Streets of blood

7

Serrin sneaked up quietly behind a peaceful Geraint, who sat reading his Financial Times in the breakfast room at the unspeakably early hour of seven-thirty in the morning. The seminars were to start at nine, but still no sign of most of the hotel’s honorable sirs and ladies so early in the day.

The Welshman was too engrossed in the headlines to notice Serrin’s soft footfall.

“One day, Geraint, you’re going to catch some rather unpleasant social disease. Mind if I sit with you?" Serrin didn’t await the reply, but instead took the chair opposite and began to help himself to grapefruit slices from the silver bowl.

"I didn’t think you’d noticed me, old man,” Geraint said, looking up from another fiercely worded editorial railing against the stale of the British economy. "You seemed in rather a hurry as I was arriving. Welcome to the dreaming spires of Cambridge.” He proffered a lordly hand in greeting.

Serrin waved away the formality. "I had people to bribe. I saw you when I got back from out of town. Just before midnight in the coffee shop with a most disreputable-looking young woman. Like I said, chummer, mind you don’t catch something.”

“I’ve been inoculated against most of what’s out there, and anyway she was very drunk. It wouldn’t have been right, don’t you know; true gentlemen don’t behave like that. Anyway, you old reprobate, what have you been doing these last seven years-and what brings you to England?”

They settled down to reminiscences of time apart as the room began to fill around them. Serrin spoke of years in hotel rooms, orbitals, and shuttles, the skeletal details of one or two of his many runs. Geraint noted the lack of any personal revelations. The elf always did hide behind lists: numbers, cities, dates, and places. Serrin didn’t speak of L.A. or the Bay area. But that had been so long ago, and they had been so young and a lot less knowing of the ways of the world.

Serrin had grown thinner, Geraint observed as he studied the other’s face. He noticed, too, that the elf’s hands shook just a little now. Though Serrin had been shot up seriously not long before he and Geraint first met, the elf had possessed an energy in those days that now seemed to have turned in on him. Behind the effort to appear glad and pleased to see his friend again, Geraint felt a little saddened.

“So that’s about it. Amsterdam, Paris, Seattle, and now the delights of the bally old Smoke for this year. But hey! What about you? I read a profile of you in one of the UCAS business datanets sometime last spring. They tipped you as one of the fifty brightest comers in European speculative finances. If you’d been a racehorse, I’d have backed you to win the Derby!”

Geraint broke into a bright srnile as he opened a new pack for the first cigarette of the day. Serrin reached across and helped himself, dismissing the silver lighter as he struck an old-fashioned rnatch and lit both their cigarettes. Feigning a voice from an ancient American detective movie and pulling an imaginary raincoat closer to his neck to keep out non-existent rain, he whispered, “I wuz pleased to see my hurnble match lit as brightly as the dude’s flashy Zippo.”

Geraint leaned back and locked Serrin in a close gaze. "You always could raise a smile, old friend. I looked for you after it was all over, you know. I hoped that someone in Tir Tairngire might have been able to give rne a lead, but you’d gone to ground and your people were very silent. Very polite, but very silent. I didn’t forget you." Their fingers reached out, and they held their hands clasped strongly for a few seconds across the table.

"I know.” The elf’s voice was soft and his expression downcast. “Geraint, it was all too much for me. I was older than you, but I guess I felt I could never hold on to anyone I cared for. Not after the killings there. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to, not since my parents died. I guess Ijust keep running. If I keep moving, and I keep doing things, then I’m always going to be alive. If I stop, I see that my hands are shaking and my leg pains me. That’s what I get if…"

His voice trailed away, and he took a deep drag on the cigarette, coughing slightly as he began to stub out half its length in the cut-glass ashtray. Then his expression changed, and he leaned forward across the table.

“Geraint, there’s something going on here that I don’t understand. Paul Kuranita’s here under a false name. Registered as James Kuruyama.” Geraint looked startled, uncertain what to say. “You know what that means to me.”

"For God’s sake, am you sure?” the Welshman hissed.

"Positive. I spent two years building up his profile from the records of all his operations. Cost me half a million to trace everything, but there isn’t any doubt. What the hell is he doing here?"

“Look, don’t be too hasty. The seminars and lectures go on until seven o’clock tomorrow night. Don’t do anything foolish; let’s both try to find out something about it. Know where he’s staying?"

“Hotel ID had him in the Chiltern Suite." Serrin looked grim.

“Give me a couple of hours. I’m down for a real stinker at ten, a three-hour marathon on drug markets and viral degeneration syndromes. Basically it comes down to how many billions of nuyen the drug companies can make out of the crumblies before they hit their ninetieth birthdays. I have people to see there, and I need to be seen nodding enthusiastically during their speeches, if I can force down enough coffee to stay awake, that is. I'll inquire very discreefly about-Kuruyama?”

Geraint began leafing through his massive collection of brochures. "I have a feeling he’s down as a teleconferencer: not attending seminars, just watching from his hotel room. It’s what the paranoids do if they don’t want a legion of trolls with automatic weapons around them every second of the day. But think it’s just possible that at some stage he might want a face-to-face with someone over a few drinks. Let me check this out and get back to you. Give me-no, not a couple of hours. Meet me here for lunch."

Geraint leaned forward and fixed the American with his steely gaze. “Don’t do anything crazy in the interim. If it is Kuranita, you won’t be able to get to him unless you’ve got a grenade launcher with you. And even that might not be enough. He may be booked into the Chiltern, but he’s probably staked out on the other side of the building.”

Serrin nodded his acquiescence. "Yeah, I guessed that. Every other room in the place has a barrier up, too. I tried just a tad of snooping last night, and had a pair of security mages show up within five minutes to gently warn me against further attempts. I think I’ll just get my pants pressed by valet service or something.”

“Trousers, boy, trousers! You’re not back home now. Speak bloody English.” They laughed as Geraint got up from the bony remains of his kippers, then pulled down the jacket sleeves to regulation half-past his shirt cuffs. Serrin smiled at the gesture, unseif-conscious as it was. The nobleman always was that cool and elegant, except just that one time all those years ago.

“Hear from Francesca at all?" Serrin asked, trying to make the question sound like a throwaway. Geraint had been waiting for it all along.

“She moved to London eighteen months ago. Flies out to Jersey a lot, likes the beaches there. One of the few places left where you can walk along without tripping over other people every step of the way. She’s doing fine. I had dinner with her a few days ago. Look her up, she’d like that."

Whipping out a gleaming pen from an inside pocket, Geraint scribbled her telecom code onto a paper napkin. He preferred to defer the query that way, not wanting to suggest that the three of them meet back in London. That might be just a little too awkward.

Serrin returned to his room and started filing his report on the laptop. He checked through his diary and noted every time and place he’d been, letting his employers know they’d got overtime and value for money. He knew he still needed to run checks on the Optical Neotech guys at some point, but that could wait. For now.

If Rutger had spiked the Johnson’s drink, the man was showing no appreciable effect of it. He was a New Yorker, a hard guy from the Rotten Apple, and he had briefed her quickly and concisely, with an answer prepared for every query Francesca could muster. But there was just one possible slip in the fifty-minute workout that had intrigued her.

“I must emphasize that my client’s interest in this matter is confined to the seeding of the target’s system with the corrosive. It is entirely possible that you may encounter an unfriendly operative once in the system. Under such circumstances your contract permits you to withdraw from hostilities if you are endangered, and we add the proviso that under no circumstances are you to enter any other system."

She pondered that one over breakfast the next morning, which was Saturday. The job would pay well, as befitted the task. Being a freelance security consultant was a discreet cover for her. To those in the know, it said, I bust systems open as well as test them.

This one was a bust. Someone wanted a nasty corrosive virus dumped into the computer system of a Fuchi subsidiary. The virus came in its own autodegrading chip; any attempt to do anything other than download it into its predestined target would melt the cyberdeck into which the chip was loaded. She hadn’t paid all that money for a Cyber-6 to have a melting chip rakk it up, and she wasn’t going to take too close a look at the thing. Thirty-five thousand nuyen were also a slamming good reason not to fool around.

Get this one right, Francesca, and the employer could become a gravy train. This could be holidays in Sri Lanka until the gray hairs started sprouting.

"I wonder why he said that, though, Annie.” As usual Francesca had asked her friend to be nearby in case the IC got nasty and she needed someone to take care of her after getting dumped, or worse. It had happened before, just once, when she’d foolishly strayed into the black IC of that Edinburgh system. On that occasion Annie had been able to give her the kiss of life in time.

“Who knows? Just do the job, honey.” Annie sprawled her six-foot length over the leather sofa, stretching her legs-and she did have fabulous legs, long and lean and muscular. If all went well now they might celebrate by going out on the town tonight. Francesca the blonde in black, Annie the brunette encasing herself in something white, tight, and very, very inadequate to the purpose. They didn’t ask too much about each other’s lives, speaking of their relationships with the flippancy more common to men talking about women, but it worked at that level. They didn’t talk much about their work, either. Francesca needed to keep quiet about what she did, while Annie proclaimed herself a model. Francesca knew what that meant, though. If Annie’s hard edge didn’t give her away, the high rents she had to pay on her flat around the corner did. But they shared a certain wary mutual respect and unspoken trust. Each knew the other was someone she wouldn’t regret having as a companion while getting far too drunk. That counted for a lot.

Francesca’s thoughts turned back to the run. The priorities for this job were different from her last. No subtleties needed here; it was bod mode all the way and the most vicious attack program she could muster. She wasn’t as happy with the attack stuff as she could have been. She’d gotten it with area-effect rather than high-penetration, thinking the shotgun approach was best when she couldn’t be sure what the Fuchi boys would have built in. Still, the Filipino armor program she’d hawked from Paris looked as if it was good enough to buy her the extra time and defense she’d need when up against the heavy IC. She also had a reliable medic program to keep the MPCP rolling when the guano hit the fan; that venerable utility had done yeoman work for at least the last couple of years.

The key to it all was programming the smartframe. She was going to use it as a decoy, she decided, rather than to cover her butt as a defense back-up. That meant she’d have to program it with instructions to confuse, detour, delay, and generally frag with anything she might encounter while dumping the virus into the Fuchi system. She’d contemplated exploring the system in sensor mode, trying to learn what she could in order to better instruct the frame, but then thought better of it. One mistake could place the system on alert, and she wasn’t about to hand out any advance warnings.

Chewing her lip, Francesca keyed in the instruction codes. When in doubt, she figured, nuke the bastards and shoot ‘em when they glow in the dark. Let’s bust through to the CPU and frag anything else.

The adrenaline was pouring through her veins now. Second-guessing Fuchi’s strategies, she used her experience and skills to anticipate what she might find, allowing for just a bit of the smartframe’s capacity for contingency programming. She flew as high as a kite, and by three in the afternoon the cyberdeck was humming. Francesca jacked in to her deck and entered the Matrix.

Optical Neotech, here I come. You are about to get squared.

The resistance was just what she’d expected. She’d battered through the IC, the frame smoking her from one crucial attack, and then she’d downloaded the virus into the CPU. She was thinking that was the safest bet when the thing suddenly appeared in the glowing world of cyberspace as a reptilian worm with the head of a moray eel, a really evil-looking beast. It snarled at her, spat hatred, and began gorging itself on subsystems. The IC began to weaken around her, its force diminishing as it faded and dislocated, fragmenting in a burst of nothingness.

The corporate decker had been there, of course, a multi-armed Kali whirling shortswords and dripping venom from his blades. Flashy, but strictly the mark of a wage slave aiming to intimidate rather than wielding true threat. Admittedly, she’d also chosen flashiness, her laser-firing chainsaw ripping arcs of blue light across the distance, blinding and driving away the assault.

Francesca was headed out of the system when she saw the ghostly figure from her last run floating off toward the SAN. The cloaked figure carried a bag, and her pulse and endocrines went through the roof when she saw him. Whatcha got in the bag, Faceless? You wanna fight for it?

She hammered toward him through a blur of abstract space, exiting the system and downlining past another SAN, not caring which system she’d entered. She switched to attack mode, too full of herself to register the menace he presented.

The cloaked figure turned to face her oncoming rush, and as he did so he opened his bag. Inside were surgical instruments: vicious pincers, blades, saws, and a long, dreadful, ivory-handled scalpel. Taking this last instrument in his taloned hand, he swiped at her.

Francesca panicked, desperately trying to dive into the SAN and escape the maniac. She was paralyzed and he knew it. This time he had a face; a terrible, fleshy, contoiled grimace suffused with madness and hatred. His visage expanded into a ghastly rictus as he pocketed the scalpel for later use and reached out with his hands, grasping for her throat.

Whore!

She felt the word expand out of the persona, an insult spat like venom from the deepest reaches of whatever elemental madness seemed to possess the thing. She felt warm hands close around her throat, felt her limbs jerking spasmodically as he strangled the life out of her, felt his hot animal breath on her face as his eyes bore into her soul. She choked as her heart pumped frantically, her hands scrabbling ineffectually at his hideous face, her screams silent as her windpipe ruptured and the world was shredded black.

It was an hour before Annie could bring her around, and then her terrified screams roused the building security. She was shaking uncontrollably when Annie hit her with a tranq patch, then put her to bed.

There wasn’t going to be any partying for Francesca that night, nor for many nights to come.