“I’ve never carried anything more than a light-a Colt, usually. Never needed anything more. I’ve hardly ever fired one of those.”

He casually tossed her a Bond and Carrington light with a hefty clip. “Twenty shots in the clip, and a spare. That should do the job. Serrin’s got his Ingram and I’ll take my usual. Okay, that’s done. Now, I don’t exactly have an anti-personnel armory here! but we should be able to come up with a few extras. Slap patches for a start. Take the best trauma I’ve got.”

“You figure we’re going to get seriously hurt?” The elf looked grave.

“Serrin, we may walk in to find someone very close to death. The best trauma patch in the world may be no more use to her than using a feather duster to beat off a troll samurai, but we can only hope.

He mused before the shelves of the safe. Serrin could see a startling number of credsticks stacked up in the top row, each taped and labelled. Geraint pocketed a couple and took a hefty wedge of notes into the bargain, but that wasn’t what was on his mind. “Maybe we should reconsider,” he said. “Do you have a pistol license, Fran?”

“Yes. I had to file a residency request, which is still in the works, but the Lord Protector, God preserve, decided I was a fit person to carry a Colt. I think my corporate references may have had something to do with that.”

“Well, technically your pistol isn’t covered by that, but it is functionally identical and I think your Colt developed a sad fault in it yesterday, right?” She grinned. “If you’re caught in possession you’ll get fined but you won’t get deported. Serrin’s Ingram is a trickier problem. I assume you have no license for that, my friend?”

“Well, er, no” Serrin obviously didn’t want to discuss how he'd acquired the weapon.

“Right. If the baggies catch you, it could be serious. If you fire the thing, you could end up as a guest of Her Majesty’s Prison Service. That is not a prospect you want to take lightly. So, maybe you should leave it behind. I can offer you a large net-gun instead. Non-lethal, constraining, purely self-defense. They catch you with that and you get deported, of course, but then that’s not really a pressing worry right now. You’d only get fined a few thou. What do you say?”

The elf grumbled at first, but he could see the wisdom behind Geraint’s suggestion. he accepted the hefty weapon and was figuring out how to conceal it under his voluminous greatcoat when the laser printer began its smooth flow. Geraint ran over to pore over the printout.

“Five of them. More than I’d expected, given the name. Well, well, one’s just gone on holiday to France, poor woman. Not something any patriotic Brit would do, never mind. Her flight left on Friday, so she’s out. One’s a civil servant, age forty-six. Think we can forget her. Number three’s a cab driver in Westway. Twenty-seven years old. She might be a possible, servicing dubious gentlemen in the back of the cab in Paddington, but right now she’s in the Royal Marsden having a retina-tightening eye operation. Someone could try to murder her there, but they’ve got incredible security. Not very likely, I think.”

“How the hell are you finding all this out?” Serrin muttered.

“Easy. Once I have the names from the public datanet it’s pretty simple to check vehicle licenses, air and rail and coach departure bookings, hospital lists, and the like. But I daren’t risk what I really want to do, which is check through Metropolitan Police files on the Met’s own network.”

“Number four is a troll in the Squeeze. Mind you, the data is five years out of date. Census data down there is pretty patchy even in these days of compulsory poll tax. She’s registered as having been a local counsellor in Croydon in 2044, which makes her one of the radfems. That was a real hoot, that business. Anyway, even if she’s still around I think we can safely eliminate a radical feminist troll from our list of possibles.” Geraint allowed himself a grim smile, which spread into a broader one as he scanned the last entry.

“Bringing us to number five. Who happens to be, good heavens, a retired travel writer living in Wood Green. Hmm. She’s sixty-six and specializes in scripting trid documentaries about vanishing cultures. Oh no, I don’t think so.”

Serrin was puzzled. “But the Catherine Eddowes you know isn’t on the list. I don’t understand.”

“That tells us one of two things. Either she’s moved and isn’t registered at her new address, or she’s where she used to be and census data is incomplete, which is more than likely down in the East End. Over a million and a half Londoners do not appear on any official lists, and that doesn’t even count the Undercity. There are plenty of places where census officials wouldn’t go even if toting a vanload of SAS laser packs at their backs. Most places with a Metropolitan Police security rating of C or worse have very incomplete data. And we’re heading into a C zone or lower, no question.”

“You people sobering up, by the way?”

Francesca ruefully admitted she was getting there, but the evening wasn’t turning out to be exactly what they’d expected. A warm haze of alcoholic glow over coffee and truffles had been an inviting prospect, but that was starting to seem all very distant now. Serrin nodded as he fingered the unused patch in his pocket. He’d let his own body deal with it naturally.

Geraint made one final check on the telecom. “Getting nothing but the answering machine. I’ll leave a short message on auto telling her to barricade herself until we arrive. She won’t take any notice even if she gets it, I suppose, but we have to try.”

Serrin had a final consideration. “Hey, what if the media are onto this? We might end up with a posse of trid-jocks down on the site. They might even get there first.”

“Well, if we do, that's great. We can just turn the car round and go home. But we know something they don’t.”

“What’s that?”

“We know about Annie Chapman. That barely got reported at all; some of her, urn, more discretion-minded, shall we say, clientele wanted it that way. So it would be a fluke if anyone in the media noticed, and as I say, we get a bunch of copycat murders every year. Even if a bright little thing noticed the connection, by this time of night her desk editor will be downing his fifteenth whisky and he’ll just tell her to check it out tomorrow. Murders don’t get any more than a single soundbite in London unless the victim’s a VIP. They’re too common these days.

By the time they had struggled into their armor and packed their weaponry. Geraint needed a minute to stuff a black bag full of bits and pieces: tools, scraps from a survival kit, even a small respirator. He carried it down the hall as the others followed him, and then the grim humor of it became apparent.

“Geraint, that bag. It looks just like-” Francesca shuddered.

“Doesn’t it just? Let’s hope we’re not going to be too late to find a killer toting one just like it.”

It was just eleven-forty when they left the house. Across the city, a very nervous Indian girl found that her hands were shaking as she bent to put on her boots. Soon she had the door locked behind her, had hailed a cab, and paid the troll the fare upfront. She sat in the back of the cab, gazing through the barred windows, the cracks in the plasglass streaming from a central impact location. That told her the windows were bulletproof. It also told her the cab had been shot at, which was pretty standard. Kids just want to have fun, after all.

20

Midnight was closing in on them by the time they parked the Saab in Aldgate. The club wasn’t exactly classy, but the troll bouncer’s eyes lit up when he saw the notes Geraint waved under his snout. He got a nice advance, a promised fee per hour for making sure no one ran off with the car, and the further promise of a handsome bonus if the Saab was safe and undamaged when they got back. Geraint made a showy display of activating the car’s defense systems.