The Cassandra Complex (8 page)

If a mistake had been made—and it had been, Lisa silently insisted—it couldn’t have been simple. The reasoning that had led the would-be burglars to her must be as convoluted as it was powerful. The fact that she was Morgan’s oldest friend wasn’t enough. Nor was the fact that she had once been his mistress. There had to be something else. But if they suspected that she and Morgan had discovered a biowarfare weapon
together
, when were the two of them supposed to have done it? Surely nothing that they had worked on back in the first decade of the century could possibly have any relevance to the hyperflu epidemic, or whatever agent of the apocalypse would follow in its train.

Or could it?

Lisa was grateful to realize that Judith Kenna was no longer looking at her. The chief inspector had been distracted by the distant sound of a helicopter’s throbbing engine.

“That’ll be your Mr. Smith,” Lisa observed, hoping her relief didn’t show too clearly. “He’s made good time.”

“Yes, he has,” the chief inspector agreed, her tone finely balanced between satisfaction and regret. “I’ll have to brief him. You’d better wait with DI Grundy.”

All but one of the fire engines had now been withdrawn, so there was plenty of space in the parking lot for the chopper to set down. Lisa watched four men climb down from the belly of the aircraft. They were all wearing black overcoats, which seemed as distinctive as a uniform—much more so, in fact, than the relatively casual shell-suits of the paramedics, let alone Mike’s plainclothesmen.

Lisa had had contact with MOD field operatives on numerous occasions, but she didn’t recognize any of these men. She couldn’t even guess which of the many available sets of cryptic initials might be used to identify their department. They looked like businessmen, but that wasn’t inappropriate to the kind of work they would be routinely engaged in. The government for which they worked was not one of those conventionally regarded as a mere puppet of the megacorps, but its supposed independence meant that its dealings with the corps were all the more intricate and challenging. The only way to compete with crocodiles, or even to avoid becoming crocodile food, was to cultivate crocodilean habits.

Lisa thought she identified Peter Grimmett Smith even at a distance, and her guess was confirmed when she saw him shake Judith Kenna’s hand. He was a tall, dark-haired individual, handsome in a stately sort of way. He seemed to be tired and fractious. Lisa was perversely pleased to note that he must be in his sixties, easily old enough to be the chief inspector’s father.

Poor Judith
, she thought.
Just can’t get away from the older generation. Mike, me, Sweet, the senior fireman, and now the man from the Ministry. Is his expertise past its use-by date too, I wonder? Is this his last mission before he retires to the old bee farm? If he’s waving the flag for gray power, he’s really going to jangle her nerves, especially if he succeeds in getting to the bottom of all this while she’s still flummoxed.

She wondered briefly whether the spook’s name really was Smith, but decided that it probably was. No one used Smith as a nom de guerre anymore; it was too
twentieth century.
The Grimmett, which presumably served to distinguish him from all the other Peter Smiths on the civil-service roster, was a bit of a giveaway.

Lisa was tempted to hang around and watch, but the advent of daylight hadn’t banished the relentless wind and she’d neglected to put on her own black overcoat before leaving home. She retreated into the building and went back to Sweet’s office, where Mike Grundy’s men were still impatiently gathering information and trying to judge its significance. Sweet had rejoined them, but no one seemed to be restricting their conversation in case he might be an enemy keeping tabs on their progress.

“They’ve got to be local,” Jerry Hapgood was saying. “The blackout proves that.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Mike told him. “The blackout only proves that they were clever enough to know they couldn’t transport Miller crosscountry without being tracked, unless they could work a concealed switch. We don’t know that they didn’t bring him out of the blackout before Powergen got its act together—and even if they bring him out now in the trunk of some commuter’s car or the back of a pickup, we don’t stand the slightest chance of intercepting him, even with real containment measures about to come into force.”

“This whole containment thing’s a joke,” once of the PC’s observed. “It’ll all be show no matter how far it goes, so that the government can pretend they’re doing
something.
When hyperflu arrives, if it hasn’t already, there’ll be no way to pin it down. If we don’t have a cure soon, it’ll run riot.”

Lisa knew that the PC was right. Even the strictest imaginable containment strategy would leave far too many loopholes where a cityplex like Greater Bristol was concerned. The inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides might manage to control traffic between the islands and the mainland carefully enough to keep out viruses, but Britain was far too overcrowded and far too
busy.
If the First Plague War really were shaping up to be World War Three—and it was difficult to see how the viruses could be offset before the epidemic was worldwide—then the Bristol cityplex would eventually find itself in the front line. So-called pre-containment measures couldn’t keep Morgan Miller in the East Central area any more than they could keep hyperflu out of it if his well-organized captors wanted to remove him.

“The men from the Ministry are here,” Lisa said, although she knew they must have heard the helicopter. “They’ll be taking over the thinking and planning.”

“Doesn’t mean they’ll carry the can if Miller slips through the net,” Hapgood pointed out. “Always blame the messenger—isn’t that the thinking?”

“Better not let the chief inspector hear you talking like that,” Mike Grundy observed as he moved away from the group to stand closer to Lisa. “Okay, Lis?” he asked, nodding toward her sealed cuts.

“Fine,” she told him. “Numb now. Did you manage to get a team out to my place?”

“Yes. Nothing yet. The burglars’ vehicle was parked on the school grounds, but there’s nothing there that might help us to identify it. Your neighbors say they didn’t hear anything until the shots were fired, and they didn’t come out of hiding in time to see anything. The paint on the door might have trapped a fiber or two, but it looks as if the bullets they fired into your equipment might be our best bet. Together with the dart in Burdillon’s body, they’re the only solid evidence we have. If we can trace either one of the handguns, we’re away … but how far we’ll get without the telephone records, I wouldn’t like to say. You look tired. You can’t go home, but you should get some sleep—can I return the favor you did me when I was between residences?”

“Kenna wants us both here, at least until Smith says we can go,” Lisa told him. “Anyway, given her attitude, it might not be a good idea for me to stay at your place. Does she know Helen?”

“God, I hope not,” Mike said. “Why?”

“Just something she said. Stella Filisetti has radfem connections.”

“She
might know Helen, then,” Grundy observed. “I doubt that Kenna would get involved with any kind of organization or movement outside the force, however respectable—and with people like your old friend Ms. West still around, radfem isn’t respectable yet. Kenna’s far too principled to associate with the Arachne Wests of this world, and getting palsy-walsy with Helen would be only one step removed. No matter how determined she might be to persuade me to retire quietly, I doubt that she’d go to Helen for ammunition. Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge. Do you think Filisetti’s the insider? Any particular reason, apart from the fact that she’s not at home?” He didn’t add:
and probably screwing your old boyfriend.
He was too scrupulous.

“If Morgan discovered something interesting,” Lisa observed, “Stella would be in the best position to know about it. If he took precautions to conceal it from her, that might have made her all the more curious. The only flaw in the theory is that Morgan
couldn’t
have discovered some state-of-the-art biological weapon by accident. That’s the stuff of cheap technothrillers—and he wasn’t doing that kind of work. If it really is cloak-and-dagger business, we’d do better to focus our attention on Ed Burdillon and Chan. Do the security wafers indicate how Ed became aware of their presence?”

“No. Do you think
he
might have been the inside man? They could have arranged to knock him over to give him an alibi of sorts.”

“No,” said Lisa. “Ed’s straight. So’s Morgan. Neither of them would have tried to hide something useful to national security, or even something valuable in purely commercial terms.”

“Unless they had a good reason,” Mike pointed out, “or the temptation was so great that even an honest man could be corrupted. Everyone has his price.”

“Not Morgan. And it’s still the stuff of cheap technothrillers.”

“It’s their script, not ours,” Mike reminded her. “If they’re crazy enough, they probably think like a cheap technothriller. Anyway, remember what you said earlier about the Cassandra Complex. Morgan Miller has spent fifty years preaching that a population crash is inevitable, even though everyone with half a brain can see that we can’t carry on increasing our numbers without completely fucking up the ecosphere. He’s been suffering all the while from feelings of impotence and bitter frustration. Just suppose that after those fifty years, he suddenly found there was, after all, a way that he could
do
something. If Morgan were offered a way to stop playing Cassandra, couldn’t he be tempted? If he were offered a means of
taking a hand
, mightn’t the chance to set aside that awful feeling of futility have been irresistible?”

“Morgan’s not behind this,” Lisa assured him. “I’d know.”

“Would you?” he asked, so softly that the other men might not have been able to hear him even if they were listening hard, “or is it just that you can’t stand the thought that you might not… that he’d let Stella Filisetti in on it, but not you?”

“There were
two
women,” Lisa reminded him grimly. “And that’s just here. Maybe
all
of them were women—the fact that Sweet’s convinced that no woman could have dragged Ed Burdillon away from Mouseworld at a trot only means that he never met Arachne West, or any other Real Woman. If you think it might have been Morgan or anyone working for him who shot the phone out of my hand, wait till you hear the tape from my living room. The way he—or she—spoke Morgan’s name is enough in itself to establish that he’s a victim.”

“Don’t rule anything out, Lisa,” Mike urged in the same low tone. “Just think about it. We need this result, you and I. If we can get one over on Kenna while the MOD man’s watching, we’ll have arms and armor—but if we come out of it looking bad, we’ll both be on the scrap heap in no time.”

“Morgan’s a victim, not a conspirator,” Lisa insisted frostily. “As am I. Not to mention half a million mice. Which is, if you care to think about it, the oddest thing of all. Why kill the mice, Mike? If there was some amazing secret hidden in Mouseworld, why not simply steal the mice that contained it? Why kill them all?”

“I can’t answer that,” Grundy whispered—and for the first time, Lisa realized just how frightened he had become. “I can’t make sense of any of it yet. I can see Kenna’s ax coming down on my neck, but I can’t see any way off the block. How’s that for a Cassandra Complex? The only one who can get us out of this with our careers intact is you, Lis. Even if the fools who came to your flat had it completely wrong, they think you know what’s going on. They must have a reason to think that, and you’re the only one who stands a chance of figuring out what it is. Whatever it is, Lis,
you
have to get to the bottom of it—and you have to face up to whatever it turns out to be. All I’m asking is that you don’t leave any stone unturned, no matter how uncomfortable it might be—not just for your sake, or mine, but for Morgan’s. If he
isn’t
behind it, they’re going to kill him as soon as they have what they want—and the longer he holds out on them, the worse they’ll hurt him.”

Lisa was tempted to tell Mike that he couldn’t have it both ways—that she couldn’t consider the possibility that Morgan might be responsible for this mad caper while simultaneously motivating herself with the thought that he might be in mortal danger—but the complaint died on her lips. Whichever one of the two possibilities was right, she
did
have to solve the puzzle as quickly as was humanly possible, and she
was
the person best placed to do so. If she failed, everybody might suffer.

Probably, she thought, that was why the intruders had come to her apartment—not to rob, but to discredit her; to do as much as they could to earn her the mistrust of Peter Grimmett Smith and his merry MOD men. If so, she had to hope that Mr. Smith wouldn’t fall for it—and whether he did or not, she had to bend every atom of her intelligence and of her knowledge of Morgan Miller’s life and work to figuring out exactly what kind of mess he had gotten himself into.

First Interlude

THG POLITICS OF MOUSEWORLD

The tour that Morgan Miller gave Lisa when he welcomed her to the department began with the lab space in which she would be working and the parallel spaces occupied by her fellow research students, then progressed to his own territory. There was far too much for her to take in all at once, and too many names to remember, but it was obvious from the start that Miller was a misfit. It wasn’t just the fact that he was the only person except for the departmental secretaries who wasn’t wearing a white coat; it was the slight wariness haunting the attitudes other people struck when they spoke to him. Some of them, Lisa assumed, must have been working cheek-by-jowl with him for years, but not one of them gave the impression of actually knowing him.

Miller was not a tall man—his height was almost exactly the same as Lisa’s—but he gave the impression of being loftier than he was. His frame was slim and his face rather gaunt. She guessed that he was in his late thirties, but there was a stern agelessness about his hard features that suggested he wouldn’t look substantially different in twenty years’ time. No one would have described him as handsome, but the narrowness of his jaw made the upper half of his face seem uncommonly wide, exaggerating the width of his forehead and making his dark-brown eyes seem a trifle overlarge. When he had been a child, Lisa thought, those eyes must have seemed plaintive and adorable, but now that he was a man, they seemed intimidatingly cool and contemplative. The whole ensemble gave the impression of a penetrating intelligence quietly lurking in the depths of an unusual mind. Had he not possessed such a luxuriant head of dark-brown hair—which certainly wasn’t a wig—Miller might have have resembled a stereotyped cartoon egghead, but there was something about him that resisted submission to any kind of category.