Then, “No,” he reported. “The street cams show that he came home alone, and they don’t show anyone else approaching the house while the power was still on. Although there’s no video or audio record, it looks as if he was in bed, asleep, until something woke him. The debris suggests a relatively brief fight—either they hit him a lot harder than he hit them, or they put him out with tranquilizer-loaded darts. They hacked his locks as easily as they hacked Lisa’s. Nobody had to be inside to let them in. One of the items taken seems to have been an ancient PC; the other may have been a more recent stand-alone.”

“They were probably looking for something that he didn’t want to put on a networked machine,” Judith Kenna concluded. “Something he might have backed up on a wafer or a sequin that he gave to you, Dr. Friemann. That’s the way it looks, isn’t it?”

“Morgan never gave me any backup wafers,” Lisa said. “If that’s what the people who burgled my flat were looking for, they were mistaken.”

“Or misinformed,” Kenna pointed out. “They must have had confidence in their source, don’t you think? They must have thought it was necessaryto secure all three targets: the mice, the data, the backup. But there might, of course, have been four targets.”

She presumably meant Stella Filisetti—but Mike Grundy was quick to say: “Or five. We still haven’t established contact with Dr. Chan.”

“But it must be significant that Miller’s computers have been taken,” Kenna countered, “and that Dr. Friemann’s backups were cleared out. If Miller isn’t the perpetrator, he’s certainly the key. Do you suppose, Dr. Friemann, that he might have placed a wafer or a sequin on your shelves without your even knowing it?”

“Not recently,” Lisa replied coldly. “He hasn’t visited my home for over a year.”

“Of course,” the chief inspector said with a perfunctory nod. “You’ve … moved on since then.”

Lisa clenched her fists reflexively, and regretted it when pain flared up in the wound she’d only just grown used to protecting.

“Morgan would never do something like that,” she said.

“But he could have discovered the codes to your locks easily enough, if he’d wanted to?”

“He wouldn’t have wanted to,” Lisa insisted. She barely prevented herself from naming the one person who didknow the codes to both her locks—but Judith Kenna already knew that name.

“Do you know the codes to hislocks, Dr. Friemann?” Kenna went on inexorably.

For a moment, Lisa considered raising the possibility that Morgan might have changed his codes, as everyone was supposed to do at regular intervals, but she knew full well that he wouldn’t have done any such thing, anymore than she had. “Yes,” she said finally. “And I could have told the bombers how to get into the labs, at least as far as Mouseworld—but I didn’t. Neither did Morgan.”

“I’m merely trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together,” Judith Kenna assured her vindictively. “You see, I can’t think of anyone else except you and Morgan Miller who had ready access to allthe necessary information. The missing research assistant might well have been able to tell someone how to open Miller’s locks, but I presume that neither she nor Dr. Chan could have told anyone how to get through yours.”

“That’s not all they did,” Mike Grundy pointed out. “They blacked out half the town. Anyone who could hack their way into thatsystem could hack any number of locks. If Miller, Chan, or Burdillon had found something that someone else wanted to get a hold of, we’ll have to look a lot farther than their friends and colleagues. We ought to backtrack their communications—trace every phone call and every e-mail, internal and external. That’s where we’ll find the clue to what this is all about—because that’s where the people who did all this must have found their motive.”

“I’m afraid that wewon’t be able to do any such thing,” Kenna informed him—and she really did seem slightly regretful. “The MOD has already placed all those records under a security blanket. If we’re lucky, they might let us in on whatever they find—but that will depend on how much help they think they need. If Morgan Miller is still being held in the area that was blacked out, they’ll probably let us help them find him—and get him back, if possible—but if the people who have him manage to smuggle him out and away, we’ll be out of the loop. I’d like to ensure that that doesn’t happen, if possible.”

Lisa realized that Judith Kenna would far rather that this turned out to be a local operation, and that it really was Morgan or one of his friends and colleagues who was behind it. If a megacorp werebehind it, the likelihood was that Morgan would never be seen again and that no one outside the secret meeting places of the Cabal would ever know where or why he had been taken.

She really would like it best of all if I were involved, Lisa thought. She’d rather find one of her own officers guilty— if only slightly— than get nothing at all. Always provided, I suppose, that the officer in question was due for retirement anyway. And if any stray mud were to stick to Mike— well, I guess she’d just grin and bear it. And grin again. Unfortunately for her, I really didn’t do it— and unfortunately for me, I really haven’t got a clue to who did, or why.

SIX

If you’ve finished your coffee,” Chief Inspector Kenna said to Lisa, “I’ll walk you to the paramedic station.”

“I can find it on my own,” Lisa assured her.

“I’m going the same way,” the younger woman pointed out. “The helicopter from London should be here soon, and I need to make sure there’s enough clearance in the parking area to let it land.”

As they walked out of the building into the cold dawn air, Lisa said: “You don’t really think I had anything to do with this, do you?”

“I certainly don’t think you’re allied with the perpetrators,” Kenna assured her. “But the fact that they decided to include you in their set of targets suggests that you do have somethingto do with it, wouldn’t you say?”

“Everyone is supposed to keep important data backed up at a remote location,” Lisa said. “I’m one of Morgan Miller’s oldest friends. Maybe they just assumed that he’d keep backups at my place—not realizing, I guess, that Morgan doesn’t do very many of the things that everyone’s supposed to do.”

“Perhaps they did,” the chief inspector admitted.

They had drawn level with the small ambulance that had trailed the fire engines; its two staff were sitting inside looking bored, having not had a single significant case of smoke-inhalation to treat. The young woman who leaped out in response to Lisa’s gesture with her towel-enshrouded hand seemed glad of the opportunity to do something.

Judith Kenna looked carefully around while the paramedic unwrapped the bloodstained dressing and peeled back the sleeve of Lisa’s undershirt, tut-tutting all the while.

“I know it probably said ‘Sterile’ on the package,” the paramedic said, “but this patch must be thirty years old. You really ought to get a modern medical kit—and the fabric of this undershirt isn’t nearly smart enough to cope with gashes like these. There are much better ones on the market nowadays.”

“Dr. Friemann was at home,” the chief inspector put in, anxious to deflect any implied criticism of the facilities at her station. “You know how it is with home kits—you never replace them until you use them up. And I don’t suppose responsiveness to injury was uppermost in her mind when she bought the undergarment.”

Lisa grit her teeth and said nothing.

The paramedic tut-tutted again over the various wounds before reaching for a tube of sealant. “You’ll never get the stain out of that tunic,” she observed. Her own uniform, unlike Judith Kenna’s, was made of ultramodern fibers that were presumably as expert at mopping up blood as they were at mopping up sweat and tears.