The Cassandra Complex (25 page)

Lisa knew that Leland had had the time, the opportunity, and the motive to rig the car after staging his flamboyant rescue, but she also knew how dangerous it was to jump to conclusions.

“And you think the Algenists are involved?”

Smith sighed. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “But the background check makes them look exceedingly fishy. It seems to me that they’re the people most likely to have grabbed Morgan Miller.”

“Why would they do that? He went to them.”

“The fact that he went to them could have convinced them that he had something valuable. If he then decided to take it to Ahasuerus instead of handing it to them—and it seems to me that if he did
any
kind of proper background check, that’s what he’d have decided to do—they might well have figured it was time to take matters into their own hands.”

It didn’t sound at all likely to Lisa, but that was the emerging pattern of the investigation. Everyone who looked into the matter seemed to be seizing on different details—details that reflected the particular tenor of their own innate paranoia.
Am I any different?
she wondered.
Am I seeing it the way I do because that’s what tickles my idiosyncratic fancy? Are we all so terrified by the impending crisis that we’re grasping at straws, all equally blinded by fear?

“What makes you think the Institute’s not what it seems?” was all she dared say.

“Once we deepened our own background check, I could see why Dr. Goldfarb was so offended by the fact that Morgan Miller put Ahasuerus and the Algenists on the same list. Adam Zimmerman’s grandparents emigrated to the States in the 1930s, fleeing Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. The Foundation’s mission statement contains some very strong injunctions against releasing results that might be useful for military purposes or for political oppression. The Algenists’ website makes similar protestations, but if you look back in time far enough, it becomes fairly obvious that algeny’s intellectual forebears were firmly in the Nazi camp. The parent Institute of Algeny in Leipzig was previously a branch of the German Vril Society, which claimed descent—falsely, one presumes, but no less significantly—from the Bavarian Illuminati. There are similarly remote historical links to Theosophy, the racial theories of Count Gobineau, and something called the World Ice Theory. Does any of that ring a bell with you?”

“No,” Lisa confessed.

“Nor to anyone else alive and sane, I suspect. Apparently, there’s more than a linguistic analogy connecting algeny to alchemy. Vril was an occult force invented by some nineteenth-century British novelist; it was enthusiastically taken up by a number of continental occultists. Nowadays, although its current mission statements still refer in approving terms to Nietzschean moral reconstruction, contemporary algeny has cleaned up its intellectual act considerably, but if Miller bothered to do any digging, his investigations would have revealed the rotten core beneath the shiny surface.”

Lisa had no idea of what to make of all this. It sounded almost surreal, and completely irrelevant—but she reminded herself that her own far more modest inferences had sounded equally irrelevant to Smith. “If they really are crackpots from way back when,” she said warily, “where does their money come from?”

“Switzerland,” was the terse reply.

Switzerland had long been a world leader in the arcane art of money laundering—which grew more arcane with every year that passed. Ordinarily, “money from Switzerland” was a euphemism for the “Mafia,” which had controlled up to fifty percent of GDP in the post-Communist nations at the turn of the century. During the last thirty years, following the example set by the organizations on which they were modeled, much of that wealth had been rechanneled into legitimate businesses, and the organizations had revamped their image considerably. Some had remarketed themselves as a new breed of revolutionary communists—hence the term “Leninist Mafia”—who were deeply and sincerely concerned with issues of social and economic reorganization. Despite their much-publicized opposition to “Imperialist Global Parasitism,” the Leninist Mafia did not seem to have fared any worse during the worldwide economic upheavals of ’25 than its alleged counterparts in China.

“So now you think they’re gangsters pretending to be crackpots,” Lisa said skeptically. “And you think they kidnapped Morgan because they got the same impression as Goldfarb—that he was deliberately underselling whatever it was he had.”

“It’s a possibility,” Smith said defensively. “There’s also the apocalyptic angle to consider. You said this Leland character inferred from what the women told you that they were apocalyptic cultists. Did he have any particular group in mind?”

“No,” Lisa said. “Do you?”

“The women didn’t mention the Ice Age Elite by any chance?”

“That’s just post-Millennial folklore,” Lisa said. “The Real Woman started sounding off about the Secret Masters and the seeds of a New Order, but those were the only phrases she used.”

Lisa remembered talk of the Ice Age Elite being bandied about during her years as a research student, but she couldn’t remember Morgan Miller ever having dignified their existence with an opinion. When the years 1999 and 2000 had come and gone, everyone gifted with common sense had expected Millenarian cults to wither away, or at least to be effectively mothballed until 2029 or 2033, the two dates most widely touted as the two-thousandth anniversary of the crucifixion. Ever perverse, however, several of the most vocal cults had refused to go away, and their tales of impending woe had grown ever more fanciful. One such tale had fixated on the anxieties expressed by some scientists that global warming might subvert the ocean-circulation mechanism sustaining the gulf stream, abruptly precipitating a new Ice Age.

The contemporary myth of the Secret Masters hadn’t really come into its own until the crash of ’25, but earlier versions had been around long before that, and one of its earliest twenty-first-century manifestations had been the idea that the greenhouse effect was being deliberately stimulated, with the intention of causing an Ice Age. The Ice Age Elite were the plotters allegedly responsible for this scheme. They were said to have made elaborate plans to survive the ecocatastrophe in comfort. Accounts of their motives were widely various, ranging from the suggestion that they were Gaean altruists determined to save Mother Earth from further rape, to the proposition that they intended to buy up all the ruined real estate in the northern hemisphere, whose overlords they would become when they eventually unleashed the biotech that would end the Ice Age as abruptly as it had begun. Little had been heard of the Ice Age Elite since 2025, presumably because the Cabal was now widely believed to be in the process of achieving their alleged aims without having had to go to the trouble of precipitating an Ice Age.

“The problem with folklore,” Smith told her, “is that it wouldn’t qualify as folklore if there weren’t people who believe it. Admittedly, Ahasuerus isn’t called Ahasuerus because its founder believed in the myth of the Wandering Jew in any simple sense—in fact, if the rumors of his present whereabouts can be trusted, he’d be more accurately considered to be the ultimate Sedentary Jew—but the Institute of Algeny is different. It wasn’t set up from scratch, so it still carries a certain amount of ideological baggage left over from who knows when. Its interest in future human evolution is closely linked to ideas of apocalyptic notions of destruction and transformation. You say that this Real Woman used the words ‘New Order’?”

“Yes,” Lisa admitted, “but it’s a perfectly commonplace phrase.”

“Maybe it is,” Smith agreed, “but the Real Women were great enthusiasts for physical culture, weren’t they? Very militant too, I believe.”

“They weren’t Nazis,” Lisa said firmly. “I think you might be letting your imagination run away with you.”

Smith obviously resented that comment, perhaps because it had a little too much accuracy in it for comfort. “Why did Leland take you along with the two women?” he asked sharply. “Even if it hadn’t been obvious that you weren’t one of them, he had only to glance at your ID. Why didn’t he leave you behind with Ginny and me, to sleep it off in the parking lot?”

“I think he wanted to explain himself,” Lisa told him judiciously. “He wanted a quick word with the ambushers before turning them in, but he didn’t want us to think they might have been spirited away by their friends. He doesn’t want us chasing after him with the same fervor we’re devoting to the task of trying to find Morgan Miller. He’d rather we thought of him as an ally. He took me with him so I could bear witness to his good intentions. He might, of course, have fed me a complete pack of lies.”

“But you think he was on the level—or as near to it as a man of his type ever is?”

“Probably,” Lisa admitted, thinking that Smith was a pompous fool whose attitudes, instincts, and modes of expression were so twentieth-century as to be almost beyond belief. “While we’re still searching for Morgan, we can use all the help we can get, and whoever he’s working for, Leland does seem to be running a parallel investigation. If I’m right and this whole thing is some kind of silly mistake, it probably won’t matter who he reports to.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

Lisa looked away, feebly pretending that the view from the window had attracted her attention. The helicopter had already begun its descent and the lights of Swindon were displayed beneath her, their brightness and variety testifying that the town was booming, as it had been for half a century. It had owed its first spurt of growth to the fact that it was the halfway point between the original termini of the Great Western Railway, and it advertised itself nowadays as the bridge between the two great cityplexes of England—a claim that excited a certain amount of resentment and scorn in the Birmingham metropolitan area and United Manchester. At the moment, it looked more like an island than a bridge; the threads of illumination connecting it to Chippenham and Reading seemed as frail as spidersilk in comparison to the blaze emitted by the glittering hub where the leisure spots of the town’s twenty-four-hour society were clustered. Lisa blinked her eyes, fighting tiredness.

“If I’m wrong,” she said, as much to herself as to Peter Smith, “and Morgan really has stumbled onto the kind of technology that can create some kind of a New Order—without bothering to tell me about it—the government doesn’t stand much chance of keeping it secret from anyone Leland might be working for, although the reverse might be a different matter. I still think the Ice Age Elite is a silly myth, but if there really are people in the world who are anxious to set themselves up as inheritors of post-Crisis Earth, our job is to make sure they don’t get away with it, whoever they are. Isn’t it?”

“Of course it is,” Smith answered—as he would surely have done even if he hadn’t been under the assumption that Leland had planted camouflaged bugs in Lisa’s clothing. He was, after all, a loyal servant of king and country. If he couldn’t be trusted to put matters of duty above personal considerations, who could?

SIXTEEN

T
here was a uniformed policeman waiting for them at the helipad. As soon as Smith descended from the craft, the man handed him a plastic bag, which he immediately passed on to Lisa.

“Change in the helicopter,” he commanded. “Put your belt and wristwatch in with the old clothes.” Lisa hesitated, wondering whether to raise an objection, but Smith was right. If Leland had planted anything, it was as likely to be in her belt or watch as in Jeff ’s shirt and trousers. If she had to be phoneless for a while, she had to be phoneless. She moved back to the second rank of seats so that she’d be shielded by the first, although she felt slightly shamed by her obsolete modesty.

It wasn’t the first time she had ever put on one of the new garments, but she had found the previous tentative trial so uncomfortable that she had decided to stick with her “dead clothes” for a while longer. Now she wondered why she had reacted so negatively. Was she as much of a dinosaur as Peter Grimmett Smith? Of course not. She was a scientist, supposedly immune to the reflexive “yuck factor” that governed initial reactions to so many new biotechnologies. In a sense, her own response had had an opposite cause; she had always thought of the new fabrics in terms of “fashion,” because that was the lexicon the advertisers had used in order to push it, and she had always resisted the idea of being a slave to fashion, valuing newness for its own sake. Now, if the suspicions raised by Smith’s clumsy inquiries could be trusted, the advertising lexicon was about to undergo an abrupt change.

What Arachne West had told Lisa on the occasion of their first meeting didn’t seem quite as paranoid now as it had then. Now it was perfectly obvious to anyone with half a brain that the new global culture was a plague culture, and that smart clothing would soon have to be seen in terms of personal defense—not antibody packaging in the traditional sense, but in a significant new sense. Soon enough the first questions anyone would ask salespeople about the clothes on their racks would concern the quality of their built-in immune systems and the rapidity with which they could react to any dangerous invasion of the commensal bodies within their loving embrace.

The garment Lisa was struggling into wasn’t uncomfortable in the sense that ill-fitting clothes could be—although the way it hugged her flesh so cloyingly was slightly disconcerting—but it was worn without underwear and followed the contours of her body so carefully that she felt unusually
exposed.
She hesitated before dropping her belt into the plastic bag along with the clothes she had discarded, eventually retrieving her personal smartcards and tucking them into one of the pockets of her new suit. The smartcards ought to be clean, she reasoned, and it was one thing to be phoneless, another to be keyless and creditless.

Ginny reentered the copter just as Lisa finally let the belt drop in the bag. There was a conspiratorial gleam in the younger woman’s eye. She extended a gloved hand over the back of the front passenger seat, opening the palm to display two small white tablets. Lisa met her gaze suspiciously.