Altered Carbon

by Richard Morgan

I laughed despite myself. Bautista joined me with a gentle smile.

  'Thing is, it's tearing her up you walking around with that face on. She and Ryker were real close. She's been paying the sleeve mortgage a year now, and on a lieu­tenant's pay that ain't an easy thing to do. Never figured on an overbid like that fucker Bancroft pulled. After all, Ryker ain't exactly young and he never was a beauty.'

  'Got neurachem,' I pointed out.

  'Oh, sure. Got neurachem.' Bautista waved an arm with largesse. 'You tried it yet?'

  'Couple of times.'

  'Like dancing flamenco in a fishing net, right?'

  'It's a little rough,' I admitted.

  This time we both laughed. When it cranked down, the cop focused on his glass again. His face grew serious.

  'I ain't trying to lean on you. All I'm saying is, go easy. This ain't exactly what she needs right now.'

  'Me neither,' I said feelingly. 'This isn't even my nicking planet.'

  Bautista looked sympathetic, or maybe just slightly drunk. 'Marian's World's a lot different to this, I guess.'

  'You guess right. Look, I don't mean to be unsubtle, but hasn't anyone pointed out to Ortega that Ryker's as gone for good as it gets without real death? She's not looking to wait two hundred years for him, is she?'

  The cop looked at me through narrowed eyes. 'You heard about Ryker, huh?'

  'I know he's down for the double barrel. I know what he went down for.'

  Bautista got something in his eyes then that looked like shards of old pain. It can't be much fun talking about your corrupt colleagues. For a moment I regretted what I'd said.

  Local colour. Soak it up.

  'You want to sit down?' said the cop unhappily, casting around for bar stools that had evidently been removed at some stage. 'Over in the booths, maybe? This'll take a while to tell.'

  We settled at one of the clock face tables and Bautista fumbled in his pocket for cigarettes. I twitched, but when he offered me one I shook my head. Like Ortega, he looked surprised.

  'I quit.'

  'In that sleeve?' Bautista's eyebrows lifted respectfully behind a veil of fragrant blue smoke. 'Congratulations.'

  'Thanks. You were going to tell me about Ryker.'

  'Ryker,' the cop jetted smoke out of his nostrils and sat back, 'was working with the Sleeve Theft boys until a couple of years ago. They're quite a sophisticated bunch compared to us. It ain't so easy to steal a whole sleeve intact and that breeds a smarter class of criminal. There's some crossover of jurisdiction with Organic Damage, mostly when they start breaking down the bodies. Places like the Wei Clinic.'

  'Oh?' I said neutrally.

  Bautista nodded. 'Yeah, someone saved us an awful lot of time and effort over there yesterday. Turned the place into a spare parts sale. But I guess you wouldn't know anything about that.'

  'Must have happened as I was walking out the door.'

  'Yeah, well anyway. Back in the winter of '09, Ryker was chasing down some random insurance fraud, you know the stuff, where re-sleeve policy clones 'turn out to be empty tanks and no one knows where the bodies went. It split wide open and turns out the bodies are being used for some dirty little war down south. High level corrup­tion. It bounced all the way up to UN Praesidium level and back. A few token heads roll, and Ryker gets to be a hero.'

  'Nice.'

  'In the short term, yeah. The way it works round here, heroes get a very high profile and they went the whole program for Ryker. Interviews on WorldWeb One, highly publicised fling with Sandy Kim even. Bylines in the faxes. Before it all could tail off, Ryker grabbed his chance. Put in for a transfer to OrgDam. He'd worked with Ortega a couple of times before, like I said we overlap here and there, so he knew the program. No way could the depart­ment turn him down, especially with some bullshit speech he made about wanting to go where he could make a difference.'

  'And did he? Make a difference, I mean?'

  Bautista puffed out his cheeks. 'He was a good cop. Maybe. A month in you could have asked Ortega that question, but then the two of them hooked up and her judgement went all to pieces.'

  'You don't approve?'

  'Hey, what's to approve? You feel that way about someone, you go with it. It just makes it tough to get any objectivity on this thing. When Ryker fucked up, Ortega was bound to side with him.'

  'Did she?' I took our empty glasses to the bar and got them refilled, still talking. 'I thought she brought him in.'

  'Where'd you hear that?'

  'Talk. Not a massively reputable source. It's not true, then?'

  'Nah. Some of the street slime like to talk it up that way. I think the idea of us ratting each other out makes them cream their pants. What happened was, Internal Affairs took Ryker down in her apartment.'

  'Ohhh.'

  'Yeah, ain't that a laser up the ass.' Bautista looked up at me as I handed him his new drink. 'She never let it show, you know. Just went right to work against the IAD charges.'

  'From what I heard, they had him cold.'

  'Yeah, your source got that bit right.' The mohican looked into his glass pensively, as if unsure he should go on. 'Ortega's theory was that Ryker was set up by some high ranking asshole who took a fall back in '09. And it's true he upset a lot of people.'

  'But you don't buy it?'

  'I'd like to. Like I said, he was a good cop. But like I also said, Sleeve Theft was dealing to a smarter class of criminal, and that meant you had to be careful. Smart criminals have smart lawyers, and you can't bounce them around whenever you feel like it. Organic Damage handles everyone, from the scum on up. Generally we get a bit more leeway. That was what you, sorry, what Ryker wanted when he transferred. The leeway.' Bautista tipped back his glass and set it down with a throat-clearing noise. He looked at me steadily. 'I think Ryker got carried away.'

  'Blam, blam, blam?'

  'Something like that. I've seen him interrogate before, he's right on the line most of the time. One slip.' There was an old terror in Bautista's eyes now. The fear he lived with every day. 'With some of these turds, it's real easy to lose your cool. So easy. I think that's what happened.'

  'My source says he RD'd two and left another two with their stacks still intact. That sounds pretty fucking care­less.'

  Bautista jerked his head affirmatively. 'What Ortega says. But it won't wash. See, it all went down in a black clinic up in Seattle. The two intacts made it out of the building breathing, grabbed a cruiser and flew. Ryker put a hundred twenty-four holes in that cruiser when it lifted. Not to mention the surrounding traffic. The intacts ditched in the Pacific. One of them died at the controls, the other one in the impact. Sank in a couple of hundred metres of water. Ryker was out of his jurisdiction, and the Seattle cops ain't all that keen on out-of-town badges shooting up the traffic, so the retrieval teams never let him close to the bodies.

  'Everyone was real surprised when the stacks came up Catholic, and someone at the Seattle PD wasn't buying. Dig a little bit deeper and it turns out the reasons-of-conscience decals are fake. Dipped in by someone real careless.'

  'Or in a real hurry.'

  Bautista snapped his fingers and pointed a finger across the table at: me. He was definitely a little drunk now. 'There you go. The way IAD read it, Ryker'd screwed up letting the witnesses escape, and his only hope was to slap a "do not disturb" sign on their stacks. Course, when they did bring back the intacts, they both swore blind that Ryker had turned up without a warrant, bluffed and then smashed his way into the clinic, and when they wouldn't answer his questions, started playing Who's Next with a plasma gun.'

  'Was it true?'

  'About the warrant? Yeah. Ryker had no business being up there in the first place. About the rest? Who knows?'

  'What did Ryker say?'

  'He said he didn't do it.'

  'Just that?'

  'Nah, it was a long story. He'd gone up on a tip, bluffed himself inside just to see how far he could push it and suddenly they were shooting at him. Claims he might h
ave taken someone out but probably not with a head shot. Claims the clinic must have brought in two sacrificial employees and torched them before he arrived. Claims he knows nothing about any Dipping that went on.' Bautista shrugged blearily. 'They found the Dipper, and he said Ryker paid him to do it. Polygraph-tested. But he also says Ryker called him up, didn't do it face to face. Virtual link.'

  'Which can be faked. Easily.'

  'Yeah.' Bautista looked pleased. 'But then, this guy says he's done work for Ryker before, this time face to face, and he polygraphed out on that too. Ryker knows him, that's indisputable. And then, of course, IAD wanted to know why Ryker didn't take any backup with him. They got witnesses in the street who said Ryker was like a maniac, shooting blind, trying to bring the cruiser down. Seattle PD didn't take too kindly to that, like I said.'

  'A hundred and twenty-four holes,' I muttered.

  'Yep. That's a lot of holes. Ryker wanted to bring those two intacts down pretty badly.'

  'It could have been a set-up.'

  'Yeah, it could have been.' Bautista sobered up a little and his voice got angry. 'Could have been a lot of things. But the fact is that you, shit, sorry, the fact is that Ryker went too far out, and when the branch broke there was no one there to catch him.'

  'So Ortega buys the set-up story, stands by Ryker and fights IAD all the way down, and when they lose . . . ' I nodded to myself. 'When they lose, she picks up the sleeve mortgage to keep Ryker's body out of the city auction room. And goes looking for fresh evidence?'

  'Got it in one. She's already lodged an appeal, but there's a minimum two-year elapse from start of sentence before she can get the disc spinning.' Bautista let go of a gut-deep sigh. 'Like I said, it's tearing her up.'

  We sat quietly for a while.

  'You know,' said Bautista finally. 'I think I'm going to go. Sitting here talking about Ryker to Ryker's face is getting a little weird. I don't know how Ortega copes.'

  'Just part of living in the modern age,' I told him, knocking back my drink.

  'Yeah, I guess. You'd think I'd have a handle on it by now. I spend half my life talking to victims wearing other people's faces. Not to mention the scumbags.'

  'So which do you make Ryker for? Victim or scumbag?'

  Bautista frowned. 'That ain't a nice question. Ryker was a good cop who made a mistake. That don't make him a scumbag. Don't make him a victim either. Just makes him someone who screwed up. Me, I only live about a block away from that myself.'

  'Sure. Sorry.' I rubbed at the side of my face. Envoy conversations weren't supposed to slip like that. 'I'm a little tired. That block you live on sounds familiar. I think I'm going to go to bed. You want another drink before you go, help yourself. It's on my tab.'

  'No thanks.' Bautista drained what was left in his glass. 'Old cop's rule. Never drink alone.'

  'Sounds like I should have been an old cop.' I stood up, swaying a little. Ryker may have been a death-wish smoker, but he didn't have much tolerance for alcohol. 'You can see yourself out: OK, I guess.'

  'Sure.' Bautista got up to go and made about a half dozen paces before he turned back. He; frowned with concentration. 'Oh, yeah. Goes without saying, I was never here, right.'

  I gestured him away. 'You were never here,' I assured him.

  He grinned bemusedly and his face looked suddenly very young. 'Right. Good. See you round, probably.'

  'See you.'

  I watched him out of sight, then, regretfully, let the ice-cold processes of Envoy control trickle down through my befuddled senses. When I was unpleasantly sober again, I picked up Curtis's drug crystals from the bar, and went to talk to the Hendrix.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  'You know anything about synamorphesterone?'

  'Heard of it.' Ortega dug absently at the sand with the toe of one boot. It was still damp from the tide's retreat, and our footprints welled soggily behind us. In either direction the curve of the beach was deserted. We were alone apart from the gulls that wheeled in geometric formations high overhead.

  'Well, since we're waiting, you want to fill me in?'

  'Harem drug.' When I looked blank, Ortega puffed out her cheeks impatiently. She was acting like someone who hadn't slept well.

  'I'm not from here.'

  'You were on Sharya, you told me.'

  'Yeah. In a military capacity. There wasn't all that much time for cultural awareness. We were too busy killing people.'

  This last wasn't quite true. Following the sack of Zihicce, the Envoys had been steeped in the mechanics of engineering a regime compliant to the Protectorate. Troublemakers were rooted out, cells of resistance infil­trated and then crushed, collaborators plugged into the political edifice. In the process we'd learnt quite a lot about local culture.

  I'd asked for an early transfer out.

  Ortega shaded her eyes and scanned the beach in both directions. Nothing stirred. She sighed. 'It's a male response enhancer. Boosts aggression, sexual prowess, confidence. On the street in the Middle East and Europe they call it Stallion, in the south it's Toro. We don't get much of it here, street mood's more ambient. Which I'm glad about. From what I hear it can be very nasty. You run across some last night?'

  'Sort of.' This was pretty much what I'd learnt from the Hendrix database last night, but more concise and with less chemistry. And Curtis's behaviour ran the checklist of symptoms and side effects like a model. 'Suppose I wanted to get hold of some of this stuff, where could I pick it up. Easily, I mean.'

  Ortega gave me a sharp look, and picked her way back up the beach onto dryer sand. 'Like I said, we don't get much of it here,' she said in time with her laboured, sinking footsteps. 'You'd have to ask around. Someone with better than local connections. Or get it synthesised locally. But I don't know. With designer hormones that's likely to be more expensive than just buying it in from down south.'

  She paused at the crest of the dune and looked around again.

  'Where the hell is she?'

  'Maybe she's not coming,' I suggested morosely. I hadn't slept all that well myself. Most of the night after Rodrigo Bautista's departure had been spent brooding over the uncooperatively jagged pieces of the Bancroft jigsaw and fighting off the urge to smoke. My head seemed barely to have hit the pillow when the Hendrix buzzed me awake with Ortega's call. It was still obscenely early in the morning.

  'She'll come,' said Ortega. 'The link's booked through to her personal pick-up. Call's probably delayed at incom­ing security. We've only been in here about ten seconds, real time.'

  I shivered in the cold wind from offshore and said nothing. Overhead, the gulls repeated their geometry. The virtuality was cheap, not designed for long stay.

  'Got any cigarettes?'

  I was seated in the cold sand, smoking with a kind of mechanical intensity, when something moved on the extreme right of the bay. I straightened up and narrowed my eyes, then laid a hand on Ortega's arm. The motion resolved itself into a plume of sand or water, ripped into the air by a fast-moving surface vehicle that was tearing round the curve of the beach towards us.

  'Told you she'd come.'

  'Or someone would,' I muttered, getting to my feet and reaching for the Nemex which was, of course, not there. Not many virtual forums allowed firearms in their con­structs. Instead, I brushed sand from my clothes and moved down the beach, still trying to rid myself of the brooding feeling that I was wasting my time here.

  The vehicle was close enough now to be visible, a dark dot at the front of the pluming wake. I could hear its engine, a shrill whine over the melancholy carping of the gulls. I turned to Ortega, who was watching the approach­ing craft impassively at my side.

  'Bit excessive for a phone call, isn't it?' I said nastily.

  Ortega shrugged and spun her cigarette away into the sand. 'Money doesn't automatically mean taste,' she said.

  The speeding dot became a stubby, finned one-man ground jet, painted iridescent pink. It was ploughing along through the shallow surf at the water's
edge, flinging water and wet sand indiscriminately behind it, but a few hundred metres away the pilot must have seen us because the little craft veered out across the deeper water and cut a spray tail twice its own height towards us.

  'Pink?'

  Ortega shrugged again.

  The ground jet beached about ten metres away and shuddered to a halt, ripped-up gobbets of wet sand splattering down around it. When the storm of its arrival had died, a hatch was flung back and a black-clad, helmeted figure clambered out. That the figure was a woman was abundantly clear from the form-fitting flight suit, a suit that ended in boots inlaid with curling silver tracery from heel to toe.

  I sighed and followed Ortega up to the craft.

  The woman in the flight suit jumped down into the shallow water and splashed up to meet us, tugging at the seals on her helmet. As we met, the helmet came off and long coppery hair spilled out over the suit's shoulders. The woman put her head back and shook out the hair, revealing a wide-boned face with large, expressive eyes the colour of flecked onyx, a delicately arched nose and a generously sculpted mouth.

  The old, ghostly hint of Miriam Bancroft's beauty this woman had once owned had been scrubbed out utterly.

  'Kovacs, this is Leila Begin,' said Ortega formally. 'Ms Begin, this is Takeshi Kovacs, Laurens Bancroft's retained investigator.'

  The large eyes appraised me frankly.

  'You're from offworld?' she asked me.

  'That's correct. Harlan's World.'

  'Yes, the lieutenant mentioned it.' There was a well-designed huskiness to Leila Begin's voice, and an accent that suggested she was unused to speaking Amanglic. 'I can only hope that means you have an open mind.'

  'Open to what?'

  'The truth.' Begin gave me a surprised look. 'Lieutenant Ortega tells me you are interested in the truth. Shall we walk?'

  Without waiting for a response, she set off parallel with the surf. I exchanged a glance with Ortega, who gestured with her thumb but showed no signs of moving herself. I hesitated for a couple of moments, then went after Begin.

  'What's all this about the truth?' I asked, catching her up.