Altered Carbon

  It took a certain kind of person to keep going, to want to keep going, life after life, sleeve after sleeve. You had to start out different, never mind what you might become as the centuries piled up.

  “So Bancroft gets shortchanged because he’s a Meth. Sorry, Laurens, you’re an arrogant, long-lived bastard. The Bay City police have got better things to do with its time than take you seriously. That kind of thing.”

  But Ortega wasn’t rising to the bait anymore. She sipped her coffee and made a dismissive gesture. “Look, Kovacs. Bancroft is alive, and whatever the facts of the case he’s got enough security to stay that way. No one here is groaning under the burden of a miscarriage of justice. The police department is underfunded, understaffed, and overworked. We don’t have the resources to chase Bancroft’s phantoms indefinitely.”

  “And if they’re not phantoms?”

  Ortega sighed. “Kovacs, I went over that house myself three times with the forensics team. There’s no sign of a struggle, no break in the perimeter defenses, and no trace of an intruder anywhere in the security net’s records. Miriam Bancroft volunteered to take every state-of-the-art polygraph test there is, and she passed them all without a tremor. She did not kill her husband. No one broke in and killed her husband. Laurens Bancroft killed himself, for reasons best known to himself, and that’s all there is to it. I’m sorry you’re supposed to prove otherwise, but wishing isn’t going to make it fucking so. It’s an open-and-shut case.”

  “And the phone call? The fact Bancroft wasn’t exactly going to forget he had remote storage? The fact someone thinks I’m important enough to send Kadmin out here?”

  “I’m not going to argue the toss with you on this, Kovacs. We’ll interrogate Kadmin and find out what he knows, but for the rest I’ve been over the ground before and it’s starting to bore me. There are people out there who need us a lot worse than Bancroft does. Real-death victims who weren’t lucky enough to have remote storage when their stacks were blown out. Catholics getting butchered because their killers know the victims will never come out of storage to put them away.” There was a hooded tiredness building up in Ortega’s eyes as she ticked the list off on her fingers. “Organic damage cases who don’t have the money to get resleeved unless the state can prove some kind of liability against somebody. I wade through this stuff ten hours a day or more, and I’m sorry, I just don’t have the sympathy to spare for Mr. Laurens Bancroft with his clones on ice and his magic walls of influence in high places and his fancy lawyers to put us through hoops every time some member of his family or staff wants to slide out from under.”

  “That happen often, does it?”

  “Often enough, but don’t look surprised.” She gave me a bleak smile. “He’s a fucking Meth. They’re all the same.”

  It was a side of her I didn’t like, an argument I didn’t want to have, and a view of Bancroft I didn’t need. And underneath it all, my nerves were screaming for sleep. I stubbed out my cigarette.

  “I think you’d better go, Lieutenant. All this prejudice is giving me a headache.”

  Something flickered in her eyes, something I couldn’t read at all. There for a second, then gone. She shrugged, put down the coffee mug, and swung her legs over the side of the shelf. She stretched herself upright, arched her spine until it cracked audibly, and walked to the door without looking back. I stayed where I was, watching her reflection move among the city lights in the window.

  At the door, she stopped, and I saw her turn her head.

  “Hey, Kovacs.”

  I looked over at her. “Forget something?”

  She nodded her head, mouth clamped in a crooked line, as if acknowledging a point in some game we’d been playing.

  “You want an insight? You want somewhere to start? Well, you gave me Kadmin, so I guess I owe you that.”

  “You don’t owe me a thing, Ortega. The Hendrix did it, not me.”

  “Leila Begin,” she said. “Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyers, see where it gets you.”

  The door sliced closed and the reflected room held nothing but the lights of the city outside. I stared out at them for a while, lit a new cigarette, and smoked it down to its filter.

  Bancroft had not committed suicide, that much was clear. I’d been on the case less than a day, and already I’d had two separate lobbies land on my back. First Kristin Ortega’s mannered thugs at the justice facility, then the Vladivostok hit man and his spare sleeve. Not to mention Miriam Bancroft’s off-the-wall behavior. Altogether too much muddied water for this to be what it purported to be. Ortega wanted something, whoever had paid Dimitri Kadmin wanted something, and what they wanted, it seemed, was for the Bancroft case to remain closed.

  That wasn’t an option I had.

  “Your guest has left the building,” the Hendrix said, jolting me out of my glazed retrospection.

  “Thanks,” I said absently, stubbing out the cigarette in an ashtray. “Can you lock the door and block the elevators from this floor?”

  “Certainly. Do you wish to be advised of any entry into the hotel?”

  “No.” I yawned like a snake trying to engorge an egg. “Just don’t let them up here. And no calls for the next seven and a half hours.”

  Abruptly it was all I could do to get out of my clothes before the waves of sleep overwhelmed me. I left Bancroft’s summer suit draped over a convenient chair and crawled into the massive crimson-sheeted bed. The surface of the bed undulated briefly, adjusting to my body weight and size, then bore me up like water. A faint odor of incense drifted from the sheets.

  I made a halfhearted attempt to masturbate, mind churning damply through images of Miriam Bancroft’s voluptuous curves, but I kept seeing Sarah’s pale body turned to wreckage by the Kalashnikov fire instead.

  And sleep dragged me under.

  CHAPTEr SEVEN

  There are ruins, steeped in shadow, and a bloodred sun going down in turmoil behind distant hills. Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic toward the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict’s fingers through the trees that line the street.

  Innenininnenininnenin . . .

  I know this place.

  I pick my way between the devastated walls of ruins, trying not to brush against them because, whenever I do, they give out muted gunshots and screams, as if whatever conflict murdered this city has soaked into the remaining stonework. At the same time, I’m moving quite fast, because there is something following me, something that has no such qualms about touching the ruins. I can chart its progress quite accurately by the tide of gunfire and anguish swelling behind me. It is closing. I try to speed up but there is a tightness in my throat and chest that isn’t helping matters.

  Jimmy de Soto steps out from behind the shattered stub of a tower. I’m not really surprised to see him here, but his ruined face still gives me a jolt. He grins with what’s left of his features and puts a hand on my shoulder. I try not to flinch.

  “Leila Begin,” he says, and nods back to where I have come from. “Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyer.”

  “I will,” I say, moving past him. But his hand stays on my shoulder, which must mean his arm is stretching out behind me like hot wax. I stop, guilty at the pain that must be causing him, but he’s still there at my shoulder. I start moving again.

  “Going to turn and fight?” he asks conversationally, drifting along beside me without apparent effort or footing.

  “With what?” I say, opening my empty hands.

  “Should have armed yourself, pal. Big-time.”

  “Virginia told us not to fall for the weakness of weapons.”

  Jimmy de Soto snorts derisively. “Yeah, and look where that stupid bitch ended up. Eighty to a hundred, no remission.”

  “You can’t know that,” I say absently, more interested in the sounds of pursuit behind me. “You died years before that happened.”

  “Oh, come on, who really dies, these days?”

  “Try telling that to a Cathol
ic. And anyway, you did die, Jimmy. Irretrievably, as I recall.”

  “What’s a Catholic?”

  “Tell you later. You got any cigarettes?”

  “Cigarettes? What happened to your arm?”

  I break the spiral of non sequiturs and stare down at my arm. Jimmy’s got a point. The scars on my forearm have turned into a fresh wound, blood welling up and trickling down into my hand. So of course . . .

  I reach up to my left eye and find the wetness below it. My fingers come away bloody.

  “Lucky one,” Jimmy de Soto says judicially. “They missed the socket.”

  He should know. His own left socket is a glutted well of gore, all that was left at Innenin when he dug the eyeball out with his fingers. No one ever found out what he was hallucinating at the time. By the time they got Jimmy and the rest of the Innenin beachhead D.H.’d for psychosurgery, the defenders’ virus had scrambled their minds beyond retrieval. The program was so virulent that at the time the clinic didn’t even dare keep what was left on stack for study. The remains of Jimmy de Soto are on a sealed disk with red DATA CONTAMINANT decals somewhere in a basement at Envoy Corps HQ.

  “I’ve got to do something about this,” I say, a little desperately. The sounds awoken from the walls by my pursuer are growing dangerously close. The last of the sun is slipping behind the hills. Blood spills down my arm and face.

  “Smell that?” Jimmy asks, lifting his own face to the chilly air around us. “They’re changing it.”

  “What?” But even as I snap the retort, I can smell it, as well. A fresh, invigorating scent, not unlike the incense back at the Hendrix, but subtly different, not quite the heady decadence of the original odor I fell asleep to only . . .

  “Got to go,” Jimmy says, and I’m about to ask him where when I realize he means me and I’m

  Awake.

  My eyes snapped open on one of the psychedelic murals of the hotel room. Slim, waiflike figures in kaftans dotted across a field of green grass and yellow and white flowers. I frowned and clutched at the hardened scar tissue on my forearm. No blood. With the realization, I came fully awake and sat up in the big crimson bed. The shift in the smell of incense that had originally nudged me toward consciousness was fully resolved into that of coffee and fresh bread. The Hendrix’s olfactory wake-up call. Light was pouring into the dimmed room through a flaw in the polarized glass of the window.

  “You have a visitor,” the voice of the Hendrix said briskly.

  “What time is it?” I croaked. The back of my throat seemed to have been liberally painted with supercooled glue.

  “Ten-sixteen, locally. You have slept for seven hours and forty-two minutes.”

  “And my visitor?”

  “Oumou Prescott,” the hotel said. “Do you require breakfast?”

  I got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. “Yes. Coffee with milk, white meat, well cooked, and fruit juice of some kind. You can send Prescott up.”

  By the time the door chimed at me, I was out of the shower and padding around in an iridescent blue bathrobe trimmed with gold braid. I collected my breakfast from the service hatch and balanced the tray on one hand while I opened the door.

  Oumou Prescott was a tall, impressive-looking African woman, topping my sleeve by a couple of centimeters, her hair braided back with dozens of oval glass beads in seven or eight of my favorite colors, and her cheekbones lined with some sort of abstract tattooing. She stood on the threshold in a pale gray suit and a long black coat turned up at the collar, and looked at me doubtfully.

  “Mr. Kovacs.”

  “Yes, come in. Would you like some breakfast?” I laid the tray on the unmade bed.

  “No, thank you. Mr. Kovacs, I am Laurens Bancroft’s principal legal representative via the firm of Prescott, Forbes, and Hernandez. Mr. Bancroft informed me—”

  “Yes, I know.” I picked up a piece of grilled chicken from the tray.

  “The point is, Mr. Kovacs, we have an appointment with Dennis Nyman at PsychaSec in—” Her eyes flicked briefly upward to consult a retinal watch. “—thirty minutes.”

  “I see,” I said, chewing slowly. “I didn’t know that.”

  “I’ve been calling since eight this morning, but the hotel refused to put me through. I didn’t realize you would sleep so late.”

  I grinned at her through a mouthful of chicken. “Faulty research, then. I was only sleeved yesterday.”

  She stiffened a little at that, but then a professional calm asserted itself. She crossed the room and took a seat on the window shelf.

  “We’ll be late, then,” she said. “I guess you need breakfast.”

  It was cold in the middle of the bay.

  I climbed out of the autocab into watery sunshine and a buffeting wind. It had rained during the night, and there were still a few piles of gray cumulus skulking around inland, sullenly resisting the attempts of a stiff sea breeze to sweep them away. I turned up the collar of my summer suit and made a mental note to buy a coat. Nothing serious, something coming to midthigh with a collar and pockets big enough to stuff your hands in.

  Beside me, Prescott was looking unbearably snug inside her coat. She paid off the cab with a swipe of her thumb, and we both stood back as it rose. A welcome rush of warm air from the lift turbines washed over my hands and face. I blinked my eyes against the small storm of grit and dust and saw how Prescott raised one slender arm to do the same. Then the cab was gone, droning away to join the beehive activity in the sky above the mainland. Prescott turned to the building behind us and gestured with one laconic thumb.

  “This way.”

  I pushed my hands into the inadequate pockets of my suit and followed her lead. Bent slightly into the wind, we picked our way up the long, winding steps to PsychaSec Alcatraz.

  I’d expected a high-security installation, and I wasn’t disappointed. PsychaSec was laid out in a series of long, low double-story modules with deeply recessed windows reminiscent of a military command bunker. The only break in this pattern was a single dome at the western end, which I guessed had to house the satellite uplink gear. The whole complex was a pale granite gray and the windows a smoky reflectant orange. There was no holodisplay, or broadcast publicity, in fact nothing to announce we’d got the right place except a sober plaque laser-engraved into the sloping stone wall of the entrance block:

  PSYCHASEC S.A.

  D.H.F. RETRIEVAL AND SECURE HOLDING

  CLONIC RESLEEVING

  Above the plaque was a small black sentry eye flanked by heavily grilled speakers. Oumou Prescott raised her arm and waved at it.

  “Welcome to PsychaSec Alcatraz,” a construct voice said briskly. “Please identify yourself within the fifteen-second security time limit.”

  “Oumou Prescott and Takeshi Kovacs to see Director Nyman. We have an appointment.”

  A thin green scanning laser flickered over us both from head to foot and then a section of the wall hinged smoothly back and down forming a passage inside. Glad to get out of the wind, I stepped nimbly into the niche and followed orange runway lights down a short corridor into a reception area, leaving Prescott to bring up the rear. As soon as we stepped off the walkway and into reception, the massive door slab rumbled upright and closed again. Solid security.

  Reception was a circular, warmly lit area with banks of seats and low tables set at the cardinal compass points. There were small groups of people seated north and east, conversing in low tones. In the center was a circular desk where a receptionist sat behind a battery of secretarial equipment. No artificial constructs here, this was a real human being, a slim young man barely out of his teens who looked up with intelligent eyes as we approached.

  “You can go right through, Ms. Prescott. The director’s office is up the stairs and third door on your right.”

  “Thank you.” Prescott took the lead again, turning back briefly to mutter as soon as we were out of earshot of the receptionist.

  “Nyman’s a bit impressed with himself since t
his place was built, but he’s basically a good person. Try not to let him irritate you.”

  “Sure.”

  We followed the receptionist’s instructions until, outside the aforementioned door, I had to stop and suppress a snigger. Nyman’s door, no doubt in the best possible Earth taste, was pure mirrorwood from top to bottom. After the high-profile security system and flesh-and-blood reception, it seemed about as subtle as the vaginal spittoons at Madame Mi’s Wharfwhore Warehouse. My amusement must have been evident because Prescott gave me a frown as she knocked on the door.

  “Come.”

  Sleep had done wonders for the interface between my mind and my new sleeve. Composing my rented features, I followed Prescott into the room.

  Nyman was at his desk, ostensibly working at a gray-and-green-colored holodisplay. He was a thin, serious-looking man who affected steel-rimmed external eyelenses to go with his expensively cut black suit and short, tidy hair. His expression, behind the lenses, was slightly resentful. He’d not been happy when Prescott phoned him from the cab to say we would be delayed, but Bancroft had obviously been in touch with him because he accepted the later appointment time with the stiff acquiescence of a disciplined child.

  “Since you have requested a viewing of our facilities here, Mr. Kovacs, shall we start? I have cleared my agenda for the next couple of hours, but I do have clients waiting.”

  Something about Nyman’s manner brought Warden Sullivan to mind, but it was an altogether smoother, less embittered Sullivan. I glanced over Nyman’s suit and face. Perhaps if the warden had made his career in storage for the superrich instead of the criminal element, he might have turned out like this.

  “Fine.”