The Cassandra Complex

“Unless it’s ourinside information,” Lisa finished for him. “They’re trying to set me up with this Traitor’ crap, aren’t they? Why would they do that, if not to distract attention from someone else?”

“You don’t suppose it could be Ms. Ke

“No,” she said, for form’s sake. “Not her—but not Morgan, either. Not me and not you and not Ed Burdillon. But it has to be someone who knows more than he or she should about at least three of those five and the places where we live and work. If it’s not someone close to us, it must be one hell of a hacker. The Gaean Libs are rumored to have high-powered hackers in the ranks, but all the best poachers turn gamekeeper as soon as they can. If we’ve been hacked to that extent, it’s far more likely to be someone working for one of the megacorps. But what would convince a megacorps that a quiet backwater like the fourth campus of a provincial university has any secrets worth stealing? That would be one hell of a mistake—if it isa mistake.”

“If it isa megacorp op,” Mike observed glumly, “the MOD won’t get to the bottom of it. Not that they’d tell us if they did. Can’t be, though. Mayhem and kidnapping isn’t the megacorp way. They already own the whole fucking world, thanks to the big smash-and-grab raid that fucked up the Eubank, the Fed, and everybody’s pension funds. Their carpetbaggers can buy anyone they want for next to nothing, even out of a university. Especially out of a university. Where else can you and I go—if Ke

It was all true, Lisa conceded. Ever since the great stock-market bouleversementof ’25, a handful of megacorporations had gradually taken effective control of the world. The power of national governments had been on the wane for a century, but the engineered crisis had administered the coup de grâce. The “gray power” everyone talked about was just ballot-box power; no matter how it contrived to expand the legally sanctioned work opportunities of the over-fifties, it couldn’t conjure up any new employers. If you wanted to work, you had to take your begging bowl to the megacorps, and if you had a valuable secret of any kind, you had to sell it to the megacorps. It was no good trying to play one corp off against another, because they all worked as a team. The broadsheets called them “the Ultimate Cartel,” but that was just politeness; the tabloids were right to prefer “the Cabal.” Megacorp publicity claimed that the substitute term had arisen because tabloid editors were as illiterate as their readers, not because anyone had knowledge of an actual secret conspiracy, but everyone with half a brain took that as one more sign of their undoubted guilt.

Mike Grundy’s gaze had wandered. Lisa followed it, tracking across the appalling blackness of the spoiled walls and the crude stumps of what had been the projecting sections of the central H Block. The stink was still appalling. No matter how hard the cold wind blew through the empty window frames, the foul odor kept on renewing itself, emanating with seemingly relentless fervor from the roasted fur of half a million mice.

“Let’s get out of here, Lis,” Grundy said. “There’s nothing we can do. Want to sneak a look at the security tapes before they’re commandeered?”

“Ke

“The Fire and Rescue paramedics are downstairs,” Mike said. “We can share the elevator.”

Lisa was by no means reluctant to be hustled back to the gaping doorway, but she couldn’t resist the temptation to take one last panoramic look at the ruins of Mouseworld.

“Seventy years,” she murmured. “Eight hundred generations. All gone in a momentary holocaust. Hideous.”

“You can say that again,” the detective muttered—but he didn’t mean what she meant. He wasn’t a scientist. He didn’t understand. It wasn’t his fault, of course, but it was a gulf between them nevertheless. There had always been a gulf between them, even when they were at their closest, in the traumatic weeks after Helen had thrown him out. At the time, Lisa had thought it was the specter of Morgan Miller that had held her back from any fuller engagement with Mike’s need or his wayward emotions, but now she realized it had been something more fundamental.

They were both detectives, in their different ways, but they had never had the same goals. Mike was a man who thought in terms of offenses and results, while Lisa thought in terms of puzzles, clues, and solutions, but even that wasn’t the heart of it. Mouseworld had meant something to Lisa, not merely as a symbol of the world’s historical predicament—which it had been set up to be—but as a symbol of humankind’s well-meaning, ill-directed, and ineffectual attempts to come to terms with that predicament. To Mike, it was just a mess of mice, which had stunk to high heaven even before it was torched.

FIVE

Mike Grundy’s subordinates had commandeered Thomas Sweet’s office, partly for the sake of the video surveillance cameras and partly for the sake of the percolator. When Grundy turned up, with Lisa still in tow, a constable in plainclothes immediately poured each a cup of coffee. Lisa hesitated before accepting hers, but the residual smoke and fumes had parched her throat and she knew that the caffeine would help her fight off the inconvenient tiredness. She took the cup. Grundy poured milk into his own cup and then offered the carton to her, but she shook her head.

“There’s nothing much on the tapes,” said the sergeant who’d been patiently ru

“Three individuals, five-seven, five-nine, and five-eleven,” Hapgood went on. “Two definitely look woman-shaped—can’t really tell about the tallest one, although it took serious muscle power to tow Burdillon to safety without hardly slowing down. Both of the women were armed, one with a real gun and one with a silly dart pistol. The one with the real gun—looks like an antique, probably been mothballed for fifty years—covered Burdillon while the other turned to fire, so they must have had a plan of sorts for dealing fairly gently with anyone who interrupted them. They sailed through all the doors, and they knew the routines of Sweet’s people well enough to be in and out without giving them any opportunity to interrupt.”

The bleeper attached to Grundy’s waistband went off and he plucked the phone from his belt. After identifying himself, he listened for a full two minutes, saving up the expletive until there was a suitable gap in the information flow. Lisa knew by the way the DI’s eyes sought out her face that the news was expected, but disappointing. She had guessed long before the phone was back in its holster.

“They all got away,” Mike reported glumly. “Traffic picked up the trace of a likely vehicle moving away from your place, but it headed straight into the blackout. Same with the van that took the bombers away from the campus.”

“Both stolen?” DS Hapgood asked, obviously assuming that the question was merely rhetorical.

“Actually, no,” Grundy said. “Both registration plates came up ’No Record.’ Not even write-off salvage—never issued.”

Lisa couldn’t see that it helped much. If the perpetrators had put false plates on their own vehicles, that gave her people a chance of matching up forensic evidence if ever the vehicles could be traced—but if they’d used stolen vehicles that they’d subsequently dumped, they might have left evidential traces in them, even if they’d torched them, and time was of the essence. “Anything at all on the people who took Morgan?” she asked.