Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon Page 48

by Richard Morgan

  With what remained of my will, I clamped grenade and skull against my own chest, hard enough to detonate.

  My last thought was the hope that Davidson was watch­ing his screen.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The address was, ironically enough, down in Licktown. I left the autocab two blocks north and walked the rest of the way, unable to quite shake an eerie feeling of synthesis, as if the machinery of the cosmos were suddenly poking through the fabric of reality for me to see.

  The apartment I was looking for formed part of a U-shaped block with a cracked and weed-grown concrete landing area in the centre. Amongst the array of sad-looking ground and flight vehicles, I spotted the micro-copter immediately. Someone had given it a purple and red-trim paint job recently, and though it still listed wearily to one side on its pods there were shiny clusters of expensive-looking sensor equipment fitted to the nose and tail. I nodded to myself and went up a flight of external steps to the second floor of the block.

  The door to number seventeen was opened by an eleven-year-old boy who stared at me with blank hostility.

  'Yeah?'

  'I'd like to speak to Sheryl Bostock.'

  'Yeah, well she ain't here.'

  I sighed and rubbed at the scar under my eye. 'I think that's probably not true. Her copter's in the yard, you're her son, Daryl, and she came off night shift about three hours ago. Will you tell her there's someone to see her about the Bancroft sleeve.'

  'You the Sia?'

  'No, I just want to talk. If she can help me, there might be some money in it for her.'

  The boy stared at me for another pair of seconds, then closed the door without a word. From inside, I heard him calling his mother. I waited, and fought the urge to smoke.

  Five minutes later Sheryl Bostock appeared around the edge of the door, dressed in a loose kaftan. Her synthetic sleeve was even more expressionless than her son had been, but it was a slack-muscled blankness that had nothing to do with attitude. Small muscle groups take a while to warm up from sleep on the cheaper model synthetics, and this was definitely a model from the cut-price end of the market.

  'You want to see me?' the synth voice asked unevenly. 'What for?'

  'I'm a private investigator working for Laurens Ban­croft,' I said as gently as I could. 'I'd like to ask you a few questions about your duties at PsychaSec. May I come in?'

  She made a small noise, one that made me think she'd probably tried to shut doors in men's faces before without success.

  'It won't take long.'

  She shrugged, and opened the door wide. I passed her and stepped into a tidily kept but threadbare room whose most important feature was clearly a sleek black entertain­ment deck. The system reared off the carpeting in the far corner like an obscure machine-god's idol, and the remaining furniture had been rearranged around it in obeisance. Like the microcopter's paint job, it looked new.

  Daryl had disappeared from view.

  'Nice deck,' I said, going over to examine the machine's raked display front. 'When did you get it?'

  'A while ago.' Sheryl Bostock closed the door and came to stand uncertainly in the centre of the room. Her face was waking up and now its expression hovered midway between sleep and suspicion. 'What do you want to ask me?'

  'May I sit down?'

  She motioned me wordlessly to one of the brutally used armchairs and seated herself opposite me on a lounger. In the gaps left by the kaftan, her synthetic flesh looked pinkish and unreal. I looked at her for a while, wondering if I wanted to go through with this after all.

  'Well?' She jerked her hand at me nervously. 'What do you want to ask me? You wake me up after the night shift, you'd better have a good goddamn reason for this.'

  'On Tuesday 14th August you went into the Bancroft family's sleeving chamber and injected a Laurens Bancroft clone with a full hypospray of something. I'd like to know what it was, Sheryl.'

  The result was more dramatic than I would have ima­gined possible. Sheryl Bostock's artificial features flinched violently and she recoiled as if I'd threatened her with a riot prod.

  'That's a part of my usual duties,' she cried shrilly. 'I'm authorised to perform chemical input on the clones.'

  It didn't sound like her speaking. It sounded like some­thing someone had told her to memorise.

  'Was it synamorphesterone?' I asked quietly.

  Cheap synths don't blush or go pale, but the look on her face conveyed the message just as effectively. She looked like a frightened animal, betrayed by its owner.

  'How do you know that? Who told you that?' Her voice scaled to a high sobbing. 'You can't know that. She said no one would know.'

  She collapsed onto the sofa, weeping into her hands. Daryl emerged from another room at the sound of his mother crying, hesitated in the doorway, and evidently deciding that he couldn't or shouldn't do anything, stayed there, watching me with a frightened expression on his face. I compressed a sigh and nodded at him, trying to look as unthreatening as possible. He went cautiously to the sofa and put a hand on his mother's shoulder, making her start as if from a blow. Ripples of memory stirred in me and I could feel my own expression turning cold and grim. I tried to smile across the room at them, but it was farcical.

  I cleared my throat. 'I'm not here to do anything to you,' I said. 'I just want to know.'

  It took a minute or so for the words to get through the cobwebby veils of terror and sink into Sheryl Bostock's consciousness. It took even longer for her to get her tears under control and look up at me. Beside her, Daryl stroked her head doubtfully. I gritted my teeth and tried to stop the memories of my own eleventh year welling up in my head. I waited.

  'It was her,' she said, finally.

  Curtis intercepted me as I came round the seaward wing of Suntouch House. His face was darkened with anger and his hands were curled into fists at his sides.

  'She doesn't want to talk to you,' he snarled at me.

  '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 Naka-mura. 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 Mieth, 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 i
t 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.'

 

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