Lisa nodded slowly. “Twice over, probably,” she said. “The MOD will have people there, as will the police.”

“I’d never get in, would I?” the Real Woman asked. “Even if I knew what I was looking for, I’d have no chance. A police officer who’s been seconded to the MOD team would be a different matter. You may be AWOL, but you’re still on the case.”

“And you’re still trying to recruit me,” Lisa said, although she knew she was merely stating the obvious. “Even after all these years.”

“And you’re still playing coy. Why would I have let Helen invite you here if I didn’t think you could be turned? And why would you have volunteered to come if you weren’t finally ripe for turning?”

“I just wanted to know what the hell was going on,” Lisa told her. “I didn’t realize you’d already figured it out. If I had—”

“You’d have come anyway. And now you do know what’s going on. Even Miller knew the time had come to hand his vile secret on to somebody—but I happen to think that his list of candidates stinks, and the Ministry of Defence is potentially even worse. You and I might find some better guardians, don’t you think?”

Another piece of the puzzle slotted into place in Lisa’s mind. In Morgan’s mind, the most significant thing that Ahasuerus and the Algenists had in common hadn’t, after all, been the fact that they each had an interest in longevity technology. It was that both organizations had a fundamental commitment to pacifism. Morgan had been trying to find someone to carry on his work who wouldn’t be interested in the weaponry potential of the imperfect retrovirus. No wonder he had been coy about telling Goldfarb and Geyer exactly what he had while he was probing the seriousness of their mission statements.

Why didn’t he come to me instead?she wondered. But she knew the answer to that. It wasn’t because she was a police officer—although that must have played a part—it was because she was sixty-one years old. At best, she’d have been a caretaker, and he was looking for a long-term arrangement. But now, like Arachne West, she was on the spot and on her own. If she asked him, Morgan would probably tell her where the information was, and if she moved quickly enough, she might be able to get it out of Morgan’s house before Peter Grimmett Smith found out what was at stake and let loose a whole army of assiduous searchers. She wouldn’t be stealing anything except time—but in a situation where time was of the essence, any margin of opportunity was a valuable commodity. Even if Arachne West was mistaken in her harsh judgment of Goldfarb and Geyer, there were undoubtedly other potential recipients of the new wisdom who would be far more interested in neutralizing its weaponry potential than exploiting it.

Lisa reminded herself that she was sixty-one years old and that her career was already in ruins. If Arachne West was willing to let her act, she was still in a position to do so, and even if the big woman-hunt were already underway, she probably still had time to play her own hand.

“Are you in?” Arachne West asked her.

“Of course I’m in,” Lisa said. “As you so rightly pointed out, why else would I be here?”

TWENTY-THREE

Lisa could hardly believe the change to which Arachne West was subjected by a conservative Salomey suit and a smart wig. The elaborate superstructure of the suit wrought a remarkable transformation of her mannish figure, while the hairpiece—in combination with a pair of ornamental eyeglasses with tinted lenses—altered the context of her features so drastically that Lisa could have passed her in the street without a flicker of recognition.

“My God,” Lisa muttered sardonically. “You could have been beautiful all along—what a waste.”

“Clothes maketh the woman, they say,” Arachne replied, “but it’s all lies. I was always beautiful.”

“If Helen and the others have altered their appearance to the same startling extent,” Lisa observed thoughtfully, “it won’t be easy to pick them out on digicam footage. If they have clever smart-cards—and they obviously do—they might actually get away.”

“The police have never fully understood the potential of smart fabrics,” Arachne observed. “It’s one of the penalties of clinging so hard to institutional masculinity.”

The once Real but now conspicuously Artificial Woman led Lisa away through the maze of subterranean corridors that extended beneath the mall. They eventually came to a door that gave them access to the staffs garage. The car in the slot directly to the left of the door was a modest blue Nissan, whose locks sprang open in response to the button on Arachne’s key ring.

Before getting into the Nissan, Lisa glanced back at the door that had closed behind them. She didn’t like leaving Morgan Miller imprisoned, even with his wounds properly dressed. Arachne had assured her that he would be released whatever happened, but Lisa wasn’t certain that the gatekeepers in Salomey could be trusted. Discipline within the ranks of Stella Filisetti’s hastily formulated conspiracy seemed to have broken down in the face of adversity, and there might be conspirators left behind who wouldn’t take kindly to Arachne West’s decision to take matters into her own hands. Lisa had to remind herself that no one had been killed yet, and that anyone who still had ready access to the hideaway would be foolish indeed to break that precedent now.

Arachne eased the Nissan out of the exit on the east side of the mall, turning left on to Pulteney Road. The cloud that had made the early morning seem bleak had been carried away by the west wind. It was not yet noon and the sun was making stately progress from east to south above the invisible expanse of Salisbury Plain. Its strengthening light stained the cloudless sky an unusually deep shade of blue. Royal blue, Lisa thought. Fading to navy blue. Or did navy blue go out with the twentieth century? Even when I was a kid, they’d started calling it Trafalgar blue. What is it now, I wonder.

“Did it ever occur to you,” she said to Arachne West, “that we might both be more paranoid than the situation actually warrants? When you think about it, ultimate weapons of one kind and another have been around for more than a century, but no one’s ever been eager to deploy them. Sure, they used atom bombs to finish World War Two—but they hadn’t used poison gas in Europe even when whole fleets of aircraft were committed to blitzkrieg tactics. The notions of chivalry and gallantry may have been ninety-percent illusion even in their heyday, but they lingered for a long time in social etiquette. Even hobbyist terrorists have standards. Maybe we’re falling prey to the yuckfactor here—zombie women with the minds of mice! Maybe nobody would want to do it. It’s possible that everyone would agree that this is a weapon too dreadful to use.”

“It’s possible,” Arachne agreed. “But if I had the choice, I’d like to have a reliable defense, just in case. Wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe there already is one,” Lisa said speculatively. “The men who run the global economy may not have have been interested in the same range of potential as the women who run Salomey, but if their messenger boy can be believed, they have smart fabrics ready for deployment that can hold anyvirus attack at bay Remember what Morgan said about being unable to transform the eggs in ovaries within a womb because he couldn’t get it across the placenta? Just because Chan’s versatile antibody-packaging system failed, it doesn’t mean the newer versions will.”

“All that could be true,” Arachne admitted as she steered the Nissan carefully around the first of the mini roundabout series that would take them up Sydney Place to Bathwick Street. “We got used to thinking of the future of fashion in terms of second skins, but the return-to-the-womb analogy has its charms. I really would like to believe that even the craziest hobbyist terrorist would think of Miller’s retrovirus as an unconscionable horror rather than a neat trick, and that no government on earth would ever countenance its use under any circumstances—but I can’t. Morgan Miller didn’t believe it either. Okay, so he’s way down the dark end of the paranoia spectrum too, thanks to this bee he’s got in his bonnet about overpopulation being the ultimate evil—but that’s the world we live in, isn’t it? Maybe everything will be fine if we just sit back and do nothing, but even if it turned out that way, would you be happy to be set down in history as someone who’d been prepared to sit back and trust everybody else in the world to be reasonable? I wouldn’t.”