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 swam 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 this 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 speakers 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, hut 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 emigre 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 ot enzymes entirely. The mad boffin, as our wonderful free press will no doubt dub him, made some startling advances in that department.”