The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [89]
“Matthias Geyer,” he said. “Delighted to meet you, Dr. Friemann. There are Friemanns in my family—perhaps we might be distantly related.” His accent was smooth and melodious, but quite distinct and deliberate.
“I doubt it,” Lisa said.
“But the ancestor who bequeathed the name to you never bothered to Anglicize it,” Geyer pointed out. Lisa wondered whether he was trying to recruit her as a potential ally, or making a point for Peter Grimmett Smith’s benefit.
“No,” she admitted. “He never did.”
Matthias Geyer was taller and slimmer than Dr. Goldfarb, but he wasn’t as tall or as angular as Peter Grimmett Smith. He was better looking and seemed considerably younger than either of them, although Lisa thought she detected signs of cosmetic somatic engineering on his cheeks and neck. If so, he was probably a forty-year-old determined to preserve the appearance of his twenty-five-year-old peak rather than a thirty-year-old devoted to clean living. He offered his guests a drink, and when they declined, he suggested that they might like something to eat, given that they must have missed dinner. When they declined that offer too, he bowed politely in recognition of their sense of urgency.
“I’m very sorry to hear that misfortune has visited Professor Miller,” he said, now addressing himself—with what must have been calculated belatedness—to Peter Grimmett Smith. “I will, of course, do anything I can to assist his safe recovery. I would be devastated to think that his contact with our organization had anything to do with his disappearance.”
“But you do recognize the possibility?” Smith said swiftly.
“I fear so. What he told me was inexplicit, but he was clearly attempting to use an element of mystery to engage my interest. I could not say that he was dangling temptation before me, but he did go to some length to hint that when he spoke of negative results and blind alleys, he was not telling the whole story.”
“And that’s what you reported back to Leipzig, is it?” Smith asked.
“I am not required to report back to anyone,” Geyer informed them loftily. “I make my own decisions. Ours is not a centralized organization, like the Ahasuerus Foundation. Nor has it any principal base in Germany. We have come a long way from our roots, Mr. Smith—in every way.”
Lisa wondered whether Geyer knew what they had been talking about in the helicopter. Even if there had been no other bug but Leland’s, it was possible that Leland was working for, or with, Geyer—but Geyer’s defensiveness was natural enough. He must have known that Smith would have made a comprehensive background check on his organization, and what it would have revealed.
“What was it that Miller was trying to sell you?” Smith asked, unwilling for the moment to be sidetracked into a discussion of the Institute’s shady origins.
“He made it perfectly clear that he was not trying to sell me anything,” Geyer corrected him. “He wanted to make a gift, of results accumulated over four decades, concerning a series of experiments he had conducted on mice and other animals.”
“What other animals?” Lisa was quick to put in. Nobody else had mentipned other animals, and it was a long time since Miller had been involved with the creation of transgenic rabbits and sheep.
“Dogs, I believe,” Geyer replied.
“Dogs?” Lisa echoed skeptically. “The university hasn’t used dogs as experimental animals since the 2010 riot.”
“What kind of experiments?” Smith asked, impatient with what seemed to him to be an irrelevant digression.
“Professor Miller was calculatedly vague,” Geyer said apologetically. “He was insistent, however, that the work had a direct bearing on our core endeavors. He expressed concern that if our researchers did not know what he had tried to do and failed, they might waste years of effort following the same sterile path. It had once seemed such a promising line of research, he said, but had disappointed him grievously—and by virtue of its time-consuming nature, he could no longer carry it forward himself.