The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [100]
If the light was on, she would have to keep moving while she assessed the situation, making herself as difficult a target as possible. If not, she would have to flick the switch with her left hand while keeping the gun at the ready, and then—
As soon as the door had opened by the merest crack, she knew the light was on, and she moved rapidly to her left as she pushed her way in, raising the gun to point it at the chest of the man who was rising from the armchair with an expression of startled horror on his face.
But she didn’t fire. The continuing effect of the pills had combined with her adrenaline to boost her sky-high, and she felt well and truly wired, but she still had the presence of mind to freeze her finger on the trigger.
Instead of firing the darter, she raised her left forefinger to her lips in an urgent gesture, imploring silence.
Fortunately, Chan Kwai Keung had always been quick on the uptake, and he must have been expecting her for hours. He stifled his cry of recognition and nodded eagerly, to show that he understood. Lisa used the barrel of the gun to beckon him to the door, and she closed it behind them as quietly as she could. Then she shook her head and pointed downstairs. Chan nodded again.
As soon as they reached the third-floor landing, Lisa knocked on John Charleston’s door. When he cracked it open, she thrust the gun through the narrow gap.
“It’s okay,” she said. “All sorted out. No cause for alarm.”
“Can I still keep it?” he asked tremulously—meaning, of course, the illicit gun.
“Keep what?” she replied generously.
Charleston wasn’t quite as quick on the uptake as Chan, but he was quick enough. “Oh,” he said feebly. The direction of his gaze switched to Chan’s face. “Right. Thanks. You’re okay now?”
“Fine,” she said. “Neither of us was ever here, okay?”
“Absolutely,” he assured her.
Lisa waited until she’d eased the car out on the road again before turning to Chan and saying: “What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” The adrenaline should have abated by now, but it hadn’t. The pills had thrown her entire system out of kilter, and she was locked like a crazy lemming or a snowshoe hare on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She was on the edge, and she wasn’t going to get off until she had seen the affair through to its bitter end.
Chan winced at the rawness of her tone. He seemed genuinely chastened. “I am very sorry,” he said, punctilious in his diction even now. “I did not know what to do for the best. I thought you would know, so I tried … I really had no idea those crazy people would try to snatch me the way they snatched Morgan. I was naive, I suppose—but that made me all the more anxious. As soon as I got out of the parking area, I ran like the wind. At first I expected you home in a couple of hours. Then, when you failed to turn up, I thought you must have been shot. I did not know what to do.”
“How did you get in? Those locks are supposed to be unhackable.”
“You should change your pass codes more often,” Chan chided her, “and your smartcard needs to be at least twice as smart as it is. But that is not important. Where have you been?”
“That’s not important. What’s important is why you’re playing silly cloak-and-dagger games while there’s a full-scale crisis on. What on earth have you got to hide?”
Dawn had turned to daylight now, but the light was gray and cold and utterly unwelcoming. It was less than a week to All Hallows’ Eve, but the weather should still have been relatively benign. This was like a return to the old days, before the greenhouse effect really took hold—but that was no reason for the dead not to hold to their calendar and keep to their graves. The world had no right to be turning topsy-turvy.
“They bombed Mouseworld,” Chan said in a whisper. “If it had just been Morgan, and Ed … but when I was told they had bombed Mouseworld, that was when I knew it had to be my fault. It had to be that crazy old experiment, not the ones we were doing for Ed Burdillon. If it had only been the work we were