“Strangely enough,” Lisa said grimly, “I think I know exactly how you feel. If this doesn’t go well, we could both end up regretting that we ever met.”
TWELVE
They looked in on both prisoners before attempting to bring either of them around. The first was in the bedroom next to the one where Lisa had been lodged. She had reddish-brown hair, severely cut into a styleless bob, and sharply delineated features flecked with freckles and moles. She was older than Lisa had expected, though not as old as Lisa herself. Lisa paused long enough to examine the tenor of the muscles in the arm that rested on top of the blanket covering her naked body.
“Metabolic retuning and artificial steroids,” Leland opined, but Lisa shook her head.
“Hard work, mostly,” she said. “Carefully calculated diet, obsessive exercising, strict denial of all cosmetic and quasimedical aids. She’s a Real Woman.”
“I don’t go for the muscular type myself,” Leland observed.
“Real Woman with a capital R and a capital W,” Lisa said.
“I thought they’d gone the same way as all once-fashionable causes. Died with the so-called third phase of feminism, didn’t they? Before my time, of course.”
And beyond your interest, evidently, Lisa added silently. She said, “The movement broke up, but its core members stayed loyal to its ideals, some of them even more so than they had been before. They still have a voice within the radfem ranks, and they still command a lot of respect in an elderly statesman kind of way.”
“We already knew they were radfems,” Leland observed in a neutral tone—but he was looking at her thoughtfully, as if there was something she wasn’t telling him.
“Did we?” Lisa countered.
“You saw the tapes of the university bombers,” he came back.
“You shouldn’t have,” Lisa reminded him. “They were supposed to be a secret between the police and the Ministry of Defence.”
“And the campus security patrol,” Leland pointed out. “How many holes does a sieve need? You don’t know her, I suppose?”
“I don’t think so,” Lisa told him.
“You don’t thinkso? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s supposed to mean that there’s something vaguely familiar about her. It might just be the type, of course—I’ve met more than a few Real Women in my time, and I wouldn’t necessarily recognize this specimen if we’d met ten or twenty years ago. Maybe I’ve seen her working out at one of the gyms I’ve used. Either way, I can’t put a name to her.”
“But if she were local, you’d have mutual acquaintances? All part of the same old-girls’ network?” He said it as if he thought he’d put his finger on a useful connection, but he didn’t follow it up. It would be easy enough to check out local women who’d once been self-declared members of the movement. Arachne West’s name would come out on top of the heap—but that didn’t mean that Arachne was involved, or that it would be easy to locate her if she were.
Lisa was still smarting from the insult of the “old-girls’ network” remark when she walked into the downstairs room where the second captive was secured, although she knew she was displacing emotional energy from a slowly growing anxiety that her personal involvement with this mess might not have begun, and might not end, with Morgan Miller. Fortunately, there was no danger of any further embarrassment. She recognized the second prisoner immediately, and knew that she was the real prize—the linchpin of the whole conspiracy.
Stella Filisetti was less than half Lisa’s age, and at least twenty years younger than her companion. Her pale hair was of medium length and silky, and her body was possessed of the peculiar combination of softness and solidity that was still the sole prerogative of authentically young women. She had not yet reached the point of decision regarding the use of such artificial aids as metabolic retuning, calorie-depleted food, indwelling scavengers, and epidermal rejuvenation.
Stella had been carrying the real gun, Lisa realized; it was Stella who had come within inches of killing her. It probably was not Stella who had called her a stupid bitch and taunted her with Morgan’s indifference, but it must have been Stella who had supplied the script.
“It’s Morgan’s current research assistant,” she informed Leland.
“Ms. Filisetti,” he said, to show that he was up to speed.
“Suspect number one,” Lisa confirmed. “The only one close enough to have taken a good long look at his continuing experiments and his stored data. The only one close enough to have gotten a hold of the wrong end of an awkwardly placed stick. She had the means to get the bombers into Mouseworld and almost certainly knew the codes that let the kidnappers into Morgan’s house.” But not, she reminded herself, the codes that let the burglars into my flat.
“We don’t know for sure that she got a hold of the wrong end of the stick,” Leland reminded her dutifully. “We have to work on the hypothesis that it might have been the right end.”
“You might,” Lisa demurred. “I’m not under contract to deliver the elixir of life to myemployers. All I have to do is free Morgan Miller before he gets hurt. For that purpose, the hypothesis that this is all some stupid mistake will do very well indeed.”
Leland didn’t bother to point out that if Miller really had nothing to give away, accounting for his exploratory visits to Ahasuerus and the Algenists wouldn’t be easy. He was more concerned to usher Lisa out of the room before Stella Filisetti woke up and heard them talking. He wanted to conserve the element of surprise.
Morgan must have been playing a game, Lisa thought. He was laying down a false trail, dangling a lure— and it worked, far too well. Why on earth couldn’t he have let me in on it?
Leland stood aside to let her precede him into a surprisingly capacious, if rather bare, kitchen, where a short and wiry man with a dark complexion—presumably Jeff—was seated at a hectically stained pine dining table, circa 1995. Lisa guessed that the table must have lost its initial polish shortly after the turn of the century, and that Jeff had never had any to lose.
As Leland and Lisa sat down, the other man politely rose to his feet, waiting for instructions. Leland told his subordinate to wake the prisoner in the downstairs room, advising him to do it gently and to give her a mug of tea, with lots of sugar. Jeff nodded. He filled a mug from the teapot that sat in the middle of the table and spooned three sugars into it before nodding to Lisa and departing.
“Okay,” Leland said when Jeff had closed the door behind him. “You know her. That puts the ball in your court. How should we play it?”
It wasn’t an easy question to answer. Lisa was slightly surprised that it had been asked. She had assumed that the plan was fairly simple: they would say what they had to say in order to elicit a response—any kind of response to begin with—and if Stella wouldn’t let anything slip, they would become gradually more provocative. Then she realized that Leland was testing her in exactly that progressive fashion: all Mister Nice Guy to begin with, slowly tightening the procedure to shake something loose from hercabinet of curiosities.
“She’s a rank amateur,” Lisa observed, feeling no compunction about reiterating the obvious. “She’ll be scared, but she must have gone into this knowing she’d eventually be caught. Professionally speaking, this was a suicide mission. Crazy—but not justcrazy. The motive must have been powerful if it not only moved her to this kind of recklessness, but allowed her to draw so many others into the conspiracy, including at least one Real Woman.”
“Right,” said Leland. “The rest probably know by now that they can’t hold out long, even if they thought differently to begin with. They must want to get the information to friends elsewhere before the net closes on them, but they obviously don’t have it yet. Why else would they come after you a second time? Miller’s holding out, or feeding them lies, and they haven’t found what they want on his computers or your wafers. That’s good—panic is always healthy in an interrogation situation. If I were to offer Filisetti a big enough bribe and a way out of the back door, do you think she’d sell her friends down the river?”