Getting to my feet, just for a moment I had the traceries of fire at Innenin across the back of my vision, the screaming deaths heard at a level that was bone deep, and suddenly Bancroft’s elegant understatement rang sickly and grotesque, like the antiseptic words of General MacIntyre’s damage reports … for securing the Innenin beachhead, a price well worth paying … Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing.
Someone else was paying.
Chapter Seventeen
The Fell Street station was an unassuming block done out in a style I assumed must be Martian Baroque. Whether it had been planned that way, as a police station, or taken over after the fact was difficult to decide. The place was, potentially, a fortress. The mock-eroded rubystone facings and hooded buttresses provided a series of natural niches in which were set high, stained-glass windows edged by the unobtrusive nubs of shield generators. Below the windows, the abrasive red surface of the stonework was sculpted into jagged obstructions that caught the morning light and turned it bloody. I couldn’t tell whether the steps up to the arched entrance were deliberately uneven or just well worn.
Inside, stained light from a window and a peculiar calm fell on me simultaneously. Subsonics, I guessed, casting a glance around at the human flotsam waiting submissively on the benches. If these were arrested suspects, they had been rendered remarkably unconcerned by something and I doubted it would be the Zen Populist murals that someone had commissioned for the hall. I crossed the patch of coloured light cast by the window, picked my way through small knots of people conversing in lowered tones more appropriate to a library than a holding centre, and found myself at a reception counter. A uniformed cop, presumably the desk sergeant, blinked kindly back at me — the subsonics were obviously getting to him as well.
“Lieutenant Ortega,” I told him. “Organic Damage.”
“Who shall I say it is?”
“Tell her it’s Elias Ryker.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another uniform turn at the sound of the name, but nothing was said. The desk sergeant spoke into his phone, listened then turned back to me.
“She’s sending someone down. Are you armed?”
I nodded and reached under my jacket for the Nemex.
“Please surrender the weapon carefully,” he added with a gentle smile. “Our security software is a little touchy, and it’s apt to stun you if you look like you’re pulling something.”
I slowed my movements to frame advance, dumped the Nemex on the desk and set about unstrapping the Tebbit knife from my arm. When I was finished, the sergeant beamed beatifically at me.
“Thank you. It’ll all be returned to you when you leave the building.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when two of the mohicans appeared through a door at the back of the hall and directed themselves rapidly towards me. Their faces were painted with identical glowers which the subsonics apparently made little impact on in the short time it took them to reach me. They went for an arm apiece.
“I wouldn’t,” I told them.
“Hey, he’s not under arrest, you know,” said the desk sergeant pacifically. One of the mohicans jerked a glance at him and snorted in exasperation. The other one just stared at me the whole time as if he hadn’t eaten red meat recently. I met the stare with a smile. Following the meeting with Bancroft I had gone back to the Hendrix and slept for almost twenty hours. I was rested, neurachemically alert and feeling a cordial dislike of authority of which Quell herself would have been proud.
It must have shown. The mohicans abandoned their attempts to paw me and the three of us rode up four floors in silence broken only by the creak of the ancient elevator.
Ortega’s office had one of the stained-glass windows, or more precisely the bottom half of one, before it was bisected horizontally by the ceiling. Presumably the remainder rose missile-like from the floor of the office above. I began to see some evidence for the original building having been converted to its present use. The other walls of the office were environment-formatted with a tropical sunset over water and islands. The combination of stained glass and sunset meant that the office was filled with a soft orange light in which you could see the drifting of dust motes.
The lieutenant was seated behind a heavy wooden desk as if caged there. Chin propped on one cupped hand, one shin and knee pressed hard against the edge of the desk, she was brooding over the scrolldown of an antique laptop when we came through the door. Aside from the machine, the only items on the desktop were a battered-looking heavy-calibre Smith & Wesson and a plastic cup of coffee, heating tab still unpulled. She dismissed the mohicans with a nod.
“Sit down, Kovacs.”
I glanced around, saw a frame chair under the window and hooked it up to the desk. The late afternoon light in the office was disorientating.
“You work the night shift?”
Her eyes flared. “What kind of crack is that?”
“Hey, nothing.” I held up my hands and gestured at the low light. “I just thought you might have cycled the walls for it. You know it’s ten o’clock in the morning outside.”
“Oh, that.” Ortega grunted and her eyes swivelled back down to the screen display. It was hard to tell in the tropical sunset, but I thought they might be grey/green, like the sea around the maelstrom. “It’s out of synch. The department got it cheap from some place in El Paso Juarez. Jams up completely sometimes.”
“That’s tough.”
“Yeah, sometimes I’ll just turn it off but the neons are—” She looked up abruptly. “What the fuck am I — Kovacs, do you know how close you are to a storage rack right now?”
I made a span of my right index finger and thumb, and looked at her through it.
“About the width of a testimony from the Wei Clinic, was what I heard.”
“We can put you there, Kovacs. Seven forty-three yesterday morning, walking out the front door larger than life.”
I shrugged.
“And don’t think your Meth connections are going to keep you organic forever. There’s a Wei Clinic limo driver telling interesting stories about hijack and Real Death. Maybe he’ll have something to say about you.”
“Impound his vehicle did you?” I asked casually. “Or did Wei reclaim it before you could run tests?”
Ortega’s mouth compressed into a hard line.
I nodded. “Thought so. And the driver will say precisely zero until Wei spring him, I imagine.”
“Listen, Kovacs. I keep pushing, something’s got to give. It’s a matter of time, motherfucker. Strictly that.”
“Admirable tenacity,” I said. “Shame you didn’t have some of that for the Bancroft case.”
“There is no fucking Bancroft case.”
Ortega was on her feet, palms hard down on the desktop, eyes slitted in rage and disgust. I waited, nerves sprung in case Bay City police stations were as prone to accidental suspect injury as some others I had known. Finally, the lieutenant drew a deep breath, and lowered herself joint by joint back into her seat. The anger had smoothed off her face, but the disgust was still there, caught in the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and the set of her wide mouth. She looked at her nails.
“Do you know what we found at the Wei Clinic yesterday?”
“Black market spare parts? Virtual torture programmes? Or didn’t they let you stay that long?”
“We found seventeen bodies with their cortical stacks burnt out. Unarmed. Seventeen dead people. Really dead.”