“You mean that the car wasbugged? You had it swept?”

“As per routine,” he said. “We’d picked up two plants that weren’t there when we left the Renaissance—one obvious, one camouflaged. Presumably planted by the same person. If the first one was there to attract our attention so we wouldn’t look hard for the second, the second could have been there to stop us short of looking reallyhard for a third.”

Lisa knew that Leland had had the time, the opportunity, and the motive to rig the car after staging his flamboyant rescue, but she also knew how dangerous it was to jump to conclusions.

“And you think the Algenists are involved?”

Smith sighed. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “But the background check makes them look exceedingly fishy. It seems to me that they’re the people most likely to have grabbed Morgan Miller.”

“Why would they do that? He went to them.”

“The fact that he went to them could have convinced them that he had something valuable. If he then decided to take it to Ahasuerus instead of handing it to them—and it seems to me that if he did anykind of proper background check, that’s what he’d have decided to do—they might well have figured it was time to take matters into their own hands.”

It didn’t sound at all likely to Lisa, but that was the emerging pattern of the investigation. Everyone who looked into the matter seemed to be seizing on different details—details that reflected the particular tenor of their own innate paranoia. Am I any different?she wondered. Am I seeing it the way I do because that’s what tickles my idiosyncratic fancy? Are we all so terrified by the impending crisis that we’re grasping at straws, all equally blinded by fear?

“What makes you think the Institute’s not what it seems?” was all she dared say.

“Once we deepened our own background check, I could see why Dr. Goldfarb was so offended by the fact that Morgan Miller put Ahasuerus and the Algenists on the same list. Adam Zimmerman’s grandparents emigrated to the States in the 1930s, fleeing Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. The Foundation’s mission statement contains some very strong injunctions against releasing results that might be useful for military purposes or for political oppression. The Algenists’ website makes similar protestations, but if you look back in time far enough, it becomes fairly obvious that algeny’s intellectual forebears were firmly in the Nazi camp. The parent Institute of Algeny in Leipzig was previously a branch of the German Vril Society, which claimed descent—falsely, one presumes, but no less significantly—from the Bavarian Illuminati. There are similarly remote historical links to Theosophy, the racial theories of Count Gobineau, and something called the World Ice Theory. Does any of that ring a bell with you?”

“No,” Lisa confessed.

“Nor to anyone else alive and sane, I suspect. Apparently, there’s more than a linguistic analogy connecting algeny to alchemy. Vril was an occult force invented by some nineteenth-century British novelist; it was enthusiastically taken up by a number of continental occultists. Nowadays, although its current mission statements still refer in approving terms to Nietzschean moral reconstruction, contemporary algeny has cleaned up its intellectual act considerably, but if Miller bothered to do any digging, his investigations would have revealed the rotten core beneath the shiny surface.”

Lisa had no idea of what to make of all this. It sounded almost surreal, and completely irrelevant—but she reminded herself that her own far more modest inferences had sounded equally irrelevant to Smith. “If they really are crackpots from way back when,” she said warily, “where does their money come from?”

“Switzerland,” was the terse reply.

Switzerland had long been a world leader in the arcane art of money laundering—which grew more arcane with every year that passed. Ordinarily, “money from Switzerland” was a euphemism for the “Mafia,” which had controlled up to fifty percent of GDP in the post-Communist nations at the turn of the century. During the last thirty years, following the example set by the organizations on which they were modeled, much of that wealth had been rechanneled into legitimate businesses, and the organizations had revamped their image considerably. Some had remarketed themselves as a new breed of revolutionary communists—hence the term “Leninist Mafia”—who were deeply and sincerely concerned with issues of social and economic reorganization. Despite their much-publicized opposition to “Imperialist Global Parasitism,” the Leninist Mafia did not seem to have fared any worse during the worldwide economic upheavals of ’25 than its alleged counterparts in China.

“So now you think they’re gangsters pretending to be crackpots,” Lisa said skeptically. “And you think they kidnapped Morgan because they got the same impression as Goldfarb—that he was deliberately underselling whatever it was he had.”

“It’s a possibility,” Smith said defensively. “There’s also the apocalyptic angle to consider. You said this Leland character inferred from what the women told you that they were apocalyptic cultists. Did he have any particular group in mind?”

“No,” Lisa said. “Do you?”

“The women didn’t mention the Ice Age Elite by any chance?”

“That’s just post-Millennial folklore,” Lisa said. “The Real Woman started sounding off about the Secret Masters and the seeds of a New Order, but those were the only phrases she used.”

Lisa remembered talk of the Ice Age Elite being bandied about during her years as a research student, but she couldn’t remember Morgan Miller ever having dignified their existence with an opinion. When the years 1999 and 2000 had come and gone, everyone gifted with common sense had expected Millenarian cults to wither away, or at least to be effectively mothballed until 2029 or 2033, the two dates most widely touted as the two-thousandth anniversary of the crucifixion. Ever perverse, however, several of the most vocal cults had refused to go away, and their tales of impending woe had grown ever more fanciful. One such tale had fixated on the anxieties expressed by some scientists that global warming might subvert the ocean-circulation mechanism sustaining the gulf stream, abruptly precipitating a new Ice Age.

The contemporary myth of the Secret Masters hadn’t really come into its own until the crash of ’25, but earlier versions had been around long before that, and one of its earliest twenty-first-century manifestations had been the idea that the greenhouse effect was being deliberately stimulated, with the intention of causing an Ice Age. The Ice Age Elite were the plotters allegedly responsible for this scheme. They were said to have made elaborate plans to survive the ecocatastrophe in comfort. Accounts of their motives were widely various, ranging from the suggestion that they were Gaean altruists determined to save Mother Earth from further rape, to the proposition that they intended to buy up all the ruined real estate in the northern hemisphere, whose overlords they would become when they eventually unleashed the biotech that would end the Ice Age as abruptly as it had begun. Little had been heard of the Ice Age Elite since 2025, presumably because the Cabal was now widely believed to be in the process of achieving their alleged aims without having had to go to the trouble of precipitating an Ice Age.

“The problem with folklore,” Smith told her, “is that it wouldn’t qualify as folklore if there weren’t people who believe it. Admittedly, Ahasuerus isn’t called Ahasuerus because its founder believed in the myth of the Wandering Jew in any simple sense—in fact, if the rumors of his present whereabouts can be trusted, he’d be more accurately considered to be the ultimate Sedentary Jew—but the Institute of Algeny is different. It wasn’t set up from scratch, so it still carries a certain amount of ideological baggage left over from who knows when. Its interest in future human evolution is closely linked to ideas of apocalyptic notions of destruction and transformation. You say that this Real Woman used the words ‘New Order’?”