Wheels turn.

Annie Chapman has less than three days to live.

So it continues.

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.