I blinked. I’d had a variety of theories circling around the central conviction that Kawahara was responsible for Bancroft’s death, but none quite this garish. But as Kawahara’s words sank in, so did a number of pieces from that jagged mirror I’d thought was already complete enough to see the truth in. I looked into a newly revealed corner and wished I had not seen the things that moved there.
Opposite me, Kawahara grinned at my silence. She knew she’d dented me, and it pleased her. Vanity, vanity. Kawahara’s only but enduring flaw. Like all Meths, she had grown very impressed with herself. The admission, the final piece to my jigsaw, had slipped out easily. She wanted me to have it, she wanted me to see how far ahead of me she was, how far behind her I was limping along.
That crack about the tennis must have touched a nerve.
“Another subtle echo of his wife’s face,” she said, “carefully selected and then amped up with a little cosmetic surgery. He choked the life out of her. As he was coming for the second time, I think. Married life, eh Kovacs? What it must do to you males.”
“You got it on tape?” My voice sounded stupid in my own ears.
Kawahara’s smile came back. “Come on, Kovacs. Ask me something that needs an answer.”
“Bancroft was chemically assisted?”
“Oh, but of course. You were right about that. Quite a nasty drug, but then I expect you know—”
It was the betathanatine. The heart-dragging slow chill of the drug, because without it I would have been moving with the breath of air as the door opened on my flank. The thought crossed my mind as rapidly as it was able, and even as it did I knew by its very presence that I was going to be too slow. This was no time for thinking. Thought in combat was a luxury about as appropriate as a hot bath and massage. It fogged the whiplash clarity of the Khumalo’s neurachem response system and I spun, just a couple of centuries too late, shard gun lifting.
Splat!
The stun bolt slammed through me like a train, and I seemed to see the brightly lit carriage windows ratcheting past behind my eyes. My vision was a frozen frame on Trepp, crouched in the doorway, stungun extended, face watchful in case she’d missed or I was wearing neural armour beneath the stealth suit. Some hope. My own weapon dropped from nerveless fingers as my hand spasmed open and I pitched forward beside it. The wooden floor came up and smashed me on the side of the head like one of my father’s cuffs.
“What kept you?” asked Kawahara’s voice from a great height, distorted to a bass growl by my fading consciousness. One slim hand reached into my field of vision and retrieved the shard gun. Numbly, I felt her other hand tug the stungun free of the other holster.
“Alarm only went off a couple of minutes ago.” Trepp stepped into view, stowing her stungun, and crouched to look at me curiously. “Took McCabe a while to cool off enough to trip the system. Most of your half-assed security is still up on the main deck, goggling at the corpse. Who’s this?”
“It’s Kovacs,” said Kawahara dismissively, tucking the shard gun and stunner into her belt on her way to the desk. To my paralysed gaze, she appeared to be retreating across a vast plain, hundreds of metres with every stride until she was tiny and distant. Doll-like, she leaned on the desk and punched at controls I could not see.
I wasn’t going under.
“Kovacs?” Trepp’s face went abruptly impassive. “I thought—”
“Yes, so did I.” The holographic data weave above the desk awoke and unwound. Kawahara put her face closer, colours swirling over her features. “He double-sleeved on us. Presumably with Ortega’s help. You should have stuck around the Panama Rose a little longer.”
My hearing was still mangled, my vision frozen in place, but I wasn’t going under. I wasn’t sure if it was some side-effect of the betathanatine, another bonus feature of the Khumalo system, or maybe both in some unintended conjunction, but something was keeping me conscious.
“Being around a crime scene with that many cops makes me nervous,” said Trepp and put out a hand to touch my face.
“Yeah?” Kawahara was still absorbed in the dataflow. “Well, distracting this psycho with moral debate and true confessions hasn’t been good for my digestion, either. I thought you were never going to — Fuck!”
She jerked her head savagely to one side, then lowered it and stared at the surface of the desk.
“He was telling the truth.”
“About what?”
Kawahara looked up at Trepp, suddenly guarded. “Doesn’t matter. What are you doing to his face?”
“He’s cold.”
“Of course he’s fucking cold.” The deteriorating language was a sure sign that Reileen Kawahara was rattled, I thought dreamily. “How do you think he got in past the infrareds? He’s Stiffed to the eyes.”
Trepp got up, face carefully expressionless. “What are you going to do with him?”
“He’s going into virtual,” said Kawahara grimly. “Along with his Harlanite fishwife friend. But before we do that, we have to perform a little surgery. He’s wearing a wire.”
I tried to move my right hand. The last joint of the middle finger twitched, barely.
“You sure he isn’t transmitting?”
“Yeah, he told me. Anyway, we would have nailed the transmission, soon as it started. Have you got a knife?”
A bone-deep tremor that felt suspiciously like panic ran through me. Desperately, I reached down into the paralysis for some sign of impending recovery. The Khumalo nervous system was still reeling. I could feel my eyes drying out from the lack of a blink reflex. Through smearing vision, I watched Kawahara coming back from the desk, hand held out expectantly to Trepp.
“I don’t have a knife.” I couldn’t be certain with the wow and flutter of my hearing, but Trepp’s voice sounded rebellious.
“No problem.” Kawahara took more long strides and disappeared from view, voice fading. “I’ve got something back here that’ll do just as well. You’d better whistle up some muscle to drag this piece of shit up to one of the decanting salons. I think seven and nine are prepped. Use the jack on the desk.”
Trepp hesitated. I felt something drop, like a tiny piece of ice thawing from the frozen block of my central nervous system. My eyelids scraped slowly down over my eyes, once and up again. The cleansing contact brought tears. Trepp saw it and stiffened. She made no move towards the desk.
The fingers of my right hand twitched and curled. I felt the beginnings of tension in the muscles of my stomach. My eyes moved.
Kawahara’s voice came through faintly. She must be in the other room, beyond the arch. “They coming?”
Trepp’s face stayed impassive. Her eyes lifted from me. “Yeah,” she said loudly. “Be here in a couple of minutes.”
I was coming back. Something was forcing my nerves back into sparking, fizzing life. I could feel the shakes setting in, and with them a soupy, suffocating quality to the air in my lungs that meant the betathanatine crash was coming on ahead of schedule. My limbs were moulded in lead and my hands felt as if I was wearing thick cotton gloves with a low electric current fizzing through them. I was in no condition for a fight.
My left hand was folded under me, flattened to the floor by the weight of my body. My right trailed out at an awkward side angle. It didn’t feel as if my legs would do much more than hold me up. My options were limited.
“Right then.” I felt Kawahara’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me onto my back like a fish for gutting. Her face was masked in concentration and there was a pair of needle-nosed pliers in her other hand. She knelt astride my chest and spread the lids of my left eye with her fingers. I forced down the urge to blink, held myself immobile. The pliers came down, jaws poised a half centimetre apart.