The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [94]
“That’s bullshit,” Lisa was quick to put in. “I’m happy to let Leland follow his own priorities while freeing Morgan is number one on his list, but I’m under no delusions as to whose side he’s on. I’m in no sort of conspiracy with anyone. The only reason Geyer was eager to talk to me was that he didn’t like the way you were talking to him. You were right to cut it short when the new information came in. Once you’ve purged the data relating to Stella’s contacts, the true guilty parties will be easy enough to identify. The priority now is making sure they don’t do anything too stupid when they’re cornered. They haven’t killed anybody yet, but they’ve come close enough to suggest that Morgan may still be in a mortal danger.”
“That’s not the only issue,” Smith said grimly.
It is for me, Lisa thought. But that was because she wasn’t yet prepared to believe that whatever Morgan had taken to Goldfarb and Geyer had had any military or commercial value.
The lights of Swindon were fading into hungry darkness as the helicopter reached its cruising altitude, but Lisa looked in vain for any hint of dawn on the horizon they were fleeing. For the first time, she felt the lack of the personal equipment she had abandoned to the plastic bag when she had been forced to change her tainted clothing. She had lost contact with the patient cycle of the hours; the pills that had banished her fatigue had disconnected her from any sense of passing time.
She had to raise her head over the top of the front seat and scan the red lights of Ginny’s instrument panel in the hope of catching sight of a clock face or digital display. When she finally found one, she was startled to observe that it was five to four, twenty-four hours to the minute since the panic had set in. A single day was all it had required to crack and bruise the veneer that sixty-one years had ingrained upon the surface of her life. It was undoubtedly the most eventful day she had ever lived—but while she watched, the display changed.
It was now four minutes to four, and a new day had begun: a day that would likely wrench the cracks apart, turn the bruises into bloody wounds, and shatter to smithereens everything she had patiently made of herself.
“It’s not just a matter of identifying the ringleaders,” Smith added, following his own train of thought into the tunnel of silence. “We need to know how wide the conspiracy extends. If Stella Filisetti did remove a number of mice from the university, they might already have been split into several different consignments and moved out of the cityplex. We need to cover the Institute and Ahasuerus, of course—but how many other possible destinations are there, and how many potential couriers? They obviously want the data as well as the animals, but losing the animals might be a serious breach of security in itself. It’s a pity that mice are so small.”
“If they weren’t” Lisa pointed out drily, “Mouseworld would never have been a possibility.” Smith was right, though; unless Stella could be persuaded to tell them exactly how many mice she’d taken and how they’d been dispersed, it would never be possible for the MOD to be sure they’d plugged the leak. Without a record of exactly how the mice had been transformed and how they had fared, it would be a long and difficult process to work back from a DNA analysis to the production of a new transformer.
“But you’re right, of course,” Smith said, switching to a conciliatory tone with all the subtlety of a charging hippopotamus. “Our first priority is to liberate Morgan Miller, and if Herr Geyer is trying to do that too, he’s not our enemy—at least not for the time being. I might have misjudged him—but you have to admit that his organization merits suspicion. What did you mean about my ‘knee-jerk response to the mention of Nietzsche’?”
“That’s what Herr Geyer seems to think,” Lisa was quick to say, conscious that it would benefit her to be a little more diplomatic. “He seemed to assume that you hadn’t quite understood the relationship between algeny and Nietzschean morality.