The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [65]
After a further minute, Leland emerged from the room and closed the door behind him. “Better let her consider her situation for a while,” he murmured. “Could be that the other one will be a little saner. After all, she’s never screwed your crafty boyfriend.”
His tone was neutral, but Lisa could tell that Stella Filisetti had got through to him. Whatever trust Leland had had in her had evaporated. From now on, she was a suspect in his eyes too. She wondered whether it was time to call for help, but decided after a moment’s hesitation that duty could wait a little longer. After all, Leland could be right. The Real Woman presumably hadn’t ever screwed the aforementioned crafty boyfriend, and even Lisa had to admit that that might make her just a little bit saner than someone who had.
“But this time,” Leland added, “it’s my turn to go first.”
Second Interlude
DISTURBIRG SYMPTOMS
The dog riots of 2010 were the closest Lisa ever came to “frontline policing.” She was called to the university to serve as an adviser to the chief inspector, David Kenneally. What she had in mind as she traveled out in one of the vans was a cozy situation way behind enemy lines, from which she could offer expert judgment as to the wise deployment of the uniformed officers. Kenneally had other ideas; although he had taken a training course in Advanced Negotiating Skills, he did not feel that what he had been taught was particularly relevant to the situation.
Presumably, the chief inspector would have felt far more confident if a lone gunman had taken hostages, or if some overstressed undergraduate were sitting atop the biology building threatening to jump, but Lisa had little sympathy for his plight. If Advanced Negotiating Skills didn’t cover ugly mobs whose members had studied strategy and tactics by watching videotapes of cult activity in Jerusalem, Tokyo, and New York in 1999 and 2000, what on earth was the use of them in the twenty-first century?
“Why me?” Lisa asked when Kenneally told her he wanted her right beside him when he went to meet the notional leader of the demonstration.
“You know more about their concerns than anyone else on my staff does,” he informed her.
“Only because I was once what they’d call a professional torturer,” Lisa pointed out. “I even used to practice my dark artistry on this very site. I never worked with dogs, but I think the temperature out there’s already a little too high to encourage nice distinctions. Right now, they’re not likely to concede that being a mere mass murderer of mice is the next best thing to saintly innocence.”
“We won’t have to discuss your credentials with the demonstrators,” Kenneally informed her dismissively. “You have seen this videotape they’re up in arms about, I take it?”
Lisa had to admit that she had. “The voice-over is a pack of lies,” she said. “Okay, so the dogs in the first sequence are more than a little disoriented, and maybe more than a little distressed, but there’s no way their symptoms were caused by prion proteins or by any prion-producing autoimmune reaction. The labs have mouse models of classic CJD and at least three of its variants, but nobody makes dog models of any human disease. The second lot are not being injected with immunosuppressant viruses for the sake of germ-warfare research, and the puppies being gassed in the final sequence are being put down humanely in order that researchers can study the development of a disease that kills thousands of pets and working dogs every year, with a view to finding a cure. Nor are any of the dogs British-born—ever since the 2000 ban on the breeding of domestic dogs for research purposes, the university has imported the very few dogs it needs from France. The tape’s pure black propaganda from beginning to end.”
“That’s exactly what I need, you see,” the chief inspector told her. “The calm voice of sanity.”
“But they’re not going to listen