Mind Control: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 2) (8 page)

Barnes was asked a few more questions, which invoked very little more information, she was thanked for her time and allowed to leave.

Jones concluded the briefing by dishing out assignments to his assembled team and dismissed them.

Michael tossed his empty Coke can in the recycling and left the broom cupboard.

~

THE PCSO WAS
standing outside the briefing room, holding her hat and fiddling with the brim, when Michael saw her again. He was trying to find Jones and was walking back down the corridor, having visited his empty office. As he passed, he perceived a bewildered feeling from her. It was strange how he felt her turn from an image on the screen to a real person in that moment.

Michael peered through a glass porthole in the door to the briefing room and saw only the table surrounded by empty chairs. He could have gone inside to double-check, but his perception told him it was empty. Jones had probably gone to the canteen for a coffee. Either that, or he was avoiding giving Michael an assignment, which was entirely possible.

“Excuse me,” said the PCSO. “I don’t suppose you could direct me to the ladies?”

“Um … sure,” said Michael.

The women’s toilets was not a place he tended to hang out, but it just so happened it was next to the gents, so he knew where it was. He was about to explain to her where it was when he caught something else from her mind. As she relaxed, and the feeling of being lost dissipated, it revealed that she was worried about what she had said to the police officers.

Intrigued, he decided that simply giving her directions would be a missed opportunity. “It’s probably easier if I show you,” he said.

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” she said.

“No trouble,” said Michael.

He walked down the corridor, focussing his perception and making sure she followed him close. She was thinking about Tyler and Bailecki, the image of their faces mixed up with a group of other teenage faces in her memory. She remembered them gathered by a shop somewhere under a street light, and it made her feel uneasy. There was something about them that unsettled her, something that she couldn’t articulate. She would have felt stupid to have told a room full of a dozen detectives about her intuition.
But maybe I should have
, she thought.
If only they had been drug dealers, then the money they had would make sense
. Many of them were from one-parent families and she used to think all the gadgets and clothes and jewellery they had were from absent fathers trying to buy their love. But, after the bombing, she wasn’t sure that was true anymore.

Michael was so concerned with perceiving her thoughts, that he almost walked straight past the women’s toilets. He covered himself by making a play that he was heading for the gents. “Oops, sorry,” he said, feigning a laugh like norms do when they are trying to convey they have been a bit stupid. “This one’s yours.” He pointed at the door marked with the silhouette of a figure in a dress.

“Thank you,” she said, and went inside. Michael just caught her relief at being moments away from emptying her bladder before he pulled his perception out.

He leant back against the wall for a moment and thought about what he had perceived. If even a norm had an uncomfortable feeling about the teenagers in the gang, there had to be more to them than just hanging around on street corners.

~

MICHAEL DID NOT
expect to find Patterson in Jones’s office. But there he was, slumped in a chair by the door, broadcasting negative emotions like a rotten apple sends out the smell of decay.

“Inspector Jones not here?” said Michael.

Patterson looked across the desk at Jones’s empty chair. “I may not be a perceiver, but I have a feeling in my water that he is, in fact, somewhere else.”

Michael glanced behind him at the rest of the office who, in theory, could hear them through the open door. The officers in the open plan area were either on the phone or absorbed by their computer displays and apparently didn’t notice.. “Do you know where he is?” said Michael.

“Reporting our lack of progress to the boss,” said Patterson. “What did you want Jones for anyway? Because there’s a queue and I was here first.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Michael.

“Clearly it does, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“You wouldn’t want to know, it was something I …” Aware of the other officers in the main part of the office, he stepped inside so he could close the door. “It was something I perceived.”

“Try me,” said Patterson. “It’ll kill time before Jones gets back.”

Michael realised he was now firmly inside the office with Patterson. Making an excuse to leave would be an admission of defeat. It was easier to explain. “The PCSO wasn’t telling you everything,” he said.

“She barely told us
anything
,” said Patterson.

“I think she was too embarrassed to say. The teenagers in the gang have more money than they should for regular kids in that neighbourhood. That’s assuming they’re not living off the proceeds of crime, which she thinks they’re not. She also thinks they’re a bit weird.”

Patterson chuckled. “Being a bit weird is not a crime. If it was, we’d have half of London locked up.”

“There’s something going on with that gang,” said Michael. “Something not involving drugs, or even religious extremism. You didn’t look into their heads, Sergeant Patterson, their minds weren’t like the minds of ordinary people.”

“Then we shall discover whatever it is they were hiding with diligent police work. They will have a digital trail on their phones or computers, they will have told someone or been seen by someone and that person will tell us. I don’t need a perceiver telling me that they have weird minds. In my experience, anyone planning to kill themselves is always a bit screwed up in the head.”

“Okay, so you don’t believe in the power of perception, I understand that. But look at me.”

Patterson allowed his gaze to drift up and down the length of Michael’s body as he stood in front of him. Michael half caught his thoughts as Patterson regarded the cuts on his face and reflected on why Michael was the one to have escaped with just a few scrapes in the explosion, while he was injured by flying shrapnel. “Not a pretty sight,” said Patterson.

“I’m seventeen years old,” said Michael. “I’m their age. I can talk to them like adults can’t talk to them, and I can see inside their heads while I do it.”

“But you’re not trained,” said Patterson. “You’re going to screw it up like you screwed up Bailecki.”

The jibe hurt, even as Michael tried to ignore it. “Then brief me. I can go in there like one of them, talk to them like one of them. Maybe find out where the explosives came from, why they did it, who they’re going to target next.”

He perceived that Patterson, despite himself, was warming to the idea.

“We’re not sure the gang has anything to do with the bombing,” said Patterson. “The two of them might just have met on the estate and the rest of the gang has nothing to do with it.”

“I can find out for sure,” said Michael. “And if it helps to persuade you, if I go onto the estate undercover, it will mean I’ll be out of this police station and out of your hair.”

The door opened and the inside handle bashed into Michael’s bruised back. He winced.

Jones was standing there with one hand on the outside door handle and the other balancing a croissant on top of a cardboard takeaway mug of coffee. A combination of sweetness and bitterness floated into the room. “What are you two doing in here?” he said.

“Michael has an idea,” said Patterson.

Michael felt Jones’s surprise as he raised his eyebrows at his sergeant. “This is an idea you like?”

“Actually,” said Patterson, “I think I do.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE FLAT SMELT
stale. Opening the door and walking inside disturbed the air for the first time in many months and caused the dust to circulate again. Michael and Patterson gagged on it as they stepped inside.

“I don’t believe I’m doing this,” said Patterson as he closed the door behind them.

They had walked directly into the living area, dimly lit by daylight that filtered through the thin curtains patterned with large roses that must have once been red and were now kind of pinkish. The place came ‘furnished’, in that it included an old fake leather sofa and a coffee table stained with the rings of many hot mugs. The wooden veneer on the coffee table, just like the paint on the walls, was starting to chip off.

Patterson walked across to the window and threw open the curtains, disturbing another layer of dust which made him cough and then sneeze. “Bloody hell, they could have cleaned it first,” he complained.

“It’s fine,” said Michael. It made a change from Galen House. In the dirty flat, there was no one to give him orders, no automated system to put his lights out and no perceivers to guard his thoughts from. It was almost like a holiday.

With the curtains open, it was easier to see the room. It really was rather dingy. Michael sat on the sofa and a cloud of dust rose into the air. He didn’t think to hold his breath until it was too late and he let out several sneezes.

Laughing at him, Patterson wandered over to the space on the other side of the front door to where there was a kitchenette area, furnished with cheap cream laminate units. He opened a few drawers and a few cupboards and neither the handles nor the doors fell off, which was a good sign. He next tried the doors of the oven, the microwave and the fridge.

“Oh my God!” said Patterson.

“What?” said Michael from his position on the sofa where he couldn’t see easily into the kitchenette.

“Mouse droppings.”

“Charming,” said Michael.

“No wonder the kids on this estate spend most of their time hanging around outside,” said Patterson. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands. “I’m going to drive to the supermarket to get some cleaning products. Are you going to be all right here on your own?”

“I think so,” said Michael. “Unless they’re giant alien killer mice.”

Patterson looked at the base of the fridge where he had seen the droppings. “No, I think they’re just the regular kind.”

“That’s all right then.”

“I’ll see you later,” said Patterson, heading back to the door.

“Bye,
Dad
,” said Michael, grinning.

Patterson gave him an irritated stare and left. The door slamming shut in the frame echoed around the bare walls. Michael savoured a moment of being alone.

Their cover story was that Michael and Patterson were father and son and had just moved to the area because Patterson had a job at a nearby warehouse. Michael could tell everyone that his ‘dad’ was on the night shift, which allowed Patterson to go home to his own bed at night and be scarce in the day when he was supposedly sleeping.

Over the course of the week it took to get approval for the operation, the media interest in the bomber had faded to almost nothing and the police inquiry had come up against several dead ends. Tests showed the explosives being carried by both teenagers were from the same batch of PETN, a common substance used by the military and civilians (for jobs such as quarrying) and could have been smuggled in from almost anywhere. As Tyler and Bailecki appeared not to have gone outside of Kennington in recent weeks, it was almost certain someone else had done the smuggling. Analysis of their phone records, emails and internet use revealed no contact with any potential smugglers and a sniffer dog sweep of their homes found no traces of PETN. Either they were very clever at hiding their tracks, or someone else was very clever on their behalf.

The officers who had interviewed the other teenagers on the estate came to the conclusion that they knew nothing about Tyler and Bailecki’s terrorist plot. For a while it looked like Michael’s idea of going undercover and infiltrating the gang was going to be kicked into the long grass. But Michael managed to write a persuasive report stating his case and, with pressure from Patterson, the operation was finally approved.

A ‘ding’ from Michael’s pocket broke into his thoughts. He pulled out his phone: it was a text from Alex.

‘How’s the new place?’ it said.

‘Like Buckingham Palace!’ Michael texted back.

He turned the phone round and took a picture of the sofa sitting alone against blank walls, and sent it to Alex.

‘The Queen’s really let the place go,’ Alex replied.

Michael found an animated chuckling face to text back to him.

‘You should invite me round – if it’s all right with Her Maj,’ smiley face.

Typical Alex, thought Michael. He put the phone back in his pocket.

Silence returned.

Michael opened one of the windows, letting in a bit of fresh air, some London pollution and the sound of nearby traffic. He toured the place a bit more, checked out the bathroom (basic) and the bedroom (at least it had a bed) and came back to where he started.

Although the quiet was lovely, it soon got boring. Michael decided he might as well go outside and see if he could find the teenage gang he was supposed to spy on.

~

MICHAEL NEGOTIATED THREE
flights of stairs of the seven storey building down to ground level. Emerging outside, he found he had come out the back way which led into a communal garden area, surrounded by other rectangular blocks of flats. He imagined, in the sunlight, the grass and the shrubs and the children’s play area would look pleasant, even inviting. But as the dusk sucked the last of the light out of the day, the foliage and climbing frames became little more than dark blobs in a darkening landscape.

Perceiving there was no one close, he passed through an alleyway to the front of the building. The road was not especially wide and was made narrower by the cars parked down one side of it. Two boys, aged ten at the most, were taking it in turns to ride a skateboard down the dotted white line in the middle, in a dangerous game which risked them being run over by some maniac motorist who preferred speed over safety. In the moment that he perceived them, he understood that the danger was part of the attraction.