Well, well. I waved the Nemex encouragingly.
“That’s it, man. All I got. It’s off the wire. Street talk. Look, Ryker never shook this place down, even back when he worked ST. I run a clean house. I never even met the guy.”
“And Oktai?”
Jerry nodded vigorously. “That’s it, Oktai. Oktai used to run spare part deals out of Oakland. You, I mean, Ryker used to shake him down all the time. Beat him half to death couple of years back.”
“So Oktai comes running to you—”
“That’s it. He’s like, crazy, saying Ryker must be working some scam down here. So we run the cabin tapes, get you talking to—”
Jerry dried up as he saw where we were heading. I gestured again with the gun.
“That’s fucking it.” There was an edge of desperation in his voice.
“All right.” I sat back a little and patted my pockets for cigarettes, remembered I had none. “You smoke?”
“Smoke? Do I look like a fucking idiot?”
I sighed. “Never mind. What about Trepp? She looked a little upmarket for your cred. Who’d you borrow her from?”
“Trepp’s an indie. Contract hire for whoever. She does me favours sometimes.”
“Not any more. You ever see her real sleeve?”
“No. Wire says she keeps it on ice in New York most of the time.”
“That far from here?”
“ ‘Bout an hour, suborbital.”
By my reckoning that put her in the same league as Kadmin. Global muscle, maybe Interplanetary too. The Senior Fleet.
‘So who’s the wire say she’s working for now?”
“I don’t know.”
I studied the barrel of the blaster as if it were a Martian relic. “Yeah, you do.” I looked up and offered him a bleak smile. “Trepp’s gone. Unstacked, the works. You don’t need to worry about selling her out. You need to worry about me.”
He stared defiantly at me for a couple of moments, then looked down.
“I heard she was doing stuff for the Houses.”
“Good. Now, tell me about the clinic. Your sophisticated friends.”
The Envoy training should have been keeping my voice even, but maybe I was getting rusty because Jerry heard something there. He moistened his lips.
“Listen, those are dangerous people. You got away, you’d better just leave it at that. You got no idea what they—”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea, actually.” I pointed the blaster into his face. “The clinic.”
“Christ, they’re just people I know. You know, business associates. They can use the spare parts, sometimes, and I—” He changed tack abruptly as he saw my face. “They do stuff for me sometimes. It’s just business.”
I thought of Louise, alias Anenome, and the journey we’d taken together. I felt a muscle beneath my eye twitch, and it was all I could do not to pull the trigger there and then. I dug up my voice, instead, and used it. It sounded more like a machine than the door robot had.
“We’re going for a ride, Jerry. Just you and me, to visit your business associates. And don’t fuck with me. I’ve already figured out it’s over the other side of the Bay. And I’ve got a good memory for places. You steer me wrong, and I’ll RD you on the spot. Got it?”
From his face I judged that he did.
But just to make sure, on the way out of the club I stopped beside each corpse and burnt its head off down to the shoulders. The burning left an acrid stench that followed us out of the gloom and into the early morning street like a ghost of rage.
There’s a village up on the north arm of the Millsport archipelago where, if a fisherman survives drowning, he is required to swim out to a low reef about half a kilometre from shore, spit into the ocean beyond and return. Sarah’s from there, and once, holed up in a cheap swamp hotel, hiding from heat both physical and figurative, she tried to explain the rationale. It always sounded like macho bullshit to me.
Now, marching down the sterile white corridors of the clinic once again, with the muzzle of my own Philips gun screwed into my neck, I began to have some understanding of the strength it must take to wade back into that water. I’d had cold shivers since we went down in the lift: for the second time, Jerry holding the gun on me from behind. After Innenin, I’d more or less forgotten what it was like to be genuinely afraid, but virtualities were a notable exception. There, you had no control, and literally anything could happen.
Again and again.
They were rattled at the clinic. The news of Trepp’s barbecue ride must have reached them by now, and the face that Jerry had spoken to on the screen at the discreetly appointed front door had gone death white at the sight of me.
“We thought—”
“Never mind that,” snapped Jerry. “Open the fucking door. We’ve got to get this piece of shit off the street.”
The clinic was part of an old turn-of-the-millennium block that someone had renovated in neo-industrial style, doors painted with heavy black and yellow chevrons, façades draped in scaffolding and balconies hung with fake cabling and hoists. The door before us divided along the upward points of the chevrons and slid noiselessly apart. With a last glance at the early morning street, Jerry thrust me inside.
The entrance hall was also neoind, more scaffolding along the walls and patches of exposed brickwork. A pair of security guards were waiting at the end. One of them put out a hand as we approached, and Jerry swung on him, snarling.
“I don’t need any fucking help. You’re the wipeouts that let this motherfucker go in the first place.”
The two guards exchanged a glance and the extended grasp turned into a placatory gesture. They conveyed us to an elevator door that proved to be the same commercial-capacity shaft I’d ridden down from the car park on the roof last time. When we came out at the bottom, the same medical team were waiting, sedating implements poised. They looked edgy, tired. Butt end of the night shift. When the same nurse moved to hypo me, Jerry brought out the snarl again. He had it down to perfection.
“Never fucking mind that.” He screwed the Philips gun harder into my neck. “He isn’t going anywhere. I want to see Miller.”
“He’s in surgery.”
“Surgery?” Jerry barked a laugh. “You mean he’s watching the machine make pick and mix. All right, Chung, then.”
The team hesitated.
“What? Don’t tell me you got all your consultants working for a living this morning.”
“No, it’s…” The man nearest me gestured. ”It’s not procedure, taking him in awake.”
“Don’t fucking tell me about procedure.” Jerry did a good impression of a man about to explode with fury. “Was it procedure to let this piece of shit get out and wreck my place after I sent him over here? Was that fucking procedure? Was it?”
There was silence. I looked at the blaster and Nemex, shoved into Jerry’s waistband, and measured the angles. Jerry took a renewed grip on my collar and ground the gun under my jaw once again. He glared at the medics and spoke with a kind of gritted calm.
“He ain’t moving. Got it? There isn’t time for this bullshit. We are going to see Chung. Now, move.”
They bought it. Anyone would have. You pile on the pressure, and most people fall back on response. They give in to the higher authority, or the man with the gun. These people were tired and scared. We double-timed it down the corridors. Past the operating theatre I had woken up in, or one like it. I caught a glimpse of figures gathered around the surgery platform, the autosurgeon moving spiderlike above them. We were a dozen paces further along when someone stepped into the corridor behind us.
“Just a moment.” The voice was cultured, almost leisurely, but it brought the medics and Jerry up short. We turned to face a tall, blue-smocked figure wearing bloodstained spray-on surgical gloves and a mask which he now unpinned with one fastidious thumb and forefinger. The visage beneath was blandly handsome, blue eyes in a tanned, square-jawed face, this year’s Competent Male, courtesy of some upmarket cosmetic salon.