The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [19]
“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.
The question was addressed to Mike, but it was the sergeant who took it upon himself to answer. “Nobody saw or heard a thing,” he said. “Detached house, nice neighborhood, four in the morning, power out—what do you expect? We still don’t know for sure that he was taken. He was definitely at home the previous evening, but he could have gone out under his own steam after the blackout.”
“Why would he do that?” Lisa countered.
“How would I know?” Hapgood said, seemingly stifling the temptation to add an insubordinate expletive by way of punctuation. “According to Sweet, the guy was the next best thing to a comic-book weird scientist. Obsessive-compulsive type.”
From the corner of her eye, Lisa saw Mike Grundy wince. The sergeant obviously wasn’t yet party to all the relevant gossip.
“His work was reckoned as an obsession only because he never found what he was looking for,” Lisa observed calmly. “If his particular Holy Grail hadn’t proved quite so elusive, his single-mindedness would be called commitment and he’d have a book-length entry in every encyclopedia on the net.”
“Holy Grail?” Hapgood queried sarcastically. For a detective, he was surprisingly slow on the uptake.
“The prize,” she said. “The panacea.”
“A cure for hyperflu?”
Lisa supposed that it was a natural guess, even though the hyperflus had been around for only seven years. “Not a cure for a specific disease,” she informed the young man wearily. “Not even for a whole class of diseases. Something even more basic than that. A general-purpose, targetable transformer that would make all gene therapies easier to administer and more precise. When he started out, cancers were still a major killer and everyone was trying to tailor virus transformers to take them out—‘magic bullets,’ the jargon used to call them. Morgan was working at the most fundamental level, trying to design a vector that could take any DNA cargo into any type of specialized cell and deliver it to any chromosomal address, according to need or demand. If he’d found it, it would have provided a method of attacking all genetic-deficiency diseases, all cancers, and most kinds of injury. One-shot medicine—just turn up at the clinic, list your symptoms, get your tailor-made injection, go home cured. A vector like that would have had other functions too, but the main incentive was medical. As individual solutions to specific problems turned up year after year, though, the pressure to develop a multipurpose delivery service eased off.
“In the end, Morgan seemed to most of his colleagues to be searching for a solution to a problem that no longer existed. It didn’t lessen his determination to find it.”
“And did he?” asked the sergeant, fishing for a motive.
“No,” Lisa admitted. “And even if he had, it wouldn’t be worth kidnapping him to get it—not unless someone’s dreamed up a brand-new killer app that no one else managed to think of during the last forty years.”
“But that kind of research is war relevant, isn