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.It’s not our fault, but we’re finished in the police force.”Mike looked at her curiously, but all he said was: “Nice suit.Where’s your belt?”“I had to put it in for cleaning,” she said.“I don’t suppose you’ve had that old wreck swept recently?”“As a matter of fact,” he told her, half turning to look down at the roof of his car, “our noble leader ordered a check on all vehicles as soon as it was obvious that the station had become leaky.You can never be a hundred-percent certain, of course, but I think I’m clean.If you can say the same, no one is listening in on us.”“Good,” she said.“It doesn’t make a lot of difference at this stage, but it would be nice to have the moment to ourselves.I’ve no time to spare so I’ll just say what I need to say.Helen’s involved in Morgan’s kidnapping.She probably thinks she’s in charge, but if she ever actually was, her authority must have grown pretty shaky by now.”The disbelief inscribed on Mike’s features was a sight to behold, but he didn’t contradict her.Instead, he let the thought linger for a moment while he studied Lisa’s face for signs of insanity.He was shaking his head slightly, but it was as much confusion as denial.In the end, all he said was: “What makes you so sure?”“It first occurred to me when Stella Filisetti referred to you as my ‘second-string boyfriend.’ There’s no way she could have got that from Morgan, or from university gossip—and Judith Kenna certainly didn’t tell her.It explained how the kidnappers got the passwords that blacked out our end of the ‘plex, and how the intruders got through my locks so easily, but I wasn’t absolutely sure until Smith told me about the contact search he ran on Stella and the Real Woman.If the threads leading to all three of the leading names had been planted, it would have been a meaningless joke.Two of the spoilers had to have been added to prevent the third name from standing out like a sore thumb—and I’m reasonably certain that the chief inspector didn’t do it.I’ll lay odds that you didn’t change your passwords to the police systems after the split, and that you wrote down the pass codes to the locks at my flat somewhere that someone who knew your habits very well could easily find.”Mike considered the catalogue of clues for a moment or so, nobly refraining from making any comment on the circumstantiality of the evidence.“Okay,” he said finally.“Why?”“Stella found something, maybe in Mouseworld and maybe in one of Morgan’s computers.Whichever one it was, it made her check the other, and she found confirmation.She put those two together with a further two from Morgan’s trips to Ahasuerus and the Institute of Algeny, and made far more than five.She’d probably confided her suspicions to her radfem friends already, but the fact that Morgan was talking to Goldfarb and Geyer spooked them sufficiently to take action.They may have a handful of hobbyist terrorists along—that’s probably where they got the weapons, the accelerant they used in Mouseworld, and the idiotic posing—but they’re not really an organized gang.Even if they’ve managed to get Arachne West on the team, as seems probable, they’re still the rankest kind of amateurs.Unfortunately, that doesn’t make them any less dangerous.When the computer team clears out all the disinformation, Smith and Kenna will move a whole task force against the couriers carrying Stella’s stolen mice, but I figure that I have at least a couple of hours to try to get Morgan out quietly before the shit hits the fan.That’s what I’m going to do, while you ferry Chan to the Renaissance.”“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 personal That’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
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