The Cassandra Complex (33 page)

PART FOUR
The Miller Effect

NINETEEN

M
ike Grundy had pulled the Rover off the road, blocking the driveway of a house on North Road. Lisa left her own car on the roadway, even though traffic was beginning to build up and she was sure to get in the way of vehicles filtering out of Hadley Road into the left-hand lane of North Road. As if suddenly uncertain of his purpose, the detective stopped in his tracks when he saw Chan emerge from the passenger seat, flattening himself against the fender as horns began to blare.

“It’s okay, Mike,” Lisa said.

Grundy waited by the Rover while they made their separate ways to stand side by side confronting him. The expression on his face was troubled, but the trouble was a mere mask pasted over a deep-seated exhaustion.

“Sorry, Mike,” Lisa said. “I needed to see you. Now I need you to take Chan in for me. Don’t expect any brownie points for it. Nothing we do from here on in is going to save either one of us. We’re too badly soiled. It’s not our fault, but we’re finished in the police force.”

Mike looked at her curiously, but all he said was: “Nice suit. Where’s your belt?”

“I had to put it in for cleaning,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve had that old wreck swept recently?”

“As a matter of fact,” he told her, half turning to look down at the roof of his car, “our noble leader ordered a check on all vehicles as soon as it was obvious that the station had become leaky. You can never be a hundred-percent certain, of course, but I think I’m clean. If you can say the same, no one is listening in on us.”

“Good,” she said. “It doesn’t make a lot of difference at this stage, but it would be nice to have the moment to ourselves. I’ve no time to spare so I’ll just say what I need to say. Helen’s involved in Morgan’s kidnapping. She probably thinks she’s in charge, but if she ever actually was, her authority must have grown pretty shaky by now.”

The disbelief inscribed on Mike’s features was a sight to behold, but he didn’t contradict her. Instead, he let the thought linger for a moment while he studied Lisa’s face for signs of insanity. He was shaking his head slightly, but it was as much confusion as denial. In the end, all he said was: “What makes you so sure?”

“It first occurred to me when Stella Filisetti referred to you as my ‘second-string boyfriend.’ There’s no way she could have got that from Morgan, or from university gossip—and Judith Kenna certainly didn’t tell her. It explained how the kidnappers got the passwords that blacked out our end of the ‘plex, and how the intruders got through my locks so easily, but I wasn’t absolutely sure until Smith told me about the contact search he ran on Stella and the Real Woman. If the threads leading to all three of the leading names had been planted, it would have been a meaningless joke. Two of the spoilers had to have been added to prevent the third name from standing out like a sore thumb—and I’m reasonably certain that the chief inspector didn’t do it. I’ll lay odds that you didn’t change your passwords to the police systems after the split, and that you wrote down the pass codes to the locks at my flat somewhere that someone who knew your habits very well could easily find.”

Mike considered the catalogue of clues for a moment or so, nobly refraining from making any comment on the circumstantiality of the evidence.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Why?”

“Stella found something, maybe in Mouseworld and maybe in one of Morgan’s computers. Whichever one it was, it made her check the other, and she found confirmation. She put those two together with a further two from Morgan’s trips to Ahasuerus and the Institute of Algeny, and made far more than five. She’d probably confided her suspicions to her radfem friends already, but the fact that Morgan was talking to Goldfarb and Geyer spooked them sufficiently to take action. They may have a handful of hobbyist terrorists along—that’s probably where they got the weapons, the accelerant they used in Mouseworld, and the idiotic posing—but they’re not really an organized gang. Even if they’ve managed to get Arachne West on the team, as seems probable, they’re still the rankest kind of amateurs. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. When the computer team clears out all the disinformation, Smith and Kenna will move a whole task force against the couriers carrying Stella’s stolen mice, but I figure that I have at least a couple of hours to try to get Morgan out quietly before the shit hits the fan. That’s what I’m going to do, while you ferry Chan to the Renaissance.”

“You didn’t answer the question,” Grundy pointed out quietly. “What could Filisetti have found that turned a woman like Helen into a master criminal?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Lisa confessed, “but my guess is that what she thinks she found is evidence that Morgan discovered a means of extending mammalian life spans that works only on females. She thinks he’s been sitting on it for up to forty years, trying to figure out a way of making it work on males too. She thinks that because he had failed to do that, he was planning to hand it over to some organization that would carry on the work while maintaining the same kind of secrecy. When she confided all this to her radfem friends, they presumably ran the same background checks on Ahasuerus and the Algenists that Peter Smith ran, and came across all the same tabloid legends. Both institutions are rumored to have exotic secret agendas—but who isn’t nowadays? Ahasuerus is said to have been set up specifically to find a means of conferring emortality upon its illustrious male founder, Adam Zimmerman, and the Algenists are misunderstood by their severest critics to be trying to create a Naziesque master race. You can see how that sort of bad press might raise radfem hackles.”

“I can easily imagine Helen getting excited about that kind of thing,” Mike admitted wryly. “In fact, I don’t have to imagine it. Imagining her as a criminal mastermind dispatching gangs of assassins and bombers is a different matter, though.”

“They think I’m in on it,” Lisa added, shivering in a sudden gust of cold wind. “They think I’ve known all about it since day one, but that I’ve kept quiet. Stella and Helen have convinced themselves that I’ve been prepared to go along with Morgan’s plans in return for a promise that I’d eventually be paid off with the treatment, thus betraying the sacred principles of sisterhood. That’s why they sprayed Traitor’ on my door and tried to shake me up by telling me that Morgan never really intended to cut me in. Can I go now?”

Grundy was still dubious. “I’m no fan of Helen’s nowadays,” he said, “but this is way beyond her. She might conceivably be involved, but she can’t possibly be the one behind it.”

“She’s more than involved, Mike,” Lisa told him, hoping she’d read that part of the puzzle right. “This whole thing’s been too
personal
That’s partly down to Stella, but only partly.”

“That doesn’t make sense either,” he objected. “We live in crazy times, but—”

“It’s not just the crazy times,” Lisa told him, determined to put her point across quickly so she could move on. “The sense of impending doom that Containment and the undeclared war have cultivated undoubtedly helped to shove them over the edge, but they’re taking it
very
personally. Stella Filisetti doesn’t know Morgan the way I do, and I doubt if she can relate to his way of life the way I could. She feels let down because he didn’t change into Mister Right the moment he started screwing her. She’s magnified that sense of betrayal into something much greater. And Helen doesn’t know
me
the way you do. She didn’t understand what happened after she threw you out, any more than she ever understood that we really were
friends.
She was all set up to believe the very worst of me. They’ve inflated their personal frustrations into a much grander paranoia—a conviction that something immensely valuable is being withheld from them by people they know. They think they’re being left to die while less worthy acquaintances are plotting to survive the impending catastrophe and come through it with a secure position in the pockets of the rulers of the new world. Hell, even Peter Grimmett Smith of the MOD is a sucker for tales of the Secret Masters and the Ice Age Elite. The only difference is that he’s either too shrewd or too contemptuous to believe that someone like me could ever be a part of that kind of conspiracy. Stella isn’t. Nor, alas, is Helen.”

“If you say so,” Grundy conceded reluctantly. “But even if you’re right, it ought to be me who goes after Helen, not you.”

“It has to be me, Mike,” Lisa told him. “It’s because I know Morgan better than anyone else does that I
know
this farce is founded on a colossal mistake. I’m the only one who can convince the radfems of that fact. Morgan obviously couldn’t.”

“Maybe no one can,” he suggested.

“Maybe not—but I don’t have time to argue, Mike. I have to go now.”

Chan had already moved to Mike’s side. He was waiting, with a meekness so exaggerated that it was almost insulting, for further orders. Mike looked sideways at him, as if reading a message from his slumped shoulders and sleepless eyes. “I suppose you have considered the possibility that they might be right, Lis?” he said finally.

That one was too important to leave unanswered, but all Lisa said was “Yes.”

Of course she’d considered the possibility that Stella really had found what she thought she had—but she’d rejected it. If Morgan Miller had discovered a life-extension treatment whose only deficiency was that it worked only on women, he wouldn’t have kept it entirely to himself. Even Helen Grundy and Stella Filisetti didn’t think that badly of him. They thought badly enough of Lisa to believe she’d conspired with him to keep it quiet, but they hadn’t been able to suppose that Morgan would simply let her grow old and die with all the rest. Even they accepted that if Morgan Miller had drawn up a list of his own personal Ice Age Elite, she would be on it.

There had to be something else: something that Stella Filisetti had missed; some obstacle that Morgan had stumbled over, that had carried on bruising his shins for forty years.

Lisa wanted to tell Mike that she was deeply sorry he had been caught up in it, and sorry that his ex-wife’s meddling would surely torpedo his attempts to cling to the vestiges of his career. She wanted to commiserate with him because her own career had been similarly blighted. She wanted to tell him, in the most heartfelt manner she could contrive, that it might all be for the best, because they should never have allowed themselves to sink so deeply into the ruts that had somehow consumed their lives. She wanted to try to convince him that they had been good citizen mice for far too long, putting up no resistance to the shrinkage of their personal space, refusing to get excited about the stultification of their options. She wanted to ask him whether it was really all bad to be a Calhounian rat, raging against the injustice of circumstance. She wanted to assure him that everything might still work out for the best, not merely for themselves, but for the world.

But she had no time.

Even if it had all been true, she had no time.

“Okay,” Grundy said when the silence had dragged on and on to the limits of bearability, even though it had lasted no more than ten or fifteen seconds. “Go.”

“You have to go first,” Lisa told him, “but you’ll have to leave your mobile with me. I need to use it.”

Chan had already moved around the Rover to the passenger door. Lisa’s final demand was a trifle excessive, but Mike didn’t have to ask why she wanted the phone. He simply nodded and handed it over before turning on his heel and opening the driver’s door. He glanced back only once before getting in and slamming it shut. Then he drove away, so fast that his onboard computer had to be flashing red warnings. Lisa pressed the automatic-dial button on Grundy’s phone and then hit 1.

The surge of relief she felt when Helen Grundy answered on the second ring with a monosyllabic “Yes?” hit Lisa like a tidal wave. She knew how utterly foolish she would have felt had she been unable to make that crucial contact.

“It’s Lisa Friemann, Helen,” she said, her voice sounding so leaden in her ears that she could hardly recognize it as her own. “We need to talk.”

On another occasion, under different circumstances, Lisa might have found something to savor in the silence that followed, knowing as she did what a heady cocktail of shock and fear must have prompted it. On this occasion, she was content merely to wait for a further response.

“What are you doing with Mike’s phone?” Helen Grundy asked, confirming Lisa’s suspicion that a call from any other instrument would probably have been blocked out.

“Mike’s not here,” Lisa said. “I sent him away. I’m alone. This is between you and me.”

“Well?” Helen said after another pause for thought. “What do you want?”

“It’s a matter of hours now, Helen. The computer people are working on the corrupted phone records. It’ll take them a while to figure out the obvious, but they’ll do it. The computers will leave a safety margin before they feel a hundred-percent confident of the link between the Real Woman we arrested with Stella Filisetti and Arachne West, but Smith has people searching for her already. It won’t matter how well hidden you are or how quiet you can keep—your blackout didn’t last long enough to make your movements untraceable. Even if it takes a small army to intercept the couriers carrying the mice, they won’t get away.”

“I don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about, Lisa,” Helen replied stubbornly. “Just put Mike on, will you?”

“Mike knows everything, Helen. For the moment, he and Chan Kwai Keung are the only two who do know—but as I said, it’s a matter of hours. Going after Chan was a mistake, by the way. His guilty conscience was reflecting on sins of his own. I can see why Stella and her friend jumped to the wrong conclusion, but it really was a masterpiece of bad judgment.”

“I don’t understand why you’re telling me all this,” Helen said. The ambiguity was so neat that Lisa felt free to assume that the other woman had regained most of her composure.