She shut the files, checked that they had downloaded properly, took the datacube out of her pocket, and flushed it down the toilet.
When she walked back into the front room, three moderately pretty girls were huddled halfway down the bar, eyeing Korchow’s man like crows parceling up a particularly fresh piece of carrion. She stepped up and took the seat beside him before the girls could initiate active stalking.
“What’s your name?” she asked. As she spoke, she could feel three resentful stares boring into her back like virusteel-sheathed augers.
Korchow’s man turned sad velvet brown eyes on her and answered as seriously as if she had asked a question that the fate of worlds turned on. “Arkady,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you.” He had the same curiously formal turn of phrase Bella had, the same air of believing that life was a serious and precarious business and not to be laughed at.
“Buy you a drink?” Li asked.
They made the usual small talk. When the beers came, still warm, still flat, they drank together. Arkady sipped his beer with a cautious frown that made Li suspect he wasn’t a drinker.
“Well?” he said finally.
Li glanced around. “You ask a lot.”
“Do I?”
“Maybe too much.”
He paused and touched his beer to his lips again. “But perhaps,” he said, “you have a friend who could help?”
A friend. Meaning Cohen. “Perhaps.”
“Have you asked him?”
“Not yet.”
Arkady’s handsome face froze for an instant, and Li saw what she should have suspected, what Cohen himself had tried to tell her. She wasn’t what they wanted. Or at least she wasn’t all they wanted. They needed Cohen. Li and her tawdry little secret had just been the bait they used to draw him.
“We would appreciate his help a great deal, of course,” Arkady was saying, “and the task brings its own rewards.”
“That doesn’t—” Li started to say. Then she stopped cold.
The task brings its own rewards. And what had Korchow told her? You’ll have to undergo a minor surgical procedure.
They were going to give Cohen a working intraface. With her, Li, on the other end of it.
She shuddered. “I’ll pass the message on,” she said, sticking to the troubles of the moment. “How can I get you an answer?”
“You don’t have to. Just be on the Helena shuttle the day after tomorrow.”
“And?”
“And that’s all you need to know.”
“Fine.” Li stood up to go, but Arkady put a hand to her arm, stopping her.
“You still haven’t told me what you want.”
“My life back,” she snapped, too angry to keep her voice down.
“Perhaps you want what we were going to give your predecessor?”
Li turned around slowly. “Voyt, you mean?” But even as she asked, she knew it was Sharifi. Korchow had been paying Sharifi, not blackmailing her. And Sharifi had sold him the information he wanted—the same information everyone wanted. She had promised him the missing datasets. “So what was Sharifi asking for?” she asked casually.
“Not what. Who.”
Li’s stomach churned, and she felt a dizzy nausea flooding over her. Of course Sharifi hadn’t had the money to buy out Bella’s contract. She had bartered; bartered something that was far more important to the Syndicates than a single B Series construct. Sharifi had traded Bose-Einstein technology, violating every security clearance she had passed during the course of her long and productive career, violating the Espionage and Sedition Act, betraying the UN and everyone who depended on it for survival.
And she had done it for Bella.
Three men were arguing in the street when Li stepped out into the arcade again. Something about a dog, she thought. Two of them looked like brothers. The third was a small, tired man who looked bruised and sickly under the raking light of the halogens.
A skinny girl stepped into Li’s peripheral vision, hawking smuggled cigarettes, weaving back and forth under the scaffolding to avoid the dripping water. She had cheap smokes. Unfiltered. The kind you could only get in places where people didn’t care much about the sky-high cost of lung bugs. Li turned aside, fishing in her pocket for the little wad of bills she carried.
When she turned around, a crowd had formed around the three men in the road.
The two brothers were still shouting, but one of them now had his hands hooked under the other’s armpits and was dragging him back into the shadows of the opposite arcade. A bystander knelt and picked a baseball bat out of the mud.
The third man stood alone in the muddy street, punch-drunk, blood streaming down his face and mixing with the gritty rain.
AMC Station: 25.10.48.
Li was in a white-hot rage by the time she got back to the station.
“Anything else you’d like to tell me?” she asked Bella when she finally tracked her down.
They stood in Haas’s quarters, Bella backed up against the long sleek sofa and shrinking away from Li.
“She was going to take me with her,” Bella whispered, unshed tears glittering in her eyes like polished condensate. “To the Ring. She already had the tickets.”
“And you never asked how she was going to square things with MotaiSyndicate?”
“I told you. She was going to buy out my contract.”
“Even Sharifi didn’t have that kind of money. She cut a deal with Korchow. And you were the go-between. Did they expect her to fall in love with you, or was that just a windfall?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Bella whispered, and now she really was crying.
“Wasn’t it?” Li asked. “Has anything you’ve told me been true, or has it all come from Korchow?”
“I never lied to you,” Bella sobbed, just as Li’s comm icon flared in her peripheral vision.
“Christ!” Li muttered, and shut the icon off.
“She wanted to do it,” Bella insisted. “It wasn’t just for me. It was for the principle.”
“It’s not Sharifi’s motives I’m questioning.”
The comm icon flared again, more urgently. The caller had disabled Li’s call filter and wouldn’t go away now until Li answered.
She made a sharp gesture of annoyance, and Bella flinched, fear rising in her eyes behind the tears. In any other mood, Li would have been horrified; now she felt only a grim satisfaction.
She took another step toward Bella, consciously intimidating the woman, God help her. “What was Korchow buying? And don’t even think about saying you don’t know.”
“I don’t—” Bella swallowed. “Information.”
“Information about Sharifi’s work.”
Bella nodded.
“And you were the go-between. The go-between and the payment.”
“No! It wasn’t like that. They just talked.”
“Well, those little talks got your girlfriend killed.”
“I loved her!”
“Like you love me?” Li said nastily. “How convenient.”
“I don’t love you,” Bella said in a voice suddenly tight with anger. “I never said I did. You think having the same geneset is enough? That I’ll fall all over you just because you look like her? You’re nothing but a cheap copy. You wouldn’t understand Hannah if you spent the rest of your life poking and prying!”