I paused next to Miriam Bancroft’s cylinder and looked into it. Even through the fogging effect of the observation plate and the gel, there was a sensual abundance to the blurred form within.
“Just one question. Who decides when to alternate the sleeves?”
Nyman glanced across at Prescott as if to enlist legal support for his words. “I am directly authorised by Mr Bancroft to effect the transfer on every occasion that he is digitised, unless specifically required not to. He made no such request on this occasion.”
There was something here, scratching at the Envoy antennae; something somewhere fitted. It was too early to give it concrete form. I looked around the room.
“This place is entry-monitored, right?”
“Naturally.” Nyman’s tone was still chilly.
“Was there much activity the day Bancroft went to Osaka?”
“No more than usual. Mr Kovacs, the police have already been through these records. I really don’t see what value—”
“Indulge me,” I suggested, not looking at him, and the Envoy cadences in my voice shut him down like a circuit breaker.
Two hours later I was staring out of the window of another autocab as it kicked off from the Alcatraz landing quay and climbed over the Bay.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
I glanced at Oumou Prescott, wondering if she could sense the frustration coming off me. I thought I’d got most of the external giveaways on this sleeve locked down, but I’d heard of lawyers who got empath conditioning to pick up more subliminal clues to their witnesses’ states of mind when on the stand. And here, on Earth, it wouldn’t surprise me if Oumou Prescott had a full infrared subsonic body and voice scan package racked into her beautiful ebony head.
The entry data for the Bancroft vault, Thursday 16th August, was as free of suspicious comings and goings as the Mishima Mall on a Tuesday afternoon. Eight a.m., Bancroft came in with two assistants, stripped off and climbed into the waiting tank. The assistants left with his clothes. Fourteen hours later his alternate clone climbed dripping out of the neighbouring tank, collected a towel from another assistant and went to get a shower. No words exchanged beyond pleasantries. Nothing.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m looking for yet.”
Prescott yawned. “Total Absorb, huh?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” I looked at her more closely. “You know much about the Corps?”
“Bit. I did my articles in UN litigation. You pick up the terminology. So what have you absorbed so far?”
“Only that there’s a lot of smoke building up around something the authorities say isn’t burning. You ever meet the lieutenant that ran the case?”
“Kristin Ortega. Of course. I’m not likely to forget her. We were yelling at each other across a desk for the best part of a week.”
“Impressions?”
“Of Ortega?” Prescott looked surprised. “Good cop, as far as I know. Got a reputation for being very tough. The Organic Damage Division are the police department’s hard men, so earning a reputation like that wouldn’t have been easy. She ran the case efficiently enough—”
“Not for Bancroft’s liking.”
Pause. Prescott looked at me warily. “I said efficiently. I didn’t say persistently. Ortega did her job, but—”
“But she doesn’t like Meths, right?”
Another pause. “You have quite an ear for the street, Mr Kovacs.”
“You pick up the terminology,” I said modestly. “Do you think Ortega would have kept the case open if Bancroft hadn’t been a Meth?”
Prescott thought about it for a while. “It’s a common enough prejudice,” she said slowly, “But I don’t get the impression Ortega shut us down because of it. I think she just saw a limited return on her investment. The police department has a promotion system based at least partly on the number of cases solved. No one saw a quick solution to this one, and Mr Bancroft was alive, so…”
“Better things to do, huh?”
“Yes. Something like that.”
I stared out the window some more. The cab was flitting across the tops of slender multi-storey stacks and the traffic-crammed crevices between. I could feel an old fury building in me that had nothing to do with my current problems. Something that had accrued through the years in the Corps and the emotional rubble you got used to seeing, like silt on the surface of your soul. Virginia Vidaura, Jimmy de Soto, dying in my arms at Innenin, Sarah … A loser’s catalogue, any way you looked at it.
I locked it down.
The scar under my eye was itching, and there was the curl of the nicotine craving in my fingertips. I rubbed at the scar. Left the cigarettes in my pocket. At some indeterminate point this morning I’d determined to quit. A thought struck me at random.
“Prescott, you chose this sleeve for me, right?”
“Sorry?” She was scanning through a subretinal projection, and it took her a moment to refocus on me. “What did you say?”
“This sleeve. You chose it, right?”
She frowned. “No. As far as I know that selection was made by Mr Bancroft. We just provided the shortlist according to specifications.”
“No, he told me his lawyers had handled it. Definitely.”
“Oh.” The frown cleared away, and she smiled faintly. “Mr Bancroft has a great many lawyers. Probably he routed it through another office. Why?”
I grunted. “Nothing. Whoever owned this body before was a smoker, and I’m not. It’s a real pain in the balls.”
Prescott’s smile gained ground. “Are you going to give up?”
“If I can find the time. Bancroft’s deal is, I crack the case, I can be re-sleeved no expense spared, so it doesn’t really matter long term. I just hate waking up with a throatful of shit every morning.”
“Do you think you can?”
“Give up smoking?”
“No. Crack this case.”
I looked at her, deadpan. “I don’t really have any other option, counsellor. Have you read the terms of my employment?”
“Yes. I drew them up.” Prescott gave me back the deadpan look, but buried beneath it were traces of the discomfort that I needed to see to stop me reaching across the cab and smashing her nose bone up into her brain with one stiffened hand.
“Well, well,” I said, and went back to looking out of the window.
AND MY FIST UP YOUR WIFE’S CUNT WITH YOU WATCHING YOU FUCKING METH MOTHERFUCKER YOU CAN’T
I slipped off the headset and blinked. The text had carried some crude but effective virtual graphics and a subsonic that made my head buzz. Across the desk, Prescott looked at me with knowing sympathy.
“Is it all like this?” I asked.
“Well, it gets less coherent.” She gestured at the holograph display floating above the desktop, where representations of the files I was accessing tumbled in cool shades of blue and green. “This is what we call the R&R stack. Rabid and Rambling. Actually, these guys are mostly too far gone to be any real threat, but it’s not nice, knowing they’re out there.”
“Ortega bring any of them in?”
“It’s not her department. The Transmission Felony Division catches a few every now and then, when we squawk loudly enough about it, but dissemination technology being the way it is, it’s like trying to throw a net over smoke. And even when you do catch them, the worst they’ll get is a few months in storage. It’s a waste of time. We mostly just sit on this stuff until Bancroft says we can delete it.”
“And nothing new in the last six months?”
Prescott shrugged. “The religious lunatics, maybe. Some increased traffic from the Catholics on Resolution 653. Mr Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oh, and some Martian archaeological sect has been screaming about that Songspire he keeps in his hall. Apparently last month was the anniversary of their founder’s martyrdom by leaky pressure suit. But none of these people have the wherewithal to crack the perimeter defences at Suntouch House.”