‘Viral Strike,’ he says clearly. I go cold as I remember my own scream taken up along the beachhead. ‘Recall that mother, do you?’
And, flicking water from his hands, he vanishes like a conjuror’s trick.
‘Look,’ said Trepp reasonably, ‘Kadmin had to check into the tank to get sleeved in an artificial. I figure that gives you the best part of a day before he even knows if he killed you or not.’
‘If he wasn’t already double-sleeved again.’
‘No. Think about it. He’s cut loose from Kawahara. Man, he doesn’t have the resources for that kind of stuff right now. He’s fucking out there on his own, and with Kawahara gunning for him, he’s a strictly limited item. Kadmin’s sell-by date is coming up, you’ll see.’
‘Kawahara’s going to keep him on tap for just as long as she needs him to drive me.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Trepp looked at her drink, embarrassed. ‘Maybe.’
There was another place, called Cable or something synonymous, where the walls were racked with colour-coded conduits out of whose designer-cracked casings wires sprouted like stiff copper hair. At intervals along the bar were hooks draped with thin, lethal-looking cables that ended in gleaming silver minijacks. In the air above the bar, a huge holographic jack and socket fucked spasmodically to the off-beat music that filled the place like water. At times, the components seemed to change into sex organs, but that could have been tetrameth-induced hallucination on my part.
I was sitting at the bar, something sweet smouldering in an ashtray at my elbow. From the sludgy feeling in my lungs and throat, I’d been smoking it. The bar was crowded but I suffered the strange conviction I was alone.
On either side of me, the other customers at the bar were jacked into the thin cables, eyes flickering beneath lids that seemed bruised, mouths twitched into dreamy half smiles. One of them was Trepp.
I was alone.
Things that might have been thoughts were tugging at the abraded underside of my mind. I picked up the cigarette and drew on it, grimly. Now was no time for thinking.
No time for –
Viral Strike!!!
– thinking.
Streets passing beneath my feet the way the rubble of Innenin passed under Jimmy’s boots as he walked along beside me in my dreams. So that’s how he does it.
The crimson-lipped woman who—
Maybe you can’t—
What? What???
Jack and socket.
Trying to tell you some—
No time for—
No time—
No—
And away, like water in the maelstrom, like the soup of mud and gore pouring off Jimmy’s hands and into the hole at the bottom of the sink…
Gone again.
But thought, like the dawn, was inevitable and it found me, with the dawn, on a set of white stone steps that led down into murky water. Grandiose architecture reared vaguely behind us and on the far side of the water I could make out trees in the rapidly greying darkness. We were in a park.
Trepp leaned over my shoulder and offered me a lit cigarette. I took it reflexively, drew once and then let smoke dribble up through my slack lips. Trepp settled into a crouch next to me. An unfeasibly large fish flopped in the water at my feet. I was too eroded to react.
‘Mutant,’ said Trepp inconsequentially.
‘Same to you.’
The little shreds of conversation drifted away over the water.
‘Going to need painkillers?’
‘Probably.’ I felt around inside my head. ‘Yeah.’
She handed me a wafer of impressively-coloured capsules without comment.
‘What you going to do?’
I shrugged. ‘Going to go back. Going to do what I’m told.’
PART FOUR: PERSUASION
(Viral Corrupt)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I changed cabs three times on the way from the airport, paying each one in currency, and then booked into an all-night flophouse in Oakland. Anyone tailing me electronically was going to take a little while to catch up, and I was reasonably sure that I hadn’t been actually followed. It seemed a bit like paranoia – after all, I was working for the bad guys now, so they had no need to tail me. But I hadn’t liked Trepp’s ironic keep in touch as she saw me off from the Bay City terminal. Also, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do yet, and if I didn’t know, I certainly didn’t want anyone else knowing either.
The flophouse room had seven hundred and eighty-six screen channels, holoporn and current affairs both advertised in lurid colours on the standby display, a hinged, self-cleansing double bed that stank of disinfectant and a self-contained shower stall that was beginning to list away from the wall it had once been epoxied to. I peered out of the single grimy window. It was the middle of the night in Bay City, and there was a fine, misty rain falling. My deadline with Ortega was running out.
The window gave onto a sloping fibrecrete roof about ten metres below. The street was as far below again. Overhead, a pagoda-like upper level screened the lower roof and street under long eaves. Covered space. After a moment’s debate, I pressed the last of Trepp’s hangover capsules out of the foil and swallowed it, then opened the window as quietly as I could, swung out and hung by my fingers from the lower frame. Fully extended, I still had the best part of eight metres to fall.
Go primitive. Well, you don’t get much more primitive than climbing out of hotel windows in the middle of the night.
Hoping the roof was as solid as it looked, I let go.
I hit the sloping surface in approved fashion, rolled to one side and abruptly found my legs hanging out into space once more. The surface was firm, but as slippery as fresh belaweed and I was slithering rapidly towards the edge. I ground my elbows down for purchase, found none and just managed to grab the sharp edge of the roof in one hand as I went over.
Ten metres to the street. With the roof edge slicing into my palm, I dangled by one arm for a moment, trying to identify possible obstacles to my fall, like trash bins or parked vehicles, then gave up and dropped anyway. The paving beneath came up and smacked me hard, but there was nothing sharp to compound the impact and when I rolled it was not into the feared assembly of trash bins. I got up and made for the nearest shadows.
Ten minutes and a random sampling of streets later, I came upon a rank of idling autocabs, stepped swiftly out from my current piece of overhead cover and got into the fifth in line. I recited Ortega’s discreet code as we lifted into the air.
‘Coding noted. Approximate arrival time, thirty-five minutes.’
We headed out across the Bay, and then out to sea.
Too many edges.
The fragmented contents of the previous night bubbled in my brain like a carelessly made fish stew. Indigestible chunks appeared on the surface, wobbled in the currents of memory and sank again. Trepp jacked into the bar at Cable, Jimmy de Soto washing his blood-encrusted hands, Ryker’s face staring back at me from the spreadeagled star of mirror. Kawahara was in there somewhere, claiming Bancroft’s death as suicide but wanting an end to the investigation, just like Ortega and the Bay City police. Kawahara, who knew things about my contact with Miriam Bancroft, knew things about Laurens Bancroft, about Kadmin.
The tail end of my hangover twitched, scorpion-like, fighting the slow-gathering weight of Trepp’s painkillers. Trepp, the apologetic Zen killer whom I’d killed and who’d apparently come back with no hard feelings because she couldn’t remember it; because, in her terms, it hadn’t happened to her.