The Cassandra Complex (29 page)

The silence allowed Lisa the luxury of a brief period of mental relaxation before Ginny pulled into the Renaissance parking lot. It required only a single unobtrusive sideways glance to reassure Lisa that Mike Grundy had done as he was asked and had brought her own car to the hotel. She collected her room key from reception and without any comment, accepted the bulky package that was handed over at the same time. She went up to her room, where she stayed close to the door as she took out the keys to her car, listening closely all the while for sounds of movement in the corridor.

As soon as she was reasonably sure she would be unobserved, she slipped out again and headed for the service stairs. She didn’t need to go through reception to get back to the parking lot, and there didn’t seem to be anyone watching as she slipped into her car and started the motor. No one followed as she drove away into the night. Dawn had still not fully come, but it could not now be far off.

EIGHTEEN

A
lthough she had no watch to keep time with, Lisa’s impression was that it took less than ten minutes to get back to Number 39—but she might have been wrong, given that her onboard computer didn’t register a single offense or an instance of contributory negligence. She parked the car in the school playground, where her intruders had left their vehicle before making their own surreptitious approach to the building, and she let herself in with a minimum of noise. She tiptoed up to the second floor, then knocked softly on the Charlestons’ door.

Unfortunately, soft knocking didn’t do the trick. She had to knock harder, then harder still. In the end, though, she heard footsteps within the apartment and repositioned herself so that she could be seen through the glass peephole.

John Charleston must have recognized her immediately, but when he opened the door, it was only by a crack.

“Lisa?” he said anxiously. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said as reassuringly as she could. “I need to use your phone.”

“Why? What’s wrong with yours?”

“It’s a crime scene upstairs,” she told him. “It hasn’t been cleared for entry yet, and I don’t have my mobile. It won’t take long.”

He was still suspicious—for which she couldn’t blame him, given that her real reason for not wanting to use her own phone was that she feared that the call might be overhead—but he unchained the door so she could slip through.

He was wearing a dressing gown that was so dead as to be slightly malodorous, but she didn’t make any comment. He indicated the phone and then stood still, making no move toward the bedroom from which he had presumably emerged. Martha called from within to ask what was happening.

“It’s nothing,” he replied. “Go back to sleep.”

Lisa tapped out the number of Mike Grundy’s mobile. As soon as he replied, she said, “It’s Lisa, Mike. Are you free to talk?”

“Sure,” he said uneasily.

“Meet me where we had the run-in with the red Nissan yesterday,” she said. “Your car’s computer logged it, in case you don’t remember. Soon as possible, okay?”

“What—” he began.

“Okay”
Lisa repeated insistently.

He got the message. “Okay,” he said, and immediately rang off.

She wasn’t off the hook yet. John Charleston had heard every word. Before he could open his mouth to ask her what it was all about, though, she lifted a finger to her lips. “Police business,” she said in a stage whisper. “If anyone asks, I was never here.”

“Oh,” he said unenthusiastically. “Yeah, I guess.” He might have said more, but his gaze suddenly moved upward as he fixed his stare on the ceiling.

Because Lisa lived in the topmost apartment, she had never quite realized how loud a creaking floorboard might sound beneath the lath-and-plaster ceiling below it, at least in the dead of night. She felt a sudden chill of fear, not so much because she thought she was in physical danger, but because she foresaw that her plan might have to be recalculated yet again. If the radfems had come back for her, that might be convenient, in a way, but if she were to convince them that she meant business, she really ought to be the one to make the approach. As Leland had shrewdly observed, anything said by a captive under duress was likely to be bullshit, and likely to be construed as bullshit even if it were the sober truth. Allowing herself to be taken prisoner might provide an easy route to the heart of the matter, but it would seriously hurt her chance of taking control once she got there.

“Shit,” she murmured

“I thought—” Charleston began.

Lisa hadn’t any time to waste. “Have you got a gun?” she asked sharply.

“A gun?” he spluttered. “That would be—”

“Just give me the gun, John,” she said, dismissing any objections with a casual gesture of her wounded hand. “I need it.”

He had to go into the bedroom to remove it from its hiding place. Citizen mice always kept their illicit guns in the bedroom, because the fear that moved them to arm themselves was that of waking up in the dead of night—as Lisa had done little more than twenty-four hours before—to find intruders in their home.

“It’s just a dart gun,” Charleston explained unnecessarily as he handed it over. “Certified nonlethal. Everybody’s got one.”

“It’ll do,” she assured him in a whisper. “Close the door behind me,
very
quietly, and stay close to it. If you hear shots, or if I don’t knock on your door again inside five minutes, hit Redial and tell the man I just spoke with to get over here as fast as he can. Whatever happens, you stay here. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said with soldierly alacrity.

As soon as the door had closed behind her, she moved lightly up the stairs. She held the gun in her right hand, rather gingerly because the sealant between thumb and forefinger was starting to denature and it had become slightly sticky. She used her left hand to sort through her smartcards. She would still have to punch in the two combinations once her card had gone through the swipe slot, but she figured she could do that quietly enough. With luck, whoever was in her apartment wouldn’t know that he or she had company until Lisa actually opened the door.

If the light was on, she would have to keep moving while she assessed the situation, making herself as difficult a target as possible. If not, she would have to flick the switch with her left hand while keeping the gun at the ready, and then—

As soon as the door had opened by the merest crack, she knew the light was on, and she moved rapidly to her left as she pushed her way in, raising the gun to point it at the chest of the man who was rising from the armchair with an expression of startled horror on his face.

But she didn’t fire. The continuing effect of the pills had combined with her adrenaline to boost her sky-high, and she felt well and truly wired, but she still had the presence of mind to freeze her finger on the trigger.

Instead of firing the darter, she raised her left forefinger to her lips in an urgent gesture, imploring silence.

Fortunately, Chan Kwai Keung had always been quick on the uptake, and he must have been expecting her for hours. He stifled his cry of recognition and nodded eagerly, to show that he understood. Lisa used the barrel of the gun to beckon him to the door, and she closed it behind them as quietly as she could. Then she shook her head and pointed downstairs. Chan nodded again.

As soon as they reached the third-floor landing, Lisa knocked on John Charleston’s door. When he cracked it open, she thrust the gun through the narrow gap.

“It’s okay,” she said. “All sorted out. No cause for alarm.”

“Can I still keep it?” he asked tremulously—meaning, of course, the illicit gun.

“Keep what?” she replied generously.

Charleston wasn’t quite as quick on the uptake as Chan, but he was quick enough. “Oh,” he said feebly. The direction of his gaze switched to Chan’s face. “Right. Thanks. You’re okay now?”

“Fine,” she said. “Neither of us was ever here, okay?”

“Absolutely,” he assured her.

Lisa waited until she’d eased the car out on the road again before turning to Chan and saying: “What the
hell
do you think you’re playing at?” The adrenaline should have abated by now, but it hadn’t. The pills had thrown her entire system out of kilter, and she was locked like a crazy lemming or a snowshoe hare on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She was on the edge, and she wasn’t going to get off until she had seen the affair through to its bitter end.

Chan winced at the rawness of her tone. He seemed genuinely chastened. “I am very sorry,” he said, punctilious in his diction even now. “I did not know what to do for the best. I thought you would know, so I tried … I really had no idea those crazy people would try to snatch me the way they snatched Morgan. I was naive, I suppose—but that made me all the more anxious. As soon as I got out of the parking area, I ran like the wind. At first I expected you home in a couple of hours. Then, when you failed to turn up, I thought you must have been shot. I did not know what to do.”

“How did you get in? Those locks are supposed to be unhackable.”

“You should change your pass codes more often,” Chan chided her, “and your smartcard needs to be at least twice as smart as it is. But that is not important. Where have you
been?”

“That’s
not important. What’s important is why you’re playing silly cloak-and-dagger games while there’s a full-scale crisis on. What on earth have you got to hide?”

Dawn had turned to daylight now, but the light was gray and cold and utterly unwelcoming. It was less than a week to All Hallows’ Eve, but the weather should still have been relatively benign. This was like a return to the old days, before the greenhouse effect really took hold—but that was no reason for the dead not to hold to their calendar and keep to their graves. The world had no right to be turning topsy-turvy.

“They bombed Mouseworld,” Chan said in a whisper. “If it had just been Morgan, and Ed … but when I was told they had bombed Mouseworld, that was when I knew it had to be my fault. It had to be that crazy old experiment, not the ones we were doing for Ed Burdillon. If it had only been the work we were doing for Ed … but how did they ever find out?”

“I don’t have the time, Chan,” Lisa said sternly. “You’ll have to do better than this.
What
crazy old experiment?”

“It was my idea,” he was quick to say. He continued so rapidly as the car sped along Wellsway toward Entry Hill that Lisa wondered whether her hearing had somehow gone into fast-forward. “I had to let Morgan in on it, but it was entirely my idea. We had to do it secretly, even if it meant breaking the law, because the department would never have given us permission. Mouseworld had become a sacred cow, untouchable—but that was pointless, do you see? As soon as all four populations had stabilized, there was no further point in the replication. If they had continued to behave differently, it would have been a different matter, but they did not. And there was so much more that might be done! Four cities: two experimental samples, two controls. What an opportunity! How could we let it go to waste? But the Departmental Committee could never have agreed. If there had ever been a majority to concede the principle, it would have fallen apart as soon as the question was raised as to which of countless imaginable experiments should be carried out. The only way that progress could be made was for one or two individuals to do what needed to be done
in secret.
All mice look alike among so many … and the people keeping track had ceased to do anything but
count.
It was so easy, Lisa, so very easy.”

Lisa felt completely numb. Time ceased to race and became suddenly still. So it was not unthinkable, after all, that Morgan had kept a secret from her for forty years—and not unthinkable, either, that Chan had kept it from her too. But even that revelation was marginally less shocking than the other. Morgan Miller and Chan Kwai Keung had subverted the Mouseworld experiment! They had taken it over, for their own secret purposes, without telling anyone what they were doing, or why. For thirty or forty years—presumably ever since the so-called “chaotic fluctuations” of the zero years—the four cities of Mouseworld had been running
their own
experiment instead of, or at the very least alongside of, the one they were supposed to be running. What kind of deception was that?

“What
experiment?” Lisa demanded tersely. She hadn’t time to digress.

Chan went on, speaking faster than he had ever spoken before, at least within earshot of Lisa. “I had developed a new and unprece-dentedly versatile system of antibody packaging. It was not
very
closely akin to the new method Edgar Burdillon has been helping to test, but it was sufficiently close to make us uncomfortable when Ed asked for our help with his new project. I am sworn to secrecy regarding that new project, of course, but I think that the broad outlines of the old experiment, at least, can be divulged without breaking that oath. I would not have you told at the time, because you were a police officer and it would have put you in an awkward ethical position, but if this is why Morgan has been kidnapped … well, it must suffice to say I thought I had devised a new and better approach to the problem of antibody packaging, and that I had high hopes for its utility. The world was still rife with natural infectious diseases in those days. I could not have been so optimistic had I come across it twenty years later, when the vast majority of those evils had been defeated by other means. I thought it an elegant method, but it involved importing a cumbersome package of new DNA into the superficial tissues of any carrier. The mouse models I constructed in order to study the efficiency of the system and its various side effects thrived, but there were certain ambiguities of effect that made me regret deeply that I could study them only in isolation, in interaction with one another. In order that the efficacy of the system could be
properly
tested, I needed to discover how the models would cope with a more realistic context. Do you see what I mean?”

Lisa turned left into Bradford Road, wondering why they had made so little progress. How much time was actually passing while the cracks in the surface of her being widened and spread?
Did
she see what he meant, or was it only the false kind of intuition she sometimes experienced in dreams?