Altered Carbon (66 page)

Below me,
the dog stopped keening at the same moment and lay down on the ground beside
the door. When I stepped away, it looked up at me once with a gaze of pure distilled
pain and reproach. In those eyes I could see reflected every victim that had
ever looked at me in the last three decades of my waking life. Then the animal
turned its head away and licked apathetically at its injured rear legs.

For a split
second, something geysered through the cold crust of the betathanatine.

I went back
to the door the animal had emerged from, drawing the shard gun on my way and
swung through, holding the weapon in both hands before me. The room beyond was
spacious and pastel-coloured with quaint two-dimensional framed pictures on the
walls. A massive four poster bed with translucent drapes occupied the centre.
Seated on the edge of the bed was a distinguished-looking man in his forties,
naked from the waist down. Above the waist, he appeared to be wearing formal
evening dress which clashed badly with the heavy-duty canvas work gloves he had
pulled up to both elbows. He was bent over, cleaning himself between the legs
with a damp white cloth.

As I
advanced into the room, he glanced up.

“Jack?
You finished al—” He stared at the gun in my hands without
comprehension, then as the muzzle came to within half a metre of his face a
note of asperity crept into his voice.“Listen, I didn’t dial for
this routine.”

“On
the house,” I said dispassionately, and watched as the clutch of
monomolecular shards tore his face apart. His hands flew up from between his
legs to cover the wounds and he flopped over sideways on the bed, gut-deep
noises grinding out of him as he died.

With the
mission time display flaring red in the corner of my vision, I backed out of
the room. The injured animal outside the door opposite did not look up as I
approached. I knelt and laid one hand gently on the matted fur. The head lifted
and the keening rose in the throat again. I set down the shard gun and tensed
my empty hand. The neural sheath delivered the Tebbit knife, glinting.

After, I
cleaned the blade on the fur, resheathed the knife and picked up the shard gun,
all with the unhurried calm of the Reaper. Then I moved silently to the
connecting corridor. Deep in the diamond serenity of the drug something was
nagging at me, but the Reaper would not let me worry about it.

As
indicated on Elliott’s stolen blueprints the cross corridor led to a set
of stairs, carpeted in the same orgiastic pattern as the main thoroughfare. I
moved warily down the steps, gun tracking the open space ahead, proximity sense
spread like a radar net before me. Nothing stirred. Kawahara must have battened
down all the hatches just in case Ortega and her crew saw something
inconvenient while they were on the premises.

Two levels
down, I stepped off the stairs and followed my memory of the blueprints through
a mesh of corridors until I was reasonably sure that the door to
Kawahara’s quarters was around the next corner. With my back to the wall,
I slid up to the corner and waited, breathing shallowly. The proximity sense
said there was someone at the door around the corner, possibly more than one
person, and I picked up the faint tang of cigarette smoke. I dropped to my
knees, checked my surroundings and then lowered my face to the ground. With one
cheek brushing the pile of the carpet, I eased my head around the corner.

A man and a
woman stood by the door, similarly dressed in green coveralls. The woman was
smoking. Although each of them had stunguns bolstered importantly at their
belts, they looked more like technical staff than security attendants. I
relaxed fractionally and settled down to wait some more. In the corner of my
eye, the minutes of mission time pulsed like an overstressed vein.

It was
another quarter of an hour before I heard the door. At full amp, the neurachem
caught the rustle of clothing as the attendants moved to allow whoever was
leaving to exit. I heard voices, Ortega’s flat with pretended official
disinterest, then Kawahara’s, as modulated as the mandroid in Larkin
& Green. With the betathanatine to protect me from the hatred, my reaction
to that voice was a muted horizon event, like the flare and crash of gunfire at
a great distance.

“…that
I cannot be of more assistance, lieutenant. If what you say about the Wei
Clinic is true, his mental balance has certainly deteriorated since he worked
for me. I feel a certain responsibility. I mean, I would never have recommended
him to Laurens Bancroft, had I suspected this would happen.”

“As I
said, this is supposition.” Ortega’s tone sharpened slightly.
“And I’d appreciate it if these details didn’t go any
further. Until we know where Kovacs has gone, and why—”

“Quite.
I quite understand the sensitivity of the matter. You are aboard Head in the
Clouds, lieutenant. We have a reputation for confidentiality.”

“Yeah.”
Ortega allowed a stain of distaste into her voice. “I’ve heard
that.”

“Well,
then, you can rest assured that this will not be spoken of. Now if you’ll
excuse me, lieutenant. Detective sergeant. I have some administrative matters
to attend to. Tia and Max will see you back to the flight deck.”

The door
closed and soft footfalls advanced in my direction. I tensed abruptly. Ortega
and her escort were coming in my direction. This was something no one had
bargained for. On the blueprints the main landing pads were forward of
Kawahara’s cabin, and I’d come up on the aft side with that in
mind. There seemed no reason to march Ortega and Bautista towards the stern.

There was
no panic. Instead, a cool analogue of the adrenalin reaction rinsed through my
mind, offering a chilly array of hard facts. Ortega and Bautista were in no
danger. They must have arrived the same way they were leaving or something
would have been said. As for me, if they passed the corridor I was in, their
escort would only have to glance sideways to see me. The area was well lit and
there were no hiding places within reach. On the other hand, with my body down
below room temperature, my pulse slowed to a crawl and my breathing at the same
low, most of the subliminal factors that will trigger a normal human
being’s proximity sense were gone. Always assuming the escorts were
wearing normal sleeves.

And if they
turned
into
this corridor to use the stairs I had come down by …

I shrank
back against the wall, dialled the shard gun down to minimum dispersal and
stopped breathing.

Ortega.
Bautista. The two attendants brought up the rear. They were so close I could
have reached out and touched Ortega’s hair.

No one
looked round.

I gave them a full minute
before I breathed again. Then I checked the corridor in both directions, went
rapidly round the corner and knocked on the door with the butt of the shard
gun. Without waiting for a reply, I walked in.

The chamber was exactly as Miller had
described it. Twenty metres wide and walled in non-reflective glass that sloped
inward from roof to floor. On a clear day you could probably lie on that slope
and peer down thousands of metres to the sea below. The décor was stark
and owed a lot to Kawahara’s early millennium roots. The walls were smoke
grey, the floor fused glass and the lighting came from jagged pieces of origami
performed in illuminum sheeting and spiked on iron tripods in the corners of
the room. One side of the room was dominated by a massive slab of black steel
that must serve as a desk, the other held a group of shale-coloured loungers
grouped around an imitation oil drum brazier. Beyond the loungers, an arched
doorway led out to what Miller had surmised were sleeping quarters.

Above the
desk, a slow weaving holodisplay of data had been abandoned to its own devices.
Reileen Kawahara stood with her back to the door, staring out at the night sky.

“Forget
something?” she asked distantly.

“No,
not a thing.”

I saw how
her back stiffened as she heard me, but when she turned it was with unhurried
smoothness and even the sight of the shard gun didn’t crack the icy calm
on her face. Her voice was almost as disinterested as it had been before she
turned.

“Who
are you? How did you get in here?”

“Think
about it.” I gestured at the loungers. “Sit down over there, take
the weight off your feet while you’re thinking.”

“Kadmin?”

“Now
you’re insulting me. Sit down!”

I saw the
realisation explode behind her eyes.

“Kovacs?”
An unpleasant smile bent at her lips. “Kovacs, you stupid,
stupid
bastard. Do you have any idea what you’ve just thrown away?”

“I
said sit down.”

“She
has gone, Kovacs. Back to Harlan’s World. I kept my word. What do you
think you’re doing here?”

“I’m
not going to tell you again,” I said mildly. “Either you sit down
now, or I’ll break one of your kneecaps.”

The thin
smile stayed on Kawahara’s mouth as she lowered herself a centimetre at a
time onto the nearest lounger. “Very well, Kovacs. We’ll play to
your script tonight. And then I’ll have that fishwife Sachilowska dragged
all the way back here and you with her. What are you going to do? Kill
me?”

“If
necessary.”

“For
what? Is this some kind of moral stand?” The emphasis Kawahara laid on
the last two words made it sound like the name of a product.
“Aren’t you forgetting something? If you kill me here, it’ll
take about eighteen hours for the remote storage system in Europe to notice and
then re-sleeve me from my last update ‘cast. And it won’t take the
new me very long to work out what happened up here.”

I seated
myself on the edge of the lounger. “Oh, I don’t know. Look how long
it’s taken Bancroft, and he still doesn’t have the truth, does
he?”

“Is
this about Bancroft?”

“No
Reileen. This is about you and me. You should have left Sarah alone. You should
have left me alone while you could.”

“Ohhh,”
she cooed, mock maternal. “Did you get
manipulated
. I’m
sorry.” She dropped the tone just as abruptly. “You’re an
Envoy
,
Kovacs. You live by manipulation. We all do. We all live in the great
manipulation matrix and it’s just one big struggle to stay on top.”

I shook my
head. “I didn’t ask to be dealt in.”

“Kovacs,
Kovacs.” Kawahara’s expression was suddenly almost tender.
“None of us ask to be dealt in. You think I asked to be born in Fission
City, with a web-fingered dwarf for a father and a psychotic whore for a
mother. You think I asked for that? We’re not dealt in, we’re
thrown
in, and after that it’s just about keeping your head above water.”

“Or
pouring water down other people’s throats,” I agreed amiably.
“I guess you took after your mother, right?”

For a
second it was as if Kawahara’s face was a mask cut from tin behind which
a furnace was raging. I saw the fury ignite in her eyes and if I had not had
the Reaper inside to keep me cold, I would have been afraid.

“Kill
me,” she said, tight-lipped. “And make the most of it, because you
are going to suffer, Kovacs. You think those sad-case revolutionaries on New
Beijing suffered when they died? I’m going to invent new limits for you
and your fish-smelling bitch.”

I shook my
head. “I don’t think so, Reileen. You see, your update needlecast
went through about ten minutes ago. And on the way I had it Dipped.
Didn’t lift anything, we just spliced the Rawling virus onto the
‘cast. It’s in the core by now, Reileen. Your remote storage has
been spiked.”

Her eyes
narrowed. “You’re lying.”

“Not
today. You liked the work Irene Elliott did at Jack It Up? Well you should see
her in a virtual forum. I bet she had time to take a half dozen mindbites while
she was inside that needlecast. Souvenirs. Collector’s items in fact,
because if I know anything about stack engineers, they’ll weld down the
lid on your remote stack faster than politicians leaving a war zone.” I
nodded over at the winding data display. “I should think you’ll get
the alarm in another couple of hours. It took longer at Innenin but that was a
long time ago. The technology’s moved on since then.”

Then she
believed, and it was as if the fury I’d seen in her eyes had banked down
to a concentrated white heat.

“Irene
Elliott,” she said intently. “When I find her—”

“I
think we’ve had enough empty threats for one day,” I interrupted
without force. “Listen to me. Currently the stack you’re wearing is
the only life you have, and the mood I’m in now it wouldn’t take
much to make me cut it out of your spine and stamp on it. Before or after I
shoot you, so
shut up
.”

Kawahara
sat still, glaring at me out of slitted eyes. Her top lip drew fractionally
back off her teeth for a moment, before control asserted itself.

“What
do you want?”

“Better.
What I want, right now, is a full confession of how you set Bancroft up.
Resolution 653, Mary Lou Hinchley, the whole thing. You can throw in how you
framed Ryker as well.”