There was nothing to say after that. I left him watching the lights and walked back to the car. He was still there when I drove back past him on the way out of the little town. He didn’t look round.

PART 2: REACTION

(INTRUSION CONFLICT)

CHAPTER NINE

I called Prescott from the car. Her face looked mildly irritated as it scribbled into focus on the dusty little screen set into the dashboard.

“Kovacs. Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Still don’t really know what I’m looking for,” I said cheerfully. “You think Bancroft ever does the biocabins?”

She pulled a face. “Oh, please.”

“All right, here’s another one. Did Leila Begin ever work biocabin joints?”

“I really have no idea, Kovacs.”

“Well, look it up then. I’ll hold.” My voice came out stony. Prescott’s well-bred distaste wasn’t sitting too well beside Victor Elliott’s anguish for his daughter.

I drummed my fingers on the wheel while the lawyer went off-screen and found myself muttering a Millsport fisherman’s rap to the rhythm. Outside the coast slid by in the night, but the scents and sounds of the sea were suddenly all wrong. Too muted, not a trace of belaweed on the wind.

“Here we are.” Prescott settled herself back within range of the phone scanner, looking slightly uncomfortable. “Begin’s Oakland records show two stints in biocabins, before she got tenure in one of the San Diego Houses. She must have had an entrée, unless it was a talent scout that spotted her.”

Bancroft would have been quite an entrée to anywhere. I resisted the temptation to say it.

“You got an image there?”

“Of Begin?” Prescott shrugged. “Only a two-d. You want me to send it.”

“Please.”

The ancient earphone fizzled a bit as it adjusted to the change of incoming signal, and then Leila Begin’s features emerged from the static. I leaned closer, scanning them for the truth. It took a moment or two to find, but it was there.

“Right. Now can you get me the address of that place Elizabeth Elliott worked. Jerry’s Closed Quarters. It’s on a street called Mariposa.”

“Mariposa and San Bruno,” Prescott’s disembodied voice came back from behind Leila Begin’s full service pout. “Jesus, it’s right under the old expressway. That’s got to be a safety violation.”

“Can you send me a map, route marked through from the bridge?”

“You’re going there? Tonight?”

“Prescott, these places don’t do a lot of business during the day,” I said patiently. “Of course I’m going there tonight.”

There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line.

“It’s not a recommended area, Kovacs. You need to be careful.”

This time I couldn’t be bothered to stifle the snort of amusement. It was like listening to someone tell a surgeon to be careful and not get his hands bloody. She must have heard me.

“I’m sending the map,” she said stiffly.

Leila Begin’s face blinked out and a tracery of grid-patterned streets inked themselves into the place she had been. I didn’t need her any more. Her hair had been iridescent crimson, her throat choked with a steel collar and her eyes made up with startle lines, but it was the lines of the face below it all that stayed with me. The same lines faintly emergent in Victor Elliott’s Kodakristal of his daughter. The understated but undeniable similarity.

Miriam Bancroft.

There was rain in the air when I got back to the city, a fine drizzle sifting down from the darkened sky. Parked across the street from Jerry’s, I watched the blinking neon club sign through the streaks and beads of water on the windscreen of the ground car. Somewhere in the gloom below the concrete bones of the expressway a holo of a woman danced in a cocktail glass, but there was a fault in the ‘caster and the image kept fizzling out.

I’d been worried about the ground car drawing attention, but it seemed that I’d come to the right part of town with it. Most of the vehicles around Jerry’s were flightless; the only exceptions to the rule were the autocabs that occasionally spiralled down to disgorge or collect passengers and then sprang back up into the aerial traffic flow with inhuman accuracy and speed. With their arrays of red, blue and white navigation lights they seemed like jewelled visitors from another world, barely touching the cracked and litter-strewn paving while their charges alighted or climbed aboard.

I watched for an hour. The club did brisk business, varied clientele but mostly male. They were checked at the door by a security robot that resembled nothing so much as a concertina’d octopus strung from the lintel of the main entrance. Some had to divest themselves of concealed items, presumably weapons, and one or two were turned away. There were no protests—you can’t argue with a robot. Outside, people parked, climbed in and out of cars and did deals with merchandise too small to make out at this distance. Once, two men started a knife fight in the shadows between two of the expressway’s support pillars, but it didn’t come to much. One combatant limped off, clutching a slashed arm, and the other returned to the club’s interior as if he’d done no more than go out to relieve himself.

I climbed out of the car, made sure it was alarmed, and wandered across the street. A couple of the dealers were seated cross-legged on the hood of a car, shielded from the rain by a static repulsion unit set up between their feet, and they glanced up as I approached.

“Sell you a disc, man? Hot spinners out of Ulan Bator, House quality.”

I gave them one smooth sweep, shook my head unhurriedly.

“Stiff?”

Another shake. I reached the robot, paused as its multiple arms snaked down to frisk me, then tried to walk over the threshold as the cheap synth voice said ‘clear’. One of the arms prodded me gently back at chest height.

“Do you want cabins or bar?”

I hesitated, pretending to weigh it up. “What’s the deal in the bar?”

“Ha ha ha.” Someone had programmed a laugh into the robot. It sounded like a fat man drowning in syrup. It cut off abruptly. “The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers too.”

“Cabins,” I said, anxious to get away from the mechanical barker’s software. The street dealers on the car had been positively warm by comparison.

“Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.”

I went down the short metal-railed flight and turned left along a corridor lit from the ceiling by rotating red lights like the ones on the autocabs outside. Incessant junk rhythm music thrashed the air as if this was the ventricle of some massive heart on tetrameth. As promised, there was a pile of fresh white towels in an alcove and beyond it the doors to the cabins. I walked past the first four, two of which were occupied, and stepped into the fifth.

The floor was satin-sheened padding, about two metres by three. If it was stained, it didn’t show because the only illumination came from a single rotating cherry like the ones in the corridor. The air was warm and stale. Under the sweeping shadows cast by the light a battered-looking credit console stood in one corner, stalk painted matt black, red LED digital display at the top. There was a slot for cards and cash. No pad for DNA credit. The far wall was frosted glass.

I’d seen this one coming and drawn a sheaf of currency through an autobank on the way down through the city. I selected one of the large denomination plastified notes and fed it into the slot. Punched the commence button. My credit flashed up in LED red. The door hinged smoothly shut behind me, muffling the music, and a body thudded against the frosted glass ahead with an abruptness that made me twitch. The display digits flickered to life. Minimal expenditure so far. I studied the body pressed against the glass. Heavy breasts pressed flat, a woman’s profile and the indistinct lines of hips and thighs. Piped moaning came softly through hidden speakers. A voice gusted.