“Sure. Sorry.” I rubbed at the side of my face. Envoy conversations weren’t supposed to slip like that. “I’m a little tired. That block you live on sounds familiar. I think I’m going to go to bed. You want another drink before you go, help yourself. It’s on my tab.”

“No thanks.” Bautista drained what was left in his glass. “Old cop’s rule. Never drink alone.”

“Sounds like I should have been an old cop.” I stood up, swaying a little. Ryker may have been a death-wish smoker, but he didn’t have much tolerance for alcohol. “You can see yourself out OK, I guess.”

“Sure.” Bautista got up to go and made about a half dozen paces before he turned back. He frowned with concentration. “Oh, yeah. Goes without saying, I was never here, right.”

I gestured him away. “You were never here,” I assured him.

He grinned bemusedly and his face looked suddenly very young. “Right. Good. See you round, probably.”

“See you.”

I watched him out of sight, then, regretfully, let the ice-cold processes of Envoy control trickle down through my befuddled senses. When I was unpleasantly sober again, I picked up Curtis’s drug crystals from the bar, and went to talk to the Hendrix.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“You know anything about synamorphesterone?”

“Heard of it.” Ortega dug absently at the sand with the toe of one boot. It was still damp from the tide’s retreat, and our footprints welled soggily behind us. In either direction the curve of the beach was deserted. We were alone apart from the gulls that wheeled in geometric formations high overhead.

“Well, since we’re waiting, you want to fill me in?”

“Harem drug.” When I looked blank, Ortega puffed out her cheeks impatiently. She was acting like someone who hadn’t slept well.

“I’m not from here.”

“You were on Sharya, you told me.”

“Yeah. In a military capacity. There wasn’t all that much time for cultural awareness. We were too busy killing people.”

This last wasn’t quite true. Following the sack of Zihicce, the Envoys had been steeped in the mechanics of engineering a regime compliant to the Protectorate. Troublemakers were rooted out, cells of resistance infiltrated and then crushed, collaborators plugged into the political edifice. In the process we’d learnt quite a lot about local culture.

I’d asked for an early transfer out.

Ortega shaded her eyes and scanned the beach in both directions. Nothing stirred. She sighed. “It’s a male response enhancer. Boosts aggression, sexual prowess, confidence. On the street in the Middle East and Europe they call it Stallion, in the south it’s Toro. We don’t get much of it here, street mood’s more ambient. Which I’m glad about. From what I hear it can be very nasty. You run across some last night?”

“Sort of.” This was pretty much what I’d learnt from the Hendrix database last night, but more concise and with less chemistry. And Curtis’s behaviour ran the checklist of symptoms and side effects like a model. “Suppose I wanted to get hold of some of this stuff, where could I pick it up. Easily, I mean.”

Ortega gave me a sharp look, and picked her way back up the beach onto dryer sand. “Like I said, we don’t get much of it here,” she said in time with her laboured, sinking footsteps. “You’d have to ask around. Someone with better than local connections. Or get it synthesised locally. But I don’t know. With designer hormones that’s likely to be more expensive than just buying it in from down south.”

She paused at the crest of the dune and looked around again.

“Where the hell is she?”

“Maybe she’s not coming,” I suggested morosely. I hadn’t slept all that well myself. Most of the night after Rodrigo Bautista’s departure had been spent brooding over the uncooperatively jagged pieces of the Bancroft jigsaw and fighting off the urge to smoke. My head seemed barely to have hit the pillow when the Hendrix buzzed me awake with Ortega’s call. It was still obscenely early in the morning.

“She’ll come,” said Ortega. “The link’s booked through to her personal pick-up. Call’s probably delayed at incoming security. We’ve only been in here about ten seconds, real time.”

I shivered in the cold wind from offshore and said nothing. Overhead, the gulls repeated their geometry. The virtuality was cheap, not designed for long stay.

“Got any cigarettes?”

I was seated in the cold sand, smoking with a kind of mechanical intensity, when something moved on the extreme right of the bay. I straightened up and narrowed my eyes, then laid a hand on Ortega’s arm. The motion resolved itself into a plume of sand or water, ripped into the air by a fast-moving surface vehicle that was tearing round the curve of the beach towards us.

“Told you she’d come.”

“Or someone would,” I muttered, getting to my feet and reaching for the Nemex which was, of course, not there. Not many virtual forums allowed firearms in their constructs. Instead, I brushed sand from my clothes and moved down the beach, still trying to rid myself of the brooding feeling that I was wasting my time here.

The vehicle was close enough now to be visible, a dark dot at the front of the pluming wake. I could hear its engine, a shrill whine over the melancholy carping of the gulls. I turned to Ortega, who was watching the approaching craft impassively at my side.

“Bit excessive for a phone call, isn’t it?” I said nastily.

Ortega shrugged and spun her cigarette away into the sand. “Money doesn’t automatically mean taste,” she said.

The speeding dot became a stubby, finned one-man ground jet, painted iridescent pink. It was ploughing along through the shallow surf at the water’s edge, flinging water and wet sand indiscriminately behind it, but a few hundred metres away the pilot must have seen us because the little craft veered out across the deeper water and cut a spray tail twice its own height towards us.

“Pink?”

Ortega shrugged again.

The ground jet beached about ten metres away and shuddered to a halt, ripped-up gobbets of wet sand splattering down around it. When the storm of its arrival had died, a hatch was flung back and a black-clad, helmeted figure clambered out. That the figure was a woman was abundantly clear from the form-fitting flight suit, a suit that ended in boots inlaid with curling silver tracery from heel to toe.

I sighed and followed Ortega up to the craft.

The woman in the flight suit jumped down into the shallow water and splashed up to meet us, tugging at the seals on her helmet. As we met, the helmet came off and long coppery hair spilled out over the suit’s shoulders. The woman put her head back and shook out the hair, revealing a wide-boned face with large, expressive eyes the colour of flecked onyx, a delicately arched nose and a generously sculpted mouth.

The old, ghostly hint of Miriam Bancroft’s beauty this woman had once owned had been scrubbed out utterly.

“Kovacs, this is Leila Begin,” said Ortega formally. “Ms. Begin, this is Takeshi Kovacs, Laurens Bancroft’s retained investigator.”

The large eyes appraised me frankly.

“You’re from offworld?” she asked me.

“That’s correct. Harlan’s World.”

“Yes, the lieutenant mentioned it.” There was a well-designed huskiness to Leila Begin’s voice, and an accent that suggested she was unused to speaking Amanglic. “I can only hope that means you have an open mind.”

“Open to what?”

“The truth.” Begin gave me a surprised look. “Lieutenant Ortega tells me you are interested in the truth. Shall we walk?”

Without waiting for a response, she set off parallel with the surf. I exchanged a glance with Ortega, who gestured with her thumb but showed no signs of moving herself. I hesitated for a couple of moments, then went after Begin.

“What’s all this about the truth?” I asked, catching her up.