"That’s what the druid meant," Serrin put in. "She said they were blaspheming creation."
The report ended with the promise of a re-run of an historical documentary on the Victorian Ripper, together with a series of "No comments" from spokesmen for the Royals and for Transys. Serrin flicked the tube dead.
"Oh." It was a long, long sigh from all of them. They hadn’t slept all night, and their bodies were as stiff as iron rods.
"We got them, Serrin," Francesca said. "The guys who tried to use you got a lot more than they bargained for. You also just wiped out the corp that killed your parents. They’ll sink without a trace after this."
"Didn’t get Kuranita, though."
"Well, I guess you can’t have everything. But revenge is sweet. Rani, you just paid off the people that baited three of your own family into a death trap. You got what you wanted, too." The Indian girl nodded silently, keeping her own counsel. She still had Smith and Jones to box.
"And me, well, I got who killed Annie and damn near killed me. That Ripper construct in the Matrix must have been part of their experiments in personality encoding. Doesn’t matter. Stuff the details. We got the bastards. Maybe I’ll even be done with those nightmares now. All I have to worry about is my leg."
Geraint smiled again. "No problem. We’ll get you up to Oxford this afternoon after you get some sleep. You saw how good my doc was."
"Yeah, as long as my leg is all he touches. I definitely wouldn’t want to take anything more than a local anesthetic in his clinic." She laughed, then relaxed back into the cool of the analgesics Geraint had given her to mellow out the trauma of coming down from the night’s highs.
"And what did you get, Geraint?" Serrin was eager to know why the nobleman had done all this. It had cost him a lot, and he’d used up plenty of favors and risked his own life.
"What did I get? Let’s just say the satisfaction of a job well done. Life lived. Wrongs righted." He changed the subject. "Ladies and gentleman, I suggest we avail ourselves of something cold with a lot of bubbles in it, and then get some desperately needed sleep. We won. Let’s celebrate. "
* * *
They slept well into the afternoon. When they woke again, Francesca set out for an overnight stay at Oxford, the wound bad enough to require a night’s rest at the Radcliffe. Rani said she had to take care of some business in the East End. I’m sure she does, Geraint thought, what with another bunch of her samurai killed.
"I want you back here, though. From what you say, your family’s disowned you and you don’t really have anywhere to go." She shrugged, but he could see she was disappointed at losing the excitement of being with them. He didn’t want this to be goodbye. "Look, I don’t know if you’d be interested, but did you like Wales? You seemed to."
She smiled a little wanly at the memory. It had been another world entirely, just like the life of this nobleman.
"We can always use security people there. You wouldn’t have to stay if you didn’t like it or if you got homesick. Try it for a couple of months perhaps? Then you’ll have some money, maybe your family will be cooled down a little. Would you like—"
Her spontaneous, crushing hug told him she would. But with the best will in the world, the embrace of an ork who had been sweating inside body armor during an unwashed thirty hours or so wasn’t entirely agreeable to him. He was somewhat glad when she backed off.
"When you’ve concluded your business, come back here. We’ll work out the details. Take care, Queen of Heaven."
Serrin was the last to go. Geraint had expected him to stay, looking forward to a slow, lazy evening winding down, but the elf had something on his mind.
"I’m leaving England Tuesday night," he said sadly. "First I’ve got to go back and find that druid. I want to let her know that the Transys place will be closed down now. Oh hell, I just want to see her again."
Geraint looked at the elf. The dark rings under his eyes said Serrin was still exhausted, but the nobleman didn’t insist that he stay until morning. Maybe Serrin had found something that would give him more peace than lazing in a Chelsea penthouse.
"Sure you can find her again?"
"Why else do I specialize in detection? But don’t worry, I’ll take a mobile telecom and stay in touch. Let you know I’m all right. And I’ll be back here Tuesday morning anyway. This time we won’t lose each other for so many years."
Geraint was surprised at how frail his friend felt when they embraced in goodbye. He needed recuperation and maybe he needed it with someone who wasn’t part of these weeks of blood-soaked murder and mayhem. An escape from all that.
So, Geraint sat alone into the evening. He had no taste for champagne or food, barely any appetite for coffee. He aimlessly flicked from channel to channel on the tube, seeing the Ripper-clone story dominating the news over and over again. But he wasn’t really listening, and as night fell around him, he settled into a state of fatigued reverie.
It was just around nine when the constant, gentle urging from his Sight sent him to the Tarot. He needed two cards: one for those he had defeated and one for himself.
Ten of Swords.
Ruin. Ah yes, the end of the road for Transys Neuronet. And now one for himself. Maybe the victory of the Seven of Wands or the completion of the Ten? Judgment? Justice? But it was none of those. In utter horror he stared at the card he’d turned face-up. The telecom began to beep, nagging at his attention.
The Moon.
Illusion, false perception. The jackal-headed guardians stared in mockery at him from the image, the four-legged servants at their feet smiling in the darkness. The figures clenched their ankhs as if to say, you see nothing. These are our insights. They do not belong to you.
It had been five years since Geraint had seen the Moon in that way. Last time it had been when he’d trusted a friend who swindled him out of nearly half a million.
The urgency of the telecom’s continuing summons jarred him out of his confused self-absorption.
It was Rani, grinning from ear to ear. "Geraint, I tied up a last piece of business," she panted somewhat breathlessly. "You know I told you about the man Pershinkin?"
He had to struggle to remember. "Yes, um, the man; yes, the man who hired your family."
"I killed him. I didn’t tell you about it and sometimes it seems like it happened in a dream, but I did it. Before he died, though, he told me he had a meeting set up with Smith and Jones. Told me when and where. So I staked it out."
The slightest ache began in his stomach, as if he were in an elevator starting its descent. "What happened? You killed them?"
She looked content, but also crestfallen. "Well, no. When they turned up at the place Pershinkin had said, a whole swarm of street samurai suddenly appeared out of nowhere and gunned them down. They dragged the bodies into a limo and buggered off sharpish.
"But they’re as dead as the scumbags we fought last night. Didn’t kill them myself, but they got what was coming to them. I got my own honor by killing Pershinkin. How about that? Anyway, see you tomorrow. I got friends to see and some celebrations waiting for me. Call you later on if they get really good. You could even pop round and join us! See ya!" The screen went dead on her smile.
Oh no, no, no.
It just went over and over in his mind. Smith and Jones were Transys men through and through. The corp wouldn’t have killed them because they might squeal. Not now. Everything was already busted wide open. Sending a whole gang of samurai to kill them didn’t make sense, unless, unless ... He just couldn’t see it.
It was almost like automatic writing, the way he downloaded the analysis programs and began examining the stock markets. Transys had crashed out of sight. Well, of course. But there were buyers. A whole string of them, all across the world. Everyone chipping in for tiny amounts. Little piranhas taking a single mouthful each from the corpse of a dying shark.
It took a little while to engage the global program. All his adult life he’d been updating, refining, cross-indexing t
his beast, fitting it out with its range of probability functions and estimators. He upgraded it for the last week of dealings, not having had time to do his usual updates.
Transys wouldn’t have killed their own people unless those weren't their own people.
And now they weren’t in any position to kill anybody. Decision-making would be completely frozen; the entire board of Transys had resigned.
Someone else killed Smith and Jones.
Someone else who was swimming into focus on his screens right now. He could see the shadows behind what he thought to be real. He could see who was behind these little fish. He could see the ancient predator lurking in the waters. He saw him at the bottom of the Moon, at the base of the card, armored and clawed.
"My God," Geraint thought, " we’ve been horribly, terribly wrong."
That was when they knocked on his door.
34
The Rolls Royce Phaeton purred comfortably along the M825, the great orbital highway ringing inner London. Geraint hadn’t much choice about whether to get in it or not. The unsmiling gentlemen with guns had decided it for him. Once inside, he came face to face with two smartly suited middle-aged men in the enormous rear portion of the car.
The two looked similar, with their winter tans, their straight white teeth, graphite-black hair, and heavy shades. The first thing they told him was that they weren’t going to kill him. For some reason, he believed it. He was happy to believe them.
"Frankly, we would prefer to," one of them said as the car weaved northward up Edgware Road toward the orbital. "However, someone might start asking awkward questions if you were to disappear. Your little kylie at OzNet has been rather indiscreet, I’m sorry to say. Now other people know about you and, well, you’re going to be something of a celebrity. The Man Who Stalked the Ripper. Better be ready for the journalists tomorrow, my Lord." The title was uttered with a sneer. "Not to mention the Met police."
"Would you care for some?" The speaker’s colleague was already opening the wafer-thin case with its rows of small gray chips.
"No thank you," Geraint said. "My mother told me never to accept drugs from murderers."
"Suit yourself." The man exhaled his pleasure as the chip began to work on his nervous system. He leaned back, relaxed. "Well, after we monitored you making those transaction checks we knew you’d get the right answer pretty quickly. You’d have found out eventually, of course, but by then it would have been yesterday’s news. Hence the need for our little talk now.
"In case you were wondering, we’ll have our people remove all the surveillance instruments from your flat whenever it’s convenient for you. You see, we really aren’t going to kill you."
"Your what? But I had the place—"
"Well, of course you did, dear boy, of course you did. I must confess that Risk Minimizers is a very good client of ours. Very rarely do we ask them for a favor. On this occasion, however, we had to cash in."
Geraint was dumbfounded. Wasn’t there anyone left he could trust?
"So, would you like the big picture first or the details? It’ll make life easier to give you the big picture, I think. Then you can ask us any questions, if you’re so inclined." The man was behaving like a teacher explaining something very simple to a willfully dim-witted child.
As they headed through Wood Green, Geraint learned about the attempts to buy out Transys. The corp was secretive, tightly controlled, and not an easy nut to crack.
"We had some people on the inside, obviously. Disaffected elements who weren’t happy with the way the company was going, bright people who saw research opportunities going astray. Then, of course, we had a sleeper or two in Transys."
"Like Smith and Jones?" Geraint’s voice was little more than a croak.
"Oh, those berks. Yes, they were ours. Pity about them, really, but it did tie up a loose end."
So that’s what murder is, Geraint thought. Tying up loose ends. I’m stuck in the back of the most expensive limo on earth with a pair of complete psychopaths.
"We had hoped to break into the corp last year after they lost that wacko star decker of theirs in the Edinburgh business. Quicksilver, wasn’t it? Unfortunately, the new chairman of the board was a tough fellow, not someone who’d let us exercise the control we wanted. So we decided it was time for Plan B. Was it Plan B?" he inquired casually of the other suit.
"Hmm. Plan C, I think." His fellow added nothing else by way of explanation.
"Well, there you have it. Plan C it was. The good old ploy of discrediting a company, shooting its stock value to drek, and then buying it up for nothing. Trouble is, with Transys it proved very difficult indeed. They’re infuriatingly moral for a megacorporation, you know. The bad stuff they get up to, well, it’s small potatoes like dumping hazardous drug stocks on the third world. You know the score, I’m sure. Dodgy experiments on kiddies in what’s left of Bangladesh, that sort of monkeying around. Problem is, nobody in the civilized world gives a toss, quite honestly."
The civilized world, oh yes, Geraint thought grimly. That’s the one you people belong to, right?
"That wouldn’t be scandal enough for the media. It had to be something closer to home. So, we really had to engineer it ourselves. Fortunately, one of the less scrupulous Brazilian subsidiaries of Transys was beginning to get somewhere with cloning technology. One renegade imigre scientist did some excellent work. Cloning from early fetal cell tissue isn’t too hard, but trying to clone from adult DNA samples, well, that’s another flaskful of enzymes entirely. The mad boffin, as our wonderful free press will no doubt dub him, made some startling advances in that department. "
"From what we heard, he sounded like a real Mengele," the other man commented laconically, before lapsing back into silence.
The first man flicked the intercom to the ork chauffeur. "Let’s take a drive around the orbital, my good man. Thank you." He closed the link. "Rakkin’ baldrick." The two men exchanged grins that evidenced their vast debt to cosmetic dentistry.
The main mouthpiece resumed his explanation as Geraint sat patiently. "After a while, however, that lab boy got rather crazy and became something of a security risk, so we terminated him and changed the data a bit. When the Transys head people got to it, it looked like a crock. Then we had to sit on it for a while, another couple of years before we could get the Cambridge sideline opened up, nice and quiet. Purely experimental biotech, no pressure, no snooping from the high-ups in Transys when the turds hit the tumble dryer over the Quicksilver business.
"By then, our people there had the cloning down to a fine art—except for one problem. Clones developed from adult DNA samples turned out to be mentally unstable, hopelessly so. Seems there’s something in the morphologic fields of the brain during development that doesn’t go quite right. The forced growth and development of a complete clone imposes too much strain on those delicate neural circuits. Ain’t it a shame? The good thing is that the old data will prove that Transys has been playing with cloning for quite a while. We arranged for the story to be released to the media around five this afternoon. Last nail in the coffin for Transys."
He lit a cigarette. "Care for one? Very soothing gamma-yohimbine extract. Relaxes the body, really mellows an edge."
Geraint accepted the cigarette. Why not? He wasn’t having much input into all this.
"But we always believe that a problem should be seen as an opportunity. That’s our motto, you know. So, we thought: why don’t we clone someone who’s a complete nutter? Then, if he’s completely deranged we can pin it on Transys. The friendly company that has been cloning madmen. That would do the trick." He exhaled a perfect smoke ring.
"Dear Jack was just the ticket. Everyone’s heard of Jack the Ripper. Top news ratings guaranteed, Transys shafted good and proper. After that, it was really down to the details. There was an extra advantage when Transys got involved in the Global-Hollywood business with that pathetic Ripper chip affair. We were delighted when the elf found out about that, though it was une
xpected. That jaunt back to Manhattan threw us a curve, but we had contingencies for feeding that information to you. Anyway, we needed truly independent exposure of the horror of it all, this terrible new Ripper stalking London’s streets again.
"So we picked the right people."
"The four of us." Geraint had questions, but he wanted to hear out his enemies first.
"Good God, no. Not that little slag of a baldrick." He spat out the insulting term for an ork like it was poison. "That was pure coincidence. That you met her again after Smith and Jones spammed her over the Fuchi job was a chance in a million. Wouldn’t have made any difference if you hadn’t. Again, we had contingencies planned. We had one or two more people up our sleeve that we never needed to bring into the frame, in the end."
"So you started with—who?"
"Well, we have a file on you so thick you could wipe your arse on the pages for a month and still have clean hands. We knew your links to Shamandar and the Young woman. You had a good range of skills and contacts between you. You are resourceful and smart. You were a good choice. You worked out great."
"How did it start?" Geraint was not sure he could take much more of this.
"Well, the Kuranita thing was just to get you all thinking. We thought the mage would start sooner asking what the rakk was going on. It was so bloody obvious that Transys wasn’t on his list, but he didn’t seem to see it. So we changed his instructions to stay at a place where we knew he’d see Kuranita. If he hadn’t, we’d have made sure he found out somehow. We knew he’d do something, and we knew you’d help him.
"We fed you the information about Kuranita’s visit to the Fuchi installation. We hired those Indian idiots as a decoy and warned Fuchi to expect them. They’re good clients of ours, Fuchi. The real Kuranita didn’t turn up at Longstanton at all, of course. But we wanted you to get away in the confusion, so we alerted Fuchi to the attack by the other group. We’d given the Indians a tactical briefing. We knew there was no way you would be so stupid as to make a frontal attack. All of that stuff was just to shake you up, like I said, because the elf wasn’t asking the right questions at that stage. Oh, and it also earned us a loyalty bonus from Fuchi for tipping them off. You know how it is; never pass up a chance to make money."
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