Streets of blood

15

Francesca did not surface until nearly noon. Wrapped in one of Geraint’s terry bathrobes she stumbled out of the guest bedroom, rubbing her eyes like a child and then bumping into a china cabinet in the hall because she wasn’t looking. Smiling indulgently. Geraint took her elbow, steered her into the bathroom and showed her the control panel.

“Red tab for the shower motor. Thirty-second floor so we need a motor, yes? You remember." She gave him a sleepy grin and squinted at him appealingly. “Flexidryer there if you need to do your hair. Shower gel in the sachets next to the shampoo. Girl’s stuff is in the pink sachet.” Geraint grinned at her pretense of a frown. Nice to have her back here, he thought.

"I brought over some clothes from your flat. I wasn’t too particular, but at least there’s a selection.”

She gave a sleepy “Mmm” and reached out blindly to put her arms around him, half a hug and half just holding herself up.

“You okay?” he asked. She nodded dopily. Geraint decided she was coherent enough to carry out her ablutions in private, so he went out, closing the door behind him. The shower motor immediately hummed into life. She wouldn’t want any breakfast, he guessed, so he just dumped some oranges into the juicer and scooped some Kenyan into the coffeemaker.

While waiting he jacked into his deck and downloaded some data from the Korean index. After his stint in the House of Nobles, he was itching to make some money again.

Francesca emerged from the bath brushing her long, fair hair with the brush from the overnight bag he’d brought for her. Somehow he thought it was best not to give her the usual female guest things. He had intuited that she’d feel better finding her own possessions around her when she finally awoke. But he had been wrong about breakfast.

"Geraint, sorry, but I’m so hungry I could eat a horse. God, I could eat a troll." She sniffed at the brewing coffee, and gulped down the juice. “Smells good. What’s in the fridge?”

He remembered her tastes and had shopped accordingly. “Waffles, real thing, of course. Strawberry, ginger, and melon preserves. And you’re a real good girl. I might just be able to come up with some ham and eggs.”

She gave him a knowing smile. “Uh huh. And what do I have to do to be a real good girl?" It was the same kind of smile she used to give him in the days when they’d breakfasted under more intimate circumstances-a complication Geraint didn’t want now. The doctors at Maudsley had probably given her a subcutaneous implant; if so, it would play havoc with her neuroendocrines for a couple of days at least. This was certainly not the right time to get into all that again.

“Just sit down and watch the screens. Let me know if anything comes through from Manila. But don’t you dare let me find you with a datajack plugged in when I come back,” he said, heading for the kitchen as the lure of coffee drew her to the table.

“Damn it, Geraint, I’m getting a tummy,” she complained, rubbing her lower abdomen. This was after stuffing herself with smoked bacon and eggs and more waffles than he could remember toasting. The ginger and melon had taken a healthy bashing, too. He felt good.

“Well, Fran, we’re both closing in on the big three-oh. Just one of life’s little indignities, I’m afraid. Past twenty-eight and it’s all downhill from there. I can give you the address of a good shadow clinic if you’re really worried," he joked, but kept a perfectly straight face. They held hands, lost for a moment to the world.

Then the moment was gone, shattered by the buzz of the doorbell.

“Can’t think who that might be. Surely the God-squadders selling redemption wouldn’t get past security. Oh well.” Geraint got to his feet and padded off down the hall to use the intercom. It seemed like a lifetime since he’d heard the voice on the other end.

“Open the door, you Welsh poseur," the elf chirped. “I got the money and I made it back to the Smoke. Come on. Who’ve you got in there?"

Geraint felt awkward when he opened the door, but he embraced the mage, biting on his lower lip to conceal his emotion. "Serrin, ace it! I never thought I’d see you again. Hey, Fran’s here. She’s got troubles too…" But the elf had already seen Francesca standing at the end of the hall, watching in curiosity.

Serrin took in the scene before him and jumped to hasty conclusions. Francesca was wearing what looked like Geraint’s bathrobe, it was the middle of the day, what else could he conclude? He felt like an intruder on their happy little love-nest.

“Hey, look, if it isn’t a good time to-”

Geraint hushed him to silence. "Come in, come in," he said. “It’s been a little eventful all around lately.” He breathed out a sigh. "Guess we’ve got some catching up to do.” Geraint looked the elf up and down with a concerned eye. “Hell, you look skinnier than ever. Ham and eggs in the fridge, waffles ready for the toaster, go get yourself some brunch. Make some more coffee too. Go on, make yourself useful.”

The elf looked down at his scuffed shoes, uncertain how to behave.

"Sack of oranges out there," Geraint went on. “Squeeze a jugful. Go on, move it, move it!" He laughed good-naturedly as Serrin shuffled off to the kitchen, not sure where to look.

Francesca was staring at the pair of them, mystified.

"My life hasn’t been so quiet recently, either," he said by way of explanation, sitting down with her again. "Wait till we get some more coffee and juice and we can talk it all through."

Geraint steered Serrin’s curiosity away from Francesca’s mishaps in the Matrix. He thought she might not want to remember all the gory details right now, so instead he engaged the elf in reminiscences of that fateful night north of Cambridge.

“I don’t know who those other poor suckers were out at Longstanton, but I doubt any of ‘em got away alive." Serrin had recounted the broad details of their misadventure for Francesca’s benefit. "I dispelled the elemental that was after them, but the Fuchi guards probably got ‘em anyway. Poor bastards”

“I lost you, couldn’t see you in the dark,” Geraint said. “I stayed as long as I could, but then I had to make a run for it. The troopers were right on my tail. Clazz, that bike of yours is a rough ride.”

"Where is it? The rental company will get nasty if it’s not back tomorrow. Only took it for the week."

"Don’t worry. It’s extremely disreputable-looking but safe among the BMWs and Rollers in the garage downstairs Laughton got a nice tip to toss a tarpaulin over it and forget all about it. So, where’d you end up?”

Serrin spoke of the river serpent and the druid, but Geraint could see that the elf was not comfortable telling the story, becoming either over-discursive or vague on detail. He had clearly been affected by the experience. The mage shifted the conversation as soon as possible.

"Anyway, I managed to finish my report on the train down. Filed, sealed, and delivered. I was supposed to meet the delightful Smith and Jones yesterday, but they left an address for delivery with the hotel. And it must have arrived damn fast. I got my last few thou by straight debit over the desk.” He flourished a credstick happily.

Geraint was surprised. “But Serrin, aren’t you at all keen to know who was employing you? I mean, after what happened this weekend.

“Whoever hired me had nothing to do with that. Strictly solo, my chasing after Kuranita. They didn’t ask me to.”

“Mmm.” Something was nagging at the back of Geraint’s mind, but he let it pass. "Guess you’re right.”

Serrin was mumbling some thanks for the meal when Geraint suddenly got up and walked over to his work consoles.

“I think I want to check something out. Won’t be a minute. Talk amongst yourselves, ladies and gentlemen.” He jacked into his cyberdeck, leaving Serrin and Fran to catch up on the many years since last they’d met. For his part, Geraint was making a little run through the Matrix to the Crescent Hotel system. While the Americans were speaking of Paris, Florence, New York, and Nagoya, he was locating an entry in a datafile. Hotels usually only data-dumped at midnight.

The address Smith and Jones had left for Serrin was in Charterhouse Street, among a warren of tiny registered offices in the heart of the city. Most of them consisted of no more than one man with a dozen telecoms and wall-to-wall datastores.

Registration Services PLC was the name assigned to the address. That could mean anything: a fast-license service to deal with the Lord Protector’s Administrative Bureau, a business-data investigation franchise, maybe only a drop address. He engaged the browse program, cursing the names Smith and Jones. If they were McAllister and Hendrick, they’d be a damn sight easier to find.

The icon of the little browse clerk had just reached the fat Jones file when a subfile slipped neatly out of the folder and whipped through the datastore’s far node. Deleted, headed for limbo. Geraint followed it, the clerk puffing and panting beside the icon of his knight. Hell, I ought to reconfigure that program, he thought idly. Make it a squire or something more appropriate.

Limbo he perceived as a mortuary, a little flourish of his occasionally morbid sense of humor. The clerk checked name tags, flipped back a sheet, and jotted down a swift note. In the distance, the white-coated attendants were immobile. Datafiles would only be permanently erased at the end of the working day, and from the dated tags on the slabs it looked as if Registration Services hadn’t made its final deletions as promptly as they should have. He made his way hack to the main datastore, where the clerk hummed and hawed as he flicked through the Smiths and Joneses. Geraint made another mental note to upgrade his browse program sometime.

It had taken under a minute. He gave instructions for data compilation and left the laser printer to its work. That took less than a minute too. By the time Francesca and Serrin had journeyed as far as Cairo in their talk, Geraint was back at the table, leafing through the 129 entries.

The entry that got deleted just as he’d entered the datastore was one of the possible candidates. “Jones, Melvin Aloysius.” Aloysius? "Opened an account with Registration Services PLC two days before you were approached, Serrin. Only one other Jones from the start of November, and he’s got a very plush address in Hampstead. Anyway, Mellie-boy simply used the place as a dead-letter drop. Nothing else received that’s been recorded. Oh ho! Surprise, surprise, look at this. Package received at eleven forty-four this morning.” It was the other entry below that which was really making his mind spin. "When did you send it off, Serrin?”

“Just before eleven."

“And you got paid-when?”

“Money was there when I checked out. Just before noon." The mage frowned, unsure or unwilling to discover where all this was leading.

“Does that tell you something?” The elf’s face betrayed no insight.

“What it means is one of two things. If they weren’t expecting anything else and didn’t want to check the package you sent from the Crescent, they made the payment by electronic transfer. Or else they collected the package and then paid you. If so, they collected it within, oh, say, ten minutes. No way would Registration Services have been able to deliver it that fast. Someone must have been there waiting."

“Maybe Registration Services checked it for them, then notified them and paid me.”

"No way. These people get paid precisely because they don’t check packages. Strictly monkey see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. For one thing, checking the package would risk having to deal with the official licensing hassles." Geraint stood again and strode back to his console. “Let’s have a look at the record."

The printout took two seconds, since he knew exactly what he was looking for in the data. "Well, I never. Package is recorded as delivered by hand and received at eleven forty-four. Same time receipt and dispatch. Someone was there to collect it. Now, don’t tell me they were hanging around all day on the off chance you might come up trumps after a no-show at yesterday’s meeting. Seems to me like someone knew when you would be delivering."

There was a long silence, broken by Serrin’s next query. “Is there an address in the file, a forwarding address of any sort?"

“No forwarding address. They have to give a home address, though, for administrative purposes." Geraint sounded almost scornful. “Good old-fashioned British red tape has its uses for deckers sometimes. All that admin needs a lot of data storage. Unfortunately, it’s somewhere in Goiania.”

“Where the frag’s Goiania?” Serrin said.

“It’s a tiny oasis of, oh, about six million down the road from Brasilia.” He remembered it because he’d gotten lucky with transactions on some of the last of the minerals down there. “Did, um, Smith and Jones strike you as, ah, South American in any way?"

“Are you kidding? About as much as your old granny.” Francesca joined in the smiles at that.

They were stymied for the moment. Geraint suggested that one of them could visit Registration Services with a hefty bribe, but that probably wouldn’t work. One whiff of indiscretion and such an agency was dead. On the other hand, their ilk sprang up like weeds every day. If one got a bad name among the corporations, all they had to do was relocate somewhere else in the city under a new one. Maybe there was a chance after all.

The one final worry was that Serrin’s employers must, at the very least, have had a spy at the Crescent Hotel. Seeing the elf arrive there, or maybe just bribing a hotel clerk to alert him to that fact, the spy could have gotten over to Registration Services by the time the package arrived.

They were stuck again, and sat looking at each other blankly for a bit. Finally Serrin shrugged and began to ask Francesca what she’d been doing while he and Geraint were getting shot at over the weekend. After a long pause, she described her encounters with the bizarre figure in the Matrix, but she was obviously avoiding the details.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before. After the first time I thought about hunting him down, but after the second, 1 think I’d prefer not to see him again.” She gave a little shiver. “I haven’t analyzed my deck to find out where he went the second time. I was so busy hunting I didn’t really register the SAN I’d passed. My deck will have the information, though. The first time the bastard went into the Transys Neuronet subsystem, which is not somewhere I really want to stick my pretty little nose."

Just then Serrin had a moment of complete illumination, almost an epiphany. Slapping one hand to his forehead, he shushed Francesca, then leaned back dramatically in his chair. Spreading his arms wide, he managed to avoid falling backward solely by the expedient of getting his feet stuck under the table. As he struggled to regain his balance and composure, the other two broke into gales of laughter. When they finally stopped, the mage revealed what he’d understood at last.

"Look, this is important. I just realized something. I told you that what I was doing at Cambridge was a waste of time, yes? Astral checks, watchers, detections around all the places-Fuchi, Renraku, ATT, Parawatch, blah di bloody blah. But why was I watching those people? What I should have seen was who 1 wasn ‘t watching.

“Transys Neuronet is out at Over, just north of Long-stanton. I wasn’t asked to check them.”

The druid shaman’s words floated back into Serrin’s mind: bad energies, a place north of the Fuchi complex. Same place?

It didn’t take Geraint long to download maps and files. They spread them out across the table, pushing the swath of greasy plates onto a service trolley and rolling back the linen tablecloth.

Serrin pointed out various locations on the first map. “Look at this other stuff. Strictly small time. And right on the edge of the Stinkfens and who the hell would want to be there? Cost a fortune in detox if you wanted anything serious. Fly-by-night places. Probably making demitech and dodgy cyberware.” Serrin’s mind was beginning to race now. "Transys is the only important target I wasn’t asked to check. Now I’m beginning to wonder.”

They each chased their own thoughts for a time, trying to put it all together. After a while, Geraint slapped his hands on the table. “What have we got?” he said. "Francesca chases something wild into the Transys subsystem here in London. But it was something she met purely by accident. So what?"

Francesca disagreed. "Who says I met it by accident? And don’t forget, the second time I was specifically asked not to enter any other system apart from the Fuchi subsidiary where I was virus-dumping."

“Fuchi?" Serrin hadn’t heard any of the details of Francesca’s run. There hadn’t been time yet. "But we were out at a Fuchi installation."

“Unbidden. No one asked us to go,” Geraint observed dryly. "But let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that it was Transys paying you. That’s why they didn’t want you snooping around their place.”

“Yeah, okay, but why? They have mages a dam sight fancier than me. So why bring me all the way from Seattle to snoop somewhere just down the road from one of their own research labs, and in a totally pointless way?”

"I don’t know the answer to that,” Francesca said, "but just as you were told, implicitly, that Transys was a no-go area, so was I, indirectly.” Francesca was beginning to look more alive and alert. "What about that?"

“And we all ended up with something related to Fuchi." Serrin was chasing that theme again. “So, is Transys hiring us to shaft Fuchi? Poisoning a Matrix system and taking pot-shots at a big wheel at Longstanton?”

“Nobody asked us to get Kuranita,” Geraint insisted. He just couldn’t see a way past that. “And what about those other poor sods who got burned at Longstanton? Did Transys hire people for a raid that hadn’t a hope in hell? Strange thing to do, paying people to make a complete hash of everything. Francesca was hired to make a real hit, which she did. It just doesn’t match up.” Gemini retreated to the coffee maker.

The argument went on for at least two more hours, but they just kept treading over the same territory and running into the same blocks.

By the time the sky had washed from gray to black over the rain-lashed streets of London, Francesca had begun to stifle a series of yawns. Serrin, meanwhile, had begun to cough heavily, getting almost red in the face.

"You need something for that,” Geraint said, heading for the bathroom.

"Yeah, it didn’t get any better in the Stinkfens.” Serrin turned his chair around to face the departing figure. “If it hadn’t been for that lady I’d probably have died of pneumonia.”

When Geraint returned he was carrying a big glass bottle filled with viscous brown liquid.

"What the frag is that?" the mage complained as he took the bottle. "Dr. Jerome Browne’s Original Victorian Cough Syrup. This some kind of joke?”

"No, dear boy. Most assuredly not. Prescription only. Works like a charm. Uses a tried and true recipe from East Anglia. That land has always been thick with mists and general unhealthiness, and this stuff was all the rage two hundred years ago. The original mix came back on the market a few years back. I swear by the stuff.”

“Swear at it more likely. It smells like some monster with killer gut-trouble got this bottle stuck up its-”

“Shut up and take a good mouthful, you coward,” Geraint taunted.

The elf complied, spluttering and pulling a disgusted face at the filthy taste. "Oh, that’s evil. Are you sure it works?”

"Just wait and see.” The noble did not think it prudent to tell Serrin that the original recipe included laudanum and a nice shot of opium to soothe the inflamed membranes of the lung lining. By the time Geraint had put on his overcoat to go check out the contact address, his two friends were both sound asleep in the chairs where they sat.

The man flicked at a grease spot on his tie with a vestige of irritation as his subordinate passed through the automatic door. The waiting game was almost over.

“What was in the report?”

"Oh, very punctilious. Dates, times, places, expenses. He’d make a wonderful bureaucrat."

The figure lounging in the recliner snorted derisively. “Doubt it. Indeed, we’re hoping that’s precisely what he wouldn’t make. Did they make checks?"

“Uh-huh. Checked the Registration Services system. We triggered the Jones file when the Welshman came browsing. He grabbed it from limbo, thinking he was being real clever.”

Sniffing and exhaling, the older man brought his hands together in his lap, a study in concentration now.

“Well, there really shouldn’t have been anything in there. I think it would have been too much to leave any trail in that file. They’d have smelled a rat."

“What do you think they’ll do?”

"They’ve got lots of avenues to explore, but I doubt Ms. Young will be doing much Matrix-hopping. We sit tight. It won’t be long now anyway.”

“We could take the kidney option." They shared an unpleasant laugh.

“No, I think we were right to reject that one. Someone in the Met police might have begun to wonder if we’d dished up that little item to the Chief Superintendent. We can’t be sure they’ll try the police again anyway. Besides, maybe Swanson wouldn’t dispense the information. No, let’s wait. The pot’s stirred and they’re resourceful enough. After all, that’s why we chose them."

Now the wheels begin to turn more swiftly. Elizabeth Stride does not suspect what is going to happen to her, but it will be swift, final, and terribly messy.