Altered Carbon (14 page)

“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 fucking 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.

The town was called Ember. I found it on
the map, about two hundred kilometres north of Bay City, on the coast road.
There was an asymmetrical yellow symbol in the sea next to it.

“
Free
Trade Enforcer
,” said Prescott, peering over my shoulder.
“Aircraft carrier. It was the last really big warship anyone ever built.
Some idiot ran it aground way back at the start of the Colony years, and the
town grew up around the site to cater for the tourists.”

“Tourists?”

She looked
at me. “It’s a big ship.”

I hired an
ancient ground car from a seedy-looking dealership two blocks down from
Prescott’s office and drove north over the rust-coloured suspension
bridge. I needed time to think. The coastal highway was poorly maintained but
almost deserted so I stuck to the yellow line in the centre of the road and
barrelled along at a steady hundred and fifty. The radio yielded a medley of
stations whose cultural assumptions were largely above my head, but I finally
found a Neo-Maoist propaganda DJ memory-wired into some dissemination satellite
that nobody had ever bothered to decommission. The mix of high political
sentiment and saccharine karaoke numbers was irresistible. The smell of the
passing sea blew in through the open window and the road unwound ahead of me,
and for a while I forgot about the Corps and Innenin and everything that had
happened since.

By the time
I hit the long curve down into Ember, the sun was going down behind the canted
angles of the
Free Trade Enforcer
’s launch deck, and the last of
its rays were leaving almost imperceptible pink stains on the surf on either
side of the wreck’s shadow. Prescott was right. It was a big ship.

I slowed my
speed in deference to the rise of buildings around me, wondering idly how
anyone could have been stupid enough to steer a vessel that large so close to
shore. Maybe Bancroft knew. He’d probably been around then.

Ember’s
main street ran along the seafront the entire length of the town and was
separated from the beach by a line of majestic palm trees and a neo-Victorian
railing in wrought iron. There were holograph ‘casters fixed to the
trunks of the palms, all projecting the same image of a woman’s face
wreathed with the words SLIPSLIDE—ANCHANA SALOMAO & THE RIO TOTAL
BODY THEATRE. Small knots of people were out, rubbernecking at the images.

I rolled the
ground car along the street in low gear, scanning the façades, and
finally found what I was looking for about two thirds of the way along the
front. I coasted past and parked the car quietly about fifty metres up, sat
still for a few minutes to see if anything happened and then, when it
didn’t, I got out of the car and walked back along the street.

Elliott’s
Data Linkage broking was a narrow façade sandwiched between an
industrial chemicals outlet and a vacant lot where gulls screeched and fought
over scraps among the shells of discarded hardware. The door of Elliott’s
was propped open with a defunct flatscreen monitor and led directly into the
operations room. I stepped inside and cast a glance up and down. There were
four consoles set in back-to-back pairs, harboured behind a long moulded
plastic reception counter. Beyond them, doors led to a glass-walled office. The
far wall held a bank of seven monitors with incomprehensible lines of data
scrolling down. A ragged gap in the line of screens marked the previous
position of the doorstop. There were scars in the paintwork behind where the
brackets had resisted extraction. The screen next to the gap had rolling
flickers, as if whatever had killed the first one was contagious.

“Help
you?”

A
thin-faced man of indeterminate age poked his head round the corner of one of
the sloping banks of console equipment. There was an unlit cigarette in his
mouth and a trailing thread of cable jacked into an interface behind his right
ear. His skin was unhealthily pale.

“Yeah,
I’m looking for Victor Elliott.”

“Out
front.” He gestured back the way I had come. “See the old guy on
the rail? Watching the wreck? That’s him.”

I looked
out into the evening beyond the door and picked out the solitary figure at the
rail.

“He
owns this place, right?”

“Yeah.
For his sins.” The datarat cracked a grin and gestured around. “Not
much call for him to be in the office, business the way it is.”

I thanked
him and went back out onto the street. The light was starting to fade now, and
Anchana Salomao’s holographic face was gaining a new dominance in the
gathering gloom. Crossing beneath one of the banners, I came up next to the man
on the rail and leaned my own arms on the black iron. He looked round as I
joined him and gave me a nod of acknowledgement, then went back to staring at
the horizon as if he was looking for a crack in the weld between sea and sky.

“That’s
a pretty grim piece of parking,” I said, gesturing out at the wreck.

It earned
me a speculative look before he answered me. “They say it was
terrorists.” His voice was empty, disinterested, as if he’d once
put too much effort into using it and something had broken. “Or sonar
failure in a storm. Maybe both.”

“Maybe
they did it for the insurance,” I said.

Elliott
looked at me again, more sharply. “You’re not from here?” he
asked, a fraction more interest edging his tone this time.

“No.
Passing through.”

“From
Rio?” He gestured up at Anchana Salomao as he said it. “You an
artist?”

“No.”

“Oh.”
He seemed to consider this for a moment. It was as if conversation was a skill
he’d forgotten. “You move like an artist.”

“Near
miss. It’s military neurachem.”

He got it
then, but the shock didn’t seem to go beyond a brief flicker in his eyes.
He looked me up and down slowly, then turned back to the sea.

“You
come looking for me? You from Bancroft?”

“You
might say that.”

He
moistened his lips. “Come to kill me?”

I took the
hardcopy out of my pocket and handed it across to him. “Come to ask you
some questions. Did you transmit this?”

He read it,
lips moving wordlessly. Inside my head, I could hear the words he was tasting
again: …
for taking my daughter from me … will burn the flesh
from your head … will never know the hour or the day … nowhere safe
in this life
… It wasn’t highly original, but it was heartfelt
and articulate in a way that was more worrying than any of the vitriol Prescott
had shown me on the Rabid & Rambling stack. It also specified exactly the
death Bancroft had suffered. The particle blaster would have charred the
outside of Bancroft’s skull to a crisp before exploding the superheated
contents across the room.

“Yes,
that’s mine,” Elliott said quietly.

“You’re
aware that someone assassinated Laurens Bancroft last month.”

He handed
me back the paper. “That so? The way I heard it, the bastard torched his
own head off.”

“Well,
that is a possibility,” I conceded, screwing up the paper and tossing it
into a refuse-filled skip below us on the beach. “But it’s not one
I’m being paid to take seriously. Unfortunately for you, the cause of
death comes uncomfortably close to your prose style there.”

“I
didn’t do it,” said Elliott flatly.

“I
figured you’d say that. I might even believe you, except that whoever did
kill Bancroft got through some very heavy-duty security systems, and you used
to be a sergeant in the tactical marines. Now, I knew some tacs back on
Harlan’s World, and a few of them were wired for covert wet work.”

Elliott
looked at me curiously. “You a grasshopper?”

“A
what?”

“Grasshopper.
Offworlder.”

“Yeah.”
If Elliott had ever been afraid of me, it was wearing off fast. I considered
playing the Envoy card, but it didn’t seem worth it. The man was still
talking.

“Bancroft
don’t need to bring in muscle from offworld. What’s your angle on
this?”

“Private
contractor,” I said. “Find the killer.”

Elliott
snorted. “And you thought it was me.”

I
hadn’t thought that, but I let it go, because the misconception was
giving him a feeling of superiority that kept the conversation rolling.
Something approaching a spark appeared in his eyes.

“You
think I could have got into Bancroft’s house? I know I couldn’t,
because I ran the specs. If there was any way in, I would have taken it a year
ago, and you would have found little pieces of him scattered on the
lawn.”

“Because
of your daughter?”

“Yes,
because of my daughter.” The anger was fuelling his animation. “My
daughter and all the others like her. She was only a kid.”

He broke
off and stared out to sea again. After a moment, he gestured at the
Free
Trade Enforcer
, where I could now see small lights glimmering around what
must be a stage set up on the sloping launch deck. “That was what she
wanted. All she wanted. Total Body Theatre. Be like Anchana Salomao and Rhian
Li. She went to Bay City because she heard there was a connection there, someone
who could—”

He jarred
to a halt, and looked at me. The datarat had called him old, and now for the
first time I saw why. In spite of his solid sergeant’s bulk and barely
swelling waistline, the face was old, carved in the harsh lines of long-term
pain. He was on the edge of tears.

“She
could have made it too. She was beautiful.”

He was
fumbling for something in his pocket. I produced my cigarettes and offered him
one. He took it automatically, lit it from the proffered ignition patch on the
packet, but he went on fumbling in his pockets until he’d dug out a small
Kodakristal. I really didn’t want to see this, but he activated it before
I could say anything and a tiny cubed image sprang up in the air between us.

He was
right. Elizabeth Elliott was a beautiful girl, blonde and athletic and only a
few years younger than Miriam Bancroft. Whether she had the driving
determination and horselike stamina that you needed in Total Body Theatre, the
picture didn’t show, but she probably could have given it a shot.

The holoshot
showed her sandwiched between Elliott and another woman who was an almost
perfect older edition of Elizabeth. The three of them had been taken in bright
sunlight somewhere with grass, and the picture was marred by a bar of shadow
falling from a tree beyond the cast of the recorder across the older
woman’s face. She was frowning, as if she had noticed the flaw in the
composition, but it was a small frown, a fractional chiselling of lines between
her brows. A palpable shimmer of happiness overwhelmed the detail.