‘She’s sending someone down. Are you armed?’
I nodded and reached under my jacket for the Nemex.
‘Please surrender the weapon carefully,’ he added with a gentle smile. ‘Our security software is a little touchy, and it’s apt to stun you if you look like you’re pulling something.’
I slowed my movements to frame advance, dumped the Nemex on the desk and set about unstrapping the Tebbit knife from my arm. When I was finished, the sergeant beamed beatifically at me.
‘Thank you. It’ll all be returned to you when you leave the building.’
The words were barely out of his mouth when two of the mohicans appeared through a door at the back of the hall and directed themselves rapidly towards me. Their faces were painted with identical glowers which the subsonics apparently made little impact on in the short time it took them to reach me. They went for an arm apiece.
‘I wouldn’t,’ I told them.
‘Hey, he’s not under arrest, you know,’ said the desk sergeant pacifically. One of the mohicans jerked a glance at him and snorted in exasperation. The other one just stared at me the whole time as if he hadn’t eaten red meat recently. I met the stare with a smile. Following the meeting with Bancroft I had gone back to the Hendrix and slept for almost twenty hours. I was rested, neurachemically alert and feeling a cordial dislike of authority of which Quell herself would have been proud.
It must have shown. The mohicans abandoned their attempts to paw me and the three of us rode up four floors in silence broken only by the creak of the ancient elevator.
Ortega’s office had one of the stained-glass windows, or more precisely the bottom half of one, before it was bisected horizontally by the ceiling. Presumably the remainder rose missile-like from the floor of the office above. I began to see some evidence for the original building having been converted to its present use. The other walls of the office were environment-formatted with a tropical sunset over water and islands. The combination of stained glass and sunset meant that the office was filled with a soft orange light in which you could see the drifting of dust motes.
The lieutenant was seated behind a heavy wooden desk as if caged there. Chin propped on one cupped hand, one shin and knee pressed hard against the edge of the desk, she was brooding over the scrolldown of an antique laptop when we came through the door. Aside from the machine, the only items on the desktop were a battered-looking heavy-calibre Smith & Wesson and a plastic cup of coffee, heating tab still unpulled. She dismissed the mohicans with a nod.
‘Sit down, Kovacs.’
I glanced around, saw a frame chair under the window and hooked it up to the desk. The late afternoon light in the office was disorientating.
‘You work the night shift?’
Her eyes flared. ‘What kind of crack is that?’
‘Hey, nothing.’ I held up my hands and gestured at the low light. ‘I just thought you might have cycled the walls for it. You know it’s ten o’clock in the morning outside.’
‘Oh, that.’ Ortega grunted and her eyes swivelled back down to the screen display. It was hard to tell in the tropical sunset, but I thought they might be grey/green, like the sea around the maelstrom. ‘It’s out of synch. The department got it cheap from some place in El Paso Juarez. Jams up completely sometimes.’
‘That’s tough.’
‘Yeah, sometimes I’ll just turn it off but the neons are—’ She looked up abruptly. ‘What the fuck am I—Kovacs, do you know how close you are to a storage rack right now?’
I made a span of my right index finger and thumb, and looked at her through it.
‘About the width of a testimony from the Wei Clinic, was what I heard.’
‘We can put you there, Kovacs. Seven forty-three yesterday morning, walking out the front door larger than life.’
I shrugged.
‘And don’t think your Meth connections are going to keep you organic forever. There’s a Wei Clinic limo driver telling interesting stories about hijack and Real Death. Maybe he’ll have something to say about you.’
‘Impound his vehicle did you?’ I asked casually. ‘Or did Wei reclaim it before you could run tests?’
Ortega’s mouth compressed into a hard line.
I nodded. ‘Thought so. And the driver will say precisely zero until Wei spring him, I imagine.’
‘Listen, Kovacs. I keep pushing, something’s got to give. It’s a matter of time, motherfucker. Strictly that.’
‘Admirable tenacity,’ I said. ‘Shame you didn’t have some of that for the Bancroft case.’
‘There is no fucking Bancroft case.’
Ortega was on her feet, palms hard down on the desktop, eyes slitted in rage and disgust. I waited, nerves sprung in case Bay City police stations were as prone to accidental suspect injury as some others I had known. Finally, the lieutenant drew a deep breath, and lowered herself joint by joint back into her seat. The anger had smoothed off her face, but the disgust was still there, caught in the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and the set of her wide mouth. She looked at her nails.
‘Do you know what we found at the Wei Clinic yesterday?’
‘Black market spare parts? Virtual torture programmes? Or didn’t they let you stay that long?’
‘We found seventeen bodies with their cortical stacks burnt out. Unarmed. Seventeen dead people. Really dead.’
She looked up at me again, the disgust still there.
‘You’ll have to pardon my lack of reaction,’ I said coldly. ‘I saw a lot worse when I was in uniform. In fact, I did a lot worse when I was fighting the Protectorate’s battles for them.’
‘That was war.’
‘Oh, please.’
She said nothing. I leaned forward across the desk.
‘And don’t tell me those seventeen bodies are what you’re on fire about, either.’ I gestured at my own face. ‘This is your problem. You don’t like the idea of someone carving this up.’
She sat silent for a moment, thinking, then reached into a drawer of the desk and took out a packet of cigarettes. She offered them to me automatically and I shook my head with clenched determination.
‘I quit.’
‘Did you?’ There was genuine surprise in her voice, as she fed herself a cigarette and lit it. ‘Good for you. I’m impressed.’
‘Yeah, Ryker should be pleased too, when he gets off stack.’
She paused behind the veil of smoke, then dropped the packet back into the drawer and palm-heeled it shut.
‘What do you want?’ she asked flatly.
The holding racks were five floors down in a double-storey basement where it was easier to regulate temperatures. Compared to PsychaSec, it was a toilet.
‘I don’t see that this is going to change anything,’ said Ortega as we followed a yawning technician along the steel gantry to slot 3089b. ‘What’s Kadmin going to tell you that he hasn’t told us?’
‘Look.’ I stopped and turned to face her, hands spread and held low. On the narrow gantry we were uncomfortably close. Something chemical happened, and the geometries of Ortega’s stance seemed suddenly fluid, dangerously tactile. I felt my mouth dry up.
‘I—’ she said.
‘3089b,’ called the technician, hefting the big, thirty-centimetre disc out of its slot. ‘This the one you wanted, lieutenant?’
Ortega pushed hurriedly past me. ‘That’s it, Micky. Can you set us up with a virtual.’
‘Sure.’ Micky jerked a thumb at one of the spiral staircases collared in at intervals along the gantry. ‘You want to go down to Five, slap on the trodes. Take about five minutes.’