The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [40]
“An unfriendly foreign government?”
“Perhaps.”
“Or the Cabal?”
Smith frowned. “We don’t use journalistic terms like that, Dr. Friemann. We’re rather old-fashioned in the Ministry. We still use phrases like ‘private enterprise’ without the slightest hint of sarcasm. But, yes—I suppose it’s possible that whatever Dr. Miller told the people at the Foundation and at the Institute was clandestinely passed on, perhaps in garbled form, to someone who scented a quick profit rather than to someone more interested in biowarfare. If either is the case, we need to know exactly what he did tell them.”
And you need to be able to understand the answers, Lisa thought. Which is where I come in—and why you’re willing to overlook Judith Kenna’s reservations about me. Chan’s the only other person with my advantages, and he’s not turned up yet. He’s also not British.
“Have you heard the tape of my conversation with the burglar?” Lisa asked the MOD man.
Smith shook his head. “DI Grundy let me in on the summary he’d received from an officer at the scene, but that’s all,” he said.
“I thought it was just bullshit at first,” Lisa said slowly, “but it’s becoming clearer. The intruder said that Morgan Miller didn’t give a damn about me—that whatever he’d promised me, I’d end up with nothing. Either they were assuming that Morgan had already confided in me as to what he was taking to Ahasuerus and the Institute of Algeny, or they were fishing—trying to figure out by provocation whether I knew. Hell and damnation! I never thought to check whether they’d taken the wafer out of the answerphone. Of course they did. That may even have been what they were after, although they had to take the rest in case I’d changed it or backed it up … they must have figured they had to cover the possibility even though they weren’t sure that Morgan had called me.”
“Which he hadn’t, had he?” Smith prompted, presumably to secure his own peace of mind. “He hadn’t actually told you anything at all.”
“Nothing at all,” Lisa confirmed grimly, wondering why not. Surely, if Morgan had made any kind of groundbreaking discovery, he’d have been avid to share his triumph, desperate to bounce the idea off someone who understood not merely the nature of his work, but the philosophy behind it.
Or would he?
Suddenly the whole hypothesis reverted to the semblance of a house of cards, too frail to survive the least disturbance. As she’d tried to impress on Mike Grundy, nobody stumbled across longevity technologies, or anything of comparable value, by accident. Morgan Miller’s Holy Grail had always been another kind of vessel entirely. He’d always been far more interested in methods of transformation than in the manipulation of particular genes. There were likely thousands of geneticists worldwide who had been looking into the genetic bases of aging for half a century—how could one man working on something entirely different stumble across something they couldn’t find with a directed search?
“There must be other areas of concern that the two institutions have in common,” Lisa said speculatively. “We shouldn’t get hung up on the seemingly obvious until we’ve actually talked to them.”
“You need some sleep,” Smith said. “My people still have work to do here, not just in Miller’s office and lab, but in Burdillon’s too—we’re not about to jump to any conclusions without covering all the ground. We also have to complete our background checks on the institutions before we move in on them. Chief Inspector Kenna says that you can’t go home yet, and there’s no point in challenging her ruling, so I want you to check into one of the hotels close to the campus and get your head down. I’ll be in one called the Renaissance, I think. Take a pill if you have to. I’ll pick you up when I’m ready.”
Lisa was about to protest, but she knew that the feeling of wakefulness prompted by the new information wouldn’t last. If she’d been sleeping properly for the last few weeks, it wouldn’t have done her much harm to