Altered Carbon

Chapter SEVENTEEN
The Fell Street station was an unassuming block done out in a style I assumed must be Martian Baroque. Whether it had been planned that way, as a police station, or taken over after the fact was difficult to decide. The place was, potentially, a fortress. The mock-eroded rubystone facings and hooded buttresses provided a series of natural niches in which were set high, stained glass windows edged by the unobtrusive nubs of shield generators. Below the windows, the abrasive red surface of the stonework was sculpted into jagged obstructions that caught the morning light and turned it bloody. I couldn’t tell whether the steps up to the arched entrance were deliberately uneven or just well worn.
Inside, stained light from a window and a peculiar calm fell on me simultaneously. Subsonics, I guessed, casting a glance around at the human flotsam waiting submissively on the benches. If these were arrested suspects, they had been rendered remarkably unconcerned by something and I doubted it would be the Zen Populist murals that someone had commissioned for the hall. I crossed the patch of coloured light cast by the window, picked my way through small knots of people conversing in lowered tones more appropriate to a library than a holding centre, and found myself at a reception counter. A uniformed cop, presumably the desk sergeant, blinked kindly back at me —the subsonics were obviously getting to him as well.
“Lieutenant Ortega,” I told him. “Organic Damage.”
“Who shall I say it is?”
“Tell her it’s Elias Ryker.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another uniform turn at the sound of the name, but nothing was said. The desk sergeant spoke into his phone, listened then turned back to me.
“She’s sending someone down. Are you armed?”
I nodded and reached under my jacket for the Nemex.
“Please surrender the weapon carefully,” he added with a gentle smile. “Our security software is a little touchy, and it’s apt to stun you if you look like you’re pulling something.”
I slowed my movements to frame advance, dumped the Nemex on the desk and set about unstrapping the Tebbit knife from my arm. When I was finished, the sergeant beamed beatifically at me.
“Thank you. It’ll all be returned to you when you leave the building.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when two of the mohicans appeared through a door at the back of the hall and directed themselves rapidly towards me. Their faces were painted with identical glowers which the subsonics apparently made little impact on in the short time it took them to reach me. They went for an arm apiece.
“I wouldn’t,” I told them.
“Hey, he’s not under arrest, you know,” said the desk sergeant pacifically. One of the mohicans jerked a glance at him and snorted in exasperation. The other one just stared at me the whole time as if he hadn’t eaten red meat recently. I met the stare with a smile. Following the meeting with Bancroft I had gone back to the Hendrix and slept for almost twenty hours. I was rested, neurachemically alert and feeling a cordial dislike of authority of which Quell herself would have been proud.
It must have shown. The mohicans abandoned their attempts to paw me and the three of us rode up four floors in silence broken only by the creak of the ancient elevator.
Ortega’s office had one of the stained glass windows, or more precisely the bottom half of one, before it was bisected horizontally by the ceiling. Presumably the remainder rose missile-like from the floor of the office above. I began to see some evidence for the original building having been converted to its present use. The other walls of the office were environment-formatted with a tropical sunset over water and islands. The combination of stained glass and sunset meant that the office was filled with a soft orange light in which you could see the drifting of dust motes.
The lieutenant was seated behind a heavy wooden desk as if caged there. Chin propped on one cupped hand, one shin and knee pressed hard against the edge of the desk, she was brooding over the scrolldown of an antique laptop when we came through the door. Aside from the machine, the only items on the desktop were a battered-looking heavy-calibre Smith & Wesson and a plastic cup of coffee, heating tab still unpulled. She dismissed the mohicans with a nod.
“Sit down, Kovacs.”
I glanced around, saw a frame chair under the window and hooked it up to the desk. The late afternoon light in the office was disorientating.
“You work the night shift?”
Her eyes flared. “What kind of crack is that?”
“Hey, nothing.” I held up my hands and gestured at the low light. “I just thought you might have cycled the walls for it. You know it’s ten o’clock in the morning outside.”
“Oh, that.” Ortega grunted and her eyes swivelled back down to the screen display. It was hard to tell in the tropical sunset, but I thought they might be grey/green, like the sea around the maelstrom. “It’s out of synch. The department got it cheap from some place in El Paso Juarez. Jams up completely sometimes.”
“That’s tough.”
“Yeah, sometimes I’ll just turn it off but the neons are—” She looked up abruptly. “What the f*ck am I—Kovacs, do you know how close you are to a storage rack right now?”
I made a span of my right index finger and thumb, and looked at her through it.
“About the width of a testimony from the Wei Clinic, was what I heard.”
“We can put you there, Kovacs. Seven forty-three yesterday morning, walking out the front door larger than life.”
I shrugged.
“And don’t think your Meth connections are going to keep you organic forever. There’s a Wei Clinic limo driver telling interesting stories about hijack and Real Death. Maybe he’ll have something to say about you.”
“Impound his vehicle did you?” I asked casually. “Or did Wei reclaim it before you could run tests?”
Ortega’s mouth compressed into a hard line.
I nodded. “Thought so. And the driver will say precisely zero until Wei spring him, I imagine.”
“Listen, Kovacs. I keep pushing, something’s got to give. It’s a matter of time, motherf*cker. Strictly that.”
“Admirable tenacity,” I said. “Shame you didn’t have some of that for the Bancroft case.”
“There is no f*cking Bancroft case.”
Ortega was on her feet, palms hard down on the desktop, eyes slitted in rage and disgust. I waited, nerves sprung in case Bay City police stations were as prone to accidental suspect injury as some others I had known. Finally, the lieutenant drew a deep breath, and lowered herself joint by joint back into her seat. The anger had smoothed off her face, but the disgust was still there, caught in the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and the set of her wide mouth. She looked at her nails.
“Do you know what we found at the Wei Clinic yesterday?”
“Black market spare parts? Virtual torture programmes? Or didn’t they let you stay that long?”
“We found seventeen bodies with their cortical stacks burnt out. Unarmed. Seventeen dead people. Really dead.”
She looked up at me again, the disgust still there.
“You’ll have to pardon my lack of reaction,” I said coldly. “I saw a lot worse when I was in uniform. In fact, I did a lot worse when I was righting the Protectorate’s battles for them.”
“That was war.”
“Oh, please.”
She said nothing. I leaned forward across the desk.
“And don’t tell me those seventeen bodies are what you’re on fire about, either.” I gestured at my own face. “This is your problem. You don’t like the idea of someone carving this up.”
She sat silent for a moment, thinking, then reached into a drawer of the desk and took out a packet of cigarettes. She offered them to me automatically and I shook my head with clenched determination.
“I quit.”
“Did you?” There was genuine surprise in her voice, as she fed herself a cigarette and lit it. “Good for you. I’m impressed.”
“Yeah, Ryker should be pleased too, when he gets off stack.”
She paused behind the veil of smoke, then dropped the packet back into the drawer and palm-heeled it shut.
“What do you want?” she asked flatly.

The holding racks were five floors down in a double-storey basement where it was easier to regulate temperatures. Compared to PsychaSec, it was a toilet.
“I don’t see that this is going to change anything,” said Ortega as we followed a yawning technician along the steel gantry to slot 3089b. “What’s Kadmin going to tell you that he hasn’t told us?”
“Look.” I stopped and turned to face her, hands spread and held low. On the narrow gantry we were uncomfortably close. Something chemical happened, and the geometries of Ortega’s stance seemed suddenly fluid, dangerously tactile. I felt my mouth dry up.
“I—” she said.
“3089b,” called the technician, hefting the big, thirty-centimetre disc out of its slot. “This the one you wanted, lieutenant?”
Ortega pushed hurriedly past me. “That’s it, Micky. Can you set us up with a virtual?”
“Sure.” Micky jerked a thumb at one of the spiral staircases collared in at intervals along the gantry. “You want to go down to Five, slap on the trodes. Take about five minutes.”
“The point is,” I said, as the three of us clattered down the steel steps, “you’re the Sia. Kadmin knows you, he’s been dealing with you all his professional life. It’s part of what he does. I’m an unknown. If he’s never been extra-system, the chances are he’s never met an Envoy before. And they tell nasty stories about the Corps most places I’ve been.”
Ortega gave me a sceptical look over her shoulder. “You’re going to frighten him into a statement? Dimitri Kadmin? I don’t think so.”
“He’ll be off balance, and when people are off balance they give things away. Don’t forget, this guy’s working for someone who wants me dead. Someone who is scared of me, at least superficially. Some of that may rub off on Kadmin.”
“And this is supposed to convince me that someone murdered Bancroft after all?”
“Ortega, it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not. We’ve been through this already. You want Ryker’s sleeve back in the tank asap, out of harm’s way. The sooner we get to whatever bottom there is to Bancroft’s death, the sooner that happens. And I’m a lot less likely to incur substantial organic damage if I’m not stumbling around in the dark. If I have your help, in fact. You don’t want this sleeve to get written off in another firefight, do you?”
“Another firefight?” It had taken nearly half an hour of heated discussion to hammer the sense of the new relationship into Ortega, and the policewoman in her still hadn’t gone to sleep on me.
“Yeah, after the Hendrix,” I improvised rapidly, cursing the face-to-face chemical interlock that had put: me off balance. “I picked up some bad bruising there. Could have been a lot worse.”
She shot me another, longer glance over her shoulder.
The virtual interrogation system was housed in a series of bubblefab cabins at one side of the basement floor. Micky settled both of us onto weary-looking automould couches that were slow to respond to our forms, applied the electrodes and hypnophones, then kicked in the power with a concert pianist’s sweep of one arm across two of the utilitarian consoles. He studied the screens as they blinked on.
“Traffic,” he said, and hawked congestion into the back of his throat with disgust. “Commissioner’s hooked in with some kind of conference environment and it’s soaking up half the system. Got to wait till someone else gets off.” He glanced back at Ortega. “Hey, that the Mary Lou Hinchley thing?”
“Yeah.” Ortega looked across to include me in the conversation, maybe as evidence of our new co-operation. “Last year the Coastals fished some kid out of the ocean. Mary Lou Hinchley. Not much left of the body, but they got the stack. Set it to spin and guess what?”
“Catholic?”
“In one. That Total Absorb stuff works, huh? Yeah, the first entry scan comes up with Barred by Reasons of Conscience decals. Usually the end of the line in a case like that, but El—” She stopped. Restarted. “The detective in charge wouldn’t let it go. Hinchley was from his neighbourhood, he knew her when she was growing up. Not well, but—” she shrugged “—he wouldn’t let it go.”
“Very tenacious. Elias Ryker?”
She nodded.
“He pushed the path labs for a month. In the end they found some evidence the body had been thrown out of an aircar. Organic Damage did some background digging and came up with a conversion less than ten months old and a hardline Catholic boyfriend with skills in infotech who might have faked the Vow. The girl’s family are border-liners, nominally Christian, but mostly not Catholic. Quite rich as well, with a vault full of stacked ancestors that they spin out for family births and marriages. The Department’s been in virtual consultation with the lot of them on and off all of this year.”
“Roll on Resolution 653, huh?”
“Yeah.”
We both went back to looking at the ceiling above the couches. The cabin was bottom of the line bubblefab, blown from a single globe of polyfibre like chicle in a child’s mouth, doors and windows lasered out and re-attached with epoxy hinges afterwards. The curved grey ceiling held absolutely nothing of interest.
“Tell me something, Ortega,” I said after a while. “That tail you had on me Tuesday afternoon, when I went shopping. How come he was so much worse than the others? A blind man could have spotted him.”
There was a pause before she spoke. Then, grudgingly. “All we had. It was a snap thing, we had to get you covered quick, after you dumped the clothes.”
“The clothes.” I closed my eyes. “Oh, no. You tagged the suit? That simple?”
“Yep.”
I threw my mind back to my first meeting with Ortega. The justice facility, the ride out to Suntouch House. The total recall ripped through the footage on fast forward. I saw us standing on the sunlit lawn with Miriam Bancroft. Ortega departing …
“Got it!” I snapped my fingers. “You hammered me on the shoulder when you left. I can’t believe I’m this stupid.”
“Enzyme bond bleeper,” said Ortega matter-of-factly. “Not much bigger than a fly’s eye. And we figured, with autumn well set in you wouldn’t be going many places without your jacket. Course, when you offloaded it into that skip we thought you’d tipped us.”
“No. Nothing so bright.”
“That’s it,” announced Micky suddenly. “Ladies and gentlemen, hold onto your spinal spiral, we are in the pipe.”
It was a rougher ride than I’d expected from a government department installation, but no worse than many jury-rigged virtuals I’d done on the World. First the hypnos, pulsing their sonocodes until the dull grey ceiling grew abruptly fascinating with fishtail swirls of light and meaning drained out of the universe like dirty water from a sink. And then I was. . .
Elsewhere.
It spread out around me, racing away from my viewpoint in all directions like nothing so much as a huge magnification of one of the spiral steps we had used to get down from the gantry. Steel grey, stippled every few metres with a nipple-like swelling, receding to infinity. The sky above was a paler shade of the same grey with shiftings that seemed vaguely to suggest bars and antique locks. Nice psychology, assuming any of the felons interrogated had anything but race memory of what an actual lock looked like.
In front of me softly shaped grey furniture was evolving from the floor like a sculpture from a pool of mercury. A plain metal table first, then two chairs this side, one opposite. Their edges and surfaces ran liquidly smooth for the final seconds of their emergence, then snapped solid and geometric as they took on an existence separate to the floor.
Ortega appeared beside me, at first a pale pencil sketch of a woman, all flickering lines and diffident shading. As I watched, pastel colours raced through her and her movements grew more defined. She was turning to speak to me, one hand reaching into the pocket of her jacket. I waited and the final gloss of colour popped out onto her surfaces. She produced her cigarettes.
“Smoke?”
“No thanks, I—” Realising the futility of worrying about virtual health, I accepted the packet and shook one out. Ortega lit us both with her petrol lighter, and the first bite of smoke in my lungs was ecstasy.
I looked up at the geometric sky. “Is this standard?”
“Pretty much.” Ortega squinted into the distance. “Resolution looks a bit higher than usual. Think Micky’s showing off.”
Kadmin scribbled into existence on the other side of the table. Before the virtual program had even coloured him in properly, he became aware of us and folded his arms across his chest. If my appearance in the cell was putting him off balance as hoped, it didn’t show.
“Again, lieutenant?” he said when the programme had rendered him complete. “There is a UN ruling on maximum virtual time for one arrest, you know.”
“That’s right, and we’re still a long way off it,” said Ortega. “Why don’t you sit down, Kadmin.”
“No thank you.”
“I said sit, motherf*cker.” There was an abrupt undercurrent of steel in the cop’s voice, and magically Kadmin blinked off and reappeared seated at the table. His face betrayed a momentary flash of rage at the displacement, but then it was gone and he unfolded his arms in an ironic gesture.
“You’re right, it’s so much more comfortable like this. Won’t you both join me?”
We took our seats in the more conventional way, and I stared at Kadmin as we did it. It was the first time I’d seen anything quite like it.
He was the Patchwork Man.
Most virtual systems recreate you from self images held in the memory, with a common-sense sub-routine to prevent your delusions from impinging too much. I generally come out a little taller and thinner in the face than I usually am. In this case, the system seemed to have scrambled a myriad different perceptions from Kadmin’s presumably long list of sleeves. I’d seen it done before, as a technique, but most of us grow rapidly attached to whatever sleeve we’re living in, and that form blanks out previous incarnations. We are, after all, evolved to relate to the physical world.
The man in front of me was different. His frame was that of a Caucasian Nordic, topping mine by nearly thirty centimetres, but the face was at odds. It began African, broad and deep ebony, but the colour ended like a mask under the eyes and the lower half was divided along the line of the nose, pale copper on the left, corpse white on the right. The nose was both fleshy and aquiline and mediated well between the top and bottom halves of the face, but the mouth was a mismatch of left and right sides that left the lips peculiarly twisted. Long straight black hair was combed mane-like back from the forehead, shot through on one side with pure white. The hands, immobile on the metal table, were equipped with claws similar to the ones I’d seen on the giant freak fighter in Licktown, hut the fingers were long and sensitive. He had breasts, impossibly full on a torso so overmuscled. The eyes, set in jet skin, were a startling pale green. Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and wreak havoc.
He would have made a fine Envoy.
“I take it I don’t have to introduce myself,” I said quietly.
Kadmin grinned, revealing small teeth and a delicate pointed tongue. “If you’re a friend of the lieutenant, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to here. Only the slobs get their virtuality edited.”
“Do you know this man, Kadmin?” asked Ortega.
“Hoping for a confession, lieutenant?” Kadmin threw back his head and laughed musically. “Oh, the crudity! This man? This woman, maybe? Or, yes, even a dog could be trained to say as much as he has said, given the right tranquillisers of course. They do tend to go pitifully insane when you decant them if not. But yes, even a dog. We sit here, three silhouettes carved from electronic sleet in the difference storm, and you talk like a cheap period drama. Limited vision, lieutenant, limited vision. Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels.”
“You tell me, Kadmin. You’re the one with the exalted professional standing.” Ortega’s tone was detached. She system-magicked a long scroll of printout into one hand and glanced idly down it. “Pimp, triad enforcer, virtual interrogator in the corporate wars, it’s all quality work. Me, I’m just some dumb cop can’t see the light.”
“I’m not going to quarrel with you there, lieutenant.”
“Says here you were a wiper for MeritCon a while back, scaring archaeologue miners off their claims in Syrtis Major. Slaughtering their families by way of incentive. Nice job.” Ortega tossed the printout back into oblivion. “We’ve got you cold, Kadmin. Digital footage from the hotel surveillance system, verifiable simultaneous sleeving, both stacks on ice. That’s an erasure mandatory, and even if your lawyers dance it down to Compliance at Machine Error, the sun’s going to be a red dwarf by the time they let you off stack.”
Kadmin smiled. “Then what are you here for?”
“Who sent you?” I asked him softly.
“The Dog speaks!

Is it a wolf I hear,
Howling his lonely communion
With the unpiloted stars,
Or merely the self importance and servitude
In the bark of a dog?

How many millennia did it take,
Twisting and torturing
The pride from the one
To make a tool,
The other?”

I inhaled smoke and nodded. Like most Harlanites, I had Quell’s Poems and Other Prevarications more or less by heart. It was taught in schools in lieu of the later and weightier political works, most of which were still deemed too radical to be put in the hands of children. This wasn’t a great translation, but it captured the essence. More impressive was the fact that anyone not actually from Harlan’s World could quote such an obscure volume.
I finished it for him.

“And how do we measure the distance from spirit to spirit?
And who do we find to blame?”

“Have you come seeking blame, Mr.Kovacs?”
“Among other things.”
“How disappointing.”
“You expected something else?”
“No,” said Kadmin with another smile. “Expectation is our first mistake. I meant, how disappointing for you.”
“Maybe.”
He shook his great piebald head. “Certainly. You will take no names from me. If you seek blame, I will have to bear it for you.”
“That’s very generous, but you’ll remember what Quell said about lackeys.”
“Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets.” Kadmin chuckled deep inside himself. “Are you threatening me in monitored police storage?”
“No. I’m just putting things into perspective.” I knocked ash off my cigarette and watched it sparkle out of existence before it reached the floor. “Someone’s pulling your strings; that’s who I’m going to wipe. You’re nothing. You I wouldn’t waste spit on.”
Kadmin tipped his head back as a stronger tremor ran through the shifting lines in the sky, like Cubist lightning. It reflected in the dull sheen on the metal table and seemed to touch his hands for a moment. When he looked down at me again, it was with a curious light in his eyes.
“I was not asked to kill you,” he said tonelessly, “unless your abduction proved inconvenient. But now I will.”
Ortega was on him as the last syllable left his mouth. The table blinked out of existence and she kicked him backwards off the chair with one booted foot. As he rolled back to his feet, the same boot caught him in the mouth and floored him again. I ran my tongue round the almost healed gashes inside my own mouth, and felt a distinct lack of sympathy.
Ortega dragged Kadmin up by the hair, the cigarette in her hand replaced by a vicious-looking blackjack courtesy of the same system magic that had eliminated the table.
“I hear you right?” she hissed. “You making threats, rackhead?”
Kadmin bared his teeth in a bloodstained grin.
“Police brutal—”
“That’s right, motherf*cker.” Ortega hit him across the cheek with the blackjack. The skin split. “Police brutality in a monitored police virtuality. Sandy Kim and WorldWeb One would have a field day, wouldn’t they? But you know what? I reckon your lawyers aren’t going to want to run this particular tape.”
“Leave him alone, Ortega.”
She seemed to remember herself then, and stepped back.
Her face twitched and she drew a deep breath. The table blinked back and Kadmin was suddenly sitting upright again, mouth undamaged.
“You too,” he said quietly.
“Yeah, sure.” There was contempt in Ortega’s voice, at least half of it directed at herself I guessed. She made a second effort to bring her breathing back under control, rearranged her clothing unnecessarily. “Like I said, going to be a cold day in hell by the time you get the chance. Maybe I’ll wait for you.”
“Whoever sent you worth this much, Kadmin?” I wondered softly. “You going down silent out of contractual loyalty, or are you just scared shitless?”
For answer, the composite man folded his arms across his chest and stared through me.
“You through, Kovacs?” asked Ortega.
I tried to meet Kadmin’s distant gaze. “Kadmin, the man I work for has a lot of influence. This could be your last chance to cut a deal.”
Nothing. He didn’t even blink.
I shrugged. “I’m through.”
“Good,” said Ortega grimly. “Because sitting downwind of this piece of shit is beginning to eat away at my usually tolerant nature.” She waggled her fingers in front of his eyes. “Be seeing you, f*ckhead.”
At that, Kadmin’s eyes turned up to meet hers, and a small, peculiarly unpleasant smile twisted his lips.
We left.

Back on the fourth floor, the walls of Ortega’s office had reverted to a dazzling high noon over beaches of white sand. I screwed up my eyes against the glare while Ortega trawled through a desk drawer and came up with her own and a spare pair of sunglasses.
“So what did you learn from that?”
I fitted the lenses uncomfortably over the bridge of my nose. They were too small. “Not much, except that little gem about not having orders to wipe me. Someone wanted to talk to me. I’d pretty much guessed that anyway, else he could have just blown my stack out all over the lobby of the Hendrix. Still, means someone wanted to cut a deal of their own, outside of Bancroft.”
“Or someone wanted to interrogate the guts out of you.”
I shook my head. “About what? I’d only just arrived. Doesn’t make any sense.”
“The Corps? Unfinished business?” Ortega made little flicking motions with her hand as if she were dealing me the suggestions. “Maybe a grudge match?”
“No. We went through this one when we were yelling at each other the other night. There are people who’d like to see me wiped, but none of them live on Earth, and none of them swing the kind of influence to go interstellar. And there’s nothing I know about the Corps that isn’t in a low-wall datastack somewhere. And anyway, it’s just too much of a f*cking coincidence. No, this is about Bancroft. Someone wanted in on the program.”
“Whoever had him killed?”
I tipped my head down to look at her directly over the sun lenses. “You believe me, then.”
“Not entirely.”
“Oh, come on.”
But Ortega wasn’t listening. “What I want to know,” she brooded, “is why he rewrote his codes at the end. You know, we’ve sweated him nearly a dozen times since we downloaded him Sunday night. That’s the first time he’s come close to even admitting he was there.”
“Even to his lawyers?”
“We don’t know what he says to them. They’re big-time sharks, out of Ulan Bator and New York. That kind of money carries a scrambler into all privy virtual interviews. We get nothing on tape but static.”
I raised a mental eyebrow. On Harlan’s World, all virtual custody was monitored as a matter of course. Scramblers were not permitted, no matter how much money you were worth.
“Speaking of lawyers, are Kadmin’s here in Bay City?”
“Physically, you mean? Yeah, they’ve got a deal with a Marin County practice. One of their partners is renting a sleeve here for the duration.” Ortega’s lip curled. “Physical meetings are considered a touch of class these days. Only the cheap firms do business down the wires.”
“What’s this suit’s name?”
There was a brief pause while she hung onto the name. “Kadmin’s a spinning item right now. I’m not sure we go this far.”
“Ortega, we go all the way. That was the deal. Otherwise I’m back to risking Elias’s fine features with some more maximal push investigation.”
She was silent for a while.
“Rutherford,” she said finally. “You want to talk to Rutherford?”
“Right now, I want to talk to anyone. Maybe I didn’t make things clear earlier. I’m working cold here. Bancroft waited a month and a half before he brought me in. Kadmin’s all I’ve got.”
“Keith Rutherford’s a handful of engine grease. You won’t get any more out of him than you did Kadmin downstairs. And anyway, how the f*ck am I supposed to introduce you, Kovacs? Hi, Keith, this is the ex-Envoy loose cannon your client tried to wipe on Sunday. He’d like to ask you a few questions. He’ll close up faster than an unpaid hooker’s hole.”
She had a point. I thought about it for a moment, staring out to sea.
“All right,” I said slowly. “All I need is a couple of minutes’ conversation. How about you tell him I’m Elias Ryker, your partner from Organic Damage? I practically am, after all.”
Ortega took off her lenses and stared at me.
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“No. I’m trying to be practical. Rutherford’s sleeving in from Ulan Bator, right?”
“New York,” she said tightly.
“New York. Right. So he probably doesn’t know anything about you or Ryker.”
“Probably not.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is, Kovacs, that I don’t like it.”
There was more silence. I dropped my gaze into my lap and let out a sigh that was only partially manufactured. Then I took off my own sunglasses and looked up at her. It was all there on plain display. The naked fear of sleeving and all that it entailed; paranoid essentialism with its back to the wall.
“Ortega,” I said gently. “I’m not him. I’m not trying to be hi—”
“You couldn’t even come close,” she snapped.
“All we’re talking about is a couple of hours’ make-believe.”
“Is that all?”
She said it in a voice like iron, and she put her sunglasses back on with such brusque efficiency that I didn’t need to see the tears welling up in the eyes behind the mirror lenses.
“All right,” she said finally, clearing her throat. ”I’ll get you in. I don’t see the point, but I’ll do it. Then what?”
“That’s a little difficult to say. I’ll have to improvise.”
“Like you did at the Wei Clinic?”
I shrugged noncommittally. “Envoy techniques are largely reactive. I can’t react to something until it happens.”
“I don’t want another bloodbath, Kovacs. It looks bad on the city stats.”
“If there’s violence, it won’t be me that starts it.”
“That’s not much of a guarantee. Haven’t you got any idea what you’re going to do?”
“I’m going to talk.”
“Just talk?” She looked at me disbelievingly. “That’s all?” I jammed my ill-fitting sunglasses back on my face. “Sometimes that’s all it takes.” I said.