Altered Carbon (28 page)

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It was quiet and sunny in the gardens at
Suntouch House, and the air smelled of mown grass. From the tennis courts came
the faint popping of a game in progress and once I heard Miriam
Bancroft’s voice raised in excitement. Flash of tanned legs beneath a
flaring white skirt and a puff of shell-pink dust where the driven ball buried
itself in the back of her opponent’s court. There was a polite ripple of
applause from the seated figures watching. I made my way down towards the
courts, flanked by heavily armed security men with blank faces.

The players
were taking a game break when I arrived, feet planted wide in front of their
seats, heads down. As my feet crunched on the gravel surround, Miriam Bancroft
looked up through tangled blonde hair and met my eye. She said nothing, but her
hands worked at the handle of her racket and a smile split her lips. Her
opponent, who also glanced up, was a slim young man with something about him
that suggested he might genuinely be as young as his body. He looked vaguely
familiar.

Bancroft
was seated at the middle of a row of deck chairs, Oumou Prescott on his right
and a man and woman I’d never met on his left. He didn’t get up
when I reached him; in fact he barely looked at me. One hand gestured to the
seat next to Prescott.

“Sit
down, Kovacs. It’s the last game.”

I twitched
a smile, resisting the temptation to kick his teeth down his throat, and folded
myself into the deck chair. Oumou Prescott leaned across to me and murmured
behind her hand.

“Mr.Bancroft
has had some unwanted attention from the police today. You are being less
subtle than we had hoped.”

“Just
warming up,” I muttered back.

By some
prior agreed time limit, Miriam Bancroft and her opponent shrugged off their
towels and took up position. I settled back and watched the play, eyes mostly
on the woman’s taut body as it surged and swung within the white cotton,
remembering how it looked unclothed, how it had writhed against me. Once, just
before a service, she caught me looking at her and her mouth bent in fractional
amusement. She was still waiting for an answer from me, and now she thought she
had it. When the match finished, in a flurry of hard-fought but visibly
inevitable points, she came off court glowing.

She was
talking to the man and woman I didn’t know when I approached to offer my
congratulations. She saw me coming and turned to include me in the little
group.

“Mr.Kovacs.”
Her eyes widened the slightest bit. “Did you enjoy watching?”

“Very
much,” I said truthfully. “You’re quite merciless.”

She tipped
her head on one side and began to towel her sweat-soaked hair with one hand.
“Only when required,” she said. “You won’t know Nalan
or Joseph, of course. Nalan, Joseph, this is Takeshi Kovacs, the Envoy Laurens
hired to look into his murder. Mr.Kovacs is from offworld. Mr.Kovacs, this is
Nalan Ertekin, Chief Justice of the UN Supreme Court, and Joseph Phiri from the
Commission of Human Rights.”

“Delighted.”
I made a brief formal bow to both of them. “You’re here to discuss
Resolution 653, I imagine.”

The two
officials exchanged a glance, then Phiri nodded. “You’re very well
informed,” he said gravely. “I’ve heard a lot about the Envoy
Corps, but still I’m impressed. How long have you been on Earth,
exactly?”

“About
a week.” I exaggerated, hoping to play down the usual paranoia elected
officials exhibit around Envoys.

“A
week, yes. Impressive indeed.” Phiri was a heavy-set black man,
apparently in his fifties, with hair that was greying a little and careful
brown eyes. Like Dennis Nyman, he affected external eye-wear, but where
Nyman’s steely lenses had been designed to enhance the planes of his
face, this man wore the glasses to deflect attention. They were heavy-framed
and gave him the appearance of a forgetful cleric, but behind the lenses, the
eyes missed nothing.

“And
are you making progress with your investigation?” This was Ertekin, a
handsome Arab woman a couple of decades younger than Phiri, and therefore
likely to be on at least her second sleeve. I smiled at her.

“Progress
is difficult to define, your honour. As Quell would have it,
They come to
me with progress reports, but all I see is change, and bodies burnt
.”

“Ah,
you are from Harlan’s World, then,” Ertekin said politely.
“And do you consider yourself a Quellist, Mr.Kovacs?”

I let the
smile become a grin. “Sporadically. I’d say she had a point.”

“Mr.Kovacs
has been quite busy, in fact,” said Miriam Bancroft hurriedly. “I
imagine he and Laurens have a lot to discuss. Perhaps it might be better if we
left them to these matters.”

“Yes,
of course.” Ertekin inclined her head. “Perhaps we’ll talk
again later.”

The three
of them drifted over to commiserate with Miriam’s opponent, who was
ruefully stowing his racket and towels in a bag; but for all Miriam’s
diplomatic steerage, Nalan Ertekin did not seem unduly concerned to make her
escape. I felt a momentary glimmer of admiration for her. Telling a UN
executive, in effect an officer of the Protectorate, that you’re a
Quellist is a bit like confessing to ritual slaughter at a vegetarian dinner;
it’s not really the done thing.

I turned to
find Oumou Prescott at my shoulder.

“Shall
we?” she said grimly, and pointed up towards the house. Bancroft was
already striding ahead. We went after him at what I thought was an excessive
pace.

“One
question,” I managed, between breathing. “Who’s the kid? The
one Mrs.Bancroft crucified.”

Prescott
flicked me an impatient glance.

“Big
secret, huh?”

“No,
Mr.Kovacs, it is not a secret, large or otherwise. I merely think you might do
better occupying your mind with other matters than the Bancrofts’ house
guests. If you must know, the other player was Marco Kawahara.”

“Was
it, indeed.” Accidentally, I’d slipped into Phiri’s speech
patterns. Chalk up a double strike for personality. “So that’s
where I’ve seen his face before. Takes after his mother, doesn’t
he?”

“I
really wouldn’t know,” said Prescott dismissively. “I have
never met Ms.Kawahara.”

“Lucky
you.”

Bancroft
was waiting for us in an exotic conservatory pinned to the seaward wing of the
house. The glass walls were a riot of alien colours and forms, among which I
picked out a young mirrorwood tree and numerous stands of martyrweed. Bancroft
was standing next to one of the latter, spraying it carefully with a white
metallic dust. I don’t know much about martyrweed beyond its obvious uses
as a security device, so I had no idea what the powder was.

Bancroft
turned as we came in. “Please keep your voices reasonably low.” His
own voice was curiously flat in the sound absorbent environment.
“Martyrweed is highly sensitive at this stage of development. Mr.Kovacs,
I assume you are familiar with it.”

“Yeah.”
I glanced at the vaguely hand-shaped cups of the leaves, with the central
crimson stains that had given the plant its name. “You sure these are
mature?”

“Fully.
On Adoracion, you’ll have seen them larger, but I had Nakamura tailor
these for indoor use. This is as secure as a Nilvibe cabin and,” he
gestured to a trio of steel frame chairs beside the martyrweed, “a great
deal more comfortable.”

“You
wanted to see me,” I said impatiently. “What about?”

For just a
moment that black iron stare bent on me with the full force of Bancroft’s
three and a half centuries, and it was like locking gazes with a demon. For
that second, the Meth soul was looking out and I saw reflected in those eyes
all the myriad ordinary single lives that they had watched die, like the pale
flickerings of moths at a flame. It was an experience I’d only had once
before, and that was when I’d taken issue with Reileen Kawahara. I could
feel the heat on my wings.

Then it was
gone, and there was only Bancroft, moving to seat himself and setting the
powder spray aside on an adjacent table. He looked up and waited to see if I
would sit down as well. When I did not, he steepled his fingers and frowned.
Oumou Prescott hovered between us.

“Mr.Kovacs,
I am aware that by the terms of our contract I agreed to meet all reasonable
expenses in this investigation, but when I said that, I did not expect to be
paying for a trail of wilful organic damage from one side of Bay City to
another. I have spent most of this morning buying off both the West Coast
triads and the Bay City police, neither of whom were very well disposed towards
me even before you started this carnage. I wonder if you realise how much it is
costing me just to keep you alive and out of storage.”

I looked
around at the conservatory and shrugged.

“I
imagine you can afford it.”

Prescott
flinched. Bancroft allowed himself the splinter of a smile.

“Perhaps,
Mr.Kovacs, I no longer wish to afford it.”

“Then
pull the fucking plug.” The martyrweed trembled visibly at the sudden
change in tone. I didn’t care. Abruptly, I was no longer in the mood for
playing the Bancrofts’ elegant games. I was tired. Discounting the brief
period of unconsciousness at the clinic, I had been awake for over thirty hours
and my nerves were raw from the continual use of the neurachem system. I had
been in a firefight. I had escaped from a moving aircar. I had been subjected
to interrogation routines that would have traumatised most human beings for a
lifetime. I had committed multiple combat murders. And I had been in the act of
crawling into bed when the Hendrix let Bancroft’s curt summons through
the call block I’d requested, quote,‘in the interests of
maintaining good client relations and so assuring continued guest
status’. Someday, someone was going to have to overhaul the hotel’s
antique service industry idiolect; I had weighed the idea of doing it myself
with the Nemex when I got off the phone, but my irritation at the hotel’s
enslaved responses to guest-holding was overridden by the anger I felt towards
Bancroft himself. It was that anger that had stopped me ignoring the call and
going to bed anyway, and propelled me out to Suntouch House dressed in the same
rumpled clothes I had been wearing since the previous day.

“I
beg your pardon, Mr.Kovacs?” Oumou Prescott was staring at me. “Are
you suggesting—”

“No,
I’m not, Prescott. I’m threatening.” I switched my gaze back
to Bancroft. “I didn’t ask to join this fucking No dance. You
dragged me here, Bancroft. You pulled me out of the store on Harlan’s
World and you jacked me into Elias Ryker’s sleeve just to piss Ortega
off. You sent me out there with a few vague hints and watched me stumble around
in the dark, cracking my shins on your past misdemeanours. Well, if you
don’t want to play any more, now the current’s running a little
hard, that’s fine with me. I’m through risking my stack for a piece
of shit like you. You can just put me back in the box, and I’ll take my
chances a hundred and seventeen years from now. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and
whoever wants you toasted will have wiped you off the face of the planet by
then.”

I’d
had to check my weapons at the main gate, but I could feel the dangerous
looseness of the Envoy combat mode stealing over me as I spoke. If the Meth
demon came back and got out of hand, I was going to choke the life out of
Bancroft there and then just for the satisfaction.

Curiously,
what I said only seemed to make him thoughtful. He heard me out, inclined his
head as if in agreement, then turned to Prescott.

“Ou,
can you drop out for a while. There are some things that Mr.Kovacs and I need to
discuss in private.”

Prescott
looked dubious. “Shall I post someone outside?” she queried, with a
hard glance at me. Bancroft shook his head.

“I’m
sure that won’t be necessary.”

Prescott
left, looking dubious, while I struggled not to admire Bancroft’s cool.
He’d just heard me say I was happy to go back into storage, he’d
been reading my body count all morning, and still he thought he had my specs
down tight enough to know whether I was dangerous or not.

I took a
seat. Maybe he was right.

“You’ve
got some explaining to do,” I said evenly. “You can start with
Ryker’s sleeve, and go on from there. Why’d you do it, and why
conceal it from me?”

“Conceal
it?” Bancroft’s brows arched. “We barely discussed it.”

“You
told me you’d left the sleeve selection to your lawyers. You were at
pains to stress that. But Prescott insists you made the selection yourself. You
should have briefed her a bit better on the lies you were going to tell.”

“Well.”
Bancroft made a gesture of acceptance. “A reflexive caution, then. One tells
the truth to so few people in the end, it becomes a habit. But I had no idea it
would matter to you so much. After your career in the Corps, and your time in
storage, I mean. Do you usually exhibit this much interest in the past history
of the sleeves you wear?”

“No,
I don’t. But ever since I arrived, Ortega’s been all over me like
anticontaminant plastic. I thought it was because she had something to hide.
Turns out, she’s just trying to protect her boyfriend’s sleeve
while he’s in the store. Incidentally, did you bother to find out why
Ryker was on stack?”