Deng shrugged. ‘That he’s smart. Acquisitions muscled in on a lot of government contracts just before the war. Stuff the majors weren’t even looking at. The word is Hand’s telling the policy board it’ll have a seat on the Cartel by this time next year. And no one I know’s laughing at that.’
‘Yeah. Too much danger of a career change, decorating the inside of taxis with your guts. I think we’ll—’
Falling.
Leaving the ID&A format turned out to be about as much fun as coming in. It felt as if a trapdoor had opened in the floor under my chair and dropped me down a hole drilled right through the planet. The sea of static slithered in from all sides, eating up the darkness with a hungry crackling and bursting against my combined senses like an instant empathin hangover. Then it was gone, leached out and sucking away just as unpleasantly, and I was reality-aware again, head down and a tiny string of saliva drooling from one corner of my mouth.
‘You OK, Kovacs?’
Schneider.
I blinked. The air around me seemed unreasonably twilit after the static rush, as if I’d been staring into the sun for too long.
‘Kovacs?’ This time it was Tanya Wardani’s voice. I wiped my mouth and looked around. Beside me the ID&A set was humming quietly, the glowing green counter numerals frozen at 49. Wardani and Schneider stood on either side of the set, peering at me with almost comical concern. Behind them, the resin-moulded tawdriness of the whoring chamber lent the whole thing an air of badly staged farce. I could feel myself starting to smirk as I reached up and removed the skullcap.
‘Well?’ Wardani drew back a little. ‘Don’t just sit there grinning. What did you get?’
‘Enough,’ I said. ‘I think we’re ready to deal now.’
PART TWO
Commercial Considerations
In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don’t, then the agenda-makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay.
CHAPTER NINE
‘Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please.’
The auctioneer tapped a finger delicately onto the bulb of her no-hands mike and the sound frub-frubbed through the vaulted space over our heads like muffled thunder. In keeping with tradition, she was attired, minus helmet and gloves, in a vacuum suit of sorts, but it was moulded in lines that reminded me more of the fashion houses on New Beijing than a Mars exploratory dig. Her voice was sweet, warm coffee laced with overproof rum. ‘Lot seventy-seven. From the Lower Danang Field, recent excavation. Three-metre pylon with laser-engraved technoglyph base. Opening offers at two hundred thousand saft.’
‘Somehow I don’t think so.’ Matthias Hand sipped at his tea and glanced idly up to where the artefact turned in holographic magnification just beyond the edge of the clearing balcony. ‘Not today, and not with that bloody great fissure running through the second glyph.’
‘Well you never know,’ I said easily. ‘No telling what kind of idiots are wandering around with too much money in a place like this.’
‘Oh, quite.’ He twisted slightly in his seat, as if scanning the loosely knotted crowd of potential buyers scattered around the balcony. ‘But I really think you’ll see this piece go for rather less than a hundred and twenty.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I do.’ An urbane smile faded in and then out across the chiselled Caucasian planes of his face. He was, like most corporate execs, tall and forgettably good-looking. ‘Of course, I have been wrong in the past. Occasionally. Ah, good, this looks like ours.’
The food arrived, dispensed by a waiter on whom had been inflicted a cheaper and less well-cut version of the auctioneer’s suit. He unloaded our order with remarkable grace, considering. We both waited in silence while he did it and then watched him out of sight with symmetrical caution.
‘Not one of yours?’ I asked.
‘Hardly.’ Hand prodded doubtfully at the contents of the bento tray with his chopsticks. ‘You know, you might have picked another cuisine. I mean, there’s a war on and we are over a thousand kilometres from the nearest ocean. Do you really think sushi was such a good idea?’
‘I’m from Harlan’s World. It’s what we eat there.’
Both of us were ignoring the fact that the sushi bar was slap in the middle of the clearing balcony, exposed to sniper view from positions all over the auction house’s airy interior. In one such position, Jan Schneider was at that moment huddled up with a snub-barrelled hooded-discharge laser carbine, looking down a sniper-scope at Matthias Hand’s face. I didn’t know how many other men and women might be in the house doing the same thing to me.
Up on the holodisplay over our heads, the opening price slithered in warm orange numerals, down past a hundred and fifty and unchecked by the imploring tones of the auctioneer. Hand nodded towards the figure.
‘There you are. The corrosion begins.’ He started to eat. ‘Shall we get down to business then?’
‘Fair enough.’ I tossed something across the table to him. ‘That’s yours, I think.’
It rolled on the surface until he stopped it with his free hand. He picked it up between a well-manicured finger and thumb and looked at it quizzically.
‘Deng?’
I nodded.
‘What did you get out of him?’
‘Not much. No time with a virtual trace set to blow on activation, you know that.’ I shrugged. ‘He dropped your name before he realised I wasn’t a Mandrake psychosurgeon, but after that he pretty much clammed up. Tough little motherfucker.’
Hand’s expression turned sceptical, but he dropped the cortical stack into the breast pocket of his suit without further comment. He chewed slowly through another mouthful of sashimi.
‘Did you really have to shoot them all?’ he asked finally.
I shrugged. ‘That’s the way we do things up north these days. Maybe you haven’t heard. There’s a war on.’
‘Ah, yes.’ He seemed to notice my uniform for the first time. ‘So you’re in the Wedge. I wonder, how would Isaac Carrera react to news of your incursions into Landfall, do you suppose?’
I shrugged again. ‘Wedge officers get a lot of latitude. It might be a little tricky to explain, but I can always tell him I was undercover, following up a strategic initiative.’
‘And are you?’
‘No. This is strictly personal.’
‘And what if I’ve recorded this and I play it back to him?’
‘Well, if I’m undercover, I have to tell you something to maintain that cover, don’t I. That would make this conversation a double bluff. Wouldn’t it.’
There was a pause while we looked impassively at each other across the table, and then another smile spread slowly onto the Mandrake executive’s face. This one stayed longer and was unmanufactured, I thought.
‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘That is so very elegant. Congratulations, lieutenant. It’s so watertight I don’t know what to believe, myself. You could be working for the Wedge, for all I know.’
‘Yes, I could.’ I smiled back. ‘But you know what? You don’t have time to worry about that. Because the same data you received yesterday is in locked-down launch configuration at fifty places in the Landfall dataflow, preprogrammed for high-impact delivery into every corporate stack in the Cartel. And the clock is running. You’ve got about a month to put this together. After that, well, all your heavyweight competitors will know what you know, and a certain stretch of coastline is going to look like Touchdown Boulevard on New Year’s Eve.’