Altered Carbon (10 page)

“I’m
trying,” grunted the mohican. “Some augmentation in here, I reckon.
One of those antishock washers Noguchi was talking about last time he was over
… Shit!! Thought I had it there.”

“No,
look, you’re working at the wrong angle. Let me try.” Ortega took
the knife and put one knee on the skull to steady it.

“Shit,
I nearly had it, chief.”

“Yeah,
yeah, I’m not spending all night watching you poke around in
there.” She glanced up and saw me watching her, nodded a brief
acknowledgement and put the serrated point of the blade in place. Then with a
sharp blow to the haft of the knife, she chopped something loose. She looked up
at the mohican with a grin.

“Hear
that?”

She reached
down into the gore and pulled out the stack between finger and thumb. It
didn’t look like much, impact-resistant casing streaked with blood and
barely the size of a cigarette butt with the twisted filaments of the
microjacks protruding stiffly from one end. I could see how the Catholics might
not want to believe this was the receptacle of the human soul.

“Gotcha,
Dimi.” Ortega held up the stack to the light, then passed it and the
knife to the mohican. She wiped her fingers on the corpse’s clothing.
“Right, let’s get the other one out of the woman.”

As we
watched the mohican repeating the procedure on the second body, I tipped my
head close enough to Ortega to mutter.

“So
you know who this one is as well?”

She jerked
round to look at me, whether out of surprise or dislike of my proximity I
couldn’t be sure. “Yeah, this is Dimi the Twin too. Ha, pun! The
sleeve’s registered out of Ulan Bator, which for your information is the
black market downloading capital of Asia. See, Dimi’s not a very trusting
soul. He likes to have people he can be sure of backing him up. And the circles
Dimi mixes in, the only person you can really trust is you.”

“Those
sound like familiar circles. Is it easy to get yourself copied on Earth?”

Ortega
grimaced. “Getting easier all the time. Technology the way it is now, a
state-of-the-art re-sleeving processor fits into a bathroom. Pretty soon
it’s going to be an elevator. Then a suitcase.” She shrugged.
“Price of progress.”

“About
the only way you can get it done on Harlan’s World is to file for a
stellar range ‘cast, get an insurance copy held for the duration of the
trip and then cancel the transmission at the last minute. Fake a transit
certificate, then claim a vital interest for a temporary download from the
copy. This guy’s offworld and his business is crumbling, that kind of
thing. Download once from the original at the transmission station, and again
through the insurance company somewhere else. Copy One walks out of the station
legally. He just changed his mind about going. Lots of people do. Copy Two
never reports back to the insurance company for re-storage. Costs a lot of
money, though. You’ve got to bribe a lot of people, steal a lot of
machine time to get away with it.”

The mohican
slipped and cut his thumb on the knife. Ortega rolled her eyes and sighed in a
compressed fashion. She turned back to face me.

“It’s
easier here,” she said shortly.

“Yeah?
How’s it work?”

“It—”
She hesitated, as if trying to work out why she was talking to me. ”Why
do you want to know?”

I grinned
at her. “Just naturally nosy, I guess.”

“OK,
Kovacs.” She cupped both hands around her coffee mug. “Works like
this. One day Mr.Dimitri Kadmin walks into one of the big retrieval and
re-sleeving insurance companies. I mean someone
really
respectable,
like Lloyds or Cartwright Solar, maybe.”

“Is
that here?” I gestured out at the bridge lights visible beyond the
windows of my room. “In Bay City?”

The mohican
had given Ortega some odd looks when she stayed behind as the police departed
the Hendrix. She saw him off with another admonition to get Kadmin downloaded
rapido, and then we went upstairs. She barely watched the police cruisers
leave.

“Bay
City, East Coast, maybe even Europe.” Ortega sipped her coffee, wincing
at the overload of whisky she’d asked the Hendrix to dump in it.
“Doesn’t matter. What matters is the company. Someone established.
Someone who’s been underwriting since downloading happened. Mr.Kadmin
wants to take out an R&R policy, which, after a long discussion about
premiums, he does. See, this has got to look good. It’s the long con,
with the one difference that what we’re after here is more than
money.”

I leaned
back against my side of the window frame. The Watchtower suite had been aptly
named. All three rooms looked out across the city and the water beyond, either
north or westward, and the window shelf in the lounge accounted for about a
fifth of the available space, layered with psychedelically coloured cushion
mats. Ortega and I were seated opposite each other with a clean metre of space
between us.

“OK,
so that’s one copy. Then what?”

Ortega
shrugged. “Fatal accident.”

“In
Ulan Bator?”

“Right.
Dimi runs himself into a power pylon at high speed, falls out of a hotel
window, something like that. An Ulan Bator handling agent retrieves the stack,
and, for a hefty bribe, makes a copy. In come Cartwright Solar, or Lloyds with
their retrieval writ, freight Dimi (d.h.) back to their clone bank and download
him into the waiting sleeve. Thank you very much, sir. Nice doing business with
you.”

“Meanwhile…”

“Meanwhile
the handling agent buys up a black market sleeve, probably some catatonia case
from a local hospital, or a scene-of-the-crime drugs victim who’s not too
physically damaged. The Ulan Bator police do a screaming trade in DOAs. The agent
wipes the sleeve’s mind, downloads Dimi’s copy into it, and the
sleeve just walks out of there. Suborbital to the other side of the globe and
off to work in Bay City.”

“You
don’t catch these guys too often.”

“Almost
never. Point is, you’ve got to catch both copies cold, either dead like
this or held on a UN indictable offence. Without the UN rap, you’ve got
no legal right to download from a living body. And in a no-win situation, the
twin just gets its cortical stack blown out through the back of its neck before
we can make the bust. I’ve seen it happen.”

“That’s
pretty severe. What’s the penalty for all this?”

“Erasure.”

“
Erasure
?
You do that here?”

Ortega
nodded. There was a small, grim smile playing all around her mouth, but never
quite on it. “Yeah, we do that here. Shock you?”

I thought
about it. Some crimes in the Corps carried the erasure penalty, principally
desertion or refusal to obey a combat order, but I’d never seen it
applied. It ran counter to the conditioning to cut and run. And on
Harlan’s World erasure had been abolished a decade before I was born.

“It’s
kind of old-fashioned, isn’t it?”

“You
feel bad about what’s going to happen to Dimi?”

I ran the
tip of my tongue over the cuts on the inside of my mouth. Thought about the
cold circle of metal at my neck and shook my head. “No. But does it stop
with people like him?”

“There
are a few other capital crimes, but they mostly get commuted to a couple of
centuries in storage.” The look on Ortega’s face said she
didn’t think that was such a great idea.

I put my
coffee down and reached for a cigarette. The motions were automatic, and I was
too tired to stop them. Ortega waved away the offered pack. Touching my own
cigarette to the packet’s ignition patch, I squinted at her.

“How
old are you, Ortega?”

She looked
back at me narrowly. “Thirty-four. Why?”

“Never
been d.h.’d, hmm?”

“Yeah,
I had psychosurgery a few years back, they put me under for a couple of days.
Apart from that, no. I’m not a criminal, and I don’t have the money
for that kind of travel.”

I let out
the first breath of smoke. “Kind of touchy about it, aren’t
you?”

“Like
I said, I’m not a criminal.”

“No.”
I thought back to the last time I had seen Virginia Vidaura. “If you
were, you wouldn’t think two hundred years dislocation was such an easy
rap.”

“I
didn’t say that.”

“You
didn’t have to.” I didn’t know what had led me to forget that
Ortega was the law, but
something
had. Something had been building in
the space between the two of us, something like a static charge, something I
might have been able to work out if my Envoy intuitions hadn’t been so
blunted by the new sleeve. Whatever it was, it had just walked out of the room.
I drew my shoulders in and pulled harder on the cigarette. I needed sleep.

“Kadmin’s
expensive, right? With overheads like that, risks like that, he’s got to
cost.”

“About
twenty grand a hit.”

“Then
Bancroft didn’t commit suicide.”

Ortega
raised an eyebrow. “That’s fast work, for someone who just got
here.”

“Oh,
come on.” I exploded a lungful of smoke at her. “If it was suicide,
who the fuck paid out the twenty to have me hit?”

“You’re
well liked, are you?”

I leaned
forward. “No, I’m disliked in a lot of places, but not by anyone
with those kind of connections or that kind of money. I’m not classy
enough to make enemies at that level. Whoever set Kadmin on me knows I’m
working for Bancroft.”

Ortega
grinned. “Thought you said they didn’t call you by name?”

Tired,
Takeshi
. I could almost see Virginia
Vidaura wagging her finger at me.
The Envoy Corps don’t get taken
apart by local law
.

I stumbled
on as best I could.

“They
knew who I was. Men like Kadmin don’t hang around hotels waiting to rip
off the tourists. Ortega, come
on
.”

She let my
exasperation sink into the silence before she answered me. “So Bancroft
was hit as well? Maybe. So what?”

“So
you’ve got to reopen the inquiry.”

“You
don’t listen, Kovacs.” She bent me a smile meant for stopping armed
men in their tracks. “The case is closed.”

I sagged
back against the wall and watched her through the smoke for a while. Finally, I
said, “You know, when your clean-up squad arrived tonight one of them
showed me his badge for long enough to actually see it. Quite fancy, close up.
That eagle and shield. All the lettering around it.”

She made a
get-on-with-it gesture, and I took another pull on my cigarette before I sank
the barb in.

“
To
protect and serve
? I guess by the time you make lieutenant, you
don’t really believe that stuff any more.”

Contact. A
muscle jumped under one eye and her cheeks pulled in as if she was sucking on
something bitter. She stared at me, and for that moment I thought I might have
pushed too far. Then her shoulders slumped and she sighed.

“Ah,
go ahead. What the fuck do you know about it anyway? Bancroft’s not
people like you and me. He’s a fucking Meth.”

“A
Meth?”

“Yeah.
A Meth. You know,
and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty
and nine years
. He’s old. I mean, really old.”

“Is
that a crime, lieutenant?”

“It
should be,” said Ortega grimly. “You live that long, things start
happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think
you’re God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old,
well they don’t really matter any more. You’ve seen whole societies
rise and fall, and you start to feel you’re standing outside it all, and
none of it really matters to you. And maybe you’ll start snuffing those
little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet.”

I looked
seriously at her. “You pin anything like that on Bancroft? Ever?”

“I’m
not talking about Bancroft,” she waved the objection aside impatiently,
“I’m talking about his
kind
. They’re like the AIs.
They’re a breed apart. They’re not human, they deal with humanity
the way you and I deal with insect life. Well, when you’re dealing with
the Bay City police department, having that kind of attitude can sometimes
backup on you.”

I thought
briefly of Reileen Kawahara’s excesses, and wondered how far off the mark
Ortega really was. On Harlan’s World, most people could afford to be
re-sleeved at least once, but the point was that unless you were very rich you
had to live out your full span each time and old age, even with antisen
treatment, was a wearying business. Second time around was worse because you
knew what to expect. Not many had the stamina to do it more than twice. Most
people went into voluntary storage after that, with occasional temporary
re-sleevings for family matters, and of course even those re-sleevings thinned out
as time passed and new generations bustled in without the old ties.