She seemed to flinch as my gaze fell on her.
“What’s the matter?” I asked softly. “Medical ethics pinching a little?”
“It was not my idea—”
“I know that. You just signed the releases, turned a blind eye, that kind of thing. So who was it?”
“I don’t know,” she said not quite steadily. “Someone came to see Sullivan. An artificial sleeve. Asian, I think.”
I nodded. Trepp.
“What were Sullivan’s instructions?”
“Virtual net locater, fitted between the cortical stack and neural interface.” The clinical details seemed to give her strength. Her voice firmed up. “We did the surgery two days before you were freighted. Microscalpelled into the vertebrae along the line of the original stack incision, and plugged it with graft tissue. No show under any kind of sweep outside virtual. You’d have to run a full neuro-electrical to find it. How did you guess?”
“I didn’t have to guess. Someone used it to locate and lever a contract killer out of the Bay City police holding stack. That’s Aiding and Abetting. You and Sullivan are both going down for a couple of decades minimum.”
She looked pointedly up and down the empty bridge. “In that case, why aren’t the police here, Mr Kovacs?”
I thought about the rap sheet and military records that must have come to earth with me, and what it must feel like standing here alone with someone who had done all those things. What it must have taken to come out here alone. Slowly, a reluctant smile crept out of one corner of my mouth.
“All right, I’m impressed,” I said. “Now tell me how to neutralise the damn thing.”
She looked at me seriously, and the rain began to fall. Heavy drops, dampening the shoulders of her coat. I felt it in my hair. We both glanced up and I cursed. A moment later she stepped closer to me and touched a heavy brooch on one wing of her coat. The air above us shimmered and the rain stopped falling on me. Looking up again, I saw it exploding off the dome of the repulsion field over our heads. Around our feet, the paving darkened in splotches and then uniformly, but a magic circle around our feet stayed dry.
“To actually remove the locater will require microsurgery similar to its placement. It can be done, but not without a full micro-op theatre. Anything less, and you run the risk of damaging the neural interface, or even the spinal nerve canals.”
I shifted a little, uncomfortable at our proximity. “Yeah, I figured.”
“Well, then you’ve probably also figured,” she said, burlesquing my accent, “that you can enter either a scrambling signal or a mirror code into the stack receiver to neutralise the broadcast signature.”
“If you’ve got the original signature.”
“If, as you say, you have the original signature.” She reached into her pocket and produced a small, plastic-sheathed disc, weighed it in her palm for a moment and then held it out to me. “Well, now you have.”
I took the disc and looked at it speculatively.
“It’s genuine. Any neuro-electrical clinic will confirm that for you. If you have doubts, I can recommend—”
“Why are you doing this for me?”
She met my eye, without flinching this time. “I’m not doing it for you, Mr Kovacs. I am doing this for myself.”
I waited. She looked away for a moment, across the Bay. “I am not a stranger to corruption, Mr Kovacs. No one can work for long in a justice facility and fail to recognise a gangster. The synthetic was one of a type. Warden Sullivan has had dealings with these people as long as I have had tenure at Bay City. Police jurisdiction ends outside our doors, and Administration salaries are not high.”
She looked back at me. “I have never taken payment from these people, nor, until now, had I acted on their behalf. But equally, I have never stood against them. It has been very easy to bury myself in my work and pretend not to see what goes on.”
“‘The human eye is a wonderful device,’” I quoted from Poems and Other Prevarications absently. “‘With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.’”
“Very aptly put.”
“It’s not mine. So how come you did the surgery?”
She nodded. “As I said, until now I had managed to avoid actual contact with these people. Sullivan had me assigned to Offworld Sleeving because there wasn’t much of it, and the favours he did were all local. It made it easier for both of us. He’s a good manager in that respect.”
“Shame I came along then.”
“Yes, it presented a problem. He knew it’d look odd if I was taken off the procedure for one of his more compliant medics, and he didn’t want any waves. Apparently this was something big.” She placed the same derisive stress on the words as she had on my figured earlier. “These people were jacked in at high level, and everything had to be smooth. But he wasn’t stupid, he had a rationale all ready for me.”
“Which was?”
She gave me another candid look. “That you were a dangerous psychopath. A killing machine turned rabid. And that, whatever the reasons, it wouldn’t be a good idea to have you swimming the dataflows untagged. No telling where you could needlecast to once you’re out of the real world. And I bought it. He showed me the files they have on you. Oh, he wasn’t stupid. No. I was.”
I thought of Leila Begin and our talk of psychopaths on the virtual beach. Of my own flippant responses.
“Sullivan wouldn’t be the first person to call me a psychopath. And you wouldn’t be the first person to buy it either. The Envoys, well, it’s…” I shrugged and looked away. “It’s a label. Simplification for public consumption.”
“They say a lot of you turned. That twenty per cent of the serious crime in the Protectorate is caused by renegade Envoys. Is it true?”
“The percentage?” I stared away through the rain. “I wouldn’t know. There are a lot of us out there, yes. There’s not much else to do once you’ve been discharged from the Corps. They won’t let you into anything that might lead to a position of power or influence. On most worlds you’re barred from holding public office. Nobody trusts Envoys, and that means no promotion. No prospects. No loans, no credit.”
I turned back to her. “And the stuff we’ve been trained to do is so close to crime, there’s almost no difference. Except that crime is easier. Most criminals are stupid, you probably know that. Even the organised syndicates are like kid gangs compared to the Corps. It’s easy to get respect. And when you’ve spent the last decade of your life jacking in and out of sleeves, cooling out on stack and living virtual, the threats that law enforcement has to offer are pretty bland.”
We stood together in silence for a while.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally.
“Don’t be. Anyone reading those files on me would have—”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“Oh.” I looked down at the disc in my hands. “Well, if you were looking to atone for something, I’d say you just have. And take it from me, no one stays totally clean. The only place you get to do that is on stack.”
“Yes. I know.”
“Yeah, well. There is just one more thing I’d like to know.”
“Yes?”
“Is Sullivan at Bay City Central right now?”
“He was when I went out.”
“And what time is he likely to leave this evening?”
“It’s usually around seven.” She compressed her lips. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to ask him some questions,” I said truthfully.
“And if he won’t answer them?”
“Like you said, he’s not stupid.” I put the disc into my jacket pocket. “Thank you for your help, doctor. I’d suggest you try not to be around the facility at seven tonight. And thank you.”