The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  Lisa saw that Smith was frowning, and realized that Mike Grundy would probably have been blazing mad if she’d gone off like that during one of his interviews. She knew she shouldn’t be throwing speculations of this sort at a witness—but everything Goldfarb said had needled her.

  “How good is your security, Dr. Goldfarb?” Smith asked, abruptly changing the subject.

  “Oh, the very best,” Goldfarb assured him, seemingly glad that the subject had been changed. “Our founder was a systems expert, thoroughly versed in methods of encryption, and he knew as well as anyone what damage can be done when confidential information becomes available to people who want to use it for their own ends.”

  Such as precipitating stock-market crashes, Lisa thought.

  “So nobody outside your organization could possibly have obtained a copy of the text on the wafer you’ve just given my colleague?” Smith followed up. “Even though it’s been to New York and back, and even though you’ve recently produced a decrypted version?” Unless, of course, Lisa added silently, it was deliberately leaked, here or across the pond.

  “Nothing’s absolutely certain,” Goldfarb admitted cautiously, “but I have to say that it’s very unlikely. At the very least, we’d surely have some indication if our systems had been hacked. We have very good alarm bells.”

  As if on cue, a bell began to sound. Goldfarb spun around as if he’d been burned, but he relaxed almost immediately when he realized that it wasn’t an alarm at all. It was Peter Grimmett Smith’s phone.

  Smith scowled, turning his back to take the call.

  “I thought for a moment that something had crashed downstairs,” Goldfarb said to Lisa, as if to establish the fact that he was not listening in to Smith’s conversation. “It seems to happen more frequently with every week that passes. It’s all that newspaper talk about ‘slaves of the machine’—nobody with half a brain wants to do basic inputting and negotiation anymore in case they get stuck with a reputation as an idiot, so we get stuck with actual idiots minding reception and the parking facilities. They’re always pressing the wrong buttons and getting flustered because they can’t work their way out of the error maze. Believe me, Dr. Friemann, our alarms never ring, and nobody in this office has ever been accused of contributory negligence. If Morgan Miller was kidnapped because of anything he told me—which I find very difficult to believe, in view of its vagueness and negative tenor—the kidnappers must have picked it up somewhere else. You might try the Algenlsts in Swindon; I believe Professor Miller was also checking them out, although I can’t imagine why.”

  The words “pot,” “kettle,” and “black” floated unbidden into Lisa’s mind, but she resisted the temptation to extend the thought. Ever since Judith Kenna had begun to hunt for evidence of the twentieth-century habits Lisa had allegedly failed to transcend, she had been trying to update her stock of cliches.

  Smith turned around again. “It’s Ginny,” he said. “Chan Kwai Keung’s at the booth outside the lot. He must have followed us out from the Renaissance. He wants to talk to you, Lisa. He says it’s a private matter that he’s not prepared to discuss with anyone else until he’s cleared it with you.”

  Lisa could hardly help but infer that whatever Chan had to say, it must have an urgent bearing on Morgan Miller’s kidnapping—but she had no more idea than Smith of why Chan couldn’t have told the police, or the MOD man Smith had instructed to talk to him.

  “I’d better go down,” she said.

  Smith obviously resented being dragged away from an interview he didn’t consider to be complete, but it was equally obvious that he wasn’t about to let Lisa talk to Chan without being there to hear what was said. He turned away again, although all he said into the mouthpiece of the phone was: “Tell the guard to let him in. We’re on our way—we’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Goldfarb, “but I really don’t think there’s anything else I can tell you.”

  “That’s okay,” Smith said insincerely. “We’ll take a look at the transcript while we’re on the road to Swindon, and if there’s anything we need to come back for, we’ll contact you by phone.”

  “I’ll call you an elevator,” Goldfarb said, reaching out to make good his word. His eagerness to be rid of them would be understandable, Lisa thought, even if he had a conscience as pure as—

  She swallowed the intended reference to driven snow, cursing at the necessity of censoring her private thoughts.

  The elevator had arrived at the door of the outer office by the time Goldfarb had ushered them out of his little empire. Goldfarb didn’t actually push them into it, but the little man’s hands were fluttering with ill-restrained impatience. “I do hope you find Professor Miller before any harm comes to him,” he said anxiously. “A terrible thing—and Edgar Burdillon hurt! Terrible! A man held in the greatest respect throughout our organization, I can assure you.”

  “Did Miller mention Burdillon when he came to see you?” Smith asked, pausing on the threshold of the elevator.

  “No,” said Goldfarb. “At least, I don’t think—”

  The bespectacled man was still in mid-sentence when the door slid shut and the elevator slid sideways toward its shaft.

  A universal transformer might be as useful to researchers in the longevity field as any other, Lisa thought as they descended. Was it possible that Morgan had been talking about the main line of his research, albeit from a slightly odd angle? The transformer he never found might have been even more useful to people determined to give humankind a hefty shove up the evolutionary ladder. If Morgan had been talking to Goldfarb about his own Holy Grail, and someone misunderstood…. Maybe he’d recently seen some results obtained by one of the researchers sponsored by Ahasuerus that connected in a nonobvious way with what he’d been doing for the last forty years—something that made him see some of his former results in a new light. Maybe his old hopefulness had been stirred up again.

  She abandoned the train of thought when she noticed that Peter Grimmett Smith was frowning. His mind was still on Chan Kwai Keung, and Chan’s insistence on speaking to Lisa. All the suspicions Smith had generously set aside in order to make use of her expertise had obviously been reawakened. He looked like a man who was wondering whether he might have made a serious mistake. Given his age, he must be in the same position relative to compulsory retirement that Lisa was, and he probably had an equally thin margin for error,

  Lisa wished that she’d had more sleep and that she didn’t feel so ragged. Despite the smartish dressing, her right arm had begun to ache all the way from the elbow to the palm of her hand.

  Fortunately, Smith still remembered the code when the elevator reached its destination on the ground floor. The teenage receptionist hardly glanced at them as they crossed the lobby to the other elevator; she was busy with her computer, making a great show of concern, although the dullness of her blue eyes gave the lie to her performance.

  “Do you think he was lying?” Lisa asked Smith, hoping to distract his attention from more embarrassing possibilities. “Goldfarb, I mean.”

  “Difficult to say,” Smith replied, catching his lower lip with his teeth as he put on a show of bringing the question into focus. “The trouble with organizations like Ahasuerus is that they’re a law unto themselves. They think they’re above petty national concerns. If Miller had given them something they considered valuable, I’m not at all sure that they’d tell us what it was just because the poor devil has been kidnapped. They’d be more likely to hire some fancy mercenary group to go after the kidnappers for them—but we’ve had no indication yet of any such move, and even if Ahasuerus’s private enclave of the net is as secure as Goldfarb thinks it is, there isn’t a mercenary outfit in these parts whose communications are any more solid than a sieve.”

  “And if he isn’t telling the truth,” Lisa said, “why make up such a peculiar story? Why take the trouble to tell us that whatever Morgan wanted to give him, it’s forty years out of date? And
why throw in all those impressions? It’s not the kind of smoke screen I’d have—”

  She broke off as the elevator stopped and its twin doors parted.

  “Oh, fuck!” she breathed.

  Directly ahead of them, about fifteen meters away, the body of Peter Grimmett Smith’s driver lay supine on the concrete, unconscious or dead. There was an obscenely large gun in her outstretched right hand, pointed in the direction of a yellow Fiat that was skewed across the entry.

  If appearances could be trusted, the Fiat had been shunted into that position by a black Daf van, both of whose doors were yawning wide. The huge screen shielding the entrance to the parking lot had almost completed its descent a couple of meters behind the van.

  Chan Kwai Keung was standing beside the Fiat, having apparently exited the driver’s seat in some distress. There was blood on his forehead and naked fear in his face as he stared at a black-helmeted figure who was pointing a gun almost as large as Ginny’s at his chest, from little more than arm’s distance.

  TEN

  Peter Grimmett Smith was obviously a senior spook, who had presumably been desk-bound for many years, but he must have known more active days and he hadn’t lost the reflexes instilled by his early training. No sooner had he seen the body of his driver than he threw himself forward, leaning low in anticipation of plucking the gun—which Ginny had presumably failed to use to any significant effect—out of her limp hand.

  Lisa understood, of course, why Smith had felt compelled to go for the gun. He was unarmed, and the person who had felled the driver would know that, because he or she would know he would not have been allowed to carry a gun into the lobby. Smith had no idea of how many adversaries he might be facing, but he did know that once he got a gun in his hand, he would be no mean opponent.

  Unfortunately, he was by no means the only one who knew that and understood its implications.

  As Smith went for the gun, the black-helmeted figure who had Chan covered immediately turned in order to take care of the new hazard. As the gun fired, Lisa winced reflexively, but the sound was nowhere near as loud as she had anticipated.

  The MOD man was already reaching out to snatch up the gun, and the shot that had been fired at him almost missed—but almost wasn’t good enough. The impact wasn’t sufficiently powerful to bowl Smith over, but it made him lurch and stagger, and his extending hand failed to pick up the weapon.

  Lisa hadn’t been able to see the dart flying through the air, but she saw its red fletchings as soon as it lodged in the muscle at the back of Smith’s lower leg. She registered the fact that the missile was nonlethal, but only in passing. The intention at the forefront of her mind was to get out of the way before the black-helmeted figure fired again.

  Chan Kwai Keung obviously had the same idea. As soon as the gun had swung away from him, he dived to his left, determined to put the body of the Fiat between himself and the shooter.

  Lisa went to her own left. There was a gray Datsun parked on that side of the elevator doors, no more than a couple of meters away, and she dived toward it, ducking down as low as she could to ensure that her whole body would be shielded the moment she was in front of the hood. It was a wise precaution, because a second shot sounded from the direction of the attendant’s booth, far louder than the first. The window of the Datsun’s passenger seat exploded into a host of tiny shards.

  “Lights!” howled a distorted voice, twisted as much by anguished urgency as by the device set to disguise it.

  That was a real bullet! Lisa thought. If it had hit me,…

  Only twelve hours had passed since the time she had been forty years in the police force without ever having had a gun pointed in her direction. Now she had been shot at twice, and although she was fairly certain that the first shooter had aimed to miss, she wasn’t at all sure about this one.

  The first time, she had been curiously detached from the whole business, incapable even of participating fully in her own pain, but twelve hours had made a big difference. This time, she was abruptly consumed by a sickening wave of pure terror.

  If we don’t have what we need, the first shooter had told her, we’ll be back, and then.…

  They didn’t have what they needed. They couldn’t have, because she hadn’t had it. So now they were back, in a mood less generous than before. It was crazy, of course—completely crazy—but that didn’t mean that the danger facing her was any less. Quite the reverse, in fact.

  There was a delay of three or four seconds before the parking lot’s strip-lights went out. That left enough time for Lisa to peep over the Datsun’s hood and see Peter Grimmett Smith make a second attempt to grab Ginny’s pistol.

  He succeeded, but the dart in his leg had discharged its cargo of relaxant poison and the leg was already useless. He couldn’t balance himself to fire, and his body betrayed him as he tried. By the time he had swiveled the weapon to point at the Shooter, his target was on the move, chasing after Chan Kwai Keung. Smith began to topple before he could adjust his aim.

  Lisa guessed that Chan must have used the cover provided by the Fiat to roll under one of the vehicles parked on the far side of the area, because the black-helmeted figure couldn’t seem to find him.

  Is that a man or a woman? Lisa thought as she ducked down again. The figure wasn’t tall, but it was very solid, with a bodybuilder’s muscles. If it was a female body, it had to be the body of a Real Woman. Whoever had shot the telephone out of her hand had been every bit as solid, and every bit as aggressive, but if that had been a Real Woman too, it couldn’t possibly have been the one she knew best. Whatever else Arachne West might have said to her, she would never have addressed Lisa as “You stupid bitch.” She had never thought of the woman as a friend, but Arachne had seen things slightly differently.

  The overhead lights went out before Lisa gave in to the temptation to sneak another look. With the strip-lights off too, she knew that her sense of sight would be useless for at least three minutes. Although the lot wasn’t entirely dark—there were horizontal ventilation slits set high in the walls, and some daylight filtered through, but her eyes would need time to adapt. She had to presume that the shooter had wanted the lights out because her dark helmet was equipped with some kind of infrared sensor that would make living bodies stand out like beacons.

  Lisa knew that if the second shooter had the same equipment, as well as a gun that fired real bullets, she and Chan were in real trouble. She reminded herself that although the shooter in her apartment had made some ugly threats, all the bullets fired had been directed at inanimate targets. When Ed Burdillon had walked in on the Mouseworld bombers, they had only used their heavy artillery to cover him while they knocked him out and then dragged him to safety. So far, these lunatics had tried hard to avoid killing anyone—but they’d never have come back for a second bite at the cherry, especially in broad daylight, if they weren’t desperate. Their carefully laid plan must have gone wrong. They hadn’t found what they wanted at Lisa’s apartment, or on the equipment they’d stolen from Morgan’s house, and Morgan himself presumably hadn’t told them what they wanted to know. They were not as scrupulous today as they had been the night before—and the shot fired at her as she dived for cover behind the Datsun had been far too close for comfort.

  Lisa cursed herself for the weakness of her body and spirit alike. She was too old, at sixty-one, for playing cat-and-mouse with killers. Her bones were too fragile, and the shock of fear that had gripped her made her feel utterly helpless.

  She scrambled along the body of the Datsun and huddled behind the rear wheel. She guessed that whoever had shot at her must have fired from the attendant’s booth, and would probably have left it as soon as the lights went out, intending to edge along the wall against which the cars were parked. She had noted that the car beyond the Datsun was a Renault with an overgenerous wheelbase, and she rolled beneath it. That placed her in deep shadow, from which she could see nothing—but in which she could not easily be seen, even by someone with
a body-heat sensor. Unfortunately, she knew, the advantage would probably be temporary. Whoever was inching along the wall would soon start peering beneath the vehicles, knowing that they provided the only available hiding place.

  Lisa shut her eyes and concentrated her attention on listening; if their assailants had boots as smart as their black clothing, they wouldn’t be making a lot of noise, but they couldn’t move silently. She tried to summon up a picture in her mind’s eye of the exact spot in which Peter Grimmett Smith had fallen, and the probable disposition of his limbs. Had she a chance of getting to the gun that had fallen from his hand before the enemy could get a clear shot at her? If so, could she judge the position of either shooter well enough by sound alone to get off a good shot of her own? It might not be necessary to hit anyone—the mere fact that she had a gun and was capable of using it would surely make them cautious, and should make them seek cover.

  Her right arm was alight with pain from wrist to elbow. When she had rolled over, she had pressed the cuts between her body and the concrete floor, and the sealant hadn’t been laid on thick enough to provide a protective cushion.

  She swore at herself, commanding herself to focus, and to stop complaining.

  She decided, having given due consideration to the plan, that if she tried to go for Smith’s gun, she would make an absurdly easy target. The sensible thing to do was to try to put more distance between herself and the elevator door. If the person who was coming after her was moving slowly enough, she might actually be able to reach the exit gate at the far end of the lot. If she could only raise the screen …