“Speaking of lawyers, are Kadmin’s here in Bay City?”

“Physically, you mean? Yeah, they’ve got a deal with a Marin County practice. One of their partners is renting a sleeve here for the duration.” Ortega’s lip curled. “Physical meetings are considered a touch of class these days. Only the cheap firms do business down the wires.”

“What’s this suit’s name?”

There was a brief pause while she hung onto the name. “Kadmin’s a spinning item right now. I’m not sure we go this far.”

“Ortega, we go all the way. That was the deal. Otherwise I’m back to risking Elias’s fine features with some more maximal push investigation.”

She was silent for a while.

“Rutherford,” she said finally. “You want to talk to Rutherford?”

“Right now, I want to talk to anyone. Maybe I didn’t make things clear earlier. I’m working cold here. Bancroft waited a month and a half before he brought me in. Kadmin’s all I’ve got.”

“Keith Rutherford’s a handful of engine grease. You won’t get any more out of him than you did Kadmin downstairs. And anyway, how the fuck am I supposed to introduce you, Kovacs? Hi, Keith, this is the ex-Envoy loose cannon your client tried to wipe on Sunday. He’d like to ask you a few questions. He’ll close up faster than an unpaid hooker’s hole.”

She had a point. I thought about it for a moment, staring out to sea.

“All right,” I said slowly. “All I need is a couple of minutes’ conversation. How about you tell him I’m Elias Ryker, your partner from Organic Damage? I practically am, after all.”

Ortega took off her lenses and stared at me.

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“No. I’m trying to be practical. Rutherford’s sleeving in from Ulan Bator, right?”

“New York,” she said tightly.

“New York. Right. So he probably doesn’t know anything about you or Ryker.”

“Probably not.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is, Kovacs, that I don’t like it.”

There was more silence. I dropped my gaze into my lap and let out a sigh that was only partially manufactured. Then I took off my own sunglasses and looked up at her. It was all there on plain display. The naked fear of sleeving and all that it entailed; paranoid essentialism with its back to the wall.

“Ortega,” I said gently. “I’m not him. I’m not trying to be hi—”

“You couldn’t even come close,” she snapped.

“All we’re talking about is a couple of hours’ make-believe.”

“Is that all?”

She said it in a voice like iron, and she put her sunglasses back on with such brusque efficiency that I didn’t need to see the tears welling up in the eyes behind the mirror lenses.

“All right,” she said finally, clearing her throat. ”I’ll get you in. I don’t see the point, but I’ll do it. Then what?”

“That’s a little difficult to say. I’ll have to improvise.”

“Like you did at the Wei Clinic?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “Envoy techniques are largely reactive. I can’t react to something until it happens.”

“I don’t want another bloodbath, Kovacs. It looks bad on the city stats.”

“If there’s violence, it won’t be me that starts it.”

“That’s not much of a guarantee. Haven’t you got any idea what you’re going to do?”

“I’m going to talk.”

“Just talk?” She looked at me disbelievingly. “That’s all?” I jammed my ill-fitting sunglasses back on my face. “Sometimes that’s all it takes.” I said.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I met my first lawyer when I was fifteen. He was a harried-looking juvenile affray expert who defended me, not unhandily, in a minor organic damage suit involving a Newpest police officer. He bargained them down with a kind of myopic patience to Conditional Release and eleven minutes of virtual psychiatric counselling. In the hall outside the juvenile court, he looked into my probably infuriatingly smug face and nodded as if his worst fears about the meaning of his life were being confirmed. Then he turned on his heel and walked away. I forget his name.

My entry into the Newpest gang scene shortly afterwards precluded any more such legal encounters. The gangs were web-smart, wired up and already writing their own intrusion programmes or buying them from kids half their age in return for low-grade virtual porn ripped off the networks. They didn’t get caught easily, and in return for this favour the Newpest heat tended to leave them alone. Inter-gang violence was largely ritualised and excluded other players most of the time. On the odd occasion that it spilled over and affected civilians, there would be a rapid and brutal series of punitive raids that left a couple of lead gang heroes in the store and the rest of us with extensive bruising. Fortunately I never worked my way up the chain of command far enough to get put away, so the next time I saw the inside of a courtroom was the Innenin inquiry.

The lawyers I saw there had about as much in common with the man who had defended me at fifteen as automated machine rifle fire has with farting. They were cold, professionally polished and well on their way up a career ladder which would ensure that despite the uniforms they wore, they would never have to come within a thousand kilometres of a genuine firefight. The only problem they had, as they cruised sharkishly back and forth across the cool marble floor of the court, was in drawing the fine differences between war (mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own), justifiable loss (mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains) and criminal negligence (mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit). I sat in that courtroom for three weeks listening to them dress it like a variety of salads, and with every passing hour the distinctions, which at one point I’d been pretty clear on, grew increasingly vague. I suppose that proves how good they were.

After that, straightforward criminality came as something of a relief.

“Something bothering you?” Ortega glanced sideways at me as she brought the unmarked cruiser down on a shelving pebble beach below the split-level, glass-fronted offices of Prendergast Sanchez, attorneys-at-law.

“Just thinking.”

“Try cold showers and alcohol. Works for me.”

I nodded and held up the minuscule bead of metal I had been rolling between my finger and thumb. “Is this legal?”

Ortega reached up and killed the primaries. “More or less. No one’s going to complain.”

“Good. Now, I’m going to need verbal cover to start with. You do the talking, I’ll just shut up and listen. Take it from there.”

“Fine. Ryker was like that, anyway. Never used two words if one would do it. Most of the time with the scumbags, he’d just look at them.”

“Sort of Micky Nozawa-type, huh?”

“Who?”

“Never mind.” The rattle of upthrown pebbles on the hull died away as Ortega cut the engines to idle. I stretched in my seat and threw open my side of the hatch. Climbing out, I saw an over-burly figure coming down the meandering set of wooden steps from the split level. Looked like grafting. A blunt-looking gun was slung over his shoulder and he wore gloves. Probably not a lawyer.

“Go easy,” said Ortega, suddenly at my shoulder. “We have jurisdiction here. He isn’t going to start anything.”

She flashed her badge as the muscle jumped the last step to the beach and landed on flexed legs. You could see the disappointment on his face as he saw it.

“Bay City police. We’re here to see Rutherford.”

“You can’t park that here.”

“I already have,” Ortega told him evenly. “Are we going to keep Mr. Rutherford waiting?”

There was a prickly silence, but she’d gauged him correctly. Contenting himself with a grunt, the muscle gestured us up the staircase and followed at prudent shepherding distance. It took a while to get to the top, and I was pleased to see when we arrived that Ortega was considerably more out of breath than I was. We went across a modest sundeck made from the same wood as the stairs and through two sets of automatic plate glass doors into a reception area styled to look like someone’s lounge. There were rugs on the floor, knitted in the same patterns as my jacket, and Empathist prints on the walls. Five single armchairs provided parking.