The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [8]
Edgar Burdillon had been head of the Department of Applied Genetics for nearly twenty years; in the eyes of far too many half-baked, anti-GM fanatics, that made him personally responsible for the rape and near murder of Mother Gaea, secret plans to manufacture a super race, high unemployment, the torture of innocent animals, and the attempted usurpation of the female prerogative. Now that the government was openly considering stringent containment measures, there would be hundreds of crazies ready to assume that he was also fully involved in developing the weapons that would be used to fight the First Plague War. Ed’s days as a fashionable media pet were a long way behind him, but he had never been shy about issuing propaganda for biotechnology. He had been attacked before, but only at the nuisance level of egg-throwing, poison-pen letters, and acid on the hood of his car. Morgan Miller had suffered as much—and Chan Kwai Keung still had Hong Kong connections, which would make him personally responsible in the eyes of some madmen for at least one of the epidemics that the governments of Europe and America would soon be trying their utmost to “contain.”
Lisa blinked as the Rover hurtled across what had once been Claverton Down toward the industrial park erected when the old quarries had been filled and leveled. The multitudinous lights of the campus were already vivid in the gloom. The Applied Genetics building was just north of the Avenue, and she could already see the flashing blue lights on the fire apparatus gathered on the south side of the campus. The pall of smoke above them was stained an ugly shade of pink by that fraction of the sodium light it reflected back to the ground.
It can’t be anything I’ve given him, she told herself while she ran through a mental list of the tasks she had thrown Ed Burdillon’s way during the last year in her capacity as a pen-pusher. Yes, there had been investigations concerned with DNA polluted by “viral anomalies,” but there had been nothing that looked remotely like hostile action. The MOD had undoubtedly sent work to the department, for which Ed would have taken personal responsibility, but whatever the half-baked might think, England’s green and pleasant campuses were not awash with GM weapons capable of wiping out the population of a cityplex the size of Bristol in a matter of days. Viruses simply weren’t tough enough to wreak that kind of havoc in a world where civilized people were willing and able to observe elementary standards of hygiene, and their much-touted propensity to mutate was a thousand times more likely to render them harmless than to increase their lethal force. Bacteria designed for immunity to common antibiotics were slightly more dangerous, but every household armed with bleach and detergents was a virtual fortress—and Burdillon had been a virus man through and through ever since the early days of magic bullets.
They came at me too, she reminded herself. They were looking for something in my files. Even after scrupulous reexamination, however, she couldn’t find a likely link. Almost all of the work she had subcontracted to the university labs during the last three decades had had to do with problematic DNA sequences gleaned from everyday crime scenes. Not even any mass murders, let alone any sensitive industrial espionage. If Ed and she had somehow contrived to get under the skin of some rival establishment—which would presumably be a megacorp rather than a foreign government nowadays—she certainly had no idea of how they had done it.
As the Rover zoomed past a baker’s van carrying the morning quota of bread to the circus-starved masses, the driver made V signs at Mike, not caring in the least that he might be en route to an emergency. If he had known exactly who Detective Inspector Grundy was, he would probably have redoubled the vehemence of his gestures.
“And you!” Lisa muttered, loudly enough to startle herself. Mike glanced at her, but made no comment.
They were almost at the campus gate; the headlights had picked out the red-and-white