The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [21]
“I don’t know,” Lisa admitted. “He probably had a hand in designing twenty or thirty disease models, and at least as many strains transformed for other purposes.”
The predatory gaze switched targets, focusing on Mike Grundy. “Do we know for sure that Miller went home yesterday evening?” the chief inspector asked. “The officers at the house have surely confirmed that much?”
“Yes,” he acknowledged.
“Is there any evidence that anyone else was present? Did he have any visitors, apart from the unwanted ones?”
Lisa inferred the question meant that Stella Filisetti wasn’t at home, or anywhere else that she could be easily located. Mike seemed to hesitate between a straightforward negative answer and the more honest rejoinder that although nobody had reported any such evidence, he didn’t really know. Eventually, he said nothing. Instead, he picked up his mobile and called the officer at the scene for an update. There was a long pause while they waited for a response.
Then, “No,” he reported. “The street cams show that he came home alone, and they don’t show anyone else approaching the house while the power was still on. Although there’s no video or audio record, it looks as if he was in bed, asleep, until something woke him. The debris suggests a relatively brief fight—either they hit him a lot harder than he hit them, or they put him out with tranquilizer-loaded darts. They hacked his locks as easily as they hacked Lisa’s. Nobody had to be inside to let them in. One of the items taken seems to have been an ancient PC; the other may have been a more recent stand-alone.”
“They were probably looking for something that he didn’t want to put on a networked machine,” Judith Kenna concluded. “Something he might have backed up on a wafer or a sequin that he gave to you, Dr. Friemann. That’s the way it looks, isn’t it?”
“Morgan never gave me any backup wafers,” Lisa said. “If that’s what the people who burgled my flat were looking for, they were mistaken.”
“Or misinformed,” Kenna pointed out. “They must have had confidence in their source, don’t you think? They must have thought it was necessary to secure all three targets: the mice, the data, the backup. But there might, of course, have been four targets.”
She presumably meant Stella Filisetti—but Mike Grundy was quick to say: “Or five. We still haven’t established contact with Dr. Chan.”
“But it must be significant that Miller’s computers have been taken,” Kenna countered, “and that Dr. Friemann’s backups were cleared out. If Miller isn’t the perpetrator, he’s certainly the key. Do you suppose, Dr. Friemann, that he might have placed a wafer or a sequin on your shelves without your even knowing it?”
“Not recently,” Lisa replied coldly. “He hasn’t visited my home for over a year.”
“Of course,” the chief inspector said with a perfunctory nod. “You’ve … moved on since then.”
Lisa clenched her fists reflexively, and regretted it when pain flared up in the wound she’d only just grown used to protecting.
“Morgan would never do something like that,” she said.
“But he could have discovered the codes to your locks easily enough, if he’d wanted to?”
“He wouldn’t have wanted to,” Lisa insisted. She barely prevented herself from naming the one person who did know the codes to both her locks—but Judith Kenna already knew that name.
“Do you know the codes to his locks, Dr. Friemann?” Kenna went on inexorably.
For a moment, Lisa considered raising the possibility that Morgan might have changed his codes, as everyone was supposed to do at regular intervals, but she knew full well that he wouldn’t have done any such thing, anymore than she had. “Yes,” she said finally. “And I could have told the bombers how to get into the labs, at least as far as Mouseworld—but I didn’t. Neither did Morgan.”
“I’m merely trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together,” Judith Kenna assured her vindictively. “You see, I can’t think of anyone else except you and Morgan Miller who had ready access to all the necessary information. The missing research assistant might well have been