The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [58]
It was a tricky question, and Lisa thought about it for a full minute before replying. She had finished the tea and was desperate for a refill, even though she didn’t drink tea. “I think this whole stupid affair is a comedy of errors either way,” she said eventually. “If it’s not Morgan’s recent work that sparked this off, then Goldfarb, or his opposite number in Swindon, must have put two and two together and made twenty-two. Someone might think that Morgan has stumbled across some kind of longevity treatment, and the rumor may have been exaggerated as the whisper was passed on, but I can’t believe there’s anything really there. If Morgan says he failed, he really did fail.”
“There are no failed experiments in science,” Leland told her sardonically. “Just experiments that don’t give you the answer you were looking for. Sometimes that’s because you’re asking the wrong question.”
He doesn’t know Morgan Miller, Lisa thought. Morgan was always careful to ask all the questions, even if he couldn’t answer them. “So who are the crazy women working for?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “It’s not the Leninist Mafia, or any gang of biotech bootleggers that we know about. It looks like an ad hoc conspiracy, hastily flung together. Even in this game, appearances aren’t always deceptive.”
“And why should you know more about the Leninist Mafia or biotech bootlegging than we do?” Lisa challenged, trying to imply that her “we” included the MOD as well as the police, although she didn’t know the first thing about Special Branch ops, let alone Peter Grimmett Smith’s secret business. Although her warrant card identified her as a forensic scientist, she figured that her interlocutor couldn’t know for certain that she wasn’t attached to Special Branch and hadn’t done any significant work on bootlegged biotech.
Leland hesitated before saying, “Well, there are no prizes for guessing that I’m private security, nor for figuring out that I probably wouldn’t be on the case if I weren’t in something like the same line of work as you. I might as well come clean, though, and admit that busting everyday pharmaceutical counterfeiters is more my sort of thing than a weird mess like this. You know I can’t tell you who I work for, but you also know what that means.”
“The megacorps,” Lisa said. “I suppose they don’t like to be called the Cabal?”
“As far as I can tell,” Leland informed her wryly, “they love it. But that’s by the by. The question is: can we work together, or are you going to go after me for loading you in back of the van with the other two? Even though the girls aren’t mafia, they’re bound to have lawyers. If I’d left them to be taken into custody, the local plods would have done everything by the book—and by the time you’d woken up, you’d have had to sit twiddling your thumbs while the MOD hammered out some kind of deal to persuade the captives to sell out their pals. You ought to be grateful to me for expanding your options.”
“I’m not going to make myself an accessory to torture,” Lisa said sharply.
“Of course not,” Leland replied soothingly. “If I were going to try anything of that sort, I’d make very sure you weren’t involved, for my sake as well as yours. In this instance, we don’t have time—the trouble with obtaining information under duress is that you have to be able to check it out and take punitive action if you’ve been sold a pup. However crazy these