Altered Carbon (55 page)

I missed
Ortega.

“What
about Kadmin?”

“It’s
hard to know, but I’m betting whoever infected Jack It Up in the first
place probably hired Kadmin to silence me and make sure the whole thing stayed
covered up. After all, without me stirring things up, how long would it have
been before anyone realised Jack had been iced? Can’t see any of its
potential clients calling the police when they got refused entry, can
you?”

Bancroft
gave me a hard look, but I knew from his next words that the battle was almost
over. The balance of belief was tipping towards me. Bancroft was going to buy
the package. “You’re saying the virus was introduced deliberately.
That someone murdered this machine?”

I shrugged.
“It seems likely. Jack It Up operated on the margins of local law. A lot
of its software appears to have been impounded by the Felony Transmission
department at one time or another, which suggests that it had regular dealings
with the criminal world in one form or another. It is possible that it made
some enemies. On Harlan’s World the yakuza have been known to perform
viral execution on machines judged to have betrayed them. I don’t know if
that happens here, or who’d have the stack muscle to do it. But I do know
that whoever hired Kadmin used an AI to pull him out of police storage. You can
verify that with Fell Street, if you like.”

Bancroft
was silent. I watched him for a moment, seeing the belief sink in. Watching the
process as he convinced himself. I could almost see what he was seeing.
Himself, hunched over in an autocab as the sordid guilt over what he had been
doing at Jack It Up merged sickeningly with the horror of the contamination
warnings sirening in his head. Infected! Himself, Laurens Bancroft, stumbling
through the dark towards the lights of Suntouch House and the only surgery that
could save him. Why had he left the cab so far from home? Why had he not
wakened anybody for help? These were questions I no longer needed to answer for
him. Bancroft
believed
. His guilt and self-disgust
made
him
believe, and he would find his own answers to reinforce the horrific images in
his head.

And by the
time Transmission Felony cut a safe path through to Jack It Up’s core
processors, Rawling 4851 would have eaten out every scrap of coherent intellect
the machine ever had. There would be nothing left to dispute the carefully
constructed lie I’d told for Kawahara.

I got up
and went back to the balcony, wondering if I should allow myself a cigarette.
It had been tough to lock down the need the last couple of days. Watching Irene
Elliott at work had been nerve-racking. I forced my hand to relinquish the
packet in my breast pocket, and gazed down at Miriam Bancroft, who by now was
well on the way to completing her glider. When she looked up, I glanced away
along the balcony rail and saw Bancroft’s telescope, still pointed
seaward at the same shallow angle. Idle curiosity made me lean across and look
at the figures for angle of elevation. The finger marks in the dust were still
there.

Dust?

Bancroft’s
unconsciously arrogant words came back to me.
It was an enthusiasm I had.
Back when the stars were still something to stare at. You wouldn’t
remember how that felt. Last time I looked through that lens was nearly two
centuries ago
.

I stared at
the finger marks, mesmerised by my own thoughts. Someone had been looking
through this lens a lot more recently than two hundred years ago, but they
hadn’t kept at it very long. From the minimal displacement of dust it
looked as if the programming keys had only been used once. On a sudden impulse,
I moved up to the telescope and followed the line of its barrel out over the
sea to where visibility blurred in the haze. That far out the angle of
elevation would give you a view of empty air a couple of kilometres up. I bent
to the eye-piece as if in a dream. A grey speck showed up in the centre of my
field of vision, blurring in and out of focus as my eyes struggled with the
surrounding expanses of blue. Lifting my head and checking the control pad
again, I found a max amp key and thumbed it impatiently. When I looked again,
the grey speck had sprung into hard focus, filling most of the lens. I breathed
out slowly, feeling as if I’d had the cigarette after all.

The airship
hung like a bottleback, gorged after feeding frenzy. It must have been several
hundred metres long, with swellings along the lower half of the hull and
protruding sections that looked like landing pads. I knew what I was looking at
even before Ryker’s neurachem reeled in the last increments of magnification
I needed to make out the sun-burnished lettering on the side that spelled it
out; Head in the Clouds.

I stepped
back from the telescope, breathing deeply, and as my eyes slid back to normal
focus I saw Miriam Bancroft again. She was standing amidst the parts of her
glider, staring up at me. I almost flinched as our eyes met. Dropping a hand to
the telescope programme pad, I did what Bancroft should have done before he
blew his own head off. I hit memory-wipe, and the digits that had held the
airship available for viewing for the last seven weeks blinked out.

I had felt
like many kinds of fool in my life, but never quite as completely as I did at
that moment. A first-order clue had been waiting there in the lens for anyone
to come along and pick it up. Missed by the police in their haste, disinterest
and lack of close knowledge, missed by Bancroft because the telescope was so
much a part of his world view it was too close to give a second glance to, but
I had no such excuses. I had stood here a week ago and seen the two mismatched
pieces of reality clash against each other. Bancroft claiming not to have used
the telescope in centuries almost at the same moment that I saw the evidence of
recent use in the disturbed dust. And Miriam Bancroft had hammered it home less
than an hour later when she said,
While Laurens was staring at the stars,
some of us kept our eyes on the ground
. I’d thought of the telescope
then, my mind had rebelled at the downloading-induced sluggishness and tried to
tell me. Shaky and off balance, new to the planet and the flesh I was wearing,
I had ignored it. The download dues had taken their toll.

Below on
the lawn, Miriam Bancroft was still watching me. I backed away from the
telescope, composed my features and returned to my seat. Absorbed by the images
I had faked into his head, Bancroft seemed scarcely to know that I had moved.

But now my
own mind was in overdrive, ripping along avenues of thought that had opened
with Ortega’s list and the Resolution 653 T-shirt. The quiet resignation
I had felt in Ember two days ago, the impatience to sell my lies to Bancroft,
get Sarah out and be finished were all gone. Everything tied in to Head in the
Clouds, ultimately even Bancroft. It was almost axiomatic that he had gone
there the night he died. Whatever had happened to him there was the key to his
reasons for dying here at Suntouch House a few hours later. And to the truth
that Reileen Kawahara was so desperate to hide.

Which meant
I had to go there myself.

I picked up
my glass and swallowed some of the drink, not tasting it. The sound it made
seemed to wake Bancroft from his daze. He looked up, almost as if he was
surprised to see me still there.

“Please
excuse me, Mr.Kovacs. This is a lot to take in. After all the scenarios I had
envisaged, this is one I had not even considered and it is so simple. So
blindingly obvious.” His voice held a wealth of self-disgust. “The
truth is that I did not need an Envoy investigator, I simply needed a mirror to
hold up to myself.”

I set down
my glass and got to my feet.

“You’re
leaving?”

“Well,
unless you have any further questions. Personally, I think you still need some
time. I’ll be around. You can get me at the Hendrix.”

On my way
out along the main hall, I came face to face with Miriam Bancroft. She was dressed
in the same coveralls she’d been wearing in the garden, hair caught up in
an expensive-looking static clip. In one hand she was carrying a trellised
plant urn, held up like a lantern on a stormy night. Long strands of flowering
martyrweed trailed from the trellis-work.

“Have
you—” she started.

I stepped
closer to her, inside the range of the martyr-weed. “I’m
through,” I said. “I’ve taken this as far as I can stomach.
Your husband has an answer, but it isn’t the truth. I hope that satisfies
you, as well as Reileen Kawahara.”

At the
name, her mouth parted in shock. It was the only reaction that got through her
control, but it was the confirmation I needed. I felt the need to be cruel come
bubbling insistently up from the dark, rarely visited caverns of anger that
served me as emotional reserves.

“I
never figured Reileen for much of a lay, but maybe like attracts like. I hope
she’s better between the legs than she is on a tennis court.”

Miriam
Bancroft’s face whitened and I readied myself for the slap. But instead,
she offered me a strained smile.

“You
are mistaken, Mr.Kovacs,” she said.

“Yeah. I often
am.” I stepped around her. “Excuse me.” I walked away down
the hall without looking back.

The building was a stripped shell, an
entire floor of warehouse conversion with perfectly identical arched windows
along each wall and white painted support pillars every ten metres in each
direction. The ceiling was drab grey, the original building blocks exposed and
cross-laced with heavy ferrocrete load-bearers. The floor was raw concrete,
perfectly poured. Hard light fell in through the windows, unsoftened by any
drifting motes of dust. The air was crisp and cold.

Roughly in
the middle of the building, as near as I could judge, stood a simple steel
table and two uncomfortable-looking chairs, arranged as if for a game of chess.
On one of the chairs sat a tall man with a tanned, salon-handsome face. He was
beating a rapid tattoo on the table top, as if listening to jazz on an internal
receiver. Incongruously, he was dressed in a blue surgeon’s smock and
surgery slippers.

I stepped
out from behind one of the pillars and crossed the even concrete to the table.
The man in the smock looked up at me and nodded, unsurprised.

“Hello,
Miller,” I said. “Mind if I sit down?”

“My
lawyers are going to have me out of here an hour after you charge me,”
Miller said matter-of-factly. “If that. You’ve made a big mistake
here, pal.”

He went
back to beating out the jazz rhythm on the table top. His gaze drifted out over
my shoulder, as if he’d just seen something interesting through one of
the arched windows. I smiled.

“A
big
mistake,” he repeated to himself.

Very gently,
I reached out and flattened his hand onto the table top to stop the tapping.
His gaze jerked back in as if caught on a hook.

“The
fuck do you think—”

He pulled
his hand free and surged to his feet, but shut up abruptly when I stiff-armed
him back into his seat. For a moment, it looked as if he might try to charge
me, but the table was in the way. He stayed seated, glaring murderously at me
and no doubt remembering what his lawyers had told him about the laws of
virtual holding.

“You’ve
never been arrested, have you Miller?” I asked conversationally. When he
made no reply, I took the chair opposite him, turned it around and seated
myself astride it. I took out my cigarettes and shook one free. “Well,
that statement is still grammatically valid. You’re not under arrest now.
The police don’t have you.”

I saw the
first flicker of fear on his face.

“Let’s
recap events a little, shall we? You probably think that after you got shot, I
lit out and the police came to pick up the pieces. That they found enough to rack
the clinic up on, and now you’re waiting on due process. Well, it’s
partially true. I did leave, and the police did come to pick up the pieces.
Unfortunately there’s one piece that was no longer there to pick up,
because I took it with me. Your head.” I lifted one hand to demonstrate
graphically. “Burned off at the neck and carried out, stack intact, under
my jacket.”

Miller
swallowed. I bent my head and inhaled the cigarette to life.

“Now
the police think that your head was disintegrated by an overcharged blaster on
wide beam.” I blew smoke across the table at him. “I charred the
neck and chest deliberately to give that impression. With a bit of time and a
good forensic expert they might have decided otherwise, but unfortunately your
still intact colleagues at the clinic threw them out before they could start a
proper investigation. It’s understandable, given what they were likely to
find. I’m sure you would have done the same. However, what this means is
that not only are you not under arrest, you are in fact presumed Really Dead.
The police aren’t looking for you and nor is anybody else.”

“What
do you want?” Miller sounded abruptly hoarse.

“Good.
I can see you appreciate the implications of your situation. Only natural for a
man of your … Profession, I suppose. What I want is detailed information
about Head in the Clouds.”