The Cassandra Complex (2 page)

Lisa never got to hear what would happen next time if the burglars didn’t have what they needed, because the speaker was abruptly cut off by the telephone bell. It wasn’t a particularly strident bell—Lisa never needed much waking up—but the tension of the situation made it sound louder than it was.

Lisa’s eyes were immediately drawn to the screen, where the caller’s number was displayed in red above and to the left of the time. She recognized the number immediately—and so did the person on the other end of the gun.

“It’s Grundy’s mobile,” the robotic voice reported to the busy searcher. “Probably headed for the university.”

“If I don’t answer it,” Lisa pointed out, “he’ll know that something’s wrong.”

“He already knows,” the distorted voice told her. “Fifteen minutes more and he’ll know exactly how much is wrong. Believe me, Dr. Friemann, when I tell you that you won’t be very high on his list of priorities.”

That’s what you think!
Lisa retorted silently.

The telephone continued ringing.

“Finished,” the searcher reported. “If it’s here, I’ve got it.”

Lisa didn’t make any conscious decision to be brave. If she’d made a conscious decision at all, she’d have taken into account what the gun wielder had already told her about the possibility that playing up might put her life at risk. It was something deeper, something more reflexively desperate, that made her lunge for the handset and snatch it from its cradle.

“Help me, Mike!” she yelled. “Intruders on premises. Now, Mike,
now!”

“Shit,” said the searcher again.

“He’s at least four miles away,” said the burglar with the gun. The artificial voice still sounded bitter, but there was more contempt in it than anger. “The first three miles of that are in the blackout. The routine patrols have all been diverted. No help can reach you in time, Dr. Friemann.”

Lisa was still holding the handset to her mouth. Mike Grundy was saying something, but he must have been holding his own handset too far away for a decent pickup, perhaps because he needed both hands to drive. He seemed to be cursing, but the word “blackout” leaped out of the incoherent stream like a weird echo.

“I need help, Mike,” Lisa repeated, speaking more calmly now that it seemed she wasn’t about to be shot. “Alert the station. The burglars are armed. They must have a vehicle downstairs, but for the moment, they’re still here, taking time out to sneer.”

Some movement of the weapon or a slight change of the dark figure’s attitude must have spoken directly to Lisa’s subconscious mind, because she jerked her face back, away from the handset, a full second before the gun went off.

The bullet hit the earpiece.

The impact plucked the handset from her loosening grip without breaking any of her fingers, but Lisa felt plastic shards scoring the flap of flesh between her thumb and forefinger and drawing jagged slits along her inner forearm. She saw the blood spurting even before she felt the shock. The pain must have been intense, if only for a moment, but she was far more aware of the fact of pain than of any actual feeling, and the fact seemed trivial by comparison with frank wonder that she had turned her head out of the way in time.

She had no time to curse before the gun fired again.

The screen beside the headboard shattered. Then the weapon fired twice more, its wielder having swiveled through a hundred and forty degrees. The entire homestation seemed to explode—but Lisa was still conscious, still very much alive.

“Nobody cares about
you
, you stupid bitch!” the distorted voice hissed in her ear. “Miller never cared, and no matter what he promised you, you’ll be dead soon enough. I wouldn’t do you the favor of shooting you. Let’s go.”

The final remark, Lisa knew, was addressed to the companion who had emptied her shelves and cubbyholes; it was unnecessary, because the second burglar was already exiting the room as fast as was humanly possible. The gunshots must have awakened the Charlestons, whose bedroom was directly below Lisa’s, and maybe the Hammonds below them. The burglars wouldn’t necessarily have a clear run down the three flights of stairs—but the inhabitants of Number 39 were a law-abiding lot. The two young tearaways on the ground floor were the kind who’d have a dart gun stashed behind a radiator, and John Charleston had always given the impression of being a man of hidden depths, but no one would impede the escape for more than the time it took for wise discretion to get the better of foolish valor.

“Morgan Miller never made anyone a promise he didn’t intend to keep,” Lisa remarked as the burglar with the gun disappeared into the darkness of the living room. “Not his style at all.” The last words, at least, were too quietly spoken to be audible as the two intruders raced through the door that had the supposedly unhackable locks. They must have come up the stairs almost silently, but they went down like thunder, even in their muffled shoes.

Lisa leaped out of bed and ran to the window, not caring that she was naked as she snatched the curtains open. She hoped to catch a glimpse of whatever vehicle the thieves had arrived in, but they hadn’t left it parked in the road outside the block of flats. She lingered for a couple of minutes, but she didn’t see the fleeing burglars make their exit. If they’d come in by the front door, they’d obviously made provision to use a different exit.

The shooter had told the truth about the blackout. If Mike had started out from his own house in response to an alarm call, he’d have driven straight into total darkness, because all the lights on the farther side of Oldfield Park were out, at least as far to the north as Sion Hill. There had been a major power failure—or major sabotage. The town center was out, although the glow on the far side of Lyn-combe Hill suggested that Widcombe still had power.

Lisa didn’t go to her own door, partly because she wanted to be certain there was nothing else to be seen in the flat—and no useful information to be gained there that might make her statement seem less ridiculous to Judith Kenna’s censorious eye—and partly because she was still naked. As soon as she switched on the light in the living room, however, she saw the word that had been sprayed on the inswung door and knew it must have been put there before the two seeming professionals had hacked her supposedly unhackable locks.

The word was “Traitor.”

It made no sense at all. Professional spies didn’t pause in their work to spray insults on the walls of their victims. Even kids bent on pure vandalism rather than on profitable theft rarely used spray paint, because sprays were too promiscuous and carefully tagged; the contaminated clothing of the perpetrators would be ample evidence to secure conviction.

In any case, who on earth was she supposed to have betrayed? What awful secret did the burglars think she harbored, buried somewhere in her personal-data stores—and why did they think she had done them an injury by keeping it?

Lisa picked up the phone on the living-room table and was slightly surprised to find that it was still working, in spite of the comprehensive trashing of the bedroom systems. She punched out the number of Mike Grundy’s mobile.

“I’m okay, Mike,” she said as soon as he answered. “Four shots fired, but it’s mostly property damage. I’m bleeding where shrapnel cut my hand and scraped my arm, but they didn’t shoot to kill.”

“I’ll be there in two minutes,” Mike told her. “I was already on my way to pick you up. You’re not the only one to be targeted tonight—all hell is breaking loose. How bad’s the bleeding?”

“Not bad,” Lisa assured him, inspecting her hand while she said it. “It doesn’t need gelling—not if the hospital’s blacked out, at any rate. I’ll wrap it up.” She was still aware that it was hurting, as hand injuries always did, but it was still the fact of pain of which she was aware, coupled with a peculiar mental detachment. She told herself that it was hurting because of the density of the nerve endings, not because of the seriousness of the wound, and that it would heal easily enough. Then she told herself that she ought to be glad. If Judith Kenna had had her way, Lisa would have retired from the force without ever seeing
action.
Now she had been threatened and shot at, as well as embroiled in whatever kind of hell it was that was breaking out all over the western reaches of the cityplex.

“Do that,” Mike said tersely. “I’ll need you at the university. Firebomb in the labs. At least one person injured—one human, that is. Maybe half a million mice dead.”

Lisa felt a shiver run through her body, but told herself it was delayed shock caused by the fact that she’d just had a gun pointed at her, not to mention that the gun had gone off—four times.

“Is it Morgan?” she asked querulously. “How bad is he?”

“I don’t know yet,” Mike told her. “Do you have any reason to think it might be Morgan?”

Lisa was all too keenly aware, even as she issued a reflexive denial, that the gun-wielding burglar must have mentioned Morgan Miller’s name deliberately.
Everything
that had been said to her, in fact, must have been said for a reason, however perverse the reason might be. In a world whose walls were growing eyes and ears in ever-increasing quantities, only fools were incautious—and it was difficult to believe that anyone capable of opening her door could be a fool. They had painted TRAITOR on her door
for a reason.

Lisa wanted time to think, but she didn’t want to hang up the phone before she’d told Mike Grundy the most obviously interesting and most evidently sinister of all the things the person who’d shot at her had taken care to let her know. “The one who was holding the gun recognized the number of your mobile when you called,” she said. “Whoever they are, they seem to know a hell of a lot more about us than we know about them.”

It wasn’t until after she’d said it that Lisa realized it might not be the cleverest thing for a person to put on the record when she’d just found the word TRAITOR sprayed on the door of her flat by someone who’d known the secret combinations of both its locks, especially when she desperately needed the goodwill of her superiors to be allowed to go on working.

TWO

L
isa dressed, cursing the clumsiness forced on her by the torn hand. She pulled on a pair of tights and an undershirt made of smartish fibers, but force of habit remained strong, and the tunic and trousers she put on next were the same dead kind she always wore on the outside. Although the undershirt soaked up the evidence of her arm wounds easily enough, the blood still flowing copiously from the tear in her hand immediately stained the cuff of the tunic.

For once, she admitted that it really might have been wise to embrace the new generation of smart fibers more wholeheartedly. She probably would have, if she hadn’t grown so sick of hearing people recite TV-hatched slogans over the years that her natural stubbornness had intensified her determination not to be railroaded by the lords of fashion and the prophets of doom. The new police uniforms issued the previous year were only five years behind the times, but CID and lab workers had the privilege of lagging even farther behind if they wished, and she’d taken that opportunity even though she’d known it lent fuel to Judith Kenna’s conviction that she was past her use-by date.

In order to prevent the problem from getting any worse, Lisa fetched the first-aid kit from the bathroom. She hadn’t opened it for years, and it didn’t have any kind of dressing adequate to take proper care of the problem, but she found an absorbent pad that would fit over the awkwardly placed cut on her hand and managed to tape it on with old-fashioned adhesive tape.

Having dressed the wound as best she could, Lisa made a concerted effort to collect herself mentally. She thanked the good fortune that had helped her resist the temptation to fight her insomnia with drugs. She’d been having trouble sleeping for some months, but she hadn’t resorted to medication because she didn’t believe that insomnia deserved to be reckoned as an illness. She had addressed the problem as a straightforward challenge to her powers of self-discipline: a rebellion of her treasonous flesh against the stern empire of her mind. Her method of fighting the sleeplessness had been to instruct herself not to worry about it, because a woman of sixty—sixty-one, now that her birthday had come and gone—didn’t need that much sleep anyway. She had also informed herself that lying still in the darkness was, in any case, sufficient to garner most of the benefits that sleep was supposed to confer. Even so, she could easily have weakened on a dozen occasions, and last night might have been one of them.

She went downstairs to meet Mike Grundy at the front door of the building—to save time, she told herself. The crime scene would have to be examined, sooner rather than later if there were staff available, and the spray-painted legend would be duly noted; but for the time being, she wanted to concentrate on the big picture, of which the raid on her premises seemed to be a relatively trivial facet.

John Charleston and Robbie Hammond must have been lurking inside their locked front doors, listening for clues to what was going on. John peeped out as she passed by, then threw his door open wide. By that time, Lisa was halfway down the next flight. Robbie had taken his cue from the sound of the door opening. They seemed absurdly like bookends as they peered at her, one from above and one from below.

She didn’t stop. “Police emergency,” she said in what she hoped was a reassuring tone. “All safe and secure upstairs. SOCO will probably get here before I come back. No cause for alarm.”

“Was that gunfire?” was the only question either of them managed—but by that time, she’d raced past Robbie Hammond and was well on her way to the front door. She didn’t bother to answer him. She left the two of them to meet one another halfway and discuss the matter between themselves.

Mike’s black Rover was already coming around the corner, and she hardly had time to stop before it was beside her. She used her left hand to open the door.

“It’s okay,” she assured him as his eyes were drawn to the patchwork dressing on her right hand and the bloodstain on her cuff. “Stings a bit, but it’s fine. Drive. The university, not the hospital.”