The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [66]
“You speak their language,” Kenneally insisted.
“Maybe—but with an inflection that immediately marks me as an enemy,” she protested. “You might as well ask Chan to talk to them.” Chan was also in the van, as was one of the campus security guards.
“Dr. Friemann’s right,” Chan put in. “If it is not safe for me to go out, it is not safe for her.”
“But Dr. Friemann is a police officer,” Kenneally pointed out. “For her, it’s a matter of duty.”
Chan called Edgar Burdillon on his mobile phone and told him what the chief inspector was planning to do, but Kenneally was no more impressed by Burdillon’s objections than he had been by Chan’s.
“If you go out to talk to them, they will turn it into an argument,” Chan said to Lisa. “It will add fuel to the flames. Far better to stonewall them. If the chief inspector’s men can hold their position, the gale might just blow itself out. If you provoke them, you will definitely end up having to deploy riot shields and mount baton charges.”
“It’s not my decision,” was all that Lisa could say in reply.
“With all due respect, Dr. Chan,” Kenneally said, “I think I know more about keeping order in this sort of situation than you do. I helped to police dozens of political demonstrations and labor disputes while I was in the Met between fifteen and ten years ago. I even faced down the Countryside Alliance a time or two.”
“The Countryside Alliance went to bat for the privilege of killing things,” Lisa pointed out tiredly. “They weren’t possessed by anything like the kind of righteous fervor that has these people in its grip.”
In the end, of course, the chief inspector prevailed. He was the one with the privilege of issuing orders. Kenneally and his reluctant scientific adviser sallied forth, valiantly hoping to slay the dragon of extremism with the lance of moderation.
The crowd outside the main entrance of the building was about two hundred strong, but at least three-quarters of them had only come along to watch. They weren’t being proselytized particularly fiercely and for the moment, they weren’t part of the mob per se. The Animal Liberation Front and its allied organizations had bused in some two dozen agitators to swell the ranks of the local hard-liners, most of whom were local only in the sense that they lived somewhere in the cityplex. Being the easternmost campus of the Combined Universities, this one had attracted far less public attention in the past than those closer to the old Bristol city center, but the videotape that some insider had cobbled together with the aid of a miniature camera had brought the facility into prominence in spite of the fact that what the tape actually showed was negligible without the highly imaginative and completely mistaken voice-over. Having come into the eye of the public, however, the campus was not to be allowed to slip out again without a fight; that had become a point of principle ever since the ALF’s nuisance tactics had started winning battles.
Chief Inspector Kenneally was a hardened twentieth-century man; he hadn’t adapted to the reality of the new millennium. He still believed in arbitration and compromise, but his opponents here were only interested in forcing concessions—and if they had to batter a few policemen to do it, they were ready to face the consequences. The jails were so overcrowded that they would be out on amnesty in a matter of months.
The leaders of the demonstration went by the cod-revolutionary pseudonyms of Eagle, Jude, and Keeper Pan. Keeper Pan was the only female. All three had voices trained to carry, and none was given to speaking if he or she could shriek instead.
When Chief Inspector Kenneally