If anybody can convince Laurens Bancroft that he died by his own hand, it is you.
Trepp, jacked in at Cable.
Viral Strike. Recall that mother, do you?
Bancroft’s eyes boring into mine on the balcony at Suntouch House. I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I were, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now.
And then, blindingly, I knew what I was going to do.
The cab started downward.
‘Footing is unstable,’ said the machine redundantly, as we touched down on a rolling deck. ‘Please take care.’
I fed currency to the slot and the hatch hinged up on Ortega’s safe location. A brief expanse of gunmetal landing pad, railings of cabled steel, and the sea beyond, all shifting black shoulders of water beneath a night sky clogged with cloud and hard drizzle. I climbed out warily and clung to the nearest railing while the cab lifted away and was quickly swallowed by the drifting veils of rain. As the navigation lights faded, I turned my attention to the vessel I was standing on.
The landing pad was situated at the stern, and from where I clung to the railing I could see the whole length of the ship laid out. She looked to be about twenty metres, something like two thirds the size of a Millsport trawler, but much leaner in the beam. The deck modules had the smooth, self-sealing configuration of storm survival design, but despite the general businesslike appearance, no one would ever take this for a working vessel. Delicate telescopic masts rose to what looked like only half height at two points along the deck and there was a sharp bowsprit stabbing ahead of the slimly tapered prow. This was a yacht. A rich man’s floating home.
Light spilled out of a hatchway on the rear deck and Ortega emerged far enough to beckon me down from the landing pad. Hooking my fingers firmly on the rail, I braced myself against the pitch and sway of the vessel and picked my way down a short flight of steps at one side of the pad, then across the rear deck to the hatch. Swirls of drizzle swept across the ship, hurrying me along against my will. In the well of light from the open hatch I saw another, steeper set of steps and handed my way down the narrow companionway into the offered warmth. Over my head, the hatch hummed smoothly shut.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ snapped Ortega.
I took a moment to rub some of the water out of my hair and looked around. If this was a rich man’s floating home, the rich man in question hadn’t been home in a while. Furniture was stowed at the sides of the room I had descended into, sheeted over in semi-opaque plastic, and the shelves of the small niche bar were empty. The hatches over the windows were all battened down. Doors at either end of the room were open onto what seemed to be similarly mothballed spaces.
For all that, the yacht reeked of the wealth that had spawned it. The chairs and tables beneath the plastic were darkly polished wood, as was the panelling of the bulkheads and doors, and there were rugs on the waxed boards beneath my feet. The remainder of the decor was similarly sombre in tone, with what looked like original artwork on the bulkhead walls. One from the Empathist school, the skeletal ruins of a Martian shipyard at sunset, the other an abstract that I didn’t have the cultural background to read.
Ortega stood in the middle of it all, tousle-haired and scowling in a raw silk kimono that I assumed had come out of an onboard wardrobe.
‘It’s a long story.’ I moved past her to peer through the nearest door. ‘I could use a coffee, if the galley’s open.’
Bedroom. A big, oval bed set amidst less than wholly tasteful mirrors, quilt tangled and thrown aside in haste. I was moving back towards the other door when she slapped me.
I reeled sideways. It wasn’t as hard a blow as I’d given Sullivan in the noodle house, but it was delivered from standing with a lot more swing and there was the tilt of the deck to contend with. The cocktail of hangover and painkillers didn’t help. I didn’t quite go down, but it was a near thing. Stumbling back into balance, I raised a hand to my cheek and stared at Ortega, who was glaring back at me with twin spots of colour burning high on each cheekbone.
‘Look, I’m sorry if I woke you up, but—’
‘You piece of shit,’ she hissed at me. ‘You lying piece of shit.’
‘I’m not sure I—’
‘I should have you fucking arrested, Kovacs. I should have you fucking stacked for what you’ve done.’
I started to lose my temper. ‘Done what? Will you get a fucking grip, Ortega, and tell me what’s going on.’
‘We accessed the Hendrix’s memory today,’ Ortega said coldly. ‘Preliminary warrant went through at noon. Everything for the last week. I’ve been reviewing it.’
The rapidly flaring, irritable rage shrank back to nothing inside me as the words left her mouth. It was as if she’d emptied a bucket of seawater over my head.
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, there wasn’t much.’ Ortega turned away, hugging her own shoulders in the kimono, and moved past me to the unexplored doorway. ‘You’re the only guest there at the moment. So it’s just been you. And your visitors.’
I followed her through into a second, carpeted room where two steps led down to a narrow sunken galley behind a low, wood-panelled partition at one side. The other walls held similarly covered items of furniture to the first room, except for the far corner, where the plastic sheeting had been pulled off a metre-square video screen and attendant receiver/playback modules. A single, straight-backed chair was positioned in front of the screen on which was frozen the unmistakable image of Elias Ryker’s face delving between Miriam Bancroft’s widespread thighs.
‘There’s a remote on the chair,’ said Ortega, herself remote. ‘Why don’t you watch some of it while I make you a coffee? Refresh your memory. Then you can do some explaining.’
She disappeared into the galley without giving me the chance to reply. I advanced on the frozen video screen, feeling a small liquid slide in my guts as the image brought back memories tinged with Merge Nine. In the sleepless, chaotic whirl of the last day and a half, I had all but forgotten Miriam Bancroft, but now she came back to me in the flesh, overpowering and intoxicating as she had been that night. I’d also forgotten Rodrigo Bautista’s claim that they were almost through the legal wrangles with the Hendrix’s lawyers.
My foot knocked against something and I looked down at the carpet. There was a coffee mug on the floor next to the chair, still a third full. I wondered how much of the hotel’s memory Ortega had gone through. I glanced at the image on screen. Was this as far as she’d got? What else had she seen? How to play this, then? I picked up the remote and turned it over in my hands. Ortega’s co-operation had been an integral part of my planning so far. If I was going to lose her now, I was in trouble.
Scratching around inside me was something else. An emotional upwelling that I didn’t want to acknowledge, because to acknowledge it would be a clinical absurdity. A feeling that, despite my preoccupation with later factors in the hotel’s memory, was tied intimately to the image currently on screen.
Embarrassment. Shame.
Absurd. I shook my head. Fucking stupid.
‘You’re not watching.’
I turned back and saw Ortega with a steaming mug in each hand. An aroma of mingled coffee and rum wafted towards me.
‘Thanks.’ I took one of the mugs from her and sipped at it, playing for time. She leaned away from me and folded her arms.
‘So. Half a hundred reasons why Miriam Bancroft doesn’t fit the bill.’ She jerked her head at the screen. ‘How many of them is that?’