The Cassandra Complex (19 page)

“You can’t do this,” the younger woman said, with little conviction.

“Yes, we can,” Lisa retorted, figuring that she might as well go with the flow now that she had turned on the tap. “You know full well that anything that could motivate you to pull off this crazy stunt has to be important enough to motivate us to do what it takes to prize it out of your hands. It’s driven you to the brink of committing murder, although I doubt that you had any inclination in that direction beforehand, so you can imagine well enough how far it might drive us. It’s time to give it up and save yourself—and we can arrange that too. Just tell us what we need to know while there’s still time and you can walk away.”

“I don’t know where Morgan is,” Stella replied swiftly. “They thought it best that I didn’t, just in case …”

Was it too glib? Lisa wondered. It would, after all, have been a sensible precaution to keep Morgan’s location secret even from their own field troops—but these conspirators had not so far shown much sign of being sensible people. Even by the standards of a crazy world, they seemed seriously deranged.

“I don’t believe you,” Lisa said when she’d paused long enough. “The stupid thing is, Stella, that your scruples have led you astray. It was all a scam—a trap. Morgan seems to have fallen into it too, but he always did like to be out there ahead of the field, didn’t he? Never a team player, alas, even while he was playing for the greatest team of all in the cause of progress. Heroic individualists can be so seductive, don’t you think? Well, of course you do. I know exactly how you feel, because I’ve been a victim too—for forty years. Imagine that! I know
exactly
how you feel, Stella, because I’ve been up and down the same escalator half a dozen times. I know
exactly
how seductive Morgan can be, and exactly how deceptive—but I love him anyway. I always have. I love him enough to do whatever’s necessary to save him from his own recklessness. So I’d be very grateful if you could just tell me where he’s being held. It’s over anyway. You must see that. You don’t have the data, and time’s already run out.”

All the time she had been speaking, Lisa had been moving her face closer to Stella Filisetti’s, flaring her nostrils slightly and widening her eyes so that the whites would be visible all around the irises. As mad acts went, it lacked all subtlety, but subtlety didn’t seem to be an issue anymore.

It didn’t work. It wasn’t, as far as Lisa could judge, that the younger woman didn’t seem convinced. It was more a matter of the conviction being woefully insufficient to break her resistance.

“Okay, Dr. Friemann,” said Leland, his voice lowered almost to basso profundo. “That’s enough of the threats. I warned you, didn’t I? Now get the hell out of here so I can have a sensible conversation with the young lady.”

Lisa winced inwardly, not so much at the “young lady” bit as at the realization that Leland had obviously learned his good cop/bad cop routine from classic movies that Stella Filisetti had probably seen and laughed at while she was in her teens. Lisa had no alternative, though, but to keep on going with the flow and hope that the oldest tricks were still the best. She stood up and stalked out of the room, closing the door behind her before pausing and gluing her ear to the ancient hardboard panel.

“She’s upset,” Leland explained to his prisoner, his deep voice clearly audible through the door. “She doesn’t understand modern commerce. The police tend to have a very jaundiced view of the way the economy works—but that’s necessary to the way they play their role. They’re obliged to regard most forms of private enterprise as evil, and they don’t have to recognize or face up to the fact that if they weren’t
necessary
evils, they wouldn’t exist. Personally, I’m a pragmatist. No ax to grind. To me, it’s just a matter of fixing a price.”

“It’s not for sale,” Stella Filisetti told him. Her voice wasn’t powerful, but the words were quite distinct. “If you think it could be, you don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s lied to you.”

“She? You mean Dr. Friemann? Why would she do that?”

Lisa bit her lip, but reminded herself that Leland had to know that this was a ploy even older and more hackneyed than his own. Being helpless, the only chance Stella Filisetti had was to sow dissent in the opposition ranks.

“Because she wants it for herself. She’s taken the long way around, but she knows what it is and she wants it. We have proof of that.”

“What proof?” Leland wanted to know.

“Check your records, megacorp man. It’s in the freezer.”

What’s in the freezer?
Lisa thought, knowing that Leland must be wondering exactly the same thing.

“If Dr. Friemann already knows,” Leland said, “the secret’s already out. What harm is there in letting me in on it too?”

“It’s been buried too long already,” the higher voice said, becoming slightly shrill as hysteria sharpened its edge. “She’s helped to keep it under wraps—but we’re not going to let it stay buried. It doesn’t matter what you do to me. I can’t tell you where Miller is. We had to make certain of that.”

“Everything’s for sale, Stella,” Leland told her—but Lisa could hear the puzzlement in his voice. “It’s just a matter of finding the right price. The only question you have to ask yourself is whether you’d prefer to deal with a good customer or a skinflint.”

“If that’s what you think,” Stella responded, “then she’s definitely lied to you. God only knows what game she’s playing—I certainly don’t—but she and Miller have kept this thing between themselves for forty years. In my book, that’s a crime against humanity. If you want answers, ask her.”

That, Lisa thought,
had
to be acting. It had to be a bluff, no matter how convincing it sounded.

“I have asked her,” Leland said. “She’s convinced me that she doesn’t know why Miller was taken. If you want to convince me otherwise, you’ll have to give me more than mere abuse. It might be as well to remember that I’m the only thing standing between you and a long jail sentence. I’m the only one who can get you out of this.”

“I don’t have to convince you of anything,” the young woman told him. “In fact, I hope you’re right. I hope Miller
did
keep it secret, even from her. If it
is
true, however unlikely that may be, she’s going to be extremely pissed when it does come out. Anything she wants to do to me, she’ll want to do to Miller ten times over. If she thinks hell has no fury now, wait till she finds out what
scorn really is!”
The way the captive raised her voice implied that she knew perfectly well that Lisa was listening, and that she was talking to both of her interrogators, determined that if she couldn’t drive a wedge between them, she could at least sow a little unhealthy confusion.

“I’m sure that’s right,” Leland said, having carefully lowered the volume of his voice, perhaps to imply that he was prepared to deal confidentially. “My people are pretty sure that she doesn’t know—although I might be able to change their minds if you explain to me why you think otherwise. So why don’t you let me in on the secret, so that we can figure out exactly what it might be worth?”

“To you,” Stella Filisetti replied, not bothering to whisper, “it’s not worth a damn thing. And that bitch outside the door, whether she’s a rat or just a fool, probably isn’t going to profit from it now. To us, it’s worth
everything.
More than anything the law can throw at us once we’ve given it to the
right
people. So you and Friemann can go fuck yourselves—or each other, if you have the stomach for it. You’re getting nothing out of me. Even if I knew where Miller is, I wouldn’t tell you. You can hurt me as badly as you like, but all you’ll get is wasted time.”

Leland was silent. His script had been blown apart.
If
Stella’s lying
, Lisa thought,
she’s much better at it than her amateur status suggests. If she’s playing a game, she has far more skill than the average panicky interrogatee. If there really is a riddle to be solved, it isn’t going to be easy to unravel, even though it doesn’t need a genius to figure out what it must be that she thinks Morgan has discovered.

After a further minute, Leland emerged from the room and closed the door behind him. “Better let her consider her situation for a while,” he murmured. “Could be that the other one will be a little saner. After all, she’s never screwed your crafty boyfriend.”

His tone was neutral, but Lisa could tell that Stella Filisetti had got through to him. Whatever trust Leland had had in her had evaporated. From now on, she was a suspect in his eyes too. She wondered whether it was time to call for help, but decided after a moment’s hesitation that duty could wait a little longer. After all, Leland could be right. The Real Woman presumably hadn’t ever screwed the aforementioned crafty boyfriend, and even Lisa had to admit that that might make her just a little bit saner than someone who had.

“But this time,” Leland added, “it’s my turn to go first.”

Second Interlude

DISTURBIRG SYMPTOMS

The dog riots of 2010 were the closest Lisa ever came to “frontline policing.” She was called to the university to serve as an adviser to the chief inspector, David Kenneally. What she had in mind as she traveled out in one of the vans was a cozy situation way behind enemy lines, from which she could offer expert judgment as to the wise deployment of the uniformed officers. Kenneally had other ideas; although he had taken a training course in Advanced Negotiating Skills, he did not feel that what he had been taught was particularly relevant to the situation.

Presumably, the chief inspector would have felt far more confident if a lone gunman had taken hostages, or if some overstressed undergraduate were sitting atop the biology building threatening to jump, but Lisa had little sympathy for his plight. If Advanced Negotiating Skills didn’t cover ugly mobs whose members had studied strategy and tactics by watching videotapes of cult activity in Jerusalem, Tokyo, and New York in 1999 and 2000, what on earth was the use of them in the twenty-first century?

“Why me?” Lisa asked when Kenneally told her he wanted her right beside him when he went to meet the notional leader of the demonstration.

“You know more about their concerns than anyone else on my staff does,” he informed her.

“Only because I was once what
they’d
call a professional torturer,” Lisa pointed out. “I even used to practice my dark artistry on this very site. I never worked with dogs, but I think the temperature out there’s already a little too high to encourage nice distinctions. Right now, they’re not likely to concede that being a mere mass murderer of mice is the next best thing to saintly innocence.”

“We won’t have to discuss your credentials with the demonstrators,” Kenneally informed her dismissively. “You have seen this videotape they’re up in arms about, I take it?”

Lisa had to admit that she had. “The voice-over is a pack of lies,” she said. “Okay, so the dogs in the first sequence are more than a little disoriented, and maybe more than a little distressed, but there’s no way their symptoms were caused by prion proteins or by any prion-producing autoimmune reaction. The labs have mouse models of classic CJD and at least three of its variants, but nobody makes dog models of
any
human disease. The second lot are
not
being injected with immunosuppressant viruses for the sake of germ-warfare research, and the puppies being gassed in the final sequence are being put down humanely in order that researchers can study the development of a disease that kills thousands of pets and working dogs every year, with a view to finding a cure. Nor are any of the dogs British-born—ever since the 2000 ban on the breeding of domestic dogs for research purposes, the university has imported the very few dogs it needs from France. The tape’s pure black propaganda from beginning to end.”

“That’s exactly what I need, you see,” the chief inspector told her. “The calm voice of sanity.”

“But they’re not going to listen to the calm voice of sanity,” Lisa told him. “That’s not the way this kind of game is played. Even if the students who routinely use the building are steering clear, there’s bound to be somebody out there who’ll recognize me and tip them off. To them, I’ll just be one more vivisectionist plugging the party line. Believe me, sir, they hate police scientists almost as intensely as they hate company-funded research workers.”

“You speak their language,” Kenneally insisted.

“Maybe—but with an inflection that immediately marks me as an enemy,” she protested. “You might as well ask Chan to talk to them.” Chan was also in the van, as was one of the campus security guards.

“Dr. Friemann’s right,” Chan put in. “If it is not safe for me to go out, it is not safe for her.”

“But Dr. Friemann is a police officer,” Kenneally pointed out. “For her, it’s a matter of duty.”

Chan called Edgar Burdillon on his mobile phone and told him what the chief inspector was planning to do, but Kenneally was no more impressed by Burdillon’s objections than he had been by Chan’s.

“If you go out to talk to them, they will turn it into an argument,” Chan said to Lisa. “It will add fuel to the flames. Far better to stonewall them. If the chief inspector’s men can hold their position, the gale might just blow itself out. If you provoke them, you will definitely end up having to deploy riot shields and mount baton charges.”

“It’s not my decision,” was all that Lisa could say in reply.

“With all due respect, Dr. Chan,” Kenneally said, “I think I know more about keeping order in this sort of situation than you do. I helped to police dozens of political demonstrations and labor disputes while I was in the Met between fifteen and ten years ago. I even faced down the Countryside Alliance a time or two.”

“The Countryside Alliance went to bat for the privilege of killing things,” Lisa pointed out tiredly. “They weren’t possessed by anything like the kind of righteous fervor that has these people in its grip.”

In the end, of course, the chief inspector prevailed. He was the one with the privilege of issuing orders. Kenneally and his reluctant scientific adviser sallied forth, valiantly hoping to slay the dragon of extremism with the lance of moderation.