The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [79]
“Help yourself to the stuff in the fridge,” Leland said as he moved to the door. “Once they turn up, you’ll be as busy as I will—no time to snack. Wish me luck.”
“You don’t need it,” Lisa assured him, not really caring whether he did or not.
FOURTEEN
Leland had left Lisa’s outer clothes behind, draped over the banister on he upper floor. They’d been washed, but not pressed. The black smartsuits the women had worn were there too, and their guns and helmets were in the kitchen cupboard. Lisa didn’t see any point in changing out of Jeff’s slightly ill-fitting shirt and trousers, even though she figured there had to be a clever bug lurking in one of the buttons. They’d almost certainly sneaked one into her own outfit too.
As soon the van had driven away, she went back to the downstairs room where Stella Filisetti was secured.
“A police vehicle is on the way,” she told her prisoner. “It’ll be about twenty minutes. We’re in the Mendips somewhere east of Winscombe. Sorry I can’t let you take a longer look at the view—it’s the last you’ll see till you’re my age, so you’d better make the most of it while they’re loading you up. Morgan might visit you if the prison’s not too far away, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Your friend reckons that it’ll be as good a place as any to sit out the end of civilization as we know it, but I’m not so sure. If you really did spot something in one of the library models that nobody else had noticed in forty years, you must be pretty good. It’s a pity to let ability like that go to waste, but it can’t be helped now. Who do you think will get the big prize—Leland or Peter Grimmett Smith? Either way, I suppose it’ll end up with the Secret Masters. If you’d only let Morgan alone, he’d probably have given it to Ahasuerus. Your intervention will almost certainly have the effect of bringing in a worse result than the one you’d have had if you’d let well enough alone.”
“You can drop the act now,” the younger woman told her, although she surely wasn’t naive enough to think they were safe from electronic eavesdroppers. “I know you know, because I know Morgan. He wouldn’t have kept it from you. From everyone else maybe, but not from you. He trusted you to see it his way. And you did, didn’t you? You even consented to grow old—but I know how you kept your options open. You can fool that idiot cowboy, and your second-string boyfriend, and the secondhand spook from the MOD, but you can’t fool me. I know you know, so I know exactly how desperate you are to get Morgan back—but you can’t have him. There’s too much at stake.”
“Maybe I don’t need him,” Lisa suggested blandly. “Maybe I already have everything I need. Maybe the only thing your friends will accomplish by killing Morgan is to make me the sole custodian of the big secret. It’s not on any of the wafers or sequins you took from my desk, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t have it hidden.”
“Maybe you do,” Stella agreed. “Maybe the time will come when you’ll have to make up your mind what to do with it, without Morgan to seduce and tyrannize you. Maybe then you’ll realize that we’re in the right. You had radfem sympathies yourself once, I understand. If it hadn’t been for joining the police force, you might have been one of us.”
Lisa continued staring out the window for half a minute longer, but then she turned to look down sternly at the woman on the bed. Instead of responding to Stella Filisetti’s provocations, she said, “You tried to shoot me. The original plan was not to let anyone get hurt, but you were shooting to kill.”
“Was I?” was Stella’s only riposte.
Lisa watched the half smile that spread across the younger woman’s lips. It looked like a smile of satisfaction. Even though Stella’s shot had missed, she was pleased that she had tried. She wasn’t going to admit it while eavesdroppers were hanging on her every word, but she didn’t care whether