Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  * * *

  —

  Geographically, Stillwell Avenue wasn’t that far from Dover Street, but status-wise Alik was getting vertigo from the drop. They found the small projects where Riek Patterson rented a few rooms easily enough; nearly half of the building was derelict. The rest of the inhabitants vanished like rats into the cracks as soon as the two of them stepped over the threshold. Alik didn’t think they’d be dumb enough to try to tangle with one of the city’s finest and a fed, but you never knew what kind of weird neurochemical shit their twenty-year-old synthesizers squeezed out and how it affected them.

  Colleana Patterson was awake. Ordinarily he’d take that as a sign of guilt—three thirty in the morning is when the baddest of them all come out to play—but the two-month-old cradled in her arm was evidence to the contrary. It looked like she’d been awake for half a year and crying for most of that. She was a complete physical and emotional wreck. The tiny apartment was a cluttered mess that smelled of stale food and toxic diapers.

  “What now?” she wailed; she didn’t even bother checking their credentials.

  “Did you know Perigine Lexi and his crew were hit tonight?” Alik asked.

  She collapsed back into her one big chair in the scabby living room, sobbing. That set the kid off, howling like a small banshee. Alik waited. Sure enough, a neighbor started banging on the wall.

  “I need your help,” he said when her misery reached a peak.

  “I don’t know anything! How many goddamn times do I have to tell you people?”

  “I’m not NYPD, I’m FBI.”

  “You’re all the same.”

  “Not quite. I have a lot more authority than Detective Salovitz here.”

  Salovitz cheerfully gave him the finger.

  “I don’t know anything,” she repeated like it was her shiny new mantra, the one that would solve everything in life. Alik could tell she was on the verge of curling up into a fetal position tighter than junior could ever manage, one she might never uncurl from.

  “I’ve been looking at Riek’s file,” he said. “He had some insurance. Not much, but it could make a big difference to you and the kid.”

  “They won’t pay out, the company’s legal department already said. Bastards. It wasn’t an accident.”

  “It could be. I can speak to the coroner; they can officially record it as an accident. Like I said, I have authority.”

  She glanced up at Alik, her expression sullen and suspicious. “What do you want?”

  “A name. We know Rayner’s people took out Riek because of what he’d just done. It was a retaliation hit.”

  “Sure. Whatever.”

  “So tell me what it was he did for Javid-Lee? I know you know.”

  “Are you serious about the insurance company? You can really do that?”

  “I can really do that. But you have to tell me everything.”

  “It was some bitch. That’s why he took the job; not everyone would. But we needed the money. Javid-Lee rewards his people for loyalty, he’s good that way.”

  “Sure he is. Who was the girl?”

  “Samantha Lehito. Javid-Lee wanted a message delivered to her.”

  “What for? What had she done?”

  “I don’t know. Please, I really don’t. Riek never asked. You don’t. He was a solid soldier for Javid-Lee. He delivered the message like he’d been told. Put that skank in the hospital.”

  “She’s alive, then?”

  “I dunno. She was when he left her. Her altme was screaming for the paramedics.”

  “All right.” Shango was already splashing Lehito’s file across Alik’s lens. She was in Jamaica Hospital on the Van Wyck Greenway, receiving credit-level-three treatment. That confirmed Rayner took care of his people—good politics on his part. But Alik was now very curious what Samantha Lehito had done that would make Javid-Lee send Riek to kick her ass.

  “The insurance?” Colleana said desperately. “What about the insurance? I told you what you wanted to know.”

  The baby was grizzling again, picking up on mom’s distress. Alik didn’t give a rat’s turd about her, but the kid deserved a chance; it was that damn Southern Baptist conscience of his, which never quit. “I’ve loaded it in the Bureau’s network,” he told her. “The coroner will pick it up in the morning.”

  She burst into tears again.

  Alik scowled. He might be a guardian angel, but he didn’t have to put up with that kind of shit.

  * * *

  —

  “Nobody at the Farron address,” Salovitz said as the pair of them walked through the practically deserted hubs.

  “Yeah?”

  “She has a kid, a boy, Alphonse. Our precinct officers asked around; neighbors say they were definitely at home earlier today, but haven’t seen them for a while.”

  “Add them to the search list.”

  “Way ahead of you.”

  The staff at Jamaica Hospital were quite used to NYPD turning up in the bad hours. Salovitz talked to the receptionist, who directed them to the ninth floor. The strata of the hospital’s fifty-year-old brutish carbon-and-glass structure reflected human status in a way the architect probably never intended. If he did, he had a bad sense of irony.

  The Koholek Ward was decent enough, several social steps up from the five floors of MedicFare wards directly underneath it. But then again, it was quite a few floors down from the kind of treatment Alik would receive if he was ever, god forbid, admitted.

  Samantha Lehito was in a bay off the main ward. There were two beds in there, but she was the only patient. A stack of equipment had been wheeled in, with plenty of tubes connecting it to Samantha. Her face and limbs were sheathed in a blue-tinged membrane that told Alik Kcells were being used to replace chunks of flesh that were missing. In medical terms: superficial flesh. But Riek had really carved a number on her face. Just looking at her, Alik was now regretting giving Colleana help with the insurance.

  There was another woman dozing in a chair beside the bed, a short woman in her midthirties, with black hair in a pixie cut, framing a face that was creased with worry. She stirred when Alik and Salovitz came in, confusion rapidly becoming a disapproving frown. Shango ran facial recognition: Karoline Kalin. There was a marriage license for her and Samantha, issued four years ago, registered at City Hall. Her employment record was patchy, but she was currently listed as working in a local store called Karma Energy. Shango couldn’t find a connection between that and any of Rayner’s enterprises.

  “What do you want?” she asked in a voice just as weary as Colleana’s.

  Alik resisted a sigh. The reaction was so common he’d stopped resenting it years ago. But it was a regular quirk of human nature that anyone who’d been mugged or robbed welcomed the police like they were a lottery win’s delivery committee, while at any other time the boys in blue were as wanted as an IRS audit.

  “I want to talk to Samantha,” Alik told her.

  “She’s tired. What he did to her…” Karoline reached out a hand and caressed her face. “She’s mending now. That takes so much strength. You leave her be.”

  “You know Riek Patterson is dead?”

  “Yeah. And I’ve got an alibi, too. I was in here, watching her. There was even a cop on the ward. Good witness, huh?”

  “I know you didn’t touch Riek. That was Rayner, right?”

  Karoline shrugged, running a hand back through her hair. “If you say.”

  “Which means Javid-Lee is going to be looking for payback.”

  “No way. It’s over now.”

  “Between Rayner and Javid-Lee? No. It is never going to be over until one of them gets taken out of the picture.”

  “And who’s going to do that? You? I don’t think so. Not bastards like that. They don’t get arrested, they don’t stand trial, the
y don’t do time, they don’t need their gorgeous face rebuilt. That’s what they have poor fucks like Sam for.”

  “True.”

  “You know it’s painful, cosmetic application, having Kcells attach themselves to real flesh? The whole time they’re doing it, adapting to the new host body, it hurts, even with the drugs. And it’s going to take months to rebuild Sam’s features so you can’t tell what he did to her. Some people can’t take that much pain. My Sam can; she’s strong. And when she’s done, when I get her home, she is out of this shit! Away from Rayner and all the other psychos.”

  “Nice story,” Alik said. “Do you know how many times I’ve heard it before?”

  “I’m not letting her go back. I won’t.”

  “Good. Then let me help you. Tell me what she did. Why did Javid-Lee send Riek to do this to her? What was he warning Rayner to stay away from? Once I understand what’s been happening, I can go to town on these guys. We’ve got seven bodies piled up tonight, and that’s not including Riek. The Bureau won’t ever quit on this case.”

  “Sam wouldn’t tell you.”

  “Of course not, because they’ve sucked her into their world so far she’ll never be able to leave. All your love and pleading, every argument you have, all those dreams about starting fresh someplace—all that’s going to do is make her choose. You or them. Are you certain she’ll choose you?” It was an effort to convince her, harder than polishing turds, but Alik thought he could see the doubt creeping into her expression.

  “She’s my fucking wife! She’ll leave. For me.”

  “Make certain of that. Tell me what she did. I’ll take it from there. Rayner and Javid-Lee will be gone.”

  “They never go. Only the names change. Some other sonofabitch will take over the territories.”

  “But there’ll be a gap, a moment when no one is in charge. That’s your moment, that’s when you get her out.”

  “Sam wouldn’t even want me talking to you like this,” she said uncertainly.

  “And that’s the problem. This life she’s in, it’s a drug. She can’t break it by herself. But you can.”

  Karoline let out a long sigh and gripped Samantha’s limp hand. “Rayner wanted a message delivered. A clear one.”

  She didn’t even have to say that; Alik understood the culture perfectly. Messages. Threats. It was all a variant of the old rackets when the shitty words were peeled away. What it boiled down to was the power the likes of Javid-Lee and Rayner could exert over others, enforced by either money or fear. Nobody ever backed down; they had too much dumb pride. To lose face among the gangs was to lose everything.

  “What message?” Salovitz asked.

  “To back off,” she replied. “That’s all. This woman, she’d got some kind of dispute going with one of Rayner’s relatives. So Sam finds out when the woman visits her spa, a real fancy uptown one. She goes every couple of days, gets the whole treatment—hair, face, full-body skin cleanse. And she always has a massage, too, some fancy one, with warm stones or some shit. Thing is, even with an ordinary massage, you’re mostly naked. Did you know just taking your clothes off makes people feel vulnerable, never mind lying there with someone standing over you, someone you suddenly find isn’t who you thought they were?”

  “Sam gave her the massage,” Alik said.

  “Goddamn right. But Sam never hurt her, never did anything like that fucking animal Riek. She just scared the crap out of her. Exactly what Rayner wanted.”

  Alik already knew the answer, but asked the question anyway. “This woman she warned, what was her name?”

  “Rose Lorenzo.”

  * * *

  —

  Bietzk called just as Alik stepped out of the hospital. In front of him a long line of pine and oak trees stretched the whole length of the Van Wyck, a sweet stretch of parkland cutting through the slowly depopulating urban wilderness. The progressive idea behind converting the old major routes through the city was to soften the environment, and through that make the lives of the citizens that bit more positive and pleasant. All very admirable and worthy.

  He knew at its heart it was all bullshit. There had always been gangsters like Javid-Lee and Rayner right from when the city was founded, and there probably always would be. Poverty attracted a certain type—violent, without a conscience—and where there was poverty was its evil twin: exploitation. For all the money locked away in vaults uptown, the city retained a very old-style notion of equitable distribution. A bunch of long, skinny parks wouldn’t change the attitude of any New Yorker; the eternal buildings and institutions kept them captive in the same old economic cycle as surely as any jail. The only way people growing up inside the projects and low-rent tenements could break their old ways was to leave and immerse themselves in something else, something new and different, such as an asteroid habitat or a terraformed world, Universal or Utopial. But Alik had seen the statistics, always slipped into the appendix of the innumerable reports on urban crime commissioned by state senators calling for “action.” Depressingly few kids would leave the world they knew, no matter what opportunity was promised by slick government policy advertising. It wasn’t a surprise; nobody in a shiny clean habitat wanted a New York punk to screw up the perfect conformity they’d woven to hold their neocorporate lives together. And ever since New Washington was successfully terraformed back in 2134, opening its endless verdant prairies to American settlers, New York’s population hasn’t reduced by more than ten percent. Most American cities were down fifteen to twenty percent from their peak twenty-first-century levels, as people, especially the wealthier young, flooded out for that mythical Fresh Start.

  As Alik stood in the biting cold listening to Bietzk, his gaze tracked along the Van Wyck’s trees with their mantle of thin, prickly ice, as if they’d grown thorns to protect themselves through the winter: a mirror of the citizens who walked among them, bristling with hostility and rooted in the structure of the past.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Bietzk said.

  Alik and Salovitz exchanged a glance.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Connexion sent us the logs for Delphine Farron. She and her boy Alphonse walked out of Central Park West hub fifty-two minutes before the Lorenzo family came home. The civic surveillance video shows them walking into the apartment block.”

  “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Salovitz exclaimed. “They were both at the portalhome? Where the fuck did they all go?”

  “Bietzk,” Alik said, “I need you to get on to the developer. Find out if they built a safe room into the portalhome.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Where are we going?” Salovitz asked.

  “The Lorenzo place. Where else?”

  * * *

  —

  There were still a few bored cops in the portalhome, waiting for their shift to end as they watched the forensic teams finishing up. Alik walked straight along the hubhall and into the cabin on the Jörmungand Celeste.

  “You think there’s a safe room here?” Salovitz asked.

  “No.” He took his jacket off, ready for the heat outside, as they went onto the private deck. Sure enough, the temperature and humidity had both risen in the couple of hours they’d been away. When Alik peered out over the rail, the water was slipping easily along the side of the hull. That was deceptive, he knew. There would be strong currents created by the sheer speed with which the big ship was moving through the ocean. The wake would be even worse: long cyclonic swirls that would show only as choppy ripples, unless you got caught in one. You’d have to be crazy to jump. Or desperate.

  “What are you looking for?” Salovitz asked.

  “Something missing. Which is always harder to find.”

  Both ends of the deck had big red-and-white cylinders fixed on the wall, containing li
fe rafts. Alik flipped the clips on one and opened it, finding a fat package of orange fabric and five buoyancy jackets. The other one was empty.

  “No fucking way,” Salovitz exclaimed.

  “They were desperate,” Alik said slowly. “The kind of desperate that happens when two armed crews burst into your home.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Find this ship’s coordinates for eleven o’clock Eastern Standard Time last night,” he told Shango, “then alert the South African Coast Guard. Ask them to get a boat out there, or a plane if they still use them.”

  * * *

  —

  They both went back to the twentieth precinct house to wait. Alik got a call from the Bureau while he and Salovitz sat in the case office drinking vending machine coffee. Agency forensics had made some progress on the portalhome with the Antarctic room. It belonged to the Mendozas, an elderly married couple in Manila, with zero links to any kind of crime. The person coming through had wiped and crashed the security system. But that was when luck had failed them for the first time. Alik and Salovitz watched the image from Manila’s civic surveillance on the case office’s stage.

  A fair-haired woman emerged from the Mendozas’ home on Makait Avenue, opposite the Ayala Park. A cabez pulled up, and she got into it. Less than thirty seconds later, the vehicle disappeared from Manila’s transport logs. It wasn’t the best image Alik had ever seen, but it clearly showed their suspect to be just over average height, and wiry with it—the kind of figure that only came from constant workouts. She wore a bulky parka-style coat to cover her armor—which must have helped in the Antarctic, but in Manila she would have swiftly roasted in that getup. The enhancement routines rectified her out-of-focus face, and the precinct’s G7Turing ran facial recognition.

  “Nothing,” Salovitz exclaimed in disgust.

  “Maybe,” Alik said. “She’s not part of Rayner’s organization, that’s for certain.”

  “You know her?”

  “No,” he lied. Admittedly it was only a partial lie, but he was pleased with himself for carrying it off through the deep unease that had just kicked his ass. No characteristics routine could ever grasp this particular suspect, because she changed her features after every job, which was easy now with the new Kcell cosmetics that had hit the market a few years back. Her height and build, however, remained constant to within five percent, as, bizarrely, did her hair color, which was always a sandy blond, no matter what style. Then there was the bloodbath in her wake. Not a visual characteristic, but the multiple murder was her signature sure as Ainsley Zangari had money. Cancer, Alik mouthed silently.