Mind Control: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 2) (9 page)

The only other person on the street was a woman walking her dog, a little brown shaggy thing with legs going like the clappers to keep up with her long strides. As she passed, Michael perceived she was counting the days to see how soon she could take a pregnancy test. He let her frantic thoughts disappear into the distance before he followed her. Not because he wanted to follow her as such, but because she was walking in the direction of the local shops which, if he had remembered the maps he had studied correctly, was where the gang liked to hang out.

The shops sat on a wide paved area with a sculpture of twisted metal in the centre which someone had presumably decreed was ‘art’. Down the middle was a single row of street lights, sending their orange glow out to where the passageway was bordered by rows of two storey buildings. Each row had five retail units with accommodation or storage above. Three of the shops were boarded up and the rest looked run-down, even in the half-light of the early evening. The only one that was open was a convenience store at the far end with a front plate glass window through which a white light blazed out onto the street.

Unusually for him, Michael saw the teenagers before he perceived them. Five figures were silhouetted by the light from the shop window: three tall and skinny, probably male; one short and dumpy with a chest that definitely marked her out as female; and a fifth sort of middling in that he was neither particularly tall or short nor thin or fat. Michael ran through the descriptions he had memorised of Tyler and Bailecki’s friends and was fairly sure he knew who they all were by the time he got close enough to see enough detail. He was only wrong with regard to one of the tall lanky people, who turned out to be female with long dark hair tucked up into her baseball cap, and not one of the ones he’d read about in the police files.

He kept his eyes fixed ahead as he walked towards the shop, but his perception was entirely focussed on them. He expected them to have minds like the other two, empty of anything apart from the one thing that they were doing or planned to do. But what he actually perceived were the minds of normal teenagers, filled with the music they liked, the other teenagers they fancied, the memory of a row with their father and the thought of buying alcohol. All jumbled up together in a group. The only thought he singled out was from the tall girl with her hair tucked away, who checked him out as he passed.

Embarrassed, Michael walked into the shop. It was one of those places that was packed floor to ceiling with pre-packaged everything, all marked up ten per cent more than the supermarkets. It had all the sort of things people were likely to run out of and couldn’t be bothered to walk further to get, like toilet paper and toothpaste.

It would look odd for Michael to walk out of the shop empty handed and so he bought a chocolate bar and a can of Coke.

When he stepped back outside, the teenagers were standing in exactly the same place as when he went in, as static as the twisted metal art installation up the other end of the block.

“Hiya!” he said, needing to make some kind of connection.

The fat girl, whose name he knew was Laura, was the only one who looked up from contemplating her shoes, a pair of the latest Nike trainers in blue with silver trim, not yet grubbied by the experience of being worn. He filtered out the others to perceive her and got a litany of her first impressions of him. Michael, she thought, was weasely and annoying and not in the least worth shagging. She also had an aching back from standing up so long and was hoping one of the other two would soon move so she could take a turn leaning against the lamppost.

“I just moved in,” said Michael, adopting a smile which he hoped norms would find friendly. “Is there much to do around here?”

“Ain’t nothing,” said the skinny woman, stepping out from the shadow. She was older than the others, maybe nineteen and stood with her hands plunged deep into her jacket pockets, making her pointy elbows stick out like a chicken. Her mind spewed boredom. She was looking for some action, of either the violent or the sexual kind. But not, she decided, with Michael.

“Depends what you’re looking for,” said one of the skinny guys, a black boy, sixteen years old with an acne problem. He was Chad, according to the Metropolitan Police files, a college student with a dubious attendance record. His mind danced along with the music that still played in his ears, flipping between thinking about the breasts of a woman who lived across the hall from him and wondering if could get the skinny girl (who was called Cheryl, according to his thoughts) to buy him a beer from the shop.

“There’s a boxing club meets on a Thursday,” said the other skinny guy, pulling out his phone – the latest model which Michael would have bought if only he had the money – and putting his music on pause. He was a white sixteen-year-old called Eric, known to the others as E-boy. He had spikey ginger hair and freckles that speckled his nose. Michael perceived his mind flash to a memory of standing at the sidelines of a boxing class while, at the same time, clutching the inhaler in his pocket and hoping he wouldn’t have an asthma attack in front of the others.

“Boxing? You?” Chad laughed. “You couldn’t knock down a feather.”

“I was just saying,” said E-boy, “there are a few clubs he could join.”

“Yeah, like the Wednesday knitting club,” Chad sniggered, as if it were the cleverest joke in the world.

The others joined in with mocking laughter, especially the average-sized kid, a fifteen-year-old called Dave. Michael took a moment to focus on him and immediately sensed that he was more intelligent than the others, laughing the loudest because of a desperate need to be accepted by them. His thoughts revealed that he believed standing out in the cold was better than being at home with his bonkers mother and skank of a sister, even though part of him wanted to be at home studying for the physics test he had in the morning. Not that he would tell the others because he was clever enough to know that they had no time for a school swat.

Cheryl hid her smile behind the collar of her jacket which she had pulled up to protect her neck against the wind. “This is
boring
,” she announced. “Let’s go to the chippy.” She turned on the heel of her very high heeled boots – also new and expensive-looking – and walked off in the other direction.

The others turned and followed her. Not because she was their leader, but because they had nothing better to do.

Michael stood and watched, realising they were not ready to accept him, and continued to perceive them until they were too far away. Their thoughts were full of little else other than fish and chips, and it made him hungry.

It was all very disappointingly normal. Perhaps the officers who had interviewed the gang were right: the other teenagers had nothing to do with Tyler and Bailecki’s terrorist activities. Tyler and Bailecki might have acted alone and being part of the gang was just a coincidence. Perhaps the whole operation to infiltrate them would lead to nothing more than uncovering a dodgy source for expensive trainers and state-of-the-art phones. As he walked back to the flat, he realised he would have to write all this up in his report. He wondered how the hell he was going to make it look good.

CHAPTER NINE

MICHAEL RECEIVED A
subtle waft of lemon as he opened the fridge to take out two cans of Coke. It was a better smell than the one which had greeted him when he first looked inside, which could only be described as putrid. Michael had attacked the smell with one of the cleaning products Patterson had bought from the supermarket, and now the fridge epitomised the meaning of clean.

He closed the fridge door to the accompaniment of a massive, “Yeeees!” from the sofa where Alex was sitting playing a game he had rigged up by connecting his mobile phone to the television. The second hand beat-up TV set had arrived soon after they moved in because Patterson was one of those typical oldies who couldn’t seem to live without one. Patterson was a bit miffed, therefore, that almost as soon as it had arrived, it had been commandeered by one of Michael’s friends, relegating Patterson to the kitchen.

“I hope you’re not going to turn this place into a party flat,” said the policeman, looking up from the work he had spread all over the kitchen counter. He was sitting on a kitchen stool and supposedly working on his laptop computer, despite the bits of paper laying scattered next to it. Because oldies, it seemed, couldn’t seem to live without paper either.

“He’s only here for a few hours,” said Michael. “I’ve got to go out tonight to see if I can catch up with the gang again.”

“Well, good,” said Patterson. “I don’t want this place full of teenagers with loud music and drugs and girls.”

“Yes,
Dad
,” said Michael, as he breezed past him with two Coke cans in his hands.

Patterson frowned. “Don’t call me that.”

Michael chuckled and returned to the sofa with the drinks while Patterson returned to concentrating on his work.

Alex had somehow managed to take up almost the entirety of the three-person sofa by sprawling across it. So Michael stood there until Alex realised and shuffled up a bit to make room. He plonked himself down, handed over a Coke and Alex paused the game. On the screen, the animated figure of a soldier in full army fatigues stopped progressing down a dark alley with his M16A3 rifle.

“You should ask the new girl to come over,” said Alex with a suggestive smile.

“Pauline?” said Michael. “I don’t think so.”

“Come on, she’s into you!”

“I really don’t think so,” reiterated Michael. “She needed someone to be friendly when she first got there and it happened to me. I have a feeling she doesn’t want to be friendly anymore.”

“That, Mike, is why you have such a bad track record with girls.” Alex lifted the ring pull of his Coke and it let out a brief fizz. “Anyway, how’s this case thing going that you’re working on?”

“Oh good,” said Michael, allowing Alex to pick up on his lie.

Alex gave him a quizzical glance. Perceivers usually avoid lying to each other because they know the other person is be able to tell. Michael acknowledged the glance, giving the cue for Alex to open his perception further.

I think I’ve done the wrong thing
, Michael thought in his head, knowing that Alex could read those thoughts.
I think the gang is just an ordinary group of teenagers, not a terrorist cell. When they find out all this has been for nothing, all those people that said putting perceivers in the police force wouldn’t work will be proved right
.

They won’t do that
, said Alex’s thoughts.
They need us
.

Their secret conversation was interrupted by the sound of Patterson’s shoes hitting the hard kitchen floor as he hopped off the stool. He noisily gathered up all his papers and shuffled them into a pile. “Right!” he said. “I’m off for my night shift.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” said Michael from the sofa.

“Yes.” Patterson closed his laptop and thrust everything into a black holdall which looked nothing like it was designed to contain office paperwork, which was sort of the point. “Don’t spend too long playing on my television and forget what you’re supposed to be doing tonight.”

“Yes,
Dad
,” said Michael.

“And don’t call me that!”

Michael laughed. They said goodbye to each other and Patterson left the flat.

“Seriously,” said Alex after the door had closed. “They need us. This early stuff we’re doing like you messing around in the police and me in the court, it’s just gearing up for putting perceivers everywhere.”

“The public won’t accept it,” said Michael.

“Maybe not yet,” said Alex. “But eventually they will have to. I mean, at the moment, I know what I’m doing in court isn’t making any difference. I can stand there and perceive the witnesses as they give evidence and I can report back whether they’re lying to my handler and she can inform the barristers, but at the end of the day it’s not making any difference. If the jury decide to convict an innocent man or free a guilty one, I have no control over it.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“The point is,” said Alex. “It won’t always be like that. Soon, I’ll be reporting directly to the barristers myself. Then I might be called as an expert witness who can see into the mind of the accused, just like they call a psychiatrist sometimes. Eventually, they’ll do away with the jury and the barristers altogether, they’ll just appoint a perceiver to say whether someone is guilty or innocent.”

“The public doesn’t trust us enough,” said Michael.

“At one time, they didn’t trust CCTV cameras. But the need for the authorities to spy on people was greater than the public’s need for privacy and now they’re everywhere. Just like we will be eventually. They want us to spy on people, Mike, and they’re going to find a way to make it happen no matter what everyone else thinks.”

A buzzing sound emerged from the kitchen. At first, Michael thought it was the sound of one of the humane mousetraps Patterson had bought, indicating it had caught a rodent, but the buzzing was swiftly followed by a blast of rock music.

“What’s that?” said Alex.

“Patterson’s phone,” said Michael, recognising the tune. He got off the sofa and went over to the kitchen where he found it vibrating on the side near where Patterson had been working. For a moment he thought about chasing after him, but decided it wasn’t worth it and answered it. “Hello?”

“Ah, Sergeant Patterson, good,” said the person on the other end of the phone, a woman whose voice Michael sort of recognised but couldn’t immediately place.

“It’s—” Michael started to say, but the person on the other end sounded like she was in a hurry and just kept talking.

“This man keeps on ringing, and I keep telling him you’ll be back in tomorrow, but he won’t have any of it. His name’s Victor Roo … um … Victor Rublev, he says he has that list for you. I said he could email it in, but he’s not having any of that either. He says he wants to give it to you in person.”