The door closed and soft footfalls advanced in my direction. I tensed abruptly. Ortega and her escort were coming in my direction. This was something no one had bargained for. On the blueprints the main landing pads were forward of Kawahara’s cabin, and I’d come up on the aft side with that in mind. There seemed no reason to march Ortega and Bautista towards the stern.
There was no panic. Instead, a cool analogue of the adrenalin reaction rinsed through my mind, offering a chilly array of hard facts. Ortega and Bautista were in no danger. They must have arrived the same way they were leaving or something would have been said. As for me, if they passed the corridor I was in, their escort would only have to glance sideways to see me. The area was well lit and there were no hiding places within reach. On the other hand, with my body down below room temperature, my pulse slowed to a crawl and my breathing at the same low, most of the subliminal factors that will trigger a normal human being’s proximity sense were gone. Always assuming the escorts were wearing normal sleeves.
And if they turned into this corridor to use the stairs I had come down by …
I shrank back against the wall, dialled the shard gun down to minimum dispersal and stopped breathing.
Ortega. Bautista. The two attendants brought up the rear. They were so close I could have reached out and touched Ortega’s hair.
No one looked round.
I gave them a full minute before I breathed again. Then I checked the corridor in both directions, went rapidly round the corner and knocked on the door with the butt of the shard gun. Without waiting for a reply, I walked in.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The chamber was exactly as Miller had described it. Twenty metres wide and walled in non-reflective glass that sloped inward from roof to floor. On a clear day you could probably lie on that slope and peer down thousands of metres to the sea below. The décor was stark and owed a lot to Kawahara’s early millennium roots. The walls were smoke grey, the floor fused glass and the lighting came from jagged pieces of origami performed in illuminum sheeting and spiked on iron tripods in the corners of the room. One side of the room was dominated by a massive slab of black steel that must serve as a desk, the other held a group of shale-coloured loungers grouped around an imitation oil drum brazier. Beyond the loungers, an arched doorway led out to what Miller had surmised were sleeping quarters.
Above the desk, a slow weaving holodisplay of data had been abandoned to its own devices. Reileen Kawahara stood with her back to the door, staring out at the night sky.
“Forget something?” she asked distantly.
“No, not a thing.”
I saw how her back stiffened as she heard me, but when she turned it was with unhurried smoothness and even the sight of the shard gun didn’t crack the icy calm on her face. Her voice was almost as disinterested as it had been before she turned.
“Who are you? How did you get in here?”
“Think about it.” I gestured at the loungers. “Sit down over there, take the weight off your feet while you’re thinking.”
“Kadmin?”
“Now you’re insulting me. Sit down!”
I saw the realisation explode behind her eyes.
“Kovacs?” An unpleasant smile bent at her lips. “Kovacs, you stupid, stupid bastard. Do you have any idea what you’ve just thrown away?”
“I said sit down.”
“She has gone, Kovacs. Back to Harlan’s World. I kept my word. What do you think you’re doing here?”
“I’m not going to tell you again,” I said mildly. “Either you sit down now, or I’ll break one of your kneecaps.”
The thin smile stayed on Kawahara’s mouth as she lowered herself a centimetre at a time onto the nearest lounger. “Very well, Kovacs. We’ll play to your script tonight. And then I’ll have that fishwife Sachilowska dragged all the way back here and you with her. What are you going to do? Kill me?”
“If necessary.”
“For what? Is this some kind of moral stand?” The emphasis Kawahara laid on the last two words made it sound like the name of a product. “Aren’t you forgetting something? If you kill me here, it’ll take about eighteen hours for the remote storage system in Europe to notice and then re-sleeve me from my last update ‘cast. And it won’t take the new me very long to work out what happened up here.”
I seated myself on the edge of the lounger. “Oh, I don’t know. Look how long it’s taken Bancroft, and he still doesn’t have the truth, does he?”
“Is this about Bancroft?”
“No Reileen. This is about you and me. You should have left Sarah alone. You should have left me alone while you could.”