The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [60]
“Had you checked out the Institute of Algeny?” she asked.
“Not yet.” The abruptness of the answer suggested there might have been no need—perhaps because the information that had been handed down to him had originated there. Perhaps, Lisa thought, Goldfarb’s disdain for the Algenists hadn’t been a mere matter of the pot assuming that the kettle was black.
“If Morgan did have something valuable,” Lisa observed, “the fact that he was talking to supposedly nonprofit organizations implies that he wouldn’t have wanted it to fall into the hands of your employers.”
“Or Mr. Smith’s,” Leland pointed out.
“Morgan wasn’t the government’s biggest fan,” Lisa agreed, “but he did know that there’s a war on. If he’d thought the MOD could use whatever he had, he’d have given it to them. I still think this is all a wild goose chase.”
“You’re probably right,” the big man conceded. “But if there are any wild geese to be caught, I want to be the one who bags them, and if there aren’t, I need to be able to convince my employers of that fact. If I can’t, I could be out of a job. Then, if you decided to turn vindictive later, I could be in a very deep hole indeed.”
“Strangely enough,” Lisa said grimly, “I think I know exactly how you feel. If this doesn’t go well, we could both end up regretting that we ever met.”
TWELVE
They looked in on both prisoners before attempting to bring either of them around. The first was in the bedroom next to the one where Lisa had been lodged. She had reddish-brown hair, severely cut into a styleless bob, and sharply delineated features flecked with freckles and moles. She was older than Lisa had expected, though not as old as Lisa herself. Lisa paused long enough to examine the tenor of the muscles in the arm that rested on top of the blanket covering her naked body.
“Metabolic retuning and artificial steroids,” Leland opined, but Lisa shook her head.
“Hard work, mostly,” she said. “Carefully calculated diet, obsessive exercising, strict denial of all cosmetic and quasimedical aids. She’s a Real Woman.”
“I don’t go for the muscular type myself,” Leland observed.
“Real Woman with a capital R and a capital W,” Lisa said.
“I thought they’d gone the same way as all once-fashionable causes. Died with the so-called third phase of feminism, didn’t they? Before my time, of course.”
And beyond your interest, evidently, Lisa added silently. She said, “The movement broke up, but its core members stayed loyal to its ideals, some of them even more so than they had been before. They still have a voice within the radfem ranks, and they still command a lot of respect in an elderly statesman kind of way.”
“We already knew they were radfems,” Leland observed in a neutral tone—but he was looking at her thoughtfully, as if there was something she wasn’t telling him.
“Did we?” Lisa countered.
“You saw the tapes of the university bombers,” he came back.
“You shouldn’t have,” Lisa reminded him. “They were supposed to be a secret between the police and the Ministry of Defence.”
“And the campus security patrol,” Leland pointed out. “How many holes does a sieve need? You don’t know her, I suppose?”
“I don’t think so,” Lisa told him.
“You don’t think so? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s supposed to mean that there’s something vaguely familiar about her. It might just be the type, of course—I’ve met more than a few Real Women in my time, and I wouldn’t necessarily recognize this specimen if we’d met ten or twenty years ago. Maybe I’ve seen her working out at one of the gyms I’ve used. Either way, I can’t put a name to her.”
“But if she were local, you’d have mutual acquaintances? All part of the same old-girls’ network?” He said it as if he thought he’d put his finger on a useful connection, but he didn’t follow it up. It would be easy enough to check out local women who’d once been self-declared members of the movement. Arachne West’s name would come out on top of the heap—but that didn’t mean