The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  All the time she had been speaking, Lisa had been moving her face closer to Stella Filisetti’s, flaring her nostrils slightly and widening her eyes so that the whites would be visible all around the irises. As mad acts went, it lacked all subtlety, but subtlety didn’t seem to be an issue anymore.

  It didn’t work. It wasn’t, as far as Lisa could judge, that the younger woman didn’t seem convinced. It was more a matter of the conviction being woefully insufficient to break her resistance.

  “Okay, Dr. Friemann,” said Leland, his voice lowered almost to basso profundo. “That’s enough of the threats. I warned you, didn’t I? Now get the hell out of here so I can have a sensible conversation with the young lady.”

  Lisa winced inwardly, not so much at the “young lady” bit as at the realization that Leland had obviously learned his good cop/bad cop routine from classic movies that Stella Filisetti had probably seen and laughed at while she was in her teens. Lisa had no alternative, though, but to keep on going with the flow and hope that the oldest tricks were still the best. She stood up and stalked out of the room, closing the door behind her before pausing and gluing her ear to the ancient hardboard panel.

  “She’s upset,” Leland explained to his prisoner, his deep voice clearly audible through the door. “She doesn’t understand modern commerce. The police tend to have a very jaundiced view of the way the economy works—but that’s necessary to the way they play their role. They’re obliged to regard most forms of private enterprise as evil, and they don’t have to recognize or face up to the fact that if they weren’t necessary evils, they wouldn’t exist. Personally, I’m a pragmatist. No ax to grind. To me, it’s just a matter of fixing a price.”

  “It’s not for sale,” Stella Filisetti told him. Her voice wasn’t powerful, but the words were quite distinct. “If you think it could be, you don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s lied to you.”

  “She? You mean Dr. Friemann? Why would she do that?”

  Lisa bit her lip, but reminded herself that Leland had to know that this was a ploy even older and more hackneyed than his own. Being helpless, the only chance Stella Filisetti had was to sow dissent in the opposition ranks.

  “Because she wants it for herself. She’s taken the long way around, but she knows what it is and she wants it. We have proof of that.”

  “What proof?” Leland wanted to know.

  “Check your records, megacorp man. It’s in the freezer.”

  What’s in the freezer? Lisa thought, knowing that Leland must be wondering exactly the same thing.

  “If Dr. Friemann already knows,” Leland said, “the secret’s already out. What harm is there in letting me in on it too?”

  “It’s been buried too long already,” the higher voice said, becoming slightly shrill as hysteria sharpened its edge. “She’s helped to keep it under wraps—but we’re not going to let it stay buried. It doesn’t matter what you do to me. I can’t tell you where Miller is. We had to make certain of that.”

  “Everything’s for sale, Stella,” Leland told her—but Lisa could hear the puzzlement in his voice. “It’s just a matter of finding the right price. The only question you have to ask yourself is whether you’d prefer to deal with a good customer or a skinflint.”

  “If that’s what you think,” Stella responded, “then she’s definitely lied to you. God only knows what game she’s playing—I certainly don’t—but she and Miller have kept this thing between themselves for forty years. In my book, that’s a crime against humanity. If you want answers, ask her.”

  That, Lisa thought, had to be acting. It had to be a bluff, no matter how convincing it sounded.

  “I have asked her,” Leland said. “She’s convinced me that she doesn’t know why Miller was taken. If you want to convince me otherwise, you’ll have to give me more than mere abuse. It might be as well to remember that I’m the only thing standing between you and a long jail sentence. I’m the only one who can get you out of this.”

  “I don’t have to convince you of anything,” the young woman told him. “In fact, I hope you’re right. I hope Miller did keep it secret, even from her. If it is true, however unlikely that may be, she’s going to be extremely pissed when it does come out. Anything she wants to do to me, she’ll want to do to Miller ten times over. If she thinks hell has no fury now, wait till she finds out what scorn really is!” The way the captive raised her voice implied that she knew perfectly well that Lisa was listening, and that she was talking to both of her interrogators, determined that if she couldn’t drive a wedge between them, she could at least sow a little unhealthy confusion.

  “I’m sure that’s right,” Leland said, having carefully lowered the volume of his voice, perhaps to imply that he was prepared to deal confidentially. “My people are pretty sure that she doesn’t know—although I might be able to change their minds if you explain to me why you think otherwise. So why don’t you let me in on the secret, so that we can figure out exactly what it might be worth?”

  “To you,” Stella Filisetti replied, not bothering to whisper, “it’s not worth a damn thing. And that bitch outside the door, whether she’s a rat or just a fool, probably isn’t going to profit from it now. To us, it’s worth everything. More than anything the law can throw at us once we’ve given it to the right people. So you and Friemann can go fuck yourselves—or each other, if you have the stomach for it. You’re getting nothing out of me. Even if I knew where Miller is, I wouldn’t tell you. You can hurt me as badly as you like, but all you’ll get is wasted time.”

  Leland was silent. His script had been blown apart. If Stella’s lying, Lisa thought, she’s much better at it than her amateur status suggests. If she’s playing a game, she has far more skill than the average panicky interrogatee. If there really is a riddle to be solved, it isn’t going to be easy to unravel, even though it doesn’t need a genius to figure out what it must be that she thinks Morgan has discovered.

  After a further minute, Leland emerged from the room and closed the door behind him. “Better let her consider her situation for a while,” he murmured. “Could be that the other one will be a little saner. After all, she’s never screwed your crafty boyfriend.”

  His tone was neutral, but Lisa could tell that Stella Filisetti had got through to him. Whatever trust Leland had had in her had evaporated. From now on, she was a suspect in his eyes too. She wondered whether it was time to call for help, but decided after a moment’s hesitation that duty could wait a little longer. After all, Leland could be right. The Real Woman presumably hadn’t ever screwed the aforementioned crafty boyfriend, and even Lisa had to admit that that might make her just a little bit saner than someone who had.

  “But this time,” Leland added, “it’s my turn to go first.”

  Second Interlude

  DISTURBIRG SYMPTOMS

  The dog riots of 2010 were the closest Lisa ever came to “frontline policing.” She was called to the university to serve as an adviser to the chief inspector, David Kenneally. What she had in mind as she traveled out in one of the vans was a cozy situation way behind enemy lines, from which she could offer expert judgment as to the wise deployment of the uniformed officers. Kenneally had other ideas; although he had taken a training course in Advanced Negotiating Skills, he did not feel that what he had been taught was particularly relevant to the situation.

  Presumably, the chief inspector would have felt far more confident if a lone gunman had taken hostages, or if some overstressed undergraduate were sitting atop the biology building threatening to jump, but Lisa had little sympathy for his plight. If Advanced Negotiating Skills didn’t cover ugly mobs whose members had studied strategy and tactics by watching videotapes of cult activity in Jerusalem, Tokyo, and New York in 1999 and 2000, what on earth was the use of them in the twenty-first century?

  “Why me?” Lisa asked when Kenneally told her he wanted her right beside him when he went to meet the notional leader of the demonstration.

  “You
know more about their concerns than anyone else on my staff does,” he informed her.

  “Only because I was once what they’d call a professional torturer,” Lisa pointed out. “I even used to practice my dark artistry on this very site. I never worked with dogs, but I think the temperature out there’s already a little too high to encourage nice distinctions. Right now, they’re not likely to concede that being a mere mass murderer of mice is the next best thing to saintly innocence.”

  “We won’t have to discuss your credentials with the demonstrators,” Kenneally informed her dismissively. “You have seen this videotape they’re up in arms about, I take it?”

  Lisa had to admit that she had. “The voice-over is a pack of lies,” she said. “Okay, so the dogs in the first sequence are more than a little disoriented, and maybe more than a little distressed, but there’s no way their symptoms were caused by prion proteins or by any prion-producing autoimmune reaction. The labs have mouse models of classic CJD and at least three of its variants, but nobody makes dog models of any human disease. The second lot are not being injected with immunosuppressant viruses for the sake of germ-warfare research, and the puppies being gassed in the final sequence are being put down humanely in order that researchers can study the development of a disease that kills thousands of pets and working dogs every year, with a view to finding a cure. Nor are any of the dogs British-born—ever since the 2000 ban on the breeding of domestic dogs for research purposes, the university has imported the very few dogs it needs from France. The tape’s pure black propaganda from beginning to end.”

  “That’s exactly what I need, you see,” the chief inspector told her. “The calm voice of sanity.”

  “But they’re not going to listen to the calm voice of sanity,” Lisa told him. “That’s not the way this kind of game is played. Even if the students who routinely use the building are steering clear, there’s bound to be somebody out there who’ll recognize me and tip them off. To them, I’ll just be one more vivisectionist plugging the party line. Believe me, sir, they hate police scientists almost as intensely as they hate company-funded research workers.”

  “You speak their language,” Kenneally insisted.

  “Maybe—but with an inflection that immediately marks me as an enemy,” she protested. “You might as well ask Chan to talk to them.” Chan was also in the van, as was one of the campus security guards.

  “Dr. Friemann’s right,” Chan put in. “If it is not safe for me to go out, it is not safe for her.”

  “But Dr. Friemann is a police officer,” Kenneally pointed out. “For her, it’s a matter of duty.”

  Chan called Edgar Burdillon on his mobile phone and told him what the chief inspector was planning to do, but Kenneally was no more impressed by Burdillon’s objections than he had been by Chan’s.

  “If you go out to talk to them, they will turn it into an argument,” Chan said to Lisa. “It will add fuel to the flames. Far better to stonewall them. If the chief inspector’s men can hold their position, the gale might just blow itself out. If you provoke them, you will definitely end up having to deploy riot shields and mount baton charges.”

  “It’s not my decision,” was all that Lisa could say in reply.

  “With all due respect, Dr. Chan,” Kenneally said, “I think I know more about keeping order in this sort of situation than you do. I helped to police dozens of political demonstrations and labor disputes while I was in the Met between fifteen and ten years ago. I even faced down the Countryside Alliance a time or two.”

  “The Countryside Alliance went to bat for the privilege of killing things,” Lisa pointed out tiredly. “They weren’t possessed by anything like the kind of righteous fervor that has these people in its grip.”

  In the end, of course, the chief inspector prevailed. He was the one with the privilege of issuing orders. Kenneally and his reluctant scientific adviser sallied forth, valiantly hoping to slay the dragon of extremism with the lance of moderation.

  The crowd outside the main entrance of the building was about two hundred strong, but at least three-quarters of them had only come along to watch. They weren’t being proselytized particularly fiercely and for the moment, they weren’t part of the mob per se. The Animal Liberation Front and its allied organizations had bused in some two dozen agitators to swell the ranks of the local hard-liners, most of whom were local only in the sense that they lived somewhere in the cityplex. Being the easternmost campus of the Combined Universities, this one had attracted far less public attention in the past than those closer to the old Bristol city center, but the videotape that some insider had cobbled together with the aid of a miniature camera had brought the facility into prominence in spite of the fact that what the tape actually showed was negligible without the highly imaginative and completely mistaken voice-over. Having come into the eye of the public, however, the campus was not to be allowed to slip out again without a fight; that had become a point of principle ever since the ALF’s nuisance tactics had started winning battles.

  Chief Inspector Kenneally was a hardened twentieth-century man; he hadn’t adapted to the reality of the new millennium. He still believed in arbitration and compromise, but his opponents here were only interested in forcing concessions—and if they had to batter a few policemen to do it, they were ready to face the consequences. The jails were so overcrowded that they would be out on amnesty in a matter of months.

  The leaders of the demonstration went by the cod-revolutionary pseudonyms of Eagle, Jude, and Keeper Pan. Keeper Pan was the only female. All three had voices trained to carry, and none was given to speaking if he or she could shriek instead.

  When Chief Inspector Kenneally tried to assure the three of them that he could assuage many of their anxieties concerning the nature of the experiments in which the department’s dogs were involved, they assured him that he could not. When he denied that any dogs kept by the university had ever been infected with brain-damaging antibodies or artificial viruses, they told him they had heard such apologetic lies a hundred times before, and invited him to deny that the pups that had been seen to die in a gas chamber were really dead.

  “I can’t do that,” he admitted, “but my colleague Dr. Friemann will be pleased to explain to you exactly what kind of research is being conducted, and what benefits are expected to flow from it for thousands of household pets and working dogs.”

  Thanks a lot, Lisa thought as the hostile gazes of the three liberationists swung around to study her face. Eagle’s face was doubly shielded by blond dreadlocks along with face paint that split his features into black and white, but his blue eyes were penetrating. Jude’s warpaint was less flamboyant, and his dark eyes seemed less threatening, but Keeper Pan must have been even paler of complexion than Eagle when she was not in uniform, and the pinpoint pupils in her brilliant turquoise irises seemed particularly sinister.

  “Just as her colleague Dr. Goebbels would have been happy to explain exactly how the death of the victims he sent to the gas chambers would benefit the mass of humankind,” Eagle informed the chief inspector from the side of his mouth. “Murderers are never short of excuses.”

  “My job is to catch murderers,” Lisa pointed out, figuring that while she was in the spotlight, she might as well try to do the job. “Not to mention rapists, thieves, and animal abusers. I analyse DNA—not just human DNA, but plant and animal DNA. I can tie a suspect to a crime scene by means of the grass stains on his shoes. I can identify the individual nest from which eggs have been looted and the individual tiger whose organs have been ground up to make quack medicines—and I’ve done both those things, for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the World Wildlife Fund. I’m not the enemy. Biologists are not the enemy.”

  “Biologists who murder animals in the name of experimentation are the enemy,” Jude retorted. “They’re the enemy we’re here to fight, the enemy we’re here to stop. Biologists who create whole new species whose sole reason for being is to suffer from horrible d
iseases are the enemy. Biologists who make new kinds of viruses for use as weapons of war are the enemy. Biologists who play with immunosup-pressants and prions as if they were toys are the enemy. They’re the enemy that has to be defeated if we’re to five like truly human beings. They’re the enemy that has to be defeated if we’re to five at all. “

  His oratorical technique was good. If he hadn’t been trained, Lisa thought, he’d certainly put in some practice. As far as the people who’d come only to be bystanders were concerned, he was winning hands down.

  “The vice-chancellor has agreed to set up an internal inquiry to look into all the allegations made by the person who made the tape,” Kenneally said, obviously figuring that it might be best to bring the discussion down to earth again. “He’s also offered to let you have a seat on the committee as well as to send delegates to give evidence. That’s generous, I think—”

  “Generous!” echoed Keeper Pan, her high-pitched voice cutting through the stormy air like an ancient factory whistle. “One place in a ready-made committee! One vote against a ready-made majority! One voice against a chorus! One honest witness against a team of stooges! Inquiry’s just another word for stall. We don’t want an inquiry—we want immediate action and a public guarantee that all animal experiments will be abandoned for good. We want it now” Perhaps, Lisa thought, Jude and Keeper Pan practiced their rabble-rousing techniques after sex, just as she and Morgan Miller had always practiced the art of clinical rhetoric.