Below me, the dog stopped keening at the same moment and lay down on the ground beside the door. When I stepped away, it looked up at me once with a gaze of pure distilled pain and reproach. In those eyes I could see reflected every victim that had ever looked at me in the last three decades of my waking life. Then the animal turned its head away and licked apathetically at its injured rear legs.
For a split second, something geysered through the cold crust of the betathanatine.
I went back to the door the animal had emerged from, drawing the shard gun on my way and swung through, holding the weapon in both hands before me. The room beyond was spacious and pastel-coloured with quaint two-dimensional framed pictures on the walls. A massive four poster bed with translucent drapes occupied the centre. Seated on the edge of the bed was a distinguished-looking man in his forties, naked from the waist down. Above the waist, he appeared to be wearing formal evening dress which clashed badly with the heavy-duty canvas work gloves he had pulled up to both elbows. He was bent over, cleaning himself between the legs with a damp white cloth.
As I advanced into the room, he glanced up.
“Jack? You finished al—” He stared at the gun in my hands without comprehension, then as the muzzle came to within half a metre of his face a note of asperity crept into his voice.“Listen, I didn’t dial for this routine.”
“On the house,” I said dispassionately, and watched as the clutch of monomolecular shards tore his face apart. His hands flew up from between his legs to cover the wounds and he flopped over sideways on the bed, gut-deep noises grinding out of him as he died.
With the mission time display flaring red in the corner of my vision, I backed out of the room. The injured animal outside the door opposite did not look up as I approached. I knelt and laid one hand gently on the matted fur. The head lifted and the keening rose in the throat again. I set down the shard gun and tensed my empty hand. The neural sheath delivered the Tebbit knife, glinting.
After, I cleaned the blade on the fur, resheathed the knife and picked up the shard gun, all with the unhurried calm of the Reaper. Then I moved silently to the connecting corridor. Deep in the diamond serenity of the drug something was nagging at me, but the Reaper would not let me worry about it.
As indicated on Elliott’s stolen blueprints the cross corridor led to a set of stairs, carpeted in the same orgiastic pattern as the main thoroughfare. I moved warily down the steps, gun tracking the open space ahead, proximity sense spread like a radar net before me. Nothing stirred. Kawahara must have battened down all the hatches just in case Ortega and her crew saw something inconvenient while they were on the premises.
Two levels down, I stepped off the stairs and followed my memory of the blueprints through a mesh of corridors until I was reasonably sure that the door to Kawahara’s quarters was around the next corner. With my back to the wall, I slid up to the corner and waited, breathing shallowly. The proximity sense said there was someone at the door around the corner, possibly more than one person, and I picked up the faint tang of cigarette smoke. I dropped to my knees, checked my surroundings and then lowered my face to the ground. With one cheek brushing the pile of the carpet, I eased my head around the corner.
A man and a woman stood by the door, similarly dressed in green coveralls. The woman was smoking. Although each of them had stunguns bolstered importantly at their belts, they looked more like technical staff than security attendants. I relaxed fractionally and settled down to wait some more. In the corner of my eye, the minutes of mission time pulsed like an overstressed vein.
It was another quarter of an hour before I heard the door. At full amp, the neurachem caught the rustle of clothing as the attendants moved to allow whoever was leaving to exit. I heard voices, Ortega’s flat with pretended official disinterest, then Kawahara’s, as modulated as the mandroid in Larkin & Green. With the betathanatine to protect me from the hatred, my reaction to that voice was a muted horizon event, like the flare and crash of gunfire at a great distance.
“…that I cannot be of more assistance, lieutenant. If what you say about the Wei Clinic is true, his mental balance has certainly deteriorated since he worked for me. I feel a certain responsibility. I mean, I would never have recommended him to Laurens Bancroft, had I suspected this would happen.”
“As I said, this is supposition.” Ortega’s tone sharpened slightly. “And I’d appreciate it if these details didn’t go any further. Until we know where Kovacs has gone, and why—”
“Quite. I quite understand the sensitivity of the matter. You are aboard Head in the Clouds, lieutenant. We have a reputation for confidentiality.”
“Yeah.” Ortega allowed a stain of distaste into her voice. “I’ve heard that.”
“Well, then, you can rest assured that this will not be spoken of. Now if you’ll excuse me, lieutenant. Detective sergeant. I have some administrative matters to attend to. Tia and Max will see you back to the flight deck.”
The door closed and soft footfalls advanced in my direction. I tensed abruptly. Ortega and her escort were coming in my direction. This was something no one had bargained for. On the blueprints the main landing pads were forward of Kawahara’s cabin, and I’d come up on the aft side with that in mind. There seemed no reason to march Ortega and Bautista towards the stern.
There was no panic. Instead, a cool analogue of the adrenalin reaction rinsed through my mind, offering a chilly array of hard facts. Ortega and Bautista were in no danger. They must have arrived the same way they were leaving or something would have been said. As for me, if they passed the corridor I was in, their escort would only have to glance sideways to see me. The area was well lit and there were no hiding places within reach. On the other hand, with my body down below room temperature, my pulse slowed to a crawl and my breathing at the same low, most of the subliminal factors that will trigger a normal human being’s proximity sense were gone. Always assuming the escorts were wearing normal sleeves.
And if they turned into this corridor to use the stairs I had come down by …
I shrank back against the wall, dialled the shard gun down to minimum dispersal and stopped breathing.
Ortega. Bautista. The two attendants brought up the rear. They were so close I could have reached out and touched Ortega’s hair.
No one looked round.
I gave them a full minute before I breathed again. Then I checked the corridor in both directions, went rapidly round the corner and knocked on the door with the butt of the shard gun. Without waiting for a reply, I walked in.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The chamber was exactly as Miller had described it. Twenty metres wide and walled in non-reflective glass that sloped inward from roof to floor. On a clear day you could probably lie on that slope and peer down thousands of metres to the sea below. The décor was stark and owed a lot to Kawahara’s early millennium roots. The walls were smoke grey, the floor fused glass and the lighting came from jagged pieces of origami performed in illuminum sheeting and spiked on iron tripods in the corners of the room. One side of the room was dominated by a massive slab of black steel that must serve as a desk, the other held a group of shale-coloured loungers grouped around an imitation oil drum brazier. Beyond the loungers, an arched doorway led out to what Miller had surmised were sleeping quarters.
Above the desk, a slow weaving holodisplay of data had been abandoned to its own devices. Reileen Kawahara stood with her back to the door, staring out at the night sky.