The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [81]
“I’m working for the MOD at present,” Lisa told her. “I have all the latitude I need—and all the information I need, thanks to your slack mouth. It’s over, Stella. I’ll have Morgan out before noon.”
“Bitch,” the younger woman said in heartfelt fashion.
“And you,” Lisa murmured.
She went outside to meet the helicopter. The air was cold but still—there was mist in the meadow on the other side of the dirt road that led to the cottage. The cottage looked larger from the yard, but that was because the shadow gathered about the lighted windows was exaggerated by the steep pitch of the tiled roof.
As she’d expected, Peter Grimmett Smith didn’t even bother to step down. He merely held the helicopter door open, inviting her to climb in before the rotor blades slowed to a halt. She ducked reflexively as she did so, although she wasn’t tall enough to be in any danger.
Mercifully, the helicopter wasn’t one of those with a transparent cupola; its cabin was wide and deep and its sides were reassuringly opaque. The pilot was Ginny, but Lisa didn’t have time to ask after her health before Smith bundled her into the second rank of seats.
“Radio the Swindon police,” Smith instructed his dutiful chauffeur. “Tell them that one of their cityplex colleagues needs a clean suit of clothes. Tell them to have it ready at the landing pad.”
“Size twelve,” Lisa put in. “Ten if the goods are U.S.-originated. Did Chan make contact again?”
“No, he didn’t. Who shot me?” Smith obviously had his own agenda, and wasn’t about to be sidetracked. As soon as Ginny had made the call, the copter raised itself from the ground again. The downdraft from its wings scattered newly fallen leaves in every direction, but the blizzard vanished into darkness as they gained height. It was surprisingly quiet inside the cabin, although the thrum of the motor rotating the copter’s blades extended an uncomfortable vibration throughout the body of the craft.
“She wouldn’t give us a name,” Lisa told him. “Steve Forrester will find out, as soon as he can get a DNA sample. The other one was Stella Filisetti. She shot me too, by the way—I didn’t wake up until I was tucked up in the cottage. The men in the van came to our rescue, but they didn’t quite manage to arrive in the nick of time.”
“And who were they?” Smith demanded.
“The one in charge told me his name’s Leland,” Lisa told him. “Mike Grundy will be checking out the van as we speak, but it’ll probably be a dead end. Leland’s just a fly attracted by the stink. Working for the Cabal, he says—but that might be garbage. If he’s just a chancer, he’s not important; if he is working for the emperors of private enterprise, we might as well let him play his hand. If he finds Morgan before we do, so much the better. That’s why I thought it was worth giving him some rope to play with instead of calling in as soon as I woke up. Why are we going to Swindon?”
The helicopter was moving rapidly through the night, but Lisa had lost her sense of direction. The lights below could have been Paulton, but she wasn’t sure.
“Why not?” Smith asked. “Have you got a better idea?”
Lisa didn’t want to go to Swindon, and she did have a better idea—but she didn’t want to tell Peter Grimmett Smith what it was, especially while she was wearing Jeff’s bug-infested clothing.
“We’ve missed our appointment,” she stalled. “Surely they’ll have locked up and gone home.”
“Someone’s waiting up for us,” he assured her. “Did you and this Leland fellow get anything useful out of the two women?”
“Only bullshit,” Lisa told him. “Leland thinks they’re some kind of secret cult freaked out by signs of the apocalypse. He thinks they may be after something Morgan contributed to the project that Ed Burdillon had put his way—the defense work you sounded me out about while we were on our way to Ahasuerus—but he’s not sure.”
“You don’t agree,” Smith was quick to observe.
“I don’t believe they’re apocalypse freaks. I suspect they’re exactly what they seem to be: radical feminists.