Elliott’s Data Linkage broking was a narrow façade sandwiched between an industrial chemicals outlet and a vacant lot where gulls screeched and fought over scraps among the shells of discarded hardware. The door of Elliott’s was propped open with a defunct flatscreen monitor and led directly into the operations room. I stepped inside and cast a glance up and down. There were four consoles set in back-to-back pairs, harboured behind a long moulded plastic reception counter. Beyond them, doors led to a glass-walled office. The far wall held a bank of seven monitors with incomprehensible lines of data scrolling down. A ragged gap in the line of screens marked the previous position of the doorstop. There were scars in the paintwork behind where the brackets had resisted extraction. The screen next to the gap had rolling flickers, as if whatever had killed the first one was contagious.
“Help you?”
A thin-faced man of indeterminate age poked his head round the corner of one of the sloping banks of console equipment. There was an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a trailing thread of cable jacked into an interface behind his right ear. His skin was unhealthily pale.
“Yeah, I’m looking for Victor Elliott.”
“Out front.” He gestured back the way I had come. “See the old guy on the rail? Watching the wreck? That’s him.”
I looked out into the evening beyond the door and picked out the solitary figure at the rail.
“He owns this place, right?”
“Yeah. For his sins.” The datarat cracked a grin and gestured around. “Not much call for him to be in the office, business the way it is.”
I thanked him and went back out onto the street. The light was starting to fade now, and Anchana Salomao’s holographic face was gaining a new dominance in the gathering gloom. Crossing beneath one of the banners, I came up next to the man on the rail and leaned my own arms on the black iron. He looked round as I joined him and gave me a nod of acknowledgement, then went back to staring at the horizon as if he was looking for a crack in the weld between sea and sky.
“That’s a pretty grim piece of parking,” I said, gesturing out at the wreck.
It earned me a speculative look before he answered me. “They say it was terrorists.” His voice was empty, disinterested, as if he’d once put too much effort into using it and something had broken. “Or sonar failure in a storm. Maybe both.”
“Maybe they did it for the insurance,” I said.
Elliott looked at me again, more sharply. “You’re not from here?” he asked, a fraction more interest edging his tone this time.
“No. Passing through.”
“From Rio?” He gestured up at Anchana Salomao as he said it. “You an artist?”
“No.”
“Oh.” He seemed to consider this for a moment. It was as if conversation was a skill he’d forgotten. “You move like an artist.”
“Near miss. It’s military neurachem.”
He got it then, but the shock didn’t seem to go beyond a brief flicker in his eyes. He looked me up and down slowly, then turned back to the sea.
“You come looking for me? You from Bancroft?”
“You might say that.”
He moistened his lips. “Come to kill me?”
I took the hardcopy out of my pocket and handed it across to him. “Come to ask you some questions. Did you transmit this?”
He read it, lips moving wordlessly. Inside my head, I could hear the words he was tasting again: … for taking my daughter from me … will burn the flesh from your head … will never know the hour or the day … nowhere safe in this life … It wasn’t highly original, but it was heartfelt and articulate in a way that was more worrying than any of the vitriol Prescott had shown me on the Rabid & Rambling stack. It also specified exactly the death Bancroft had suffered. The particle blaster would have charred the outside of Bancroft’s skull to a crisp before exploding the superheated contents across the room.
“Yes, that’s mine,” Elliott said quietly.
“You’re aware that someone assassinated Laurens Bancroft last month.”
He handed me back the paper. “That so? The way I heard it, the bastard torched his own head off.”
“Well, that is a possibility,” I conceded, screwing up the paper and tossing it into a refuse-filled skip below us on the beach. “But it’s not one I’m being paid to take seriously. Unfortunately for you, the cause of death comes uncomfortably close to your prose style there.”
“I didn’t do it,” said Elliott flatly.
“I figured you’d say that. I might even believe you, except that whoever did kill Bancroft got through some very heavy-duty security systems, and you used to be a sergeant in the tactical marines. Now, I knew some tacs back on Harlan’s World, and a few of them were wired for covert wet work.”
Elliott looked at me curiously. “You a grasshopper?”
“A what?”
“Grasshopper. Offworlder.”
“Yeah.” If Elliott had ever been afraid of me, it was wearing off fast. I considered playing the Envoy card, but it didn’t seem worth it. The man was still talking.
“Bancroft don’t need to bring in muscle from offworld. What’s your angle on this?”
“Private contractor,” I said. “Find the killer.”
Elliott snorted. “And you thought it was me.”
I hadn’t thought that, but I let it go, because the misconception was giving him a feeling of superiority that kept the conversation rolling. Something approaching a spark appeared in his eyes.
“You think I could have got into Bancroft’s house? I know I couldn’t, because I ran the specs. If there was any way in, I would have taken it a year ago, and you would have found little pieces of him scattered on the lawn.”
“Because of your daughter?”
“Yes, because of my daughter.” The anger was fuelling his animation. “My daughter and all the others like her. She was only a kid.”
He broke off and stared out to sea again. After a moment, he gestured at the Free Trade Enforcer, where I could now see small lights glimmering around what must be a stage set up on the sloping launch deck. “That was what she wanted. All she wanted. Total Body Theatre. Be like Anchana Salomao and Rhian Li. She went to Bay City because she heard there was a connection there, someone who could—”
He jarred to a halt, and looked at me. The datarat had called him old, and now for the first time I saw why. In spite of his solid sergeant’s bulk and barely swelling waistline, the face was old, carved in the harsh lines of long-term pain. He was on the edge of tears.
“She could have made it too. She was beautiful.”
He was fumbling for something in his pocket. I produced my cigarettes and offered him one. He took it automatically, lit it from the proffered ignition patch on the packet, but he went on fumbling in his pockets until he’d dug out a small Kodakristal. I really didn’t want to see this, but he activated it before I could say anything and a tiny cubed image sprang up in the air between us.
He was right. Elizabeth Elliott was a beautiful girl, blonde and athletic and only a few years younger than Miriam Bancroft. Whether she had the driving determination and horselike stamina that you needed in Total Body Theatre, the picture didn’t show, but she probably could have given it a shot.
The holoshot showed her sandwiched between Elliott and another woman who was an almost perfect older edition of Elizabeth. The three of them had been taken in bright sunlight somewhere with grass, and the picture was marred by a bar of shadow falling from a tree beyond the cast of the recorder across the older woman’s face. She was frowning, as if she had noticed the flaw in the composition, but it was a small frown, a fractional chiselling of lines between her brows. A palpable shimmer of happiness overwhelmed the detail.