The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  It was not to be. As she rolled across the gap separating the protective chassis of one vehicle from its neighbor, she finally heard the give-away scrape of cloth against brick, and the gun that was firing real bullets sounded again, close enough this time to leave her ears ringing.

  The adaptation of her eyes was set back too, by the sight of the muzzle flash and the vivid spark that soared from the concrete not five centimeters from her face as the bullet struck the ground and ricocheted away.

  “Cool it!” screeched a distorted voice, which must have originated from the far side of the lot, although it blended with the gunshot echoes rebounding eerily from the walls.

  “Have you got him?” was the only response—a totally unnecessary one, given that the shooter with the dart gun hadn’t fired, as he or she surely would have if Chan had presented a target.

  Despite the aftereffects of the echoing shot, Lisa heard her own pursuer drop awkwardly to the ground, presumably using the butt of the gun for temporary support as he or she fell into a prone position no more than a couple of meters away. Lisa knew that she had to get out of the confined space beneath the car if she were to avoid a shot that could hardly miss, so she scrambled forward desperately, not caring about the fact that she would expose herself fully to the shooter with the dart gun. If she had to be taken out, she figured it was far better that it should be done by a dart than by a bullet.

  As soon as she pulled herself to her feet, she set herself to run across the open space between the lanes, hoping she could see well enough to throw herself into the space between two cars and obtain a measure of cover. She could see a little better now, but the world was full of shadows.

  She heard the dart gun go off as the other shooter fired at her, but she felt no impact. As soon as the body of another vehicle offered her protection against another shot from that direction, she concentrated on putting something solid between her body and the enemy who was firing real bullets.

  This time, there was no pursuing shot. Was that because the advice to cool it had been heard and heeded? Or was it just that the shooter with the real gun knew exactly where she was and was moving in for the kill?

  For the kill. The unspoken words echoed in Lisa’s skull, sending forth new ripples of panic—but no shot came.

  Lisa dared to think that she might make it after all if she resumed her stealthy flight toward the exit door—and the distinction between deep and light shadow was becoming a little clearer now. She couldn’t see, exactly, but she wasn’t blind either. She began to move once more—but then the dart gun went off yet again, and this time she did feel an impact.

  The strike was in the upper part of her left arm, and it didn’t feel like a prick or a stab. It was as if some mildly boisterous acquaintance had struck her lightly with his fist, in a perfectly friendly fashion—but that was an illusion. Lisa knew immediately that the glancing nature of the blow wasn’t good news. The muscle relaxant with which the dart was tipped had to be powerful if it had felled a man of Peter Grimmett Smith’s mass within seconds. Although it might take as much as a minute for her veins to carry the less than full dose far enough to immobilize her, and a further two minutes for enough of it to reach her brain to render her unconscious, she was finished—and with two searchers to evade, Chan Kwai Keung’s chances of getting away would be minimal.

  Then she heard an almighty crash, far louder than the gunshots that had preceded it.

  Startled, she turned and lifted her head. The movement made her dizzy, but she was still conscious, and true sight was abruptly returned to her.

  The plastic doors closing off the entrance to the parking area had imploded. A black van, somewhat larger than the Daf that had rear-ended Chan’s Fiat, was hurtling through them, its headlights ablaze. A voice was already blaring from an invisible loudspeaker: “Put down your weapons now”

  It wasn’t a cityplex police van. Cityplex police vans were white. It could be Special Branch, Lisa thought, or even more spooks from the MOD. Whoever it was, though, they had to be on her side, not the side of the black-clad assassins.

  As she began to feel faint, the first retaliatory shot rang out. She saw the black van’s windshield respond to the impact; it was crazed, but not shattered. The result of the shot became irrelevant in any case when the new arrival cannoned into the back of the Daf, whose forward lurch sent Chan’s yellow Fiat spinning. The noise was appalling.

  The Fiat’s windows weren’t as resilient as the big van’s. Shards of plastic seemed to fly everywhere. The shooter with the dart gun was briefly silhouetted against the glare of the headlights, running but seemingly going nowhere.

  Lisa just had time to think “Wow!” before the dizziness blurred her vision irrevocably. Even then, she didn’t lose consciousness. She tried with all her might to stand up, but her body wouldn’t obey, and the only result of her determination was that she stumbled sideways. The concrete rose up to smash itself into her shoulder, but she was hardly aware of the fact of the pain, let alone the intensity of the feeling.

  Hey! she thought. This stuff has its advantages. I could get used to this state of mind, if only …

  It seemed, somehow, to be terribly unfair that she never got the chance to finish the sentence. Her pain had disappeared. Her fear had disappeared. Even the burden of her years seemed to have disappeared, but she didn’t have time to savor her immunity from all harm. She finally fell, precipitously, into unconsciousness.

  ELEVEN

  The first thing Lisa remembered after waking up was that the last time she had awakened, she had had been unable to remember where she was, because she had been forced to check into the Renaissance Hotel instead of going home. For a moment or two, therefore, she assumed that because the bed on which she was lying was definitely not her own, she was back in the hotel. This conviction lent moral support to her reluctance to open her eyes, but her attention was soon claimed by the awkward awareness that her mouth was very dry. That seemed odd—she couldn’t remember drinking any alcohol. What on earth could have happened to render her so thirsty?

  When she finally remembered the circumstances under which she had gone to sleep, and the fragment of a day that had preceded it, she had no alternative but to force her sticky eyes open. She tried to sit up, but she got only halfway and had to lean back on her elbow.

  She found herself staring into the capacious features of a brown-eyed man she had never seen before.

  He waited for her to realize, as she tried to raise herself, that she was wearing only her not-so-smart underwear—at which point she snatched up the sheet she had been trying to cast off.

  She glanced around at the room, which was small and low-ceilinged, its walls papered with off-white anaglypta that probably dated back at least to the 1990s. The abundant but desiccated autumnal foliage visible through the wood-framed window, eerily lit from within, suggested that she was in an upstairs room overlooking a tree considerably older than the wallpaper. The bed had a tubular-steel frame whose brown paint was flaking off, and the chair in which the brown-eyed man sat was a pine kitchen chair whose cherry-red woodstain was equally eroded. She certainly wasn’t in a police station.

  Night had obviously fallen again, but there was no way of knowing exactly how long she had been unconscious.

  A large hand extended a cup toward her that was full of a warm brown liquid, at which she stared suspiciously.

  “It’s tea,” explained a deep voice.

  “I don’t drink tea,” she said, contradicting herself by taking a tentative sip. “And I wouldn’t take sugar if I did,” she added, grimacing.

  “Drink it anyway,” the brown-eyed man advised. He was wearing a smartsuit made from the same fabric as Peter Grimmett Smith’s but cut in a contemporary style. Its quiet elegance made Lisa all the more conscious of her own lack of clothing and the fact that her undershirt was far from smart in any sense of the word.

  She drank some more tea, figuring that the only thing that really mattered, given the
circumstances, was its wetness. It moistened her mouth and moderated the intensity of her thirst. Then she said, “Who are you?”

  “The man who saved you from abduction by two crazy women. Abduction—or worse,” he replied. He obviously knew that she was a police officer, and felt obliged to establish his moral credentials in case she felt—as she was surely entitled to do—that wherever she was it was not the place she ought to be.

  “Crazy women?” Lisa queried.

  “You didn’t know they were women? Or was it that you didn’t know they were crazy?” He was trying to make a slight joke, but she wasn’t in the mood.

  “Those matte-black one-pieces aren’t the most figure-flattering garments in the world,” she pointed out. “Who are you—and what were you doing crashing into the parking area like that?”

  “You can call me Leland,” he said in an offhand manner calculated to suggest that it probably wasn’t his real name, first or last. “We were paying a call on someone in the building. We figured that something must be wrong when we saw the security guard unconscious, hanging halfway out of the hatchway. It seemed to be our duty as honest citizens to ride to the rescue.”

  “It probably was,” Lisa conceded. “But you must have checked the ID in my pouch, so the fact that you’ve brought me here makes you guilty of obstructing justice, as well as abduction and unlawful imprisonment, so you can cut the honest-citizen crap. Why did you take my clothes?”

  “They were dirty and torn,” Leland told her. “Even smart fabric wouldn’t have been able to cope with all that rolling around on the concrete, and there were some old bloodstains too. Your belt wasn’t clean either—police personnel really ought to be more careful about pollution, especially the metaphorical kind. Intruders in the night don’t just take things away, you know.”

  “They bugged my belt?”

  “I’ve cleaned it—but if you’ve said anything you shouldn’t have in the last eighteen or twenty hours, you’d better start thinking of ways to limit the damage. I think I can find you a shirt and some slacks to wear until your own clothes have been cleaned—Jeff’s, not mine. He’s more your size. He was with me in the van; you owe him for the rescue too.” The man still seemed amused. Lisa didn’t have time for a mental run-through of all the conversations of the early morning and late afternoon, but she was fairly certain that her own ignorance would have prevented her from giving away anything of real value to Morgan’s kidnappers.

  “Where am I?” Lisa asked. “Why aren’t we at East Central Police Station?”

  “Well, that’s a long story,” Leland told her. “I admit that I fell prey to temptation—but I honestly believe that you might thank me for it. I thought we might be able to scratch one another’s backs. No pressure at all, of course—you can have your phone back at any time, and call whomever you want, so there’s no question of unlawful imprisonment or obstructing justice. It wasn’t me who shot you, but you did get a whiff of the gas we used against the shooters, so I felt obliged to render what first aid I could. If you feel that you have to cry for help right now, I’ll just fade quietly way, leaving you here with the two women. I’d understand your determination to play by the book, in spite of your personal involvement. On the other hand, if you happened to decide that you’d rather have a word with the people who tried to shoot you before their lawyers get involved—or if you’d simply like to listen in while I have a word—I’d understand that too.”

  “Where am I?” Lisa repeated stubbornly.

  “A little way out in the country,” Leland said. “Not far from the cityplex. You could be back home inside an hour, by car—ten minutes if they care to send the MOD helicopter. There’s nothing of much interest happening back there, though. Here’s where it’s at, for the moment. I really do think that we could help one another, and that you and I stand a better chance of figuring this thing out together than either of us would have if we followed separate lines of investigation. If your first priority is to get Morgan Miller out in one piece, I could be a lot more useful than Kenna’s blindfolded plods or Smith’s third eleven spooks. What do you say, Dr. Friemann?”

  Lisa’s head was still aching, and the tea hadn’t yet quenched her thirst. She didn’t want to make any decisions just yet. She made a show of inspecting the sealant on her arm and hand. The old wounds hadn’t been reopened, but she noticed a new graze on her elbow. Her upper left arm, where she’d been darted, was much uglier but it didn’t hurt at all. Leland, or his friend Jeff, had sprayed sealant on it.

  “Who are you working for?” she asked.

  “Can’t tell you that,” he replied unapologetically.

  “Who were you going to visit when you interrupted our little melodrama?”

  “Goldfarb, of course. We don’t know much more than you do, so we were following the same trail. Really lucked out, didn’t we? All we had to do to crack the case was smash down the door. The crazies had already kayoed all three of you, so it was just a matter of picking up the bad girls and getting the hell out before the cityplex police arrived. Your response times stink, by the way.”

  He hadn’t mentioned Chan, Lisa noted. Maybe he didn’t know that Chan had been there. He obviously thought the “bad girls” had been after her, and hadn’t realized that the pulverized Fiat had anything to do with the case. Maybe Chan was still loose, still carrying whatever item of information he had that he wanted to confide to her and her alone.

  “Try to see it from my point of view,” the big man urged. “I had to take the opportunity to grab the two women, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to bring you along too. Technically, as you’ve carefully pointed out, it’s illegal, but we’re on the same side. We both want Morgan Miller out, and we’re both burning to know why he was snatched in the first place. As proof of my good intentions, I’m prepared to give you the one bit of valuable information I have that you don’t, without asking anything in return but a little of your time. Want to hear it?”

  “Go on,” said Lisa, making no promises.

  “Smith’s got his knickers in a twist for nothing. The project Burdillon was working on is redundant. It never mattered a damn whether he succeeded or not. The government spent so much time dithering that the war arrived before they were halfway ready, but my guys were always ahead of the game. They already have the product, and they’ll be the ones who’ll determine its distribution. It’s quite possible, of course, that the crazy ladies didn’t realize that and thought it might be salable, but if that’s so, the whole thing is a storm in a teacup of no real significance. If it were something else of Miller’s—something unconnected with the war work—I’d be as puzzled as you are by the fact that he doesn’t seem to have confided in you. If that’s so, there must be a very good reason for it, don’t you think?”

  It was a tricky question, and Lisa thought about it for a full minute before replying. She had finished the tea and was desperate for a refill, even though she didn’t drink tea. “I think this whole stupid affair is a comedy of errors either way,” she said eventually. “If it’s not Morgan’s recent work that sparked this off, then Goldfarb, or his opposite number in Swindon, must have put two and two together and made twenty-two. Someone might think that Morgan has stumbled across some kind of longevity treatment, and the rumor may have been exaggerated as the whisper was passed on, but I can’t believe there’s anything really there. If Morgan says he failed, he really did fail.”

  “There are no failed experiments in science,” Leland told her sardonically. “Just experiments that don’t give you the answer you were looking for. Sometimes that’s because you’re asking the wrong question.”

  He doesn’t know Morgan Miller, Lisa thought. Morgan was always careful to ask all the questions, even if he couldn’t answer them. “So who are the crazy women working for?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he confessed. “It’s not the Leninist Mafia, or any gang of biotech bootleggers that we know about. It looks like an ad hoc conspiracy, hastily flung together
. Even in this game, appearances aren’t always deceptive.”

  “And why should you know more about the Leninist Mafia or biotech bootlegging than we do?” Lisa challenged, trying to imply that her “we” included the MOD as well as the police, although she didn’t know the first thing about Special Branch ops, let alone Peter Grimmett Smith’s secret business. Although her warrant card identified her as a forensic scientist, she figured that her interlocutor couldn’t know for certain that she wasn’t attached to Special Branch and hadn’t done any significant work on bootlegged biotech.

  Leland hesitated before saying, “Well, there are no prizes for guessing that I’m private security, nor for figuring out that I probably wouldn’t be on the case if I weren’t in something like the same line of work as you. I might as well come clean, though, and admit that busting everyday pharmaceutical counterfeiters is more my sort of thing than a weird mess like this. You know I can’t tell you who I work for, but you also know what that means.”

  “The megacorps,” Lisa said. “I suppose they don’t like to be called the Cabal?”

  “As far as I can tell,” Leland informed her wryly, “they love it. But that’s by the by. The question is: can we work together, or are you going to go after me for loading you in back of the van with the other two? Even though the girls aren’t mafia, they’re bound to have lawyers. If I’d left them to be taken into custody, the local plods would have done everything by the book—and by the time you’d woken up, you’d have had to sit twiddling your thumbs while the MOD hammered out some kind of deal to persuade the captives to sell out their pals. You ought to be grateful to me for expanding your options.”

  “I’m not going to make myself an accessory to torture,” Lisa said sharply.

  “Of course not,” Leland replied soothingly. “If I were going to try anything of that sort, I’d make very sure you weren’t involved, for my sake as well as yours. In this instance, we don’t have time—the trouble with obtaining information under duress is that you have to be able to check it out and take punitive action if you’ve been sold a pup. However crazy these two are, they know that we’re in a race against the clock. They’ll feed us bullshit if they can, especially if we play the bully. We’ll have to work a little more creatively. It won’t be easy—but I figure that the two of us might have a better chance than either one alone.”