He glanced at it absently.

“Once.
It was an enthusiasm I had. Back when the stars were still something to stare
at. You wouldn’t remember how that felt.” It was said without
conscious pretension or arrogance, almost inconsequentially. His voice lost
some of its focus, like a transmission fading out. “Last time I looked
through that lens was nearly two centuries ago. A lot of the Colony ships were
still in flight then. We were still waiting to find out if they’d make
it. Waiting for the needlebeams to come back to us. Like lighthouse
beacons.”

He was
losing me. I brought him back to reality. “Perspective?” I reminded
him gently.

“Perspective.”
He nodded and swung an arm out over his property. “You see that tree.
Just beyond the tennis courts.”

I could
hardly miss it. A gnarled old monster taller than the house, casting shade over
an area the size of a tennis court in itself. I nodded.

“That
tree is over seven hundred years old. When I bought this property, I hired a
design engineer and he wanted to chop it down. He was planning to build the
house further up the rise and the tree was spoiling the sea view. I sacked
him.”

Bancroft
turned to make sure his point was getting across.

“You
see, Mr.Kovacs, that engineer was a man in his thirties, and to him the tree
was just an inconvenience. It was in his way. The fact it had been part of the
world for over twenty times the length of his own life didn’t seem to
bother him. He had no respect.”

“So
you’re the tree.”

“Just
so,” said Bancroft equably. “I am the tree. The police would like
to chop me down, just like that engineer. I am inconvenient to them, and they
have no respect.”

I went back
to my seat to chew this over. Kristin Ortega’s attitude was beginning to
make some sense at last. If Bancroft thought he was outside the normal
requirements of good citizenship, he wasn’t likely to make many friends
in uniform. There would have been little point trying to explain to him that
for Ortega there was another tree called the Law and that in her eyes he was
banging a few profane nails into it himself. I’ve seen this kind of thing
from both sides, and there just isn’t any solution except to do what my
own ancestors had done. When you don’t like the laws, you go somewhere
they can’t touch you.

And then
you make up some of your own.

Bancroft
stayed at the rail. Perhaps he was communing with the tree. I decided to shelve
this line of inquiry for a while.

“What’s
the last thing you remember?”

“Tuesday
14th August,” he said promptly. “Going to bed at about
midnight.”

“That
was the last remote update.”

“Yes,
the needlecast would have gone through about four in the morning, but obviously
I was asleep by then.”

“So
almost a full forty-eight hours before your death.”

“I’m
afraid so.”

Optimally
bad. In forty-eight hours, almost anything can happen. Bancroft could have been
to the moon and back in that time. I rubbed at the scar under my eye again,
wondering absently how it had got there.

“And
there’s nothing before that time that could suggest to you why someone
might want to kill you.”

Bancroft
was still leaning on the rail, looking out, but I saw how he smiled.

“Did
I say something amusing?”

He had the
grace to come back to his seat.

“No,
Mr.Kovacs. There is nothing amusing about this situation. Someone out there
wants me dead, and that’s not a comfortable feeling. But you must
understand that for a man in my position enmity and even death threats are part
and parcel of everyday existence. People envy me, people hate me. It is the
price of success.”

This was
news to me. People hate me on a dozen different worlds and I’ve never
considered myself a successful man.

“Had
any interesting ones recently? Death threats, I mean.”

He
shrugged. “Perhaps. I don’t make a habit of screening them.
Ms.Prescott handles that for me.”

“You
don’t consider death threats worth your attention?”

“Mr.Kovacs,
I am an entrepreneur. Opportunities arise, crises present themselves, and I
deal with them. Life goes on. I hire managers to deal with that.

“Very
convenient for you. But in view of the circumstances, I find it hard to believe
neither you nor the police have consulted Ms.Prescott’s files.”