Altered Carbon

Chapter TWENTY-NINE
Ortega’s list was over two thousand names long, each annotated with a brief surveillance report and any Organic-Damage convictions tied to the operators or clientele. In hardcopy format it ran to about two hundred concertina’d sheets, which started to unravel like a long paper scarf as soon as I got past page one. I tried to scan the list in the cab back to Bay City, but gave up when it threatened to overwhelm us both on the back seat. I wasn’t in the mood anyway. Most of me wished I was still bedded down in the stern cabin of Ryker’s yacht, isolated from the rest of humanity and its problems by hundreds of kilometres of trackless blue.
Back at the Watchtower suite, I put Ortega in the kitchen while I called Kawahara at the number Trepp had given me. It was Trepp that came on screen first, features smeared with sleep. I wondered if she’d been up all night trying to track me.
“Morning.” She yawned and presumably checked an internal timechip. “Afternoon, I mean. Where’ve you been?”
“Out and about.”
Trepp rubbed inelegantly at one eye and yawned again. “Suit yourself. Just making conversation. How’s your head?”
“Better, thanks. I want to talk to Kawahara.”
“Sure.” She reached towards the screen. “Talk to you later.”
The screen dropped into neutral, an unwinding tricoloured helix accompanied by sickly sweet string arrangements. I gritted my teeth.
“Takeshi-san.” As always, Kawahara started in Japanese, as if it established some kind of common ground with me. “This is unlooked-for so early. Do you have good news for me?”
I stayed doggedly in Amanglic. “Is this a secure line?”
“As close as such a thing can be said to exist, yes.”
“I have a shopping list.”
“Go ahead.”
“To begin with, I need access to a military virus. Rawling 4851 for preference, or one of the Condomar variants.”
Kawahara’s intelligent features hardened abruptly. “The Innenin virus?”
“Yeah. It’s over a century out of date now, shouldn’t be too hard to get hold of. Then I need—”
“Kovacs, I think you’d better explain what you’re planning.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I understood this was my play, and you didn’t want to be involved.”
“If I secure you a copy of the Rawling virus, I’d say I’m already involved.” Kawahara offered me a measured smile. “Now what are you planning to do with it?”
“Bancroft killed himself, that’s the result you want, right?”
A slow nod.
“Then there has to be a reason,” I said, warming to the deceit structure I’d come up with, despite myself. I was doing what they’d trained me to do, and it felt good. “Bancroft has remote storage, it doesn’t make sense that he’d light himself up unless he had a very specific reason. A reason unrelated to the actual act of suicide. A reason like self preservation.”
Kawahara’s eyes narrowed. “Go on.”
“Bancroft uses whorehouses on a regular basis, real and virtual. He told me that himself a couple of days ago. And he’s not too particular about the quality of establishment he uses either. Now, let’s assume that there’s an accident in one of these virtuals while he’s getting his itch scratched. Accidental bleedover from some grimed-up old programs that no one’s bothered to even open for a few decades. Go to a low enough grade of house, there’s no telling what might be lying around.”
“The Rawling virus.” Kawahara exhaled as if she had been holding her breath in anticipation.
“Rawling variant 4851 takes about a hundred minutes to go fully active, by which time it’s too late to do anything.” I forced images of Jimmy de Soto from my mind. “The target’s contaminated beyond redemption. Suppose Bancroft finds this out through some kind of systems warning. He must be wired internally for that kind of thing. He suddenly discovers the stack he’s wearing and the brain it’s wired to is burnt. That’s not a disaster, if you’ve got clone backup and remote storage, but—”
“Transmission.” Kawahara’s face lit up as she got it.
“Right. He’d have to do something to stop the virus being ‘cast to the remote with the rest of his personality. With the next needlecast coming up that night, maybe in a few minutes’ time, there was only one way to ensure the remote stack didn’t get contaminated.”
I mimed a pistol at my head.
“Ingenious.”
“That’s why he made the call, the timecheck. He couldn’t trust his own internal chip, the virus might already have scrambled it.”
Solemnly, Kawahara lifted her hands into view and applauded. When she had finished, she clasped her hands together and looked at me over them.
“Very impressive. I will obtain the Rawling virus immediately. Have you selected a suitable virtual house for it to be downloaded into?”
“Not yet. The virus isn’t the only thing I need. I want you to arrange the parole and re-sleeving of Irene Elliott, currently held at Bay City Central on conviction of Dipping. I also want you to look into the possibility of acquiring her original sleeve back from its purchasers. Some corporate deal, there’ll be records.”
“You’re going to use this Elliott to download Rawling?”
“The evidence is she’s good.”
“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?”
“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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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. “Motherf*cker.”
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.