Altered Carbon

by Richard Morgan

  '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.

  'Animal abandonment,' she said finally. 'And then abject gratitude. And I stopped feeling them both as soon as he stopped paying me.'

  'And what do you feel now?'

  'Now?' Leila Begin looked out to sea, as if testing the temperature of the breeze against what was inside her. 'Now I feel nothing, Mr Kovacs.'

  'You agreed to talk to me. You must have had a reason.'

  Begin made a dismissive gesture. 'The lieutenant asked me to.'

  'Very public-spirited of you.'

  The woman's gaze came back to me. 'You know what happened after my miscarriage?'

  'I heard you were paid off.'

  'Yes. Unpleasant-sounding, isn't it? But that's what happened. I took Bancroft's money and I shut up. It was a lot of money. But I didn't forget where I came from. I still get back to Oakland two or three times a year, I know the girls who work the Rack now. Lieutenant Ortega has a good name there. Many of the girls owe her. You might say I am paying off some favours.'

  'And revenge on Miriam Bancroft doesn't come into it?'

  'What revenge?' Leila Begin laughed her hard little laugh again. 'I am giving you information because the lieutenant has asked me to. You won't be able to do anything to Miriam Bancroft. She is a Meth. She is untouchable.'

  'No one's untouchable. Not even Meths.'

  Begin looked at me sadly.

  'You are not from here,' she said. 'And it shows.'

  Begin's call had been routed through a Caribbean linkage broker, and the virtual time rented out of a Chinatown forum provider. Cheap, Ortega told me on the way in, and probably as secure as anywhere. Bancroft wants privacy, he spends half a million on discretion systems. Me, I just go talk where no one's listening.

  It was also cramped. Slotted in between a pagoda-shaped bank and a steamy-windowed restaurant frontage, space was at a premium. The reception area was reached by filing up a narrow steel staircase and along a gantry pinned to one wing of the pagoda's middle tier. A lavish seven or eight square metres of fused sand flooring under a cheap glass viewdome provided prospective clients with a waiting area, natural light and two pairs of seats that looked as if they had been torn out of a decommissioned jetliner. Adjacent to the seats, an ancient Asian woman sat behind a battery of secretarial equipment, most of which appeared to be switched off, and guarded a flight of access steps into the bowels of the building. Down below, it was all hairpin corridors racked with cable conduits and piping. Each length of corridor was lined with the doors of the service cubicles. The trode couches were set into the cubicles at a sharp upright angle to economise on floor space and surrounded on all sides by blinking, dusty-faced instrument panels. You strapped yourself in, traded up and then tapped the code number given to you at reception into the arm of the couch. Then the machine came and got your mind.

  Returning from the wide open horizon of the beach virtuality was a shock. Opening my eyes on the banks of instrumentation just above my head, I suffered a momen­tary flashback to Harlan's World. Thirteen years old and waking up in a virtual arcade after my first porn format. A low-ratio forum where two minutes of real time got me an experiential hour and a half in the company of two pneumatically-breasted playmates whose bodies bore more resemblance to cartoons than real women. The scenario had been a candy-scented room of pink cushions and fake fur rugs with windows that gave poor resolution onto a night-time cityscape. When I started running with the gangs and making more money, the ratio and res­olution went up, and the scenarios got more imagin­ative, but the thing that never changed was the stale smell and the tackiness of the trodes on your skin when you surfaced afterwards between the cramped walls of the coffin.

  'Kovacs?'

  I blinked and reached for the straps. Shouldering my way out of the cubicle, I found Ortega already waiting in the pipe-lined corridor.

  'So what do you think?'

  'I think she's full of shit.' I raised my hands to forestall Ortega's outburst. 'No, listen, I buy Miriam Bancroft as scary. I've got no argument with that. But there are about half a hundred reasons why she doesn't fit the bill. Ortega, you polygraphed he
r for fuck's sake.'

  'Yeah, I know.' Ortega followed me down the corridor. 'But that's what I've been thinking about. You know, she volunteered to take that test. I mean, it's witness-manda­tory anyway, but she was demanding it practically as soon as I got to the scene. No weeping partner shit, not even a tear, she just slammed into the incident cruiser and asked for the wires.'

  'So?'

  'So I'm thinking about that stuff you pulled with Rutherford. You said if they polygraphed you while you were doing that, you wouldn't register, now — '

  'Ortega, that's Envoy conditioning. Pure mind disci­pline. It's not physical. You can't buy stuff like that off the rack at SleeveMart.'

  'Miriam Bancroft wears state-of-the-art Nakamura. They use her face and body to sell the stuff — '

  'Do Nakamura do something that'll beat a police polygraph?'

  'Not officially.'

  'Well there you — '

  'Don't be so fucking obtuse. You never heard of custom biochem?'

  I paused at the foot of the stairs up to reception and shook my head. 'I don't buy it. Torch her husband with a weapon only she and he have access to. No one's that stupid.'

  We went upstairs, Ortega at my heels.

  'Think about it, Kovacs. I'm not saying it was pre­meditated — '

  'And what about the remote storage? It was a pointless crime — '

  ' — not saying it was even rational, but you've got to — '

  ' — got to be someone who didn't know —

  'Fuck! Kovacs!'

  Ortega's voice, up a full octave.

  We were into the reception zone by now. Still two clients waiting on the left, a man and a woman deep in discussion of a large paper-wrapped package. On the right a peripheral flicker of crimson where there should have been none. I was looking at blood.

  The ancient Asian receptionist was dead, throat cut with something that glinted metallic deep within the wound around her neck. Her head rested in a shiny pool of her own blood on the desk in front of her.

  My hand leapt for the Nemex. Beside me, I heard the snap as Ortega chambered the first slug in her Smith & Wesson. I swung towards the two waiting clients and their paper-wrapped package.

  Time turned dreamlike. The neurachem made every­thing impossibly slow, separate images drifting to the floor of my vision like autumn leaves.

  The package had fallen apart. The woman was holding a compact Sunjet, the man a machine pistol. I cleared the Nemex and started firing from the hip.

  The door to the gantry burst open and another figure stood in the opening, brandishing a pistol in each fist.

  Beside me, Ortega's Smith & Wesson boomed and blew the new arrival back through the door like a reversed film sequence of his entrance.

  My first shot ruptured the headrest of the woman's seat, showering her with white padding. The Sunjet sizzled, the beam went wide. The second slug exploded her head and turned the drifting white flecks red.

  Ortega yelled in fury. She was still firing, upward my peripheral sense told me. Somewhere above us, her shots splintered glass.

  The machine gunner had struggled to his feet. I registered the bland features of a synth and put a pair of slugs into him. He staggered back against the wall, still raising the gun. I dived for the floor.

  The dome above our heads smashed inward. Ortega yelled something and I rolled sideways. A body tumbled bonelessly head over feet onto the ground next to me.

  The machine pistol cut loose, aimless. Ortega yelled again and flattened herself on the floor. I rolled upright on the lap of the dead woman and shot the synthetic again, three times in rapid succession. The gunfire choked off.

  Silence.

  I swung the Nemex left and right, covering the corners of the room and the front door. The jagged edges of the smashed dome above. Nothing.

  'Ortega?'

  'Yeah, fine.' She was sprawled on the other side of the room, propping herself up on one elbow. There was a tightness in her voice that belied her words. I swayed to my feet and made my way across to her, footsteps crunching on broken glass.

  'Where's it hurt?' I demanded, crouching to help her sit up.

  'Shoulder. Fucking bitch got me with the Sunjet.'

  I stowed the Nemex and looked at the wound. The beam had carved a long diagonal furrow across the back of Ortega's jacket and clipped through the left shoulder pad at the top. The meat beneath the pad was cooked, seared down to the bone in a narrow line at the centre.

  'Lucky,' I said with forced lightness. 'You hadn't ducked, it would have been your head.'

  'I wasn't ducking, I was fucking falling over.'

  'Good enough. You want to stand up?'

  'What do you think?' Ortega levered herself to her knees on her uninjured arm and then stood. She grimaced at the movement of her jacket against the wound. 'Fuck, that stings.'

  'I think that's what the guy in the doorway said.'

  Leaning on me, she turned to stare, eyes centimetres away. I deadpanned it, and the laughter broke across her face like a sunrise. She shook her head.

  'Jesus, Kovacs, you are one sick motherfucker. They teach you to tell post-firefight jokes in the Corps or is it just you?'

  I guided her towards the exit. 'Just me. Come on, let's get you some fresh air.'

  Behind us, there was a sudden flailing sound. I jerked around and saw the synthetic sleeve staggering upright. Its head was smashed and disfigured where my last shot had torn the side of the skull off, and the gun hand was spasmed open at the end of a stiff, blood-streaked right arm, but the other arm was flexing, hand curling into a fist. The synth stumbled against the chair, righted itself and came towards us, dragging its right leg.

  I drew the Nemex and pointed it.

  'Fight's over,' I advised.

  The slack face grinned at me. Another halting step. I frowned.

  'For Christ's sake, Kovacs,' Ortega was fumbling for her own weapon. 'Get it over with.'

  I snapped off a shot and the shell punched the synth backwards onto the glass-strewn floor. It twisted a couple of times, then lay still but breathing sluggishly. As I watched it, fascinated, a gurgling laugh arose from its mouth.

  'That's fucking enough,' it coughed, and laughed again. 'Eh, Kovacs? That's fucking enough.'

  The words held me in shock for the space of a heartbeat, then I wheeled and made for the door, dragging Ortega with me.

  'Wha — '

  'Out. Get the fuck out.' I thrust her through the door ahead of me and grabbed the railing outside. The dead pistoleer lay twisted on the walkway ahead. I shoved Ortega again and she vaulted the body awkwardly. Slam­ming the door after me, I followed her at a run.

  We were almost to the end of the gantry when the dome behind us detonated in a geyser of glass and steel. I distinctly heard the door come off its hinges behind us, and then the blast picked us both up like discarded coats and threw us down the stairs into the street.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The police are more impressive by night.

  First of all you've got the flashing lights casting dramatic colour into everyone's faces, grim expressions steeped alternately in criminal red and smoky blue. Then there's the sound of the sirens on the night, like an elevator ratcheting down the levels of the city, the crackling voices of the comsets, somehow brisk and mysterious at the same time, the coming and going of dimly lit bulky figures and snatches of cryptic conversation, the deployed technology of law enforcement for wakened bystanders to gape at, the lack of anything else going on to provide a vacuum backdrop. There can be absolutely nothing to see beyond this and people will still watch for hours.

  Nine o'clock on a workday morning it's a different matter. A couple of cruisers turned up in response to Ortega's call in but their lights and sirens were barely noticeable above the general racket of the city. The uni­formed crews strung incident barriers at either end of the street and shepherded customers out of the neighbouring businesses, while Ortega persuaded the bank's private security not t
o arrest me as a possible accessory to the bombing. There was a bounty on terrorists, apparently. A crowd of sorts developed beyond the almost invisible hazing of the barriers, but it seemed mostly composed of irate pedestrians trying to get past.

  I sat the whole thing out on the kerb opposite, checking over the superficial injuries I'd acquired on my short flight down from the gantry to the street. Mostly, it was bruising and abrasions. The shape of the forum provider's recep­tion area had channelled most of the blast directly upwards through the roof and that was the route the bulk of the shrapnel had taken as well. We'd been very lucky.

  Ortega left the clutch of uniformed officers gathered outside the bank and strode across to the street towards me. She had removed her jacket and there was a long white smear of tissue weld congealing over her shoulder wound. She held her discarded shoulder holster dangling in one hand and her breasts moved beneath the thin cotton of a white T-shirt that bore the legend You Have The Right To Remain Silent — Why Don't You Try It For A While? She seated herself next to me on the kerb.

  'Forensic wagon's on the way,' she said inconsequen­tially. 'You reckon we'll get anything useful out of the wreckage?'

  I looked at the smouldering ruin of the dome and shook my head.

  'There'll be bodies, maybe even stacks intact, but those guys were just local street muscle. All they'll tell you is that the synth hired them, probably for half a dozen ampoules of tetrameth each.'

  'Yeah, they were kind of sloppy, weren't they?'

  I felt a smile ghost across my lips. 'Kind of. But then I don't think they were even supposed to get us.'

  'Just keep us busy till your pal blew up, huh?'

  'Something like that.'

  'The way I figure it, the detonator was wired into his vital signs, right? You snuff him and boom, he takes you with him. Me too. And the cheap hired help.'

  'And wipes out his own stack and sleeve.' I nodded. 'Tidy, isn't it?'

  'So what went wrong?'

  I rubbed absently at the scar under my eye. 'He over­estimated me. I was supposed to kill him outright, but I missed. Probably would have killed himself at: that stage, but I messed up his arm trying to stop the machine pistol.' In my mind's eye the gun drops from splayed fingers and skitters across the floor. 'Blew it way out of his reach as well. He must have been lying there, willing himself to die when he heard us leaving. Wonder what make of synth he was using.'