Altered Carbon (70 page)

“Get
out of my way, Curtis,” I said evenly. “Or you’re going to
get hurt.”

His arms
snapped up into a karate guard. “I said, she does—”

At that
point I kicked him in the knee and he collapsed at my feet. A second kick
rolled him a couple of metres down the slope towards the tennis courts. By the
time he came out of the roll, I was on him. I jammed a knee into the small of
his back and pulled his head up by the hair.

“I’m
not having a great day,” I told him patiently. “And you’re
making it worse. Now, I’m going up there to talk to your boss.
It’ll take about ten minutes, and then I’ll be gone. If
you’re wise, you’ll stay out of the way.”

“You
fuck—”

I pulled
his hair harder and he yelped. “If you come in there after me, Curtis,
I’m going to hurt you. Badly. Do you understand? I’m not in the
mood for swampsuck grifters like you today.”

“Leave
him alone, Mr.Kovacs. Weren’t you ever nineteen?”

I glanced
over my shoulder to where Miriam Bancroft stood with her hands in the pockets
of a loose, desert-coloured ensemble apparently modelled on Sharyan harem-wear.
Her long hair was caught up under a swathe of the ochre cloth and her eyes
glinted in the sun. I remembered suddenly what Ortega had said about Nakamura.
They
use her face and body to sell the stuff
. Now I could see it, the casual
poise of a fashion-house sleeve demonstrator.

I let go of
Curtis’s hair and stood back while he climbed to his feet. “I
wasn’t this stupid at any age,” I said untruthfully. “Do you
want to tell him to back off, instead? Maybe he’ll listen to you.”

“Curtis,
go and wait for me in the limousine. I won’t be long.”

“Are
you going to let him—”

“Curtis!”
There was a cordial astonishment in her tone, as if there must be some mistake,
as if answering back just wasn’t on the menu. Curtis’s face flushed
when he heard it, and he stalked away from us with tears of consternation
standing in his eyes. I watched him out of sight, still not convinced I
shouldn’t have hit him again. Miriam Bancroft must have read the thought
on my face.

“I
would have thought even your appetite for violence had been sated by
now,” she said quietly. “Are you still looking for targets?”

“Who
says I’m looking for targets?”

“You
did.”

I looked
quickly at her. “I don’t remember that.”

“How
convenient.”

“No,
you don’t understand.” I lifted my open hands towards her. “I
don’t
remember
it. Everything we did together is gone. I
don’t have those memories. It’s been wiped.”

She
flinched as if I’d struck her.

“But
you,” she said in pieces. “I thought. You look—”

“The
same.” I looked down at myself, at Ryker’s sleeve. “Well,
there wasn’t much left of the other sleeve when they fished me out of the
sea. This was the only option. And the UN investigators point-blank refused to
allow another double sleeving. Don’t blame them, really. It’s going
to be hard enough to justify the one we did as it is.”

“But
how did you—”

“Decide?”
I smiled without much enthusiasm. “Shall we go inside and talk about
this?”

I let her
lead me back up to the conservatory, where someone had set out a jug and
tall-stemmed glasses on the ornamental table beneath the martyrweed stands. The
jug was filled with a liquid the colour of sunsets. We took seats opposite each
other without exchanging words or glances. She poured herself a glass without
offering me one, a tiny casualness that spoke volumes about what had happened
between Miriam Bancroft and my other self.

“I’m
afraid I don’t have much time,” she said absently. “As I told
you on the phone, Laurens has asked me to come to New York immediately. I was
actually on my way out when you called.”

I said
nothing, waiting, and when she had finished pouring I got my own glass. The
move felt bone-deep wrong, and my awkwardness must have shown. She started with
realisation.

“Oh,
I—”

“Forget
it.” I settled back into my seat and sipped at the drink. It had a faint
bite beneath the mellowness. “You wanted to know how we decided? We
gambled. Paper, scissors, stone. Of course, we talked around it for hours
first. They had us in a virtual forum over in New York, very high ratio,
discretion-shielded while we made up our minds. No expense spared for the
heroes of the hour.”

I found an
edge of bitterness creeping into my voice, and I had to stop to dump it. I took
a longer pull at my drink.

“Like
I said, we talked. A lot. We thought of a lot of different ways to decide, some
of them were maybe even viable, but in the end we kept coming back to it.
Scissors, paper, stone. Best of five. Why not?”

I shrugged,
but it was not the casual gesture I hoped it would appear. I was still trying
to shake off the cold that crept through me whenever I thought about that game,
trying to second-guess myself with my own existence at stake. The best of five,
and it had gone to two all. My heart was beating like the junk rhythm in
Jerry’s Closed Quarters, and I was dizzy with adrenalin. Even facing
Kawahara hadn’t been this hard.

When he
lost the last round—stone to my paper—we both stared at our two
extended hands for what seemed like a long time. Then, he’d got up with a
faint smile and cocked his thumb and forefinger at his own head, somewhere
midway between a salute and a burlesque of suicide.

“Anything
I should tell Jimmy when I see him?”

I shook my
head wordlessly.

“Well,
have a nice life,” he said, and left the sunlit room, closing the door
gently behind him. Part of me was still screaming inside that he had somehow
thrown the last game.

They
re-sleeved me the next day.

I looked up
again. “Now I guess you’re wondering why I bothered coming
here.”

“Yes,
I am.”

“It
concerns Sheryl Bostock,” I said.

“Who?”

I sighed.
“Miriam, please. Don’t make this any tougher than it already is.
Sheryl Bostock is shit-scared you’re going to have her torched because of
what she knows. I’ve come here to have you convince me she’s wrong,
because that’s what I promised her.”

Miriam
Bancroft looked at me for a moment, eyes widening, and then, convulsively, she
threw her drink in my face.

“You
arrogant little man,” she hissed. “How dare you?
How dare you
?”

I wiped
drink out of my eyes and stared at her. I’d expected a reaction but it
wasn’t this. I raked surplus cocktail from my hair.

“Excuse
me?”

“How
dare you walk in here, telling me this is difficult for you? Do you have any
idea what my husband is going through at this moment?”

“Well,
let’s see.” I wiped my hands clean on my shirt, frowning.
“Right now he’s the five-star guest of a UN Special Inquiry in New
York. What do you reckon, the marital separation’s getting to him?
Can’t be that hard to find a whorehouse in New York.”

Miriam
Bancroft’s jaw clenched.

“You
are cruel,” she whispered.

“And
you’re dangerous.” I felt a little steam wisping off the surface of
my own control. “I’m not the one who kicked an unborn child to
death in San Diego. I’m not the one who dosed her own husband’s
clone with synamorphesterone while he was away in Osaka, knowing full well what
he’d do to the first woman he fucked in that state. Knowing that woman
wouldn’t be you, of course. It’s no wonder Sheryl Bostock’s
terrified. Just looking at you, I’m wondering whether I’ll live
past the front gates.”

“Stop
it.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “Stop it. Please.”

I stopped.
We both sat in silence, she with her head bowed.

“Tell
me what happened,” I said finally. “I got most of it from Kawahara.
I know why Laurens torched himself—”

“Do
you?” Her voice was quiet now, but there were still traces of her
previous venom in the question. “Tell me, what do you know? That he
killed himself to escape blackmail. That’s what they’re saying in
New York, isn’t it?”

“It’s
a reasonable assumption, Miriam,” I said quietly. “Kawahara had him
in a lock. Vote down Resolution 653 or face exposure as a murderer. Killing
himself before the needlecast went through to PsychaSec was the only way out of
it. If he hadn’t been so bloody-minded about the suicide verdict, he
might have got away with it.”

“Yes.
If you hadn’t come.”

I made a
gesture that felt unfairly defensive. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“And
what about
guilt
?” she said into the quiet. “Did you stop
to consider that? Did you stop to think how Laurens must have felt when he
realised what he’d done, when they told him that girl Rentang was a
Catholic, a girl who could never have her life back, even if Resolution 653 did
force her back into temporary existence to testify against him? Don’t you
think when he put the gun against his own throat and pulled the trigger, that
he was punishing himself for what he’d done? Did you ever consider that
maybe he was not trying to
get away with it
, as you put it?”

I thought
about Bancroft, turning the idea over in my mind, and it wasn’t entirely
difficult to say what Miriam Bancroft wanted to hear.

“It’s
a possibility,” I said.

She choked
a laugh. “It’s more than a possibility, Mr.Kovacs. You forget, I
was here that night. I watched him from the stairs when he came in. I saw his
face. I saw the pain on his face. He paid for what he’d done. He judged
and executed himself for it. He paid, he destroyed the man who committed the
crime, and now a man who has no memory of that crime, a man who
did not
commit
that crime, is living with the guilt again. Are you satisfied,
Mr.Kovacs?”

The bitter
echoes of her voice were leached out of the room by the martyrweed. The silence
thickened.

“Why’d
you do it?” I asked, when she showed no sign of speaking again.
“Why did Maria Rentang have to pay for your husband’s
infidelities?”

She looked
at me as if I had asked her for some major spiritual truth and shook her head
helplessly.

“It
was the only way I could think of to hurt him,” she murmured.

No
different to Kawahara in the end, I thought: with carefully manufactured
savagery. Just another Meth, moving the little people around like pieces in a
puzzle.

“Did
you know Curtis was working for Kawahara?” I asked tonelessly.

“I
guessed. Afterwards.” She lifted a hand. “But I had no way of
proving it. How did you work it out?”

“Retrospectively.
He took me to the Hendrix, recommended it to me. Kadmin turned up five minutes
after I went in, on Kawahara’s orders. That’s too close for a
coincidence.”

“Yes,”
she said distantly. “It fits.”

“Curtis
got the synamorphesterone for you?”

She nodded.

“Through
Kawahara, I imagine. A liberal supply as well. He was dosed to the eyes the
night you sent him to see me. Did he suggest spiking the clone before the Osaka
trip?”

“No.
That was Kawahara.” Miriam Bancroft cleared her throat. “We had an
unusually candid conversation a few days before. Looking back, she must have
been engineering the whole thing around Osaka.”

“Yeah,
Reileen’s pretty thorough. Was pretty thorough. She would have known
there was an even chance Laurens would refuse to back her. So you bribed Sheryl
Bostock with a visit to the island funhouse, just like me. Only instead of
getting to play with the glorious Miriam Bancroft body like me, she got to wear
it. A handful of cash, and the promise she could come back and play again some
day. Poor cow, she was in paradise for thirty-six hours and now she’s
like a junkie in withdrawal. Were you ever going to take her back there?”

“I am
a woman of my word.”

“Yeah?
Well, as a favour to me, do it soon.”

“And
the rest? You have evidence? You intend to tell Laurens about my part in
this?”

I reached
into my pocket and produced a matt black disc. “Footage of the
injection,” I said, holding it up. “Composite footage of Sheryl
Bostock leaving PsychaSec and flying to a meeting with your limousine, which
subsequently heads out to sea. Without this, there’s nothing to say your
husband didn’t kill Maria Rentang chemically unassisted, but
they’re probably going to assume Kawahara dosed him aboard Head in the
Clouds. There’s no evidence, but it’s expedient.”

“How
did you know?” She was looking into a corner of the conservatory, voice
small and distant. “How did you get to Bostock?”

“Intuition,
mostly. You saw me looking through the telescope?”

She nodded
and cleared her throat. “I thought you were playing with me. I thought
you’d told him.”

“No.”
I felt a faint stab of anger. “Kawahara was still holding my friend in
virtual. And threatening to torture her into insanity.”