The Cassandra Complex

Ed Burdillon had been merely one of the troops in those days, with not a gray hair on his head, and Chan had been in his second year of post-doc, patiently waiting for opportunity to come knocking. In those days, she had driven to the campus from a brand-new high-rise in Bathampton Warren on a 50cc motorcycle. She’d spent the best part of three years in a lab just along the corridor from Mouseworld, in and out of it all the time. It was easy enough to imagine someone working late one night, tracking a particularly tricky 3-D electrophoretic migration pattern, hearing noises and going to investigate….

Except, of course, that Ed Burdillon didn’t work just along the corridor from Mouseworld. He worked on one of the floors above, in a Level 4 biocontainment facility. He might have heard the noises through the floor—but if it had been only noise, he wouldn’t have thought too much about it, because he couldn’t have known that Security was unwittingly watching tapes instead of live transmissions. He must have seen something—perhaps a black-clad figure in a helmet like the one Lisa’s assailant had worn—and realized that Security wasn’t on the ball. To fix the digicams, Lisa thought, the bombers must have had an inside man—but how had they sneaked him in? Even the humblest lab assistants had to be positively vetted these days if they were to have access to the biocontainment facility.

The flashing blue lights were all around them now. Mike slowed down before braking, but Lisa had reflexively put out her right hand; the pressure of her fingers on the dashboard reminded her that she still hurt and that even the slightest shock could renew her awareness of her pain, taunting her with her fragility.

Mike, in a fit of unaccustomed chivalry, had already run around the car to open the door for her. “Let’s go,” he said tersely. “Better find out what we can before the men from Ministry take it out of our hands.”

It was probably going to be worse than that for her, Lisa realized. She wasn’t likely to have just the case taken out of her hands. Everything the intruders had said and done for the benefit of the recording devices in her living room had been calculated to imply that she knew far more about this than she actually did. Painting TRAITOR on the door was presumably mere underlining, made for mocking emphasis. She would have to be treated as a suspect by the men from Ministry, at least to begin with—and wouldn’t Judith Ke

THREE

Lisa paused in the doorway of Mouseworld, content for the moment to look inside without actually stepping over the threshold. There were too many people there already.

She placed her right hand against her sternum, not caring that the blood oozing from the dressing would stain the front of her tunic. The pain of the rip was definitely a feeling now as well as a fact, and the fumes were making her head ache. To make matters worse, the tiredness she’d been unable to cultivate while she lay awake in bed had now descended upon her like a pall. She had never felt less like throwing herself into her work.

The stink was the worst of it—but that was partly because the smoke spiraling from every direction in the hectic airflow made it difficult to see. The sheer faces of almost undifferentiated blackness might as well have been mere shadows. Oddly enough, there seemed to be hardly any warmth left in the cavernous space; the sharp autumn air circulating through the blown-out windows had carried away most of the heat, even though oily smoke still seeped from the molten remains of the plastic faces that were once cages housing small animals.

Lisa had to squint and concentrate hard to make out the vaguest outlines of the thousands of tiny corpses within the walls of shadow. Most of them must have been roasted rather than burned, but it was only in her imagination that the chorus of five hundred thousand agonized mice sounded obscenely loud. Mice weren’t equipped for screaming and within a couple of seconds, the intense heat and smoke must have robbed them of what voices they had.

The central H Block had suffered worst of all. It didn’t require an expert to guess that the incendiaries—of which there must have been at least two—had been placed in the coverts of the H-shaped area.

The main experiment, involving the four mouse “cities” arranged around the walls of the room, had run for decades. It had been famous in its way, but it had been regarded as a mere curiosity—a kind of scientific folly—even in 2002, when Lisa had arrived, shortly after her twenty-second birthday, impatient to be trained in all the hot new techniques of DNA analysis. She had already joined the police force, and had gone through basic training of a sort during the summer months.

If the Mouseworld cities had been a folly then, what were they now in 2041? The passage of time had lent them a certain dignity, although all the claims made over the years for their renewed relevance rang slightly hollow to those in the know. The human population explosion had indeed produced all the dire effects that prophets such as Morgan Miller had predicted, but careful analysis of the physiological tricks that the mice of Mouseworld had mastered had made not a jot of difference. Those humans who followed the mouse example had needed no help to do so, and those who were Calhounian rats through and through could not have been changed by any plausible intervention.

Half a dozen firemen were wandering around aimlessly, two of them still in full breathing apparatus and two others carrying huge axes in a fashion suggesting they were longing to get on with the job of clearing the debris off the staircases and catwalks—a job that would have to wait until the Fire Investigation Team had made a meticulous inspection of the site, probably in company with experts from the Bomb Squad. The axemen had taken their masks off, although the SOCO workers operating under the supervision of Steve Forrester were fully suited.

Lisa still outranked Forrester, in theory at least, but she wasn’t his line manager; he was the up-and-coming heir-apparent to the entire department. He came over as soon as he noticed her, but it was a token gesture.

“Nothing much for us here,” he said. “I sent Max and Lydia with Burdillon in the ambulance—we might get something from his clothing, if we’re verylucky. As he came through the door, he was shot and fell sideways to his right. One of the bombers got a hold of his jacket and dragged him thirty meters down the corridor. His jacket was dead and the bomber was wearing smart gloves, but there’s still a possibility that something stuck.”

When Lisa nodded an acknowledgment, Forrester immediately turned away. Although the senior fireman must have deduced by now that she was police, he wasn’t in any hurry to talk to her. She was, after all, a middle-aged woman, even if her passcard did state that she was a doctor of philosophy as well as an inspector. She seemed to have held the rank of inspector forever; three reorganizations of the relationship between forensic-science officers and the main body of the force hadn’t succeeded in solving the problem of a grotesquely inappropriate and largely tokenistic ranking system.

When the senior fireman finally condescended to approach her, Lisa stepped over the threshold and moved to the left of the door so they wouldn’t be in the way.

“Your mice, were they?” asked the officer as he squinted at the fine print on her card, having rubbed his eyes to clear away the last few smoke-induced tears. His hair was dyed black. The fire service, like the police force, was an institution in which youth and physical fitness were traditionally held in great esteem; they seemed destined to be the nation’s last bastions against the quiet revolution of gray power. Lisa wondered whether the fireman viewed the prospect of premature redundancy with the same vaguely nauseating apprehension that had become her own mind’s rest state.