“And you always give the players what they want, don’t you?”
He reached out for her instream, ran into a wall, and stared into her eyes only to find that they were equally unreadable. “Not you,” he whispered. “I love you.”
At that instant their contact stepped out of a narrow alley between two restaurants, glanced at them—so briefly that Cohen only caught the look when he replayed Li’s spinfeed—then looked quickly away.
Li settled in her chair, shifting her weight forward, sliding her feet farther apart. Her face was expressionless, but onstream she radiated a profound and wordless satisfaction that Cohen suspected was pretty close to what you’d get if you tapped the neural feed of a cat who’d just found a nice fat mouse to play with.
The contact turned out to be a woman, and a woman who had the history of Israel written on her face. She could have stepped straight out of a 1950s kibbutz harvest photo or a grainy black-and-white movie about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The rawboned farmer-turned-soldier body. The tousled fair hair and the hawklike face. The steel-blue eyes—one of them dark with the stain of an old injury.
‹Shrapnel?› Li asked. ‹Or did she have a rifle blow up in her face?›
‹Love tap from a grenade. Sayeret Golani training exercise.›
‹Ah. So you doknow her.›
‹I told you, I don’t want you having any contact with people from the Office unless it’s absolutely necessary. I thought we agreed about that.›
‹No. I just stopped arguing about it so router/decomposer wouldn’t have to waste his time playing magical moving files for you.›
Cohen ignored the jibe. Li could complain all she wanted to about unequal file-sharing protocols, but he wasn’t going to drop the firewall he kept between her and the boys on King Saul Boulevard as long as he had a choice in the matter. She could think up enough ways to get herself killed on her own without his help.
‹So what should I know about her that you’re actually willing to tell me?› Li asked.
‹Let’s just say that Tel Aviv might not be the most tactful topic to raise.›
The woman stopped in front of their table, crossed her arms over her chest, and threw her head a little back and sideways in order to get her good eye on them. “Oh, so it wasyou back in the airport. You could have said so. Or don’t you remember me?”
“Of course I remember you, Osnat. I just didn’t know you’d gone private sector.”
“Lot of people’s careers went down in flames after Tel Aviv. Can’t complain. Could have been worse. Could have ended up with a bullet in the head.”
The fury radiated off her like a bomb blast. Well, Cohen couldn’t blame her. They’d known each other very slightly. As far as she was concerned he was Gavi’s friend, end of story. And Osnat had special, complicated, and intensely personal reasons for hating Gavi.
“I heard Gur died,” Cohen said. “I’m sorry.”
“Everybody’s sorry.”
She pulled the empty chair free of the table and sat down in it. No one spoke for a long and extremely unpleasant moment.
“When do we get to talk to the sellers?” Li asked finally.
Osnat ignored her. “You were supposed to come alone,” she told Cohen flatly, “not bring a golem of your own.”
Li made her move so fast that even Cohen missed it. One moment she was on the far side of the table from Osnat. A blink later, she had her hand around the other woman’s wrist and was squeezing hard enough to drain the blood from her face.
“Being a golem has its uses,” she said in a companionable tone. “Also, the only way to ALEF is through Cohen, and the only way to Cohen is through me. So the next time I talk to you, you’ll look me in the eye when you answer.”
Osnat gave her a pale hostile stare. Then she did what every well-trained infantryman does when pinned down by enemy fire; she called for air support. And she called for it, of all places, from the next table.
Cohen followed Osnat’s glance just in time to see the Ha’aretzreader put down his newspaper and smile politely at them.
“May I join you?” he asked. He folded his newspaper into precise halves, picked up his drink, and walked over to sit next to Osnat. “Moshe Feldman,” he said. “Pleasure to meet you. Can I buy you coffee?”
A waiter they hadn’t seen before appeared before Moshe had even raised his hand, carrying a filigreed coffee service. He deposited it on their table, poured out two eggshell-sized cups of cardamom-flavored coffee, produced a bottle of mineral water and two glasses from his apron pocket, and left.
Cohen reached for the water.
Moshe reached for Cohen’s hand.
Li reached for her gun.
“Please,” Moshe said. “Drink your coffee first.”
Li picked hers up, drank, grimaced.
‹Are you all right?› Cohen asked anxiously.
‹God, that’s shitty coffee!›
‹Is that a yes or a no, Catherine?›
‹Yeah, I’m fine.› But as she set the cup back in the saucer he felt a chilly little quiver of pain and shock run across the intraface.
All her systems, biological and synthetic, natural and artificial, kicked into overdrive to identify the attack and tally up the damage. Cohen could feel the churning, chaotic, complicated process unfolding as clearly as if he were inside her skin and not sitting in his own chair with two feet of air between them. Eventually she identified the cold prick of pain as the point of a needle sliding into the web of skin between thumb and forefinger. ‹It’s fine,› she told him a moment later. ‹DNA sampler.›
‹He’s a suspicious bastard, isn’t he?›
‹Unless he has some reason to mistrust us that you’re not telling me about?›
As he picked up his own cup and felt the needle slide into Roland’s flesh, Cohen decided that the implied question in that statement was one he’d rather leave unanswered.
It took Moshe an hour to do the genetic work.
“Well,” Li asked when he finally returned, “are we who we say we are?”
“Apparently. Even Cohen’s…er…”
“Face,” Cohen prompted.
“Right. Even the, er, face is who you told us he would be.” Moshe paused uncomfortably. “How do you acquire your bodies, by the way? Do you grow them?”
“Good heavens, no! We’re not the Syndicates. He’s a real person. Parents, passport, bank accounts. Bank accounts that are substantially better funded since he started working for me.”
Cohen crossed his arms, realized the gesture looked defensive, and asked himself whether deep down inside he might not have something to feel just the tiniest bit guilty about. Hadn’t Roland been meaning to put himself through medical school back when they first met? When was the last time he’d heard anything about that? Was Li right, God forbid? Did he just sort of …swallowpeople? He pushed away that unwelcome thought, telling himself that he’d ask Roland how med school was going next time they saw each other.
“And how much does it cost to…what’s the right word…rent someone?”
Cohen grinned. “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
“And it’s legal, is it?”
“Well, mostly.” Cohen felt Li’s smirk tickling at the back of his mind. “As my associate has just pointed out, it’s easier to bend the rules when you’re filthy stinking rich.”
“Mmm.” Moshe’s expression sharpened. “Speaking of bending the rules, I understood that ALEF would send one representative to the bidding. And that it would be someone we could vet beforehand to make sure they didn’t pose any security risks.” His eyes touched briefly on Li, then skittered away again. “But now here you are with one of the, uh, least vettable individuals in UN space.”
‹He could talk to me about it,› Li said. ‹What the hell’s wrong with these people, anyway?›
“You could talk to her about it,” Cohen repeated, mimicking her annoyed tone with such painstaking precision that only someone who hadn’t grown up surrounded by the twenty-four-hour hum of spinstream traffic could have mistaken the words for Cohen’s.