Graft Nicholson bared his teeth in a knowing leer that made me feel slightly sorry for anyone working in the Seattle leisure industry that week. “Don’t worry ‘bout me, man. Old Graft knows how to grab a good time by the titties.”
“I’m glad. Just don’t get too comfortable. We may need to move it in a hurry.”
“Yeah, yeah. What about the rest of the plastique, man?”
“I told you. You’ll get paid when we’re done.”
“And what about if you don’t show up in three days?”
“In that case,” I said pleasantly, “I’ll be dead. That happens, it’d be better to drop out of sight for a few weeks. They’re not going to waste time looking for you. They find me, they’ll be happy.”
“Man, I don’t think I’m—”
“You’ll be fine. See you in three days.” I dropped back to the ground, slammed the truck door and banged on it twice. The engine rumbled into drive and Nicholson pulled the truck back out into the middle of the carriageway.
Watching him go, I wondered briefly if he’d actually go to Seattle at all. I’d given him a sizable chunk of credit, after all, and even with the promise of a second down payment if he followed instructions, the temptation would still be to double back somewhere up the coast and head straight back to the bar I’d picked him out of. Or he might get jumpy, sitting in the hotel waiting for a knock on the door, and skip before the three days were up. I couldn’t really blame him for these potential betrayals, since I had no intention of turning up myself. Whatever he did was fine by me.
In systems evasion, you must scramble the enemy’s assumptions, said Virginia in my ear. Run as much interference as you can without breaking pace.
“A friend of yours, Mr. Kovacs?” The doctor had come to the barrier and was watching the car recede.
“Met him in a bar,” I said truthfully, climbing over to her side, and making for the rail. It was the same view I’d seen when Curtis brought me back from Suntouch House the day of my arrival. In the gloomy, pre-rain light the aerial traffic glimmered above the buildings across the Bay like a swarm of fireflies. Narrowing my eyes, I could make out detail on the island of Alcatraz, the grey-walled and orange-windowed bunker of PsychaSec SA. Beyond lay Oakland. At my back, the open sea and to north and south a solid kilometre of empty bridge. Reasonably sure that nothing short of tactical artillery could surprise me here, I turned back to look at the doctor.
She seemed to flinch as my gaze fell on her.
“What’s the matter?” I asked softly. “Medical ethics pinching a little?”
“It was not my idea—”
“I know that. You just signed the releases, turned a blind eye, that kind of thing. So who was it?”
“I don’t know,” she said not quite steadily. “Someone came to see Sullivan. An artificial sleeve. Asian, I think.”
I nodded. Trepp.
“What were Sullivan’s instructions?”
“Virtual net locater, fitted between the cortical stack and neural interface.” The clinical details seemed to give her strength. Her voice firmed up. “We did the surgery two days before you were freighted. Microscalpelled into the vertebrae along the line of the original stack incision, and plugged it with graft tissue. No show under any kind of sweep outside virtual. You’d have to run a full neuro-electrical to find it. How did you guess?”
“I didn’t have to guess. Someone used it to locate and lever a contract killer out of the Bay City police holding stack. That’s Aiding and Abetting. You and Sullivan are both going down for a couple of decades minimum.”
She looked pointedly up and down the empty bridge. “In that case, why aren’t the police here, Mr. Kovacs?”
I thought about the rap sheet and military records that must have come to earth with me, and what it must feel like standing here alone with someone who had done all those things. What it must have taken to come out here alone. Slowly, a reluctant smile crept out of one corner of my mouth.
“All right, I’m impressed,” I said. “Now tell me how to neutralise the damn thing.”
She looked at me seriously, and the rain began to fall. Heavy drops, dampening the shoulders of her coat. I felt it in my hair. We both glanced up and I cursed. A moment later she stepped closer to me and touched a heavy brooch on one wing of her coat. The air above us shimmered and the rain stopped falling on me. Looking up again, I saw it exploding off the dome of the repulsion field over our heads. Around our feet, the paving darkened in splotches and then uniformly, but a magic circle around our feet stayed dry.
“To actually remove the locater will require microsurgery similar to its placement. It can be done, but not without a full micro-op theatre. Anything less, and you run the risk of damaging the neural interface, or even the spinal nerve canals.”
I shifted a little, uncomfortable at our proximity. “Yeah, I figured.”
“Well, then you’ve probably also figured,” she said, burlesquing my accent, “that you can enter either a scrambling signal or a mirror code into the stack receiver to neutralise the broadcast signature.”
“If you’ve got the original signature.”
“If, as you say, you have the original signature.” She reached into her pocket and produced a small, plastic-sheathed disc, weighed it in her palm for a moment and then held it out to me. “Well, now you have.”
I took the disc and looked at it speculatively.
“It’s genuine. Any neuro-electrical clinic will confirm that for you. If you have doubts, I can recommend—”
“Why are you doing this for me?”
She met my eye, without flinching this time. “I’m not doing it for you, Mr. Kovacs. I am doing this for myself.”
I waited. She looked away for a moment, across the Bay. “I am not a stranger to corruption, Mr. Kovacs. No one can work for long in a justice facility and fail to recognise a gangster. The synthetic was one of a type. Warden Sullivan has had dealings with these people as long as I have had tenure at Bay City. Police jurisdiction ends outside our doors, and Administration salaries are not high.”
She looked back at me. “I have never taken payment from these people, nor, until now, had I acted on their behalf. But equally, I have never stood against them. It has been very easy to bury myself in my work and pretend not to see what goes on.”
“ ‘The human eye is a wonderful device,’ ” I quoted from Poems and Other Prevarications absently. “ ‘With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.’ ”
“Very aptly put.”
“It’s not mine. So how come you did the surgery?”
She nodded. “As I said, until now I had managed to avoid actual contact with these people. Sullivan had me assigned to Offworld Sleeving because there wasn’t much of it, and the favours he did were all local. It made it easier for both of us. He’s a good manager in that respect.”
“Shame I came along then.”
“Yes, it presented a problem. He knew it’d look odd if I was taken off the procedure for one of his more compliant medics, and he didn’t want any waves. Apparently this was something big.” She placed the same derisive stress on the words as she had on my figured earlier. “These people were jacked in at high level, and everything had to be smooth. But he wasn’t stupid, he had a rationale all ready for me.”
“Which was?”
She gave me another candid look. “That you were a dangerous psychopath. A killing machine turned rabid. And that, whatever the reasons, it wouldn’t be a good idea to have you swimming the dataflows untagged. No telling where you could needlecast to once you’re out of the real world. And I bought it. He showed me the files they have on you. Oh, he wasn’t stupid. No. I was.”