“Maybe,” Lisa concurred. “The blackout—”
She broke off when Mike cursed. An old red Nissan had zoomed across his path as he approached the junction of North Road and Ralph Allen’s Drive, even though it was his right of way. He kept his foot on the accelerator regardless. He had switched off the computer’s warning bell, but it took only three seconds for the dashboard screen to bring up a red-lettered message stating that although the primary responsibility for the near miss lay with the other vehicle, the person in charge of the Rover was nevertheless guilty of “contributory negligence.”
Lisa wondered what conditions were like in the town center. The roadside digicams were self-contained and battery-powered, so they hadn’t been disabled by the general blackout, but they weren’t equipped to see in darkness as intense as that which had descended in the wake of the power cut. There were plenty of kids on the new estates west of the campus who might figure that this was the ideal time for joyriding. It might not be just teenagers, either—all the drivers in England tended to take whatever opportunities they found nowadays to exceed the claustrophobic legal restrictions on their speed and movement, no matter what their onboard computers dumped into their black boxes. Mercifully, it was nearly five o’clock in the morning and there wouldn’t be many honest citizens on the roads, except for those driving delivery vans. The vast majority of people tucked up in their beds wouldn’t know when they woke up that there had been a blackout.
Lisa was about to resume her observation about the blackout when Mike’s phone rang. He snatched the handset up and pressed it to his ear. Lisa cocked her own ear as if to listen, although she couldn’t possibly make sense of the slight leakage of sound. She had to wait for him to put the phone down again to receive the news.
“It’s not Miller,” he said tersely. “The body in the corridor, that is. The wafer from the corridor’s best-placed eye shows Ed Burdillon going in after the bombers. They shot him—but they didn’t leave him to burn. He’s been taken to the hospital, but the paramedics reckon he’ll be okay. He’s unlikely to have been a preselected target, given that the perpetrators took the trouble to drag him clear before the bomb went off. Probably just unlucky—wrong place, wrong time. On the other hand …”
Lisa’s stomach had lurched in response to the news that a man she had known for nearly forty years had been hurt, but not as much as it might have done had the man been Morgan Miller.
Edgar Burdillon had been head of the Department of Applied Genetics for nearly twenty years; in the eyes of far too many half-baked, anti-GM fanatics, that made him personally responsible for the rape and near murder of Mother Gaea, secret plans to manufacture a super race, high unemployment, the torture of innocent animals, and the attempted usurpation of the female prerogative. Now that the government was openly considering stringent containment measures, there would be hundreds of crazies ready to assume that he was also fully involved in developing the weapons that would be used to fight the First Plague War. Ed’s days as a fashionable media pet were a long way behind him, but he had never been shy about issuing propaganda for biotechnology. He had been attacked before, but only at the nuisance level of egg-throwing, poison-pen letters, and acid on the hood of his car. Morgan Miller had suffered as much—and Chan Kwai Keung still had Hong Kong connections, which would make him personally responsible in the eyes of some madmen for at least one of the epidemics that the governments of Europe and America would soon be trying their utmost to “contain.”
Lisa blinked as the Rover hurtled across what had once been Claverton Down toward the industrial park erected when the old quarries had been filled and leveled. The multitudinous lights of the campus were already vivid in the gloom. The Applied Genetics building was just north of the Avenue, and she could already see the flashing blue lights on the fire apparatus gathered on the south side of the campus. The pall of smoke above them was stained an ugly shade of pink by that fraction of the sodium light it reflected back to the ground.
It can’t be anything I’ve given him, she told herself while she ran through a mental list of the tasks she had thrown Ed Burdillon’s way during the last year in her capacity as a pen-pusher. Yes, there had been investigations concerned with DNA polluted by “viral anomalies,” but there had been nothing that looked remotely like hostile action. The MOD had undoubtedly sent work to the department, for which Ed would have taken personal responsibility, but whatever the half-baked might think, England’s green and pleasant campuses were not awash with GM weapons capable of wiping out the population of a cityplex the size of Bristol in a matter of days. Viruses simply weren’t tough enough to wreak that kind of havoc in a world where civilized people were willing and able to observe elementary standards of hygiene, and their much-touted propensity to mutate was a thousand times more likely to render them harmless than to increase their lethal force. Bacteria designed for immunity to common antibiotics were slightly more dangerous, but every household armed with bleach and detergents was a virtual fortress—and Burdillon had been a virus man through and through ever since the early days of magic bullets.
They came at me too, she reminded herself. They were looking for something in my files.Even after scrupulous reexamination, however, she couldn’t find a likely link. Almost all of the work she had subcontracted to the university labs during the last three decades had had to do with problematic DNA sequences gleaned from everyday crime scenes. Not even any mass murders, let alone any sensitive industrial espionage. If Ed and she had somehow contrived to get under the skin of some rival establishment—which would presumably be a megacorp rather than a foreign government nowadays—she certainly had no idea of how they had done it.
As the Rover zoomed past a baker’s van carrying the morning quota of bread to the circus-starved masses, the driver made V signs at Mike, not caring in the least that he might be en route to an emergency. If he had known exactly who Detective Inspector Grundy was, he would probably have redoubled the vehemence of his gestures.
“And you!” Lisa muttered, loudly enough to startle herself. Mike glanced at her, but made no comment.
They were almost at the campus gate; the headlights had picked out the red-and-white stripes on the barrier.
The security guard didn’t wait to inspect the passcard Mike was fumbling from his pocket—he presumably figured that anyone in a black Rover who wanted to get in must have a legitimate mission. Reporters always drove brightly colored Italian cars and never got out of bed at five o’clock on an October morning.
Lisa wondered whether the team that was flying out from London by helicopter might be just for show, but it seemed unlikely. Until they had more information about the motive for the attack, the Ministry of Defence would be obliged to treat the incident as a possible threat to national security. Even if some lunatic fringe organization like the Defenders of Mother Gaea or the New Luddites were to own up to the crime campaign before noon, the MOD would probably want to remain involved, if only to keep a heavy foot on the toes of the Special Branch. Hobbyist terrorists were perversely unwilling to accommodate their missions and objectives to the neat divisions of responsibility set out by the last wave of institutional reorganizations.
It had been some months since Lisa had last visited the university in person, but the campus still felt more like home than her actual home. She had only to visit it twice or three times a year to maintain the force of impressions stamped on her psyche nearly forty years before, when she’d started her course of postgraduate study under the supervision of Dr. Morgan Miller.