Mind Control: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 2) (20 page)

Norm the Norm appeared to have no retort and stood, gripping tightly to the handrail, as Hodges passed him.

He still had that annoyed expression as he watched Michael follow. “Sanderson?” he asked.

“Sorry, sir,” said Michael. “I really wanted to give a girl a bunch of flowers.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE SECURITY GUARD
at the Andrew Huxley Building at UCL rang ahead to inform Doctor Saul Lucas that he had a visit from the police. So it was a smiling and nervous Doctor Saul Lucas who answered his door to Michael and Sergeant Patterson.

With only a few dark strands in his otherwise white hair, he was an older man in his fifties with black-rimmed, square-lensed glasses that dominated his face. He looked every bit the scientist with a pristine white lab coat buttoned up so there was very little of his shirt and trousers visible underneath. “Come in, come in …”

He ushered Patterson and Michael inside to what was not really a laboratory or an office, but a strange mixture of the two. Down one side was a bench crammed with scientific equipment, some bits of which Michael recognised like the centrifuge, microscope and rack of pipettes, as well as some bits he didn’t. Two stools, much like bar stools, were tucked under the bench at the near end, while at the far end a glass-fronted fridge quietly rumbled to keep cool its contents of neatly labelled test tubes. Next to it was a standard desk with computer, telephone and a mass of papers which didn’t look so much piled up, as discarded on its surface. Above it, on the wall, was a corkboard literally covered with pieces of paper pinned on top of each other. To Michael’s untrained eye, the spreadsheets of numbers and graphs meant nothing, although there were also a few colour pictures which he recognised as MRI brain scans.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” said Doctor Lucas, sitting down behind his desk in the one and only chair in the room. He leant back as casually as if it had been a sofa.

He didn’t, however, offer anyone else a seat. Michael perceived that Patterson didn’t think that was very welcoming, but it was fine, as he felt more in control if he could stand. Michael, meanwhile, perched himself up on one of the stools.

“What can I do for the Metropolitan Police today?” said Lucas.

Patterson got out his phone and brought up an image of James Hetherington. It was a couple of years out of date because it had been pulled from school records, but it was a good likeness. “What can you tell me about this boy?”

Lucas leant forward, peering at Patterson’s phone first with his glasses on, then pushing his glasses up onto his forehead to stare with naked eyes. The picture gave him a sting of recognition:
James Hetherington
, said his mind, but his body language said the opposite as he sat back in his chair and shook his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know him.”

“His name is James Hetherington,” said Patterson.

“Really?”

“He was a perceiver who you signed off after being cured.”

“Was he?” said Lucas. His mind was racing, trying to work out what the police knew, what they wanted to know and how he could deflect their interest. “That was a long time ago, Sergeant Patterson, I can’t possibly remember every child I saw.”

“It was only a year ago.”

“Really? It was a blip in my career, I’ve mostly forgotten about it.”

“Why were you working at the cure clinic, Doctor Lucas? It seems a strange thing for a neuroscientist to be doing.”

Lucas dodged the question with one of his own. “Have you ever worked in science, Sergeant Patterson?”

Patterson grimaced at his facetious question. “Funnily enough, I haven’t.”

Lucas smiled, calming himself with the belief he was steering the policeman away from the sort of questions he didn’t want to answer. “Scientific research is all about chasing grants. Writing proposals to get the money to carry out the research that you want to carry out, constantly under pressure to publish papers to show your research is garnering results in order to keep getting the grants so you can keep working. Unfortunately, a year ago, I entered a dry patch. No one wanted to pay for neuroscience research and I needed the work. The cure clinics were hiring and so I got a job there, but it’s not something I put on my CV. I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention it to my colleagues.”

“Of course,” said Patterson. “It’s just that this boy, James Hetherington, wasn’t cured at all. He’s still a perceiver. Do you know anything about that?”

Lucas shook his head again, but inside he was panicking. He needed to find out what the policeman knew, but without tipping his hand. And he needed to warn the boy, to call him as soon as the police were out of his office. Except,
what if they’d tapped his phone?
What if they got a warrant to search his office?
He needed to get rid of them, and get rid of them soon. “I don’t know anything about that, I’m afraid,” said Lucas. “I just administered the injections, I didn’t monitor if they were effective or not. Perhaps you should address your questions to the people who run the cure programme.”

“Of course,” said Patterson, playing the man at his own game, stringing him along by acting ignorant. “It’s just that your name was on the form and I needed to start somewhere.”

“I understand,” said Lucas, getting up from his chair and walking over to Patterson as if to show him out. “As I say, I gave the injections and signed the form. I don’t even remember this boy. Sorry you had a wasted journey.”

Michael jumped off his stool. As they were talking and he was perceiving them, he was also looking at the images on the wall. Especially one particular brain scan with a large area lit up in red. “Isn’t that the area where perception is active?” he said.

“What?” said Lucas.

“That area of the brain,” said Michael, approaching the scan on the pin board. “Isn’t that the bit that lights up in perceivers?”

Lucas, disgruntled at having his efforts to get the police contingent out of his lab interrupted, viewed the scan with a cursory look. “That’s the primary somatic sensory cortex,” he said. “I think that scan was taken when the subject was eating chocolate and listening to Mozart.”

“I thought it only lit up like that in a perceiver,” said Michael, knowing his own brain was lighting up at that very moment as he perceived Lucas was lying. He noticed that, on the bottom of the scan was printed a date which showed it was taken three months earlier and there was a subject code which said simply: ‘E48’.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Lucas. “It’s been a long time since I read about that area of research.”
Who is this kid?

“What
is
your area of research?” asked Michael.

Lucas turned to Patterson. “Sergeant, are these questions really necessary? I have a report to write and I’m close to my deadline.”

Another lie. It meant Lucas really didn’t want Michael poking around in his lab, which only gave him the incentive to poke around some more.

Now closer to the desk, Michael cast his eye over the scattered papers. There were more spreadsheets, pages of hand-written notes that he couldn’t easily decipher and one cardboard file which he desperately wanted to look inside because it had the code E48 typed on the cover.

“I’m just interested,” said Michael, turning to look at the bench of the lab, still not recognising any of the equipment beyond the centrifuge, microscope and pipettes.

“If you must know,” said Lucas, his irritation starting to show in his voice. “I’m looking into neurological development in adolescents and its possible application in the treatment of dementia.”

Michael crouched down in front of the fridge. Now that he could see directly through the glass door, he realised the test tubes inside were actually vials of liquid, some of it clear and some blood red.

“No, not in there!” Lucas rushed over as Michael touched the handle of the fridge. “The temperature is strictly controlled. It should only be opened if absolutely necessary.”

There was an element of truth to what Lucas was saying, but Michael perceived he was also afraid of Michael finding out what the fridge contained. Each blood sample was labelled with a date and a code, many of which read E48. Lucas stepped in front of the fridge, blocking his view and forcing him to drop his grip on the handle. Just before he did so, Michael read the label on a vial of blood on the top shelf. The date was the day of the fire that nearly killed him and the label did not contain a code, but a name in quotation marks: ‘Michael’.

Michael felt a chill run through him as he stepped back from the fridge and away from the scientist. Was that what the man was hiding? Samples of his own blood kept ready to be experimented on? He remembered the stab of the needle in the derelict office and the way Hetherington had stared at him with cold, hazel eyes.

“Now I must insist you leave,” said Lucas. “I really have to write that report.”

He really didn’t, but Michael had perceived enough and joined Patterson at the door.

“Thank you for your time, Doctor Lucas,” said Patterson and they left.

Out in the corridor, just far enough away so Lucas couldn’t hear, Michael stopped. “He’s lying,” he said to Patterson.

“I figured,” said the policeman.

“About a lot of things,” said Michael.

~

PATTERSON AND MICHAEL
joined Jones in his office and closed the door. Now that a perceiver was at the centre of their investigation, it was no longer appropriate to hold a briefing involving all of the officers working on the inquiry.

Jones didn’t take a seat, but stood behind his desk, hands on his hips with the flaps of his jacket pushed back so the paunch of his stomach was visible hanging over the belt of his trousers. Michael perceived the man was worried, the investigation was slipping away from him, and the crazy secrets that surrounded the perceivers programme were hampering his ability to pull in all the resources he would usually employ.

Not Patterson. Patterson was excited. He stood on the other side of the desk, his eyes wide as he went through all the evidence in his head. Soon, he believed, they would have enough to make an arrest, if not several arrests.

Michael stood somewhere in the middle, both literally and figuratively. He was tired and wanted to sit down, but because the detectives were standing, he leant against the side wall of Jones’s office, watching and perceiving them both in equal measure. He trusted the detectives to do their job, but he wasn’t sure arresting people would be enough. If they caught Hetherington, they could charge him with something like conspiracy to murder, but they couldn’t try him in open court without letting some very large and unpredictable cats out of the bag. They could hand him over to the cure programme and have him stripped of his perception, but all that would achieve would be to stop Hetherington doing it again. Michael wasn’t sure that was enough. He also couldn’t get the image out of his head of the vials of his blood in Lucas’s fridge. He feared the whole thing was much larger than one boy pushing his will onto others.

“It’s the Russians,” Patterson announced.

“Russians?” said Jones.

“Tania’s been working up some background on the case. It’s sort of complicated, but—” Patterson looked around the office. “Have you got any paper?”

“Yeah,” said Jones. He pulled out the tray of the printer on his desk and drew out a pristine white sheet.

“Perfect.” Patterson laid it on the desk in front of him. Jones peered over his computer monitor to see.

Patterson reached for Jones’s desk tidy and took the first pen his hand touched. It was a retractable biro. He clicked the top, revealing the tip, and wrote a large ‘R’ at the top left hand corner in faltering blue ink. He swore. He reached back to the desk tidy, fingered through the other pens and found one that was sleek, black and more to his liking. He pulled off the lid to reveal a fibre tip. He traced over the ‘R’, making a clear mark in black ink and continued with other letters until it read, ‘Rublev’.

“We know Rublev was a Russian dissident, right?” He looked round the room to make sure the others were following. “Not exactly a popular guy with the current Russian administration. If anyone wanted him dead, it was them.”

“Except we know he was killed – well, fatally poisoned – by a British journalist,” said Jones.

“Elkins did the deed,” said Patterson, “but like Michael said before, he might have been programmed to do it. I think the Russians were behind it.”

“How do you work that out?” said Jones.

“I’m coming to that,” said Patterson, letting it show that he was frustrated by the interruptions. “The bombing at the hotel we originally didn’t think had a motive, just some mindless terrorism. But Tania looked closer into the conference that was taking place there, and it was a trade conference at which a prominent Russian delegate was present. This man, Pavlovsky—” he wrote ‘Pavlovsky’ under ‘Rublev’ on the piece of paper “—is also not very popular with the Russian administration. His companies are so successful he’s using his money and influence to get his own way. So, from the Russian administration’s point of view, how better to get rid of him than having him ‘tragically’ killed in a British terrorist atrocity?”

Patterson wrote ‘Russia’ in the middle of the paper, circled it, and drew arrows linking it to the names. “Michael thinks both of these assassinations and attempted assassinations were arranged by James Hetherington – that boy we saw meeting with Elkins on the CCTV.”

“Yes,” said Michael. “Hetherington is a perceiver. A strong one. I think he used his power to program Elkins and Bailecki to administer the poison and set off the bomb. Records show that he was cured of perception a year ago, but it seems those records were forged by Doctor Lucas.”

“Who’s Doctor Lucas?” said Jones.

Patterson was getting frustrated that his mind was racing faster than Jones could keep up. “We think he’s what links the Hetherington boy with Russia.” He wrote ‘Hetherington’ and ‘Lucas’ on the sheet of paper. “Lucas denied knowing Hetherington, but I showed the boy’s picture to the security guard at the lab where he works and he confirmed he’s one of Lucas’s research subjects.”