Altered Carbon (38 page)

We sat
quietly for a while.

“You
know,” said Bautista finally. “I think I’m going to go.
Sitting here talking about Ryker to Ryker’s face is getting a little
weird. I don’t know how Ortega copes.”

“Just
part of living in the modern age,” I told him, knocking back my drink.

“Yeah,
I guess. You’d think I’d have a handle on it by now. I spend half
my life talking to victims wearing other people’s faces. Not to mention
the scumbags.”

“So
which do you make Ryker for? Victim or scumbag?”

Bautista
frowned. “That ain’t a nice question. Ryker was a good cop who made
a mistake. That don’t make him a scumbag. Don’t make him a victim
either. Just makes him someone who screwed up. Me, I only live about a block
away from that myself.”

“Sure.
Sorry.” I rubbed at the side of my face. Envoy conversations
weren’t supposed to slip like that. “I’m a little tired. That
block you live on sounds familiar. I think I’m going to go to bed. You
want another drink before you go, help yourself. It’s on my tab.”

“No
thanks.” Bautista drained what was left in his glass. “Old
cop’s rule. Never drink alone.”

“Sounds
like I should have been an old cop.” I stood up, swaying a little. Ryker
may have been a death-wish smoker, but he didn’t have much tolerance for
alcohol. “You can see yourself out OK, I guess.”

“Sure.”
Bautista got up to go and made about a half dozen paces before he turned back.
He frowned with concentration. “Oh, yeah. Goes without saying, I was
never here, right.”

I gestured
him away. “You were never here,” I assured him.

He grinned
bemusedly and his face looked suddenly very young. “Right. Good. See you
round, probably.”

“See
you.”

I watched him out of sight,
then, regretfully, let the ice-cold processes of Envoy control trickle down
through my befuddled senses. When I was unpleasantly sober again, I picked up
Curtis’s drug crystals from the bar, and went to talk to the Hendrix.

You know anything about
synamorphesterone?”

“Heard
of it.” Ortega dug absently at the sand with the toe of one boot. It was
still damp from the tide’s retreat, and our footprints welled soggily
behind us. In either direction the curve of the beach was deserted. We were
alone apart from the gulls that wheeled in geometric formations high overhead.

“Well,
since we’re waiting, you want to fill me in?”

“Harem
drug.” When I looked blank, Ortega puffed out her cheeks impatiently. She
was acting like someone who hadn’t slept well.

“I’m
not from here.”

“You
were on Sharya, you told me.”

“Yeah.
In a military capacity. There wasn’t all that much time for cultural
awareness. We were too busy killing people.”

This last
wasn’t quite true. Following the sack of Zihicce, the Envoys had been
steeped in the mechanics of engineering a regime compliant to the Protectorate.
Troublemakers were rooted out, cells of resistance infiltrated and then
crushed, collaborators plugged into the political edifice. In the process
we’d learnt quite a lot about local culture.

I’d
asked for an early transfer out.

Ortega
shaded her eyes and scanned the beach in both directions. Nothing stirred. She
sighed. “It’s a male response enhancer. Boosts aggression, sexual
prowess, confidence. On the street in the Middle East and Europe they call it
Stallion, in the south it’s Toro. We don’t get much of it here,
street mood’s more ambient. Which I’m glad about. From what I hear
it can be very nasty. You run across some last night?”

“Sort
of.” This was pretty much what I’d learnt from the Hendrix database
last night, but more concise and with less chemistry. And Curtis’s
behaviour ran the checklist of symptoms and side effects like a model.
“Suppose I wanted to get hold of some of this stuff, where could I pick
it up. Easily, I mean.”

Ortega gave
me a sharp look, and picked her way back up the beach onto dryer sand.
“Like I said, we don’t get much of it here,” she said in time
with her laboured, sinking footsteps. “You’d have to ask around.
Someone with better than local connections. Or get it synthesised locally. But
I don’t know. With designer hormones that’s likely to be more
expensive than just buying it in from down south.”

She paused
at the crest of the dune and looked around again.

“Where
the hell is she?”

“Maybe
she’s not coming,” I suggested morosely. I hadn’t slept all
that well myself. Most of the night after Rodrigo Bautista’s departure
had been spent brooding over the uncooperatively jagged pieces of the Bancroft
jigsaw and fighting off the urge to smoke. My head seemed barely to have hit
the pillow when the Hendrix buzzed me awake with Ortega’s call. It was
still obscenely early in the morning.

“She’ll
come,” said Ortega. “The link’s booked through to her
personal pick-up. Call’s probably delayed at incoming security.
We’ve only been in here about ten seconds, real time.”

I shivered
in the cold wind from offshore and said nothing. Overhead, the gulls repeated
their geometry. The virtuality was cheap, not designed for long stay.

“Got
any cigarettes?”

I was
seated in the cold sand, smoking with a kind of mechanical intensity, when
something moved on the extreme right of the bay. I straightened up and narrowed
my eyes, then laid a hand on Ortega’s arm. The motion resolved itself
into a plume of sand or water, ripped into the air by a fast-moving surface
vehicle that was tearing round the curve of the beach towards us.

“Told
you she’d come.”

“Or
someone would,” I muttered, getting to my feet and reaching for the Nemex
which was, of course, not there. Not many virtual forums allowed firearms in
their constructs. Instead, I brushed sand from my clothes and moved down the
beach, still trying to rid myself of the brooding feeling that I was wasting my
time here.

The vehicle
was close enough now to be visible, a dark dot at the front of the pluming
wake. I could hear its engine, a shrill whine over the melancholy carping of
the gulls. I turned to Ortega, who was watching the approaching craft
impassively at my side.

“Bit
excessive for a phone call, isn’t it?” I said nastily.

Ortega
shrugged and spun her cigarette away into the sand. “Money doesn’t
automatically mean taste,” she said.

The
speeding dot became a stubby, finned one-man ground jet, painted iridescent
pink. It was ploughing along through the shallow surf at the water’s
edge, flinging water and wet sand indiscriminately behind it, but a few hundred
metres away the pilot must have seen us because the little craft veered out
across the deeper water and cut a spray tail twice its own height towards us.

“
Pink
?”

Ortega
shrugged again.

The ground
jet beached about ten metres away and shuddered to a halt, ripped-up gobbets of
wet sand splattering down around it. When the storm of its arrival had died, a
hatch was flung back and a black-clad, helmeted figure clambered out. That the
figure was a woman was abundantly clear from the form-fitting flight suit, a
suit that ended in boots inlaid with curling silver tracery from heel to toe.

I sighed
and followed Ortega up to the craft.

The woman
in the flight suit jumped down into the shallow water and splashed up to meet
us, tugging at the seals on her helmet. As we met, the helmet came off and long
coppery hair spilled out over the suit’s shoulders. The woman put her
head back and shook out the hair, revealing a wide-boned face with large,
expressive eyes the colour of flecked onyx, a delicately arched nose and a
generously sculpted mouth.

The old,
ghostly hint of Miriam Bancroft’s beauty this woman had once owned had
been scrubbed out utterly.

“Kovacs,
this is Leila Begin,” said Ortega formally. “Ms.Begin, this is
Takeshi Kovacs, Laurens Bancroft’s retained investigator.”

The large
eyes appraised me frankly.

“You’re
from offworld?” she asked me.

“That’s
correct. Harlan’s World.”

“Yes,
the lieutenant mentioned it.” There was a well-designed huskiness to
Leila Begin’s voice, and an accent that suggested she was unused to
speaking Amanglic. “I can only hope that means you have an open
mind.”

“Open
to what?”

“The
truth.” Begin gave me a surprised look. “Lieutenant Ortega tells me
you are interested in the truth. Shall we walk?”

Without
waiting for a response, she set off parallel with the surf. I exchanged a
glance with Ortega, who gestured with her thumb but showed no signs of moving
herself. I hesitated for a couple of moments, then went after Begin.

“What’s
all this about the truth?” I asked, catching her up.

“You
have been retained to discover who killed Laurens Bancroft,” she said
intensely, without looking round. “You wish to know the truth of what
transpired the night he died. Is this not so?”

“You
don’t think it was suicide, then?”

“Do
you?”

“I
asked first.”

I saw a
faint smile cross her lips. “No. I don’t.”

“Let
me guess. You’re pinning it on Miriam Bancroft.”

Leila Begin
stopped and turned on one of her ornate heels. “Are you mocking me,
Mr.Kovacs?”

There was
something in her eyes that drained the irritable amusement out of me on the
spot. I shook my head.

“No,
I’m not mocking you. But I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Have
you met Miriam Bancroft?”

“Briefly,
yes.”

“You
found her charming, no doubt.”

I shrugged
evasively. “A bit abrasive at times, but generally, yes. Charming would
do it.”

Begin
looked me in the eyes. “She is a psychopath,” she said seriously.

She resumed
walking. After a moment I followed her.

“Psychopath’s
not a narrow term any more,” I said carefully. “I’ve heard it
applied to whole cultures on occasion. It’s even been applied to me once
or twice. Reality is so flexible these days, it’s hard to tell who’s
disconnected from it and who isn’t. You might even say it’s a
pointless distinction.”

“Mr.Kovacs.”
There was an impatient note in the woman’s voice now. “Miriam
Bancroft assaulted me when I was pregnant and murdered my unborn child. She was
aware that I was pregnant. She acted with intention. Have you ever been seven
months pregnant?”

I shook my
head. “No.”

“That
is too bad. It’s an experience we should all be required to go through at
least once.”

“Kind
of hard to legislate.”

Begin
looked at me sidelong. “In that sleeve, you look like a man acquainted
with loss, but that’s the surface. Are you what you appear, Mr.Kovacs?
Are you acquainted with loss? Irretrievable loss, we’re discussing. Are
you acquainted with that?”

“I
think so,” I said, more stiffly than I’d intended.

“Then
you will understand my feelings about Miriam Bancroft. On Earth, cortical
stacks are fitted after birth.”

“Where
I come from too.”

“I
lost that child. No amount of technology will bring it back.”

I
couldn’t tell if the rising tide of emotion in Leila Begin’s voice
was real or contrived, but I was losing focus. I cut back to start.

“That
doesn’t give Miriam Bancroft a motive for killing her husband.”

“Of
course it does.” Begin favoured me with the sidelong glance again, and
there was another bitter smile on her face. “I was not an isolated
incident in Laurens Bancroft’s life. How do you think he met me?”

“In
Oakland, I heard.”

The smile
blossomed into a hard laugh. “Very euphemistic. Yes, he certainly met me
in Oakland. He met me at what they used to call the Meat Rack. Not a very
classy place. Laurens needed to degrade, Mr.Kovacs. That’s what made him
hard. He’d been doing it for decades before me, and I don’t see why
he would have stopped afterwards.”

“So
Miriam decides, suddenly, enough’s enough and ventilates him?”

“She’s
capable of it.”

“I’m
sure she is.” Begin’s theory was as full of holes as a captured
Sharyan deserter, but I wasn’t about to elaborate the details of what I
knew to this woman. “You harbour no feelings about Bancroft himself, I
suppose? Good or bad.”

The smile
again. “I was a whore, Mr.Kovacs. A good one. A good whore feels what the
client wants them to feel. There’s no room for anything else.”

“You
telling me you can shut your feelings down just like that?”

“You
telling me you can’t?” she retorted.

“All
right, what did Laurens Bancroft want you to feel?”

She stopped
and faced me slowly. I felt uncomfortably as if I had just slapped her. Her
face had gone mask-like with remembrance.