The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [13]
The fireman had turned away while Lisa was thinking, and she couldn’t see any need to call him back. Someone was coming up the corridor behind her and she put her head around the door to see who it was, after briefly rubbing her smoke-irritated eyes.
Lisa recognized the campus security guard responsible for the building. He’d been around almost as long as she had. His name was Thomas Sweet, although Lisa realized with a slight shock that she’d never actually had occasion to address him by name. He knew her only as an occasional visitor, but she obviously seemed to him to be a sympathetic figure—a possible ally against all the uniformed men and “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” The deeply mournful look brought forth a faint but heartrending echo in her own being.
“Miss Friemann?” he said desolately. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” she said, unworried by the fact that he hadn’t called her “Doctor,” let alone “Inspector,” although she certainly wasn’t unaware of it. “What happened, Mr. Sweet? Have you collected the wafers from the security cams?”
“Gave them to a DS,” Sweet assured her. “DI Grundy wants to run through them again, but I’ve taken a peek and the bombers are all wrapped up. Won’t have left much evidence for you, thanks to the so-called smart fabrics they were wearing.” His own uniform was thoroughly dead, and Lisa guessed that his private wardrobe was even farther behind the times than her own.
“We’ll get something,” she said, trying to sound optimistic.
“Wasn’t my fault, Miss,” Sweet insisted. “They hacked into the system and sent false pictures to my VDU’s. They had smartcards, you know—didn’t trigger a single alarm.”
“How many were there?” she asked, unable to remember whether she’d already been told.
“Three of them. Heads inside helmets—purpose-built, not ordinary motorcycling helmets. Looked like they were pretending to be SAS commandos. Only one thing I could make out for sure.”
“What was that?”
“They were women. Two of them, at least. Third might have been a man—probably was, judging by the way he dragged the prof along the corridor like a sack of potatoes, but not the ones with dart guns. Doesn’t make much difference these days. Remember that evil bitch you banged up after the Dog Riots thirty years back? What was it she called herself?”
“Keeper Pan,” Lisa said automatically, slightly surprised by the readiness of her memory.
“Let her out again soon enough, though, didn’t they? Animal Liberation Front! Is this what they call liberation?”
For the moment, Lisa thought, Animal Liberationists were probably the least likely suspects. Even in their heyday, animal libbers had used firebombs only against people. Mice were right at the bottom of their hierarchy of deserving species, way below pigs and rabbits, but they were innocents nevertheless. Keeper Pan and her friends would never have firebombed Mouseworld. Lisa did, however, pause to wonder whether the person who’d shot the phone out of her hand could possibly have been a woman. It had been too dark to judge the shape of the black shell-suit, but there might have been something else that would give her a clue, if only she could focus her memories….
“He had a lot of stuff in here, didn’t he?” the security man went on. “Stuff from way back—been inoculating mice with voodoo for forty years, they say, trying to work magic. Never came to anything much, though, did it?”
After a moment’s confusion, Lisa realized that the he in Sweet’s statement wasn’t Edgar Burdillon, but Morgan Miller.
“Did they try to get into any of the other labs or offices?” she asked sharply.
Sweet shook his