The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  “You haven’t tried to question them by yourself?” Lisa asked skeptically.

  “They’re still asleep,” he told her. “There wasn’t time to be subtle back in the car lot—I had to hit them with the gas. I figure they’ll be awake at any time now, but it might be as well to let them consider their situation for a little while. Their clothes weren’t nearly as badly damaged as yours, but I took them anyway. They’re very modern girls—smartskins, no underwear. They’re tightly secured, each in a different room. They’ll be feeling very vulnerable.”

  “I can’t be a party to this,” Lisa said, without much conviction.

  “That’s a shame,” Leland told her. “I’ll be talking to them anyway—the only result of your staying out of it will be that our chances of getting what we need are reduced—and you’ll remain ignorant of anything I do manage to find out. Do you really want to pass on your best chance of finding out where Miller is in time to get him out alive?”

  Lisa could only reply to that with a censorious glare, but Leland wasn’t the kind of man to wilt before a dirty look. She knew he was right, and that the two would-be assassins were far more likely to let something slip in their present circumstances than they would be if they were subjected to due process under the protection of PACE 2, with their lawyers at their elbows. She also knew that he was trying to curry favor by letting her in on the interrogations—a favor whose acceptance might be dangerous. Making herself an accessory to an illegal interrogation could easily turn out to be the next best thing to handing her head to Judith Kenna on a silver platter, careerwise. Mike Grundy had suggested that cracking the case might be exactly what the two of them needed to stave off compulsory retirement for a few more years, but the way it was cracked might be even more important in that regard than merely getting a result.

  In the end, it all came back to Morgan Miller and the need to get him out of whatever mess he’d contrived to get himself into. How much did she have to lose? The fact that Kenna was out to get her anyway increased the danger of not playing by the book—but how much should she care, at her time of life? If she wasn’t prepared to be reckless now, when would she ever be?

  “So what are you waiting for?” she asked the big man. “Get me those bloody clothes. And something else to drink.”

  Leland grinned as he took back the empty cup. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll cover your back if you cover mine. All we have to do is make sure that the good end happily and the bad unhappily. As long as the story works out, it won’t matter a damn whether there really is an immortality serum or not.”

  Lisa waited until he had fetched the clothes, a bunch of bananas, and another cup of tea before telling him that the legendary Adam Zimmerman hadn’t approved of the word “immortality” because it implied an inability to die. “In the business,” she said as she regarded the bananas with a suspicious eye, “we prefer the term emortality, with an ‘e.’”

  “They’re ordinary supermarket fruit,” Leland assured her. “Standard dietary supplements. No therapeutics, let alone psychotropics. I’m paid to hunt down bootleggers—I don’t rip off their stock.”

  The shirt and slacks he gave her were loose, but not absurdly ill-fitting. When she’d achieved a better state of modesty and a fuller stomach, he handed back her belt, pouches and all. It was an obvious gesture of good faith. She could have summoned help within two seconds, using two fingers; he wouldn’t have been able to stop her. If they were way out in the wilds of Somerset or Gloucestershire, it might take so long for help to come that he and his friend Jeff could be five miles away by the time it arrived, but he’d have to be very clever indeed to avoid the consequent chase, and he probably wouldn’t get anything out of his captives in the meantime. Lisa didn’t bother to take the phone out of its holster.

  “Had you checked out the Institute of Algeny?” she asked.

  “Not yet.” The abruptness of the answer suggested there might have been no need—perhaps because the information that had been handed down to him had originated there. Perhaps, Lisa thought, Goldfarb’s disdain for the Algenists hadn’t been a mere matter of the pot assuming that the kettle was black.

  “If Morgan did have something valuable,” Lisa observed, “the fact that he was talking to supposedly nonprofit organizations implies that he wouldn’t have wanted it to fall into the hands of your employers.”

  “Or Mr. Smith’s,” Leland pointed out.

  “Morgan wasn’t the government’s biggest fan,” Lisa agreed, “but he did know that there’s a war on. If he’d thought the MOD could use whatever he had, he’d have given it to them. I still think this is all a wild goose chase.”

  “You’re probably right,” the big man conceded. “But if there are any wild geese to be caught, I want to be the one who bags them, and if there aren’t, I need to be able to convince my employers of that fact. If I can’t, I could be out of a job. Then, if you decided to turn vindictive later, I could be in a very deep hole indeed.”

  “Strangely enough,” Lisa said grimly, “I think I know exactly how you feel. If this doesn’t go well, we could both end up regretting that we ever met.”

  TWELVE

  They looked in on both prisoners before attempting to bring either of them around. The first was in the bedroom next to the one where Lisa had been lodged. She had reddish-brown hair, severely cut into a styleless bob, and sharply delineated features flecked with freckles and moles. She was older than Lisa had expected, though not as old as Lisa herself. Lisa paused long enough to examine the tenor of the muscles in the arm that rested on top of the blanket covering her naked body.

  “Metabolic retuning and artificial steroids,” Leland opined, but Lisa shook her head.

  “Hard work, mostly,” she said. “Carefully calculated diet, obsessive exercising, strict denial of all cosmetic and quasimedical aids. She’s a Real Woman.”

  “I don’t go for the muscular type myself,” Leland observed.

  “Real Woman with a capital R and a capital W,” Lisa said.

  “I thought they’d gone the same way as all once-fashionable causes. Died with the so-called third phase of feminism, didn’t they? Before my time, of course.”

  And beyond your interest, evidently, Lisa added silently. She said, “The movement broke up, but its core members stayed loyal to its ideals, some of them even more so than they had been before. They still have a voice within the radfem ranks, and they still command a lot of respect in an elderly statesman kind of way.”

  “We already knew they were radfems,” Leland observed in a neutral tone—but he was looking at her thoughtfully, as if there was something she wasn’t telling him.

  “Did we?” Lisa countered.

  “You saw the tapes of the university bombers,” he came back.

  “You shouldn’t have,” Lisa reminded him. “They were supposed to be a secret between the police and the Ministry of Defence.”

  “And the campus security patrol,” Leland pointed out. “How many holes does a sieve need? You don’t know her, I suppose?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lisa told him.

  “You don’t think so? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s supposed to mean that there’s something vaguely familiar about her. It might just be the type, of course—I’ve met more than a few Real Women in my time, and I wouldn’t necessarily recognize this specimen if we’d met ten or twenty years ago. Maybe I’ve seen her working out at one of the gyms I’ve used. Either way, I can’t put a name to her.”

  “But if she were local, you’d have mutual acquaintances? All part of the same old-girls’ network?” He said it as if he thought he’d put his finger on a useful connection, but he didn’t follow it up. It would be easy enough to check out local women who’d once been self-declared members of the movement. Arachne West’s name would come out on top of the heap—but that didn’t mean that Arachne was involved, or that it would be easy to locate her if she were.

  Lisa was still smarting
from the insult of the “old-girls’ network” remark when she walked into the downstairs room where the second captive was secured, although she knew she was displacing emotional energy from a slowly growing anxiety that her personal involvement with this mess might not have begun, and might not end, with Morgan Miller. Fortunately, there was no danger of any further embarrassment. She recognized the second prisoner immediately, and knew that she was the real prize—the linchpin of the whole conspiracy.

  Stella Filisetti was less than half Lisa’s age, and at least twenty years younger than her companion. Her pale hair was of medium length and silky, and her body was possessed of the peculiar combination of softness and solidity that was still the sole prerogative of authentically young women. She had not yet reached the point of decision regarding the use of such artificial aids as metabolic retuning, calorie-depleted food, indwelling scavengers, and epidermal rejuvenation.

  Stella had been carrying the real gun, Lisa realized; it was Stella who had come within inches of killing her. It probably was not Stella who had called her a stupid bitch and taunted her with Morgan’s indifference, but it must have been Stella who had supplied the script.

  “It’s Morgan’s current research assistant,” she informed Leland.

  “Ms. Filisetti,” he said, to show that he was up to speed.

  “Suspect number one,” Lisa confirmed. “The only one close enough to have taken a good long look at his continuing experiments and his stored data. The only one close enough to have gotten a hold of the wrong end of an awkwardly placed stick. She had the means to get the bombers into Mouseworld and almost certainly knew the codes that let the kidnappers into Morgan’s house.” But not, she reminded herself, the codes that let the burglars into my flat.

  “We don’t know for sure that she got a hold of the wrong end of the stick,” Leland reminded her dutifully. “We have to work on the hypothesis that it might have been the right end.”

  “You might,” Lisa demurred. “I’m not under contract to deliver the elixir of life to my employers. All I have to do is free Morgan Miller before he gets hurt. For that purpose, the hypothesis that this is all some stupid mistake will do very well indeed.”

  Leland didn’t bother to point out that if Miller really had nothing to give away, accounting for his exploratory visits to Ahasuerus and the Algenists wouldn’t be easy. He was more concerned to usher Lisa out of the room before Stella Filisetti woke up and heard them talking. He wanted to conserve the element of surprise.

  Morgan must have been playing a game, Lisa thought. He was laying down a false trail, dangling a lure—and it worked, far too well. Why on earth couldn’t he have let me in on it?

  Leland stood aside to let her precede him into a surprisingly capacious, if rather bare, kitchen, where a short and wiry man with a dark complexion—presumably Jeff—was seated at a hectically stained pine dining table, circa 1995. Lisa guessed that the table must have lost its initial polish shortly after the turn of the century, and that Jeff had never had any to lose.

  As Leland and Lisa sat down, the other man politely rose to his feet, waiting for instructions. Leland told his subordinate to wake the prisoner in the downstairs room, advising him to do it gently and to give her a mug of tea, with lots of sugar. Jeff nodded. He filled a mug from the teapot that sat in the middle of the table and spooned three sugars into it before nodding to Lisa and departing.

  “Okay,” Leland said when Jeff had closed the door behind him. “You know her. That puts the ball in your court. How should we play it?”

  It wasn’t an easy question to answer. Lisa was slightly surprised that it had been asked. She had assumed that the plan was fairly simple: they would say what they had to say in order to elicit a response—any kind of response to begin with—and if Stella wouldn’t let anything slip, they would become gradually more provocative. Then she realized that Leland was testing her in exactly that progressive fashion: all Mister Nice Guy to begin with, slowly tightening the procedure to shake something loose from her cabinet of curiosities.

  “She’s a rank amateur,” Lisa observed, feeling no compunction about reiterating the obvious. “She’ll be scared, but she must have gone into this knowing she’d eventually be caught. Professionally speaking, this was a suicide mission. Crazy—but not just crazy. The motive must have been powerful if it not only moved her to this kind of recklessness, but allowed her to draw so many others into the conspiracy, including at least one Real Woman.”

  “Right,” said Leland. “The rest probably know by now that they can’t hold out long, even if they thought differently to begin with. They must want to get the information to friends elsewhere before the net closes on them, but they obviously don’t have it yet. Why else would they come after you a second time? Miller’s holding out, or feeding them lies, and they haven’t found what they want on his computers or your wafers. That’s good—panic is always healthy in an interrogation situation. If I were to offer Filisetti a big enough bribe and a way out of the back door, do you think she’d sell her friends down the river?”

  “How big a bribe?”

  “Think of a number. What she’ll eventually get, if anything, will depend on what she has to sell. As to what we can offer—the sky’s the limit.”

  There was no point in insisting that what Stella Filisetti would eventually get was at least ten years if Lisa had any say in the matter. “She’s not stupid,” she said instead. “She’s not going to believe you if you offer her a million euros. In fact, our principal problem is going to be persuading her that anything we say can be trusted—and persuading ourselves that anything she says can be trusted. As you’ve already pointed out, people desperate to buy time will come out with any old bullshit.”

  Leland sighed. “All the effort that went into the Human Genome Project,” he said, “and we still have no trustworthy truth serum. Call that progress?”

  Jeff returned. “She’s very woozy,” he reported. “Might be better to catch her before she’s collected herself.”

  “Oh, well,” said Leland. “I guess it’s play-it-by-ear time. Come on.”

  Lisa took a quick peek through the kitchen curtains as she followed Leland back to Stella Filisetti’s bedside, but there wasn’t much to be seen through the reflection of the lighted room. The absence of any discernible lights outside suggested that they were quite a way from the cityplex, but she already knew that. There was a faint animal odor in the corridor, but the suggestion that they were in an old farm laborer’s cottage could have been misleading.

  Woozy or not, Stella Filisetti recognized Lisa immediately, and her eyes grew wide. She looked around as if unable to reconcile Lisa’s presence with the surroundings. The fact that one of her wrists and one of her ankles were secured to the head and foot of the bed by smartfiber cords must have told her that she was not in police custody, even if the godawful carpet and matching curtains hadn’t.

  “Hello, Stella,” Lisa said, unable to deny herself the satisfaction. “How does it feel to be such a lousy shot?”

  The younger woman didn’t reply, although her eyes certainly reacted. Lisa moved a straight-backed wooden chair to the side of the bed and sat down, her face no more than a meter from Stella Filisetti’s. Leland remained standing, showing off his intimidating bulk.

  “This is how it is, Stella,” Lisa said, improvising furiously. “For me, this is a personal matter, for reasons you’ll understand perfectly. For my friend here, it’s business. He wants to bribe you and I want to cause you pain, but we both want Morgan Miller and we’re prepared to settle for that. If anything happens to him that you could have prevented by talking to us sooner, you’re going to answer to me as well as to the courts—and I can guarantee that it won’t be a comfortable ride.” She really had intended to start out gently, but it wasn’t so easy to play nice while she was staring into the unrepentant face of the person who was responsible for this whole sorry mess, who had compounded that offense by trying to shoot her.

  “You
can’t do this,” the younger woman said, with little conviction.

  “Yes, we can,” Lisa retorted, figuring that she might as well go with the flow now that she had turned on the tap. “You know full well that anything that could motivate you to pull off this crazy stunt has to be important enough to motivate us to do what it takes to prize it out of your hands. It’s driven you to the brink of committing murder, although I doubt that you had any inclination in that direction beforehand, so you can imagine well enough how far it might drive us. It’s time to give it up and save yourself—and we can arrange that too. Just tell us what we need to know while there’s still time and you can walk away.”

  “I don’t know where Morgan is,” Stella replied swiftly. “They thought it best that I didn’t, just in case …”

  Was it too glib? Lisa wondered. It would, after all, have been a sensible precaution to keep Morgan’s location secret even from their own field troops—but these conspirators had not so far shown much sign of being sensible people. Even by the standards of a crazy world, they seemed seriously deranged.

  “I don’t believe you,” Lisa said when she’d paused long enough. “The stupid thing is, Stella, that your scruples have led you astray. It was all a scam—a trap. Morgan seems to have fallen into it too, but he always did like to be out there ahead of the field, didn’t he? Never a team player, alas, even while he was playing for the greatest team of all in the cause of progress. Heroic individualists can be so seductive, don’t you think? Well, of course you do. I know exactly how you feel, because I’ve been a victim too—for forty years. Imagine that! I know exactly how you feel, Stella, because I’ve been up and down the same escalator half a dozen times. I know exactly how seductive Morgan can be, and exactly how deceptive—but I love him anyway. I always have. I love him enough to do whatever’s necessary to save him from his own recklessness. So I’d be very grateful if you could just tell me where he’s being held. It’s over anyway. You must see that. You don’t have the data, and time’s already run out.”