“All right, that’s enough.” Rutherford’s hand rose decisively to a remote summons emitter pinned to his lapel. Our escort was on his way. “I don’t have time to play games with you. There is no statute by that name, and this is getting perilously close to harassment.”
I raised my voice. “Just wanted to know which side you want to be on when the program crashes, Rutherford. There is a statute. UN indictable offence, last handed down 4th May 2207. Look it up. I had to go back a long way to dig this one up, but it’ll take all of you down in the end. Kadmin knows it, that’s why he’s cracking.”
Rutherford smiled. “I don’t think so, detective.”
I repeated my shrug. “Shame. Like I said, look it up. Then decide which side you want to play for. We’re going to need inside corroboration, and we’re prepared to pay for it. If it isn’t you, Ulan Bator’s stuffed with lawyers who’ll give blow jobs for the chance.”
The smile wavered fractionally.
“That’s right, think about it.” I nodded at Ortega. “You can get me at Fell Street, same as the lieutenant here. Elias Ryker, offworld liaison. I’m promising you, this is going to go down, whatever happens, and when it does, I’ll be a good person to know.”
Ortega took the cue like she’d been doing it all her life. Like Sarah would have done. She unleaned herself from the chairback and made for the door.
“Be seeing you, Rutherford,” she said laconically, as we stepped back out onto the deck. The muscle was there, grinning widely and flexing his hands at his sides. “And you, don’t even think about it.”
I contented myself with the silent look that I had been told Ryker used to such great effect and followed my partner down the stairs.
Back in the cruiser, Ortega snapped on a screen and watched identity data from the bug scroll down.
“Where’d you put it?”
“Print over the fireplace. Corner of the frame.”
She grunted. “They’ll sweep it out of there in nothing flat, you know. And none of it’s admissible as evidence, anyway.”
“I know. You’ve told me that twice already. That’s not the point. If Rutherford’s rattled, he’ll jump first.”
“You think he’s rattled?”
“A little.”
“Yeah.” She glanced curiously at me. “So what the fuck is third party retro-associative complicity?”
“No idea. I made it up.”
Her eyebrow went up. “No shit?”
“Convinced you, huh? Know what, you could have given me a polygraph test while I was spinning it, and I would have convinced that too. Basic Envoy tricks. Course, Rutherford will know that as soon as he looks it up, but it’s already served its purpose.”
“Which is what?”
“Provide the arena. Tell lies, you keep your opponent off balance. It’s like fighting on unfamiliar ground. Rutherford was rattled, but he smiled when I told him this stuff was why Kadmin was acting up.” I looked up through the windscreen at the house above, formulating the scrapings of intuition into understanding. “He was fucking relieved when I said that. I don’t suppose normally he would have given that much away, but the bluff had him running scared, and him knowing better than me about something was that little ray of stability he needed. And that means he knows another reason why Kadmin changed behaviour. He knows the real reason.”
Ortega grunted approvingly. “Pretty good, Kovacs. You should have been a cop. You notice his reaction when I told him the good news about what Kadmin had done? He wasn’t surprised at all.”
“No. He was expecting it. Or something like it.”
“Yeah.” She paused. “This really what you used to do for a living?”
“Sometimes. Diplomatic missions, or deep-cover stuff. It wasn’t—”
I fell silent as she elbowed me in the ribs. On the screen, a series of coded sequences were unwinding like snakes of blue fire.
“Here we go. Simultaneous calls, he must be doing this in virtual to save time. One, two, three—that one’s New York, must be to update the senior partners, and oops.”
The screen flared and went abruptly dark.
“They found it,” I said.
“They did. The New York line probably has a sweeper attached, flushes out the call vicinity on connection.”
“Or one of the others does.”
“Yeah.” Ortega punched up the screen’s memory and stared at the call codes. “They’re all three routed through discreet clearing. Take us a while to locate them. You want to eat?”
Homesickness isn’t something a veteran Envoy should confess to. If the conditioning hasn’t already ironed it out of you, the years of sleeving back and forth across the Protectorate should have done. Envoys are citizens of that elusive state, Here-and-Now, a state that jealously admits of no dual nationalities. The past is relevant only as data.
Homesickness was what I felt as we stepped past the kitchen area of the Flying Fish and the aroma of sauces I had last tasted in Millsport hit me like a friendly tentacle.
Teriyaki, frying tempura and the undercurrent of miso. I stood wrapped in it for a moment, remembering that time. A ramen bar Sarah and I had skulked in while the heat from the Gemini Biosys gig died down, eyes hooked to newsnet broadcasts and a corner videophone with a smashed screen that was supposed to ring, any time now. Steam on the windows and the company of taciturn Millsport skippers.
And back beyond that, I remembered the moth-battered paper lanterns outside Watanabe’s on a Newpest Friday night. My teenage skin slick with sweat from the jungle wind blowing out of the south and my eyes glittering with tetrameth in one of the big windchime mirrors. Talk, cheaper than the big bowls of ramen, about big scores and yakuza connections, tickets north and beyond, new sleeves and new worlds. Old Watanabe had sat out on the deck with us, listening to it all but never commenting, just smoking his pipes and glancing from time to time in the mirror at his own Caucasian features—always with mild surprise, it seemed to me.
He never told us how he’d got that sleeve, just as he never denied or confirmed the rumours about his escapades with the marine corps, the Quell Memorial Brigade, the Envoys, whatever. An older gang member once told us he’d seen Watanabe face down a roomful of Seven Per Cent Angels with nothing but his pipe in his hands, and some kid from the swamp towns once came up with a fuzzy slice of newsreel footage he claimed was from the Settlement wars. It was only two-d, hurriedly shot just before an assault team went over the top, but the sergeant being interviewed was subtitled Watanabe, Y and there was something about the way he tilted his head when questioned that had us all crowing recognition at the screen. But then Watanabe was a common enough name, and come to that, the guy who said he’d seen the Angels facedown was also fond of telling us how he’d slept with a Harlan family heiress when she came slumming, and none of us believed that.
Once, on a rare evening when I was both straight and alone at Watanabe’s, I swallowed enough of my adolescent pride to ask the old man for his advice. I’d been reading UN armed forces promotional literature for weeks, and I needed someone to push me one way or the other.
Watanabe just grinned at me around the stem of his pipe. “I should advise you?” he asked. “Share with you the wisdom that brought me to this?”
We both looked around the little bar and the fields beyond the deck.
“Well, uh, yes.”
“Well, uh, no,” he said firmly, and resumed his pipe.
“Kovacs?”
I blinked and found Ortega in front of me, looking curiously into my eyes.
“Something I need to know about?”
I smiled faintly and glanced around at the kitchen’s shining steel counters. “Not really.”
“It’s good food,” she said, misinterpreting the look.
“Well, let’s get some, then.”
She led me out of the steam and onto one of the restaurant’s gantries. The Flying Fish was, according to Ortega, a decommissioned aerial minesweeper that some oceanographic institute had bought up. The institute was now either defunct or had moved on and the bayward-facing facility had been gutted, but someone had stripped the Flying Fish, rerigged her as a restaurant and cabled her five hundred metres above the decaying facility buildings. Periodically the whole vessel was reeled gently back down to earth to disgorge its sated customers and take on fresh. There was a queue around two sides of the docking hangar when we arrived but Ortega jumped it with her badge, and when the airship came floating down through the open roof of the hangar, we were the first aboard.