“So you beaconed in on me, hooked him out and beamed him over to Carnage for re-sleeving, right?” I felt in my pockets and found Ortega’s cigarettes. In the grim twilight of the basilica, the familiar packet was like a postcard from another place. “No wonder the Panama Rose didn’t have his second fighter decanted when we got there. He’d probably only just finished sleeving Kadmin. That motherfucker walked out of there in a Right Hand of God martyr.”
“About the same time you were coming aboard,” agreed Kawahara. “In fact, I understand he was posing as a menial and you walked right past him. I’d rather you didn’t smoke in here.”
“Kawahara, I’d rather you died of an internal haemorrhage, but I don’t suppose you’ll oblige me.” I touched my cigarette to the ignition patch and drew it to life, remembering. The man knelt in the ring. I played it back slowly. On the deck of the fightdrome ship, peering down at the design being painted onto the killing floor. The upturned face as we passed. Yes, he’d even smiled. I grimaced at the memory.
“You’re being a lot less courteous than befits a man in your situation.” I thought that, underneath the cool, I could detect a ragged edge in her voice. Despite her much vaunted self-control, Reileen Kawahara wasn’t much better at coping with disrespect than Bancroft, General MacIntyre or any other creature of power I’d had dealings with. “Your life is in danger and I am in a position to safeguard it.”
“My life’s been in danger before,” I told her. “Usually as a result of some piece of shit like you making large-scale decisions about how reality ought to be run. You’ve already let Kadmin get too close for my comfort. In fact, he probably used your fucking virtual locater to do it.”
“I sent him,” Kawahara gritted, “to collect you. Again he disobeyed me.”
“Didn’t he just.” I rubbed reflexively at the bruise on my shoulder. “So why should I believe you can do any better next time?”
“Because you know I can.” Kawahara came across the centre of the chamber, ducking her head to avoid the leathery grey clone sacs, and intercepting my path around the perimeter. Her face was taut with anger. “I am one of the seven most powerful human beings in this solar system. I have access to powers that the UN Field Commander General would kill for.”
“This architecture’s going to your head, Reileen. You wouldn’t even have found me if you hadn’t been keeping tabs on Sullivan. How the fuck are you going to find Kadmin?”
“Kovacs, Kovacs.” There was a definite trembling in her laugh, as if she was fighting an urge to put her thumbs through my eye sockets. “Do you have any idea what happens on the streets of any given city on Earth, if I put out a search on someone? Do you have any idea how easy it would be to snuff you out here and now?”
I drew deliberately on the cigarette and plumed the smoke out at her. “As your faithful retainer Trepp said, not ten minutes ago, why bring me here just to snuff me out? You want something from me. Now what is it?”
She breathed in through her nose, hard. A measure of calm seeped onto her face and she stepped back a couple of paces, turned away from the confrontation.
“You’re right, Kovacs. I want you alive. If you disappear now, Bancroft’s going to get the wrong message.”
“Or the right message.” I scuffed absently at engraved lettering on the stone beneath my feet. “Did you torch him?”
“No.” Kawahara looked almost amused. “He killed himself.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Whether you believe it or not is immaterial to me, Kovacs. What I want from you is an end to the investigation. A tidy end.”
“And how do you suggest I achieve that?”
“I don’t care. Make something up. You’re an Envoy, after all. Convince him. Tell him you think the police verdict was correct. Produce a culprit, if you must.” A thin smile. “I do not include myself in that category.”
“If you didn’t kill him, if he torched his own head off, why should you care what happens? What’s your interest in this?”
“That isn’t under discussion here.”
I nodded slowly. “And what do I get in return for this tidy ending?”
“Apart from the hundred thousand dollars?” Kawahara tilted her head quizzically. “Well, I understand you’ve been made a very generous recreational offer by other parties. And for my part, I will keep Kadmin off your back by whatever means necessary.”
I looked down at the lettering beneath my feet, and thought it through, link by link.
“Francisco Franco,” said Kawahara, mistaking the direction of my gaze for focused interest. “Petty tyrant a long time back. He built this place.”
“Trepp said it belonged to the Catholics.”
Kawahara shrugged. “Petty tyrant with delusions of religion. Catholics get on well with tyranny. It’s in the culture.”
I glanced around, ostensibly casual, scanning for robot security systems. “Yeah, looks like it. So let me get this straight. You want me to sell Bancroft a parabolic full of shit, in return for which you’ll call off Kadmin, who you set on me in the first place. That’s the deal?”
“That, as you put it, is the deal.”
I took one last lungful of smoke, savoured it and exhaled.
“You can go fuck yourself, Kawahara.” I dropped my cigarette on the engraved stonework and ground it out with my heel. “I’ll take my chances with Kadmin, and let Bancroft know you probably had him killed. So. Change your mind about letting me live now?”
My hands hung open at my sides, twitching to be filled with the rough woven bulk of handgun butts. I was going to put three Nemex shells through Kawahara’s throat, at stack height, then put the gun in my mouth and blow my own stack apart. Kawahara almost certainly had remote storage anyway, but fuck it, you’ve got to make a stand somewhere. And a man can only stave off his own death wish for so long.
It could have been worse. It could have been Innenin. Kawahara shook her head regretfully. She was smiling. “Always the same Kovacs. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Romantic nihilism. Haven’t you learnt anything since New Beijing?”
“There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.”
“Oh, that’s Quell, isn’t it? Mine was Shakespeare, but then I don’t expect colonial culture goes back that far, does it?” She was still smiling, poised like a total body theatre gymnast about to launch into her aria. For a moment I suffered the almost hallucinatory conviction that she was going to break into a little dance, choreographed to a junk rhythm beat from speakers hidden in the dome above us.
“Takeshi, where did you get this belief that everything can be resolved with such brute simplicity? Surely not from the Envoys? Was it the Newpest gangs? The thrashings your father gave you as a child? Did you really think I would allow you to force my hand? Did you really think I would have come to the table this empty-handed? Think about it. You know me. Did you really believe it would be this easy?”
The neurachem seethed within me. I bit it back, hung from the moment like a parachutist braced in the jump hatch.
“All right,” I said evenly. “Impress me.”
“Gladly.” Kawahara reached into the breast pocket of her liquid black blouse. She produced a tiny holofile and flicked it into active with a thumbnail. As the images evolved in the air above the unit, she passed it to me. “A lot of the detail is legalistic, but you will of course recognise the salient points.”
I took the little sphere of light as if it were a poisonous flower. The name hit me at once, leaping out of the print —
— Sarah Sachilowska —