Mind Control: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 2) (15 page)

“It should be.”

Page went back round to her side of the desk and sat down. She closed the active window on her screen – a list of numbers in an impenetrable spreadsheet – and initiated some software which opened with a blue logo with CCL written in the centre.

Cure Clinic List?
thought Michael, although it probably stood for something more sophisticated.

Michael and Pauline stood behind Page and peered at the screen.

“His name is James …?” said Page.

“I don’t have a surname,” said Michael, suddenly realising with embarrassment that he might have come on a wild goose chase. “But he’s about thirteen years old.”

Page sat back in her chair and gave him a despairing look. “Do you know how many thirteen-year-olds there are in Britain called James?”

Michael didn’t answer, but he was willing to bet quite a few.

“Except,” said Pauline, “we know he lives in Kennington, or around there. There’s got to be only a handful schools he could have gone to. And Michael knows what he looks like, right?”

Michael nodded. “Oh yeah, that face is etched into my brain.”

“So …” Pauline pulled out her phone and her fingers danced across the screen. “There’s only six high schools in that area where he could have been a pupil. If you’ve got access to school photos, you can pull up pictures of everyone called James of the right age group in those schools and we should find him.”

“Brilliant!” said Michael. “I knew there was a reason I brought you.” He took the phone from her and showed it to Page.

Page squinted at it. “God, I’m getting old,” she said to herself and put on her reading glasses. She took the phone and laid it beside her computer keyboard. “If I search for boys named James in years eight, nine and ten in those schools over the past three years, we should find him. Assuming he went to one of those schools and you’ve got his name and age correct.”

She made several attempts at the search, muttering about it not being the sort of thing the database was designed to do, before coming up with a result. There were twenty-two matches.

“Can you pull up their photos?” said Pauline.

“Um … yep,” said Page. With a few clicks of her mouse, she displayed the details of the first James, which included a photo in the top right hand corner. He was a black boy and definitely not the one.

“Not him,” said Michael. “Can you pull up the next?”

She nodded and pulled up another record of a boy called James. This one was chubby with ginger hair and also rejected. They went through six more photos like that before they found the one. James stared out of the screen with those same hazel eyes he’d used to stare into Michael’s face. He looked even younger in the photo in his school uniform, but it was definitely him.

“That’s James,” said Michael.

Page clicked again and pulled up a different record. “His name is James Hetherington, he’s just had a birthday, so he fourteen years old,” she said. “It says here he was screened last year. The result was positive and he was cured.”

“That’s the fudge,” said Michael. “The kid I met definitely wasn’t cured, he was strong, he could control other people with his mind.”

Page turned to him. “Control people?”

“I don’t know what you’d call it, brain washing or programming, but he was able to make the norms in his gang do what he wanted, as if they had no free will. I think he also did the same to that kid who blew himself up outside the Capital Hotel.”

“That’s not a power perceivers have,” said Page.

“As far as you know,” said Michael.

“Your father and I did a lot of testing in the early days, Michael. We never found anything like that.”

“Maybe not in natural borns, but what about the ones who were created by the vitamin pills? Maybe your tests didn’t cover everything.”

Pauline interrupted. “Is there a way to find out how the fudging happened?”

“Possibly,” said Page. She brought up another form on her computer. “It was signed off by Doctor S.O. Lucas. That must be Saul Lucas. I remember him, an uptight little man. He was a norm, used to oversee the injections at the cure clinics, he left the project a while back.” She peered closer at the screen. “I don’t recognise that clinic code, though.”

Next to James Hetherington’s name was a four digit code, AP93. Page double clicked to copy and paste it back into the original software. It brought up the name Harrow Bridge Clinic, Greater London. Michael perceived her concern before she said anything. A glance over to Pauline revealed she perceived it too.

“Wasn’t that the place that was firebombed in the early days of the perceiver riots?” said Michael.

“Yes,” said Page. “We had to close it down and move somewhere else. There hasn’t been a perceiver cured in that building for more than two years.”

“So somebody lied on the form?” said Pauline.

“It would seem so,” said Page. “I would have put it down to human error, someone putting down the wrong code when they were tired, but if you say he
wasn’t
cured …”

“It has to have been deliberate,” said Michael. “Maybe he controlled the mind of this Doctor Lucas person to falsify the records.”

“I need to inform Cooper,” said Page. She reached for the telephone on her desk, but Michael’s hand got there first and stopped her picking it up.

“No,” he said. “I’m working with the police, they can look into Doctor Lucas. If anything comes of it, I’m sure it’ll get reported back to Agent Cooper. There’s no point in telling him until we know what we’re dealing with.”

Michael took his hand away and perceived Page’s regret at not feeling his touch any longer. She allowed her own hand to slide from the telephone and come to rest in her lap. She looked at Michael and allowed a thought to slip from her mind:
Are you doing okay?

Pauline must have perceived it too because she stepped away from them. Embarrassed, Michael perceived, at intruding in a relationship she didn’t understand. “Thank you for your help, Doctor Page,” she said. “Come on, Michael, my pass says I have to be back before dinner.” She was at the door already, holding the handle ready to open it.

“Could you wait for Michael outside for a minute?” said Doctor Page. “I just need to ask him something.”

Pauline took a moment to get Michael’s reaction. He nodded at her.
It’s okay
, he said in his thoughts. She perceived him and closed the door behind her with the gentle click of the latch.

Page swivelled round on her chair so she could look at him directly. “She’s a nice girl,” she said.

“You didn’t want to talk to me alone about Pauline,” said Michael.

“No.” She felt uncomfortable, then she realised Michael could perceive her discomfort and she blushed a little. “I would like, if you don’t mind, to
really
know how you are doing.”

Her perception brushed at his mind, as if gently knocking to come in. But the memory of nearly dying in the fire was too fresh and if he let her in, he didn’t think he could hide it from her. Instead, he strengthened his blocks and sensed her disappointment.

“You have to believe me when I say I’m fine,” he said.

“I’ll believe you if you want me to.” She withdrew her perception.

“Look, I need to go,” said Michael. “Me and Pauline have a train to catch.”

“Then promise me before you go, Michael, that you will visit your father.”

He had perceived there was something festering in her head that she wanted to say to him, but he hadn’t probed, so the mention of his father caught him by surprise. “No.”

“He could be sent to prison.”

“That’s got nothing to do with me.”

“You could show him your support,” said Page.

“I don’t support what he did, you know that.”

“But still,” said Page. “He’s your
father
. He misses you.”

“It’s his fault I don’t remember being brought up by him.”

“In a way, it’s my fault as well,” she admitted.

“Pauline’s waiting.”

“Of course,” said Page. She didn’t hide her disappointment, but let it flow out of her so she could be sure he perceived it.

Michael shut it out, but it had already got in and he couldn’t forget it. He headed for the door. “Thanks for looking up that stuff on the database,” he said and stepped into the corridor.

Pauline was waiting. “Who was that woman?” she said as they walked off together towards the lift.

“My biological mother,” said Michael.

Her surprise filled his perception. “Your family are weird.”

Michael laughed. “Yeah.”

She giggled too and they laughed together all the way to the ground floor.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE JOURNALIST LOOKED
pale, his white skin tinged with a green that allowed his neck to blend into the olive colour of his jacket. He had thrown it over the faded black T-shirt he was wearing when the police came because he thought it made him appear more respectable. Instead, he looked like a washed out drug addict as he desperately clutched a paper cup of machine-dispensed coffee like he was in withdrawal.

Michael knew this because he sat with him in the interrogation room, perceiving him. The journalist, whose name was Oscar Elkins, thought it was disgusting that a teenager was allowed to observe what was going on.
What is it with the Metropolitan Police these days?
said his thoughts
. Have they embraced ‘bring your son to work day’, or something?
It made Michael laugh inside. It was odd, sometimes, seeing what other people thought of him.

Elkins didn’t think much better of Patterson, who sat across the interrogation table from him, using the fake smile that was supposed to make him appear friendly. Elkins wasn’t fooled. He was a strong believer in freedom of the press and free speech and he wasn’t impressed by being dragged out of his flat and down to the police station just because he had interviewed Victor Rublev for
The Daily News
.

Patterson smoothed his already-smooth tie against his belly and shuffled in his seat. “Thanks for coming in, Mr Elkins,” he said.

“I didn’t think I had a choice,” said Elkins.

“I need to remind you that you are not under arrest, but this conversation is being recorded.”

“How long is this going to take?” said Elkins. He felt like he had a hangover even though he hadn’t been drinking. He’d forced down breakfast that morning, but wished he hadn’t because the wholemeal toast and jam sat in his stomach like a stone, refusing to be digested. It made him want to give up on the idea of eating healthily and go back to processed white bread.

“It shouldn’t take long, Mr Elkins,” said Patterson, trying a little too hard with his smile. “I want to ask you about the murder of Victor Rublev.”

Shocked, Elkins sat up straight, spilling his coffee over the edge of its cardboard cup so it ran down his fingers. “Murder?”

“Yes,” said Patterson.

“I heard he died, but I thought he had a heart attack or something. Murder? Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Memory flashed in Elkins’s mind of his interview with Rublev. Strangely, not of them sitting in the Filigree Restaurant chatting over afternoon tea – which police investigations had confirmed they did – but of sitting in his flat listening back to the recording of the conversation. He remembered trying to make out Rublev’s Russian accented words over the noise of chinking china cups and background piano music. “You don’t think that I …? I’m a journalist, I attack people with words, I don’t shoot or stab them.”

“We believe Mr Rublev was poisoned within a two week window,” said Patterson. “Your meeting with him was right in the middle of those two weeks.”

“We had tea and cake,” said Elkins. “Not arsenic and cyanide.” He rubbed his hand around the collar of his jacket where the wool blend scratched at his neck. He felt suddenly sweaty. Moisture gathered under his arms and on his chest. It made him look guilty to Patterson, but the only emotion Michael perceived from Elkins was confusion.

“The doctors believe he ingested a radioactive substance,” said Patterson. “You were sharing food with him, perhaps you slipped in something when he wasn’t looking.”

“No!” Elkins’s indignation was genuine, as was a nagging fear he was about to be fitted up for a crime. The journalist had interviewed many political activists, of which Rublev was the most recent, and he’d heard many horror stories about the authorities abroad arresting and imprisoning people who didn’t agree with their point of view. But he never thought he would experience that in Britain. “What reason would I have to kill Rublev? He was a valuable source for my articles, he’s no good to me dead.”

“Then take me through it,” said Patterson. “Everything you did on the day that you met Rublev.”

Elkins sighed. He took his jacket by the lapels and flapped them against his chest, fanning in some cooling air. He remembered, that morning, packing his bag with his notes and his recording equipment, and realising the batteries were dead. “I had to get off the bus early to buy some batteries,” he said. “But I’d left plenty of time, so it wasn’t a problem. I often buy a newspaper from the little shop near the canal, and it’s a nice walk if it’s not raining, so I don’t mind. I met Rublev at the restaurant, did the interview and came home.”

Elkins had skipped over the vital bit of the story, even in his head. Perceiving his memory was like watching a film on normal speed, only to have it fast forward during the good bit. Elkins, however, didn’t seem aware that he’d missed anything out.

“Perhaps you could go into a little bit more detail about what happened at the restaurant,” pressed Patterson.

“Oh,” said Elkins, surprised. “Well I … I must have handed in my coat when I got there. Did I hand in my coat? It must have been a jacket, because I left the flat wearing a jacket. Yes, yes that’s right, because it wasn’t cold enough for a coat.”

Elkins’s memories were mixed up with other times he’d been to the Filigree Restaurant. Evidently, it was his favourite place to meet foreign political activists when he was working on a story. He remembered handing a long coat to a man in a white shirt and black waistcoat and black tie, but he also remembered putting on his brown padded jacket that morning. His mind made allowances, mixed up the memories, and suddenly it was the
brown jacket
, and
not
the winter coat, that he recalled handing to the man at the cloakroom.