Alchemist (6 page)

‘Don't you remember the words of our Lord, boy?' his father said. ‘
Although they claimed to be wise
,
they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles?
'

The boy stared, bewildered. No, he did not remember. He was six years old.

‘
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is forever praised. Amen
.'

The boy stared in silence.

‘Amen!' his father said again, more loudly. ‘
Amen
, boy!'

Daniel Judd warded off another blow from his mother by meekly mouthing, ‘Amen.'

There was a brief lull. He lay, terrified, hands by his sides, beneath the seething fury of his parents. Then his mother spoke, her eyes half closed, as if she were in a trance and receiving her instructions from a frequency into which she had just tuned. Her face softened from anger into a serene smile.

‘Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace. Because the sinful mind is hostile to God, it does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.'

‘You understand that, Daniel, don't you?' his father said, his voice gentle now, pleading.

The boy nodded meekly as his mother continued without pausing for breath. ‘You are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you.'

‘Does the Spirit of God live in you, Daniel?' his father asked.

The boy was silent for a moment then nodded.

‘Are you sure, boy?'

‘I'm sure, Father.' It came out as a frightened squeak.

‘You want to please God, boy?'

‘Yes, Father, I want to please God.'

‘If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ,' his mother said. ‘But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.'

‘Do you understand that, boy?' His father's voice had lost its gentleness.

The boy did not understand, the logic was beyond him. Yet he knew the answers that were expected, knew the only way to get peace, to avoid another slap, to avoid being thrashed or locked in the unheated shed in the garden all night. He nodded, and gave a weakly mouthed ‘Yes'.

‘You want the Spirit to be living in you, boy, or do you want eternal damnation?' his father said.

‘Spirit,' the boy mouthed.

‘Speak up, Daniel, I can't hear you and your mother can't hear you, and if we can't hear you the Lord our Father cannot hear you.'

‘Spirit,' the boy said again, more loudly, choking on the tears that guttered down his cheeks.

‘For if you live according to the sinful nature,' his mother continued, ‘you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live, because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.'

The father pressed his face close to his son's. So close the son could feel the warmth of human breath, could see chin stubble.

‘You do not want to commit any misdeeds of the body do you, boy? Assure your mother and I and, above all, assure our Lord.'

‘No mm-mm-middeeds,' the boy said in terror.

‘For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the spirit of sonship. And by him we cry,
Abba, Father
. The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.'

‘And you want to be one of God's children, don't you, boy? Not one of Satan's?'

‘God's children,' the boy mouthed.

‘Now if we are children, then we are heirs – heirs of God. Like Christ. And if we share in His sufferings it is in order that we may also share in His glory.'

His parents fell silent. Daniel watched their faces in turn; cold eyes raked him. He had let them down again, even in his sleep, in some way he did not comprehend.

‘Do you want us to save you from the Lord's wrath, boy?'

Daniel stared at his father and nodded meekly. He saw his mother slip out of the room.

His father asked again. ‘Are you sure you wouldn't rather enjoin with Satan? Suffer the eternal fires of damnation in Hell?'

The boy shook his head.

‘Shall we say the Lord's Prayer together, boy?'

Daniel nodded.

‘Our Father which art in Heaven,' his father began.

‘Our Father which art in Heaven,' the boy repeated as his mother returned to the room with two long leather straps. As they continued to recite the Lord's Prayer, she bound his left arm tightly by the wrist, then tugged it down the outside of the bed, looped the strap tightly around the outside of the metal
frame and secured it. Then she did the same with his right arm so that he was lying on his back with his arms pinioned down the outside of the bed.

‘It's for your own good,' his father said more gently when his mother had finished. ‘To save you from yourself in the eyes of the Lord. To save you from being tempted to touch your forbidden parts.'

‘To save us all from the Lord's wrath,' his mother added in her sour, loveless voice. ‘To save us from your sins.'

Then they turned the light off and closed the door.

London
.
October
,
1993

The Directors' dining room on the forty-ninth floor of the Bendix Building felt so light and airy it seemed to Monty almost impossible to believe that it had no hidden windows with natural daylight streaming in.

The décor was the same Regency grey and white colour scheme as the anteroom; it was furnished with a traditional oval mahogany dining table and matching chairs, and the walls were hung with Impressionist paintings, which was the school she loved most. There was a Degas still life on the wall behind her father, and she found herself unable to stop looking at it.
An original Degas. Not a print or a copy. She was eating her lunch in front of a real Degas!
She had never seen one outside a gallery before.

The menu was superb: grilled scallops, followed by fillet steak, and an exotic fruit salad, along with fine white and red wines.

At least her father had behaved himself so far. In fact, he had been remarkably good company, tucking into his meal and chatting convivially, mostly about genetics, more as if he were at a dinner party with favourite colleagues than at an interview on which his future might depend.

Rorke ate and drank with gusto as well; in contrast, Dr Crowe cut his food one sliver at a time, his slender fingers manipulating his cutlery with surgical deftness. Almost as a foil to Rorke's cheery ebullience, he sat quietly, whilst studying Monty and her father with alert, steely eyes that missed nothing.

He was a lean, sharp-featured man of fifty-two, with a narrow equine face, and his eyes were abnormally close together, giving an intensity to his gaze that Monty found rather unsettling. His lips were strange also, she thought. They were very thin, with a vermilion hue that stood out against his alabaster complexion, their effect being to make him look rather effete.

She had done her homework on Crowe and had been impressed by his background. It was rare in the pharmaceutical industry to have a chief exec who was a scientist, and Crowe undoubtedly could have had a very brilliant career in research if he'd chosen. He had graduated from Cambridge with a double first in biology and pharmacology, then gone to the United States where he had done his masters at John Hopkins on the immune system.

Back in Britain he'd spent three years as a research fellow at the Imperial Cancer Research Foundation. He'd then joined the Clinical Trials division of the Bendix Schere Foundation and become head of it after two years. At the age of thirty-six he was made the youngest main board director in the history of the company. Ten years later, in 1986, he was appointed Chief Executive on the sudden death of his predecessor, who was killed when the company jet crashed in mysterious circumstances during a routine visit to the Bendix Schere manufacturing plant in the Philippines.

Whilst Rorke was a man who had clearly reached the top through inborn leadership quality and force of personality, Crowe struck Monty as more of a manipulator. She had not taken a dislike to him, but at the same time had not warmed towards him in the way she had to Rorke. Yet she knew there were big advantages for her father in having a fellow scientist at the top of the company, because at least they could talk the same language.

Dick Bannerman pushed a wedge of cheese into his mouth, chewing ruminatively. ‘Sir Neil, one of the things that's always struck me as curious is the obsession with secrecy that your company – foundation – seems to have.'

Monty looked at the three men anxiously. This was the first hint of hostility from her father. Crowe impassively snapped a biscuit in half; in the silence it sounded like a gunshot.

Rorke smiled, and opened his hands expansively. ‘A very reasonable query, Dr Bannerman.'

Monty had noticed that, in spite of the conviviality of the luncheon, their hosts had made no overtures about relaxing the formalities and moving to first-name terms.

‘You see,' Rorke continued, ‘in our industry we encounter opposition from a great many sources. People object to the mark-ups we make on prescription pharmaceuticals, forgetting that the cost today of developing a new drug and bringing it to the market is upwards of one hundred million pounds, and that we only have a limited patent life in which to recoup those costs. And there are some very unpleasant fanatics among the Animal Rights lot – quite frankly as dangerous as some political terrorist groups. We keep information about our company secret to protect the shareholders, the directors and our staff. Simple as that.'

‘Would you be prepared to divulge the shareholders to me?'

After a brief exchanged glance with Crowe, Rorke smiled amiably. ‘We're going to put a proposal to you today, Dr Bannerman. If you accept it, I'm sure you'll find there are no secrets kept from you.'

Dick Bannerman leaned back in his chair and looked at the two men in turn. ‘So, what is the proposal?'

‘We'd like to give you a short tour first, show you some of the work we're doing here and the facilities we have – if you can spare the time?'

Rorke went to the door and opened it. As Monty walked through she sought Rorke's eye and he winked.

They went back into the lift they'd come up in. Rorke looked at the lens above the door and enunciated clearly: ‘Sixth floor.'

The door closed and the lift sank swiftly downwards.

‘How does that work?' Monty asked.

‘A combination of visual and voice recognition,' Crowe said, with a smile of satisfaction. ‘Computer identification security. It matches the face of the person giving the command to the image in its data base, combines it with the voice print, then accepts the command. Or denies it.'

The lift stopped and they stepped into a wide corridor with emerald carpeting and pale green walls. One side was much brighter than the other, as if bathed in rays of sunshine streaming through invisible skylights. The doors boasted elegant brass handles, and with the exception of the small observation windows cut into a few of them, and the faintly acrid smell, it felt more like the corridor of a modern five-star hotel than a laboratory.

Rorke inserted a card into a slot, punched a sequence of numbers on the key pad, then courteously ushered Monty and her father into another, equally plush corridor, which stretched into the distance. There was a row of notice boards on either side, with graphs, Department of Health and Safety regulations, and various posters, giving it a slightly more familiar air to Monty, and the acrid smell she always associated with molecular biology labs was stronger here.

‘On this floor and the next two above we do pure genetics research,' Crowe said, ‘and we also co-ordinate the results from our research campuses in Reading, Plymouth, Carlisle, Bern, Frankfurt and Charlottesville.'

‘You're in the process of building new labs at Slough, aren't you?' Dick Bannerman said.

‘Yes,' Vincent Crowe confirmed. ‘We're building a completely new research campus from scratch. When it's completed in three years' time it will house the largest transgenics laboratory facility in the world.'

‘And it's all underground, isn't it?' Dick Bannerman pursued.

Crowe stiffened fleetingly, then smiled. ‘The transgenics, yes. I wasn't aware that was public knowledge.'

‘Twenty-seven acres of underground labs, I believe?' Bannerman said, then stopped, momentarily distracted by a
computer screen on the wall that was an electronic notice board. The screen was headed:
BENDIX SCHERE NEWSNET,
and a flashing announcement beneath it read:
MATERNOX-11 RECEIVES FDA APPROVAL
.

‘Twenty-
eight
acres,' Crowe said.

‘Why underground? Security?'

‘Precisely.'

‘And you think that kind of environment will be conducive to work? To getting the best out of people?'

‘How do you find the atmosphere in here, Dr Bannerman?' Crowe asked.

‘It's very impressive,' he said. ‘I have to admit that. I find it hard to believe there aren't any windows.'

‘It won't be any different at Slough. There's no magic formula about daylight – in fact much of daylight, as you know, is highly corrosive. We've simply applied science, sifted the good qualities and filtered out the bad. Productivity here in the Bendix Building is thirty per cent higher than in conventional working environments.'