Altered Carbon

  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 Ortega back 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 disks 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 disks 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 where 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.

  This time, it was Kawahara.

  “I have what you want,” she said offhandedly. “A dormant version of the Rawling virus will be delivered to Silset Holdings tomorrow morning after eight o’clock. Address 1187 Sacramento. They’ll know you’re coming.”

  “And the activator codes?”

  “Delivery under separate cover. Trepp will contact you.”

  I nodded. U.N. law governing transfer and ownership of war viruses was clear to the point of bluntness. Inert viral forms could be owned as subjects for study, or even, as one bizarre test case had proved, private trophies. Ownership or sale of an active military virus, or the codes whereby a dormant virus could be activated, was a U.N. indictable offense, punishable with anything between a hundred and two hundred years storage. In the event of the virus actually being deployed, the sentence could be upped to erasure. Naturally these penalties were applicable only to private citizens, not military commanders or government executives. The powerful are jealous of their toys.

  “Just make sure she contacts me soon,” I said briefly. “I don’t want to use up any more of my ten days than I have to.”

  “I understand.” Kawahara made a sympathetic face, for all the world as if the threats against Sarah were being made by some malignant force of nature over which neither of us had control. “I will have Irene Elliott resleeved by tomorrow evening. Nominally, she is being bought out of storage by JacSol S.A., one of my communications interface companies. You’ll be able to collect her from Bay City Central around ten o’clock. I have you temporarily accredited as a security consultant for JacSol Division West. Name, Martin Anderson.”

  “Got it.” This was Kawahara’s way of telling me that if anything went wrong, I was tied to her and would go down first. “That’s going to clash with Ryker’s gene signature. He’ll be a live file at Bay City Central as long as the body’s decanted.”

  Kawahara nodded. “Dealt with. Your accreditation will be routed through JacSol corporate channels before any individual genetic search. A punch-in code. Within JacSol, your gene print will be recorded as Anderson’s. Any other problems?”

  “What if I bump into Sullivan?”

  “Warden Sullivan has gone on extended leave. Some kind of psychological problem. He is spending some time in virtual. You will not be seeing him again.”

  Despite myself, I felt a cold shiver as I looked at Kawahara’s composed features. I cleared my throat.

  “And the sleeve repurchase?”

  “No.” Kawahara smiled faintly. “I checked the specs; Irene Elliott’s sleeve has no biotech augmentation to justify the cost of retrieving it.”

  “I didn’t say it had. This isn’t about technical capacity, it’s about motivation. She’ll be more loyal if—”

  Kawahara leaned forward in the screen. “I can be pushed so far, Kovacs. And then it stops. Elliott’s getting a compatible sleeve; she should be thankful for that. You wanted her; any loyalty problems you have with her are going to be your problems exclusively. I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “She’ll take longer to adjust,” I said doggedly. “In a new sleeve, she’ll be slower, less resp—”

  “Also your problem. I offered you the best intrusion experts money can buy, and you turned them down. You’ve got to learn to live with the consequences of your actions, Kovacs.” She paused and sat back with another faint smile. “I had a check run on Elliott. Who she is, who her family is, what the connection is. Why you wanted her off stack. It’s a nice thought, Kovacs, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to support your own Good Samaritan gestures without my help. I’m not running a charity here.”

  “No,” I said flatly. “I suppose not.”

  “No. And I think we can also suppose that this will be the last direct contact between us until this matter is resolved.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, inappropriate t
hough it may seem, then: Good luck, Kovacs.”

  The screen blanked, leaving the words hanging in the air. I sat for what seemed like a long time, hearing them, staring at an imagined afterimage on-screen that my hate made almost real. When I spoke, Ryker’s voice sounded alien in my ears, as if someone or something else was speaking through me.

  “Inappropriate is right,” it said into the quiet room. “Motherfucker.”

  Ortega did not come back, but the aroma of what she had cooked curled through the apartment and my stomach flexed in sympathy. I waited some more, still trying to assemble all the jagged edges of the puzzle in my mind, but either my heart was not in it or there was still something major missing. Finally, I forced down the coppery taste of the hate and frustration, and went to eat.

  CHAPTEr THIrTY

  Kawahara’s groundwork was flawless.

  An automated limo with JacSol insignia lightning flashed onto its flanks turned up outside the Hendrix at eight the next morning. I went down to meet it and found the rear cabin stacked with Chinese designer-label boxes.

  Opened back in my room, the boxes yielded a line of high-quality corporate props that Serenity Carlyle would have gone wild for: two blocky, sand-colored suits, cut to Ryker’s size, a half-dozen handmade shirts with the JacSol logo embroidered on each wing collar, formal shoes in real leather, a midnight blue raincoat, a JacSol dedicated mobile phone, and a small black disk with a thumbprint DNA encoding pad.

  I showered and shaved, dressed, and ran the disk. Kawahara blinked up on the screen, construct perfect.

  “Good morning, Takeshi-san, and welcome to JacSol Communications. The DNA coding on this disk is now webbed into a line of credit in the name Martin James Anderson. As I mentioned earlier, the punch-in corporate prefix for JacSol will negate any clash with Ryker’s genetic records or the account set up for you by Bancroft. Please note the coding below.”

  I read off the string of digits in a single sweep and went back to watching Kawahara’s face.

  “The JacSol account will bear all reasonable expenses and is programmed to expire at the end of our ten-day agreement. Should you wish to dissolve the account earlier than this, double-punch the code, apply the gene trace, and double-punch again.

  “Trepp will contact you via the corporate mobile sometime today, so keep the unit with you at all times. Irene Elliott will be downloaded at twenty-one forty-five West Coast time. Processing should take about forty-five minutes. And by the time you receive this message, Silset Holdings will have your package. After consultation with my own experts, I have appended a list of the likely hardware Elliott will need, and a number of suppliers who can be trusted to acquire it discreetly. Charge everything through the JacSol account. The list will print out in hardcopy momentarily.

  “Should you need any repetition of these details, the disk will remain playable for the next eighteen minutes, at which point it will self-wipe. You are now on your own.”

  Kawahara’s features arranged themselves in a PR smile, and the image faded as the printer chittered out the hardware list. I scanned it briefly on my way down to the limo.

  Ortega had not come back.

  At Silset Holdings I was treated like a Harlan family heir. Polished human receptionists busied themselves with my comfort while a technician brought out a metal cylinder roughly the dimensions of a hallucinogen grenade.

  Trepp was less impressed. I met her early that evening, as per her phoned instructions, in a bar in Oakland, and when she saw the JacSol image she laughed sourly.

  “You look like a fucking programmer, Kovacs. Where’d you get that suit?”

  “My name’s Anderson,” I reminded her. “And the suit goes with the name.”

  She pulled a face.

  “Well, next time you go shopping, Anderson, take me with you. I’ll save you a lot of money, and you won’t come out looking like a guy takes the kids to Honolulu on weekends.”

  I leaned across the tiny table. “You know, Trepp, last time you gave me a hard time about my dress sense, I killed you.”

  She shrugged. “Goes to show. Some people just can’t take the truth.”

  “Did you bring the stuff?”

  Trepp put her hand flat on the table, and when she removed it there was a nondescript gray disk sealed in impact plastic between us.

  “There you go. As requested. Now I know you’re crazy.” There might have been something like admiration in her voice. “You know what they do to you on Earth for playing with this stuff?”

  I covered the disk with my own hand and pocketed it. “Same as anywhere else, I guess. Federal offense, down the double-barrel. You forget, I don’t have any choice.”

  Trepp scratched an ear. “Double-barrel, or the Big Wipe. I haven’t enjoyed carrying this around all day. You got the rest of it there?”

  “Why? Worried about being seen in public with me?”

  She smiled. “A bit. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  I hoped so, too. The bulky, grenade-sized package I’d collected from SilSet had been burning a hole in my expensive coat pocket all day.

  I went back to the Hendrix and checked for messages. Ortega had not called. I killed time in the hotel room, thinking through the line I was going to feed Elliott. At nine I got back in the limo and took it down to Bay City Central.

  I sat in a reception room while a young doctor completed the necessary paperwork and I initialed the forms where he indicated. There was an eerie familiarity to the process. Most of the clauses in the parole were on behalf of stipulations, which effectively made me responsible for Irene Elliott’s conduct during the release period. She had even less say in the matter than I’d had when I arrived the week before.

  When Elliott finally emerged from the RESTRICTED ZONE doors beyond the reception rooms, it was with the halting step of someone recovering from a debilitating illness. The shock of the mirror was written into her new face. When you don’t do it for a living, it’s no easy thing to face the stranger for the first time, and the face that Elliott now wore was almost as far from the big-boned blonde I remembered from her husband’s photocube as Ryker was from my own previous sleeve. Kawahara had described the new sleeve as compatible, and it fitted that bleak description perfectly. It was a female body, about the same age as Elliott’s original body had been, but there the resemblance ended. Where Irene Elliott had been big and fair-skinned, this sleeve had the sheen of a narrow vein of copper seen through falling water. Thick black hair framed a face with eyes like hot coals and lips the color of plums, and the body was slim and delicate.

  “Irene Elliott?”

  She leaned unsteadily on the reception counter as she turned to look at me. “Yes. Who are you?”

  “My name is Martin Anderson. I represent JacSol Division West. We arranged for your parole.”

  Her eyes narrowed a little, scanning me from head to foot and back again. “You don’t look like a programmer. Apart from the suit, I mean.”

  “I’m a security consultant, attached to JacSol for certain projects. There is some work we would like you to do for us.”

  “Yeah? Couldn’t get anyone else to do it cheaper than this?” She gestured around her. “What happened, did I get famous while I was in the store?”

  “In a sense,” I said carefully. “Perhaps it would be better if we dealt with the formalities here and moved on. There is a limousine waiting.”

  “A limo?” The incredulity in her voice put a genuine smile on my face for the first time that day. She signed the final release as if in a dream.

  “Who are you really?” she asked when the limousine was in the air. It felt like a lot of people had been asking me that over the past few days. I was almost beginning to wonder myself.

  I stared ahead over the navigation block of the limo. “A friend,” I said quietly. “That’s all you need to know for now.”

  “Before we start anything, I want—”

  “I know.” The limousine was banking in the sky as I said it. “
We’ll be in Ember in about half an hour.”

  I hadn’t turned, but I could feel the heat of her stare on the side of my face.

  “You’re not corporate,” she said definitely. “Corporates don’t do this stuff. Not like this.”

  “The corporates do whatever turns a profit. Don’t let your prejudices blind you. Sure, they’ll burn down entire villages if it pays. But if having a human face is what cuts it, they’ll whip out a human face and put it on.”

  “And you’re the human face?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What’s the work you want me to do? Something illegal?”

  I pulled the cylindrical virus loader out of my pocket and passed it across to her. She took it in both hands and examined the decals with professional interest. As far as I was concerned, this was the first test. I’d pulled Elliott out of the store because that way she would be mine in a way no one supplied by Kawahara or skimmed off the street would ever be. But beyond that I had nothing to go on but instinct and Victor Elliott’s word that his wife was good, and I was feeling slightly queasy about the direction I’d let things go. Kawahara was right. Good Samaritan gestures can be expensive.

  “So let’s see. You’ve got a first-generation Simultec virus here.” Scorn made her enunciate each syllable slowly. “Collector’s item, practically a relic. And you’ve got it in a state-of-the-art rapid-deployment jacket with antilocational casing. Why don’t you just cut the crap and tell me what’s really in here? You’re planning a run, aren’t you.”

  I nodded.

  “What’s the target?”

  “Virtual whorehouse. A.I. managed.”

  Elliott’s new lips parted in a soundless whistle. “Liberation run?”

  “No. We’re installing.”

  “Installing this?” She hefted the cylinder. “So what is it?”

  “Rawling 4851.”

  Elliott stopped hefting abruptly. “That’s not funny.”

  “Wasn’t intended to be. That’s a dormant Rawling variant. Set for rapid deployment, as you so rightly observed. The activation codes are in my pocket. We are going to plant Rawling inside an A.I. whorehouse database, inject the codes, and then weld the lid shut on it. There’s some peripheral stuff with monitoring systems, and some tidying up, but basically that’s the run.”