The Cassandra Complex (3 page)

He nodded and put the car back into gear. He had to do a three-point turn to get out of the cul-de-sac, and the screech of his brakes probably woke up more people than the four gunshots had, but he was back on Cotswold Road inside of ten seconds. Ordinarily, he’d have crossed Wellsway on to Greenway Lane, but Greenway Lane led into the blackout, so he headed south to use Bradford Road and Claverton Road. It was a longer way around, but it was probably safer.

Why black out that part of the grid?
Lisa wondered.
It doesn’t cover the university or the flat
—
only a couple of miles in between. Are they just trying to cover their escape routes, or is there a third scene we don’t yet know about?
She didn’t raise the point with Mike, though, because he was already talking urgently.

“The live feeds to the security TV’s were doctored,” he reported, “but the digicams themselves weren’t damaged, so the wafers should tell us what actually happened. The alarms went off when the sprinklers kicked in, but the system couldn’t do more than contain the fire and stop it from spreading. Apart from the one room, damage is limited. The injured man was shot with one of those dart guns that everybody and his cousin seem to have nowadays, but they dragged him way down the corridor before leaving him, so he shouldn’t have inhaled too much smoke—hopefully.”

“You said
half a million
dead mice?” Lisa queried to make sure she’d taken the right inference.

“That’s right,” Mike confirmed. “The bombs were in the room you always called Mouseworld.”

“Why would anyone want to bomb
Mouseworld?”
Lisa asked. “All the AV research is on the upper floors, in the containment facility. All the sensitive commercial stuff is there too—what there is of it nowadays.”

“Maybe they couldn’t get access farther up and hoped the fire would spread through the ceiling,” Mike suggested. “It won’t make much difference—the Ministry of Defence is sending down a team of spooks from London. I know we aren’t supposed to say there’s a war on, but there
is
a bloody war on, and until they know this isn’t that kind of hostile action, they have to assume it is. Whatever your people pick up tonight is likely to be taken out of their hands tomorrow, in the interests of national security. I’m likely to be left high and dry too, looking just as foolish. The chief inspector’s on her way to the scene, but that won’t help either of us.”

“I suppose not,” Lisa agreed. Chief Inspector Kenna hadn’t taken any great pains to support Mike through his recent divorce, and hadn’t seemed to approve of the fact that Lisa had tried to help him, even though they’d been friends and colleagues for more than twenty years. Kenna seemed to think they were both dinosaurs, their methods and instincts equally out of date. “On the other hand,” Lisa added, “you and I know the territory better than anyone—and I’ll probably know the victim too. The men from the Ministry will need our help.”

“I know that and you know that, but will they?” Mike countered. “The spooks are coming by helicopter, but it’ll take a little while for them to assemble at the point of departure—they probably won’t get here until nine or ten this morning. We’re trying to contact Burdillon, Miller, Chan and the other members of the department, but that won’t be easy at this time of night, even if it weren’t for the blackout. If the bombers could cause that to simply cover their tracks … who the hell are we dealing with, Lisa? What were they after at your apartment?”

“I don’t know,” Lisa said, wishing there were some way to display her sincerity more clearly, even though Mike Grundy was the one person in the world who wouldn’t dream of doubting her. “They seemed to think I would know, but I don’t. I don’t have a clue. All I know for sure is that they recognized your phone number, and that they took time out to tell me that Morgan’s promises couldn’t be trusted, even though he never made me any, and that the one with the gun was tempted to shoot me even though that probably wasn’t in the plan … and they spray-painted Traitor’ on my door.”

She hadn’t really planned to let that out just yet, but the flow had built up a momentum of its own. Mike turned to look at her, even though his eyes ought to have been glued to the patch of visibility that the headlights carved out of the road; this far out of town, the streetlights were so sparse that they might as well have been driving in the blackout.

“That’s crazy!” he said. “Why would
anyone
do something as stupid as that?”

“Why would anyone do something as stupid as bombing Mouseworld?” she countered. “That’s what
I
call crazy. What kind of terrorist would target a room full of mice?”

“The mice could have been innocent bystanders,” Grundy pointed out. “On the other hand … well, there may be a real plague war on now, but hobbyist terrorism has been a plague of sorts since ’22, and I don’t suppose the talk of curfews and all other containment precautions the commission’s considering will have pleased the flackers, whackers, and code-busters. Must be a big gang, though, to hit three hard targets with such precision—assuming that the blackout really is theirs. Maybe they want to make us believe they’re hobbyist terrorists, although they’re not. Maybe they’re using crazy doodles to obscure their real agenda. Some of these so-called private-security people …” He left the sentence dangling.

“Maybe,” Lisa concurred. “The blackout—”

She broke off when Mike cursed. An old red Nissan had zoomed across his path as he approached the junction of North Road and Ralph Allen’s Drive, even though it was his right of way. He kept his foot on the accelerator regardless. He had switched off the computer’s warning bell, but it took only three seconds for the dashboard screen to bring up a red-lettered message stating that although the primary responsibility for the near miss lay with the other vehicle, the person in charge of the Rover was nevertheless guilty of “contributory negligence.”

Lisa wondered what conditions were like in the town center. The roadside digicams were self-contained and battery-powered, so they hadn’t been disabled by the general blackout, but they weren’t equipped to see in darkness as intense as that which had descended in the wake of the power cut. There were plenty of kids on the new estates west of the campus who might figure that this was the ideal time for joyriding. It might not be just teenagers, either—all the drivers in England tended to take whatever opportunities they found nowadays to exceed the claustrophobic legal restrictions on their speed and movement, no matter what their onboard computers dumped into their black boxes. Mercifully, it was nearly five o’clock in the morning and there wouldn’t be many honest citizens on the roads, except for those driving delivery vans. The vast majority of people tucked up in their beds wouldn’t know when they woke up that there had been a blackout.

Lisa was about to resume her observation about the blackout when Mike’s phone rang. He snatched the handset up and pressed it to his ear. Lisa cocked her own ear as if to listen, although she couldn’t possibly make sense of the slight leakage of sound. She had to wait for him to put the phone down again to receive the news.

“It’s not Miller,” he said tersely. “The body in the corridor, that is. The wafer from the corridor’s best-placed eye shows Ed Burdillon going in after the bombers. They shot him—but they didn’t leave him to burn. He’s been taken to the hospital, but the paramedics reckon he’ll be okay. He’s unlikely to have been a preselected target, given that the perpetrators took the trouble to drag him clear before the bomb went off. Probably just unlucky—wrong place, wrong time. On the other hand …”

Lisa’s stomach had lurched in response to the news that a man she had known for nearly forty years had been hurt, but not as much as it might have done had the man been Morgan Miller.

Edgar Burdillon had been head of the Department of Applied Genetics for nearly twenty years; in the eyes of far too many half-baked, anti-GM fanatics, that made him personally responsible for the rape and near murder of Mother Gaea, secret plans to manufacture a super race, high unemployment, the torture of innocent animals, and the attempted usurpation of the female prerogative. Now that the government was openly considering stringent containment measures, there would be hundreds of crazies ready to assume that he was also fully involved in developing the weapons that would be used to fight the First Plague War. Ed’s days as a fashionable media pet were a long way behind him, but he had never been shy about issuing propaganda for biotechnology. He had been attacked before, but only at the nuisance level of egg-throwing, poison-pen letters, and acid on the hood of his car. Morgan Miller had suffered as much—and Chan Kwai Keung still had Hong Kong connections, which would make him personally responsible in the eyes of some madmen for at least one of the epidemics that the governments of Europe and America would soon be trying their utmost to “contain.”

Lisa blinked as the Rover hurtled across what had once been Claverton Down toward the industrial park erected when the old quarries had been filled and leveled. The multitudinous lights of the campus were already vivid in the gloom. The Applied Genetics building was just north of the Avenue, and she could already see the flashing blue lights on the fire apparatus gathered on the south side of the campus. The pall of smoke above them was stained an ugly shade of pink by that fraction of the sodium light it reflected back to the ground.

It can’t be anything I’ve given him
, she told herself while she ran through a mental list of the tasks she had thrown Ed Burdillon’s way during the last year in her capacity as a pen-pusher. Yes, there had been investigations concerned with DNA polluted by “viral anomalies,” but there had been nothing that looked remotely like hostile action. The MOD had undoubtedly sent work to the department, for which Ed would have taken personal responsibility, but whatever the half-baked might think, England’s green and pleasant campuses were not awash with GM weapons capable of wiping out the population of a cityplex the size of Bristol in a matter of days. Viruses simply weren’t tough enough to wreak that kind of havoc in a world where civilized people were willing and able to observe elementary standards of hygiene, and their much-touted propensity to mutate was a thousand times more likely to render them harmless than to increase their lethal force. Bacteria designed for immunity to common antibiotics were slightly more dangerous, but every household armed with bleach and detergents was a virtual fortress—and Burdillon had been a virus man through and through ever since the early days of magic bullets.

They came at me too
, she reminded herself.
They were looking for something in my files.
Even after scrupulous reexamination, however, she couldn’t find a likely link. Almost all of the work she had subcontracted to the university labs during the last three decades had had to do with problematic DNA sequences gleaned from everyday crime scenes. Not even any mass murders, let alone any sensitive industrial espionage. If Ed and she had somehow contrived to get under the skin of some rival establishment—which would presumably be a megacorp rather than a foreign government nowadays—she certainly had no idea of how they had done it.

As the Rover zoomed past a baker’s van carrying the morning quota of bread to the circus-starved masses, the driver made V signs at Mike, not caring in the least that he might be en route to an emergency. If he had known exactly who Detective Inspector Grundy was, he would probably have redoubled the vehemence of his gestures.

“And you!” Lisa muttered, loudly enough to startle herself. Mike glanced at her, but made no comment.

They were almost at the campus gate; the headlights had picked out the red-and-white stripes on the barrier.

The security guard didn’t wait to inspect the passcard Mike was fumbling from his pocket—he presumably figured that anyone in a black Rover who wanted to get in must have a legitimate mission. Reporters always drove brightly colored Italian cars and never got out of bed at five o’clock on an October morning.

Lisa wondered whether the team that was flying out from London by helicopter might be just for show, but it seemed unlikely. Until they had more information about the motive for the attack, the Ministry of Defence would be obliged to treat the incident as a possible threat to national security. Even if some lunatic fringe organization like the Defenders of Mother Gaea or the New Luddites were to own up to the crime campaign before noon, the MOD would probably want to remain involved, if only to keep a heavy foot on the toes of the Special Branch. Hobbyist terrorists were perversely unwilling to accommodate their missions and objectives to the neat divisions of responsibility set out by the last wave of institutional reorganizations.

It had been some months since Lisa had last visited the university in person, but the campus still felt more like home than her actual home. She had only to visit it twice or three times a year to maintain the force of impressions stamped on her psyche nearly forty years before, when she’d started her course of postgraduate study under the supervision of Dr. Morgan Miller.

Ed Burdillon had been merely one of the troops in those days, with not a gray hair on his head, and Chan had been in his second year of post-doc, patiently waiting for opportunity to come knocking. In those days, she had driven to the campus from a brand-new high-rise in Bathampton Warren on a 50cc motorcycle. She’d spent the best part of three years in a lab just along the corridor from Mouseworld, in and out of it all the time. It was easy enough to imagine someone working late one night, tracking a particularly tricky 3-D electrophoretic migration pattern, hearing noises and going to investigate….

Except, of course, that Ed Burdillon didn’t work just along the corridor from Mouseworld. He worked on one of the floors above, in a Level 4 biocontainment facility. He might have heard the noises through the floor—but if it had been only noise, he wouldn’t have thought too much about it, because he couldn’t have known that Security was unwittingly watching tapes instead of live transmissions. He must have seen something—perhaps a black-clad figure in a helmet like the one Lisa’s assailant had worn—and realized that Security wasn’t on the ball. To fix the digicams, Lisa thought, the bombers must have had an inside man—but how had they sneaked him in? Even the humblest lab assistants had to be positively vetted these days if they were to have access to the biocontainment facility.