PART 4 : PERSUASION
(VIRAL CORRUPT)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I changed cabs three times on the way from the airport, paying each one in currency, and then booked into an all-night flophouse in Oakland. Anyone tailing me electronically was going to take a little while to catch up, and I was reasonably sure that I hadn’t been actually followed. It seemed a bit like paranoia—after all, I was working for the bad guys now, so they had no need to tail me. But I hadn’t liked Trepp’s ironic keep in touch as she saw me off from the Bay City terminal. Also, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do yet, and if I didn’t know, I certainly didn’t want anyone else knowing either.
The flophouse room had seven hundred and eighty-six screen channels, holoporn and current affairs both advertised in lurid colours on the standby display, a hinged, self-cleansing double bed that stank of disinfectant and a self-contained shower stall that was beginning to list away from the wall it had once been epoxied to. I peered out of the single grimy window. It was the middle of the night in Bay City, and there was a fine, misty rain falling. My deadline with Ortega was running out.
The window gave onto a sloping fibrecrete roof about ten metres below. The street was as far below again. Overhead, a pagoda-like upper level screened the lower roof and street under long eaves. Covered space. After a moment’s debate, I pressed the last of Trepp’s hangover capsules out of the foil and swallowed it, then opened the window as quietly as I could, swung out and hung by my fingers from the lower frame. Fully extended, I still had the best part of eight metres to fall.
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 f*ck 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 f*cking arrested, Kovacs. I should have you f*cking stacked for what you’ve done.”
I started to lose my temper. “Done what? Will you get a f*cking 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. F*cking 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 f*cking time, you’ve had your nose buried in her crotch like a faithful f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking weren’t,” Ortega snarled. “You weren’t going to f*cking 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 motherf*cker.” 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 f*cking 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—”
“Wait a minute.” I put my own coffee down on the chair at my side. “Just like who, who am I just like?”
“What?”
“You just said I’m just—”
“Never f*cking mind what I said. Do you understand what you’ve done here, Kovacs?”
“The only thing I under—” Abruptly, sound welled from the screen behind me, liquid groans and the sound of organic suction. I glanced at the remote clenched in my left hand, trying to see how I’d inadvertently unfrozen the playback, and a deep, female moan sent the blood twitching through my guts. Then Ortega was on me, trying to snatch the remote out of my hand.
“Give me that, turn that f*cking thing—”
For a moment I wrestled with her and our struggling only succeeded in making the volume louder. Then, suddenly, riding a solitary updraft of sanity, I let go and she collapsed against the chair, pressing buttons.
“—off.”
There was a long silence, punctuated only by our own heavy breathing. I fixed my gaze on one of the battened-down viewports across the room, Ortega, slumped between my leg and the chair, was presumably still looking at the screen. I thought that, for a moment, our breathing matched pace.
When I turned and bent to help her up, she was already rising towards me. Our hands were on each other, I think, before either of us realised what was happening.
It was like resolution. The circling antagonisms collapsed inward like orbitals crashing and burning, surrendering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains while it endured but in release was a streak of fire through the nerves. We were both trying to kiss each other and laugh at the same time. Ortega made excited little panting sounds as my hands slipped inside the kimono, palms skidding over coarse nipples as broad and stiff as rope-ends and the breasts that fitted into my hands as if designed to nestle there. The kimono came off, sliding at first and then jerked insistently free of each swimmer’s shoulder in turn. I shed jacket and shirt in one, while Ortega’s hands tangled frantically at my belt, opening the fly and sliding one hard, long-fingered hand into the gap. I felt the calluses at the base of each finger, rubbing.
Somehow we got out of the room with the screen, and made it to the stern-end cabin I’d seen earlier. I followed the taut sway of Ortega’s strides across the room between, the muscled lines of the long thighs, and it must have been Ryker as much as me, because I felt like a man coming home. There, in the room full of mirrors, she threw her head down on the disarrayed sheets, lifted herself up and I saw myself slide into her up to the hilt, with a gasp because now she was burning. She was burning inside, gripping me with the liquid entirety of hot bath water, and the heated globes of her buttocks branded my hips with the impact of each stroke. Ahead of me, her spine lifted and wove like a snake and her hair cascaded down from her bent head in a chaotic elegance. In the mirrors around me I saw Ryker reaching forward to cup her breasts, then the breadth of her ribs, the rounding of her shoulders, and all the while she lifted and yawed like the ocean around the ship. Ryker and Ortega, writhing against each other like the reunited lovers of a timeless epic.
I felt the first climax go through her, but it was the sight of her looking back at me, up through tumbled hair, lips parted, that slipped the final catches on my own control and moulded me against the contours of her back and ass until my spasms were all spent inside her and we collapsed across the bed. I felt myself slide out of her like something being born. I think she was still coming.
Neither of us said anything for a long time. The ship ploughed on its automated way and around us the dangerous cold of the mirrors lapped inwards like an icy tide, threatening to tinge, and then drown the intimacy. In a few moments we would be fixing our gazes carefully outwards on the images of ourselves, instead of on each other.
I slid an arm around Ortega’s flank and tilted her gently onto one side, so that we lay like spoons. In the mirror, I found her eyes.
“Where’re we going?” I asked her gently.
A shrug, but she used it to snuggle deeper into me. “Programmed cycle, down the coast, out to Hawaii, hook around and then back.”
“And no one knows we’re out here?”
“Only the satellites.”
“Nice thought. Who does it all belong to it?”
She twisted to look at me over her shoulder. “It’s Ryker’s.”
“Ooops.” I looked elaborately away. “Nice carpet in here.”
Against the odds, it brought a laugh out of her. She turned fully to face me in the bed. Her hand rose to touch my face softly, as if she thought it might mark easily, or maybe disappear.
“I told myself,” she murmured, “it was crazy. It was just the body, you know.”
“Most things are. Conscious thought doesn’t have much to do with this stuff. Doesn’t have much to do with the way we live our lives, full stop, if you believe the psychologists. A bit of rationalisation, most of it with hindsight. Put the rest down to hormonal drives, gene instinct and pheromones for the fine tuning. Sad, but true.”
Her finger followed a line down the side of my face. “I don’t think it’s sad. What we’ve done with the rest of ourselves, that’s sad.”
“Kristin Ortega.” I took hold of her finger and squeezed it gently. “You are a real f*cking Luddite, aren’t you. How in God’s name did you get into this line of work?”
She shrugged again. “Family of cops. Father was a cop. Grandmother was a cop. You know how it goes.”
“Not from experience.”
“No.” She stretched one long leg languidly up towards the mirrored ceiling. “I guess not.”
I reached across the plain of her belly and slid my hand along the length of thigh to the knee, levering her gently over and bringing my mouth to kiss gently at the shaved bar of pubic hair where it descended into cleft. She resisted fractionally, maybe thinking of the screen in the other room, or maybe just our mingled juices trickling from her body, then relented and spread herself under me. I shifted her other thigh up over my shoulder and lowered my face into her.
This time, when she came, it was with escalating cries that she locked in her throat each time with powerful flexings of the muscles at the base of her stomach while her whole body eeled back and forth across the bed and her hips bucked upward, grinding the soft flesh into my mouth. At some point she had lapsed into softly uttered Spanish, whose tones stoked my own arousal, and when she finally flopped to stillness, I was able to slide up and into her directly, gathering her under the arms and sinking my tongue into her mouth in the first kiss we’d shared since reaching the bed.
We moved slowly, trying for the rhythm of the sea outside and the laughter of our first embrace. It seemed to last a long time, time for talking, up the scale from languid murmurs to excited gabbling, for shifts in posture and soft bitings, the clasping of hands, and all the time a feeling of brimming to overflow that hurt my eyes. It was from that last, unbearable pressure as much as any that I finally let go and came into her, feeling her chase the last of my fading hardness to her own shaking finish.
In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, said Virginia Vidaura, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.
As we separated for the second time, the weight of the last twenty-four hours came down on me like one of the heavy rugs in the other room and consciousness slipped gradually away from the increasing warmth beneath it. My last clear impressions were of the long body beside me rearranging itself with breasts pressed into my back, an arm draped over me and a peculiarly comfortable clasping of feet, mine in hers, like hands. My thought processes were slowing down.
What is offered. Sometimes. Enough.