“Okay, you guys just keep together. Like I say, it’s tomorrow we expect the drek to hit the fan. Now I’m out of here; I’ve got some other work to do.”
Just two more Mary Kellys on the list. She might get around to the first tonight, but it was getting a little late and Rani decided not to take any chances alone on the street, not even with a heavy pistol in her jacket and a Uzi in her carryall. It would have to wait until the morning.
The others had agonized long and hard over the question of where to stay once they got back in London. They needed total privacy and protection, but couldn’t risk having a security firm around while plotting their moves. Despite the certain knowledge that their enemies knew the exact location of Geraint’s flat, it seemed the only viable choice. He settled for the discreet security outside and the new bulletproof glass and security systems inside. Not much short of assault cannons could get to them now, and the licensed security mages outside gave them as much protection as anyone could hope for against subtler infiltrations. For good measure Serrin also placed watchers around the building.
By noon, the computers were overheating, the telecoms beeping, and the data downloading.
“Right. London Security is posted at the second-level targets, the possibles. We’re down to eleven left to trace and, ah”-Geraint paused as another download came up on the screens-“make that ten. Mary Christine Kelly of Acacia Avenue, Neasden, is currently visiting her aged mother in a charming suburban crumpler somewhere in deepest, darkest Kent. Anyway, she’s a nice person. Goes to church every week, member of the Universal Brotherhood, according to this, Well, well. I think we can knock her off the list.”
“A crumpler? What’s that?” Serrin wasn’t entirety familiar with the more arcane Britspeak.
“A place where old folks go to crumple quietly. Their sympathetic young relatives prefer them somewhere out of sight.”
“By God, Geraint, look at this stuff. Where do you get this kind of detailed information about people? It’s damn scary.” Francesca was astonished at the sheer depth of data she was trawling.
“Francesca, dearest, it’s not for nothing that I'm a nobleman with friends in government and the corps, that I’m familiar with common and semi-restricted databases, and also an occasional employer of security services. One of the mixed blessings of living in our over-regulated society is that so much information is stored somewhere or other on almost everybody. The government sells a lot of it to various commercial concerns to raise money for the Exchequer. For a fee, those same concerns will allow access to the information. You’d be surprised what all kinds of people know about you. For example, only this morning I learned about the plastic surgery you had at Guy’s. Frankly, I think your nose looked cute the way it was.” He smiled broadly at Francesca’s half-angry, half-startled look.
By tea time, they’d whittled the list of potential targets down to a much more manageable four. Three looked possible: two women with convictions for prostitution, and a tea-leaf reader from Tir Nan Og whose files referred to the high proportion of male clients among her clients.
“She’s way out in SX, though, pretty suburban. Really doesn’t seem the right district. You know, apart from Annie, these murders have all taken place in the right locations, more or less. Right districts, at the very least. None of these three would fit that pattern, but it’s the best we have. I’m going to run the semantics package on them to see what that does.”
“What?” Serrin hadn’t a clue to what command Geraint was planning to give the bewildering array of electronic hardware now.
“Francesca and I went back over the four murders and used a template system to compare everything we could find on the original Ripper killings. Fran did most of the work actually, bless her.” Serrin could sense her smile from where he was sitting, though she was facing the screens.
“We banged in all the known past history of the victims, place names, locations, all the incidental details. Then we compared it to other people with the same names in London. The four names came out as the likeliest possible targets by virtue of the factors we included in the analysis. They were all prostitutes, the districts they lived in and where they were killed were similar, and there were some odd curves thrown out. Like, the original Annie Chapman’s body was found in Hanbury Street, while Fran’s friend of the same name was found slain in her flat in Hanbury Court. part of a building of another name. That was weird.”
“It’s almost as if someone else did a similar comparison to choose the right victims.” Serrin was pondering what he’d just heard. “As if the women were selected by computer.”
“That occurred to me, too. If Transys is testing a personality chip with these killings, it wouldn’t be out of character for them at all. They’re famous for the meticulousness of their tests. But the one remaining problem is the Mary Kellys we’ll never be able to find.”
Francesca was bent over one of the multiple screen arrays, but she’d been listening. “The Squeeze download, such as it is, is a pure shambles. It’s almost impossible to keep tabs on people. There are five Mary Kellys there, but the data is all marked incomplete, too dated, too many unknowns. If they’re going to hit one of them, we’ll never be able to stop them.”
Serrin sat bolt upright. “But then, someone living in the Squeeze wouldn’t be the target! Think about it. Even if you had spies checking around in that place, it would be desperately hard to make sure your victim was in the right place at the right time, right?”
“He’s got something there,” Geraint conceded. “No one finds it easy to monitor what goes on in the Squeeze. After the genetic manipulation disaster that the corps tried when the Squeeze was first formed, the people there hate corporations of any stripe. A corporate spy would have a very short life span among them.”
“Don’t I know it,” Francesca sighed. “That’s why the data I’m getting from my British Industrial source is such drek. Even they can’t get more than fragmentary data, and they’re right on the spot.”
“So lets take a chance,” Geraint suggested. “Lets say that the difficulties inherent in the Squeeze mean they wouldn’t select a target there. That leaves us our two hookers and the tea-leaf reader. They're the only realistic targets we have left since Rani called. The last two East Enders don’t fit at all. We take the top probability target, stake it out, and leave my security people with the other two.”
“The police?” Serrin offered the suggestion, but only as a matter of formality.
“Waste of time. They’ll consider it a wild goose chase. Frankly, London Security will handle it better.”
“We could kidnap the three of them, as it were. Place them under our protection somewhere. Bring them here” Again. Serrin was fishing for solutions.
“No way. We want to get the killers, and that means we need to use the targets as bait. It sounds bloody cold and callous, but I’m also thinking about the four women they’ve already killed. They deserve their murderers being brought to justice. With the security we can provide, the trap will be a deadly one unless they bring a coach-load of troll samurai and enough mages to light up the whole of St. Paul’s for a week.”