‘Envoys don’t feel guilt,’ I said shortly. ‘I’m serious. It’s likely, no it’s almost certain in fact that Kawahara had Ryker set up because he was heating up the Mary Lou Hinchley case too much. Do you remember anything about her employment records?’
Ortega thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. ‘She ran away from home to be with the boyfriend. Mostly unregistered stuff, anything to bring the rent in. Boyfriend was a piece of shit, got a record goes back to age fifteen. He dealt a little Stiff, crashed a few easy datastacks, mostly lived off his women.’
‘Would he have let her work the Meat Rack? Or the cabins?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Ortega nodded, face stony. ‘Soon as spit.’
‘If someone was recruiting for a snuff house, Catholics would be the ideal candidates, wouldn’t they? They’re not going to tell any tales after the event, after all. By reasons of conscience.’
‘Snuff.’ If Ortega’s face had been stony before, it was weathered granite now. ‘Most of the snuff victims around here just get a bolt through the stack when it’s over. They don’t tell any tales.’
‘Right. But what if something went wrong. Specifically, what if Mary Lou Hinchley was going to be used as a snuff whore, so she tried to escape and fell out of an aerial whorehouse called Head in the Clouds. That would make her Catholicism very convenient, wouldn’t it?’
‘Head in the Clouds? Are you serious?’
‘And it’d make the owners of Head in the Clouds very anxious to stop Resolution 653 dead in its tracks, wouldn’t it?’
‘Kovacs.’ Ortega was making slow-down gestures with both palms. ‘Kovacs, Head in the Clouds is one of the Houses. Class prostitution. I don’t like those places, they make me want to vomit just as bad as the cabins, but they’re clean. They cater for elevated society and they don’t run scams like snuff—’
‘You don’t think the upper echelons go in for sadism and necrophilia, then. That’s strictly a lower-class thing, is it?’
‘No, it isn’t,’ said Ortega evenly. ‘But if anyone with money wants to play at torturer, they can afford to do it in virtual. Some of the Houses run virtual snuff, but they run it because it’s legal, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And that’s the way they like it.’
I drew a deep breath. ‘Kristin, someone was taking me to see Kawahara on board Head in the Clouds. Someone from the Wei Clinic. And if Kawahara is involved in the West Coast Houses, then they will do anything that turns a profit, because she will do anything, anything at all. You wanted a big bad Meth to believe in? Forget Bancroft, he’s practically a priest in comparison. Kawahara grew up in Fission City, dealing anti-radiation drugs to the families of fuel rod workers. Do you know what a water carrier is?’
She shook her head.
‘In Fission City it’s what they used to call the gang enforcers. See, if someone refused to pay protection, or informed to the police, or just didn’t jump fast enough when the local yakuza boss said frog, the standard punishment was to drink contaminated water. The enforcers used to carry it around in shielded flasks, siphoned off low-grade reactor cooling systems. They’d turn up at the offender’s house one night and tell him how much he had to drink. His family would be made to watch. If he didn’t drink, they’d start cutting his family one by one until he did. You want to know how I know that delightful piece of Earth history trivia?’
Ortega said nothing, but her mouth was tight with disgust.
‘I know because Kawahara told me. That’s what she used to do when she was a kid. She was a water carrier. And she’s proud of it.’
The phone chimed.
I waved back Ortega out of range and went to answer it.
‘Kovacs?’ It was Rodrigo Bautista. ‘Is Ortega with you?’
‘No.’ I lied automatically. ‘Haven’t seen her for a couple of days. Is there a problem?’
‘Ah, probably not. She’s vanished off the face of the planet again. Well, if you do see her, tell her she missed a squad assembly this afternoon and Captain Murawa wasn’t impressed.’
‘Should I expect to see her?’
‘With Ortega, who fucking knows?’ Bautista spread his hands. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. See you around.’
‘See you.’ I watched as the screen blanked, and Ortega came back from her place by the wall. ‘Did you get that?’
‘Yeah. I was supposed to turn the Hendrix memory discs over this morning. Murawa will probably want to know why I took them out of Fell Street in the first place.’
‘It’s your case, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, but there are norms.’ Ortega looked suddenly tired. ‘I can’t stall them for long, Kovacs. I’m already getting a lot of funny looks for working with you. Pretty soon someone’s going to get seriously suspicious. You’ve got a few days to run this scam on Bancroft, but after that…’
She raised her hands eloquently.
‘Can’t you say you were held up? That Kadmin took the discs off you?’
‘They’ll polygraph me—’
‘Not immediately.’
‘Kovacs, this is my career we’re flushing down the toilet here, not yours. I don’t do this job for fun, it’s taken me—’
‘Kristin, listen to me.’ I went to her and took her hands in mine. ‘Do you want Ryker back, or not?’
She tried to turn away from me, but I held on.
‘Kristin. Do you believe he was set up?’
She swallowed. ‘Yes.’
‘Then why not believe it was Kawahara? The cruiser he tried to shoot down in Seattle was heading out over the ocean when it crashed. You extrapolate that heading and see where it takes you. You plot the point that the Coastals fished Mary Lou Hinchley out of the sea. Then put Head in the Clouds on the map and see if it all adds up to anything.’
Ortega pulled away from me with a strange look in her eyes.
‘You want this to be true, don’t you? You want the excuse to go after Kawahara, no matter what. It’s just hate with you, isn’t it? Another score to settle. You don’t care about Ryker. You don’t even care about your friend, Sarah any—’
‘Say that again,’ I told her coldly, ‘and I’ll deck you. For your information, nothing that we’ve just discussed matters more to me than Sarah’s life. And nothing I’ve said means I have any option other than to do exactly what Kawahara wants.’
‘Then what’s the fucking point?’
I wanted to reach out for her. Instead, I turned the yearning into a displacement gesture with both hands chopping gently at the air.
‘I don’t know. Not yet. But if I can get Sarah clear, there might be a way to bring Kawahara down afterwards. And there might be a way to clear Ryker too. That’s all I’m saying.’
She stayed looking at me for a moment, then turned and swept up her jacket from the arm of the chair where she had draped it when we arrived.
‘I’m going out for a while,’ she said quietly.
‘Fine.’ I stayed equally quiet. This was not a moment for pressure. ‘I’ll be here, or I’ll leave a message for you if I have to go out.’
‘Yes, do that.’
There was nothing in her voice to indicate whether she was really coming back or not.
After she had gone, I sat thinking for a while longer, trying to flesh out the glimpse of structure that the Envoy intuition had given me. When the phone chimed again, I had evidently given up, because the chime caught me staring out of the window, wondering where in Bay City Ortega had gone.