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, troded 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 her 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.”