“You make it sound like I had a lucky escape.”

For a few seconds I stared out to the horizon, remembering.

“Yeah.” I drained the rest of my coffee. “Come on, let’s get back.”

As we drove back along the promenade, something had changed in the quiet between us. Something that, like the gradually waxing light of dawn around the car, was at once intangible and impossible to ignore.

When we pulled up outside the data broker’s frontage, Irene Elliott was waiting, leaned against the side of the limo and watching the sea. There was no sign of her husband.

“Better stay here,” I told Trepp as I climbed out. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“Sure.”

“I guess I’ll be seeing you in my rear-view screen for a while, then.”

“I doubt you’ll see me at all, Kovacs,” said Trepp cheerfully. “I’m better at this than you are.”

“Remains to be seen.”

“Yeah, yeah. Be seeing you.” She raised her voice as I started to walk away. “And don’t fuck up that run. We’d all hate to see that happen.”

She backed up the car a dozen metres and kicked it into the air in a showy, dropped-nose bunt that shattered the quiet with a shriek of turbines and barely cleared our heads before flipping up and out over the ocean.

“Who was that?” There was a huskiness to Irene Elliott’s voice that sounded like the residue of too much crying.

“Back-up,” I said absently, watching the car trail out over the wrecked aircraft carrier. “Works for the same people. Don’t worry, she’s a friend.”

“She may be your friend,” said Elliott bitterly. “She isn’t mine. None of you people are.”

I looked at her, then back out to sea. “Fair enough.”

Silence, apart from the waves. Elliott shifted against the polished coachwork of the limo.

“You know what’s happened to my daughter,” she said in a dead voice. “You knew all the time.”

I nodded.

“And you don’t give a flying fuck, do you? You’re working for the man that used her like a piece of toilet tissue.”

“Lots of men used her,” I said brutally. “She let herself be used. And I’m sure your husband’s told you why she did that as well.”

I heard Irene Elliott’s breath catch in her throat and concentrated on the horizon, where Trepp’s cruiser was fading into the predawn gloom. “She did it for the same reason she tried to blackmail the man I was working for, the same reason she tried to put drivers on a particularly unpleasant man called Jerry Sedaka who subsequently had her killed. She did it for you, Irene.”

“You fuck.” She started to cry, a small hopeless sound in the stillness.

I kept my eyes fixed on the ocean. “I don’t work for Bancroft any more,” I said carefully. “I’ve swapped sides on that piece of shit. I’m giving you the chance to hit Bancroft where it hurts, to hit him with the guilt that fucking your daughter never gave him. Plus, now you’re out of the store maybe you’ll be able to get the money together and re-sleeve Elizabeth. Or at least get her off stack, rent her some space in a virtual condo or something. The point is, you’re off the ice, you can do something. You’ve got options. That’s what I’m offering you. I’m dealing you back into the game. Don’t throw that away.”

Beside me, I heard her struggling to force down the tears. I waited.

“You’re pretty impressed with yourself, aren’t you?” she said finally. “You think you’re doing me this big favour, but you’re no fucking Good Samaritan. I mean, you got me out of the store, but it all comes at a price, right?”

“Of course it does,” I said quietly.

“I do what you want, this virus run. I break the law for you, or I go back on stack. And if I squeal, or screw up, I’ve got more to lose than you. That’s the deal, isn’t it? Nothing for free.”

I watched the waves. “That’s the deal,” I agreed.

More silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look down at the body she was wearing, as if she’d spilled something down herself. “Do you know how I feel?” she asked.

“No.”

“I slept with my husband, and I feel like he’s been unfaithful to me.” A choked laugh. She smeared angrily at her eyes. “I feel like I’ve been unfaithful. To something. You know, when they put me away I left a body and a family behind. Now I don’t have either.”

She looked down at herself again. She lifted her hands and turned them, fingers spread.

“I don’t know what I feel,” she said. “I don’t know what to feel.”

There was a lot I could have said. A lot that has been said, written, researched and disputed on the subject. Trite little magazine-length summings-up of the problems inherent in re-sleeving—How to make your partner love you again, in any body—trite, interminable psychological tracts—Some observations of secondary trauma in civil re-sleeving—even the sanctified manuals of the fucking Envoy Corps itself had something trite to say on the matter. Quotes, informed opinion, the ravings of the religious and the lunatic fringe. I could have thrown it all at her. I could have told her that what she was going through was quite normal for an unconditioned human. I could have told her that it would pass with time. That there were psychodynamic disciplines for dealing with it. That millions of other people survived it. I could even have told her that whichever God she owed nominal allegiance to was watching over her. I could have lied, I could have reasoned. It all would have meant about the same, because the reality was pain, and right now there was nothing anyone could do to take it away.

I said nothing.

The dawn gained on us, light strengthening on the closed-up frontages behind us. I glanced at the windows of Elliott’s Data Linkage.

“Victor?” I asked.

“Sleeping.” She wiped an arm across her face and snorted her tears back under control like badly cut amphetamine. “You say this is going to hurt Bancroft?”

“Yeah. In a subtle way, but yeah, it’ll hurt.”

“Installation run on an AI,” said Irene Elliott to me. “Installing an erasure penalty virus. Fucking over a known Meth. You know what the risks are? You know what you’re asking me to do?”

I turned to look her in the eye.

“Yes. I know.”

Her mouth clamped down on a tremor.

“Good. Then let’s do it.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The run took less than three days to set up. Irene Elliott turned stone-cold pro and made it happen that way.

In the limo back to Bay City, I laid it out for her. At first she was still crying inside, but as the detail mounted she clicked in, nodding, grunting, stopping me and backing me up on minor points I hadn’t made clear enough. I showed her Reileen Kawahara’s suggested hardware list and she OK’d about two thirds of it. The rest was just corporate padding and Kawahara’s advisors, in her opinion, didn’t know shit.

By the end of the journey she had it down. I could see the run already unfolding behind her eyes. The tears had dried on her face, forgotten, and her expression was clean purpose, locked-down hate for the man who had used her daughter, and an embodied will to revenge.

Irene Elliott was sold.

I rented an apartment in Oakland on the JacSol account. Elliott moved in and I left her there to catch up on some sleep. I stayed at the Hendrix, tried to do some sleeping of my own without much success and went back six hours later to find Elliott already prowling about the apartment.

I called the names and numbers Kawahara had given me and ordered the staff Elliott had ticked. The crates arrived in hours. Elliott cracked them open and laid out the hardware across the floor of the apartment.

Together we went through Ortega’s list of virtual forums and worked it down to a shortlist of seven.

(Ortega had not turned up, or called me at the Hendrix.)

Mid afternoon on the second day, Elliott kicked on the primary modules and cruised each of the shortlist options. The list fell to three, and Elliott gave me a couple more items to go shopping for. Refinement software for the big kill.