I put a hand on her arm and she stopped moving abruptly.
“Two. No surprises. You tell me exactly what’s going to happen well before it does. Anything unexpected, and you’re likely to be disappointing your sensei all over again.”
“Fine. No surprises.” Trepp produced a slightly forced smile that told me she wasn’t accustomed to being grabbed by the arm. “We’re going to walk out of the restaurant and catch a taxi. That all right by you?”
“Just so long as it’s empty.” I released her arm and she resumed motion, coming fluidly upright, hands still well away from her sides. I reached into my pocket and tossed a couple of plastic notes at Sullivan. “You stay here. If I see your face come through the door before we’re gone, I’ll put a hole in it. Tea’s on me.”
As I followed Trepp to the door, the waiter arrived with Sullivan’s tea cup and a big white handkerchief, presumably for the warden’s smashed lip. Nice kid. He practically tripped over himself trying to stay out of my way, and the look he gave me was mingled disgust and awe. In the wake of the icy fury that had possessed me earlier, I sympathised more than he could have known.
The young men in silk watched us go with the dead-eyed concentration of snakes.
Outside, it was still raining. I turned up my collar and watched as Trepp produced a transport pager and waved it casually back and forth above her head. “Be a minute,” she said, and gave me a curious sidelong glance. “You know who that place belongs to?”
“I guessed.”
She shook her head. “Triad noodle house. Hell of a place for an interrogation. Or do you just like living dangerously?”
I shrugged. “Where I come from, criminals stay out of other people’s fights. They’re a gutless lot, generally. Much more likely to get interference from a solid citizen.”
“Not around here. Most solid citizens around here are a little too solid to get involved in a brawl on some stranger’s behalf. The way they figure it, that’s what the police are for. You’re from Harlan’s World, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Maybe it’s that Quellist thing, then. You reckon?”
“Maybe.”
An autocab came spiralling down through the rain in response to the pager. Trepp stood aside at the open hatch and made an irony of demonstrating the empty compartment within. I smiled thinly.
“After you.”
“Suit yourself.” She climbed aboard and moved over to let me in. I settled back on the seat opposite her and watched her hands. When she saw where I was looking, she grinned and spread her arms cruciform along the back of the seat. The hatch hinged down, shedding rain in sliding sheets.
“Welcome to Urbline services,” said the cab smoothly. “Please state your destination.”
“Airport,” said Trepp, lounging back in her seat and looking for my reaction. “Private carriers’ terminal.”
The cab lifted. I looked past Trepp at the rain on the rear window. “Not a local trip, then,” I said tonelessly.
She brought her arms in again, hands held palm upward. “Well, we figured you wouldn’t go virtual, so now we have to do it the hard way. Sub-orbital. Take about three hours.”
“Sub-orbital?” I drew a deep breath and touched the holstered Philips gun lightly. “You know, I’m going to get really upset if someone asks me to check this hardware before we fly.”
“Yeah, we figured that too. Relax Kovacs, you heard me say private terminal. This is a custom flight, just for you. Carry a fucking tactical nuke on board if you like. OK?”
“Where are we going, Trepp?”
She smiled.
“Europe,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Wherever it was in Europe that we landed, the weather was better. We left the blunt, windowless sub-orbital sitting on the fused glass runway, and walked to the terminal building through glinting sunlight that was a physical pressure on my body, even through my jacket. The sky above was an uncompromising blue from horizon to horizon, and the air felt hard and dry. According to the pilot’s time-check, it was still only mid afternoon. I shrugged my way out of the jacket.
“Should be a limo waiting for us,” Trepp said over her shoulder.
We passed, without formality, into the terminal and across a zone of micro-climate where palms and other less recognisable tropicalia made a bid for the massive glass ceiling. A misty rain drifted down from sprinkler systems, rendering the air pleasantly damp after the aridity outside. Along the aisles set between the trees, children played and squalled, and old people sat dozily on wrought iron benches in a seemingly impossible co-existence. The middle generations were gathered in knots at coffee stands, talking with more gesticulation than I’d seen in Bay City and seemingly oblivious to the factors of time and schedule that govern most terminal buildings.
I adjusted the jacket across my shoulder to cover my weapons as much as possible and followed Trepp into the trees. It wasn’t quick enough to beat the gaze of two security guards standing under a palm nearby, or that of a little girl scuffing her toes along the side of the aisle towards us. Trepp made a sign to the security as they stiffened, and they fell back into their previous relaxed postures with nods. Clearly, we were expected. The little girl wasn’t so easily bought — she stared up at me with wide eyes until I made a pistol out of my fingers and shot her with noisy sound effects. Then she showed her teeth in a huge grin and hid behind the nearest bench. I heard her shooting me in the back all the way along the aisle.
Outside again, Trepp steered me past a mob of taxis to where an anonymous black cruiser was idling in a no-waiting zone. We climbed into air-conditioned cool and pale grey automould seating.
“Ten minutes,” she promised, as we rose into the air. “What did you think of the micro-climate?”
“Very nice.”
“Got them all over the airport. Weekends, people come out from the centre to spend the day here. Weird, huh?”
I grunted and watched the window as we banked over the whorled settlement patterns of a major city. Further out, a dusty-looking plain stretched to the horizon and the almost painful blue of the sky. To the left, I could make out the rise of mountains.
Trepp seemed to pick up on my disinclination to talk and she busied herself with a phone jack that she plugged in behind the ear with the ironic pendant. Another internal chip. Her eyes closed as she began the call, and I was left with the peculiar feeling of aloneness that you get when someone’s using one of those things.
Alone was fine with me.
The truth was that I’d been a poor travelling companion for Trepp for most of the journey. In the cabin of the sub-ship I’d been steadfastly withdrawn despite Trepp’s obvious interest in my background. Finally she gave up trying to extract anecdotes about Harlan’s World and the Corps and tried instead to teach me a couple of card games she knew. Impelled by some ghost of cultural politeness, I reciprocated, but two isn’t an ideal number for cards and neither of our hearts was in it. We landed in Europe in silence, each flipping through our own selection from the jet’s media stack. Despite Trepp’s apparent lack of concern on the subject, I was having a hard time forgetting the circumstances of our last trip together.
Below us, the plain gave way to increasingly green uplands and then one valley in particular where the forested crags seemed to close around something man-made. As we started to descend, Trepp unjacked herself with a flutter of eyelids that meant she hadn’t bothered to disconnect the chip synapses first — strictly advised against by most manufacturers, but maybe she was showing off. I barely noticed. Most of me was absorbed in the thing we were landing beside.