The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [59]
“You haven’t tried to question them by yourself?” Lisa asked skeptically.
“They’re still asleep,” he told her. “There wasn’t time to be subtle back in the car lot—I had to hit them with the gas. I figure they’ll be awake at any time now, but it might be as well to let them consider their situation for a little while. Their clothes weren’t nearly as badly damaged as yours, but I took them anyway. They’re very modern girls—smartskins, no underwear. They’re tightly secured, each in a different room. They’ll be feeling very vulnerable.”
“I can’t be a party to this,” Lisa said, without much conviction.
“That’s a shame,” Leland told her. “I’ll be talking to them anyway—the only result of your staying out of it will be that our chances of getting what we need are reduced—and you’ll remain ignorant of anything I do manage to find out. Do you really want to pass on your best chance of finding out where Miller is in time to get him out alive?”
Lisa could only reply to that with a censorious glare, but Leland wasn’t the kind of man to wilt before a dirty look. She knew he was right, and that the two would-be assassins were far more likely to let something slip in their present circumstances than they would be if they were subjected to due process under the protection of PACE 2, with their lawyers at their elbows. She also knew that he was trying to curry favor by letting her in on the interrogations—a favor whose acceptance might be dangerous. Making herself an accessory to an illegal interrogation could easily turn out to be the next best thing to handing her head to Judith Kenna on a silver platter, careerwise. Mike Grundy had suggested that cracking the case might be exactly what the two of them needed to stave off compulsory retirement for a few more years, but the way it was cracked might be even more important in that regard than merely getting a result.
In the end, it all came back to Morgan Miller and the need to get him out of whatever mess he’d contrived to get himself into. How much did she have to lose? The fact that Kenna was out to get her anyway increased the danger of not playing by the book—but how much should she care, at her time of life? If she wasn’t prepared to be reckless now, when would she ever be?
“So what are you waiting for?” she asked the big man. “Get me those bloody clothes. And something else to drink.”
Leland grinned as he took back the empty cup. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll cover your back if you cover mine. All we have to do is make sure that the good end happily and the bad unhappily. As long as the story works out, it won’t matter a damn whether there really is an immortality serum or not.”
Lisa waited until he had fetched the clothes, a bunch of bananas, and another cup of tea before telling him that the legendary Adam Zimmerman hadn’t approved of the word “immortality” because it implied an inability to die. “In the business,” she said as she regarded the bananas with a suspicious eye, “we prefer the term emortality, with an ‘e.’”
“They’re ordinary supermarket fruit,” Leland assured her. “Standard dietary supplements. No therapeutics, let alone psychotropics. I’m paid to hunt down bootleggers—I don’t rip off their stock.”
The shirt and slacks he gave her were loose, but not absurdly ill-fitting. When she’d achieved a better state of modesty and a fuller stomach, he handed back her belt, pouches and all. It was an obvious gesture of good faith. She could have summoned help within two seconds, using two fingers; he wouldn’t have been able to stop her. If they were way out in the wilds of Somerset or Gloucestershire, it might take so long for help to come that he and his friend Jeff could be five miles away by the time it arrived, but he’d have to be very clever indeed to avoid the consequent chase, and he probably