In order to prevent the problem from getting any worse, Lisa fetched the first-aid kit from the bathroom. She hadn’t opened it for years, and it didn’t have any kind of dressing adequate to take proper care of the problem, but she found an absorbent pad that would fit over the awkwardly placed cut on her hand and managed to tape it on with old-fashioned adhesive tape.
Having dressed the wound as best she could, Lisa made a concerted effort to collect herself mentally. She thanked the good fortune that had helped her resist the temptation to fight her insomnia with drugs. She’d been having trouble sleeping for some months, but she hadn’t resorted to medication because she didn’t believe that insomnia deserved to be reckoned as an illness. She had addressed the problem as a straightforward challenge to her powers of self-discipline: a rebellion of her treasonous flesh against the stern empire of her mind. Her method of fighting the sleeplessness had been to instruct herself not to worry about it, because a woman of sixty—sixty-one, now that her birthday had come and gone—didn’t need that much sleep anyway. She had also informed herself that lying still in the darkness was, in any case, sufficient to garner most of the benefits that sleep was supposed to confer. Even so, she could easily have weakened on a dozen occasions, and last night might have been one of them.
She went downstairs to meet Mike Grundy at the front door of the building—to save time, she told herself. The crime scene would have to be examined, sooner rather than later if there were staff available, and the spray-painted legend would be duly noted; but for the time being, she wanted to concentrate on the big picture, of which the raid on her premises seemed to be a relatively trivial facet.
John Charleston and Robbie Hammond must have been lurking inside their locked front doors, listening for clues to what was going on. John peeped out as she passed by, then threw his door open wide. By that time, Lisa was halfway down the next flight. Robbie had taken his cue from the sound of the door opening. They seemed absurdly like bookends as they peered at her, one from above and one from below.
She didn’t stop. “Police emergency,” she said in what she hoped was a reassuring tone. “All safe and secure upstairs. SOCO will probably get here before I come back. No cause for alarm.”
“Was that gunfire?” was the only question either of them managed—but by that time, she’d raced past Robbie Hammond and was well on her way to the front door. She didn’t bother to answer him. She left the two of them to meet one another halfway and discuss the matter between themselves.
Mike’s black Rover was already coming around the corner, and she hardly had time to stop before it was beside her. She used her left hand to open the door.
“It’s okay,” she assured him as his eyes were drawn to the patchwork dressing on her right hand and the bloodstain on her cuff. “Stings a bit, but it’s fine. Drive. The university, not the hospital.”
He nodded and put the car back into gear. He had to do a three-point turn to get out of the cul-de-sac, and the screech of his brakes probably woke up more people than the four gunshots had, but he was back on Cotswold Road inside of ten seconds. Ordinarily, he’d have crossed Wellsway on to Greenway Lane, but Greenway Lane led into the blackout, so he headed south to use Bradford Road and Claverton Road. It was a longer way around, but it was probably safer.
Why black out that part of the grid?Lisa wondered. It doesn’t cover the university or the flat— only a couple of miles in between. Are they just trying to cover their escape routes, or is there a third scene we don’t yet know about?She didn’t raise the point with Mike, though, because he was already talking urgently.
“The live feeds to the security TV’s were doctored,” he reported, “but the digicams themselves weren’t damaged, so the wafers should tell us what actually happened. The alarms went off when the sprinklers kicked in, but the system couldn’t do more than contain the fire and stop it from spreading. Apart from the one room, damage is limited. The injured man was shot with one of those dart guns that everybody and his cousin seem to have nowadays, but they dragged him way down the corridor before leaving him, so he shouldn’t have inhaled too much smoke—hopefully.”
“You said half a milliondead mice?” Lisa queried to make sure she’d taken the right inference.
“That’s right,” Mike confirmed. “The bombs were in the room you always called Mouseworld.”
“Why would anyone want to bomb Mouseworld?”Lisa asked. “All the AV research is on the upper floors, in the containment facility. All the sensitive commercial stuff is there too—what there is of it nowadays.”
“Maybe they couldn’t get access farther up and hoped the fire would spread through the ceiling,” Mike suggested. “It won’t make much difference—the Ministry of Defence is sending down a team of spooks from London. I know we aren’t supposed to say there’s a war on, but there isa bloody war on, and until they know this isn’t that kind of hostile action, they have to assume it is. Whatever your people pick up tonight is likely to be taken out of their hands tomorrow, in the interests of national security. I’m likely to be left high and dry too, looking just as foolish. The chief inspector’s on her way to the scene, but that won’t help either of us.”
“I suppose not,” Lisa agreed. Chief Inspector Kenna hadn’t taken any great pains to support Mike through his recent divorce, and hadn’t seemed to approve of the fact that Lisa had tried to help him, even though they’d been friends and colleagues for more than twenty years. Kenna seemed to think they were both dinosaurs, their methods and instincts equally out of date. “On the other hand,” Lisa added, “you and I know the territory better than anyone—and I’ll probably know the victim too. The men from the Ministry will need our help.”
“I know that and you know that, but will they?” Mike countered. “The spooks are coming by helicopter, but it’ll take a little while for them to assemble at the point of departure—they probably won’t get here until nine or ten this morning. We’re trying to contact Burdillon, Miller, Chan and the other members of the department, but that won’t be easy at this time of night, even if it weren’t for the blackout. If the bombers could cause that to simply cover their tracks … who the hell are we dealing with, Lisa? What were they after at your apartment?”
“I don’t know,” Lisa said, wishing there were some way to display her sincerity more clearly, even though Mike Grundy was the one person in the world who wouldn’t dream of doubting her. “They seemed to think I would know, but I don’t. I don’t have a clue. All I know for sure is that they recognized your phone number, and that they took time out to tell me that Morgan’s promises couldn’t be trusted, even though he never made me any, and that the one with the gun was tempted to shoot me even though that probably wasn’t in the plan … and they spray-painted Traitor’ on my door.”
She hadn’t really planned to let that out just yet, but the flow had built up a momentum of its own. Mike turned to look at her, even though his eyes ought to have been glued to the patch of visibility that the headlights carved out of the road; this far out of town, the streetlights were so sparse that they might as well have been driving in the blackout.
“That’s crazy!” he said. “Why would anyonedo something as stupid as that?”
“Why would anyone do something as stupid as bombing Mouseworld?” she countered. “That’s what Icall crazy. What kind of terrorist would target a room full of mice?”
“The mice could have been innocent bystanders,” Grundy pointed out. “On the other hand … well, there may be a real plague war on now, but hobbyist terrorism has been a plague of sorts since ’22, and I don’t suppose the talk of curfews and all other containment precautions the commission’s considering will have pleased the flackers, whackers, and code-busters. Must be a big gang, though, to hit three hard targets with such precision—assuming that the blackout really is theirs. Maybe they want to make us believe they’re hobbyist terrorists, although they’re not. Maybe they’re using crazy doodles to obscure their real agenda. Some of these so-called private-security people …” He left the sentence dangling.