The Cassandra Complex (17 page)

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.”

“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.