Altered Carbon

Chapter THIRTY-TWO
I find this exceptionally difficult to believe,” said Bancroft sharply. “Are you quite sure I went to this establishment?”
Below the balcony on the lawns of Suntouch House, Miriam Bancroft appeared to be constructing an enormous paper glider from instructions in a moving holoprojection. The white of the wings was so bright it hurt to look directly at them. As I leaned on the balcony rail, she shaded her eyes from the sun and looked up at me.
“The mall has security monitors.” I said, affecting disinterest. “Automated system, still operational after all these years. They’ve got footage of you walking right up to the door. You do know the name, don’t you?”
“Jack It Up? Of course, I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never actually used the place.”
I looked round without leaving the rail. “Really. You have something against virtual sex, then? You’re a reality purist?”
“No.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I have no problem with virtual formats, and as I believe I’ve told you already, I have used them on occasion. But this place Jack It Up is, how can I put it, hardly the elegant end of the market.”
“No,” I agreed. “And how would you classify Jerry’s Closed Quarters? An elegant whorehouse?”
“Hardly.”
“But that didn’t stop you going there to play cabin games with Elizabeth Elliott, did it? Or has it gone downhill recently, because—”
“All right.” The smile in the voice had turned to a grimace. “You’ve made your point. Don’t labour it.”
I stopped watching Miriam Bancroft and came back to my seat. My iced cocktail was still standing on the little table between us. I picked it up.
“I’m glad you take the point,” I said, stirring the drink. “Because it’s taken a lot of pain to sort through this mess. I’ve been abducted, tortured and nearly killed in the process. A woman called Louise, not much older than your precious daughter Naomi, was killed because she got in the way. So if you don’t like my conclusions, you can go f*ck yourself.”
I raised my glass to him across the table.
“Spare me the melodrama, Kovacs, and sit down for God’s sake. I’m not rejecting what you say, I’m just questioning it.”
I sat and levelled a finger at him. “No. You’re squirming. This thing’s pointing up a part of your character you despise for its appetites. You’d rather not know what kind of software you were accessing that night over at Jack It Up, in case it’s even more grubby than you already imagine. You’re being forced to confront the part of yourself that wants to come in your wife’s face, and you don’t like it.”
“There will be no need to revisit that particular conversation,” said Bancroft stiffly. He steepled his fingers. “You are aware, I suppose, that the security camera footage you base your assumptions on could be faked very easily by anyone with access to newstape images of me.”
“Yes, I am.” I’d watched Irene Elliott do exactly that only forty-eight hours previously. Easy wasn’t the word. After the virus run, it had been like asking a concert total body dancer to encore with stretching exercises. I’d barely had time to smoke a cigarette while she did it. “But why would anyone bother? A distractor, to tinsel me off course, assuming of course that some wrong turn would have me sniffing around the ruins of a derelict Richmond mall in the first place. Come on, Bancroft, get real. The fact I was out there in the first place proves the validity of that footage. And in any case, those images aren’t the basis for anything. They just confirm what I’d already worked out, which is that you killed yourself to avoid viral contamination of your remote stack.”
“That is a quite remarkable leap of intuition to make after only a six-day investigation.”
“Blame Ortega,” I said lightly, though Bancroft’s enduring suspicion in the face of unpleasant facts was beginning to worry me. I hadn’t realised he would take so much wearing down. “She’s the one who put me onto the right track. She wouldn’t wear the murder theory from the start. She kept telling me you were too tough and smart a Meth motherf*cker to let anyone kill you. Quote, unquote. And that brought me back to the conversation we had here a week ago. You told me I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I was, 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. Envoys have total recall, those were your exact words.”
I paused and set down my glass, searching for the fine edge of deceit that always lies right up against the truth.
“All this time, I’ve been working on the assumption you didn’t pull the trigger because you weren’t the type to commit suicide. I ignored all the evidence to the contrary because of that single assumption. The electron-tight security you’ve got here, the lack of any traces of intrusion, the handprint lock on the safe.”
“And Kadmin. And Ortega.”
“Yeah, that didn’t help. But we straightened out the Ortega angle, and Kadmin, well, I’m coming to Kadmin in a moment. The point is, as long as I equated pulling that trigger with suicide, I was jammed. But then, what if those two acts were not synonymous. What if you’d torched your own stack, not because you wanted to die but for some other reason. Once I let myself think that, the rest was easy. What were the possible reasons that you’d do it? It’s not an easy thing to put a gun to your own head, even if you do want to die. To do it when you want to live must take the will of a demon. No matter how much you might know intellectually that you’ll be re-sleeved with the bulk of your mind intact, the person you are at that moment is going to die. You had to have been desperate to pull that trigger. It had to have been something,” I smiled faintly, “life-threatening. Given that assumption, it didn’t take long to come up with the virus scenario. Then all I had to do was work out how and where you’d been infected.”
Bancroft shifted uncomfortably at the word, and I felt a stab of elation run through me. Virus! Even Meths were afraid of the invisible corroder, because even they, with their remote storage and their clones on ice, were not immune. Viral Strike! Stack down! Bancroft was off balance.
“Now, it’s virtually impossible to snug something as complex as a virus into a disconnected target, so you had to have been jacked in somewhere along the line. I thought of the PsychaSec facility, but they’re sewed up too tight. And it couldn’t have been before you went to Osaka for the same reasons; even dormant, the virus would have tripped every alarm at PsychaSec when they set up the ‘cast. It had to have been some time in the last forty-eight hours, because your remote stack was uncontaminated. I knew from talking to your wife that the likelihood was you’d been out on the town when you got back from Osaka, and on your own admission that could quite possibly include some kind of virtual whorehouse. After that, it was just a matter of doing the rounds. I tried a half dozen places before I hit Jack It Up, and when I punched up their inquiries the viral contam siren nearly blew my phone out. That’s the thing about AIs—they write their own security and it’s second to none. Jack It Up is sealed off so tight it’ll take the police months to tunnel in and see what’s left of the core processors.”
I felt a vague pang of guilt as I thought of the AI thrashing like a man in an acid vat as its systems dissolved around it, consciousness shrivelling down a tunnel of closing perspectives into nothing. The feeling passed rapidly. We’d chosen Jack It Up for a variety of reasons: it was in a roofed-over area that meant there would be no satellite coverage to dispute the lies we’d planted in the mall surveillance system, it operated in a criminal environment so that no one would have a problem believing an illicit virus had somehow got loose inside it, but most of all it ran a series of software options so distasteful that it was unlikely the police would ever bother to investigate the wreckage of the murdered machine more than cursorily. Under its heading on Ortega’s list, there were at least a dozen copycat sex crimes which the Organic Damage department had traced to software packages available from Jack It Up. I could imagine the curl of Ortega’s lip as she read the software listings, the studied indifference with which she would handle the case.
I missed Ortega.
“What about Kadmin?”
“It’s hard to know, but I’m betting whoever infected Jack It Up in the first place probably hired Kadmin to silence me and make sure the whole thing stayed covered up. After all, without me stirring things up, how long would it have been before anyone realised Jack had been iced? Can’t see any of its potential clients calling the police when they got refused entry, can you?”
Bancroft gave me a hard look, but I knew from his next words that the battle was almost over. The balance of belief was tipping towards me. Bancroft was going to buy the package. “You’re saying the virus was introduced deliberately. That someone murdered this machine?”
I shrugged. “It seems likely. Jack It Up operated on the margins of local law. A lot of its software appears to have been impounded by the Felony Transmission department at one time or another, which suggests that it had regular dealings with the criminal world in one form or another. It is possible that it made some enemies. On Harlan’s World the yakuza have been known to perform viral execution on machines judged to have betrayed them. I don’t know if that happens here, or who’d have the stack muscle to do it. But I do know that whoever hired Kadmin used an AI to pull him out of police storage. You can verify that with Fell Street, if you like.”
Bancroft was silent. I watched him for a moment, seeing the belief sink in. Watching the process as he convinced himself. I could almost see what he was seeing. Himself, hunched over in an autocab as the sordid guilt over what he had been doing at Jack It Up merged sickeningly with the horror of the contamination warnings sirening in his head. Infected! Himself, Laurens Bancroft, stumbling through the dark towards the lights of Suntouch House and the only surgery that could save him. Why had he left the cab so far from home? Why had he not wakened anybody for help? These were questions I no longer needed to answer for him. Bancroft believed. His guilt and self-disgust made him believe, and he would find his own answers to reinforce the horrific images in his head.
And by the time Transmission Felony cut a safe path through to Jack It Up’s core processors, Rawling 4851 would have eaten out every scrap of coherent intellect the machine ever had. There would be nothing left to dispute the carefully constructed lie I’d told for Kawahara.
I got up and went back to the balcony, wondering if I should allow myself a cigarette. It had been tough to lock down the need the last couple of days. Watching Irene Elliott at work had been nerve-racking. I forced my hand to relinquish the packet in my breast pocket, and gazed down at Miriam Bancroft, who by now was well on the way to completing her glider. When she looked up, I glanced away along the balcony rail and saw Bancroft’s telescope, still pointed seaward at the same shallow angle. Idle curiosity made me lean across and look at the figures for angle of elevation. The finger marks in the dust were still there.
Dust?
Bancroft’s unconsciously arrogant words came back to me. It was an enthusiasm I had. Back when the stars were still something to stare at. You wouldn’t remember how that felt. Last time I looked through that lens was nearly two centuries ago.
I stared at the finger marks, mesmerised by my own thoughts. Someone had been looking through this lens a lot more recently than two hundred years ago, but they hadn’t kept at it very long. From the minimal displacement of dust it looked as if the programming keys had only been used once. On a sudden impulse, I moved up to the telescope and followed the line of its barrel out over the sea to where visibility blurred in the haze. That far out the angle of elevation would give you a view of empty air a couple of kilometres up. I bent to the eye-piece as if in a dream. A grey speck showed up in the centre of my field of vision, blurring in and out of focus as my eyes struggled with the surrounding expanses of blue. Lifting my head and checking the control pad again, I found a max amp key and thumbed it impatiently. When I looked again, the grey speck had sprung into hard focus, filling most of the lens. I breathed out slowly, feeling as if I’d had the cigarette after all.
The airship hung like a bottleback, gorged after feeding frenzy. It must have been several hundred metres long, with swellings along the lower half of the hull and protruding sections that looked like landing pads. I knew what I was looking at even before Ryker’s neurachem reeled in the last increments of magnification I needed to make out the sun-burnished lettering on the side that spelled it out; Head in the Clouds.
I stepped back from the telescope, breathing deeply, and as my eyes slid back to normal focus I saw Miriam Bancroft again. She was standing amidst the parts of her glider, staring up at me. I almost flinched as our eyes met. Dropping a hand to the telescope programme pad, I did what Bancroft should have done before he blew his own head off. I hit memory-wipe, and the digits that had held the airship available for viewing for the last seven weeks blinked out.
I had felt like many kinds of fool in my life, but never quite as completely as I did at that moment. A first-order clue had been waiting there in the lens for anyone to come along and pick it up. Missed by the police in their haste, disinterest and lack of close knowledge, missed by Bancroft because the telescope was so much a part of his world view it was too close to give a second glance to, but I had no such excuses. I had stood here a week ago and seen the two mismatched pieces of reality clash against each other. Bancroft claiming not to have used the telescope in centuries almost at the same moment that I saw the evidence of recent use in the disturbed dust. And Miriam Bancroft had hammered it home less than an hour later when she said, While Laurens was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground. I’d thought of the telescope then, my mind had rebelled at the downloading-induced sluggishness and tried to tell me. Shaky and off balance, new to the planet and the flesh I was wearing, I had ignored it. The download dues had taken their toll.
Below on the lawn, Miriam Bancroft was still watching me. I backed away from the telescope, composed my features and returned to my seat. Absorbed by the images I had faked into his head, Bancroft seemed scarcely to know that I had moved.
But now my own mind was in overdrive, ripping along avenues of thought that had opened with Ortega’s list and the Resolution 653 T-shirt. The quiet resignation I had felt in Ember two days ago, the impatience to sell my lies to Bancroft, get Sarah out and be finished were all gone. Everything tied in to Head in the Clouds, ultimately even Bancroft. It was almost axiomatic that he had gone there the night he died. Whatever had happened to him there was the key to his reasons for dying here at Suntouch House a few hours later. And to the truth that Reileen Kawahara was so desperate to hide.
Which meant I had to go there myself.
I picked up my glass and swallowed some of the drink, not tasting it. The sound it made seemed to wake Bancroft from his daze. He looked up, almost as if he was surprised to see me still there.
“Please excuse me, Mr.Kovacs. This is a lot to take in. After all the scenarios I had envisaged, this is one I had not even considered and it is so simple. So blindingly obvious.” His voice held a wealth of self-disgust. “The truth is that I did not need an Envoy investigator, I simply needed a mirror to hold up to myself.”
I set down my glass and got to my feet.
“You’re leaving?”
“Well, unless you have any further questions. Personally, I think you still need some time. I’ll be around. You can get me at the Hendrix.”
On my way out along the main hall, I came face to face with Miriam Bancroft. She was dressed in the same coveralls she’d been wearing in the garden, hair caught up in an expensive-looking static clip. In one hand she was carrying a trellised plant urn, held up like a lantern on a stormy night. Long strands of flowering martyrweed trailed from the trellis-work.
“Have you—” she started.
I stepped closer to her, inside the range of the martyr-weed. “I’m through,” I said. “I’ve taken this as far as I can stomach. Your husband has an answer, but it isn’t the truth. I hope that satisfies you, as well as Reileen Kawahara.”
At the name, her mouth parted in shock. It was the only reaction that got through her control, but it was the confirmation I needed. I felt the need to be cruel come bubbling insistently up from the dark, rarely visited caverns of anger that served me as emotional reserves.
“I never figured Reileen for much of a lay, but maybe like attracts like. I hope she’s better between the legs than she is on a tennis court.”
Miriam Bancroft’s face whitened and I readied myself for the slap. But instead, she offered me a strained smile.
“You are mistaken, Mr.Kovacs,” she said.
“Yeah. I often am.” I stepped around her. “Excuse me.” I walked away down the hall without looking back.