“It’d learnt to sew, then?”
“Tengu are multi-talented. However many times it replaced itself, after a few days the new portions began to putrefy, and it was driven out once more to hunt. In the quarter they call it the Patchwork Man.”
I fell silent. Ortega mouthed a silent O, then slowly exhaled smoke through it. She watched the smoke dissipate, then turned to face me.
“Your mother tell you that story?”
“Father. When I was five.”
She looked at the end of her cigarette. “Nice.”
“No. He wasn’t. But that’s another story.” I stood up and looked down the street to where the crowd was massed at one of the incident barriers. “Kadmin’s out there, and he’s out of control. Whoever he was working for, he’s working for himself now.”
“How?” Ortega spread her hands in exasperation. “OK, an AI could tunnel into the Bay City PD stack. I’ll buy that. But we’re talking about microsecond intrusion here. Any longer and it’d ring bells from here to Sacramento.”
“Microsecond’s all it needed.”
“But Kadmin isn’t on stack. They’d need to know when he was being spun, and they’d need a fix. They’d need…”
She stopped as she saw it coming.
“Me.” I finished for her. “They’d need me.”
“But you—”
“I’m going to need some time to sort this out, Ortega.” I spun my cigarette into the gutter and grimaced as I tasted the inside of my own mouth. “Today, maybe tomorrow too. Check the stack. Kadmin’s gone. If I were you, I’d keep your head down for a while.”
Ortega pulled a sour face. “You telling me to go undercover in my own city?”
“Not telling you to do anything.” I pulled out the Nemex and ejected the half-spent magazine with actions almost as automatic as the smoking had been. The clip went into my jacket pocket. “I’m giving you the state of play. We’ll need somewhere to meet. Not the Hendrix. And not anywhere you can be traced to either. Don’t tell me, just write it down.” I nodded at the crowd beyond the barriers. “Anybody down there with decent implants could have this conversation focused and amped.”
“Jesus.” She blew out her cheeks. “That’s technoparanoia, Kovacs.”
“Don’t tell me that. I used to do this for a living.”
She thought about it for a moment, then produced a pen and scribbled on the side of the cigarette packet. I fished a fresh magazine from my pocket and jacked it into the Nemex, eyes still scanning the crowd.
“There you go.” Ortega tossed me the packet. “That’s a discreet destination code. Feed it to any taxi in the Bay area and it’ll take you there. I’ll be there tonight, tomorrow night. After that, it’s back to business as usual.”
I caught the packet left-handed, glanced briefly at the numbers and put it away in my jacket. Then I snapped the slide on the Nemex to chamber the first slug and stuffed the pistol back into its holster.
“Tell me that when you’ve checked the stack,” I said, and started walking.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I walked south.
Over my head, autocabs wove in and out of the traffic with programmed hyper-efficiency and swooped occasionally to ground level in attempts to stimulate custom. The weather above the traffic flow was on the change, grey cloud cover racing in from the west and occasional spots of rain hitting my cheek when I looked up. I left the cabs alone. Go primitive, Virginia Vidaura would have said. With an AI gunning for you, your only hope is to drop out of the electronic plane. Of course, on a battlefield that’s a lot more easily done. Plenty of mud and chaos to hide in. A modern city—unbombed—is a logistical nightmare for this kind of evasion. Every building, every vehicle, every street is jacked into the web, and every transaction you make tags you for the datahounds.
I found a battered-looking currency dispenser and replenished my thinning sheaf of plastified notes from it. Then I backed up two blocks and went east until I found a public callbox. I searched through my pockets, came up with a card, settled the call trades on my head and dialled.
There was no image. No sound of connection. This was an internal chip. The voice spoke brusquely out of a blank screen.
“Who is this?”
“You gave me your card,” I said, “in case of anything major. Well, now it seems there’s something pretty fucking major we need to talk about, doctor.”
There was an audible click as she swallowed, just once, and then her voice was there again, level and cool. “We should meet. I assume you don’t want to come to the facility.”
“You assume right. You know the red bridge?”
“The Golden Gate, it’s called,” she said dryly. “Yes, I’m familiar with it.”
“Be there at eleven. Northbound carriageway. Come alone.”
I cut the connection. Dialled again.
“Bancroft residence, with whom do you wish to speak?” A severely-suited woman with a hairstyle reminiscent of Angin Chandra’s pilot cuts arrived on the screen a fraction after she started speaking.
“Laurens Bancroft, please.”
“Mr. Bancroft is in conference at present.”
That made it even easier. “Fine. When he’s available, can you tell him Takeshi Kovacs called.”
“Would you like to speak to Mrs. Bancroft? She has left instructions that—”
“No,” I said rapidly. “That won’t be necessary. Please tell Mr. Bancroft that I shall be out of contact for a few days, but that I will call him from Seattle. That’s all.”
I cut the connection, and checked my watch. There was about an hour and forty minutes left of the time I’d given myself to be on the bridge. I went looking for a bar.
I’m stacked, backed up and I’m fifth dan
And I’m not afraid of the Patchwork Man
The small coin of urchin rhyme gleamed up at me from the silted bed of my childhood.
But I was afraid.
The rain still hadn’t set in when we got onto the approach road to the bridge, but the clouds were massing sullenly above and the windscreen was splattered with heavy droplets too few to trigger the truck’s wipers. I watched the rust-coloured structure looming up ahead through the distortion of the exploded raindrops and knew I was going to get soaked.
There was no traffic on the bridge. The suspension towers rose like the bones of some incalculably huge dinosaur above deserted asphalt lanes and side gantries lined with unidentifiable detritus.
“Slow down,” I told my companion as we passed under the first tower, and the heavy vehicle braked with uncalled for force. I glanced sideways. “Take it easy. I told you, this is a no-risk gig. I’m just meeting someone.”
Graft Nicholson gave me a bleary look from the driver’s seat, and a breath of stale alcohol came with it.
“Yeah, sure. You hand out this much plastique on drivers every week, right? Just pick them out of Licktown bars for charity?”
I shrugged. “Believe what you want. Just keep your speed down. You can drive as fast as you like after you let me out.”
Nicholson shook his tangled head. “This is fucked, man—”
“There. Standing on the walkway. Drop me there.” There was a solitary figure leaning on the rail up ahead, apparently contemplating the view of the bay. Nicholson frowned with concentration and hunched the vastly out-sized shoulders for which, presumably, he was named. The battered truck drifted sedately but not quite smoothly across two lanes and came to a bumpy halt beside the right-hand barrier.
I jumped down, glanced around for bystanders, saw none and pulled myself back up on the open door.
“All right now, listen. It’s going to be at least two days till I get to Seattle, maybe three, so you just hole up in the first hotel the city limits datastack has to offer, and you wait for me there. Pay cash, but book in under my name. I’ll contact you between ten and eleven in the morning, so be in the hotel at those times. The rest of the time, you can do what you like. I figure I gave you enough cash not to get bored.”