Mind Control: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 2) (7 page)

He thought back to when he had first come to Galen House. It was a long time. “Two years,” he said. “Give or take.”

“You don’t know what it’s like out there.” She pointed into the distance, indicating the world outside the camp. “They find out you’re a perceiver and you’re a second class citizen. The law says you can live with it like a normal person, but people don’t let you. Like that boy last year who jumped off Beachy Head because he was bullied for being a perceiver. No, in the real world, they find out what you are in school screening and they strongly ‘suggest’ you take the cure. Pankhurst said some nice things, but no one listens to him anymore. My mum says he’s a fool who’ll be humiliated at the next election. My mum says …”

Talking about her mother, Michael perceived, brought back the memory of the home that she missed and she stopped herself from saying more.

“There was always the cure,” said Michael.

She shook her head, the pain of the decision was still raw. “Perception was already part of me,” she said. “I didn’t know how I would cope if it was taken away. Besides, it was too late for me, my family would never trust me again, they saw me as an alien in their house. They were happy when we got the knock on the door and I was invited to join this place. I’d screwed up school anyway, so when they offered me a job as a perceiver, I took it. Maybe the cure is right for those whose perception is weak, but I couldn’t do it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Michael. He felt her anger and frustration, and understood it. It reminded him of making that horrible choice himself, except he didn’t have a family to leave behind. Not really.

“Ransom did that to me, he did that to all of us,” said Pauline. “I want to see it all laid out in front of him in court, then I want to see him take the stand and squirm as he explains why he did it. They say the creation of perceivers has changed the world, that’s not something one man should be allowed to get away with.”

She had every right to be angry. Michael had been angry once. But there was nothing he could do about it, so he decided not to waste his energy. The perceivers genie was out of the bottle and now they had to deal with it. Ransom had claimed that, given enough time, evolution would have turned the whole world into perceivers. All he had done was hurry evolution along a bit, in his twisted, utopian belief that a generation of people who could perceive each other would promote understanding.

“There would always have been the natural borns,” said Michael.

Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t understand. “The what?”

“The natural borns,” said Michael. “The perceivers who would have existed anyway. I’m a natural born, my mother didn’t take a pill.”

She shook her head. “Perceivers are teenagers, we were all born in those years when women thought they were getting free vitamin pills that would make their babies healthy. No one knew about it until we reached puberty and we started perceiving.”

“They didn’t know about it because the natural borns kept it quiet,” said Michael. “How do you think Ransom knew what DNA to splice into those vitamin pills? DNA that already existed in the few people like him who’d been born with it.”

Michael suddenly stopped. In his rush to explain, he had let slip that Ransom was a perceiver. Something a lot of people had taken a lot of trouble to keep quiet.

“You’re wrong,” said Pauline. “Why would you think that?”

“I know it because—” He stopped himself. He wanted to tell her, even though he knew he shouldn’t. He felt her probing into his mind, trying to find the information in there and increased his blocks. “Get out of my head!”

She frowned at him, embarrassed she’d been detected and frustrated that he was hiding something from her. “You know because of what?”

“Can I tell you something, Pauline?” said Michael. “Something that I haven’t told anyone else in here?”

“Sure,” she said. Her tone had changed and maybe she perceived it was something personal.

“I know because Ransom is my father.”

He perceived her as she stood there, processing his words. They confused her. Part of her was still angry, but mostly she was unsure if she believed him. “But your surname is Sanderson, not Ransom.”

“I took my mother’s maiden name. I didn’t want people to know.”

“But you’re telling me,” she pointed out.

“Yes,” said Michael. He still wasn’t entirely sure why.

“And you live here with the rest of us. Spying on us?”

“No,” said Michael. He stepped forward, he wanted to put a hand on her arm to reassure her, but she stepped back from him. “Let’s say that me and my father are … ‘estranged’. He didn’t give my mother one of his pills, he created me in a lab with his sperm and the egg of a natural born woman perceiver. He wanted me to inherit perception from both parents, to be stronger than anyone else.”

“So you’re not the same as me,” said Pauline, maintaining her distance.

“I guess not,” said Michael. There was water in his eyes, blurring his vision. He fought to stop it turning to tears.

“I should be getting back,” she said. “I have to get ready for training.”

Michael perceived her mentally distancing herself from him. It made him ache inside. “Do you see why I’m uncomfortable watching the trial? I believe Ransom deserves to be punished, but I’m afraid the court will expose things which should remain secret.”

“Sure, I understand,” said Pauline. “But I’m going to be late.”

She turned away and started walking. “Thanks again for the coffee!” he called after her.

“Your flies are still undone,” she called back without turning round.

Michael’s hand shot down to his trousers and felt the gap where he had forgotten to do the zip up. He fumbled with the zip as he watched the black-clad figure of Pauline, small in the distance, walking out of the car park and back towards Galen House. He worried that he had exposed himself more than he should.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MICHAEL SAW PATTERSON
limping down the corridor. Part of the bomb had lodged in his leg when it exploded and severed a muscle. He’d been standing closer to the blast than Michael and caught more of the force of it. His bulletproof vest had protected his vital organs, but a gash on his arm had required stitches and the bandage the hospital had put on could be seen poking out of the end of his shirt cuff. He also had a severe cut across his right cheek, the sharp red line of the scab looking like it might turn into a scar worthy of a movie villain.

Patterson stopped a few steps from Michael, his anger so loud that Michael had to increase his filters to shut it out. Around them, other policemen and women walked past, some in uniform, others in business suits. Several of them disappeared through the door into the briefing room.

“You lied to me,” said Patterson.

“I’m sorry,” said Michael. Sorry for his injuries, not so sorry for the lying.

“You told me Jones said you could be there, but it was all bollocks. You disobeyed me and spoke to the suspect and nearly got us killed.”

“But I saw into his head,” said Michael.

“So did I,” said Patterson. “As bits of it splattered all over my body.”

Michael’s attention was caught by Jones walking down the corridor carrying a bunch of cardboard files. He was wearing the same suit as yesterday, he had loosened his tie and undone the top button of his shirt to reveal where the grime of sweat had worn into the material. It didn’t look as if he had slept much, if at all.

Patterson noticed Michael was looking at something behind his shoulder and turned to see who it was. “What’s he doing here?” Patterson asked Jones as he approached, referring to Michael.

“Orders,” said Jones. Michael got the sense that Jones didn’t like it either, but with his filters on high to block out Patterson’s strong emotions, he wasn’t sure.

“If it wasn’t for him, we could be questioning the suspect right now,” said Patterson. “Instead of scraping him off the pavement.”

“If you have a problem, Tony, you could rest at home like the doctor told you to,” said Jones.

“I can’t rest,” said Patterson. “Daytime TV does my head in.”

“Then shut up and get into the briefing room.”

Patterson gave Michael one last glare and stepped sideways with an exaggerated limp to get past him.

“And you,” said Jones, pointing his finger at Michael. “Make yourself scarce.”

~

MICHAEL HID HIMSELF
away in the observation room; a broom cupboard of a space with little more than a desk, a couple of chairs and a monitor which displayed a feed from, usually, one of the interrogation rooms. On this occasion, the display had been flipped to a feed from a single camera in the briefing room. At some point in the past, a senior officer had decided to film the briefings for whatever reason and had had the camera installed. Whoever that officer was, he or she had either moved on to another job or retired because no one could remember who it was. But the camera had stayed, allowing Michael to take advantage.

He wasn’t allowed into the briefing room. As far as the other officers on the team were concerned, he was hanging around the department because he was some sort of trainee or police cadet. They didn’t know he was a perceiver and, apart from Jones and Patterson, they weren’t allowed to know. So Michael was banished to the broom cupboard where he could sit back with his feet on the desk, open a can of Coke and slurp it as loud as he liked, while the police business unfolded on the screen in front of him.

The camera was set on the ceiling, giving him a bird’s-eye view of a long table with, he counted, twelve police officers sitting around it, their faces indistinct because of the distance and wide angle of the lens.

Jones, at the head of the table, brought everyone to order. “We’ve got a busy day, so let’s crack on. Baker’s been looking into the kid’s background – Tania?”

A woman with long blonde hair spoke, rattling through her information like she was on a timer. “The bomber was Stephen Bailecki, seventeen years old, no criminal record, no red flags on the terror watch list. Average kid, as far as we can tell. But the interesting thing is, he lived on the same estate in Kennington as Jerome Tyler, the other kid with explosives we arrested.”

Murmurs of interest from some of the others.

“We went down there yesterday, spoke to a few people. Nothing popped. We’ve confiscated his computer, tablet, yadda: forensics are looking at it now.”

“What about his target?” said Jones.

“I’ve been looking into that,” said one of the other men around the table. Michael recognised him as the chubby man with a big nose he’d seen around, but couldn’t remember his name. “There was a trade conference at the Capital Hotel, so we’re working on the assumption that he wanted to disrupt the conference, but … it’s a weird one. The attendees were from various countries and were there to discuss oil and gas exports – hardly the sort of thing terrorists usually go after. I’m looking into the background of the delegates to see if they might have been targeted for another reason, but I’m drawing a blank so far.”

“Hasn’t someone accepted responsibility for the attack?” said another voice. Michael didn’t see who it was because he was in the middle of taking a swig from his Coke can. It was frustrating watching people on a screen when he couldn’t perceive them. Like watching a movie with empty shells of characters walking and talking, and supposedly having emotions, which he couldn’t feel.

“The Army Against Fossil Fuels,” said the chubby man in response to the question. “Unfortunately, the media have picked up on that one so the press are all talking about it, but there’s no record of these people ever existing before. I think it’s a lone nutjob wanting some publicity on the back of the bombing.”

“Probably,” said Jones. “But check it out anyway.”

“On it,” said Chubby.

A delicate knocking sound stopped their discussion as the police officers in the briefing room all looked in the direction of the door.

“This will be the PCSO,” said Tania Baker.

Michael could tell the person who walked in was a woman by the way she moved. She wore a blue hat which, because of the angle of the camera, obscured her face.

Baker asked her to sit down. “This is PCSO Gillian Barnes who’s based at Kennington Police Station. She’s fairly sure Tyler and Bailecki hung around in the same gang that she deals with as part of her beat.”

Patterson shuffled up his seat so Barnes could take the spare chair next to his. As she sat down, she removed her hat to reveal her short cropped black hair. She wore a PCSO uniform of white shirt and blue tie, which distinguished her from regular police officers.

“Thank you for coming, Officer Barnes,” said Jones. “Anything you can tell us would be of benefit.”

“I didn’t know anything about them being terrorists,” she told the assembled officers. “I swear, if I had known, I would have reported it.”

“No one is blaming you, Officer Barnes,” said Jones. “We just want to know what you know about them. It could be really useful to us.”

“They hung out on street corners, much like any kids of that age,” said Barnes. “Talking and playing with their phones. I moved them on a few times and told them to keep the noise down late at night, but nothing out of the ordinary. A couple of them were given cautions for minor crime, shoplifting and stuff, but nothing major. They’re not involved in drugs, not dealing anyway. The big dealer on the estate got arrested a while back and the users that are left go elsewhere to score. I suspected Tyler was involved with criminal damage on some parked cars about six months ago, but I was never able to prove it.”

“Did they, perhaps, have contact with strangers from outside the estate?” said Jones. “Anything recently?”

“Not that I saw. But, then, if anything happened outside of my patch, I wouldn’t have known.” She paused, fiddling with the rim of her hat on the table in front of her. “Perhaps they were … what do they call it …? Bedroom terrorists? I don’t patrol their bedrooms.”

There was a little snigger from some of the officers. Michael wasn’t sure if she was making a joke or if the officers found her funny. It was so hard trying to judge people without perception.