The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  Lisa was about to protest, but she knew that the feeling of wakefulness prompted by the new information wouldn’t last. If she’d been sleeping properly for the last few weeks, it wouldn’t have done her much harm to miss out on a single night’s sleep, but she hadn’t actually had a good night’s sleep for as long as she could remember. She really did need to crash out, even if she had to take a pill to put her away and another to bring her around again. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll book into the Renaissance. It has delusions of grandeur, but a bed’s a bed.”

  “Good,” said Smith. “With luck, this whole thing will be unraveled by this time tomorrow.” He didn’t sound as if he meant it, and Lisa could understand well enough why he wasn’t expecting overmuch luck. He worked for a government with its back against the wall. If the opposition were the EU, or the USA, or even representative of the kind of private enterprise in which the megacorps indulged, Smith would be working from a position of severe disadvantage.

  On the other hand, Lisa thought as she moved toward the door, if it really is someone at Ahasuerus or the Institute of Algeny who has set this farce in motion, there might be hope. Common sense suggests that fringe organizations of their kind ought to be even less competent than the police or the Ministry of Defence.

  She had left the room before she realized that she didn’t have her car, and would either have to walk to the campus gate or beg a lift from a friendly policeman. In the circumstances, the friendly policeman seemed to be the better choice, even if his friendliness might wane slightly when she explained that she couldn’t tell him anything of what had passed between herself and the man from the Ministry.

  In the event, Mike Grundy had sufficient tact not to ask her what Smith had told her. He knew well enough that everything he couldn’t get directly from the man from the Ministry was being deliberately withheld, and that it wouldn’t be diplomatic to go after it, even in the privacy of his own car.

  The journey to the Renaissance Hotel was only a few hundred yards, but it was long enough for Mike to voice concerns for Lisa’s safety.

  “I could post a uniformed officer outside,” he suggested.

  “When he could be doing something useful? Don’t be ridiculous, Mike. It’s broad daylight. If they’re crazy enough to come after me again—and I can’t believe for a moment they are—they’re going to wait until they have at least minimal cover.”

  “They’re crazy enough to incinerate half a million mice,” Grundy pointed out. “They could be crazy enough to do anything if things aren’t going their way. Amateur terrorism always looks good to the amateurs in question while it’s a plan on paper, but once the dreamers start acting it out, it always spins out of control.”

  “It’s too complicated to be amateur terrorism,” Lisa told him, figuring that it was safe to say that much. “They want something, and they’re not going to do anything that will blow their chances of getting it. They won’t turn rat until they’re cornered, and we haven’t even got near them yet.”

  “I could take you to my place,” he suggested. “I owe you, remember.”

  “And your place is a fortress, is it? They walked straight into mine. I’m safer in the hotel, Mike. It’s a public place, full of human eyes and ears as well as the electronic kind.”

  He conceded defeat readily enough as the Rover drew up on the hotel’s forecourt. “We’ll get them, Lis,” he said as she fumbled at the car door with her left hand. “We’ll find Morgan, and we’ll get him out.” It was pure bravado.

  “Thanks, Mike,” was all Lisa could say when she finally got the door open. “We’ll talk later.”

  As it turned out, she didn’t have to take a pill. The nights she had spent lying fretfully awake, unable to relax into sleep, had been spent in a very different context. Relaxation was no longer necessary; exhaustion had taken control. She didn’t even undress; the moment she was in her room, she had only to throw herself on the bed to pass swiftly into unconsciousness.

  EIGHT

  Lisa was unaware of having dreamed, or even of time having elapsed, when she was awakened by the ringing of the phone beside the bed. At first she had not the slightest idea of where she was; it took five seconds of bewildered confusion to get her mind back into gear and reconnect her with her memories of the long night and painful dawn. Even then, her reflexes made her reach for the phone with her right hand, and the torn skin between her thumb and forefinger sent a stab of pain into her brain as she flexed her fingers in preparation for the grab.

  She overrode the warning and picked the handset up anyway, but transferred it to her left hand as soon as she had rolled over.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Peter Grimmett Smith, Dr. Friemann. I’ve got a car to take us to Ahasuerus. I’ve brought you some breakfast. Five minutes, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  She didn’t have a toothbrush or a comb, and her unsmart outer garments were not only bloodstained, but showing clear signs of long wear. There wasn’t much she could do about any of that; it was the inevitable penalty of clinging too hard to twentieth-century habits. She washed and tidied herself as well as she could, then went down to the lobby to meet Peter Grimmett Smith.

  “Better not check out,” he told her. “You might need the room again.”

  “Maybe,” she admitted. “But I’ll also need to go home at some stage, unless Mike Grundy or Steve Forrester can delegate someone to bring me some stuff from my wardrobe and bathroom. I’ll need my car too.”

  “You can phone one of them later,” Smith said as he led her out to the car. “You really ought to invest in some smarter clothing—that tunic’s ruined.”

  His own outer clothes, Lisa noted, were only shaped in an old-fashioned way; the fibers were brand new, as avidly active as anything on the market. Only something as paradoxical as gray power, she thought, could create a market for living fibers that maintained an appearance so staid as to seem more fossilized than dead.

  The car was a sleek gray Jaguar with tinted windows. The driver’s window was wound down to reveal a young blond woman with eyes so pale as to seem almost colorless. Smith introduced her as Ginny. As soon as she and Lisa had exchanged nods, Ginny closed the window again, to seal herself away from the eyes of the world.

  Smith opened the rear door for Lisa before going around to the other side of the car. The tray built into the back of the front-passenger seat was down; there was a cup of black coffee slotted into it beside a bag containing a flaccid croissant and an over-iced Danish pastry. The cup and the bag were both made of active fibers, though, so the coffee was still hot and the food was warm.

  Lisa checked her wristwatch. She had slept through the remainder of the morning and well into the afternoon; it was far too late to be eating breakfast, but she was glad that Smith hadn’t attempted to provide lunch. She had lived alone all her life, and had long since given up hope that food technology would ever deliver a satisfactory prepackaged meal. She went to work on the food, glad of the simultaneous hit she obtained from the caffeine in the coffee and the sugar in the Danish pastry’s embellishments.

  As the Jaguar pulled out into traffic, the computer sounded a discreetly mellow-sounding bell, but the screen didn’t flash up any warning messages; it was obviously programmed in a more sensitive way than Mike Grundy’s.

  “Get lost,” the driver muttered, presumably addressing the driver in the car behind, who must have reckoned that she should have let him pass first. In several American states, so rumor had it, whole families had been shot to death for less, but British drivers were famed for their restraint. Few of them carried anything more lethal than a pepper spray for self-defense in road-rage incidents.

  “Chief Inspector Kenna seems to favor the hypothesis that this is all due to some lunatic fringe group,” Smith told Lisa. “I’ve tried to ease her away from that point of view, but I can’t share my own suspicions while there’s a possibility that Miller’s in possession of a secret with security implication
s. She’s no fool, though, so she’s keeping in mind the chance that the seemingly amateurish aspects of the assault on your flat are a calculated smoke screen of disinformation. In any case, we should be careful not to lose sight of the possibility that she might be right. If the target is the university’s Department of Applied Genetics and what it stands for, rather than Morgan Miller, our involvement in the investigation might be one of the things the perpetrators would like to highlight in a list of imagined crimes against nature and humanity.”

  Lisa was still busy eating and didn’t particularly want to reply, but there were questions she had to ask. “Has Chan turned up?” she said.

  “He’s alive and well,” Smith assured her. “He was in Birmingham last night, but he called in as soon as he picked up his messages. He said he’d be here as soon as possible.”

  Lisa was surprised by the shock of relief that coursed through her. She hadn’t been consciously aware of the level of her anxiety. She wasn’t in the least reconciled to the possibility of losing Morgan Miller, but even if worse came to worst, there was some small solace in the fact that Chan was alive and well.

  “He’ll help,” she said. “If anyone knows what Morgan’s been up to lately, it’s Chan.”

  “I have someone waiting to talk to him as soon as he arrives,” Smith confirmed.

  Lisa realized that she hadn’t the faintest idea of where the local office of the Ahasuerus Foundation was, but the fact that the Jaguar was powering up the access road to the westbound artery suggested that it was in the Bristolian sector of the cityplex. There didn’t seem to be any urgent need to inquire further.

  Smith hesitated slightly before introducing the next topic of conversation, but only for show. “You and Miller,” he said abruptly. “More than colleagues? More than friends?”

  Lisa nodded, unable to do more until she had washed down the last of the pastry. Handling the cup was awkward because the holder was at the right-hand side of the tray and she didn’t want to test the wounded skin on that hand again.

  “What about Burdillon and Chan?”

  Lisa blinked slightly at that one. “Ed and I have been friends for a long time,” she said. “Nothing more. My department occasionally puts some work his way, but not recently, so I guess our friendship has become a trifle dormant. I still see Chan once in a while—just as friends. It’s difficult to describe in conventional terms the relationship Morgan and I have nowadays. I haven’t seen him more than half a dozen times in the last three years—maybe less frequently than I’ve seen Chan.”

  “But you were very close at one time?”

  “We still are, even if it doesn’t look like it—as close as we ever were. Neither of us ever wanted to get married, and neither of us ever thought of the other as the great love of our life, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t care deeply about getting him out of this in one piece, or that I wouldn’t take this business personally even if they hadn’t paid a call on me too.”

  “I’ve listened to the tape now,” Smith said. “That part you drew my attention to—what do you make of the insistence that Miller never cared about you, and that any promises he made were false?”

  “Exactly what I wondered then,” she said. “That the idiot with the gun doesn’t know the first thing about Morgan Miller. Morgan doesn’t make promises he can’t keep—and he always cared about me as deeply as I always cared about him.”

  “But he didn’t tell you what he was taking to Ahasuerus?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Lisa said, becoming tired of having to repeat it. She had been waiting for an opportunity to turn the conversation around, and she didn’t give him time to slip another fquestion in. “So what, exactly, is Ahasuerus? Why are we going there first?”

  “It’s nearer,” he said, answering the second question. “That may be why Miller went there first. Ready accessibility might have been the primary motive for him selecting both institutions from a longer list of candidates, given that he obviously didn’t want to discuss what he had over the phone. Unfortunately, our background check hasn’t turned up much more than the information that’s freely available on the Ahasuerus website. The Foundation was set up by a man named Adam Zimmerman, who made billions out of the financial crisis of 2025. What the website doesn’t say, of course, is that he helped to engineer and direct the crisis—he was just a mercenary, hired by the megacorps to do their dirty work, but he seems to have had an agenda of his own. He’s dropped completely out of sight, and there’s a rumor that he’s been frozen down, but it’s easy enough for a man with that sort of wealth to hide, even in today’s world, and to manufacture disinformation by the yard. It’s possible that Ahasuerus is a front, but everything we and Interpol can gather suggests that it’s a bona-fide research sponsor, financing and collating information on longevity biotech and SusAn techniques. At any rate, it seems distinctly less shady and somewhat saner than its apparent rival for Miller’s affections. Dr. Goldfarb wouldn’t discuss Morgan Miller over the phone, understandably, but when I told him what had happened, he seemed anxious to help us. I’ll be keeping an open mind, of course.”

  “Of course,” Lisa echoed. She knew as she said it that it wasn’t enough to maintain the change of subject if he wanted to go back to it, and he clearly did.

  “What about Miller and Burdillon?” he asked. “How close were they?”

  For a moment, she wondered if Smith were asking whether Morgan and Ed had ever been lovers, but that idea was too bizarre. “Certainly not enemies,” she said. “Perhaps not even rivals, although there’s bound to be an element of that within a department. Not close friends, though. If Morgan had a hot secret, I think he’d confide in Chan before he would in Ed Burdillon—and in me before he would in Chan.”

  “What about vice versa?”

  “You think it might have been something of Ed’s that Morgan was taking to Ahasuerus? No—he’d never do that, even if he didn’t like what Ed was proposing to do with it. He’s a man of principle.”

  “That’s not quite what I meant,” Smith was quick to say. “Given that Miller is a man of principle, and trustworthy, might Burdillon have asked for his help on work that he’d been commissioned to do, if time were pressing?”

  Lisa looked at Smith long and hard before replying. “What work might that be?” she asked finally.

  “Urgent work,” Smith parried. “Might Burdillon have co-opted Miller, if the need were there and his expertise fit the bill?”

  “Yes,” Lisa said, having considered the hypothetical question with all due seriousness. “If Ed were up against a deadline and needed help, he’d have asked Morgan first, Chan second—and I suppose he might have instructed both of them not to tell me about it. So what was Ed doing for the war effort that might have required urgent assistance?”

  “I’m not a biologist,” Smith said defensively. “I don’t even know what the words mean, but have you ever heard of antibody packaging?”

  “Yes,” Lisa admitted. “I have.”

  “Did Miller ever mention it to you?”

  “Only in a general way—long before the war that we aren’t supposed to call a war actually broke out. We always discussed ongoing developments, breaking news. I take it that we’re not just talking about the salvation of the banana republics?”

  “What?” Smith was obviously telling the truth about not being a biologist. He probably didn’t even bother to read the science pages in the newspapers. The war effort really must be soaking up a lot of time and expertise, Lisa thought, if the Ministry has to put someone like Peter Grimmett Smith in charge of an investigation like this.

  “One of the earliest applications of genetic modification was the production of so-called plantibodies and plantigens,” Lisa told the Ministry man. “Way back at the turn of the century, engineers began transplanting genes that produced antibodies and antigens into plants. A lot of the early experiments used tobacco and potatoes, because they were the best hosts for the mosaic viruses that were then the vectors o
f choice for ferrying DNA into plant cells. Attention soon switched to bananas because bananas are naturally packaged and eaten raw, so the fruit could be used as a carrier of antibody-cocktail oral vaccines. Genetically modified bananas helped wipe out most of the major tropical diseases between 2010 and 2025. That was when the phrase ‘packaged antibodies’ was first bandied about. It has slightly different connotations in a biowar context, but the basic principle’s the same.”

  “I don’t follow,” Smith confessed.

  “You’re presumably familiar with the theoretical protocols of biological warfare,” Lisa said, although she was testing the limits of Smith’s ignorance, not making any such presumption. “Anyone planning an assault using pathogens as weapons needs to make sure not only that they can be efficiently delivered to the target and that they will then have the desired effect, but also that they won’t rebound. The aggressors need to immunize their own personnel against the spread of infection—but if they do that too openly, or too far in advance of the attack, they risk blowing their cover and attracting retaliation. Mass immunization programs are difficult to hide, and once the immunization has been implanted in everyone who needs to be defended, it’s out there in the world just waiting to be analyzed and synthesized by the intended objects of the aggression. I’m no expert in strategy, but I assume that tactical difficulties of this kind have been primarily responsible for the fact that the only confirmed uses of biological weaponry during the last twenty years have been intranational, either by terrorists like those lunatics who carried out the Eurostar attack or by political elites aiming bioweapons at their own troublesome underclasses.