“I’m not going to argue the toss with you on this, Kovacs. We’ll interrogate Kadmin and find out what he knows, but for the rest I’ve been over the ground before and it’s starting to bore me. There are people out there who need us a lot worse than Bancroft does. Real death victims who weren’t lucky enough to have remote storage when their stacks were blown out. Catholics getting butchered because their killers know the victims will never come out of storage to put them away.” There was a hooded tiredness building up in Ortega’s eyes as she ticked the list off on her fingers. “Organic damage cases who don’t have the money to get re-sleeved unless the state can prove some kind of liability against somebody. I wade through this stuff ten hours a day or more, and I’m sorry, I just don’t have the sympathy to spare for Mr. Laurens Bancroft with his clones on ice and his magic walls of influence in high places and his fancy lawyers to put us through hoops every time some member of his family or staff wants to slide out from under.”

“That happen often, does it?”

“Often enough, but don’t look surprised.” She gave me a bleak smile. “He’s a fucking Meth. They’re all the same.”

It was a side of her I didn’t like, an argument I didn’t want to have and a view of Bancroft I didn’t need. And underneath it all, my nerves were screaming for sleep.

I stubbed out my cigarette.

“I think you’d better go, lieutenant. All this prejudice is giving me a headache.”

Something flickered in her eyes, something I couldn’t read at all. There for a second, then gone. She shrugged, put down the coffee mug and swung her legs over the side of the shelf. She stretched herself upright, arched her spine until it cracked audibly and walked to the door without looking back. I stayed where I was, watching her reflection move among the city lights in the window.

At the door, she stopped and I saw her turn her head.

“Hey, Kovacs.”

I looked over at her. “Forget something?”

She nodded her head, mouth clamped in a crooked line, as if acknowledging a point in some game we’d been playing.

“You want an insight? You want somewhere to start? Well, you gave me Kadmin, so I guess I owe you that.”

“You don’t owe me a thing, Ortega. The Hendrix did it, not me.”

“Leila Begin,” she said. “Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyers, see where it gets you.”

The door sliced closed and the reflected room held nothing but the lights of the city outside. I stared out at them for a while, lit a new cigarette and smoked it down to its filter.

Bancroft had not committed suicide, that much was clear. I’d been on the case less than a day and already I’d had two separate lobbies land on my back. First, Kristin Ortega’s mannered thugs at the justice facility, then the Vladivostock hitman and his spare sleeve. Not to mention Miriam Bancroft’s off-the-wall behaviour. Altogether too much muddied water for this to be what it purported to be. Ortega wanted something, whoever had paid Dimitri Kadmin wanted something, and what they wanted, it seemed, was for the Bancroft case to remain closed.

That wasn’t an option I had.

“Your guest has left the building,” said the Hendrix, jolting me out of my glazed retrospection.

“Thanks,” I said absently, stubbing out the cigarette in an ashtray. “Can you lock the door, and block the elevators from this floor?”

“Certainly. Do you wish to be advised of any entry into the hotel?”

“No.” I yawned like a snake trying to engorge an egg. “Just don’t let them up here. And no calls for the next seven-and-a-half hours.”

Abruptly it was all I could do to get out of my clothes before the waves of sleep overwhelmed me. I left Bancroft’s summer suit draped over a convenient chair and crawled into the massive crimson-sheeted bed. The surface of the bed undulated briefly, adjusting to my body weight and size, then bore me up like water. A faint odour of incense drifted from the sheets.

I made a half-hearted attempt to masturbate, mind churning damply through images of Miriam Bancroft’s voluptuous curves, but I kept seeing Sarah’s pale body turned to wreckage by the Kalashnikov fire instead.

And sleep dragged me under.

There are ruins, steeped in shadow, and a blood-red sun going down in turmoil behind distant hills. Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic towards the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict’s fingers through the trees that line the street.

Innenininennininennin …

I know this place.

I pick my way between the devastated walls of ruins, trying not to brush against them because, whenever I do, they give out muted gunshots and screams, as if whatever conflict murdered this city has soaked into the remaining stonework. At the same time, I’m moving quite fast, because there is something following me, something that has no such qualms about touching the ruins. I can chart its progress quite accurately by the tide of gunfire and anguish swelling behind me. It is closing. I try to speed up but there is a tightness in my throat and chest that isn’t helping matters.

Jimmy de Soto steps out from behind the shattered stub of a tower. I’m not really surprised to see him here, but his ruined face still gives me a jolt. He grins with what’s left of his features and puts a hand on my shoulder. I try not to flinch.

“Leila Begin,” he says, and nods back to where I have come from. “Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyer.”

“I will,” I say, moving past him. But his hand stays on my shoulder, which must mean his arm is stretching out behind me like hot wax. I stop, guilty at the pain that must be causing him, but he’s still there at my shoulder. I start moving again.

“Going to turn and fight?” he asks conversationally, drifting along beside me without apparent effort or footing.

“With what?” I say, opening my empty hands.

“Should have armed yourself, pal. Big time.”

“Virginia told us not to fall for the weakness of weapons.”

Jimmy de Soto marts derisively. “Yeah, and look where that stupid bitch ended up. Eighty to a hundred, no remission.”

“You can’t know that,” I say absently, more interested in the sounds of pursuit behind me. “You died years before that happened.”

“Oh, come on, who really dies these days?”

“Try telling that to a Catholic. And anyway, you did die, Jimmy. Irretrievably, as I recall.”

“What’s a Catholic?”

“Tell you later. You got any cigarettes?”

“Cigarettes? What happened to your arm?”

I break the spiral of non sequiturs and stare down at my arm. Jimmy’s got a point. The scars on my forearm have turned into a fresh wound, blood welling up and trickling down into my hand. So of course …

I reach up to my left eye and find the wetness below it. My fingers come away bloody.

“Lucky one,” says Jimmy de Soto judicially. “They missed the socket.”

He should know. His own left socket is a glutted well of gore, all that was left at Innenin when he dug the eyeball out with his fingers. No one ever found out what he was hallucinating at the time. By the time they got Jimmy and the rest of the Innenin beachhead d.h.’d for psychosurgery, the defenders’ virus had scrambled their minds beyond retrieval. The program was so virulent that at the time the clinic didn’t even dare keep what was left on stack for study. The remains of Jimmy de Soto are on a sealed disc with red DATA CONTAMINANT decals somewhere in a basement at Envoy Corps HQ.

“I’ve got to do something about this,” I say, a little desperately. The sounds awoken from the walls by my pursuer are growing dangerously close. The last of the sun is slipping behind the hills. Blood spills down my arm and face.