‘Not a fan, then?’ Trepp nodded at the screen. ‘I didn’t use to be, but you live in New York long enough, you get the habit.’
‘Trepp, how the fuck are you supposed to watch my back if your head is jammed in here watching screen?’
Trepp gave me a hurt look and withdrew her head. I climbed out of the limo and stretched in the chilly air. Overhead, Anchana Salomao was still resplendent, but the lights above Elliott’s were out.
‘They stayed up until a couple of hours ago,’ said Trepp helpfully. ‘I thought they might be running out on you, so I checked the back.’
I gazed up at the darkened windows. ‘Why are they going to run out on me? She hasn’t even heard what the terms of the deal are.’
‘Well, involvement in an erasure offence tends to make most people nervous.’
‘Not this woman,’ I said, and wondered how much I believed myself.
Trepp shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. I still think you’re crazy, though. Kawahara’s got Dippers could do this stuff standing on their heads.’
Since my own reasons for not accepting Kawahara’s offer of technical support were almost entirely instinctive, I said nothing. The icy certainty of my revelations about Bancroft, Kawahara and Resolution 653 had faded with the previous day’s rush of set-up details for the run, and any sense of interlocking well-being had gone when Ortega left. All I had now was the gravity pull of mission time, the cold dawn and the sound of the waves on the shore. The taste of Ortega in my mouth and the warmth of her long-limbed body curled into mine was a tropical island in the chill, receding in my wake.
‘You reckon there’s somewhere open this early that serves coffee,’ I asked.
‘Town this size?’ Trepp drew breath in through her teeth. ‘Doubt it. But I saw a bank of dispensers on the way in. Got to be one that does coffee.’
‘Machine coffee?’ I curled my lip.
‘Hey, what are you, a fucking connoisseur? You’re living in a hotel that’s just one big goddamned dispenser. Christ, Kovacs, this is the Machine Age. Didn’t anybody tell you that?’
‘You got a point. How far is it?’
‘Couple of klicks. We’ll take my car, that way if Little Miss Homecoming wakes up, she won’t look out the window and panic.’
‘Sold.’
I followed Trepp across the street to a low-slung black vehicle that looked as if it might be radar invisible, and climbed into a snug interior that smelled faintly of incense.
‘This yours?’
‘No, rented. Picked it up when we flew back in from Europe. Why?’
I shook my head. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
Trepp started up and we ghosted silently along the promenade. I looked out of the seaward window and wrestled with an insubstantial sense of frustration. The scant hours of sleep in the limo had left me itchy. Everything about the situation was suddenly chafing at me again, from the lack of solution to Bancroft’s death to my relapse into smoking. I had a feeling that it was going to be a bad day, and the sun wasn’t even up yet.
‘You thought about what you’re going to do when this is over?’
‘No,’ I said morosely.
We found the dispensers on a frontage that sloped down to the shore at one end of the town. Clearly they had been installed with beach clientele in mind, but the dilapidated state of the shelters that housed them suggested that trade was no better here than for Elliott’s Data Linkage. Trepp parked the car pointing at the sea and went to get the coffees. Through the window I watched her kick and slam the machine until it finally relinquished two plastic cups. She carried them back to the car and handed me mine.
‘Want to drink it here?’
‘Yeah, why not?’
We pulled the tabs on the cups and listened to them sizzle. The mechanism didn’t heat especially well, but the coffee tasted reasonable and it had a definite chemical effect. I could feel my weariness sliding away. We drank slowly and watched the sea through the windscreen, immersed in a silence that was almost companionable.
‘I tried for the Envoys once,’ said Trepp suddenly.
I glanced sideways at her, curious. ‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah, long time ago. They rejected me on profile. No capacity for allegiance, they said.’
I grunted. ‘Figures. You were never in the military, were you?’
‘What do you think?’ She was looking at me as if I’d just suggested she might have a history of child-molesting. I chuckled tiredly.
‘Thought not. See, the thing is, they’re looking for borderline psychopathic tendencies. That’s why they do most of their recruiting from the military in the first place.’
Trepp looked put out. ‘I’ve got borderline psychopathic tendencies.’
‘Yeah, I don’t doubt it, but the point is, the number of civilians with those tendencies and a sense of team spirit is pretty limited. They’re opposing values. The chances of them both arising naturally in the same person are almost nil. Military training takes the natural order and fucks with it. It breaks down any resistance to psychopathic behaviour at the same time as it builds fanatical loyalties to the group. Package deal. Soldiers are perfect Envoy material.’
‘You make it sound like I had a lucky escape.’
For a few seconds I stared out to the horizon, remembering.
‘Yeah.’ I drained the rest of my coffee. ‘Come on, let’s get back.’
As we drove back along the promenade, something had changed in the quiet between us. Something that, like the gradually waxing light of dawn around the car, was at once intangible and impossible to ignore.
When we pulled up outside the data broker’s frontage, Irene Elliott was waiting, leaned against the side of the limo and watching the sea. There was no sign of her husband.
‘Better stay here,’ I told Trepp as I climbed out. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’
‘Sure.’
‘I guess I’ll be seeing you in my rear-view screen for a while, then.’
‘I doubt you’ll see me at all, Kovacs,’ said Trepp cheerfully. ‘I’m better at this than you are.’
‘Remains to be seen.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Be seeing you.’ She raised her voice as I started to walk away. ‘And don’t fuck up that run. We’d all hate to see that happen.’
She backed up the car a dozen metres and kicked it into the air in a showy, dropped-nose bunt that shattered the quiet with a shriek of turbines and barely cleared our heads before flipping up and out over the ocean.
‘Who was that?’ There was a huskiness to Irene Elliott’s voice that sounded like the residue of too much crying.
‘Back-up,’ I said absently, watching the car trail out over the wrecked aircraft carrier. ‘Works for the same people. Don’t worry, she’s a friend.’
‘She may be your friend,’ said Elliott bitterly. ‘She isn’t mine. None of you people are.’
I looked at her, then back out to sea. ‘Fair enough.’
Silence, apart from the waves. Elliott shifted against the polished coachwork of the limo.
‘You know what’s happened to my daughter,’ she said in a dead voice. ‘You knew all the time.’
I nodded.
‘And you don’t give a flying fuck, do you? You’re working for the man that used her like a piece of toilet tissue.’
‘Lots of men used her,’ I said brutally. ‘She let herself be used. And I’m sure your husband’s told you why she did that as well.’
I heard Irene Elliott’s breath catch in her throat and concentrated on the horizon, where Trepp’s cruiser was fading into the predawn gloom. ‘She did it for the same reason she tried to blackmail the man I was working for, the same reason she tried to put drivers on a particularly unpleasant man called Jerry Sedaka who subsequently had her killed. She did it for you, Irene.’