The Cassandra Complex

by Brian Stableford

  Mike considered the catalogue of clues for a moment or so, nobly refraining from making any comment on the circumstantiality of the evidence.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Why?”

  “Stella found something, maybe in Mouseworld and maybe in one of Morgan’s computers. Whichever one it was, it made her check the other, and she found confirmation. She put those two together with a further two from Morgan’s trips to Ahasuerus and the Institute of Algeny, and made far more than five. She’d probably confided her suspicions to her radfem friends already, but the fact that Morgan was talking to Goldfarb and Geyer spooked them sufficiently to take action. They may have a handful of hobbyist terrorists along—that’s probably where they got the weapons, the accelerant they used in Mouseworld, and the idiotic posing—but they’re not really an organized gang. Even if they’ve managed to get Arachne West on the team, as seems probable, they’re still the rankest kind of amateurs. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. When the computer team clears out all the disinformation, Smith and Kenna will move a whole task force against the couriers carrying Stella’s stolen mice, but I figure that I have at least a couple of hours to try to get Morgan out quietly before the shit hits the fan. That’s what I’m going to do, while you ferry Chan to the Renaissance.”

  “You didn’t answer the question,” Grundy pointed out quietly. “What could Filisetti have found that turned a woman like Helen into a master criminal?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Lisa confessed, “but my guess is that what she thinks she found is evidence that Morgan discovered a means of extending mammalian life spans that works only on females. She thinks he’s been sitting on it for up to forty years, trying to figure out a way of making it work on males too. She thinks that because he had failed to do that, he was planning to hand it over to some organization that would carry on the work while maintaining the same kind of secrecy. When she confided all this to her radfem friends, they presumably ran the same background checks on Ahasuerus and the Algenists that Peter Smith ran, and came across all the same tabloid legends. Both institutions are rumored to have exotic secret agendas—but who isn’t nowadays? Ahasuerus is said to have been set up specifically to find a means of conferring emortality upon its illustrious male founder, Adam Zimmerman, and the Algenists are misunderstood by their severest critics to be trying to create a Naziesque master race. You can see how that sort of bad press might raise radfem hackles.”

  “I can easily imagine Helen getting excited about that kind of thing,” Mike admitted wryly. “In fact, I don’t have to imagine it. Imagining her as a criminal mastermind dispatching gangs of assassins and bombers is a different matter, though.”

  “They think I’m in on it,” Lisa added, shivering in a sudden gust of cold wind. “They think I’ve known all about it since day one, but that I’ve kept quiet. Stella and Helen have convinced themselves that I’ve been prepared to go along with Morgan’s plans in return for a promise that I’d eventually be paid off with the treatment, thus betraying the sacred principles of sisterhood. That’s why they sprayed Traitor’ on my door and tried to shake me up by telling me that Morgan never really intended to cut me in. Can I go now?”

  Grundy was still dubious. “I’m no fan of Helen’s nowadays,” he said, “but this is way beyond her. She might conceivably be involved, but she can’t possibly be the one behind it.”

  “She’s more than involved, Mike,” Lisa told him, hoping she’d read that part of the puzzle right. “This whole thing’s been too personal That’s partly down to Stella, but only partly.”

  “That doesn’t make sense either,” he objected. “We live in crazy times, but—”

  “It’s not just the crazy times,” Lisa told him, determined to put her point across quickly so she could move on. “The sense of impending doom that Containment and the undeclared war have cultivated undoubtedly helped to shove them over the edge, but they’re taking it very personally. Stella Filisetti doesn’t know Morgan the way I do, and I doubt if she can relate to his way of life the way I could. She feels let down because he didn’t change into Mister Right the moment he started screwing her. She’s magnified that sense of betrayal into something much greater. And Helen doesn’t know me the way you do. She didn’t understand what happened after she threw you out, any more than she ever understood that we really were friends. She was all set up to believe the very worst of me. They’ve inflated their personal frustrations into a much grander paranoia—a conviction that something immensely valuable is being withheld from them by people they know. They think they’re being left to die while less worthy acquaintances are plotting to survive the impending catastrophe and come through it with a secure position in the pockets of the rulers of the new world. Hell, even Peter Grimmett Smith of the MOD is a sucker for tales of the Secret Masters and the Ice Age Elite. The only difference is that he’s either too shrewd or too contemptuous to believe that someone like me could ever be a part of that kind of conspiracy. Stella isn’t. Nor, alas, is Helen.”

  “If you say so,” Grundy conceded reluctantly. “But even if you’re right, it ought to be me who goes after Helen, not you.”

  “It has to be me, Mike,” Lisa told him. “It’s because I know Morgan better than anyone else does that I know this farce is founded on a colossal mistake. I’m the only one who can convince the radfems of that fact. Morgan obviously couldn’t.”

  “Maybe no one can,” he suggested.

  “Maybe not—but I don’t have time to argue, Mike. I have to go now.”

  Chan had already moved to Mike’s side. He was waiting, with a meekness so exaggerated that it was almost insulting, for further orders. Mike looked sideways at him, as if reading a message from his slumped shoulders and sleepless eyes. “I suppose you have considered the possibility that they might be right, Lis?” he said finally.

  That one was too important to leave unanswered, but all Lisa said was “Yes.”

  Of course she’d considered the possibility that Stella really had found what she thought she had—but she’d rejected it. If Morgan Miller had discovered a life-extension treatment whose only deficiency was that it worked only on women, he wouldn’t have kept it entirely to himself. Even Helen Grundy and Stella Filisetti didn’t think that badly of him. They thought badly enough of Lisa to believe she’d conspired with him to keep it quiet, but they hadn’t been able to suppose that Morgan would simply let her grow old and die with all the rest. Even they accepted that if Morgan Miller had drawn up a list of his own personal Ice Age Elite, she would be on it.

  There had to be something else: something that Stella Filisetti had missed; some obstacle that Morgan had stumbled over, that had carried on bruising his shins for forty years.

  Lisa wanted to tell Mike that she was deeply sorry he had been caught up in it, and sorry that his ex-wife’s meddling would surely torpedo his attempts to cling to the vestiges of his career. She wanted to commiserate with him because her own career had been similarly blighted. She wanted to tell him, in the most heartfelt manner she could contrive, that it might all be for the best, because they should never have allowed themselves to sink so deeply into the ruts that had somehow consumed their lives. She wanted to try to convince him that they had been good citizen mice for far too long, putting up no resistance to the shrinkage of their personal space, refusing to get excited about the stultification of their options. She wanted to ask him whether it was really all bad to be a Calhounian rat, raging against the injustice of circumstance. She wanted to assure him that everything might still work out for the best, not merely for themselves, but for the world.

  But she had no time.

  Even if it had all been true, she had no time.

  “Okay,” Grundy said when the silence had dragged on and on to the limits of bearability, even though it had lasted no more than ten or fifteen seconds. “Go.”

  “You have to go first,” Lisa told him, “but you’ll have to leave your mobile with me. I need
to use it.”

  Chan had already moved around the Rover to the passenger door. Lisa’s final demand was a trifle excessive, but Mike didn’t have to ask why she wanted the phone. He simply nodded and handed it over before turning on his heel and opening the driver’s door. He glanced back only once before getting in and slamming it shut. Then he drove away, so fast that his onboard computer had to be flashing red warnings. Lisa pressed the automatic-dial button on Grundy’s phone and then hit 1.

  The surge of relief she felt when Helen Grundy answered on the second ring with a monosyllabic “Yes?” hit Lisa like a tidal wave. She knew how utterly foolish she would have felt had she been unable to make that crucial contact.

  “It’s Lisa Friemann, Helen,” she said, her voice sounding so leaden in her ears that she could hardly recognize it as her own. “We need to talk.”

  On another occasion, under different circumstances, Lisa might have found something to savor in the silence that followed, knowing as she did what a heady cocktail of shock and fear must have prompted it. On this occasion, she was content merely to wait for a further response.

  “What are you doing with Mike’s phone?” Helen Grundy asked, confirming Lisa’s suspicion that a call from any other instrument would probably have been blocked out.

  “Mike’s not here,” Lisa said. “I sent him away. I’m alone. This is between you and me.”

  “Well?” Helen said after another pause for thought. “What do you want?”

  “It’s a matter of hours now, Helen. The computer people are working on the corrupted phone records. It’ll take them a while to figure out the obvious, but they’ll do it. The computers will leave a safety margin before they feel a hundred-percent confident of the link between the Real Woman we arrested with Stella Filisetti and Arachne West, but Smith has people searching for her already. It won’t matter how well hidden you are or how quiet you can keep—your blackout didn’t last long enough to make your movements untraceable. Even if it takes a small army to intercept the couriers carrying the mice, they won’t get away.”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about, Lisa,” Helen replied stubbornly. “Just put Mike on, will you?”

  “Mike knows everything, Helen. For the moment, he and Chan Kwai Keung are the only two who do know—but as I said, it’s a matter of hours. Going after Chan was a mistake, by the way. His guilty conscience was reflecting on sins of his own. I can see why Stella and her friend jumped to the wrong conclusion, but it really was a masterpiece of bad judgment.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re telling me all this,” Helen said. The ambiguity was so neat that Lisa felt free to assume that the other woman had regained most of her composure.

  “I’m trying to make it clear to you that you no longer have anything to lose by talking to me, and maybe everything to gain. I want to make you an offer.”

  “An offer I can’t refuse?” Helen countered, although the attempted wit rang hollow.

  “I don’t blame you for thinking I must be involved,” Lisa said. “It was a perfectly natural assumption. I don’t blame you or Stella for refusing to take my denials seriously. If I can’t understand why Morgan never let me in on his little secret, how could you? I wouldn’t blame you for thinking I must be lying now. If I were in your position, that’s exactly what I’d be thinking. But consider this, Helen. In a few hours, everyone else will know what I know. I could tip them off right now if I wanted to heed the call of duty. I could have called Judith Kenna, Peter Grimmett Smith, or the mysterious Mr. Leland instead of you, and then I could have gone back to the Renaissance Hotel to sleep all day, knowing that I’d wake up to find the whole thing tidied up—and I’m certainly tired enough. For the first time in months, I’m tired enough to do exactly that. My job was as good as lost already, but the moment I phoned you instead of Smith, I made absolutely certain that I’m finished. Careerwise, the fact that I’m talking to you now is suicide.”

  “It sounds more like madness to me,” Helen Grundy observed, still careful not to commit herself to any recordable admission that she knew what Lisa was talking about.

  “Maybe,” Lisa admitted. “But the fact is, I want to know. I want to know why every initial assumption I made about this case has proved false. I want to know why I was so ludicrously mistaken about the nature of my relationship with Morgan Miller that I was unable to believe he’d kept a secret from me for all these years. I want to know why he never gave me the opportunity to be the kind of traitor you and Stella Filisetti think I am.”

  “I don’t see how any of this concerns me,” Helen Grundy said, a faint trace of contempt creeping into her voice.

  “Use your imagination, Helen. You haven’t got anything tangible out of Morgan. You haven’t found anything on the hard disks of his old PC’s and you haven’t found any backups among the wafers and sequins you stole from my apartment. All you’ve got today is what Stella managed to put together before she told you that if you didn’t act quickly, you’d never get another chance, because her spying activities were bound to be uncovered. You can’t get anything you can trust out of Morgan, because he knows as well as you do that it’s just a matter of hanging on till rescue comes. If I know Morgan only half as well as I thought I did, I’d guess that he’s been feeding you bullshit by the ream ever since you picked him up, and I’ll bet a million euros to a bent bingo token that it would take an army of scientists thirty years to sort out fact from fantasy.

  “I presume that you and Arachne and the hard core of the sisterhood are more than willing to accept martyrdom for the cause, but I know that you’d be willing to risk anything to get what you want before you go down—to get something you can broadcast to all the other sisters. But you have only one chance of getting that, because there’s only one person who has the moral clout necessary to demand the truth from Morgan Miller and get it. In brief, Helen, you need me.

  “It wouldn’t have done you any good to lift me when you lifted Morgan, because I’d have been just as stubborn and just as inventive in stalling you, and I guess there must have been quite an argument about whether it was safe to leave me on the outside to help with the investigation. My guess is that it was my old acquaintance Arachne who persuaded the team to go for the bug option—which might have been a valuable information feed if Mr. Leland hadn’t stuck his paranoid oar in—but that doesn’t matter. The point is that it was the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons. I’m ready to help you, Helen. I’m ready to do what you can’t, and demand the truth from Morgan because I want to know, before my life goes down the toilet with all of yours, exactly what it is that’s flushed me away.

  “I need to know, Helen. It’s the one thing left that I really do need. And the beauty of it is that from your point of view, it’s cost-free. You have nothing left to lose, and any chance to win is worth taking.”

  It had been an exhaustingly long speech, and she was shivering in the night-born cold that the sullen morning light hadn’t yet contrived to banish, but Lisa felt more alive than she had for many a year, and it certainly wasn’t Ginny’s pep pills that were responsible. She was prepared to go on if she had to; Helen might still need time to think about it, and in a situation of this kind, it was best to keep piling the pressure on until something gave.

  Fortunately, something had already given. “I can’t trust you,” the other woman said pathetically.

  “You don’t have to,” Lisa said. “Your worst-case scenario is that you might be arrested two hours early. I can’t guarantee that even I can get anything out of Morgan—after all, whether you believe it or not, he’s been keeping me in the dark for the best part of forty years—but at the very least, you’d have an extra hostage to bargain with. I have my car. You name the time and the place—but make it soon. If there aren’t enough sisters where you are to constitute a quorum, somebody had better make an executive decision.”

  “Bitch,” was Helen Grundy’s reply—but she said it offhandedly, with no rea
l feeling. Lisa was confident that it hadn’t been Helen who’d shot the phone out of her hand or sprayed “Traitor” on her door, but she now figured that Helen, not Stella, must have been the principal shaper of the burglars’ script.

  “We don’t have time for insults,” Lisa said. “Where? When?”

  Whether Helen was alone or not, the executive decision was made. “The mall straddling North Parade Road, where the old recreation ground and cricket field used to be,” she said defeatedly. “There’s a shop called Salomey on the ground floor, just to the right of the Johnstone Street entrance. Come to the dressing rooms. Come on foot, alone. You have ten minutes.”

  “I’m too far away. Make it fifteen.”

  “Break the speed limit and leave the car on a double yellow. You have ten.” Helen rang off.

  TWENTY

  Lisa had no watch to tell her the time, but it was obviously too late now to do the run into what had once been the Bath city center in ten minutes. The morning rush hour was already well underway. The onboard computer, roused from quietude by the parking offense she’d committed on North Road, logged six more manifest offenses and four instances of contributory negligence. Its muted voice was still beeping plaintively about parking regulations when she abandoned it, but she figured she made it to the Recreation Ground Mall within a couple of minutes of the deadline she’d been given.

  Lisa didn’t expect that her tardiness would make any difference; Helen’s imposition of a time limit was a meaningless gesture, born of the desire to pretend that she still had some degree of control over the situation. Lisa left Mike Grundy’s mobile in the car, having switched it off after the call to Helen.