“There are no failed experiments in science,” Leland told her sardonically. “Just experiments that don’t give you the answer you were looking for. Sometimes that’s because you’re asking the wrong question.”
He doesn’t know Morgan Miller, Lisa thought. Morgan was always careful to askall the questions, even if he couldn’t answer them.“So who are the crazy women working for?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “It’s not the Leninist Mafia, or any gang of biotech bootleggers that weknow about. It looks like an ad hoc conspiracy, hastily flung together. Even in this game, appearances aren’t always deceptive.”
“And why should you know more about the Leninist Mafia or biotech bootlegging than wedo?” Lisa challenged, trying to imply that her “we” included the MOD as well as the police, although she didn’t know the first thing about Special Branch ops, let alone Peter Grimmett Smith’s secret business. Although her warrant card identified her as a forensic scientist, she figured that her interlocutor couldn’t know for certain that she wasn’t attached to Special Branch and hadn’t done any significant work on bootlegged biotech.
Leland hesitated before saying, “Well, there are no prizes for guessing that I’m private security, nor for figuring out that I probably wouldn’t be on the case if I weren’t in something like the same line of work as you. I might as well come clean, though, and admit that busting everyday pharmaceutical counterfeiters is more my sort of thing than a weird mess like this. You know I can’t tell you who I work for, but you also know what that means.”
“The megacorps,” Lisa said. “I suppose they don’t like to be called the Cabal?”
“As far as I can tell,” Leland informed her wryly, “they loveit. But that’s by the by. The question is: can we work together, or are you going to go after me for loading you in back of the van with the other two? Even though the girls aren’t mafia, they’re bound to have lawyers. If I’d left them to be taken into custody, the local plods would have done everything by the book—and by the time you’d woken up, you’d have had to sit twiddling your thumbs while the MOD hammered out some kind of deal to persuade the captives to sell out their pals. You ought to be grateful to me for expanding your options.”
“I’m not going to make myself an accessory to torture,” Lisa said sharply.
“Of course not,” Leland replied soothingly. “If I were going to try anything of that sort, I’d make very sure you weren’t involved, for my sake as well as yours. In this instance, we don’t have time—the trouble with obtaining information under duress is that you have to be able to check it out and take punitive action if you’ve been sold a pup. However crazy these two are, they know that we’re in a race against the clock. They’ll feed us bullshit if they can, especially if we play the bully. We’ll have to work a little more creatively. It won’t be easy—but I figure that the two of us might have a better chance than either one alone.”
“You haven’t tried to question them by yourself?” Lisa asked skeptically.
“They’re still asleep,” he told her. “There wasn’t time to be subtle back in the car lot—I had to hit them with the gas. I figure they’ll be awake at any time now, but it might be as well to let them consider their situation for a little while. Their clothes weren’t nearly as badly damaged as yours, but I took them anyway. They’re very modern girls—smartskins, no underwear. They’re tightly secured, each in a different room. They’ll be feeling veryvulnerable.”
“I can’t be a party to this,” Lisa said, without much conviction.
“That’s a shame,” Leland told her. “I’ll be talking to them anyway—the only result of your staying out of it will be that our chances of getting what we need are reduced—and you’ll remain ignorant of anything I do manage to find out. Do you really want to pass on your best chance of finding out where Miller is in time to get him out alive?”
Lisa could only reply to that with a censorious glare, but Leland wasn’t the kind of man to wilt before a dirty look. She knew he was right, and that the two would-be assassins were far more likely to let something slip in their present circumstances than they would be if they were subjected to due process under the protection of PACE 2, with their lawyers at their elbows. She also knew that he was trying to curry favor by letting her in on the interrogations—a favor whose acceptance might be dangerous. Making herself an accessory to an illegal interrogation could easily turn out to be the next best thing to handing her head to Judith Kenna on a silver platter, careerwise. Mike Grundy had suggested that cracking the case might be exactly what the two of them needed to stave off compulsory retirement for a few more years, but the wayit was cracked might be even more important in that regard than merely getting a result.
In the end, it all came back to Morgan Miller and the need to get him out of whatever mess he’d contrived to get himself into. How much did she have to lose? The fact that Kenna was out to get her anyway increased the danger of not playing by the book—but how much should she care, at her time of life? If she wasn’t prepared to be reckless now, when would she ever be?
“So what are you waiting for?” she asked the big man. “Get me those bloody clothes. And something else to drink.”
Leland grinned as he took back the empty cup. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll cover your back if you cover mine. All we have to do is make sure that the good end happily and the bad unhappily. As long as the story works out, it won’t matter a damn whether there really is an immortality serum or not.”
Lisa waited until he had fetched the clothes, a bunch of bananas, and another cup of tea before telling him that the legendary Adam Zimmerman hadn’t approved of the word “immortality” because it implied an inability to die. “In the business,” she said as she regarded the bananas with a suspicious eye, “we prefer the term emortality, with an ‘e.’”
“They’re ordinary supermarket fruit,” Leland assured her. “Standard dietary supplements. No therapeutics, let alone psychotropics. I’m paid to hunt down bootleggers—I don’t rip off their stock.”
The shirt and slacks he gave her were loose, but not absurdly ill-fitting. When she’d achieved a better state of modesty and a fuller stomach, he handed back her belt, pouches and all. It was an obvious gesture of good faith. She could have summoned help within two seconds, using two fingers; he wouldn’t have been able to stop her. If they were way out in the wilds of Somerset or Gloucestershire, it might take so long for help to come that he and his friend Jeff could be five miles away by the time it arrived, but he’d have to be very clever indeed to avoid the consequent chase, and he probably wouldn’t get anything out of his captives in the meantime. Lisa didn’t bother to take the phone out of its holster.
“Had you checked out the Institute of Algeny?” she asked.
“Not yet.” The abruptness of the answer suggested there might have been no need—perhaps because the information that had been handed down to him had originated there. Perhaps, Lisa thought, Goldfarb’s disdain for the Algenists hadn’t been a mere matter of the pot assuming that the kettle was black.
“If Morgan did have something valuable,” Lisa observed, “the fact that he was talking to supposedly nonprofit organizations implies that he wouldn’t have wanted it to fall into the hands of your employers.”
“Or Mr. Smith’s,” Leland pointed out.
“Morgan wasn’t the government’s biggest fan,” Lisa agreed, “but he did know that there’s a war on. If he’d thought the MOD could use whatever he had, he’d have given it to them. I still think this is all a wild goose chase.”
“You’re probably right,” the big man conceded. “But if there are any wild geese to be caught, I want to be the one who bags them, and if there aren’t, I need to be able to convince my employers of that fact. If I can’t, I could be out of a job. Then, if you decided to turn vindictive later, I could be in a very deep hole indeed.”