"Charles, that’s utter bollocks!" They both burst out Laughing, then broke into contented grins. "Okay, let’s check the conditioning. I think he’s pretty much done by now. Let’s arrange the logistics."

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.