Altered Carbon (11 page)

It took a
certain kind of person to keep going, to
want
to keep going, life
after life, sleeve after sleeve. You had to start out different, never mind
what you might become as the centuries piled up.

“So
Bancroft gets short-changed because he’s a Meth. Sorry, Laurens,
you’re an arrogant, long-lived bastard. The Bay City police has got
better things to do with its time than take you seriously. That kind of
thing.”

But Ortega
wasn’t rising to the bait any more. She sipped her coffee and made a
dismissive gesture. “Look, Kovacs. Bancroft is alive, and whatever the
facts of the case he’s got enough security to stay that way. No one here
is groaning under the burden of a miscarriage of justice. The police department
is underfunded, understaffed and overworked. We don’t have the resources
to chase Bancroft’s phantoms indefinitely.”

“And
if they’re not phantoms?”

Ortega
sighed. “Kovacs, I went over that house myself three times with the
forensics team. There’s no sign of a struggle, no break in the perimeter
defences and no trace of an intruder anywhere in the security net’s
records. Miriam Bancroft volunteered to take every state-of-the-art polygraphic
test there is and she passed them all without a tremor. She did not kill her
husband, no one broke in and killed her husband. Laurens Bancroft killed
himself, for reasons best known to himself, and that’s all there is to
it. I’m sorry you’re supposed to prove otherwise, but wishing
isn’t going to make it fucking so. It’s an open-and-shut
case.”

“And
the phone call? The fact Bancroft wasn’t exactly going to forget he had
remote storage? The fact someone thinks I’m important enough to send
Kadmin out here?”

“I’m
not going to argue the toss with you on this, Kovacs. We’ll interrogate
Kadmin and find out what he knows, but for the rest I’ve been over the
ground before and it’s starting to bore me. There are people out there
who need us a lot worse than Bancroft does. Real death victims who
weren’t lucky enough to have remote storage when their stacks were blown
out. Catholics getting butchered because their killers know the victims will
never come out of storage to put them away.” There was a hooded tiredness
building up in Ortega’s eyes as she ticked the list off on her fingers.
“Organic damage cases who don’t have the money to get re-sleeved
unless the state can prove some kind of liability against somebody. I wade
through this stuff ten hours a day or more, and I’m sorry, I just don’t
have the sympathy to spare for Mr.Laurens Bancroft with his clones on ice and
his magic walls of influence in high places and his fancy lawyers to put us
through hoops every time some member of his family or staff wants to slide out
from under.”

“That
happen often, does it?”

“Often
enough, but don’t look surprised.” She gave me a bleak smile.
“He’s a fucking Meth. They’re all the same.”

It was a
side of her I didn’t like, an argument I didn’t want to have and a
view of Bancroft I didn’t need. And underneath it all, my nerves were
screaming for sleep.

I stubbed
out my cigarette.

“I
think you’d better go, lieutenant. All this prejudice is giving me a
headache.”

Something
flickered in her eyes, something I couldn’t read at all. There for a
second, then gone. She shrugged, put down the coffee mug and swung her legs
over the side of the shelf. She stretched herself upright, arched her spine
until it cracked audibly and walked to the door without looking back. I stayed
where I was, watching her reflection move among the city lights in the window.

At the
door, she stopped and I saw her turn her head.

“Hey,
Kovacs.”

I looked
over at her. “Forget something?”

She nodded
her head, mouth clamped in a crooked line, as if acknowledging a point in some
game we’d been playing.

“You
want an insight? You want somewhere to start? Well, you gave me Kadmin, so I
guess I owe you that.”

“You
don’t owe me a thing, Ortega. The Hendrix did it, not me.”

“Leila
Begin,” she said. “Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyers, see
where it gets you.”

The door
sliced closed and the reflected room held nothing but the lights of the city
outside. I stared out at them for a while, lit a new cigarette and smoked it
down to its filter.

Bancroft
had not committed suicide, that much was clear. I’d been on the case less
than a day and already I’d had two separate lobbies land on my back.
First, Kristin Ortega’s mannered thugs at the justice facility, then the
Vladivostock hitman and his spare sleeve. Not to mention Miriam
Bancroft’s off-the-wall behaviour. Altogether too much muddied water for
this to be what it purported to be. Ortega wanted something, whoever had paid
Dimitri Kadmin wanted something, and what they wanted, it seemed, was for the
Bancroft case to remain closed.

That
wasn’t an option I had.

“Your
guest has left the building,” said the Hendrix, jolting me out of my
glazed retrospection.

“Thanks,”
I said absently, stubbing out the cigarette in an ashtray. “Can you lock
the door, and block the elevators from this floor?”

“Certainly.
Do you wish to be advised of any entry into the hotel?”

“No.”
I yawned like a snake trying to engorge an egg. “Just don’t let
them up here. And no calls for the next seven-and-a-half hours.”

Abruptly it
was all I could do to get out of my clothes before the waves of sleep
overwhelmed me. I left Bancroft’s summer suit draped over a convenient
chair and crawled into the massive crimson-sheeted bed. The surface of the bed
undulated briefly, adjusting to my body weight and size, then bore me up like
water. A faint odour of incense drifted from the sheets.

I made a
half-hearted attempt to masturbate, mind churning damply through images of
Miriam Bancroft’s voluptuous curves, but I kept seeing Sarah’s pale
body turned to wreckage by the Kalashnikov fire instead.

And sleep dragged me under.

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.