“You didn’t answer the question,” Grundy pointed out quietly. “What could Filisetti have found that turned a woman like Helen into a master criminal?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Lisa confessed, “but my guess is that what she thinks she found is evidence that Morgan discovered a means of extending mammalian life spans that works only on females. She thinks he’s been sitting on it for up to forty years, trying to figure out a way of making it work on males too. She thinks that because he had failed to do that, he was planning to hand it over to some organization that would carry on the work while maintaining the same kind of secrecy. When she confided all this to her radfem friends, they presumably ran the same background checks on Ahasuerus and the Algenists that Peter Smith ran, and came across all the same tabloid legends. Both institutions are rumored to have exotic secret agendas—but who isn’t nowadays? Ahasuerus is said to have been set up specifically to find a means of conferring emortality upon its illustrious male founder, Adam Zimmerman, and the Algenists are misunderstood by their severest critics to be trying to create a Naziesque master race. You can see how that sort of bad press might raise radfem hackles.”
“I can easily imagine Helen getting excited about that kind of thing,” Mike admitted wryly. “In fact, I don’t have to imagine it. Imagining her as a criminal mastermind dispatching gangs of assassins and bombers is a different matter, though.”
“They think I’m in on it,” Lisa added, shivering in a sudden gust of cold wind. “They think I’ve known all about it since day one, but that I’ve kept quiet. Stella and Helen have convinced themselves that I’ve been prepared to go along with Morgan’s plans in return for a promise that I’d eventually be paid off with the treatment, thus betraying the sacred principles of sisterhood. That’s why they sprayed Traitor’ on my door and tried to shake me up by telling me that Morgan never really intended to cut me in. Can I go now?”
Grundy was still dubious. “I’m no fan of Helen’s nowadays,” he said, “but this is way beyond her. She might conceivably be involved, but she can’t possibly be the one behind it.”
“She’s more than involved, Mike,” Lisa told him, hoping she’d read that part of the puzzle right. “This whole thing’s been too personalThat’s partly down to Stella, but only partly.”
“That doesn’t make sense either,” he objected. “We live in crazy times, but—”
“It’s not just the crazy times,” Lisa told him, determined to put her point across quickly so she could move on. “The sense of impending doom that Containment and the undeclared war have cultivated undoubtedly helped to shove them over the edge, but they’re taking it verypersonally. Stella Filisetti doesn’t know Morgan the way I do, and I doubt if she can relate to his way of life the way I could. She feels let down because he didn’t change into Mister Right the moment he started screwing her. She’s magnified that sense of betrayal into something much greater. And Helen doesn’t know methe way you do. She didn’t understand what happened after she threw you out, any more than she ever understood that we really were friends.She was all set up to believe the very worst of me. They’ve inflated their personal frustrations into a much grander paranoia—a conviction that something immensely valuable is being withheld from them by people they know. They think they’re being left to die while less worthy acquaintances are plotting to survive the impending catastrophe and come through it with a secure position in the pockets of the rulers of the new world. Hell, even Peter Grimmett Smith of the MOD is a sucker for tales of the Secret Masters and the Ice Age Elite. The only difference is that he’s either too shrewd or too contemptuous to believe that someone like me could ever be a part of that kind of conspiracy. Stella isn’t. Nor, alas, is Helen.”
“If you say so,” Grundy conceded reluctantly. “But even if you’re right, it ought to be me who goes after Helen, not you.”
“It has to be me, Mike,” Lisa told him. “It’s because I know Morgan better than anyone else does that I knowthis farce is founded on a colossal mistake. I’m the only one who can convince the radfems of that fact. Morgan obviously couldn’t.”
“Maybe no one can,” he suggested.
“Maybe not—but I don’t have time to argue, Mike. I have to go now.”
Chan had already moved to Mike’s side. He was waiting, with a meekness so exaggerated that it was almost insulting, for further orders. Mike looked sideways at him, as if reading a message from his slumped shoulders and sleepless eyes. “I suppose you have considered the possibility that they might be right, Lis?” he said finally.
That one was too important to leave unanswered, but all Lisa said was “Yes.”
Of course she’d considered the possibility that Stella really had found what she thought she had—but she’d rejected it. If Morgan Miller had discovered a life-extension treatment whose only deficiency was that it worked only on women, he wouldn’t have kept it entirely to himself. Even Helen Grundy and Stella Filisetti didn’t think that badly of him. They thought badly enough of Lisa to believe she’d conspired with him to keep it quiet, but they hadn’t been able to suppose that Morgan would simply let her grow old and die with all the rest. Even they accepted that if Morgan Miller had drawn up a list of his own personal Ice Age Elite, she would be on it.
There had to be something else: something that Stella Filisetti had missed; some obstacle that Morgan had stumbled over, that had carried on bruising his shins for forty years.
Lisa wanted to tell Mike that she was deeply sorry he had been caught up in it, and sorry that his ex-wife’s meddling would surely torpedo his attempts to cling to the vestiges of his career. She wanted to commiserate with him because her own career had been similarly blighted. She wanted to tell him, in the most heartfelt manner she could contrive, that it might all be for the best, because they should never have allowed themselves to sink so deeply into the ruts that had somehow consumed their lives. She wanted to try to convince him that they had been good citizen mice for far too long, putting up no resistance to the shrinkage of their personal space, refusing to get excited about the stultification of their options. She wanted to ask him whether it was really all bad to be a Calhounian rat, raging against the injustice of circumstance. She wanted to assure him that everything might still work out for the best, not merely for themselves, but for the world.
But she had no time.
Even if it had all been true, she had no time.
“Okay,” Grundy said when the silence had dragged on and on to the limits of bearability, even though it had lasted no more than ten or fifteen seconds. “Go.”
“You have to go first,” Lisa told him, “but you’ll have to leave your mobile with me. I need to use it.”
Chan had already moved around the Rover to the passenger door. Lisa’s final demand was a trifle excessive, but Mike didn’t have to ask why she wanted the phone. He simply nodded and handed it over before turning on his heel and opening the driver’s door. He glanced back only once before getting in and slamming it shut. Then he drove away, so fast that his onboard computer had to be flashing red warnings. Lisa pressed the automatic-dial button on Grundy’s phone and then hit 1.
The surge of relief she felt when Helen Grundy answered on the second ring with a monosyllabic “Yes?” hit Lisa like a tidal wave. She knew how utterly foolish she would have felt had she been unable to make that crucial contact.
“It’s Lisa Friemann, Helen,” she said, her voice sounding so leaden in her ears that she could hardly recognize it as her own. “We need to talk.”
On another occasion, under different circumstances, Lisa might have found something to savor in the silence that followed, knowing as she did what a heady cocktail of shock and fear must have prompted it. On this occasion, she was content merely to wait for a further response.