The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [84]
“I know the feeling,” Smith admitted. “We’ll fly back to the Renaissance as soon as the Algenists’ spokesman has given us his side of the story. I’m beginning to wish I’d taken a couple of hours out this morning, while you were resting.”
Lisa resented the implication that she’d wimped out when she’d accepted Smith’s offer to take time out from the investigation, but it wasn’t worth challenging. “Why all the urgency to get to the Institute of Algeny?” she asked.
“I’m using the helicopter because I’m reasonably confident that it isn’t bugged,” Smith said, misunderstanding the import of her question. “At least I was reasonably confident until we took you aboard.”
“You mean that the car was bugged? You had it swept?”
“As per routine,” he said. “We’d picked up two plants that weren’t there when we left the Renaissance—one obvious, one camouflaged. Presumably planted by the same person. If the first one was there to attract our attention so we wouldn’t look hard for the second, the second could have been there to stop us short of looking really hard for a third.”
Lisa knew that Leland had had the time, the opportunity, and the motive to rig the car after staging his flamboyant rescue, but she also knew how dangerous it was to jump to conclusions.
“And you think the Algenists are involved?”
Smith sighed. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “But the background check makes them look exceedingly fishy. It seems to me that they’re the people most likely to have grabbed Morgan Miller.”
“Why would they do that? He went to them.”
“The fact that he went to them could have convinced them that he had something valuable. If he then decided to take it to Ahasuerus instead of handing it to them—and it seems to me that if he did any kind of proper background check, that’s what he’d have decided to do—they might well have figured it was time to take matters into their own hands.”
It didn’t sound at all likely to Lisa, but that was the emerging pattern of the investigation. Everyone who looked into the matter seemed to be seizing on different details—details that reflected the particular tenor of their own innate paranoia. Am I any different? she wondered. Am I seeing it the way I do because that’s what tickles my idiosyncratic fancy? Are we all so terrified by the impending crisis that we’re grasping at straws, all equally blinded by fear?
“What makes you think the Institute’s not what it seems?” was all she dared say.
“Once we deepened our own background check, I could see why Dr. Goldfarb was so offended by the fact that Morgan Miller put Ahasuerus and the Algenists on the same list. Adam Zimmerman’s grandparents emigrated to the States in the 1930s, fleeing Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. The Foundation’s mission statement contains some very strong injunctions against releasing results that might be useful for military purposes or for political oppression. The Algenists’ website makes similar protestations, but if you look back in time far enough, it becomes fairly obvious that algeny’s intellectual forebears were firmly in the Nazi camp. The parent Institute of Algeny in Leipzig was previously a branch of the German Vril Society, which claimed descent—falsely, one presumes, but no less significantly—from the Bavarian Illuminati. There are similarly remote historical links to Theosophy, the racial theories of Count Gobineau, and something called the World Ice Theory. Does any of that ring a bell with you?”
“No,” Lisa confessed.
“Nor to anyone else alive and sane, I suspect. Apparently, there’s more than a linguistic analogy connecting algeny to alchemy. Vril was an occult force invented by some nineteenth-century British novelist; it was enthusiastically taken up by a number of continental occultists. Nowadays, although its current mission statements still refer in approving terms to Nietzschean moral reconstruction, contemporary algeny has cleaned up its intellectual act considerably, but if Miller bothered to do any digging, his