The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  “I’ll be there in two minutes,” Mike told her. “I was already on my way to pick you up. You’re not the only one to be targeted tonight—all hell is breaking loose. How bad’s the bleeding?”

  “Not bad,” Lisa assured him, inspecting her hand while she said it. “It doesn’t need gelling—not if the hospital’s blacked out, at any rate. I’ll wrap it up.” She was still aware that it was hurting, as hand injuries always did, but it was still the fact of pain of which she was aware, coupled with a peculiar mental detachment. She told herself that it was hurting because of the density of the nerve endings, not because of the seriousness of the wound, and that it would heal easily enough. Then she told herself that she ought to be glad. If Judith Kenna had had her way, Lisa would have retired from the force without ever seeing action. Now she had been threatened and shot at, as well as embroiled in whatever kind of hell it was that was breaking out all over the western reaches of the cityplex.

  “Do that,” Mike said tersely. “I’ll need you at the university. Firebomb in the labs. At least one person injured—one human, that is. Maybe half a million mice dead.”

  Lisa felt a shiver run through her body, but told herself it was delayed shock caused by the fact that she’d just had a gun pointed at her, not to mention that the gun had gone off—four times.

  “Is it Morgan?” she asked querulously. “How bad is he?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Mike told her. “Do you have any reason to think it might be Morgan?”

  Lisa was all too keenly aware, even as she issued a reflexive denial, that the gun-wielding burglar must have mentioned Morgan Miller’s name deliberately. Everything that had been said to her, in fact, must have been said for a reason, however perverse the reason might be. In a world whose walls were growing eyes and ears in ever-increasing quantities, only fools were incautious—and it was difficult to believe that anyone capable of opening her door could be a fool. They had painted TRAITOR on her door for a reason.

  Lisa wanted time to think, but she didn’t want to hang up the phone before she’d told Mike Grundy the most obviously interesting and most evidently sinister of all the things the person who’d shot at her had taken care to let her know. “The one who was holding the gun recognized the number of your mobile when you called,” she said. “Whoever they are, they seem to know a hell of a lot more about us than we know about them.”

  It wasn’t until after she’d said it that Lisa realized it might not be the cleverest thing for a person to put on the record when she’d just found the word TRAITOR sprayed on the door of her flat by someone who’d known the secret combinations of both its locks, especially when she desperately needed the goodwill of her superiors to be allowed to go on working.

  TWO

  Lisa dressed, cursing the clumsiness forced on her by the torn hand. She pulled on a pair of tights and an undershirt made of smartish fibers, but force of habit remained strong, and the tunic and trousers she put on next were the same dead kind she always wore on the outside. Although the undershirt soaked up the evidence of her arm wounds easily enough, the blood still flowing copiously from the tear in her hand immediately stained the cuff of the tunic.

  For once, she admitted that it really might have been wise to embrace the new generation of smart fibers more wholeheartedly. She probably would have, if she hadn’t grown so sick of hearing people recite TV-hatched slogans over the years that her natural stubbornness had intensified her determination not to be railroaded by the lords of fashion and the prophets of doom. The new police uniforms issued the previous year were only five years behind the times, but CID and lab workers had the privilege of lagging even farther behind if they wished, and she’d taken that opportunity even though she’d known it lent fuel to Judith Kenna’s conviction that she was past her use-by date.

  In order to prevent the problem from getting any worse, Lisa fetched the first-aid kit from the bathroom. She hadn’t opened it for years, and it didn’t have any kind of dressing adequate to take proper care of the problem, but she found an absorbent pad that would fit over the awkwardly placed cut on her hand and managed to tape it on with old-fashioned adhesive tape.

  Having dressed the wound as best she could, Lisa made a concerted effort to collect herself mentally. She thanked the good fortune that had helped her resist the temptation to fight her insomnia with drugs. She’d been having trouble sleeping for some months, but she hadn’t resorted to medication because she didn’t believe that insomnia deserved to be reckoned as an illness. She had addressed the problem as a straightforward challenge to her powers of self-discipline: a rebellion of her treasonous flesh against the stern empire of her mind. Her method of fighting the sleeplessness had been to instruct herself not to worry about it, because a woman of sixty—sixty-one, now that her birthday had come and gone—didn’t need that much sleep anyway. She had also informed herself that lying still in the darkness was, in any case, sufficient to garner most of the benefits that sleep was supposed to confer. Even so, she could easily have weakened on a dozen occasions, and last night might have been one of them.

  She went downstairs to meet Mike Grundy at the front door of the building—to save time, she told herself. The crime scene would have to be examined, sooner rather than later if there were staff available, and the spray-painted legend would be duly noted; but for the time being, she wanted to concentrate on the big picture, of which the raid on her premises seemed to be a relatively trivial facet.

  John Charleston and Robbie Hammond must have been lurking inside their locked front doors, listening for clues to what was going on. John peeped out as she passed by, then threw his door open wide. By that time, Lisa was halfway down the next flight. Robbie had taken his cue from the sound of the door opening. They seemed absurdly like bookends as they peered at her, one from above and one from below.

  She didn’t stop. “Police emergency,” she said in what she hoped was a reassuring tone. “All safe and secure upstairs. SOCO will probably get here before I come back. No cause for alarm.”

  “Was that gunfire?” was the only question either of them managed—but by that time, she’d raced past Robbie Hammond and was well on her way to the front door. She didn’t bother to answer him. She left the two of them to meet one another halfway and discuss the matter between themselves.

  Mike’s black Rover was already coming around the corner, and she hardly had time to stop before it was beside her. She used her left hand to open the door.

  “It’s okay,” she assured him as his eyes were drawn to the patchwork dressing on her right hand and the bloodstain on her cuff. “Stings a bit, but it’s fine. Drive. The university, not the hospital.”

  He nodded and put the car back into gear. He had to do a three-point turn to get out of the cul-de-sac, and the screech of his brakes probably woke up more people than the four gunshots had, but he was back on Cotswold Road inside of ten seconds. Ordinarily, he’d have crossed Wellsway on to Greenway Lane, but Greenway Lane led into the blackout, so he headed south to use Bradford Road and Claverton Road. It was a longer way around, but it was probably safer.

  Why black out that part of the grid? Lisa wondered. It doesn’t cover the university or the flat—only a couple of miles in between. Are they just trying to cover their escape routes, or is there a third scene we don’t yet know about? She didn’t raise the point with Mike, though, because he was already talking urgently.

  “The live feeds to the security TV’s were doctored,” he reported, “but the digicams themselves weren’t damaged, so the wafers should tell us what actually happened. The alarms went off when the sprinklers kicked in, but the system couldn’t do more than contain the fire and stop it from spreading. Apart from the one room, damage is limited. The injured man was shot with one of those dart guns that everybody and his cousin seem to have nowadays, but they dragged him way down the corridor before leaving him, so he shouldn’t have inhaled too much smoke—hopefully.”

  “You said half a million dead
mice?” Lisa queried to make sure she’d taken the right inference.

  “That’s right,” Mike confirmed. “The bombs were in the room you always called Mouseworld.”

  “Why would anyone want to bomb Mouseworld?” Lisa asked. “All the AV research is on the upper floors, in the containment facility. All the sensitive commercial stuff is there too—what there is of it nowadays.”

  “Maybe they couldn’t get access farther up and hoped the fire would spread through the ceiling,” Mike suggested. “It won’t make much difference—the Ministry of Defence is sending down a team of spooks from London. I know we aren’t supposed to say there’s a war on, but there is a bloody war on, and until they know this isn’t that kind of hostile action, they have to assume it is. Whatever your people pick up tonight is likely to be taken out of their hands tomorrow, in the interests of national security. I’m likely to be left high and dry too, looking just as foolish. The chief inspector’s on her way to the scene, but that won’t help either of us.”

  “I suppose not,” Lisa agreed. Chief Inspector Kenna hadn’t taken any great pains to support Mike through his recent divorce, and hadn’t seemed to approve of the fact that Lisa had tried to help him, even though they’d been friends and colleagues for more than twenty years. Kenna seemed to think they were both dinosaurs, their methods and instincts equally out of date. “On the other hand,” Lisa added, “you and I know the territory better than anyone—and I’ll probably know the victim too. The men from the Ministry will need our help.”

  “I know that and you know that, but will they?” Mike countered. “The spooks are coming by helicopter, but it’ll take a little while for them to assemble at the point of departure—they probably won’t get here until nine or ten this morning. We’re trying to contact Burdillon, Miller, Chan and the other members of the department, but that won’t be easy at this time of night, even if it weren’t for the blackout. If the bombers could cause that to simply cover their tracks … who the hell are we dealing with, Lisa? What were they after at your apartment?”

  “I don’t know,” Lisa said, wishing there were some way to display her sincerity more clearly, even though Mike Grundy was the one person in the world who wouldn’t dream of doubting her. “They seemed to think I would know, but I don’t. I don’t have a clue. All I know for sure is that they recognized your phone number, and that they took time out to tell me that Morgan’s promises couldn’t be trusted, even though he never made me any, and that the one with the gun was tempted to shoot me even though that probably wasn’t in the plan … and they spray-painted Traitor’ on my door.”

  She hadn’t really planned to let that out just yet, but the flow had built up a momentum of its own. Mike turned to look at her, even though his eyes ought to have been glued to the patch of visibility that the headlights carved out of the road; this far out of town, the streetlights were so sparse that they might as well have been driving in the blackout.

  “That’s crazy!” he said. “Why would anyone do something as stupid as that?”

  “Why would anyone do something as stupid as bombing Mouseworld?” she countered. “That’s what I call crazy. What kind of terrorist would target a room full of mice?”

  “The mice could have been innocent bystanders,” Grundy pointed out. “On the other hand … well, there may be a real plague war on now, but hobbyist terrorism has been a plague of sorts since ’22, and I don’t suppose the talk of curfews and all other containment precautions the commission’s considering will have pleased the flackers, whackers, and code-busters. Must be a big gang, though, to hit three hard targets with such precision—assuming that the blackout really is theirs. Maybe they want to make us believe they’re hobbyist terrorists, although they’re not. Maybe they’re using crazy doodles to obscure their real agenda. Some of these so-called private-security people …” He left the sentence dangling.

  “Maybe,” Lisa concurred. “The blackout—”

  She broke off when Mike cursed. An old red Nissan had zoomed across his path as he approached the junction of North Road and Ralph Allen’s Drive, even though it was his right of way. He kept his foot on the accelerator regardless. He had switched off the computer’s warning bell, but it took only three seconds for the dashboard screen to bring up a red-lettered message stating that although the primary responsibility for the near miss lay with the other vehicle, the person in charge of the Rover was nevertheless guilty of “contributory negligence.”

  Lisa wondered what conditions were like in the town center. The roadside digicams were self-contained and battery-powered, so they hadn’t been disabled by the general blackout, but they weren’t equipped to see in darkness as intense as that which had descended in the wake of the power cut. There were plenty of kids on the new estates west of the campus who might figure that this was the ideal time for joyriding. It might not be just teenagers, either—all the drivers in England tended to take whatever opportunities they found nowadays to exceed the claustrophobic legal restrictions on their speed and movement, no matter what their onboard computers dumped into their black boxes. Mercifully, it was nearly five o’clock in the morning and there wouldn’t be many honest citizens on the roads, except for those driving delivery vans. The vast majority of people tucked up in their beds wouldn’t know when they woke up that there had been a blackout.

  Lisa was about to resume her observation about the blackout when Mike’s phone rang. He snatched the handset up and pressed it to his ear. Lisa cocked her own ear as if to listen, although she couldn’t possibly make sense of the slight leakage of sound. She had to wait for him to put the phone down again to receive the news.

  “It’s not Miller,” he said tersely. “The body in the corridor, that is. The wafer from the corridor’s best-placed eye shows Ed Burdillon going in after the bombers. They shot him—but they didn’t leave him to burn. He’s been taken to the hospital, but the paramedics reckon he’ll be okay. He’s unlikely to have been a preselected target, given that the perpetrators took the trouble to drag him clear before the bomb went off. Probably just unlucky—wrong place, wrong time. On the other hand …”

  Lisa’s stomach had lurched in response to the news that a man she had known for nearly forty years had been hurt, but not as much as it might have done had the man been Morgan Miller.

  Edgar Burdillon had been head of the Department of Applied Genetics for nearly twenty years; in the eyes of far too many half-baked, anti-GM fanatics, that made him personally responsible for the rape and near murder of Mother Gaea, secret plans to manufacture a super race, high unemployment, the torture of innocent animals, and the attempted usurpation of the female prerogative. Now that the government was openly considering stringent containment measures, there would be hundreds of crazies ready to assume that he was also fully involved in developing the weapons that would be used to fight the First Plague War. Ed’s days as a fashionable media pet were a long way behind him, but he had never been shy about issuing propaganda for biotechnology. He had been attacked before, but only at the nuisance level of egg-throwing, poison-pen letters, and acid on the hood of his car. Morgan Miller had suffered as much—and Chan Kwai Keung still had Hong Kong connections, which would make him personally responsible in the eyes of some madmen for at least one of the epidemics that the governments of Europe and America would soon be trying their utmost to “contain.”

  Lisa blinked as the Rover hurtled across what had once been Claverton Down toward the industrial park erected when the old quarries had been filled and leveled. The multitudinous lights of the campus were already vivid in the gloom. The Applied Genetics building was just north of the Avenue, and she could already see the flashing blue lights on the fire apparatus gathered on the south side of the campus. The pall of smoke above them was stained an ugly shade of pink by that fraction of the sodium light it reflected back to the ground.

  It can’t be anything I’ve given him, she told herself while she ran through a mental list of the tasks she had thrown Ed
Burdillon’s way during the last year in her capacity as a pen-pusher. Yes, there had been investigations concerned with DNA polluted by “viral anomalies,” but there had been nothing that looked remotely like hostile action. The MOD had undoubtedly sent work to the department, for which Ed would have taken personal responsibility, but whatever the half-baked might think, England’s green and pleasant campuses were not awash with GM weapons capable of wiping out the population of a cityplex the size of Bristol in a matter of days. Viruses simply weren’t tough enough to wreak that kind of havoc in a world where civilized people were willing and able to observe elementary standards of hygiene, and their much-touted propensity to mutate was a thousand times more likely to render them harmless than to increase their lethal force. Bacteria designed for immunity to common antibiotics were slightly more dangerous, but every household armed with bleach and detergents was a virtual fortress—and Burdillon had been a virus man through and through ever since the early days of magic bullets.

  They came at me too, she reminded herself. They were looking for something in my files. Even after scrupulous reexamination, however, she couldn’t find a likely link. Almost all of the work she had subcontracted to the university labs during the last three decades had had to do with problematic DNA sequences gleaned from everyday crime scenes. Not even any mass murders, let alone any sensitive industrial espionage. If Ed and she had somehow contrived to get under the skin of some rival establishment—which would presumably be a megacorp rather than a foreign government nowadays—she certainly had no idea of how they had done it.

  As the Rover zoomed past a baker’s van carrying the morning quota of bread to the circus-starved masses, the driver made V signs at Mike, not caring in the least that he might be en route to an emergency. If he had known exactly who Detective Inspector Grundy was, he would probably have redoubled the vehemence of his gestures.