“Right.”

One of the mohicans came and hovered over us. Ortega glanced up at him with a look that said she didn’t want to be disturbed.

“We got a make on the DNA samples,” the mohican said diffidently, and handed her a videofax slate. Ortega scanned it and started.

“Well, well. You were in exalted company for a while, Kovacs.” She waved an arm in the direction of the male corpse. “Sleeve last registered to Dimitri Kadmin, otherwise known as Dimi the Twin. Professional assassin out of Vladivostock.”

“And the woman?”

Ortega and the mohican exchanged glances. “Ulan Bator registry?”

“Got it in one, chief.”

“Got the motherfucker.” Ortega bounced to her feet with renewed energy. “Let’s get their stacks excised and over to Fell Street. I want Dimi downloaded into Holding before midnight.” She looked back at me. “Kovacs, you may just have proved useful.”

The mohican reached under his double-breasted suit and produced a heavy-bladed killing knife with the nonchalance of a man getting out cigarettes. Together, they went over to the corpse and knelt beside it. Interested uniformed officers drifted across to watch. There was the wet, cracking sound of cartilage being cut open. After a moment, I got up and went to join the spectators. Nobody paid any attention to me.

It was not what you’d call refined biotech surgery. The mohican had chopped out a section of the corpse’s spine to gain access to the base of the skull, and now he was digging around with the point of the knife, trying to locate the cortical stack. Kristin Ortega was holding the head steady in both hands.

“They bury them a lot deeper in than they used to,” she was saying. “See if you can get the rest of the vertebrae out, that’s where it’ll be.”

“I’m trying,” grunted the mohican. “Some augmentation in here, I reckon. One of those antishock washers Noguchi was talking about last time he was over … Shit!! Thought I had it there.”

“No, look, you’re working at the wrong angle. Let me try.” Ortega took the knife and put one knee on the skull to steady it.

“Shit, I nearly had it, chief.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m not spending all night watching you poke around in there.” She glanced up and saw me watching her, nodded a brief acknowledgement and put the serrated point of the blade in place. Then with a sharp blow to the haft of the knife, she chopped something loose. She looked up at the mohican with a grin.

“Hear that?”

She reached down into the gore and pulled out the stack between finger and thumb. It didn’t look like much, impact-resistant casing streaked with blood and barely the size of a cigarette butt with the twisted filaments of the microjacks protruding stiffly from one end. I could see how the Catholics might not want to believe this was the receptacle of the human soul.

“Gotcha, Dimi.” Ortega held up the stack to the light, then passed it and the knife to the mohican. She wiped her fingers on the corpse’s clothing. “Right, let’s get the other one out of the woman.”

As we watched the mohican repeating the procedure on the second body, I tipped my head close enough to Ortega to mutter.

“So you know who this one is as well?”

She jerked round to look at me, whether out of surprise or dislike of my proximity I couldn’t be sure. “Yeah, this is Dimi the Twin too. Ha, pun! The sleeve’s registered out of Ulan Bator, which for your information is the black market downloading capital of Asia. See, Dimi’s not a very trusting soul. He likes to have people he can be sure of backing him up. And the circles Dimi mixes in, the only person you can really trust is you.”

“Those sound like familiar circles. Is it easy to get yourself copied on Earth?”

Ortega grimaced. “Getting easier all the time. Technology the way it is now, a state-of-the-art re-sleeving processor fits into a bathroom. Pretty soon it’s going to be an elevator. Then a suitcase.” She shrugged. “Price of progress.”

“About the only way you can get it done on Harlan’s World is to file for a stellar range ‘cast, get an insurance copy held for the duration of the trip and then cancel the transmission at the last minute. Fake a transit certificate, then claim a vital interest for a temporary download from the copy. This guy’s offworld and his business is crumbling, that kind of thing. Download once from the original at the transmission station, and again through the insurance company somewhere else. Copy One walks out of the station legally. He just changed his mind about going. Lots of people do. Copy Two never reports back to the insurance company for re-storage. Costs a lot of money, though. You’ve got to bribe a lot of people, steal a lot of machine time to get away with it.”

The mohican slipped and cut his thumb on the knife. Ortega rolled her eyes and sighed in a compressed fashion. She turned back to face me.

“It’s easier here,” she said shortly.

“Yeah? How’s it work?”

“It—” She hesitated, as if trying to work out why she was talking to me. ”Why do you want to know?”

I grinned at her. “Just naturally nosy, I guess.”

“OK, Kovacs.” She cupped both hands around her coffee mug. “Works like this. One day Mr. Dimitri Kadmin walks into one of the big retrieval and re-sleeving insurance companies. I mean someone really respectable, like Lloyds or Cartwright Solar, maybe.”

“Is that here?” I gestured out at the bridge lights visible beyond the windows of my room. “In Bay City?”

The mohican had given Ortega some odd looks when she stayed behind as the police departed the Hendrix. She saw him off with another admonition to get Kadmin downloaded rapido, and then we went upstairs. She barely watched the police cruisers leave.

“Bay City, East Coast, maybe even Europe.” Ortega sipped her coffee, wincing at the overload of whisky she’d asked the Hendrix to dump in it. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is the company. Someone established. Someone who’s been underwriting since downloading happened. Mr. Kadmin wants to take out an R&R policy, which, after a long discussion about premiums, he does. See, this has got to look good. It’s the long con, with the one difference that what we’re after here is more than money.”

I leaned back against my side of the window frame. The Watchtower suite had been aptly named. All three rooms looked out across the city and the water beyond, either north or westward, and the window shelf in the lounge accounted for about a fifth of the available space, layered with psychedelically coloured cushion mats. Ortega and I were seated opposite each other with a clean metre of space between us.

“OK, so that’s one copy. Then what?”

Ortega shrugged. “Fatal accident.”

“In Ulan Bator?”

“Right. Dimi runs himself into a power pylon at high speed, falls out of a hotel window, something like that. An Ulan Bator handling agent retrieves the stack, and, for a hefty bribe, makes a copy. In come Cartwright Solar, or Lloyds with their retrieval writ, freight Dimi (d.h.) back to their clone bank and download him into the waiting sleeve. Thank you very much, sir. Nice doing business with you.”

“Meanwhile…”

“Meanwhile the handling agent buys up a black market sleeve, probably some catatonia case from a local hospital, or a scene-of-the-crime drugs victim who’s not too physically damaged. The Ulan Bator police do a screaming trade in DOAs. The agent wipes the sleeve’s mind, downloads Dimi’s copy into it, and the sleeve just walks out of there. Suborbital to the other side of the globe and off to work in Bay City.”

“You don’t catch these guys too often.”

“Almost never. Point is, you’ve got to catch both copies cold, either dead like this or held on a UN indictable offence. Without the UN rap, you’ve got no legal right to download from a living body. And in a no-win situation, the twin just gets its cortical stack blown out through the back of its neck before we can make the bust. I’ve seen it happen.”