Then Kowalski; an involuntary flinch response went off in Holden’s gut. Beneath each scan were lines of information, sub-type classifications and the like.
“So?” Holden glanced away from the screen, over toward Batty. “The department’s keeping its files updated. What did you expect them to be doing?”
“You’re not tracking, pal.” With his fingernail, Batty tapped the corner of the screen.
“Look at the date. That’s when this information-including the photo scans—was logged into the system.” Smile. “Take a good look.”
He sighed. “If it makes you happy . . .” Holden looked at the monitor again.
Simple digits. 2019 for the year, last year; 24 for the day. And in between those, 10 for the month. That’d make it, thought Holden, a week before Halloween. That seemed appropriate. Old pagan holiday, trick or treat. . . .
“October,” he said aloud. The realization came to him, perfect and clear. “This information was in the system in October.”
“That’s right.” Nothing funny in Batty’s thin smile. “And Bryant sent you out to the Tyrell Corporation headquarters the first week of November 2019. He sent you out there, without showing you these ID scans.”
“He told me . . .” As though from a distance, Holden heard his own voice, barely audible.
“He told me that there weren’t any scans or photos of the escaped replicants. He told me that the off-world authorities didn’t have any . . . that the data couldn’t be sent . . . something like that. And I’d have to go out there with the Voigt-Kampff machine and run the empathy tests on all of Tyrell’s new employees . . . to find which ones were the replicants . . .”
“Look at the access record.” Batty called up another screen. His finger tapped the glass again. “Bryant pulled these scan files out of the police department data banks three times before he gave you the assignment. He even printed out hard copies. The photos of the escaped replicants-by which you would’ve been able to recognize them without running any tests-were probably sitting in one of his desk drawers the whole time, the last time he talked to you in his office.”
“But that would mean . . .” The pieces had linked up inside his head. It just took time to speak of them. “But that would mean Bryant sent me out there . . . to the Tyrell headquarters . . . to get killed.”
“Figure it out.” Batty laid a hand on Holden’s shoulder. His voice soft, almost kind. “If you were putting together a conspiracy to eliminate the blade runners—for whatever reason-who’d be better for it than the man in charge of them?”
A tiny glimmer of light shone inside his skull. As Holden turned his gaze back toward the pure, empty glow of the monitor, he thought he’d started to understand.
And a joy as pure flooded his soul.
A smaller space, its own little world. As familiar to Deckard as the one he’d just walked across.
With its own smells, even its own dust, residue of time past. Deckard closed the door behind himself. Through the glass pane, with Bryant’s name showing in reverse on it, the fragmented light of the station’s ground floor folded shadows across the desk and the file cabinets.
He stood motionless, scoping out the room’s darkness. Nobody had recognized him, stopped him as he’d made his way here from the bank of elevators. The virtue of machines, at least on this occasion, was their anonymity.
The blinds over the office’s windows kept anyone from seeing him in here, while still leaking through enough light for him to gradually make out the rat’s-nest clutter with which the space was stuffed.
“Bryant?” Keeping his voice low, he stepped into the center of the room. When he’d found the door unlocked, and had been able to slide right in with just a glance over his shoulder to make sure no one had been watching, he’d expected to find his old boss in here.
Even though the desk lamp was switched off-he knew that Bryant often did his deepest brooding with the lights out and the scotch bottle close at hand. The inspector had been keeping night hours for so long that his skin, beneath his slob stubble and alcohol flush, was as pallid as a cave fish or a corpse. “You in here?” Deckard took another step closer to the desk.
A blue glow fell across him. Shielding his eyes with one hand, he saw the blunt rectangle of a video monitor in front of him, the screen at the height where Bryant’s face should have been. A short-legged tripod, monitor fastened to its top plate, sat in the chair behind the desk, a set of cables dangling from it and looped snakelike into a wall socket behind.
“Hiya, pal.” Bryant’s jowly visage came into focus on the screen. His small eyes glinted through the low-rez mesh of a video transmission. “Good to see you again.” Even in black-and-white, his smile’s yellow-stained teeth were still apparent. “Thanks for stopping by.”
“What the hell’s going on?” Deckard spotted a small video-cam on the desktop, geared to a motorized tracking pivot. A red dot from the device had fastened onto his chest; when he moved to one side, the camera followed his motion, keeping him in sight. “What’s all this for?”
“It’s a friggin’ pain in the butt, is what it is.” As though the monitor were a tiny room in which he was trapped, Bryant leaned forward, short-sleeved elbows resting on a desktop somewhere else. The camera tracking him took a moment to refocus. “I’m in quarantine. Caught a bug—or at least I got exposed to one. One of those new jobbies that keep coming up from Belize.” His wheezing voice came from a small intercom speaker on his desk. “I made the jackass mistake of helping make a collar in the flop palace behind my apartment building-hell, I was off-duty and everything. Supposed to’ve been catching my sleep rather than wrestling some disease-ridden, spickety wog bastard to the ground, like I was some young pup. Next thing you know, I got the department medics telling me there’s antibodies the size of Buicks cruising my bloodstream.” One of his big, hair-backed hands gestured toward the screen.
“Hey, make yourself comfortable. Have a seat.”
Deckard pulled up the other chair and sat down, scanning through the narrow spaces between the blinds’ slats; nobody outside appeared to have noticed anything going on in the office. He pushed the chair back a couple of inches, to avoid the monitor’s glow washing across him. “I guess you heard I was in town.”
“I heard. News travels fast in a place like this. I mean, the does got me stuck over here in the infirmary, doing everything by remote, and I still knew about it.”
He peered closer at the image on the screen. “Are you going to be all right?” Even in person, it would’ve been hard to determine if Bryant was well, sick, or dying. “You going to live through whatever this is?”
“Hell, yes.” Bryant shook his head. “Don’t worry about me, pal. You’re the one with his ass in a sling. Me, they’ve got so pumped with wonder drugs I could crap a pharmacy. They’ll probably be letting me loose in a day or two.”
“Because I need you up and running. You owe me big time, Bryant.” He spoke softly, urgently, aware of the footsteps and barely muffled voices of the cops walking by, just beyond the office’s thin walls. “I bailed you out plenty of times. Now you gotta do it for me.”
“Well, well, well. What an interesting development.” A sadistic delight radiated from the face on the monitor screen. “And I thought you were the guy who was all through with the blade runner unit. You gave the impression that you didn’t like us anymore. Hurt my feelings, Deckard. Just about broke my heart-you were the best man on the squad. You always were. And then for you to just walk out on us, like you didn’t even care . . .” The intercom speaker transmitted the sound of Bryant sucking his breath in through his discolored teeth. “Especially this last time. You walked a long ways, pal; I didn’t expect to ever see you around these parts again.”