The Cassandra Complex (24 page)

“I could say the same to you,” Lisa pointed out—but she turned to look out the window as she heard the distant wail of a siren. The bright headlights and the stroboscopic blue flash of a police cruiser were just visible on the road that wound through Chew Valley, several miles to the north. The headlights flickered as they were briefly interrupted by leaf-laden trees. The leaves were all brown by now, but they were still awaiting the Atlantic front, whose swirling winds would whip them from the branches.

Then Lisa caught sight of the internally lit helicopter that was moving effortlessly past the car, fifty or sixty meters overhead. She calculated that it would arrive several minutes earlier. Peter Grimmett Smith had obviously decided, after waking up from his enforced nap, that time was now far too pressing to permit him the luxury of road travel. In any case, he probably wanted to make sure that Lisa talked to him before—and perhaps instead of—reporting to her own people.

“You’ve stepped over the line here,” Stella Filisetti whispered. “You should have made that call an hour ago. They’ll throw you out of the force. How old are you, Lisa? What choices have you got?”

“I’m working for the MOD at present,” Lisa told her. “I have all the latitude I need—and all the information I need, thanks to your slack mouth. It’s over, Stella. I’ll have Morgan out before noon.”

“Bitch,” the younger woman said in heartfelt fashion.

“And you,” Lisa murmured.

She went outside to meet the helicopter. The air was cold but still—there was mist in the meadow on the other side of the dirt road that led to the cottage. The cottage looked larger from the yard, but that was because the shadow gathered about the lighted windows was exaggerated by the steep pitch of the tiled roof.

As she’d expected, Peter Grimmett Smith didn’t even bother to step down. He merely held the helicopter door open, inviting her to climb in before the rotor blades slowed to a halt. She ducked reflexively as she did so, although she wasn’t tall enough to be in any danger.

Mercifully, the helicopter wasn’t one of those with a transparent cupola; its cabin was wide and deep and its sides were reassuringly opaque. The pilot was Ginny, but Lisa didn’t have time to ask after her health before Smith bundled her into the second rank of seats.

“Radio the Swindon police,” Smith instructed his dutiful chauffeur. “Tell them that one of their cityplex colleagues needs a clean suit of clothes. Tell them to have it ready at the landing pad.”

“Size twelve,” Lisa put in. “Ten if the goods are U.S.-originated. Did Chan make contact again?”

“No, he didn’t. Who shot me?” Smith obviously had his own agenda, and wasn’t about to be sidetracked. As soon as Ginny had made the call, the copter raised itself from the ground again. The downdraft from its wings scattered newly fallen leaves in every direction, but the blizzard vanished into darkness as they gained height. It was surprisingly quiet inside the cabin, although the thrum of the motor rotating the copter’s blades extended an uncomfortable vibration throughout the body of the craft.

“She wouldn’t give us a name,” Lisa told him. “Steve Forrester will find out, as soon as he can get a DNA sample. The other one was Stella Filisetti. She shot me too, by the way—I didn’t wake up until I was tucked up in the cottage. The men in the van came to our rescue, but they didn’t quite manage to arrive in the nick of time.”

“And who were they?” Smith demanded.

“The one in charge told me his name’s Leland,” Lisa told him. “Mike Grundy will be checking out the van as we speak, but it’ll probably be a dead end. Leland’s just a fly attracted by the stink. Working for the Cabal, he says—but that might be garbage. If he’s just a chancer, he’s not important; if he
is
working for the emperors of private enterprise, we might as well let him play his hand. If he finds Morgan before we do, so much the better. That’s why I thought it was worth giving him some rope to play with instead of calling in as soon as I woke up. Why are we going to Swindon?”

The helicopter was moving rapidly through the night, but Lisa had lost her sense of direction. The lights below could have been Paulton, but she wasn’t sure.

“Why not?” Smith asked. “Have you got a better idea?”

Lisa didn’t want to go to Swindon, and she did have a better idea—but she didn’t want to tell Peter Grimmett Smith what it was, especially while she was wearing Jeff’s bug-infested clothing.

“We’ve missed our appointment,” she stalled. “Surely they’ll have locked up and gone home.”

“Someone’s waiting up for us,” he assured her. “Did you and this Leland fellow get anything useful out of the two women?”

“Only bullshit,” Lisa told him. “Leland thinks they’re some kind of secret cult freaked out by signs of the apocalypse. He thinks they may be after something Morgan contributed to the project that Ed Burdillon had put his way—the defense work you sounded me out about while we were on our way to Ahasuerus—but he’s not sure.”

“You don’t agree,” Smith was quick to observe.

“I don’t believe they’re apocalypse freaks. I suspect they’re exactly what they seem to be: radical feminists. Leland didn’t even know a Real Woman when he saw one, and when I told him what she was, he figured that he might be able to excite her disdain for Stella Filisetti because she’s prettier and hasn’t cultivated her muscles. I think he annoyed her by failing so utterly to understand where she was coming from.” She was speaking as much for Leland’s benefit as Smith’s, on the assumption that he was still listening in as he headed for the cityplex in the hope of picking up Chan’s trail.

“You’d have to explain it to me too, I’m afraid,” Smith said unenthusiastically. “But not now. We’ve more important matters to deal with.”

The niceties of post-backlash feminism obviously interested him as little as they interested Leland. Lisa had to remind herself that Smith, like her, had been born in the late twentieth century and had been delivered by maturity into the midst of the so-called backlash. Like Leland, he took it for granted that people he didn’t agree with were all essentially alike. Lisa knew better—and she suspected that the internal politics of twenty-first-century feminism might have a significant bearing not merely on the motive for Morgan Miller’s abduction, but on its ultimate outcome.

Real Women hadn’t seen the stalling of the feminist cause as an unfortunate failure of a crusade to win equality of opportunity and reward. For them, as Arachne West had taken great pains to explain, the battle had always been a straightforward power struggle. What men had surrendered in the late twentieth century was no more than a series of palliative concessions, intended to blunt the force of female complaint and produce the illusion that progress would continue to be made if only women could be patient. The Real Women weren’t interested in inching toward equality; they wanted to take as much ground as possible as quickly as possible by any means available—and they didn’t see any virtue in stopping when the balance was even. They wanted the upper hand, although they didn’t have any illusions about the difficulty of taking it. That tied in to their unbounded enthusiasm for “natural physical culture.”

Although the movement’s brief popularity had passed by 2035 at the latest, the remaining Real Women still saw themselves as units in an army of conquest. Other feminists might see them as misfits unable to compromise with the demands of the moment, but that only made it all the more remarkable that the Real Woman had been fighting shoulder to shoulder with Stella Filisetti—and that Stella had had the gun that fired real bullets. The conspiracy whose outlines had now been revealed was, Lisa knew, far more remarkable than Leland or Peter Grimmett Smith could imagine.

“We need to find Chan,” Lisa told Smith. “They may go after him again.”

“We have people on that,” Smith assured her. “So has Chief inspector Kenna. Dr. Chan’s behaving rather irresponsibly, I fear. Professor Burdillon should never have admitted him to the research program.”

“According to Leland,” Lisa told him, “the project was and is redundant. He says that the princes of private enterprise already have a method of protecting their clients from the effects of plague war. Presumably, the only reason they haven’t advertised it already is that they’re letting paranoia inflate demand. It’s nice to know that all those Mexican, Nigerian, and Cambodian kids are dying in a good cause, isn’t it?”

Peter Grimmett Smith was staring at her, but it wasn’t the thought of millions of Third World children dying for lack of a defense that had startled him; it was the thought that the megacorps hadn’t deigned to inform his government of the fact that they had the means to save whomever they wanted to save from the war that wasn’t officially a war at all.

“Chan was right all along,” Lisa remarked.

“I can’t agree,” Smith retorted. “This ludicrous insistence on talking to you before he parts with whatever information he has is holding up the investigation.”

“Not about that,” Lisa said. “About the politics of Mouseworld. He always said that it was a better mirror of contemporary human affairs than Morgan would ever allow, and he was right. No matter how hard we pretended, Mouseworld’s cities were always ruled from without, not from within. The imperatives of birth and death, and the conditions in which life had to be lived, were all determined by the experimenters: the Secret Masters. They always had the power to decide how many mice there were, which ones lived and which ones died. The mice only had to find their own stability because the experimenters refused to intervene—which they could have done at any time, according to their merest whim or most careful long-term strategy. Sound familiar?”

“It sounds
irrelevant”
Smith told her.

“Unlike the Institute of Algeny, I suppose,” Lisa said. “I think we’d get to the heart of the problem a lot faster if I could talk to an old friend of mine—Arachne West.” She figured it was safe to say that much, even with Leland listening in. As soon as Mike Grundy saw the Real Woman at the cottage, he’d remember Arachne, and he’d start looking for her. Leland would find out about that soon enough, if he cared to. But Lisa wasn’t about to say any more, for the present. Now didn’t seem to be the right time to inform Peter Smith—or anyone else—that she had a shrewd suspicion as to who might have recruited Arachne and her loyal troopers to assist in the kidnapping of Morgan Miller, or that she had formed a plausible hypothesis as to why that person thought the discovery that Miller might or might not have made was worth killing for.

“Arachne West will have to wait,” Smith informed her brusquely. “I have a trail of my own to follow, and I may need your advice again.”

“Okay,” said Lisa, knowing there was nothing she could do about it. “So we go to Swindon first.”

She couldn’t help resenting the digression, but she knew she had to make the best of it. The quicker they got through the interview with the Algenists, the sooner the helicopter would be on its way westward again. In the meantime, she had to take the opportunity to reconsider her own long-term strategy as carefully and profoundly as she could. She had to figure out exactly whose side she ought to be on, if her guesses turned out to be correct, when the cracked plot finally fell apart. That would be a lot easier, she supposed, if she could only work out what Stella Filisetti had meant when she claimed to know how Lisa had “kept her own options open.” The one enigma her guesswork hadn’t even begun to unravel centered on how she was supposed to prove she had known all along what this uproar was all about, when she hadn’t known at all.

If the radfems believed, however mistakenly, that Morgan Miller really had stumbled onto a technology of longevity that worked only on females, why would they think that she would have had to do anything to keep her options open?

FIFTEEN

T
he night through which the helicopter soared was clear of cloud, but the light pollution was too intense to allow the stars to be seen. The moon was three-quarters full and the pink stain cast on its face by the intervening atmosphere seemed slightly sinister, as if it were an extension of the vale of shadow that hid the invisible crescent.

The vibration that crept into Lisa’s limbs from the polished plastic upholstery seemed to be growing more intrusive with every minute that passed. Although she had relaxed into her seat with some relief after the constant tension of the interrogations in the cottage, Lisa felt that she was already back on the edge of experience. She began to wish she had taken advantage of Leland’s invitation to raid the fridge at the cottage. Hunger was now adding to the confusion of troubles by which she was beleaguered, although not as much as exhaustion was.

Peter Smith finally thought of asking Lisa how her hand and arm were.

“They’re okay,” she assured him. “Leland gelled the dart wound. I’ll be able to peel the sealant off my hand tomorrow, and I should be able to use it normally. I could do with some sleep, though—some real sleep, that is. My usual insomnia seems to have deserted me in my hour of need. I don’t know why, but knockout drops don’t do the trick. I woke up just as tired as I was before I fell unconscious.”

“I know the feeling,” Smith admitted. “We’ll fly back to the Renaissance as soon as the Algenists’ spokesman has given us his side of the story. I’m beginning to wish I’d taken a couple of hours out this morning, while you were resting.”

Lisa resented the implication that she’d wimped out when she’d accepted Smith’s offer to take time out from the investigation, but it wasn’t worth challenging. “Why all the urgency to get to the Institute of Algeny?” she asked.

“I’m using the helicopter because I’m reasonably confident that it isn’t bugged,” Smith said, misunderstanding the import of her question. “At least I was reasonably confident until we took
you
aboard.”

“You mean that the car
was
bugged? You had it swept?”

“As per routine,” he said. “We’d picked up two plants that weren’t there when we left the Renaissance—one obvious, one camouflaged. Presumably planted by the same person. If the first one was there to attract our attention so we wouldn’t look hard for the second, the second could have been there to stop us short of looking
really
hard for a third.”