"Okay," Grundy said when the silence had dragged on and on to the limits of bearability, even though it had lasted no more than ten or fifteen seconds. "Go."
"You have to go first," Lisa told him, "but you"ll have to leave your mobile with me. I need to use it."
Chan had already moved around the Rover to the pa.s.senger door. Lisa"s final demand was a trifle excessive, but Mike didn"t have to ask why she wanted the phone. He simply nodded and handed it over before turning on his heel and opening the driver"s door. He glanced back only once before getting in and slamming it shut. Then he drove away, so fast that his...o...b..ard computer had to be flashing red warnings. Lisa pressed the automatic-dial b.u.t.ton on Grundy"s phone and then hit 1.
The surge of relief she felt when Helen Grundy answered on the second ring with a monosyllabic "Yes?" hit Lisa like a tidal wave. She knew how utterly foolish she would have felt had she been unable to make that crucial contact.
"It"s Lisa Friemann, Helen," she said, her voice sounding so leaden in her ears that she could hardly recognize it as her own. "We need to talk."
On another occasion, under different circ.u.mstances, Lisa might have found something to savor in the silence that followed, knowing as she did what a heady c.o.c.ktail of shock and fear must have prompted it. On this occasion, she was content merely to wait for a further response.
"What are you doing with Mike"s phone?" Helen Grundy asked, confirming Lisa"s suspicion that a call from any other instrument would probably have been blocked out.
"Mike"s not here," Lisa said. "I sent him away. I"m alone. This is between you and me."
"Well?" Helen said after another pause for thought. "What do you want?"
"It"s a matter of hours now, Helen. The computer people are working on the corrupted phone records. It"ll take them a while to figure out the obvious, but they"ll do it. The computers will leave a safety margin before they feel a hundred-percent confident of the link between the Real Woman we arrested with Stella Filisetti and Arachne West, but Smith has people searching for her already. It won"t matter how well hidden you are or how quiet you can keep-your blackout didn"t last long enough to make your movements untraceable. Even if it takes a small army to intercept the couriers carrying the mice, they won"t get away."
"I don"t have the faintest idea of what you"re talking about, Lisa," Helen replied stubbornly. "Just put Mike on, will you?"
"Mike knows everything, Helen. For the moment, he and Chan Kwai Keung are the only two who do know-but as I said, it"s a matter of hours. Going after Chan was a mistake, by the way. His guilty conscience was reflecting on sins of his own. I can see why Stella and her friend jumped to the wrong conclusion, but it really was a masterpiece of bad judgment."
"I don"t understand why you"re telling me all this," Helen said. The ambiguity was so neat that Lisa felt free to a.s.sume that the other woman had regained most of her composure.
"I"m trying to make it clear to you that you no longer have anything to lose by talking to me, and maybe everything to gain. I want to make you an offer."
"An offer I can"t refuse?" Helen countered, although the attempted wit rang hollow.
"I don"t blame you for thinking I must be involved," Lisa said. "It was a perfectly natural a.s.sumption. I don"t blame you or Stella for refusing to take my denials seriously. If I can"t understand why Morgan never let me in on his little secret, how could you? I wouldn"t blame you for thinking I must be lying now. If I were in your position, that"s exactly what I"d be thinking. But consider this, Helen. In a few hours, everyone else will know what I know. I could tip them off right now if I wanted to heed the call of duty. I could have called Judith Kenna, Peter Grimmett Smith, or the mysterious Mr. Leland instead of you, and then I could have gone back to the Renaissance Hotel to sleep all day, knowing that I"d wake up to find the whole thing tidied up-and I"m certainly tired enough. For the first time in months, I"m tired enough to do exactly that. My job was as good as lost already, but the moment I phoned you instead of Smith, I made absolutely certain that I"m finished. Careerwise, the fact that I"m talking to you now is suicide."
"It sounds more like madness to me," Helen Grundy observed, still careful not to commit herself to any recordable admission that she knew what Lisa was talking about.
"Maybe," Lisa admitted. "But the fact is, I want to know. know. I want to know why every initial a.s.sumption I made about this case has proved false. I want to know why I was so ludicrously mistaken about the nature of my relationship with Morgan Miller that I was unable to believe he"d kept a secret from me for all these years. I want to know why he never gave me the opportunity to be the kind of traitor you and Stella Filisetti think I am." I want to know why every initial a.s.sumption I made about this case has proved false. I want to know why I was so ludicrously mistaken about the nature of my relationship with Morgan Miller that I was unable to believe he"d kept a secret from me for all these years. I want to know why he never gave me the opportunity to be the kind of traitor you and Stella Filisetti think I am."
"I don"t see how any of this concerns me," Helen Grundy said, a faint trace of contempt creeping into her voice.
"Use your imagination, Helen. You haven"t got anything tangible out of Morgan. You haven"t found anything on the hard disks of his old PC"s and you haven"t found any backups among the wafers and sequins you stole from my apartment. All you"ve got today is what Stella managed to put together before she told you that if you didn"t act quickly, you"d never get another chance, because her spying activities were bound to be uncovered. You can"t get anything you can trust out of Morgan, because he knows as well as you do that it"s just a matter of hanging on till rescue comes. If I know Morgan only half as well as I thought I did, I"d guess that he"s been feeding you bulls.h.i.t by the ream ever since you picked him up, and I"ll bet a million euros to a bent bingo token that it would take an army of scientists thirty years to sort out fact from fantasy.
"I presume that you and Arachne and the hard core of the sisterhood are more than willing to accept martyrdom for the cause, but I know that you"d be willing to risk anything to get what you want before you go down-to get something you can broadcast to all the other sisters. But you have only one chance of getting that, because there"s only one person who has the moral clout necessary to demand the truth from Morgan Miller and get it. In brief, Helen, you need me.
"It wouldn"t have done you any good to lift me when you lifted Morgan, because I"d have been just as stubborn and just as inventive in stalling you, and I guess there must have been quite an argument about whether it was safe to leave me on the outside to help with the investigation. My guess is that it was my old acquaintance Arachne who persuaded the team to go for the bug option-which might have been a valuable information feed if Mr. Leland hadn"t stuck his paranoid oar in-but that doesn"t matter. The point is that it was the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons. I"m ready to help you, Helen. I"m ready to do what you can"t, and demand the truth from Morgan because I want to know, before my life goes down the toilet with all of yours, exactly exactly what it is that"s flushed me away. what it is that"s flushed me away.
"I need to know, Helen. It"s the one thing left that I really do need. And the beauty of it is that from your point of view, it"s cost-free. You have nothing left to lose, and any chance to win is worth taking."
It had been an exhaustingly long speech, and she was shivering in the night-born cold that the sullen morning light hadn"t yet contrived to banish, but Lisa felt more alive than she had for many a year, and it certainly wasn"t Ginny"s pep pills that were responsible. She was prepared to go on if she had to; Helen might still need time to think about it, and in a situation of this kind, it was best to keep piling the pressure on until something gave.
Fortunately, something had already given. "I can"t trust you," the other woman said pathetically.
"You don"t have to," Lisa said. "Your worst-case scenario is that you might be arrested two hours early. I can"t guarantee that even I can get anything out of Morgan-after all, whether you believe it or not, he"s been keeping me in the dark for the best part of forty years-but at the very least, you"d have an extra hostage to bargain with. I have my car. You name the time and the place-but make it soon. If there aren"t enough sisters where you are to const.i.tute a quorum, somebody had better make an executive decision."
"b.i.t.c.h," was Helen Grundy"s reply-but she said it offhandedly, with no real feeling. Lisa was confident that it hadn"t been Helen who"d shot the phone out of her hand or sprayed "Traitor" on her door, but she now figured that Helen, not Stella, must have been the princ.i.p.al shaper of the burglars" script.
"We don"t have time for insults," Lisa said. "Where? When?"
Whether Helen was alone or not, the executive decision was made. "The mall straddling North Parade Road, where the old recreation ground and cricket field used to be," she said defeatedly. "There"s a shop called Salomey on the ground floor, just to the right of the Johnstone Street entrance. Come to the dressing rooms. Come on foot, alone. You have ten minutes."
"I"m too far away. Make it fifteen."
"Break the speed limit and leave the car on a double yellow. You have ten." Helen rang off.
TWENTY.
Lisa had no watch to tell her the time, but it was obviously too late now to do the run into what had once been the Bath city center in ten minutes. The morning rush hour was already well underway. The onboard computer, roused from quietude by the parking offense she"d committed on North Road, logged six more manifest offenses and four instances of contributory negligence. Its muted voice was still beeping plaintively about parking regulations when she abandoned it, but she figured she made it to the Recreation Ground Mall within a couple of minutes of the deadline she"d been given.
Lisa didn"t expect that her tardiness would make any difference; Helen"s imposition of a time limit was a meaningless gesture, born of the desire to pretend that she still had some degree of control over the situation. Lisa left Mike Grundy"s mobile in the car, having switched it off after the call to Helen.
She was not surprised to discover that Salomey was a clothing shop, specializing in ultrasmart costumes for ultrasmart women. A notice on the automatic door informed customers that THIS IS A WOMEN-ONLY SHOP, but that wasn"t unusual nowadays. The special intimacy of smart fabrics had given birth to a new modesty, and had brought a backlash in favor of privacy that had drawn many new kinds of social boundaries.
The Real Woman who watched Lisa from the purchase desk as she crossed the smart-carpeted floor to the dressing room looked completely out of place. Even if she hadn"t been so powerfully built, she would have stood out simply because she didn"t look as diffident as the younger sales a.s.sistants obviously fighting boredom while they waited for opening time. A clock on the wall told Lisa that the time was now eight thirty-five.
The woman waiting in the dressing room wasn"t a bodybuilder, but that didn"t detract from the frank hostility and meanness of her gaze.
"Strip," she instructed.
Lisa peeled off the smartsuit supplied by the Swindon police. She braced herself for yet another dose of censorious advice about her style sense, but was pleasantly surprised for once. The one-woman reception committee gave her naked body the once-over with some kind of sweeper before handing her a brand-new outfit. It was a smart, dark-red one-piece, far more expensive and stylish than anything she"d ever have dreamed of buying. Had she not been so ruthless in excising all twentieth-century cliches from her vocabulary, it would have made her feel like mutton dressed as lamb.
The woman to whom she"d given her old one-piece took it away. It was another, even younger woman who came in to peel back the carpet, exposing the trapdoor set in the floor of the room.
"You got me dressed up like this this and you want to take me down into the sewers?" Lisa asked, feigning astonishment. and you want to take me down into the sewers?" Lisa asked, feigning astonishment.
"You can walk through a sewer in a Salomey outfit and come up as lovely as a bird of paradise and as fresh as a golden rose," the woman told her, straight-faced. "It says so in our catalogue."
"That"s a relief," said Lisa as she lowered herself into the opening, searching with what seemed to her to be stockinged feet for the rungs of the ladder. "In my day, birds of paradise still existed in the wild, and freshness standards were set by daisies-but everything"s artificial these days."
It transpired, however, that the well beneath Salomey did not lead to the sewers at all. It led to a dimly lit, stone-clad tunnel that extended in a southeastern direction. To begin with, the tunnel was conspicuously clean and obviously new, but its storeroom-lined walls gave access within a hundred meters to brick-lined s.p.a.ces of an ancient cast.
Lisa remembered the days when permission had first been granted for the construction of the mall, and she tried to recall the controversies that had raged around the project. There had been a convent on the north side of North Parade Road, she remembered. Deconsecrated and sold off by the cash-strapped Church Commissioners, it had briefly become the site of a rescue dig by archaeologists from the university before its crypt had been abandoned as a supposedly untouchable enclave within the stockholding cellars. Once out of public sight, the place had obviously fallen prey to the combined forces of economic convenience and the new privacy.
"The crypts of a nunnery overlaid and overlapped by a shopping mall," she said to her guide. "You brought Morgan Miller to face the feminist inquisition in the cellars of a b.l.o.o.d.y nunnery." This, she thought, was a decision that had Arachne West"s stamp on it.
"Quiet," her guide instructed, although the command was pointless. If Lisa had still been carrying some kind of bug, the people listening in to it wouldn"t have required any verbal cues to help them figure out where she was.
The doors in the various sections of the cellar complex were far more modern than the brickwork that contained them, and they bore fancy combination locks. The guide conducted her through two of them before coaxing open a third. She waited outside to close it again once Lisa was inside, but Lisa wasn"t entirely convinced of the impregnability of the inner sanctum to which she was admitted. There was probably more than one way in, and there were probably too many people who knew the codes.
There was no sign of ancient brickwork inside the cosy cell. Its walls had been coated with some kind of artificial plastic, a pale green in color. Against one wall there was a semicircular desk; its generous size took up slightly more than half the available s.p.a.ce, effectively reducing the rest to the status of a short, curved corridor. There was yet another inner room on the far side, similarly secured with a certified-unhackable double lock.
There was no one seated behind the desk to monitor the various screens mounted therein, but Arachne West was sitting on top of it. She was still bald, of course, but now that she was in her late forties, the baldness looked almost natural. What didn"t look natural was the velvety-black Salomey outfit she was wearing. It should have been highly polished synthetic leather, Lisa thought, or some kind of paramilitary uniform. Arachne wasn"t so much mutton dressed as lamb as lion dressed as kitten, but the effect was just as false.
"My mother always told me it was dangerous to talk to policemen," the Real Woman said, "but kids never listen, do they?"
"The advice was bad," Lisa told her. "You should have ignored it entirely. Where"s Helen?"
"I told her she ought to try to make a getaway before she"s installed on top of the "Most Wanted" list. It was good to have the excuse-she"d become a liability since we had to make it clear to her that she wasn"t running the show anymore. So why was Mama"s advice bad?"
"If you"d come to me when Stella and Helen first persuaded you that Morgan had something worth stealing," Lisa told her, "we could have avoided every sad act of this ridiculous farce. I could have talked to him for you."
"You"d been talking to him for thirty-nine years," Arachne pointed out. "I was on your side to begin with-I thought Stella and Helen might be letting personal matters affect their judgment-but in the end, I didn"t think I knew you well enough to know for sure which side you"d be on when the chips were down. You never let me get that close. You always kept me at arm"s length."
"I was never convinced that you didn"t have designs on my body," Lisa said. "What clinched the crazy deal? What"s this proof proof Stella thinks she has of my complicity with Morgan"s allegedly unholy schemes? You must have figured out after you bugged my belt that I don"t know a d.a.m.n thing." Stella thinks she has of my complicity with Morgan"s allegedly unholy schemes? You must have figured out after you bugged my belt that I don"t know a d.a.m.n thing."
"You had your ovaries stripped, and the eggs frozen," the Real Woman told her unhesitatingly. "There didn"t seem to be any reason for you to do that unless you were in on Miller"s grand plan. Stella had her own account of why he gave up on the dogs, which seemed plausible enough to those of us who remembered the old ALF riots. Did you know that Helen Grundy was the social worker responsible for the woman convicted after the riot at the East Central campus way back in "15? Do people still say it"s a small world, or is that too twentieth century? Pure coincidence, of course-but that"s the whole thing in a nutsh.e.l.l, isn"t it? If you stick around long enough, the coincidences acc.u.mulate. n.o.body can tell anymore what"s significant and what"s not. Once the dogs were off the menu, Stella said, Miller had to use mice or human embryos. She reckoned that your eggs might be supplying him with raw material as well as giving you the chance to save up for the big payoff. As for the bugged belt-you might have been running a double bluff. People who know they"ve been tagged can turn the leak to their own purposes, if they"re clever enough. You"re a cop, after all. You"re paranoid, I"m very paranoid, Stella and Helen are extremely extremely paranoid. When the whole world turns paranoid, everybody begins to see things that aren"t there-especially conspiracies." paranoid. When the whole world turns paranoid, everybody begins to see things that aren"t there-especially conspiracies."
"But you, Helen, and Stella really are a conspiracy, aren"t you?" Lisa pointed out. "How many others are involved? At first I thought eight or ten, but now I"m beginning to think forty or fifty."
"You have to fight fire with fire," Arachne West informed her solemnly. Beneath her slowly fading musculature, there seemed to be a twentieth-century thinker-but how could that be, when Arachne wouldn"t have been more than eight or nine years old when the century turned?
Maybe, Lisa thought, it"s the century itself that won"t die, having embedded its cliches far too deeply in the very fabric of social thought. On the other hand, perhaps the people who lived in twentieth-century England spent just as much time berating themselves and one another for a host of leftover Victorian att.i.tudes that weren"t at all what they seemed to be. it"s the century itself that won"t die, having embedded its cliches far too deeply in the very fabric of social thought. On the other hand, perhaps the people who lived in twentieth-century England spent just as much time berating themselves and one another for a host of leftover Victorian att.i.tudes that weren"t at all what they seemed to be.
"We"re wasting time," she pointed out.
"I know," the Real Woman replied. "Sometimes I think that"s all we"ve done for the last twenty years while everyone just waited for the war to break out. Now it has-and are we ready? Are we h.e.l.l?"
Lisa knew that the "we" in question wasn"t just the two of them, or the Real Women, or the entire population of radfemdom, and it might even include a few males of the species.
"According to Leland, private enterprise is ready," Lisa told her. "Whatever containment measures the commission finally recommends will be irrelevant. The lovely people who brought you the kind of fabrics you "could wear in a sewer and still come up as lush as a golden rose" have their new season all planned out. Suits that protect you from the plague-in all its myriad forms-will be the next big thing. You don"t have to contain the evil germs if the people can contain themselves. You needn"t worry about hidden eugenic strategies, though. Private enterprise will sell to anyone, provided they have the money. And who doesn"t, when it"s your money or your life? There may yet be a little worm in the bud, unfortunately."
"What worm?"
"I didn"t have time to get the whole story, but Chan"s already tested some kind of versatile antibody-packaging system in the only kind of context that really counts. It didn"t work. Maybe the suitskin system will screw up. You can never change just one thing, you see, and you can never tell how far the unantic.i.p.ated consequences will extend."
"Stella told us about the war work Miller was doing for Burdillon," Arachne admitted. "She thought that was what had finally persuaded him to give up on the other thing."
"Can I go in now?" Lisa asked. "I"d rather like to get it over with before the guys break down all the doors and start blazing away in every direction."
"He really didn"t tell you anything at all, did he?" the Real Woman said wonderingly. "And you never thought to go digging, the way Stella did. You could have winkled it out forty years ago, if you"d only thought to look. Lisa the policeman, scourge of all the murderers and Leverers in Bristol, overlooks the crime of the century on her own doorstep! What a fool you must feel."
"Okay," Lisa conceded ungraciously. "I"m a fool. It"s way past time to repair my sins of omission. Do I get to see him now?"
"Be my guest," the bald woman said tiredly. "You"d better change his dressing before you start, though. The anesthetic"s probably worn off and you won"t get much out of him while he"s all racked up. That was Helen"s idea-but if and when the time comes, I won"t be trying to duck responsibility on the grounds that I was just an innocent bystander."
Arachne"s tone had changed. The last vestiges of graveyard humor had vanished. Her pale eyes were still locked on Lisa"s stare, but it wasn"t a compet.i.tion. The Real Woman knew how badly this whole operation had screwed up, but she wasn"t looking for a way out. She was just seeing it through to its end.
Lisa accepted the medical kit and water bottle that Arachne hauled out from behind the desk, along with the smartcard that would complete the deactivation of the inner room"s locks, provided the code numbers had already been loaded.
"I hope it isn"t too painful," the bald woman said. "Unlike the loose cannon, I never had anything against you." you."
Lisa wasn"t certain whether Arachne was talking about the sight that would greet her when she pa.s.sed through the door, or the truth that would finally be told once she got to interrogate Morgan Miller.
"I can take it," she said, figuring that the reply would do in either case.
Arachne West swung her st.u.r.dy legs over the desk and slipped into a seat behind one of the screens. Lisa had no doubt that it was a position from which the Real Woman would be able to see and hear everything that transpired in the cell where Morgan Miller was confined. She didn"t mind. There had been far too many secrets for far too long. It was high time that everything was brought out in the open.
She pa.s.sed the smartcard through the swipe slot, and the door obligingly clocked open. She went through it and closed it behind her.
It was as if she were closing the door on all sixty-one years of her carefully acc.u.mulated past.
TWENTY-ONE.
The cell was gloomier by far than the anteroom. The bare brick had been carefully preserved here in all its brutal simplicity. The temperature seemed to have dropped by five degrees as Lisa crossed the threshold.
Morgan Miller was lying on a tubular-steel foldaway bed not unlike the one in which Leland had installed Stella Filisetti. He wasn"t secured to the frame by smart cords, but that was because he wasn"t in any condition to do anything as stupid as attacking his captors. The sleeve of the unsmart shirt he was wearing had been ripped from shoulder to cuff to expose his right arm, which was folded very carefully across his chest, exposing a long series of burns that looked as if they had been etched by a blowtorch. Some kind of dressing had been applied to the wounds, but the synthetic flesh hadn"t been able to bond properly. It had mopped up blood and other fluids that had leaked from the wounds, but its capacity to metabolize them had been overloaded. Even its painkilling capabilities had been overstretched.
When he first caught sight of Lisa, a hopeful gleam came into Morgan"s eyes, but it dwindled almost immediately to a mere ember of endurance. Even the benign mental chemistry of hope could be converted by injury into a source of pain.
Lisa knelt beside the bed and opened the medical kit. She drew off the useless pseudoskin as carefully as she could-not quite carefully enough, to judge by Morgan"s ragged breathing-and subst.i.tuted a generous helping of gel. Only then was Morgan able to open his eyes again. He seemed to have been utterly drained of all physical resources-a considerable indignity for a man who had fondly imagined that he was as fit as a flea. It was an effort for him to raise his head and take a few sips from the plastic bottle.
"s.h.i.t, Morgan," Lisa murmured. "Why didn"t you just tell them what they wanted to know?"
"What kind of fool do you take me for?" he whispered as he let his head sink back again. "I told them everything everything before they even turned the flame in my direction. I told them the absolute truth-but they wouldn"t believe me. I found out a couple of hours too late that the only way to deal with torture is to tell the f.u.c.kers what they want to before they even turned the flame in my direction. I told them the absolute truth-but they wouldn"t believe me. I found out a couple of hours too late that the only way to deal with torture is to tell the f.u.c.kers what they want to hear hear, not what they want to know."
"s.h.i.t," said Lisa again. She had never felt so helpless.
"I told told them you didn"t have anything to do with it," Miller said, urgency raising his voice. "They weren"t in a mood to take my word for anything. If I"d said that two plus two was four, they"d have got out their calculators." them you didn"t have anything to do with it," Miller said, urgency raising his voice. "They weren"t in a mood to take my word for anything. If I"d said that two plus two was four, they"d have got out their calculators."
"It"s okay, Morgan," Lisa said. "I"m here of my own free will. I came as soon as I figured out which of my old friends and acquaintances were involved. The cavalry won"t be far behind. The farce is almost over. Arachne"s people were panicked into precipitate action, but they"ve calmed down now. We"ll be okay."
"It was a mistake," Morgan said. "That little fool Stella guessed half the story and didn"t have the imagination to look for the twist in the tail. I told them the truth, but they started burning me anyway, and they kept right on no matter what I said. I had to try something else, and when that didn"t work ... by then, I wasn"t in any condition to come up with anything they might find convincing. I tried, but..."
"It"s okay, Morgan."
"They still won"t believe it, Lisa. Your being here won"t make any difference. They won"t believe that I did what I did for the reasons I did it. They"re too paranoid."
"There"s a war on," Lisa reminded him. "The fact that the government won"t admit it yet only makes it that much more terrifying-and the fact that the MOD is ten or twenty years behind the new cutting edge of defense research doesn"t help. If you know why Chan"s versatile-packaging system was a nonstarter, you"re in a better position than I am to guess whether the new systems will fare any better, but the likes of Helen Grundy and Arachne West don"t have any reason to believe that they"re high on anyone"s list of defense priorities. They"re ent.i.tled to their paranoia-and it wasn"t just Stella"s prying that made you into a plausible target. You should have told me, Morgan. This farce has trashed my life. All the gray power in England couldn"t save me from the sc.r.a.p heap now. Whatever it is, you should have told me." you should have told me."
"I know that now," he said. He was speaking a little more comfortably; the painkillers administered by the smart dressing had restored what remained of his equilibrium. He was even able to raise his head from the pillow again and prop himself up on his left elbow. "The smartsuit"s a mistake, though," he added. "It"s nice, but it"s not your your "You wouldn"t know," she said bitterly. "So concentrate on what you do know. Stella and Helen might not have been able to recognize the truth when they heard it from your lying lips, but I can. Tell me me the truth. Explain to me how come I"ve known you for thirty-nine years without ever being able to see what a sly hypocrite you are." the truth. Explain to me how come I"ve known you for thirty-nine years without ever being able to see what a sly hypocrite you are."