‘With mindbites, you get everything,’ said Elliott with a peculiar enthusiasm I suspected was a graft from his wife’s opinions. ‘The doubt, the muck, the humanity. People will pay a fortune for it.’
‘But it’s illegal?’
Elliott gestured at the shopfront that bore his name. ‘The data market was down. Too many brokers. Saturated. We had a clone and re-sleeving policy to pay on both of us, plus Elizabeth. My tac pension wasn’t going to be enough. What could we do?’
‘How long did she get?’ I asked him softly.
Elliott stared out to sea. ‘Thirty years.’
After a while, stare still fixed on the horizon, he said, ‘I was OK for six months, then I turn on the screen and see some corporate negotiator wearing Irene’s body.’ He half-turned towards me and coughed out something that might have been a laugh. ‘Corporation bought it direct from the Bay City storage facility. Paid five times what I could have afforded. They say the bitch only wears it alternate months.’
‘Elizabeth know that?’
He nodded once, like an axe coming down. ‘She got it out of me, one night. I was jack-happy. Been cruising the stacks all day, looking for business. No handle on where I was or what was going on. You want to know what she said?’
‘No,’ I muttered.
He didn’t hear me. His knuckles had whitened on the iron railing. ‘She said, Don’t worry Daddy, when I’m rich we’ll buy Mummy back.’
This was getting out of hand.
‘Look, Elliott, I’m sorry about your daughter, but from what I hear she wasn’t working the kind of places Bancroft goes. Jerry’s Closed Quarters isn’t exactly the Houses, is it?’
The ex-tac spun on me without warning, and there was blind murder in his eyes and his crooked hands. I couldn’t blame him. All he could see in front of him was Bancroft’s man.
But you can’t jump an Envoy – the conditioning won’t let it happen. I saw the attack coming almost before he knew he was going to do it himself, and I had the neurachem of my borrowed sleeve online fragments of a second later. He hit low, driving under the guard he thought I’d put up, looking for the body blows that would break up my ribs. The guard wasn’t there, and neither was I. Instead, I stepped inside the hooks of his punches, took him off balance with my weight and tangled one leg amidst his. He stumbled back against the railing and I drove a cruel elbow uppercut into his solar plexus. His face went grey with the shock. Leaning over, I pinned him to the rail and jammed the fork of my thumb and fingers into his throat.
‘That’s enough,’ I snapped, a little unsteadily. The sleeve’s neurachem wiring was a rougher piece of work than the Corps systems I’d used in the past and in overdrive the overwhelming impression was of being slung around in a subcutaneous bag of chicken wire.
I looked down at Elliott.
His eyes were a hand’s breadth from mine, and despite the grip I had on his throat they were still burning with rage. Breath whistled in his teeth as he clawed after the strength to break my grip and damage me.
I yanked him off the rail and propped him away from me with a cautionary arm.
‘Listen, I’m passing no judgements here. I just want to know. What makes you think she has any connection to Bancroft?’
‘Because she told me, motherfucker.’ The sentence hissed out of him. ‘She told me what he’d done.’
‘And what was that?’
He blinked rapidly, the undischarged rage condensing into tears. ‘Dirty things,’ he said. ‘She said he needed them. Badly enough to come back. Badly enough to pay.’
Meal ticket. Don’t worry Daddy, when I’m rich we’ll buy Mummy back. Easy enough mistake to make when you’re young. But nothing comes that easy.
‘You think that’s why she died?’
He turned his head and looked at me as if I was a particularly poisonous species of spider on his kitchen floor.
‘She didn’t die, mister. Someone killed her. Someone took a razor and cut her up.’
‘Trial transcript says it was a client. Not Bancroft.’
‘How would they know?’ he said dully. ‘They name a body, who knows who’s inside it. Who’s paying for it all.’
‘They find him yet?’
‘Biocabin whore’s killer? What do you think? It ain’t exactly like she worked for the Houses, right?’
‘That’s not what I meant, Elliott. You say she turned Bancroft in Jerry’s, I’ll believe you. But you’ve got to admit it doesn’t sound like Bancroft’s style. I’ve met the man, and slumming?’ I shook my head. ‘He doesn’t read that way to me.’
Elliott turned away.
‘Flesh,’ he said. ‘What you going to read in a Meth’s flesh?’
It was nearly full dark. Out across the water on the sloping deck of the warship, the performance had started. We both stared at the lights for a while, heard the bright snatches of music, like transmissions from a world that we were forever locked out of.
‘Elizabeth’s still on stack,’ I said quietly.
‘Yeah, so what? Re-sleeving policy lapsed four years ago, when we sank all the money we had into some lawyer said he could crack Irene’s case.’ He gestured back at the dimly lit frontage of his offices. ‘I look like the kind of guy’s going to come into some money real soon?’
There was nothing to say after that. I left him watching the lights and walked back to the car. He was still there when I drove back past him on the way out of the little town. He didn’t look round.
PART TWO: REACTION
(Intrusion Conflict)
CHAPTER NINE
I called Prescott from the car. Her face looked mildly irritated as it scribbled into focus on the dusty little screen set into the dashboard.
‘Kovacs. Did you find what you were looking for?’
‘Still don’t really know what I’m looking for,’ I said cheerfully. ‘You think Bancroft ever does the biocabins?’
She pulled a face. ‘Oh, please.’
‘All right, here’s another one. Did Leila Begin ever work biocabin joints?’
‘I really have no idea, Kovacs.’
‘Well, look it up then. I’ll hold.’ My voice came out stony. Prescott’s well-bred distaste wasn’t sitting too well beside Victor Elliott’s anguish for his daughter.
I drummed my fingers on the wheel while the lawyer went off-screen and found myself muttering a Millsport fisherman’s rap to the rhythm. Outside, the coast slid by in the night, but the scents and sounds of the sea were suddenly all wrong. Too muted, not a trace of belaweed on the wind.
‘Here we are.’ Prescott settled herself back within range of the phone scanner, looking slightly uncomfortable. ‘Begin’s Oakland records show two stints in biocabins, before she got tenure in one of the San Diego Houses. She must have had an entrée, unless it was a talent scout that spotted her.’
Bancroft would have been quite an entrée to anywhere. I resisted the temptation to say it.
‘You got an image there?’
‘Of Begin?’ Prescott shrugged. ‘Only a two-d. You want me to send it.’
‘Please.’
The ancient carphone fizzled a bit as it adjusted to the change of incoming signal, and then Leila Begin’s features emerged from the static. I leaned closer, scanning them for the truth. It took a moment or two to find, but it was there.
‘Right. Now can you get me the address of that place Elizabeth Elliott worked. Jerry’s Closed Quarters. It’s on a street called Mariposa.’
‘Mariposa and San Bruno,’ Prescott’s disembodied voice came back from behind Leila Begin’s full service pout. ‘Jesus, it’s right under the old expressway. That’s got to be a safety violation.’