“You don’t say?” Mohinder’s expression changed totally. “And you couldn’t find her?”
“Between me and my friends we’ve found scores of Mary Kellys, but they’re all dead ends. No one fits the bill.”
The samurai twisted in his chair and called to the men.
“Hey, Scirea! You know Typhoid?”
Scirea grinned. “Sure do. Crazy blooming decker. Bit of a trancer, head full of drek with too many rags she shot up and some of that tanking stuff. She used to work for me. Wasn’t bad when she was younger. Used to take payment in kind sometimes.”
The men around him sniggered unpleasantly. Rani realized they were talking about one of the women Scirea’s family pimped for. She was disgusted by them as they laughed again.
Meanwhile, though, Mohinder was tapping a number into his telecom. A vacant-faced girl appeared on the screen. She had hair dyed black, mascara that looked like she’d put it on with a spoon, black lipgloss, and an expression somewhere between hopelessness and complete despair.
Rani’s mind triggered a memory: the Toadslab restaurant. After she’d sold Mohinder the Predator. Her.
“Yeah” The woman’s voice was virtually robotic.
“Typhoid? What you doing right now?” Mohinder was grinning like a crocodile.
“Mohinder? Hey, guy, thanks for the little loan, y’know. Pay you back soon as I can.” Her expression, and all of her vacant hand-waving, did nothing to suggest that it would be too soon.
“Typhoid, baby, tell me something simple. What’s your real name? I mean, we all call you Typhoid Mary, but what’s the real thing?”
She was suspicious. Panda eyes narrowed sharply through her chemically assisted fog. “What you want to know for? You freelancing for the poll-tax hunters?”
“Come on, honey, you know me better than that. Tell you what, we’ll forget those few nuyen. Just speak your name to Mohinder.”
That persuaded her like nothing else ever could. She spoke the words slowly, in a childlike voice, as if remembering what she’d been called in a dim and distant past when someone actually cared about her.
“Kelly,” said Typhoid Mary. “Mary Jane Kelly.”
Geraint whooped in delight. “My God, even the second name is right. Mary Jane Kelly, a young hooker in Whitechapel. This is it! This is bloody it!”
Serrin and Francesca grinned back at him. All the tension of the day evaporated from the room like a puddle on a sunny day.
She isn’t in any register because of the tax evasion, and if she’s a decker she can make enough to stay out of sight and pay people to lie about her. This has to be the one. No time to run the analysis programs and we don’t have the additional data, but we’re ready now. They’re on their way to protect her, Rani says. Greatorex Street, Whitechapel. If they plan to kill her tomorrow, we’ll be there almost an hour in advance. Come on, people, this is it. At last.”
32
The Saab screeched into Greatorex Street at eleven minutes past the hour. They’d been delayed by a random police patrol, in which a pair of blase officers had tested the alcohol levels of Geraint’s breath. To everyone’s fury, they’d had to sit for more than ten minutes behind a line of five other cars stopped for the same reason. The only good thing about the delay was that it gave them time to pay the samurai in the car.
Heading down the right road at last, they could see two figures standing under the streetlight outside the address Rani had given them. Geraint picked out the Indian girl easily; the other he didn’t know. Serrin was leaping out of the passenger door almost before Geraint had parked the car.
“She look off!” Rani was calling out. “We told her someone was out to hurt her and she should stay put until we got here. Said we would only be a few minutes, but she got crazy and she’s bloody gone and left,” Rani yelled breathlessly.
Serrin turned and slammed his fist into the roof of the car.
“It was my fault,” Mohioder said calmly. “I shouldn’t have warned her. Should have come over without saying why. But she’s so unpredictable she might have gone out anyway.” He grinned at the elf. “hello, pixie. I won’t shake hands.” The retractables flashed from his fingers.
“I sent my people out to look and talk to folks, and made a couple of calls,” Mohinder continued as Geraint and Francesca joined the listening throng. “There’re a couple of places she might go, and a bar or two where we might find her. She doesn’t have many places to go to ground. We’ll get her. You can bet on it.”
“But how long will that take?” the nobleman demanded.
Serrin stifled Geraint’s impatience. “Look. Geraint, if we can’t find her, then neither can they. And we’ve got local people to give us an edge in the search.”
“Unless the killers already had the place staked out with spies of their own,” Francesca muttered. She looked up at the elf in a moment of understanding, and he switched his perceptions immediately, probing for a mage in the area, he had to be there. Serrin found him for an instant, before the masking shut him out. He got a strong impression of movement, receding into the distance, and that gave him a fix.
“Just to the southwest. He must be in a car. They’re heading just south of west. It’s got to be them.”
“Bury Street.” Mohinder was emphatic. ‘She knows old Jen, the owner of a flophouse there. Takes her food and stuff sometimes. She used to work near there when she was still on the streets, I remember. If she’s gone that way, that’s where she’ll be. For sure.”
They were already piling into the car as Scirea and the dwarf joined them from the shadows. Mohinder was phoning his other samurai, telling them where to meet up. There was no time to drive around to pick them up now.
“Didn’t know you could get seven people into one of these things,” Francesca grumbled.
“Honey, you can’t. Come sit on my lap,” Mohinder suggested, licking his ups.
She scowled and opted for Rani’s instead.
The group of samurai whipped out of the darkness of an alleyway as the Saab hurtled down the road. The fire from their automatic weapons ripped into the car, but Geraint had installed a strobe blast that augmented the headlights. He flicked the anti-strobing window modulators as everyone inside the Saab ducked their heads and the back windows wound down. The windscreen could take one good burst for sure; after that it was down to luck and a prayer.
Then Geraint stopped the car on a dime. Because of the stroboscopic lighting one of the samurai couldn’t get out of the way in time, his cybereye mods become useless. From the impact Geraint guessed that he’d knocked the guy down, but he probably wasn’t out. The second samurai had taken an expertly directed burst from Rani’s Uzi as the car hurtled toward him, and the gaping holes in his body armor showed that ballistic had been no protection against the volley of bullets.
Though Serrin had a protective barrier spell running, the column of fire he saw shimmering down the street told him he wasn’t going to be able to keep sustaining the spell because he’d need his concentration somewhere else.
The third samurai was changing a clip, ready to pump lead into the back-seat passengers as they got out of the car, but he never got the chance. Scirea had his sleeves rolled up as the car entered the street, and the tube strapped to his forearm delivered a small metal globe straight into the samurai’s torso. It must be some kind of grenade, Rani thought, but she couldn’t guess what sort or how it was fired. The demitech worked, though. The samurai reeled back, sticky flame burning and licking across his clothes and body. His screams were like needles in her ears.
They poured out of the car, reflexes boosted to maximum one way or another. Others were working on pure unaugmented adrenaline, but they were all afire.
Serrin moved to the side of the road, into shadow, concentrating on combating the raging elemental bearing down upon them. Here we go again, he thought gloomily. Why do I seem to spend so much of my life trying to deal with these fraggers? Francesca moved to his side, covering him with her pistol.