The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  “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

  Mike 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.”

  She became uncomfortably aware that everybody in the room was staring at her, embarrassed by the intensity of her polemic. Jerry Hapgood had finally got the message, and he shut up—but Mike Grundy had heard that kind of sermon far too many times to give it his full attention, and he was still mulling over the conversation he and Lisa had had at the door of Mouseworld. “What if it weren’t a new means of defense?” he asked quietly. “What if it were a new means of attack?”

  That, Lisa had to admit, was a horse of a different color. If Morgan had had a secret, and a powerful motive for keeping it… .

  “This is all rather hypothetical, isn’t it?” said Judith Kenna’s voice from the doorway of the surveillance room. “Wouldn’t you be better employed helping the constable scan the tapes, DS Hapgood? Have you seen the paramedic yet, Dr. Friemann?”

  “It was my fault,” Mike put in quickly. “We were sidetracked.”

  “I needed a cup of coffee more than I needed sealant,” Lisa said. “Given that you ordered me to stick around instead of going back to the labs with Steve or to Professor Miller’s house, I thought I’d be best employed in helping to fit the various pieces of the puzzle together. If your people are trying to establish Morgan Miller as the prime suspect in this affair, they’re barking up the wrong tree, and if I can direct them to more profitable lines of inquiry, I might be able to save you a great deal of work.”

  “How many of the mice in the burned-out lab belonged to Morgan Miller?” Kenna asked abruptly. The eyes that she fixed on Lisa had a distinctly predatory gleam.

  “I doubt that there were more than a couple of hundred involved in current experiments,” Lisa told her. “Stella Filisetti will probably be able to give you an exact number, and a full account of any transformations Morgan had carried out on them.”

  “What about mice left over from old experiments?”

  “I don’t know,” Lisa admitted. “He probably had a hand in designing twenty or thirty disease models, and at least as many strains transformed for other purposes.”

  The predatory gaze switched targets, focusing on Mike Grundy. “Do we know for sure that Miller went home yesterday evening?” the chief inspector asked. “The officers at the house have surely confirmed that much?”

  “Yes,” he acknowledged.

  “Is there any evidence that anyone else was present? Did he have any visitors, apart from the unwanted ones?”

  Lisa inferred the question meant that Stella Filisetti wasn’t at home, or anywhere else that she could be easily located. Mike seemed to hesitate between a straightforward negative answer and the more honest rejoinder that although nobody had reported any such evidence, he didn’t really know. Eventually, he said nothing. Instead, he picked up his mobile and called the officer at the scene for an update. There was a long pause while they waited for a response.

  Then, “No,” he reported. “The street cams show that he came home alone, and they don’t show anyone else approaching the house while the power was still on. Although there’s no video or audio record, it looks as if he was in bed, asleep, until something woke him. The debris suggests a relatively brief fight—either they hit him a lot harder than he hit them, or they put him out with tranquilizer-loaded darts. They hacked his locks as easily as they hacked Lisa’s. Nobody had to be inside to let them in. One of the items taken seems to have been an ancient PC; the other may have been a more recent stand-alone.”

  “They were probably looking for something that he didn’t want to put on a networked machine,” Judith Kenna concluded. “Something he might have backed up on a wafer or a sequin that he gave to you, Dr. Friemann. That’s the way it looks, isn’t it?”

  “Morgan never gave me any backup wafers,” Lisa said. “If that’s what the people who burgled my flat were looking for, they were mistaken.”

  “Or misinformed,” Kenna pointed out. “They must have had confidence in their source, don’t you think? They must have thought it was necessary to secure all three targets: the mice, the data, the backup. But there might, of course, have been four targets.”

  She presumably meant Stella Filisetti—but Mike Grundy was quick to say: “Or five. We still haven’t established contact with Dr. Chan.”

  “But it must be significant that Miller’s computers have been taken,” Kenna countered, “and that Dr. Friemann’s backups were cleared out. If Miller isn’t the perpetrator, he’s certainly the key. Do you suppose, Dr. Friemann, that he might have placed a wafer or a sequin on your shelves without your even knowing it?”

  “Not recently,” Lisa replied coldly. “He hasn’t visited my home for over a year.”

  “Of course,” the chief inspector said with a perfunctory nod. “You’ve … moved on since then.”

  Lisa clenched her fists reflexively, and regretted it when pain flared up in the wound she’d only just grown used to protecting.

  “Morgan would never do something like that,” she said.

  “But he could have discovered the codes to your locks easily enough, if he’d wanted to?”

  “He wouldn’t have wanted to,” Lisa insisted. She barely prevented herself from naming the one person who did know the codes to both her locks—but Judith Kenna already knew that name.

  “Do you know the codes to his locks, Dr. Friemann?” Kenna went on inexorably.

  For a moment, Lisa considered raising the possibility that Morgan might have changed his codes, as everyone was supposed to do at regular intervals, but she knew full well that he wouldn’t have done any such thing, anymore than she had. “Yes,” she said finally. “And I could have told the bombers how to get into the labs, at least as far as Mouseworld—but I didn’t. Neither did Morgan.”

  “I’m merely trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together,” Judith Kenna assured her vindictively. “You see, I can’t think of anyone else except you and Morgan Miller who had ready access to all the necessary information. The missing research assistant might well have been able to tell someone how to open Miller’s locks, but I presume that neither she nor Dr. Chan could have told anyone how to get through yours.”

  “That’s not all they did,” Mike Grundy pointed out. “They blacked out half the town. Anyone who could hack their way into that system could hack any number of locks. If Mill
er, Chan, or Burdillon had found something that someone else wanted to get a hold of, we’ll have to look a lot farther than their friends and colleagues. We ought to backtrack their communications—trace every phone call and every e-mail, internal and external. That’s where we’ll find the clue to what this is all about—because that’s where the people who did all this must have found their motive.”

  “I’m afraid that we won’t be able to do any such thing,” Kenna informed him—and she really did seem slightly regretful. “The MOD has already placed all those records under a security blanket. If we’re lucky, they might let us in on whatever they find—but that will depend on how much help they think they need. If Morgan Miller is still being held in the area that was blacked out, they’ll probably let us help them find him—and get him back, if possible—but if the people who have him manage to smuggle him out and away, we’ll be out of the loop. I’d like to ensure that that doesn’t happen, if possible.”

  Lisa realized that Judith Kenna would far rather that this turned out to be a local operation, and that it really was Morgan or one of his friends and colleagues who was behind it. If a megacorp were behind it, the likelihood was that Morgan would never be seen again and that no one outside the secret meeting places of the Cabal would ever know where or why he had been taken.

  She really would like it best of all if I were involved, Lisa thought. She’d rather find one of her own officers guilty—if only slightly—than get nothing at all. Always provided, I suppose, that the officer in question was due for retirement anyway. And if any stray mud were to stick to Mike—well, I guess she’d just grin and bear it. And grin again. Unfortunately for her, I really didn’t do it—and unfortunately for me, I really haven’t got a clue to who did, or why.

  SIX

  If you’ve finished your coffee,” Chief Inspector Kenna said to Lisa, “I’ll walk you to the paramedic station.”