“The cities had gone on far too long,” the woman told her coldly. “They were a living lie. The Crisis is already here, and the population of all the real cities on Earth is about to take a steep fall. You know it, I know it—and everyone involved in the making and distribution of hyperflu certainly knows it.”

“Is that why you burned them?” Lisa asked, unable to believe it. “Because they were a living lie?”

“Weren’t they always supposed to be a parable? That’s how Morgan puts it, at any rate. Well, now they’re a parable of the coming holocaust. That’s why we did it.”

Lisa didn’t believe her. Presumably, Stella had persuaded her fellow conspirators that it was necessary to destroy the H Block to cover up the fact that some mice were missing, and to prevent them from being identified. They had burned it to prevent anyone who investigated from figuring out which ones had been removed by surveying the remaining DNA patterns. Did that mean there might be other library specimens tucked way in a forgotten corner of some other institution’s Mouseworld? Probably not—but it wasn’t something to discuss out loud in any case, given that Leland was bound to be listening. The longer it took him to figure out what this was really about, the more time Lisa would have to find Arachne West and persuade her that she had to let Morgan go.

“It’s not too late,” Stella Filisetti told her. “You could still throw in your lot with us. If we don’t manage to get the data files, you might turn out to be the last hope of the cause. I know how you kept your options open when Miller first discovered the emortal mice. They’re still open. It’s not too late to change your mind.”

“I could say the same to you,” Lisa pointed out—but she turned to look out the window as she heard the distant wail of a siren. The bright headlights and the stroboscopic blue flash of a police cruiser were just visible on the road that wound through Chew Valley, several miles to the north. The headlights flickered as they were briefly interrupted by leaf-laden trees. The leaves were all brown by now, but they were still awaiting the Atlantic front, whose swirling winds would whip them from the branches.

Then Lisa caught sight of the internally lit helicopter that was moving effortlessly past the car, fifty or sixty meters overhead. She calculated that it would arrive several minutes earlier. Peter Grimmett Smith had obviously decided, after waking up from his enforced nap, that time was now far too pressing to permit him the luxury of road travel. In any case, he probably wanted to make sure that Lisa talked to him before—and perhaps instead of—reporting to her own people.

“You’ve stepped over the line here,” Stella Filisetti whispered. “You should have made that call an hour ago. They’ll throw you out of the force. How old are you, Lisa? What choices have you got?”

“I’m working for the MOD at present,” Lisa told her. “I have all the latitude I need—and all the information I need, thanks to your slack mouth. It’s over, Stella. I’ll have Morgan out before noon.”

“Bitch,” the younger woman said in heartfelt fashion.

“And you,” Lisa murmured.

She went outside to meet the helicopter. The air was cold but still—there was mist in the meadow on the other side of the dirt road that led to the cottage. The cottage looked larger from the yard, but that was because the shadow gathered about the lighted windows was exaggerated by the steep pitch of the tiled roof.

As she’d expected, Peter Grimmett Smith didn’t even bother to step down. He merely held the helicopter door open, inviting her to climb in before the rotor blades slowed to a halt. She ducked reflexively as she did so, although she wasn’t tall enough to be in any danger.

Mercifully, the helicopter wasn’t one of those with a transparent cupola; its cabin was wide and deep and its sides were reassuringly opaque. The pilot was Ginny, but Lisa didn’t have time to ask after her health before Smith bundled her into the second rank of seats.

“Radio the Swindon police,” Smith instructed his dutiful chauffeur. “Tell them that one of their cityplex colleagues needs a clean suit of clothes. Tell them to have it ready at the landing pad.”

“Size twelve,” Lisa put in. “Ten if the goods are U.S.-originated. Did Chan make contact again?”

“No, he didn’t. Who shot me?” Smith obviously had his own agenda, and wasn’t about to be sidetracked. As soon as Ginny had made the call, the copter raised itself from the ground again. The downdraft from its wings scattered newly fallen leaves in every direction, but the blizzard vanished into darkness as they gained height. It was surprisingly quiet inside the cabin, although the thrum of the motor rotating the copter’s blades extended an uncomfortable vibration throughout the body of the craft.

“She wouldn’t give us a name,” Lisa told him. “Steve Forrester will find out, as soon as he can get a DNA sample. The other one was Stella Filisetti. She shot me too, by the way—I didn’t wake up until I was tucked up in the cottage. The men in the van came to our rescue, but they didn’t quite manage to arrive in the nick of time.”

“And who were they?” Smith demanded.

“The one in charge told me his name’s Leland,” Lisa told him. “Mike Grundy will be checking out the van as we speak, but it’ll probably be a dead end. Leland’s just a fly attracted by the stink. Working for the Cabal, he says—but that might be garbage. If he’s just a chancer, he’s not important; if he isworking for the emperors of private enterprise, we might as well let him play his hand. If he finds Morgan before we do, so much the better. That’s why I thought it was worth giving him some rope to play with instead of calling in as soon as I woke up. Why are we going to Swindon?”

The helicopter was moving rapidly through the night, but Lisa had lost her sense of direction. The lights below could have been Paulton, but she wasn’t sure.

“Why not?” Smith asked. “Have you got a better idea?”

Lisa didn’t want to go to Swindon, and she did have a better idea—but she didn’t want to tell Peter Grimmett Smith what it was, especially while she was wearing Jeff’s bug-infested clothing.

“We’ve missed our appointment,” she stalled. “Surely they’ll have locked up and gone home.”

“Someone’s waiting up for us,” he assured her. “Did you and this Leland fellow get anything useful out of the two women?”

“Only bullshit,” Lisa told him. “Leland thinks they’re some kind of secret cult freaked out by signs of the apocalypse. He thinks they may be after something Morgan contributed to the project that Ed Burdillon had put his way—the defense work you sounded me out about while we were on our way to Ahasuerus—but he’s not sure.”

“You don’t agree,” Smith was quick to observe.

“I don’t believe they’re apocalypse freaks. I suspect they’re exactly what they seem to be: radical feminists. Leland didn’t even know a Real Woman when he saw one, and when I told him what she was, he figured that he might be able to excite her disdain for Stella Filisetti because she’s prettier and hasn’t cultivated her muscles. I think he annoyed her by failing so utterly to understand where she was coming from.” She was speaking as much for Leland’s benefit as Smith’s, on the assumption that he was still listening in as he headed for the cityplex in the hope of picking up Chan’s trail.

“You’d have to explain it to me too, I’m afraid,” Smith said unenthusiastically. “But not now. We’ve more important matters to deal with.”

The niceties of post-backlash feminism obviously interested him as little as they interested Leland. Lisa had to remind herself that Smith, like her, had been born in the late twentieth century and had been delivered by maturity into the midst of the so-called backlash. Like Leland, he took it for granted that people he didn’t agree with were all essentially alike. Lisa knew better—and she suspected that the internal politics of twenty-first-century feminism might have a significant bearing not merely on the motive for Morgan Miller’s abduction, but on its ultimate outcome.