Ortega gestured. “Yeah, well. Busy city at night.”
I offered her the packet. She looked at it as if I’d just posed a major philosophical question, then took it and shook out a cigarette. Ignoring the ignition patch on the side of the packet, she searched her pockets, produced a heavy petrol lighter and snapped it open. She seemed to be on autopilot, moving aside almost without noticing to let a forensics team bring in new equipment, then returning the lighter to a different pocket. Around us, the lobby seemed suddenly crowded with efficient people doing their jobs.
“So.” She plumed smoke into the air above her head. “You know these guys?”
“Oh, give me a fucking break!”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, I’ve been out of storage six hours, if that.” I could hear my voice starting to rise. “Meaning, I’ve talked to precisely three people since the last time we met. Meaning, I’ve never been on Earth in my life. Meaning, you know all this. Now, are you going to ask me some intelligent questions or am I going to bed?”
“All right, keep your skull on.” Ortega looked suddenly tired. She sank into the lounger opposite mine. “You told my sergeant they were professionals.”
“They were.” I’d decided it was the one piece of information I might as well share with the police, since they’d probably find out anyway, as soon as they ran the make on the two corpses through their files.
“Did they call you by name?”
I furrowed my brow with great care. “By name?”
“Yeah.” She made an impatient gesture. “Did they call you Kovacs?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Any other names?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”
The weariness that had clouded her face retreated abruptly, and she gave me a hard look. “Forget it. We’ll run the hotel’s memory, and see.”
Oops.
“On Harlan’s World you’d have to get a warrant for that.” I made it come out lazily.
“We do here.” Ortega knocked ash off her cigarette onto the carpet. “But it won’t be a problem. Apparently this isn’t the first time the Hendrix has been up on an organic damage charge. While ago, but the archives go back.”
“So how come it wasn’t decommissioned?”
“I said up on charges, not convicted. Court threw it out. Demonstrable self defence. Course,” she nodded over at the dormant gun turret, where two members of the forensic team were running an emissions sweep, “we’re talking about covert electrocution that time. Nothing like this.”
“Yeah, I was meaning to ask. Who fits that kind of hardware in a hotel anyway?”
“What do you think I am, a search construct?” Ortega had started watching me with a speculative hostility I didn’t much like. Then, abruptly, she shrugged. “Archive précis I ran on the way over here says it got done a couple of centuries back, when the corporate wars turned nasty. Makes sense. With all that shit breaking loose, a lot of buildings were retooling to cope. Course, most of the companies went under shortly afterwards with the trading crash, so no one ever got around to passing a decommissioning bill. The Hendrix graded to artificial intelligence status instead and bought itself out.”
“Smart.”
“Yeah, from what I hear the AIs were the only ones with any kind of real handle on what was happening to the market anyway. Quite a few of them made the break about then. Lot of the hotels on this strip are AI.” She grinned at me through the smoke. “That’s why no one stays in them. Shame, really. I read somewhere they’re hardwired to want customers the way people want sex. That’s got to be frustrating, right?”
“Right.”
One of the mohicans came and hovered over us. Ortega glanced up at him with a look that said she didn’t want to be disturbed.
“We got a make on the DNA samples,” the mohican said diffidently, and handed her a videofax slate. Ortega scanned it and started.
“Well, well. You were in exalted company for a while, Kovacs.” She waved an arm in the direction of the male corpse. “Sleeve last registered to Dimitri Kadmin, otherwise known as Dimi the Twin. Professional assassin out of Vladivostock.”
“And the woman?”
Ortega and the mohican exchanged glances. “Ulan Bator registry?”
“Got it in one, chief.”
“Got the motherfucker.” Ortega bounced to her feet with renewed energy. “Let’s get their stacks excised and over to Fell Street. I want Dimi downloaded into Holding before midnight.” She looked back at me. “Kovacs, you may just have proved useful.”
The mohican reached under his double-breasted suit and produced a heavy-bladed killing knife with the nonchalance of a man getting out cigarettes. Together, they went over to the corpse and knelt beside it. Interested uniformed officers drifted across to watch. There was the wet, cracking sound of cartilage being cut open. After a moment, I got up and went to join the spectators. Nobody paid any attention to me.
It was not what you’d call refined biotech surgery. The mohican had chopped out a section of the corpse’s spine to gain access to the base of the skull, and now he was digging around with the point of the knife, trying to locate the cortical stack. Kristin Ortega was holding the head steady in both hands.
“They bury them a lot deeper in than they used to,” she was saying. “See if you can get the rest of the vertebrae out, that’s where it’ll be.”
“I’m trying,” grunted the mohican. “Some augmentation in here, I reckon. One of those antishock washers Noguchi was talking about last time he was over… Shit!! Thought I had it there.”
“No, look, you’re working at the wrong angle. Let me try.” Ortega took the knife and put one knee on the skull to steady it.
“Shit, I nearly had it, chief.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m not spending all night watching you poke around in there.” She glanced up and saw me watching her, nodded a brief acknowledgement and put the serrated point of the blade in place. Then with a sharp blow to the haft of the knife, she chopped something loose. She looked up at the mohican with a grin.
“Hear that?”
She reached down into the gore and pulled out the stack between finger and thumb. It didn’t look like much, impact-resistant casing streaked with blood and barely the size of a cigarette butt with the twisted filaments of the microjacks protruding stiffly from one end. I could see how the Catholics might not want to believe this was the receptacle of the human soul.
“Gotcha, Dimi.” Ortega held up the stack to the light, then passed it and the knife to the mohican. She wiped her fingers on the corpse’s clothing. “Right, let’s get the other one out of the woman.”
As we watched the mohican repeating the procedure on the second body, I tipped my head close enough to Ortega to mutter.
“So you know who this one is as well?”
She jerked round to look at me, whether out of surprise or dislike of my proximity I couldn’t be sure. “Yeah, this is Dimi the Twin too. Ha, pun! The sleeve’s registered out of Ulan Bator, which for your information is the black market downloading capital of Asia. See, Dimi’s not a very trusting soul. He likes to have people he can be sure of backing him up. And the circles Dimi mixes in, the only person you can really trust is you.”