“But she wasn’t out of sight. Rani said-”
“Ah yes. Saw her in that disgusting baldrick foodhole. Unfortunate that. Our man shouldn’t have let her out. She was drugged to the eyeballs and kept under surveillance up to the last minute. Mohinder staged that very well.”
“Mohinder?” Another defeat. Another snake. Another thing he simply hadn’t seen.
“Great fellow, huh? Quite a moralist too. Refused point-blank to box any of you after the run. Won’t kill anyone who’s paid him money in good faith, how about that? So we didn’t compromise his morals. Actually, you know I think he wanted to jump that smelly little Indian girly’s bones. Rather him than me, I must say.”
“He had quite a key role; he knew where the security was in Kelly’s hidey-hole and he had the vidlink to make sure you got the evidence. Needless to say, I’m afraid Mr. Mohinder is somewhere at the bottom of the Thames by now. We really couldn’t risk letting him live. He wont be missed, I’m sure. He didn’t know exactly who he was working for. obviously, but we really couldn’t take any chances.”
“You could have killed us all with the meat and muscle you had in that final battle,” Geraint said.
“No, not really. Mohinder knew what the opposition might be. You were well up to the job. Anyway, to let you in on a little secret, we did wire some very nice glitches into the weapons our folks carried. Buggered up their aiming completely within a hundred yards or so of your car. Very simple little telemetry toy, Practice with the gun out of range, works as sweet as anything. Put it next to your Saab, you couldn’t shoot your granny off`a commode ten yards away. So our people looked fierce. but they were pussycats. Really. The mage with the elemental actually got a bullet in the back or the head from a cover sniper of ours. We wanted the scene for show, not to turn you into noble toastie.” He sniggered.
“Most of the rest is incidental detail. We had the police under our thumb, obviously. We had certain contacts make sure Swanson got panicky messages from Annie Chapman’s nobleman clients. I think you overlooked that one. The killing wasn’t publicized, so how did those people get in touch with the police so fast? But, then, poor old PC Plod’s daughter has been a very naughty girl herself. We have the photographs to prove it. Poor old sod would fall apart if it got out. So he was only too happy to keep it quiet and on the back burner.”
“But, the media. You couldn’t have known that we wouldn’t go to the media.” The two men exchanged glances behind their shades.
“Yes, I must give you that one, my lord. That was the one calculated risk we took. We decided you almost certainly would not do so initially, because you had escalating levels of personal involvement and your own curiosity would make you want to investigate on your own. Once you’d gone to the media, you’d have lost that chance. That’s one of the reasons we tossed Kuranita into the pot, as I’ve said, It gave the mage very personal reasons to be involved. Same with Ms. Young and her dead friend, not to mention the Ripper construct in the Matrix. That also served to make you confused; there was so much that didn’t seem connected, right?”
Geraint had to nod in agreement
“And you, you’re conservative by nature. So you’d want time to try to piece it all together. Our top shrink said you wouldn’t blow the whistle until you’d gotten a high level of personal satisfaction from your own involvement, all of you, and he was right. Guess we should slip him a bonus for that. When you did finally go to the media, it couldn’t have suited us better.
“Thank you. Lord Llanfrechfa.”
Signed, sealed, delivered. The logic of it was inexorable. There was almost nothing left to say, apart from a couple of final queries.
“But why a Ripper? Why the hell would anyone believe that Transys would want to clone him, rather than their own executives, for example?”
“Because they’re a megacorporatlon, and our glorious British public knows that megacorporations are bastards. And research scientists are mad boffins, right? Oh, there are theoretical reasons, too. Such as, it is important to know that it is possible to successfully clone even an old and degraded sample of DNA. Working that out is easiest if you try to clone someone with known and extreme behavioral patterns, right? You can test the validity of your experiment best when you can more easily appraise the outcome. Then again, the Brazilian scientist was obsessive; he had a personal thing about serial killers. Sick, sad man. Its just what he wanted to do, and then Transys took the experiment over, as it were. We’ve established all that in the data we had leaked to the press.”
“The Duke of Clarence? He was really the original Ripper?”
The suits burst into peals of amused laughter.
“Good God, almost certainly not! No one has any idea who the original Ripper was, well, not really. We cloned him because we wanted a Royal involvement. You’ll find out more about that later, too. He was the one Royal possible in the frame. The clone was conditioned to become a Ripper, sir. A whole year of dream conditioning, psychodrama, subliminals, neuroactives, sadistic surrogates, you name it, we pumped him full of it. We patterned his innate psychosis, or rather, our insiders at Cambridge did. Stuffed him full of the original scenes, stories, and rumors. Boy, did he have a downer on whores when we were through with him.” The men shook their heads and sighed quietly.
“Well, we’re going to take you home now. Very soon, there’ll be a huge gaggle of reptiles from the media outside your front door. Wouldn’t be surprised if they started bribing your security and getting up to all sorts of shameful mischief to get a story. Tomorrow, you'll have to give them the full monty on how you caught the Ripper.”
“Incidentally, I’m sure I hardly need point out that you don’t have a thing on us. We spent seventeen million nuyen and almost three years on this, and you won’t find anything. You’re smart enough to have tracked the purchasing of Transys shares to us, but that could just be insider knowledge. It would only prove we have someone inside Transys, that’s all. The Cambridge lab was stripped out in midweek. There is nothing left to show that the project ever existed. Trust me on this.”
His face was grim and Geraint knew it was true. People who could go to such lengths really wouldn’t have left anything to chance.
“And, sir, you wouldn’t want to hurt your friends. Mr. Shamandar thinks he has avenged his parents, doesn’t he? It would be tragic for him to learn, as he certainly would, that the datafile you got at was, ah, slightly modified. It would pain him deeply to know that he has just delivered Transys to the company that really paid for his parents death.”
“As I say, Fuchi is a good client of ours. When Kuranhta was unable to continue working as a samurai, we were happy to pass him along. Most people thought he was a freelancer. We knew better.” He smiled warmly. Oh, neural implants can buy such loyalty. You never betray a company that can turn your brain to soggy mush in five seconds flat. Those mycotoxins are lovely agents. don’t you think?” The second man grinned his agreement.
“Then again, Ms. Young feels she has avenged her friend Annie Chapman. Wouldn’t it cut her to the quick to learn that she has done nothing of the kind? That she’s just handed a billion-nuyen company over to the people who really killed Annie Chapman? From what I read in her psychiatric files, well, she just might suffer some kind of permanent breakdown if she learned that. I don’t think that’s something you’d want to risk with your ex-lover, I really don’t.”