Spin State - Chris Moriarty [143]
“Buy you a drink?” Li asked.
They made the usual small talk. When the beers came, still warm, still flat, they drank together. Arkady sipped his beer with a cautious frown that made Li suspect he wasn’t a drinker.
“Well?” he said finally.
Li glanced around. “You ask a lot.”
“Do I?”
“Maybe too much.”
He paused and touched his beer to his lips again. “But perhaps,” he said, “you have a friend who could help?”
A friend. Meaning Cohen. “Perhaps.”
“Have you asked him?”
“Not yet.”
Arkady’s handsome face froze for an instant, and Li saw what she should have suspected, what Cohen himself had tried to tell her. She wasn’t what they wanted. Or at least she wasn’t all they wanted. They needed Cohen. Li and her tawdry little secret had just been the bait they used to draw him.
“We would appreciate his help a great deal, of course,” Arkady was saying, “and the task brings its own rewards.”
“That doesn’t—” Li started to say. Then she stopped cold.
The task brings its own rewards. And what had Korchow told her? You’ll have to undergo a minor surgical procedure.
They were going to give Cohen a working intraface. With her, Li, on the other end of it.
She shuddered. “I’ll pass the message on,” she said, sticking to the troubles of the moment. “How can I get you an answer?”
“You don’t have to. Just be on the Helena shuttle the day after tomorrow.”
“And?”
“And that’s all you need to know.”
“Fine.” Li stood up to go, but Arkady put a hand to her arm, stopping her.
“You still haven’t told me what you want.”
“My life back,” she snapped, too angry to keep her voice down.
“Perhaps you want what we were going to give your predecessor?”
Li turned around slowly. “Voyt, you mean?” But even as she asked, she knew it was Sharifi. Korchow had been paying Sharifi, not blackmailing her. And Sharifi had sold him the information he wanted—the same information everyone wanted. She had promised him the missing datasets. “So what was Sharifi asking for?” she asked casually.
“Not what. Who.”
Li’s stomach churned, and she felt a dizzy nausea flooding over her. Of course Sharifi hadn’t had the money to buy out Bella’s contract. She had bartered; bartered something that was far more important to the Syndicates than a single B Series construct. Sharifi had traded Bose-Einstein technology, violating every security clearance she had passed during the course of her long and productive career, violating the Espionage and Sedition Act, betraying the UN and everyone who depended on it for survival.
And she had done it for Bella.
Three men were arguing in the street when Li stepped out into the arcade again. Something about a dog, she thought. Two of them looked like brothers. The third was a small, tired man who looked bruised and sickly under the raking light of the halogens.
A skinny girl stepped into Li’s peripheral vision, hawking smuggled cigarettes, weaving back and forth under the scaffolding to avoid the dripping water. She had cheap smokes. Unfiltered. The kind you could only get in places where people didn’t care much about the sky-high cost of lung bugs. Li turned aside, fishing in her pocket for the little wad of bills she carried.
When she turned around, a crowd had formed around the three men in the road.
The two brothers were still shouting, but one of them now had his hands hooked under the other’s armpits and was dragging him back into the shadows of the opposite arcade. A bystander knelt and picked a baseball bat out of the mud.
The third man stood alone in the muddy street, punch-drunk, blood streaming down his face and mixing with the gritty rain.
AMC Station: 25.10.48.
Li was in a white-hot rage by the time she got back to the station.
“Anything else you’d like to tell me?” she asked Bella when she finally tracked her down.
They stood in Haas’s quarters, Bella backed up against the long sleek sofa and shrinking away from Li.
“She was going to take me with her,” Bella whispered, unshed tears glittering