Alchemist (84 page)

‘Yes,' the male voice interrupted. ‘We are very sorry to hear about Dr Bannerman's stroke. We have him down as cancelled.'

‘
Stroke?
' she echoed. ‘Did you say
stroke
?'

‘That's the information I have. We were informed by fax – is there –?' His words hung in the air.

‘I – I'm sorry – I think, I – I didn't realize someone had already been in touch.' She thanked him lamely and hung up.

‘Stroke,' she repeated automatically to Conor. ‘Someone from Bendix Schere has rung the Symposium office and told them Daddy's had a stroke.'

Conor was working on his laptop which had arrived in his suitcase by taxi from Dave Schwab's home a short while ago, and he barely looked up. ‘They'll have it all in hand, you can be sure as hell of that.'

‘But, Conor –'

‘Your father has not had a stroke.'

Monty turned round, startled, to see Tabitha Donoghue striding into the room, dressed, as yesterday, all in black.

‘He's being held against his will but he's not sick and he's not injured,' she said. ‘I can't tell exactly what they're doing to him, but I would guess he's been doped.' Then the tone of her voice changed, and she jerked her head towards the window. ‘We have company.'

‘Like who?' Conor said.

‘I just took a walk down to the gates. Two guys in a blue Chevrolet parked a hundred yards down the hill; third time I've checked – they've been there all morning.'

It felt as if the temperature in the room had suddenly dropped. Although Monty had been expecting a tail, the confirmation scared her.

Tabitha sat down beside her and examined the weals on her neck for a moment. ‘They're doing fine. I'll lend you a turtleneck to hide them when we leave. We're booked on a seven o'clock flight to Heathrow.'

‘
We?
'

‘I'm coming with you.'

Monty had come to accept Tabitha, for all her strange aura, and she was gladdened by this news. Not least because there was safety in numbers. Wasn't there? She glanced at her watch. It was midday. ‘We can't get – there – there's no flight sooner?'

‘Nothing that's going to make much difference. As we're being watched, I think it's smarter to wait here and leave after dark. I've also made smokescreen reservations in our names on other airlines to Los Angeles, Rome, New York, Hong Kong and Sydney.'

‘Dark or not, we're going to have a problem with the guys outside the gates when we leave,' Conor contributed.

His mother smiled. ‘That's taken care of. I have a good friend in the local police. I just have to call him an hour beforehand. He'll have those creeps tied up every which way to Sunday in a stolen vehicle check, and he's going to give us an escort right to the airport and on to the plane.'

She turned to Monty next. ‘As for you, my dear, we're going to have to make sure you use all the protection protocols. This Crowe character has forged a very strong link through to you; when a channel like that has been opened once, it can be reopened very easily. Any dairy products will heighten your emotional responses, particularly fear. We need to damp your emotions right down so they become harder for anyone outside to manipulate.'

Monty frowned; she found it hard to believe that milk or butter could make any difference. It was her life she was worried about, not her diet.

But Tabitha had not finished. ‘Do you wear your crucifix for any special reason?'

‘Yes, it's sentimental; it belonged to my mother. Do you think it can help?'

She looked at Monty reproachfully. ‘I've never understood why people think carrying the symbol of Christ around is going to act like some magic shield. We're talking about psychic attack, not religion, OK?'

Monty nodded, rebuked.

Tabitha tapped her head. ‘You do realize that we're dealing with the occult here, don't you? And the occult is about harnessing the powers of the planet, of the universe, of the human mind. It's about living forces, not dead gurus.'

Monty already felt out of her depth; but there was more to come.

‘Satan is a logo, Monty. A brand name, a product packaged and sold by the Church; a big stick to beat the flock with and keep them in line. And the Church's very convenient bogeyman.' Tabitha Donoghue looked at her solemnly. ‘The people we're up against aren't interested in that kind of mumbo-jumbo claptrap. They may use all the black imagery, but what they're about is
power
. And power comes through control: the control of the physical, the control of the mind. The power that can enable a man three thousand miles away to persuade a rational young woman to stand on a rickety table and wind a wire around her neck.'

Monty was genuinely intrigued and just wished that the drama they were talking about had a different cast. ‘Where does this power come from – and how is it harnessed?' she asked.

‘It comes from the natural energies of our planet, our universe, our minds and our bodies. I think we may find the answer one day in quantum mechanics. The old scientists used to believe that the mind and the universe were separate, and that the universe was greater than either any individual human mind, or the sum of all human minds. But right now no one understands or can define the real extent of the powers of the human mind.'

Monty nodded; she could accept that.

‘I will give you as much protection as I can, Monty, but I can't guarantee it's going to be enough,' Tabitha continued.
‘You need to take salt-water baths to purify your auras. Anyone under psychic attack must work from the outside in. Salt water will help shield you from Crowe's attempts to project to you.' She lit a cigarette, and gave Monty a smile of encouragement. ‘You see, they have to make a dent in your aura before they can attack. When you feel under attack you have to try to visualize your aura as a shield.'

Monty remembered in a scientific magazine once seeing photographs of people's auras; they looked like psychedelic space-suits. She tried to picture her own aura as a shield, but the image was elusive. ‘How often do I have to take a salt bath?'

‘Daily. And I'm going to give you a visualization to do.' She glanced at Conor, then looked back at Monty. ‘I want you to think of a gold cross in your solar plexus and another at the base of your skull. Not religious crosses, just two pieces of gold intersecting. These are the two mega-nerve meeting points in the body.'

Monty looked down at the area of her own solar plexus, then touched the base of her skull with her fingers. The movement hurt her neck muscles.

‘Have you ever studied martial arts, Monty?'

‘No.'

‘These are the points in martial arts to go for. If you visualize strongly enough you get them radiating gold, and if the attack is very violent you can make them radiate white lights. You can't maintain it for long, because you'll get violent headaches if you try. But whoever's perpetrating the attack cannot maintain their energy level for long either. Remember that.'

She tapped some ash off, then drew on her cigarette again. ‘You need to have salt with you all the time. Wherever you are, make a circle of salt and stay inside it. Nothing can live in salt, and nothing of a psychic nature can pass through it.'

She opened her handbag and removed from it a small piece of paper folded inside a zipped freezer bag, which she handed to Monty. ‘Conor already has one of these.'

Monty opened the clear bag, took out the paper and unfolded it. It was covered in a mass of letters and symbols.

‘You keep it in the bag because you mustn't wet it – it can cause havoc if that happens, like something electrical shorting out. It's called a Lumiel square and it'll be your protective talisman. Keep it with you and it'll protect you physically and mentally. It will also protect your soul.' She nodded reassuringly, as if trying to dispel Monty's scepticism.

‘I used to have a young woman in one of my development circles when I worked as a medium. She always carried one of these. Well, she was in a real bad car smash. Of five kids, three were killed, and one is in a persistent vegetative state. But she got out with just a few scratches.'

Accepting the Lumiel square, as she was accepting everything right now, Monty thanked the older woman warmly.

Tabitha leaned back reflectively. ‘And to think I believed I'd left all this stuff behind years ago. I never intended, ever, to get back into all this shit.'

‘I don't think any of us
intended
–' Monty began.

Tabitha cut her short. ‘Uh oh. Conor very definitely
intended
. From the day his daddy died it's been there, chewing him up, the thought of those big bad guys who harmed his pa. It's driven his whole life.' She smiled sadly. ‘I've tried for twenty-six years to talk him into letting it go; tried to tell him that he doesn't understand the power of what he's up against. Now, at last, I think he does understand. But perhaps just a little bit too late in the day.'

‘Whatever the reasons, Mrs Donoghue, he's done the right thing. Wasn't it Edmund Burke who said,
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing
?'

Tabitha stared at her with dark eyes that combined respect and anguish. Monty felt the first hint of acknowledgement of a bond between them.

‘My mother was a medium and a healer, Monty. She spent her life rescuing people who had gotten caught up in the occult.' Tabitha took out another cigarette. ‘You did your history at school?'

‘Yes.'

‘Remember when people laid siege to a walled city? Very few attackers ever won by knocking those walls down. They
won by patience, by tactics, by infiltration, getting inside knowledge, inside help, sneaking inside with the wooden horse of Troy, attacking from within, opening the gates from the inside.'

‘That's exactly what we've been doing,' Conor said, looking up.

‘Bullshit!' Tabitha said. ‘How long have you been there? Less than two months and you've caused mayhem. You tried to knock down the castle walls in one go and now they're swarming out at you, mad as hell. You're not going to beat them this way, Conor, no way in Hell.'

‘I'm going to beat them,' he said quietly. ‘You'd better believe it.'

His mother looked at him in silence with an expression of such sadness on her face that it made Monty feel for her. ‘That's what your daddy said. Those were his exact words.'

Thursday 8 December, 1994

Nikky Fitzhugh-Porter listened, eyes closed in an attempt to return to sleep, through the sequence of Gunn's morning ablutions. The ringing of his long, hard stream of urine; the vigorous shower; the scraping of his razor; the hiss of his deodorant spray. Footsteps; the rustle of clothes.

Then she was aware of him standing over her, could smell his indifferent Yardley cologne, felt the brief touch of his lips on her cheek.

‘Call you later,' he said.

She heard the door open and close. A train rumbled by outside. She opened her eyes and squinted at the clock-radio. It was 6.45. Too early, much too early. She should wait until after nine, she decided, but in her agitated state, brain whirring, she was unable to go back to sleep. She passed the time by trying to concentrate her thoughts on the term paper
she had done on Graham Greene and which she was scheduled to discuss with her tutor at midday.

At 7.30, unable to lie still, she got up and showered. When she towelled herself, the crummy bedsitting room felt even more cold and draughty than usual. Perhaps it was her nerves.

When she had dressed, she walked across the threadbare carpet to the door and peered out at the landing. No one there; no footsteps; he was an efficient man and she had never known him return home because he'd forgotten something, but even so she did not want the embarrassment of being caught.

Satisfied the coast was clear, she began a hasty search of the room: cupboards, drawers, careful not to disturb anything. Then she looked under the bed, and even under the carpet, but she found nothing. What she was looking for was stored safely away on the hard disk of his laptop computer which he had taken with him, as always, in his briefcase.

But there was a small copy of it still stored inside her own brain. Not much, not enough to provide her with any answers, but enough to provide plenty of concern.

The phone had rung at three o'clock that morning. Gunn had answered it, whispering, and she had pretended to be asleep. The conversation had been brief and Gunn had sounded furious.

Molloy? And the Bannerman woman? They're not? What the hell's going on over there? You have them nailed down? In a house? Can't you go in and neutralize? Why not? – is it a house or is it fucking Fort Knox?

Molloy and the Bannerman woman. Two names on the list that'd had black Christmas trees marked beside them on Gunn's computer. She went into the tiny kitchenette to make herself a cup of coffee. The atmosphere stank permanently of the fry-ups on which Gunn lived when she didn't cook for him. For some reason she found that the lack of fresh air stimulated her. She could picture that list clearly.

Charles Rowley
had been on it. He had drowned in Hawaii, she had read in the Bendix Schere magazine.
Molloy
had been there too. And so had
Bannerman
.

The Bannerman woman's MG had been blown up by a
bomb. After what she had listened to during the night, she figured it did not need a degree in rocket science to work out that her soldier boy had been instructing someone to kill.

She left the bedsit for Ealing Broadway, and passed the next hour by having a café breakfast. Then she went off in search of a pay phone.

A woman's voice answered, brisk and efficient. ‘New Scotland Yard.'

Nikky glanced warily through the windows of the booth. There was no need to be scared, she knew, there was no way that Gunn was suddenly going to appear. So why had she got the shakes? ‘I want to report something suspicious,' she said.