“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. Lets 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 white, 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 train 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 flutter? 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 lack 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 unexpected. 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.”
“The murders?”
“Well, of course, the first one nobody would even notice. The second we’d park right on your doorstep. Wasn’t that convenient? Part of the reason we selected you, of course. If we'd had an Annie Chapman closer to another of your friends, we’d have roped them in somehow. We had contingencies.”
I don’t doubt it, Geraint thought.
As if reading his mind, the man leaned forward slightly lo emphasize a point. “It cost us a fair bit, you know. We actually had to pay Elizabeth Stride to change her name by deed poll a year ago, just to fit in with the series. She was humble Jane Dews before. But perhaps you know that already.”
That’s one thing I didn’t check, Geraint reflected. Name changes. Clazz, I should have had the sense to find that one out.
“After the second murder, we knew you’d be hooked. We paid Ms. Young to make the Fuchi runs, and our experimental construct worked pretty well.”
Geraint interrupted him. “But I thought Fuchi was a good customer of yours.”
“Well, they are, but so arc all manner of people. That’s business.” He shrugged almost innocently. “Anyway, the Transys London system is very lax because they’ve been concentrating all their resources on the Scottish HQ. It was so easy to get our little Jack-in-the-Matrix into that subsystem. Actually, our purpose was merely for Young to see the IC complex, not necessarily to be harmed by it. Annie Chapman’s murder would have been enough. She was involved then, just like the elf was after seeing Kuranita. With her history, she’d have to be. Got her psychiatric reports after that San Francisco business, you know.
“So, with the mage in, and the decker in, you had to be. You were all old friends, and our file says you and Ms. Young haven’t exactly been cool toward each other in the past.” He smirked unpleasantly.
“But how could you know about Catherine Eddowes? How could you know that I-”
“Ah. well now, you’ll learn a little morn about that later. That one helped to drag you in a bit further, didn’t it? We didn’t actually expect you to arrive there, you know, not so fast. Our security was a bit on the light side for that one. That’s when we realized you were better than we’d thought.”
“So, we shipped Mary Kelly out of sight for a while. Here’s something you’ll love: she was the main decker who worked on the Ripper construct for us. Isn’t chat lovely? Of course, she didn’t know it was a Ripper. Whacked her full of hypnoconditioning and neuroactives and she just did it by automatic configurings right out of her nightmares. Totally amnesic afterward, She was putty in our hands. Dozy bitch.”
Geraint leaned back, wearily. He’d never dreamed any of this might have been going on. He was tired, depressed, defeated. Still the explanations kept coming.
“The fact that there were lots of Mary Kellys you could check was both a good thing and a bad thing for us. Good because you’d be occupied tracking them down for the whole damn week, bad because it made it harder for us to point you at the right bloody one. We took a while to figure that one out, I can tell you. Meanwhile, we simply suppressed all the data regarding our little Typhoid Mary, got her out of sight, let you waste a week-or most of it-with the others and then, presto! Up she pops. And when she did, you knew for sure it had to be the right one, because the others were hopeless, let’s face it.”