Spin State - Chris Moriarty [139]
“Unfortunate. Though, I must confess, not entirely unexpected.”
Korchow lifted Bella’s hand, and a pale ideogram appeared under the curve of her palm. It rotated, unfolded, blossomed into a dog-eared piece of yellow paper covered with close-set numbers.
“What is that?” Li asked, and even she could hear the tremor in her voice.
“I think you know,” he said as he handed it to her.
It felt real in her fingers, so real that she imagined for a moment she could just rip it up, burn it, get rid of it somehow. But she knew that the rough nap of the paper under her hands, even the slightly musty smell of it, was illusion. The original was somewhere far away. Down on Compson’s where Korchow was. Maybe even back on Gilead.
“I don’t know what you think this is,” she said, though of course she did know.
“Read it,” Korchow suggested.
Block letters ran across the top of the page: REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES, S.A., J. M. JOSS, M.D.G.P., B.S., SPECIALIZING IN ARTIFICIAL REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES AND REMEDIAL GENETIC ENGINEERING. Below the letters were a series of numbers: medical codes to the left, prices to the right. The prices were given in both UN currency and AMC scrip.
Li didn’t have to check her oracle to know what the codes stood for; she already knew. And even if she hadn’t known, there was her own signature, or rather Caitlyn Perkins’s signature, scrawled below the tightly printed boilerplate of the medical release.
“Where did you get this?” she whispered.
“Where do you think, Major?”
“I watched Joss burn my file. He burned it in the sink. I wouldn’t leave until he’d done it.”
“Apparently,” Korchow said, “he didn’t burn everything. People are so untrusting in human space.”
She sat, head down, staring at the paper. When Korchow reached out to take it back, she made no effort to stop him.
“Well,” he said, folding the slip of paper and whisking it back out of realspace. “We all make mistakes. The thing now is to put regret behind you and go forward.”
“What do you want?”
“I want this little venture to work out satisfactorily for all of us. But at the moment I just want you to make a choice. If you decide to help me, then you will go to Shantytown twelve hours from now and meet with a man who will give you the data you need for the first stage of the operation. And you will bring the AI with you. Or at least an assurance that he will participate.”
It took Li several moments to realize he was talking about Cohen. “He’s not under contract to us,” she argued. “He’s a freelancer. I can’t make him do shit.”
“I imagine you can make him do quite a lot, actually.”
“You’d imagine wrong, then.”
“Oh? Why don’t we ask him?”
“Oh, sure,” Li said mockingly. “What do I do, draw a pentagram and say his name three times?”
Korchow smiled. “What an amusing idea. I think a simple and sincere call for assistance will suffice, however. Try it.”
She stared at Korchow. But then she did try it. And there Cohen was, real as a government paycheck.
He wore a summer suit the color of pomegranates. Wherever he’d been when she called him, he was in the middle of getting dressed. He leaned forward, still peering into a mirror that was no longer there, knotting a mushroom brown silk tie around his throat.
“Oh, my,” he said. He cocked his head in apparent confusion and turned slowly around until he caught sight of Li. “This is a nice surprise,” he said, blinking and smiling.
Then he took in her state of undress, the rumpled bed, Bella sitting across the room. His smile vanished.
“Korchow,” he said in a voice of terrifying gentleness. “I can’t say it’s a pleasure, so I won’t say anything.”
“I thought we talked about this, Cohen,” Li said. “I thought you were going to stop spying on me.”
He turned back to her. “What a nasty little word. Of course I would never spy on you. And if I do assign an autonomous agent or two to keep an eye on you, it’s only to prevent unpleasant people”—he glanced in Korchow’s direction—“from making trouble for you.”
Bella cleared her throat meaningfully, and Cohen looked at her again.