The Cassandra Complex (6 page)

She wondered if it was possible that the bombers had gone after Mouseworld simply because it was a classic experiment, a living legend. Extreme Gaeans, way out on the green end of the spectrum, might conceivably believe that hitting Mouseworld might help them make a point about the
real
London, Paris, New York, and Rome and their plight within the context of the
other
war that dare not speak its name: the war for the salvation of the ecosphere. But what, if so, was the motive for Morgan’s abduction?

She recalled then that Thomas Sweet had told her that Chan Kwai Keung wasn’t answering his phone, and that he hadn’t been able to get a hold of Stella Filisetti either. It was possible that the register of crimes patiently listed by Judith Kenna would expand even further before daybreak. Chan lived way out in the country, so it would take time for Mike’s men to check out his address, but Stella Filisetti probably lived closer to the campus. The men sent to bring her in for questioning should be reporting shortly. The true magnitude of the crime would be evident soon enough.

Mike was still waiting for a comment.

“If their target really was the cities, and they’re doing it to make a point,” Lisa said hesitantly, “they’ll have to ram the point home somehow. Maybe Kenna was wrong about the ransom demand—maybe we’ll get one as soon as the TV news people wake up.”

Mike immediately picked up the thread of the argument. “We have to be looking at some kind of organization with an inside connection,” he said. “They had a smartcard pass and the combinations of all the doors they needed to get through. In a way,
than
the weirdest thing about the whole operation. They got through your door, and Miller’s, just as easily. They also switched off the power to a substantial slice of the city, and they knew my mobile-phone number. That’s a
lot
of inside information, Lis—and it’s from at least three different insides, unless…”

“Unless it’s
our
inside information,” Lisa finished for him. “They’re trying to set me up with this Traitor’ crap, aren’t they? Why would they do that, if not to distract attention from someone else?”

“You don’t suppose it could be Ms. Kenna, do you?” He wasn’t serious. He had seen Lisa’s mood darken again, and he was trying to compensate.

“No,” she said, for form’s sake. “Not her—but not Morgan, either. Not me and not you and not Ed Burdillon. But it has to be someone who knows more than he or she should about at least three of those five and the places where we live and work. If it’s not someone close to us, it must be one hell of a hacker. The Gaean Libs are rumored to have high-powered hackers in the ranks, but all the best poachers turn gamekeeper as soon as they can. If we’ve been hacked to that extent, it’s far more likely to be someone working for one of the megacorps. But what would convince a megacorps that a quiet backwater like the fourth campus of a provincial university has any secrets worth stealing? That would be one hell of a mistake—if it
is
a mistake.”

“If it
is
a megacorp op,” Mike observed glumly, “the MOD won’t get to the bottom of it. Not that they’d tell us if they did. Can’t be, though. Mayhem and kidnapping isn’t the megacorp way. They already own the whole fucking world, thanks to the big smash-and-grab raid that fucked up the Eubank, the Fed, and everybody’s pension funds. Their carpetbaggers can buy anyone they want for next to nothing, even out of a university. Especially out of a university. Where else can you and I go—if Kenna manages to ease us out—but straight into the pocket of the Cabal?”

It was all true, Lisa conceded. Ever since the great stock-market
bouleversement
of ’25, a handful of megacorporations had gradually taken effective control of the world. The power of national governments had been on the wane for a century, but the engineered crisis had administered the coup de grâce. The “gray power” everyone talked about was just ballot-box power; no matter how it contrived to expand the legally sanctioned work opportunities of the over-fifties, it couldn’t conjure up any new employers. If you wanted to work, you had to take your begging bowl to the megacorps, and if you had a valuable secret of any kind, you had to sell it to the megacorps. It was no good trying to play one corp off against another, because they all worked as a team. The broadsheets called them “the Ultimate Cartel,” but that was just politeness; the tabloids were right to prefer “the Cabal.” Megacorp publicity claimed that the substitute term had arisen because tabloid editors were as illiterate as their readers, not because anyone had knowledge of an actual secret conspiracy, but everyone with half a brain took that as one more sign of their undoubted guilt.

Mike Grundy’s gaze had wandered. Lisa followed it, tracking across the appalling blackness of the spoiled walls and the crude stumps of what had been the projecting sections of the central H Block. The stink was still appalling. No matter how hard the cold wind blew through the empty window frames, the foul odor kept on renewing itself, emanating with seemingly relentless fervor from the roasted fur of half a million mice.

“Let’s get out of here, Lis,” Grundy said. “There’s nothing we can do. Want to sneak a look at the security tapes before they’re commandeered?”

“Kenna told me to get my cuts properly cleaned and dressed,” Lisa replied uneasily. “Given her deep-seated conviction that I’m too firmly stuck in the past to be useful to today’s go-ahead police force, it might have been a bad idea to let her see me sporting a Stone Age dressing and multiple bloodstains on my dead sweatshirt.”

“The Fire and Rescue paramedics are downstairs,” Mike said. “We can share the elevator.”

Lisa was by no means reluctant to be hustled back to the gaping doorway, but she couldn’t resist the temptation to take one last panoramic look at the ruins of Mouseworld.

“Seventy years,” she murmured. “Eight hundred generations. All gone in a momentary holocaust. Hideous.”

“You can say that again,” the detective muttered—but he didn’t mean what she meant. He wasn’t a scientist. He didn’t understand. It wasn’t his fault, of course, but it was a gulf between them nevertheless. There had always been a gulf between them, even when they were at their closest, in the traumatic weeks after Helen had thrown him out. At the time, Lisa had thought it was the specter of Morgan Miller that had held her back from any fuller engagement with Mike’s need or his wayward emotions, but now she realized it had been something more fundamental.

They were both detectives, in their different ways, but they had never had the same goals. Mike was a man who thought in terms of offenses and results, while Lisa thought in terms of puzzles, clues, and solutions, but even that wasn’t the heart of it. Mouseworld had meant something to Lisa, not merely as a symbol of the world’s historical predicament—which it had been set up to be—but as a symbol of humankind’s well-meaning, ill-directed, and ineffectual attempts to come to terms with that predicament. To Mike, it was just a mess of mice, which had stunk to high heaven even before it was torched.

FIVE

M
ike Grundy’s subordinates had commandeered Thomas Sweet’s office, partly for the sake of the video surveillance cameras and partly for the sake of the percolator. When Grundy turned up, with Lisa still in tow, a constable in plainclothes immediately poured each a cup of coffee. Lisa hesitated before accepting hers, but the residual smoke and fumes had parched her throat and she knew that the caffeine would help her fight off the inconvenient tiredness. She took the cup. Grundy poured milk into his own cup and then offered the carton to her, but she shook her head.

“There’s nothing much on the tapes,” said the sergeant who’d been patiently running them through. Lisa had never met him before, so she assumed that he was part of Judith Kenna’s infusion of new blood. Grundy introduced him as Jerry Hapgood.

“Three individuals, five-seven, five-nine, and five-eleven,” Hapgood went on. “Two definitely look woman-shaped—can’t really tell about the tallest one, although it took serious muscle power to tow Burdillon to safety without hardly slowing down. Both of the women were armed, one with a real gun and one with a silly dart pistol. The one with the real gun—looks like an antique, probably been mothballed for fifty years—covered Burdillon while the other turned to fire, so they must have had a plan of sorts for dealing fairly gently with anyone who interrupted them. They sailed through all the doors, and they knew the routines of Sweet’s people well enough to be in and out without giving them any opportunity to interrupt.”

The bleeper attached to Grundy’s waistband went off and he plucked the phone from his belt. After identifying himself, he listened for a full two minutes, saving up the expletive until there was a suitable gap in the information flow. Lisa knew by the way the DI’s eyes sought out her face that the news was expected, but disappointing. She had guessed long before the phone was back in its holster.

“They all got away,” Mike reported glumly. “Traffic picked up the trace of a likely vehicle moving away from your place, but it headed straight into the blackout. Same with the van that took the bombers away from the campus.”

“Both stolen?” DS Hapgood asked, obviously assuming that the question was merely rhetorical.

“Actually, no,” Grundy said. “Both registration plates came up ’No Record.’ Not even write-off salvage—never issued.”

Lisa couldn’t see that it helped much. If the perpetrators had put false plates on their own vehicles, that gave her people a chance of matching up forensic evidence if ever the vehicles could be traced—but if they’d used stolen vehicles that they’d subsequently dumped, they might have left evidential traces in them, even if they’d torched them, and time was of the essence. “Anything at all on the people who took Morgan?” she asked.

The question was addressed to Mike, but it was the sergeant who took it upon himself to answer. “Nobody saw or heard a thing,” he said. “Detached house, nice neighborhood, four in the morning, power out—what do you expect? We still don’t know for sure that he was taken. He was definitely at home the previous evening, but he could have gone out under his own steam after the blackout.”

“Why would he do that?” Lisa countered.

“How would I know?” Hapgood said, seemingly stifling the temptation to add an insubordinate expletive by way of punctuation. “According to Sweet, the guy was the next best thing to a comic-book weird scientist. Obsessive-compulsive type.”

From the corner of her eye, Lisa saw Mike Grundy wince. The sergeant obviously wasn’t yet party to all the relevant gossip.

“His work was reckoned as an obsession only because he never found what he was looking for,” Lisa observed calmly. “If his particular Holy Grail hadn’t proved quite so elusive, his single-mindedness would be called commitment and he’d have a book-length entry in every encyclopedia on the net.”

“Holy Grail?” Hapgood queried sarcastically. For a detective, he was surprisingly slow on the uptake.

“The prize,” she said. “The panacea.”

“A cure for hyperflu?”

Lisa supposed that it was a natural guess, even though the hyperflus had been around for only seven years. “Not a cure for a specific disease,” she informed the young man wearily. “Not even for a whole class of diseases. Something even more basic than that. A general-purpose, targetable transformer that would make
all
gene therapies easier to administer and more precise. When he started out, cancers were still a major killer and everyone was trying to tailor virus transformers to take them out—‘magic bullets,’ the jargon used to call them. Morgan was working at the most fundamental level, trying to design a vector that could take any DNA cargo into any type of specialized cell and deliver it to any chromosomal address, according to need or demand. If he’d found it, it would have provided a method of attacking all genetic-deficiency diseases, all cancers, and most kinds of injury. One-shot medicine—just turn up at the clinic, list your symptoms, get your tailor-made injection, go home cured. A vector like that would have had other functions too, but the main incentive was medical. As individual solutions to specific problems turned up year after year, though, the pressure to develop a multipurpose delivery service eased off.

“In the end, Morgan seemed to most of his colleagues to be searching for a solution to a problem that no longer existed. It didn’t lessen his determination to find it.”

“And did he?” asked the sergeant, fishing for a motive.

“No,” Lisa admitted. “And even if he had, it wouldn’t be worth kidnapping him to get it—not unless someone’s dreamed up a brand-new killer app that no one else managed to think of during the last forty years.”

“But that kind of research
is
war relevant, isn’t it?” Mike put in. “If Morgan had found it, it would provide a general defense against biowarfare agents, wouldn’t it?”

“Actually, no,” said Lisa. “We already have defenses against the individual hyperflus and their kin—the problem is that they mutate so quickly and so promiscuously that they keep one step ahead of our immune systems. Morgan’s new delivery system wouldn’t get around that problem. Nor would it fortify us against the
next
wave of biowarfare agents, which will undoubtedly be transformers themselves. If this mess has anything to do with Morgan’s research, it must relate to something he found by accident—but if Morgan had discovered
anything
relevant to biowar defense, he’d have handed it straight to the MOD. He wouldn’t even have asked for a quid pro quo. Obsessive-compulsive he might be, but he’s not conscienceless, and he would
never
try to play political or commercial games with something that might save lives.”

“According to Sweet,” DS Hapgood put in, “he was nutty about overpopulation. Just like the Gaean Libs. Always argued that plague war was inevitable, and not entirely a bad thing, Sweet said.”

“That’s right,” said Lisa. “Morgan always said that everything that’s happening now had been inevitable for nearly a century, and easily foreseeable to anyone with half a mind at least since the days of his childhood. He’s always argued that the coming collapse would have an upside as well as a down—but that doesn’t mean he regards it as any less hideous and tragic than it seems to be working out to be. He’d never have admitted to obsession, but he always pleaded guilty to being a victim of the Cassandra Complex: the sense of powerlessness and world-weariness that comes from knowing that terrible things are going to happen without anyone being able to prevent them. The Gaean Libs and other pious econuts might be prepared to tell the world that the death of millions of people is a blessing and exactly what Mother Ecosphere needs, and that we all deserve everything we get, but Morgan Miller despised that kind of sanctimony. If he’d stumbled across a cure for hyperflu, he’d have done everything he could to get it to everyone who might benefit from it. Believe me,
I
know.”