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Smith nodded. Lisa’s explanation had obviously added a measure of enlightenment to what he’d learned from the dictionary. “So the most obvious thing that the two institutions Miller contacted have in common—” he began tentatively.
“—is a strong interest in technologies of longevity,” Lisa finished for him.
“Miller’s not a young man,” Smith observed. “Do you think he was a potential buyer?”
Lisa considered the possibility, then shook her head. She felt that a shadow had fallen over her, and knew it must show on her face. “He was deeply ambivalent about the process of growing old,” she admitted, “but he was a lifelong enemy of narcissism. He thought that declining sperm counts and the changing demographics of the developed countries were both good things, even if they were too little too late, because it’s better to have more older and, hopefully, wiser people around than lots of hungry children. It would have gone against his conscience to seek self-preservation in a world whose population was way past the long-term carrying capacity of the ecosphere.”
“A seller, then,” Smith said.
Lisa shook her head to that too. “No,” she said softly. “I don’t think so.”
Smith didn’t bother to point put that there didn’t seem to be an obvious third alternative—unless the Ahasuerus Foundation and the Institute of Algeny had something less obvious in common. “Neither institution is British,” he commented, watching closely for Lisa’s reaction. “The Swindon outfit’s European Union, but its headquarters are in Germany. Ahasuerus is American.”
“Intellectual activity is as global as commerce nowadays,” Lisa pointed out. “In any case, the EU and the USA are the best of buddies, united against the menaces of hyperflu, international terrorism, and illicit economic migration.”
“True,” said Smith in a tone that suggested it wasn’t the whole truth. The MOD probably figured that the nation’s friends needed more careful watching than its enemies did.
Lisa waited for the MOD man to continue—which he did after a contemplative pause. “So tell me, Dr. Friema
Lisa didn’t open her mouth to begin a reply, because she knew full well that she wouldn’t be able to finish the first sentence before doubts consumed it and spat it out. She needed more time to weigh the possibilities and to recalculate her assessments of the situation as she had so far found it. She shuffled uncomfortably in her seat, not because the chair was badly designed, but because the ambience of the seminar room had begun to call forth fugitive memories of long-past pressures and intellectual discomforts.
As long ago as 1999, she knew, a gene had been discovered whose modification extended the normal life span of a mouse by a third. It had triggered an assiduous search for more, which had still been in full swing in 2002, but Morgan had never deigned to participate. He had correctly predicted that the equivalent gene in humans would turn out to have been activated already by the processes of natural selection that had extended the human life span in the interests of parental care. Was it conceivable, she wondered, that even though he hadn’t been in the hunt, Morgan had nevertheless contrived to stumble upon a transformation that allowed mice to live muchlonger than their natural spans without exposing them to the long-understood rigors of calorific restriction? If so, it mighthave provided a motive powerful enough to inspire his kidnappers—and maybe a motive powerful enough to take the precaution of destroying every single mouse in Mouseworld.
Lisa wondered if Morgan’s paranoia about overpopulation might have been sufficiently intense to stop him from publishing an experimental finding that might have made the problem even worse—but she quickly rejected the hypothesis. As she had already told Peter Grimmett Smith, Morgan wasn’t that kind of man. Nor was he the kind of man who would automatically seek custodians for any kind of secret inside such fringe organizations as the Ahasuerus Foundation and the Institute of Algeny—in which case, why on earth had he contacted them? The fact that he hadmight have persuaded someone—someone who didn’t know him as well as she did—that he might have a secret worth stealing. In these troubled times, even a hint might have been enough to move someone to take desperate measures to steal his secret.
“Do you think someone inside one of the two organizations had Morgan snatched?” Lisa asked.
“It’s an appealing hypothesis,” Smith conceded. “If not, perhaps someone in one of them forwarded the information to some interested third party.”
“An unfriendly foreign government?”
“Perhaps.”
“Or the Cabal?”
Smith frowned. “We don’t use journalistic terms like that, Dr. Friema
And you need to be able to understand the answers, Lisa thought. Which is where I come in— and why you’re willing to overlook Judith Ke
“Have you heard the tape of my conversation with the burglar?” Lisa asked the MOD man.
Smith shook his head. “DI Grundy let me in on the summary he’d received from an officer at the scene, but that’s all,” he said.
“I thought it was just bullshit at first,” Lisa said slowly, “but it’s becoming clearer. The intruder said that Morgan Miller didn’t give a damn about me—that whatever he’d promised me, I’d end up with nothing. Either they were assuming that Morgan had already confided in me as to what he was taking to Ahasuerus and the Institute of Algeny, or they were fishing—trying to figure out by provocation whether I knew. Hell and damnation! I never thought to check whether they’d taken the wafer out of the answerphone. Of coursethey did. That may even have been what they were after, although they had to take the rest in case I’d changed it or backed it up … they must have figured they had to cover the possibility even though they weren’t sure that Morgan had called me.”
“Which he hadn’t, had he?” Smith prompted, presumably to secure his own peace of mind. “He hadn’t actually told you anything at all.”
“Nothing at all,” Lisa confirmed grimly, wondering why not. Surely, if Morgan hadmade any kind of groundbreaking discovery, he’d have been avid to share his triumph, desperate to bounce the idea off someone who understood not merely the nature of his work, but the philosophy behind it.
Or would he?
Suddenly the whole hypothesis reverted to the semblance of a house of cards, too frail to survive the least disturbance. As she’d tried to impress on Mike Grundy, nobody stumbled across longevity technologies, or anything of comparable value, by accident.Morgan Miller’s Holy Grail had always been another kind of vessel entirely. He’d always been far more interested in methodsof transformation than in the manipulation of particular genes. There were likely thousands of geneticists worldwide who had been looking into the genetic bases of aging for half a century—how could one man working on something entirely different stumble across something they couldn’t find with a directed search?
“There must be other areas of concern that the two institutions have in common,” Lisa said speculatively. “We shouldn’t get hung up on the seemingly obvious until we’ve actually talked to them.”