The Cassandra Complex (7 page)

She became uncomfortably aware that everybody in the room was staring at her, embarrassed by the intensity of her polemic. Jerry Hapgood had finally got the message, and he shut up—but Mike Grundy had heard that kind of sermon far too many times to give it his full attention, and he was still mulling over the conversation he and Lisa had had at the door of Mouseworld. “What if it weren’t a new means of defense?” he asked quietly. “What if it were a new means of attack?”

That, Lisa had to admit, was a horse of a different color. If Morgan
had
had a secret, and a powerful motive for keeping it… .

“This is all rather hypothetical, isn’t it?” said Judith Kenna’s voice from the doorway of the surveillance room. “Wouldn’t you be better employed helping the constable scan the tapes, DS Hapgood? Have you seen the paramedic yet, Dr. Friemann?”

“It was my fault,” Mike put in quickly. “We were sidetracked.”

“I needed a cup of coffee more than I needed sealant,” Lisa said. “Given that you ordered me to stick around instead of going back to the labs with Steve or to Professor Miller’s house, I thought I’d be best employed in helping to fit the various pieces of the puzzle together. If your people are trying to establish Morgan Miller as the prime suspect in this affair, they’re barking up the wrong tree, and if I can direct them to more profitable lines of inquiry, I might be able to save you a great deal of work.”

“How many of the mice in the burned-out lab belonged to Morgan Miller?” Kenna asked abruptly. The eyes that she fixed on Lisa had a distinctly predatory gleam.

“I doubt that there were more than a couple of hundred involved in current experiments,” Lisa told her. “Stella Filisetti will probably be able to give you an exact number, and a full account of any transformations Morgan had carried out on them.”

“What about mice left over from old experiments?”

“I don’t know,” Lisa admitted. “He probably had a hand in designing twenty or thirty disease models, and at least as many strains transformed for other purposes.”

The predatory gaze switched targets, focusing on Mike Grundy. “Do we know for sure that Miller went home yesterday evening?” the chief inspector asked. “The officers at the house have surely confirmed that much?”

“Yes,” he acknowledged.

“Is there any evidence that anyone else was present? Did he have any visitors, apart from the unwanted ones?”

Lisa inferred the question meant that Stella Filisetti wasn’t at home, or anywhere else that she could be easily located. Mike seemed to hesitate between a straightforward negative answer and the more honest rejoinder that although nobody had reported any such evidence, he didn’t really know. Eventually, he said nothing. Instead, he picked up his mobile and called the officer at the scene for an update. There was a long pause while they waited for a response.

Then, “No,” he reported. “The street cams show that he came home alone, and they don’t show anyone else approaching the house while the power was still on. Although there’s no video or audio record, it looks as if he was in bed, asleep, until something woke him. The debris suggests a relatively brief fight—either they hit him a lot harder than he hit them, or they put him out with tranquilizer-loaded darts. They hacked his locks as easily as they hacked Lisa’s. Nobody had to be inside to let them in. One of the items taken seems to have been an ancient PC; the other may have been a more recent stand-alone.”

“They were probably looking for something that he didn’t want to put on a networked machine,” Judith Kenna concluded. “Something he might have backed up on a wafer or a sequin that he gave to you, Dr. Friemann. That’s the way it looks, isn’t it?”

“Morgan never gave me any backup wafers,” Lisa said. “If that’s what the people who burgled my flat were looking for, they were mistaken.”

“Or misinformed,” Kenna pointed out. “They must have had confidence in their source, don’t you think? They must have thought it was
necessary
to secure all three targets: the mice, the data, the backup. But there might, of course, have been four targets.”

She presumably meant Stella Filisetti—but Mike Grundy was quick to say: “Or five. We still haven’t established contact with Dr. Chan.”

“But it must be significant that Miller’s computers have been taken,” Kenna countered, “and that Dr. Friemann’s backups were cleared out. If Miller isn’t the perpetrator, he’s certainly the key. Do you suppose, Dr. Friemann, that he might have placed a wafer or a sequin on your shelves without your even knowing it?”

“Not recently,” Lisa replied coldly. “He hasn’t visited my home for over a year.”

“Of course,” the chief inspector said with a perfunctory nod. “You’ve … moved on since then.”

Lisa clenched her fists reflexively, and regretted it when pain flared up in the wound she’d only just grown used to protecting.

“Morgan would never do something like that,” she said.

“But he could have discovered the codes to your locks easily enough, if he’d wanted to?”

“He wouldn’t have wanted to,” Lisa insisted. She barely prevented herself from naming the one person who
did
know the codes to both her locks—but Judith Kenna already knew that name.

“Do you know the codes to
his
locks, Dr. Friemann?” Kenna went on inexorably.

For a moment, Lisa considered raising the possibility that Morgan might have changed his codes, as everyone was supposed to do at regular intervals, but she knew full well that he wouldn’t have done any such thing, anymore than she had. “Yes,” she said finally. “And I could have told the bombers how to get into the labs, at least as far as Mouseworld—but I didn’t. Neither did Morgan.”

“I’m merely trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together,” Judith Kenna assured her vindictively. “You see, I can’t think of anyone else except you and Morgan Miller who had ready access to
all
the necessary information. The missing research assistant might well have been able to tell someone how to open Miller’s locks, but I presume that neither she nor Dr. Chan could have told anyone how to get through yours.”

“That’s not all they did,” Mike Grundy pointed out. “They blacked out half the town. Anyone who could hack their way into
that
system could hack any number of locks. If Miller, Chan, or Burdillon had found something that someone else wanted to get a hold of, we’ll have to look a lot farther than their friends and colleagues. We ought to backtrack their communications—trace every phone call and every e-mail, internal and external. That’s where we’ll find the clue to what this is all about—because that’s where the people who did all this must have found their motive.”

“I’m afraid that
we
won’t be able to do any such thing,” Kenna informed him—and she really did seem slightly regretful. “The MOD has already placed all those records under a security blanket. If we’re lucky, they might let us in on whatever they find—but that will depend on how much help they think they need. If Morgan Miller is still being held in the area that was blacked out, they’ll probably let us help them find him—and get him back, if possible—but if the people who have him manage to smuggle him out and away, we’ll be out of the loop. I’d like to ensure that that doesn’t happen, if possible.”

Lisa realized that Judith Kenna would far rather that this turned out to be a local operation, and that it really was Morgan or one of his friends and colleagues who was behind it. If a megacorp
were
behind it, the likelihood was that Morgan would never be seen again and that no one outside the secret meeting places of the Cabal would ever know where or why he had been taken.

She really would like it best of all if I were involved
, Lisa thought.
She’d rather find one of her own officers guilty
—
if only slightly
—
than get nothing at all. Always provided, I suppose, that the officer in question was due for retirement anyway. And if any stray mud were to stick to Mike
—
well, I guess she’d just grin and bear it. And grin again. Unfortunately for her, I really didn’t do it
—
and unfortunately for me, I really haven’t got a clue to who did, or why.

SIX

I
f you’ve finished your coffee,” Chief Inspector Kenna said to Lisa, “I’ll walk you to the paramedic station.”

“I can find it on my own,” Lisa assured her.

“I’m going the same way,” the younger woman pointed out. “The helicopter from London should be here soon, and I need to make sure there’s enough clearance in the parking area to let it land.”

As they walked out of the building into the cold dawn air, Lisa said: “You don’t really think I had anything to do with this, do you?”

“I certainly don’t think you’re allied with the perpetrators,” Kenna assured her. “But the fact that they decided to include you in their set of targets suggests that you do have
something
to do with it, wouldn’t you say?”

“Everyone is supposed to keep important data backed up at a remote location,” Lisa said. “I’m one of Morgan Miller’s oldest friends. Maybe they just assumed that he’d keep backups at my place—not realizing, I guess, that Morgan doesn’t do very many of the things that everyone’s supposed to do.”

“Perhaps they did,” the chief inspector admitted.

They had drawn level with the small ambulance that had trailed the fire engines; its two staff were sitting inside looking bored, having not had a single significant case of smoke-inhalation to treat. The young woman who leaped out in response to Lisa’s gesture with her towel-enshrouded hand seemed glad of the opportunity to do something.

Judith Kenna looked carefully around while the paramedic unwrapped the bloodstained dressing and peeled back the sleeve of Lisa’s undershirt, tut-tutting all the while.

“I know it probably said ‘Sterile’ on the package,” the paramedic said, “but this patch must be thirty years old. You really ought to get a modern medical kit—and the fabric of this undershirt isn’t nearly smart enough to cope with gashes like these. There are much better ones on the market nowadays.”

“Dr. Friemann was at home,” the chief inspector put in, anxious to deflect any implied criticism of the facilities at her station. “You know how it is with home kits—you never replace them until you use them up. And I don’t suppose responsiveness to injury was uppermost in her mind when she bought the undergarment.”

Lisa grit her teeth and said nothing.

The paramedic tut-tutted again over the various wounds before reaching for a tube of sealant. “You’ll never get the stain out of that tunic,” she observed. Her own uniform, unlike Judith Kenna’s, was made of ultramodern fibers that were presumably as expert at mopping up blood as they were at mopping up sweat and tears.

Lisa tried to take the criticism as stoically as she was taking the treatment, although the anesthetic effect of the sealant couldn’t offer much protection to her self-esteem. In the hope of deflecting the censorious gaze of Judith Kenna’s eyes from her hand, she said: “On the other hand, if the kidnappers were just guessing where Morgan might have kept his backup wafers, they probably wouldn’t have contented themselves with raiding my place. If Morgan had found something recently, they might have been more likely to look for it at Stella Filisetti’s place.” She was fishing, to find out whether Kenna knew whether or not Morgan had been screwing his research assistant. When Kenna didn’t bite, Lisa added: “Unless, of course, it was Stella who told them my flat was the more likely hiding place.”

“How well do you know Stella Filisetti?” Kenna was quick to ask.

“Hardly at all,” Lisa admitted. “I’ve only met her a couple of times. Morgan never told me anything about her, except for a few passing remarks about her radfem sympathies.”

“Some of the nicest people I know are radfems,” the chief inspector commented mildly. “None of them pose any threat to national security.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that he disapproved,” Lisa said swiftly.

“You have radfem acquaintances yourself, I believe,” Kenna added.

Lisa had to stop herself from asking the chief inspector where that tidbit of information had come from. Instead, she said: “I’ve known one or two.” Her first assumption was that Kenna must be talking about Arachne West—but then she remembered that she had had more recent and much longer-enduring contact with another proud wearer of the label, and wondered how significant the chief inspector’s choice of the word “acquaintances” had been. Arachne West had almost qualified as a friend once—but Helen Grundy never had.

If Helen was numbered by Kenna as one of those radfems who were “among the nicest people I know,” Lisa thought, that might go a long way to explain why she was so down on Mike—and why she might disapprove so strongly of Lisa’s having taken Mike in for a while after Helen threw him out.

“All done,” said the paramedic brightly. “None of the cuts is bad enough to need syntheflesh—just peel off the sealant in three or four days. How’d you do it?”

“Somebody shot a telephone receiver out of my hand,” Lisa said laconically. “It could have been worse—at least the shooter waited until I’d taken it away from my ear.”

The young woman grinned as if it were a joke, then went back to join her partner.

“Is Stella Filisetti a suspect?” Lisa asked the chief inspector.

“We’re treating everyone as a suspect until we know otherwise,” Kenna replied predictably, “including your friend Sweet. Security people usually have ways of accumulating information on people with whom they come into regular contact.”

“He’s another casual acquaintance,” Lisa said. “But it would take a master of disguise to seem that stupid if he were actually the criminal mastermind who planned all this.”

Kenna was still watching her closely, speculatively, if not actually suspiciously. The chief inspector was obviously not convinced that Morgan Miller hadn’t entrusted her with a precious backup wafer, perhaps containing the secret of the Ultimate Weapon of Biowarfare. Lisa realized that it might not be easy to persuade Kenna that the burglars had simply made a mistake—understandably enough, given that she couldn’t quite convince herself that they had
simply
made a mistake.