Altered Carbon

Chapter SEVEN
There are ruins, steeped in shadow, and a blood-red sun going down in turmoil behind distant hills. Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic towards the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict’s fingers through the trees that line the street.
Innenininennininennin …
I know this place.
I pick my way between the devastated walls of ruins, trying not to brush against them because, whenever I do, they give out muted gunshots and screams, as if whatever conflict murdered this city has soaked into the remaining stonework. At the same time, I’m moving quite fast, because there is something following me, something that has no such qualms about touching the ruins. I can chart its progress quite accurately by the tide of gunfire and anguish swelling behind me. It is closing. I try to speed up but there is a tightness in my throat and chest that isn’t helping matters.
Jimmy de Soto steps out from behind the shattered stub of a tower. I’m not really surprised to see him here, but his ruined face still gives me a jolt. He grins with what’s left of his features and puts a hand on my shoulder. I try not to flinch.
“Leila Begin,” he says, and nods back to where I have come from. “Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyer.”
“I will,” I say, moving past him. But his hand stays on my shoulder, which must mean his arm is stretching out behind me like hot wax. I stop, guilty at the pain that must be causing him, but he’s still there at my shoulder. I start moving again.
“Going to turn and fight?” he asks conversationally, drifting along beside me without apparent effort or footing.
“With what?” I say, opening my empty hands.
“Should have armed yourself, pal. Big time.”
“Virginia told us not to fall for the weakness of weapons.”
Jimmy de Soto marts derisively. “Yeah, and look where that stupid bitch ended up. Eighty to a hundred, no remission.”
“You can’t know that,” I say absently, more interested in the sounds of pursuit behind me. “You died years before that happened.”
“Oh, come on, who really dies these days?”
“Try telling that to a Catholic. And anyway, you did die, Jimmy. Irretrievably, as I recall.”
“What’s a Catholic?”
“Tell you later. You got any cigarettes?”
“Cigarettes? What happened to your arm?”
I break the spiral of non sequiturs and stare down at my arm. Jimmy’s got a point. The scars on my forearm have turned into a fresh wound, blood welling up and trickling down into my hand. So of course …
I reach up to my left eye and find the wetness below it. My fingers come away bloody.
“Lucky one,” says Jimmy de Soto judicially. “They missed the socket.”
He should know. His own left socket is a glutted well of gore, all that was left at Innenin when he dug the eyeball out with his fingers. No one ever found out what he was hallucinating at the time. By the time they got Jimmy and the rest of the Innenin beachhead d.h.’d for psychosurgery, the defenders’ virus had scrambled their minds beyond retrieval. The program was so virulent that at the time the clinic didn’t even dare keep what was left on stack for study. The remains of Jimmy de Soto are on a sealed disc with red DATA CONTAMINANT decals somewhere in a basement at Envoy Corps HQ.
“I’ve got to do something about this,” I say, a little desperately. The sounds awoken from the walls by my pursuer are growing dangerously close. The last of the sun is slipping behind the hills. Blood spills down my arm and face.
“Smell that?” Jimmy asks, lifting his man face to the chilly air around us. “They’re changing it.”
“What?” But even as I snap the retort, I can smell it as well. A fresh, invigorating scent, not unlike the incense back at the Hendrix, but subtly different, not quite the heady decadence of the original odour I fell asleep to only …
“Got to go,” says Jimmy, and I’m about to ask him where when I realise he means me and I’m. . .
Awake.
My eyes snapped open on one of the psychedelic murals of the hotel room. Slim, waif-like figures in kaftans dotted across a field of green grass and yellow and white flowers. I frowned and clutched at the hardened scar tissue on my forearm. No blood. With the realisation, I carne fully awake and sat up in the big crimson bed. The shift in the smell of incense that had originally nudged me towards consciousness was fully resolved into that of coffee and fresh bread. The Hendrix’s olfactory wake-up call. Light was pouring into the dimmed room through a flaw in the polarised glass of the window.
“You have a visitor,” said the voice of the Hendrix briskly.
“What time is it?” I croaked. The back of my throat seemed to have been liberally painted with supercooled glue.
“Ten-sixteen, locally. You have slept for seven hours and forty-two minutes.”
“And my visitor?”
“Oumou Prescott,” said the hotel. “Do you require breakfast?”
I got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. “Yes. Coffee with milk, white meat, well-cooked, and fruit juice of some kind. You can send Prescott up.”
By the time the door chimed at me, I was out of the shower and padding around in an iridescent blue bathrobe trimmed with gold braid. I collected my breakfast from the service hatch and balanced the tray on one hand while I opened the door.
Oumou Prescott was a tall, impressive-looking African woman, topping my sleeve by a couple of centimetres, her hair braided back with dozens of oval glass beads in seven or eight of my favourite colours and her cheekbones lined with some sort of abstract tattooing. She stood on the threshold in a pale grey suit and a long black coat turned up at the collar, and looked at me doubtfully.
“Mr.Kovacs.”
“Yes, come in. Would you like some breakfast?” I laid the tray on the unmade bed.
“No, thank you. Mr.Kovacs, I am Laurens Bancroft’s principal legal representative via the firm of Prescott, Forbes and Hernandez. Mr.Bancroft informed me—”
“Yes, I know.” I picked up a piece of grilled chicken from the tray.
“The point is, Mr.Kovacs, we have an appointment with Dennis Nyman at PsychaSec in…” Her eyes flicked briefly upward to consult a retinal watch. ”Thirty minutes.”
“I see,” I said, chewing slowly. “I didn’t know that.”
“I’ve been calling since eight this morning, but the hotel refused to put me through. I didn’t realise you would sleep so late.”
I grinned at her through a mouthful of chicken. “Faulty research, then. I was only sleeved yesterday.”
She stiffened a little at that, but then a professional calm asserted itself. She crossed the room and took a seat on the window shelf.
“We’ll be late, then,” she said. “I guess you need breakfast.”

It was cold in the middle of the Bay.
I climbed out of the autocab into watery sunshine and a buffeting wind. It had rained during the night, and there were still a few piles of grey cumulus skulking around inland, sullenly resisting the attempts of a stiff sea breeze to sweep them away. I turned up the collar of my summer suit and made a mental note to buy a coat. Nothing serious, something coming to mid thigh with a collar and pockets big enough to stuff your hands in.
Beside me, Prescott was looking unbearably snug inside her coat. She paid off the cab with a swipe of her thumb and we both stood back as it rose. A welcome rush of warm air from the lift turbines washed over my hands and face. I blinked my eyes against the small storm of grit and dust and saw how Prescott raised one slender arm to do the same. Then the cab was gone, droning away to join the beehive activity in the sky above the mainland. Prescott turned to the building behind us and gestured with one laconic thumb.
“This way.”
I pushed my hands into the inadequate pockets of my suit and followed her lead. Bent slightly into the wind, we picked our way up the long, winding steps to PsychaSec Alcatraz.
I’d expected a high-security installation, and I wasn’t disappointed. PsychaSec was laid out in a series of long, low double-storey modules with deeply recessed windows reminiscent of a military command bunker. The only break in this pattern was a single dome at the western end which I guessed had to house the satellite uplink gear. The whole complex was a pale granite grey and the windows a smoky reflectant orange. There was no holodisplay, or broadcast publicity, in fact nothing to announce we’d got the right place except a sober plaque laser-engraved into the sloping stone wall of the entrance block:

PsychaSec S.A.
________________

D.H.F. Retrieval and Secure Holding
Clonic Re-sleeving

Above the plaque was a small black sentry eye flanked by heavily grilled speakers. Oumou Prescott raised her arm and waved at it.
“Welcome to PsychaSec Alcatraz,” said a construct voice briskly. “Please identify yourself within the fifteen-second security time limit.”
“Oumou Prescott and Takeshi Kovacs to see Director Nyman. We have an appointment.”
A thin, green scanning laser flickered over us both from head to foot and then a section of the wall hinged smoothly back and down forming a passage inside. Glad to get out of the wind, I stepped nimbly into the niche and followed orange runway lights down a short corridor into a reception area, leaving Prescott to bring up the rear. As soon as we stepped off the walkway and into reception, the massive door slab rumbled upright and closed again. Solid security.
Reception was a circular, warmly lit area with banks of seats and low tables set at the cardinal compass points. There were small groups of people seated north and east, conversing in low tones. In the centre was a circular desk where a receptionist sat behind a battery of secretarial equipment. No artificial constructs here; this was a real human being, a slim young man barely out of his teens who looked up with intelligent eyes as we approached.
“You can go right through, Ms.Prescott. The Director’s office is up the stairs and third door on your right.”
“Thank you.” Prescott took the lead again, turning back briefly to mutter as soon as we were out of earshot of the receptionist, “Nyman’s a bit impressed with himself since this place was built, but he’s basically a good person. Try not to let him irritate you.”
“Sure.”
We followed the receptionist’s instructions until, outside the aforementioned door I had to stop and suppress a snigger. Nyman’s door, no doubt in the best possible Earth taste, was pure mirrorwood from top to bottom. After the high-profile security system and flesh and blood reception, it seemed about as subtle as the vaginal spittoons at Madame Mi’s Wharfwhore Warehouse. My amusement must have been evident because Prescott gave me a frown as she knocked on the door.
“Come.”
Sleep had done wonders for the interface between my mind and my new sleeve. Composing my rented features, I followed Prescott into the room.
Nyman was at his desk, ostensibly working at a grey and green coloured holodisplay. He was a thin, serious-looking man who affected steel-rimmed external eyelenses to go with his expensively cut black suit and short, tidy hair. His expression, behind the lenses, was slightly resentful. He’d not been happy when Prescott phoned him from the cab to say we would be delayed, but Bancroft had obviously been in touch with him because he accepted the later appointment time with the stiff acquiescence of a disciplined child.
“Since you have requested a viewing of our facilities here, Mr.Kovacs, shall we start? I have cleared my agenda for the next couple of hours, but I do have clients waiting.”
Something about Nyman’s manner brought Warden Sullivan to mind, but it was an altogether smoother, less embittered Sullivan. I glanced over Nyman’s suit and face. Perhaps if the Warden had made his career in storage for the super rich instead of the criminal element he might have turned out like this.
“Fine.”
It got pretty dull after that. PsychaSec, like most d.h.f. depots, wasn’t much more than a gigantic set of air-conditioned warehouse shelves. We tramped through basement rooms cooled to the 7 to 11 degrees Celsius recommended by the makers of altered carbon, peered at racks of the big thirty-centimetre expanded format discs and admired the retrieval robots that ran on wide-gauge rails along the storage walls. “It’s a duplex system,” said Nyman proudly. “Every client is stored on two separate discs in different parts of the building. Random code distribution, only the central processor can find them both and there’s a lock on the system to prevent simultaneous access to both copies. To do any real damage, you’d have to break in and get past all the security systems twice.”
I made polite noises.
“Our satellite uplink operates through a network of no less than eighteen secure clearing orbital platforms, leased in random sequence.” Nyman was getting carried away with his own sales pitch. He seemed to have forgotten that neither Prescott nor myself were in the market for PsychaSec’s services. “No orbital is leased for more than twenty seconds at a time. Remote storage updates come in via needlecast, with no way to predict the transmission route.”
Strictly speaking, that wasn’t true. Given an artificial intelligence of sufficient size and inclination, you’d get it right sooner or later, but this was clutching at straws. The kind of enemies who used AIs to get at you didn’t need to finish you off with a particle blaster to the head. I was looking in the wrong place.
“Can I get access to Bancroft’s clones?” I asked Prescott abruptly.
“From a legal point of view?” Prescott shrugged. “Mr.Bancroft’s instructions give you carte blanche as far as I know.”
Carte blanche? Prescott had been springing these on me all morning. The words almost had the taste of the heavy parchment. It was like something an Alain Marriott character would say in a Settlement years flic.
Well, you’re on Earth now. I turned to Nyman, who nodded grudgingly.
“There are some procedures,” he said.
We went back up to ground level, along corridors that forcibly reminded me of the re-sleeving facility at Bay City Central by their very dissimilarity. No rubber gurney wheel tracks here—the sleeve transporters would be air cushion vehicles—and the corridor walls were decked out in pastel shades. The windows, bunker peepholes from the outside, were framed and corniched in Gaudí-style waves on the inside. At one corner we passed a woman cleaning them by hand. I raised an eyebrow. No end to the extravagance.
Nyman caught the look. “There are some jobs that robot labour just never gets quite right,” he said.
“I’m sure.”
The clone banks appeared on our left, heavy, sealed doors in beveled and sculpted steel counterpointing the ornate windows. We stopped at one and Nyman peered into the retina scan set beside it. The door hinged smoothly outwards, fully a metre thick in tungsten steel. Within was a four-metre long chamber with a similar door at the far end. We stepped inside, and the outer door swung shut with a soft thud that pushed the air into my ears.
“This is an airtight chamber,” said Nyman redundantly. “We will receive a sonic cleansing to ensure that we bring no contaminants into the clone bank. No reason to be alarmed.”
A light in the ceiling pulsed on and off in shades of violet to signify that the dust-off was in progress and then the second door opened with no more sound than the first. We walked out into the Bancroft family vault.
I’d seen this sort of thing before. Reileen Kawahara had maintained a small one for her transit clones on New Beijing, and of course the Corps had them in abundance. Still, I’d never seen anything quite like this.
The space was oval, dome-ceilinged, and must have extended through both storeys of the installation. It was huge, the size of a temple back home. Lighting was low, a drowsy orange, and the temperature was blood-warm. The clone sacs were everywhere, veined translucent pods of the same orange as the light, suspended from the ceiling by cables and nutrient tubes. The clones were vaguely discernible within, foetal bundles of arms and legs, but fully grown. Or at least, most were; towards the top of the dome I could see smaller sacs where new additions to the stock were being cultured. The sacs were organic, a toughened analogue of womb lining, and they would grow with the foetus within to become like the metre and a half lozenges in the lower half of the vault. The whole crop hung there like an insane mobile, just waiting for some huge sickly breeze to stir it into motion.
Nyman cleared his throat, and both Prescott and I shook off the paralysed wonder that had gripped us on the threshold.
“This may look haphazard,” he said, “but the spacing is computer generated.”
“I know.” I nodded and went closer to one of the lower sacs. “It’s fractal-derived, right?”
“Ah, yes.” Nyman seemed almost to resent my knowledge.
I peered in at the clone. Centimetres away from my face Miriam Bancroft’s features dreamed in amniotic fluid beneath the membrane. Her arms were folded protectively across her breasts and her hands were folded lightly into fists under her chin. Her hair had been gathered into a thick, coiled snake on the top of her head and covered in some kind of web.
“The whole family’s here,” murmured Prescott at my shoulder. “Husband and wife, and all sixty-one children. Most only have one or two clones, but Bancroft and his wife run to six each. Impressive, huh?”
“Yeah.” Despite myself, I had to put out a hand and touch the membrane above Miriam Bancroft’s face. It was warm, and gave slightly under my hand. There was raised scarring around the entry points of the nutrient feeds and waste pipes, and in tiny pimples where needles had been pushed through to extract tissue samples or provide IV additives. The membrane would give in to such penetrations and heal afterwards.
I turned away from the dreaming woman and faced Nyman.
“This is all very nice, but presumably you don’t shell one of these whenever Bancroft comes in here. You must have tanks as well.”
“This way.” Nyman gestured us to follow him and went to the back of the chamber where another pressure door was set into the wall. The lowest sacs swayed eerily in the wake of our passage, and I had to duck to avoid brushing against one. Nyman’s fingers played a brief tarantella over the keypad of the pressure door and we went though into a long, low room whose clinical illumination was almost blinding after the womb light of the main vault. A row of eight metallic cylinders not unlike the one I’d woken up in yesterday were ranked along one wall, but where my birthing tube had been unpainted and scarred with the million tiny defacements of frequent use, these units carried a thick gloss of cream paint with yellow trim around the transparent observation plate and the various functional protrusions.
“Full life support suspension chambers,” said Nyman. “Essentially the same environment as the pods. This is where all the re-sleeving is done. We bring fresh clones through, still in the pod, and load them here. The tank nutrients have an enzyme to break down the pod wall, so the transition is completely trauma-free. Any clinical work is carried out by staff working in synthetic sleeves, to avoid any risk of contamination.”
I caught the exasperated rolling of Oumou Prescott’s eyes on the periphery of my vision and a grin twitched at the corner of my mouth.
“Who has access to this chamber?”
“Myself, authorised staff under a day code. And the owners, of course.”
I wandered down the line of cylinders, bending to examine the data displays at the foot of each one. There was a Miriam clone in the sixth, and two of Naomi’s at seven and eight.
“You’ve got the daughter on ice twice?”
“Yes.” Nyman looked puzzled, and then slightly superior. This was his chance to get back the initiative he’d lost on the fractal patterning. “Have you not been informed of her current condition?”
“Yeah, she’s in psychosurgery,” I growled. “That doesn’t explain why there’s two of her here.”
“Well.” Nyman darted a glance back at Prescott, as if to say that the divulging of further information involved some legal dimension. The lawyer cleared her throat.
“PsychaSec have instructions from Mr.Bancroft to always hold a spare clone of himself and his immediate family ready for decanting. While Ms.Bancroft is committed to the Vancouver psychiatric stack, both sleeves are stored here.”
“The Bancrofts like to alternate their sleeves,” said Nyman knowledgeably. “Many of our clients do, it saves on wear and tear. The human body is capable of quite remarkable regeneration if stored correctly, and of course we offer a complete package of clinical repair for more major damage. Very reasonably priced.”
“I’m sure it is.” I turned back from the end cylinder and grinned at him. “Still, not much you can do for a vaporised head, is there?”
There was a brief silence, during which Prescott looked fixedly at a corner of the ceiling and Nyman’s lips tightened to almost anal proportions.
“I consider that remark in very poor taste,” the director said finally. “Do you have any more important questions, Mr.Kovacs?”
I paused next to Miriam Bancroft’s cylinder and looked into it. Even through the fogging effect of the observation plate and the gel, there was a sensual abundance to the blurred form within.
“Just one question. Who decides when to alternate the sleeves?”
Nyman glanced across at Prescott as if to enlist legal support for his words. “I am directly authorised by Mr.Bancroft to effect the transfer on every occasion that he is digitised, unless specifically required not to. He made no such request on this occasion.”
There was something here, scratching at the Envoy antennae; something somewhere fitted. It was too early to give it concrete form. I looked around the room.
“This place is entry-monitored, right?”
“Naturally.” Nyman’s tone was still chilly.
“Was there much activity the day Bancroft went to Osaka?”
“No more than usual. Mr.Kovacs, the police have already been through these records. I really don’t see what value—”
“Indulge me,” I suggested, not looking at him, and the Envoy cadences in my voice shut him down like a circuit breaker.

Two hours later I was staring out of the window of another autocab as it kicked off from the Alcatraz landing quay and climbed over the Bay.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
I glanced at Oumou Prescott, wondering if she could sense the frustration coming off me. I thought I’d got most of the external giveaways on this sleeve locked down, but I’d heard of lawyers who got empath conditioning to pick up more subliminal clues to their witnesses’ states of mind when on the stand. And here, on Earth, it wouldn’t surprise me if Oumou Prescott had a full infrared subsonic body and voice scan package racked into her beautiful ebony head.
The entry data for the Bancroft vault, Thursday 16th August, was as free of suspicious comings and goings as the Mishima Mall on a Tuesday afternoon. Eight a.m., Bancroft came in with two assistants, stripped off and climbed into the waiting tank. The assistants left with his clothes. Fourteen hours later his alternate clone climbed dripping out of the neighbouring tank, collected a towel from another assistant and went to get a shower. No words exchanged beyond pleasantries. Nothing.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m looking for yet.”
Prescott yawned. “Total Absorb, huh?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” I looked at her more closely. “You know much about the Corps?”
“Bit. I did my articles in UN litigation. You pick up the terminology. So what have you absorbed so far?”
“Only that there’s a lot of smoke building up around something the authorities say isn’t burning. You ever meet the lieutenant that ran the case?”
“Kristin Ortega. Of course. I’m not likely to forget her. We were yelling at each other across a desk for the best part of a week.”
“Impressions?”
“Of Ortega?” Prescott looked surprised. “Good cop, as far as I know. Got a reputation for being very tough. The Organic Damage Division are the police department’s hard men, so earning a reputation like that wouldn’t have been easy. She ran the case efficiently enough—”
“Not for Bancroft’s liking.”
Pause. Prescott looked at me warily. “I said efficiently. I didn’t say persistently. Ortega did her job, but—”
“But she doesn’t like Meths, right?”
Another pause. “You have quite an ear for the street, Mr.Kovacs.”
“You pick up the terminology,” I said modestly. “Do you think Ortega would have kept the case open if Bancroft hadn’t been a Meth?”
Prescott thought about it for a while. “It’s a common enough prejudice,” she said slowly, “But I don’t get the impression Ortega shut us down because of it. I think she just saw a limited return on her investment. The police department has a promotion system based at least partly on the number of cases solved. No one saw a quick solution to this one, and Mr.Bancroft was alive, so…”
“Better things to do, huh?”
“Yes. Something like that.”
I stared out the window some more. The cab was flitting across the tops of slender multi-storey stacks and the traffic-crammed crevices between. I could feel an old fury building in me that had nothing to do with my current problems. Something that had accrued through the years in the Corps and the emotional rubble you got used to seeing, like silt on the surface of your soul. Virginia Vidaura, Jimmy de Soto, dying in my arms at Innenin, Sarah … A loser’s catalogue, any way you looked at it.
I locked it down.
The scar under my eye was itching, and there was the curl of the nicotine craving in my fingertips. I rubbed at the scar. Left the cigarettes in my pocket. At some indeterminate point this morning I’d determined to quit. A thought struck me at random.
“Prescott, you chose this sleeve for me, right?”
“Sorry?” She was scanning through a subretinal projection, and it took her a moment to refocus on me. “What did you say?”
“This sleeve. You chose it, right?”
She frowned. “No. As far as I know that selection was made by Mr.Bancroft. We just provided the shortlist according to specifications.”
“No, he told me his lawyers had handled it. Definitely.”
“Oh.” The frown cleared away, and she smiled faintly. “Mr.Bancroft has a great many lawyers. Probably he routed it through another office. Why?”
I grunted. “Nothing. Whoever owned this body before was a smoker, and I’m not. It’s a real pain in the balls.”
Prescott’s smile gained ground. “Are you going to give up?”
“If I can find the time. Bancroft’s deal is, I crack the case, I can be re-sleeved no expense spared, so it doesn’t really matter long term. I just hate waking up with a throatful of shit every morning.”
“Do you think you can?”
“Give up smoking?”
“No. Crack this case.”
I looked at her, deadpan. “I don’t really have any other option, counsellor. Have you read the terms of my employment?”
“Yes. I drew them up.” Prescott gave me back the deadpan look, but buried beneath it were traces of the discomfort that I needed to see to stop me reaching across the cab and smashing her nose bone up into her brain with one stiffened hand.
“Well, well,” I said, and went back to looking out of the window.

AND MY FIST UP YOUR WIFE’S CUNT WITH YOU WATCHING YOU F*ckING METH MOTHERF*ckER YOU CAN’T
I slipped off the headset and blinked. The text had carried some crude but effective virtual graphics and a subsonic that made my head buzz. Across the desk, Prescott looked at me with knowing sympathy.
“Is it all like this?” I asked.
“Well, it gets less coherent.” She gestured at the holograph display floating above the desktop, where representations of the files I was accessing tumbled in cool shades of blue and green. “This is what we call the R&R stack. Rabid and Rambling. Actually, these guys are mostly too far gone to be any real threat, but it’s not nice, knowing they’re out there.”
“Ortega bring any of them in?”
“It’s not her department. The Transmission Felony Division catches a few every now and then, when we squawk loudly enough about it, but dissemination technology being the way it is, it’s like trying to throw a net over smoke. And even when you do catch them, the worst they’ll get is a few months in storage. It’s a waste of time. We mostly just sit on this stuff until Bancroft says we can delete it.”
“And nothing new in the last six months?”
Prescott shrugged. “The religious lunatics, maybe. Some increased traffic from the Catholics on Resolution 653. Mr.Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oh, and some Martian archaeological sect has been screaming about that Songspire he keeps in his hall. Apparently last month was the anniversary of their founder’s martyrdom by leaky pressure suit. But none of these people have the wherewithal to crack the perimeter defences at Suntouch House.”
I tilted my chair back and stared up at the ceiling. A flight of grey birds angled overhead in a southward pointing chevron. Their voices were faintly audible, honking to each other. Prescott’s office was environment-formatted, all six internal surfaces projecting virtual images. Currently, her grey metal desk was incongruously positioned halfway down a sloping meadow on which the sun was beginning to decline, complete with a small herd of cattle in the distance and occasional birdsong. The image resolution was some of the best I’d seen.
“Prescott, what can you tell me about Leila Begin?”
The silence that ensued pulled my eyes back down to ground level. Oumou Prescott was staring off into a corner of the field.
“I suppose Kristin Ortega gave you that name,” she said slowly.
“Yeah.” I sat up. “She said it would give me some insight into Bancroft. In fact, she told me to run it by you to see if you rattled.”
Prescott swivelled to face me. “I don’t see how this can have any bearing on the case at hand.”
“Try me.”
“Very well.” There was a snap in her voice as she said it, and a defiant look on her face. “Leila Begin was a prostitute. Maybe still is. Fifty years ago, Bancroft was one of her clients. Through a number of indiscretions, this became known to Miriam Bancroft. The two women met at some function down in San Diego, apparently agreed to go to the bathroom together, and Miriam Bancroft beat the shit out of Leila Begin.”
I studied Prescott’s face across the table, puzzled. “And that’s it?”
“No, that’s not it, Kovacs,” she said tiredly. “Begin was six months pregnant at the time. She lost the child as a result of the beating. You physically can’t fit a spinal stack into a foetus, so that made it real death. Potential three- to five-decade sentence.”
“Was it Bancroft’s baby?”
Prescott shrugged. “Debatable. Begin refused to let them do a gene match on the foetus. Said it was irrelevant who the father was. She probably figured the uncertainty was more valuable from a press point of view than a definite no.”
“Or she was too distraught?”
“Come on, Kovacs.” Prescott jerked a hand irritably at me. “This is an Oakland whore we’re talking about.”
“Did Miriam Bancroft go into storage?”
“No, and that’s where Ortega gets to stick her knife in. Bancroft bought off everybody. The witnesses, the press, even Begin took a pay-off in the end. Settled out of court. Enough to get her a Lloyds cloning policy and take her out of the game. Last I heard, she was wearing out her second sleeve somewhere down in Brazil. But this is half a century ago, Kovacs.”
“Were you around?”
“No.” Prescott leaned across the desk. “And neither was Kristin Ortega, which makes it kind of sickening to hear her whining on about it. Oh, I had an earful of it too, when they pulled out of the investigation last month. She never even met Begin.”
“I think it might be a matter of principle,” I said gently. “Is Bancroft still going to prostitutes on a regular basis?”
“That is none of my concern.”
I stuck my finger through the holographic display and watched the coloured files distort around the intrusion. “You might have to make it your concern, counsellor. Sexual jealousy’s a pretty sturdy motive for murder, after all.”
“May I remind you that Miriam Bancroft tested negative on a polygraph when asked that question,” said Prescott sharply.
“I’m not talking about Mrs.Bancroft.” I stopped playing with the display and stared across the desk at the lawyer before me. “I’m talking about the other million available orifices out there and the even larger number of partners or blood relatives who might not relish seeing some Meth f*cking them. That’s going to have to include some experts on covert penetration, no pun intended, and maybe the odd psychopath or two. In short, someone capable of getting into Bancroft’s house and torching him.”
Off in the distance, one of the cows lowed mournfully.
“What about it, Prescott.” I waved my hand through the holograph. “Anything in here that begins FOR WHAT YOU DID TO MY GIRL, DAUGHTER, SISTER, MOTHER, DELETE AS APPLICABLE?”
I didn’t need her to answer me. I could see it in her face.
With the sun painting slanting stripes across the desk and birdsong in the trees across the meadow, Oumou Prescott bent to the database keyboard and called up a new purple oblong of holographic light on the display. I watched as it bloomed and opened like some Cubist rendition of an orchid. Behind me, another cow voiced its resigned disgruntlement.
I slipped the headset back on.