Altered Carbon

By early evening the list was down to two, with Elliott writing up preliminary intrusion procedures for both. Whenever she hit a glitch, we backed up and compared relative merits.

By midnight we had our target. Elliott went to bed and slept eight solid hours. I went back to the Hendrix and brooded.

(Nothing from Ortega.)

I bought breakfast in the street and took it back to the apartment. Neither of us felt much like eating.

10.15 local time. Irene Elliott calibrated her equipment for the last time.

We did it.

Twenty-seven-and-a-half minutes.

A piece of piss, said Elliott.

I left her dismantling equipment and flew out to see Bancroft that afternoon.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“I find this exceptionally difficult to believe,” said Bancroft sharply. “Are you quite sure I went to this establishment?”

Below the balcony on the lawns of Suntouch House, Miriam Bancroft appeared to be constructing an enormous paper glider from instructions in a moving holoprojection. The white of the wings was so bright it hurt to look directly at them. As I leaned on the balcony rail, she shaded her eyes from the sun and looked up at me.

“The mall has security monitors.” I said, affecting disinterest. “Automated system, still operational after all these years. They’ve got footage of you walking right up to the door. You do know the name, don’t you?”

“Jack It Up? Of course, I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never actually used the place.”

I looked round without leaving the rail. “Really. You have something against virtual sex, then? You’re a reality purist?”

“No.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I have no problem with virtual formats, and as I believe I’ve told you already, I have used them on occasion. But this place Jack It Up is, how can I put it, hardly the elegant end of the market.”

“No,” I agreed. “And how would you classify Jerry’s Closed Quarters? An elegant whorehouse?”

“Hardly.”

“But that didn’t stop you going there to play cabin games with Elizabeth Elliott, did it? Or has it gone downhill recently, because—”

“All right.” The smile in the voice had turned to a grimace. “You’ve made your point. Don’t labour it.”

I stopped watching Miriam Bancroft and came back to my seat. My iced cocktail was still standing on the little table between us. I picked it up.

“I’m glad you take the point,” I said, stirring the drink. “Because it’s taken a lot of pain to sort through this mess. I’ve been abducted, tortured and nearly killed in the process. A woman called Louise, not much older than your precious daughter Naomi, was killed because she got in the way. So if you don’t like my conclusions, you can go fuck yourself.”

I raised my glass to him across the table.

“Spare me the melodrama, Kovacs, and sit down for God’s sake. I’m not rejecting what you say, I’m just questioning it.”

I sat and levelled a finger at him. “No. You’re squirming. This thing’s pointing up a part of your character you despise for its appetites. You’d rather not know what kind of software you were accessing that night over at Jack It Up, in case it’s even more grubby than you already imagine. You’re being forced to confront the part of yourself that wants to come in your wife’s face, and you don’t like it.”

“There will be no need to revisit that particular conversation,” said Bancroft stiffly. He steepled his fingers. “You are aware, I suppose, that the security camera footage you base your assumptions on could be faked very easily by anyone with access to newstape images of me.”

“Yes, I am.” I’d watched Irene Elliott do exactly that only forty-eight hours previously. Easy wasn’t the word. After the virus run, it had been like asking a concert total body dancer to encore with stretching exercises. I’d barely had time to smoke a cigarette while she did it. “But why would anyone bother? A distractor, to tinsel me off course, assuming of course that some wrong turn would have me sniffing around the ruins of a derelict Richmond mall in the first place. Come on, Bancroft, get real. The fact I was out there in the first place proves the validity of that footage. And in any case, those images aren’t the basis for anything. They just confirm what I’d already worked out, which is that you killed yourself to avoid viral contamination of your remote stack.”

“That is a quite remarkable leap of intuition to make after only a six-day investigation.”

“Blame Ortega,” I said lightly, though Bancroft’s enduring suspicion in the face of unpleasant facts was begi

I paused and set down my glass, searching for the fine edge of deceit that always lies right up against the truth.

“All this time, I’ve been working on the assumption you didn’t pull the trigger because you weren’t the type to commit suicide. I ignored all the evidence to the contrary because of that single assumption. The electron-tight security you’ve got here, the lack of any traces of intrusion, the handprint lock on the safe.”

“And Kadmin. And Ortega.”

“Yeah, that didn’t help. But we straightened out the Ortega angle, and Kadmin, well, I’m coming to Kadmin in a moment. The point is, as long as I equated pulling that trigger with suicide, I was jammed. But then, what if those two acts were not synonymous. What if you’d torched your own stack, not because you wanted to die but for some other reason. Once I let myself think that, the rest was easy. What were the possible reasons that you’d do it? It’s not an easy thing to put a gun to your own head, even if you do want to die. To do it when you want to live must take the will of a demon. No matter how much you might know intellectually that you’ll be re-sleeved with the bulk of your mind intact, the person you are at that moment is going to die. You had to have been desperate to pull that trigger. It had to have been something,” I smiled faintly, “life-threatening. Given that assumption, it didn’t take long to come up with the virus scenario. Then all I had to do was work out how and where you’d been infected.”

Bancroft shifted uncomfortably at the word, and I felt a stab of elation run through me. Virus! Even Meths were afraid of the invisible corroder, because even they, with their remote storage and their clones on ice, were not immune. Viral Strike! Stack down! Bancroft was off balance.

“Now, it’s virtually impossible to snug something as complex as a virus into a disco