Alchemist (19 page)

He drew again on his cigarette, stubbed it out, then shook some ketchup over his chips. ‘There are a whole series of monitoring tests done throughout the manufacturing process: control of the physical form, the biological form, control of the formulate – everything, right through until it's packaged. From every lot and batch number Quality Control put random capsules aside, break them open and test them.'

‘What kind of test?'

‘Chromatography analysis. A moving solvent produces a unique fingerprint – or pattern – of the materials, in a sample which is read through dyes or ultraviolet light.'

‘Is there any way at all a rogue batch could get through Quality Control?'

He picked up a chip with his fingers and ate it. ‘There is a flaw with our chromatography system as it is set up – it will only give us info on what we are looking for; the method won't show up anything we are not looking for.'

‘Such as?'

He shrugged. ‘If someone has added something they shouldn't have done.'

‘Why would they do that?'

‘I've known it happen; a company wants to alter the design of a drug, so they quietly slip a few batches in among the existing product and watch to see what happens; saves messing about with early-stage clinical trials with animals.'

She stared at him, shocked. ‘You've known it happen?'

‘Yes.'

‘Maybe abroad in some unscrupulous labs, perhaps, but not with a company like Bendix Schere, surely?'

He raised his eyes. ‘You're talking hundreds of millions of pounds in revenue a year on some formulae. If a company like Bendix can knock three years off its research, that's another three years in which it can be earning from the drug.'

‘But the dangers are phenomenal – they just couldn't take the risk of getting caught.'

He held up his right hand and rubbed his forefinger and thumb together. Monty could read the signal clearly.
Money, bribery
. Even so, she felt a little heretical when she asked: ‘Is there any way you can check batch numbers of the Maternox these three women took?'

She justified the question by telling herself that if Jake could get the batch numbers and they could then test a few samples, it would conclusively prove to Hubert Wentworth that there was nothing wrong with the pills. And it would nip in the bud any possible risk of bad publicity for the company.

He speared a stack of chips with his fork, then raised them up over his plate, to let the steam escape. ‘I know Rick Wilson who's in charge of Quality Control at Reading – we were at college together. I can have a word with him, see if he can identify the batches for me. They always retain a few samples from each batch in case of problems – I might be able to persuade him to run a check on those – or I could get him to send me over the release specification and I could do it myself.'

‘I'd be really grateful,' she said.

‘Anything to put the boot into Bendix is fine by me,' he said, and pushed the tangle of chips into his mouth, chewed, then gave her a smug grin. ‘End of the month I'm outta here. Going to Cobbold Tessering with a fifty per cent rise. I'll see Bendix Fucking Schere in Hell.'

Monty sipped some more wine. ‘Why – what is it that you have against them?'

His eyes shot towards the door and she saw a sudden flash of fear in them. A deep, intense fear that transmitted to her, sending a chill wisp of air curling through her gut.

Anxiously, she followed his gaze to a man who had just come in, solidly built in his late thirties, in a brown anorak. Then across to another man, with sandy hair and freckles, who was seated reading a newspaper, only a few chairs away from them and well within earshot. She wondered why she hadn't noticed him when she had brought the food over.
Probably because there were dozens of people she had not glanced at. She looked quizzically at the lab technician. His face was drained of colour and he looked even more pasty than normal.

‘You OK, Jake?'

He nodded, mouthed a silent warning at her, sipped his beer, then said, breezily and loudly: ‘So what hobbies do you have when you're not at work?'

Bill Gunn sat, stunned, in front of the wall of monitors in the enhancement room. Only one, the thirty-six-inch high-density screen in the middle, was switched on.

An audio tape screeched as he touched ‘Rewind' and watched the digital counter on the control panel, pressing the ‘Stop' key as it hit the mark. Then he eased several level controls forward, further filtering out the background sound, and played the tape again:

‘
I've never heard of Cyclops Syndrome
.' Jake Seals' voice. There was the sound of a match flaring. ‘
Three cases doesn't sound much
.' Jake Seals' voice again.

He stopped the tape, quivering not just with anger but with shock. Where was the leak? Where the hell was the leak?

‘
Number thirty-two!
' a background voice called out.

‘
That's us, I'll get them
.' Montana Bannerman's voice.

‘
Ketchup
.' Seals' voice. ‘
Matemox is made at several different sites. At Reading, Plymouth and Carlisle here in the UK. In Connecticut, Maryland and Hawaii in the US. In Korea, and I think in Cape Town and Melbourne. There's also a plant making it under licence in Russia. There's always a chance of a rogue batch – but the quality-control procedures make it pretty improbable that it would ever reach the retailers
.'

Gunn's cup of coffee in front of him had gone cold, but he didn't even care; he listened through to the end of the tape,
then played it one more time.
Got you this time, my friend
, he thought.
Got you by the scruff of your nasty little neck
.

He hit ‘Stop', leaned back in his chair and pressed the video sync button. On the screen in front of him he could see, in black and white, Jake Seals and Montana Bannerman seated in a pub having lunch. Bill Gunn did all his monitoring in black and white. Colour might be prettier, but black and white gave better definition, particularly in low light. He glanced at the red digits of the clock of the panel, and then, as if he did not agree, checked his Rolex. 7.45.

‘Shit!' He had promised Nikky he'd be home in good time to take her to the theatre. Shakespeare. She was studying literature at the University of London. He didn't mind a bit of culture now and then. He was taking her to
Othello
at the Old Vic tonight. It was a play full of intrigue and he liked intrigue; if Othello had only had as efficient an eavesdropping system as the one he ran at Bendix Schere, Desdemona would never have died.

Nikky was a good kid. Twenty. Two years since he'd divorced
the bitch
who had ruined his life for a decade. Even now it hurt him to say her real name, the wounds were that deep; so she remained the anonymous
bitch
. Nikky would grow up, get bored with him, find someone closer to her own age and settle down one day. But in the meantime it was good, it was what he needed. Wild sex, few questions and unfettered hero-worship. There had been worse times in his life. A lot worse.

He picked up the external phone and punched the number stored in the machine's memory. Nikky answered after the second ring.

‘I'm delayed. Jump in a cab; leave my ticket at the box office and I'll see you inside.' Without waiting for her reply he hung up and looked back at the video in front of him.

Speed. When you had a situation like this, speed was essential. There were two people who were real danger: Charles Rowley and Jake Seals. He had advised getting rid of Rowley a long time back, but the Board had decided Rowley knew too much about the company's genetics work and didn't want to risk him moving to a competitor – which he almost
certainly would do if he left Bendix; any pharmaceutical company would snap him up. So, instead, Gunn had been charged with keeping him under close watch. Putting the new American, Conor Molloy, with him was a bad move, Gunn believed. If pressed, he couldn't have explained why. It was just instinct; and his instincts were usually good.

His advice on getting rid of Seals had also been turned down for much the same reason – too much risk of Seals moving to a competitor. Now the ball game had changed.

Cyclops Syndrome.

Jesus.

He played the video again from the top, turning the audio up a little louder and listened to the first part of the conversation again:

‘
I've never heard of Cyclops Syndrome. Three cases doesn't sound much
.'

Who had started this conversation? Seals or the Bannerman woman?

He replayed the earlier tape from the lab.

‘
Last week you hinted there were things you wanted to tell me about Bendix Schere, and said we should have a talk some time, away from here? Are you free for lunch in the next few days?
' Montana Bannerman's voice.

He sat in thought. He had put a twenty-four-hour surveillance order on Seals, but the stupid fools had missed one of the key moments: what the hell had happened between the Bannerman woman coming to see him in the lab and the start of the conversation in the pub? The goons on Seals' tail had missed some vital bits at the start of the conversation. Had the Bannerman woman instigated it? Was it she who had expressed the interest in Cyclops Syndrome? Or was it Seals trying to poison her loyalty? That was a question to which quite a few people were going to want an answer, and Gunn didn't have one to give them, not right now. But he would get one. In the meantime, urgent damage limitation was needed.

He picked up the internal secure phone, punched in his access code, then a number.

Barnet, North London
.
1946

Daniel made an effort to be good on Saturday. A very special effort. It was Saturn's day and he could not afford to miss the chance.

He had learned each of the days by heart. Luna was Monday. Mars, Tuesday. Mercury, Wednesday. Jupiter, Thursday. Venus, Friday. Sol, Sunday.

Saturn's day
. The book said he had to do it tonight. He could not risk having his hands strapped to the bed and having to wait another week; anyway, he didn't think he could get away with hiding the things he had gathered and fashioned for another week, particularly as the rabbit had already eaten its way out of two boxes.

He had offered to help his mother in the kitchen, but she'd told him to go away, that he was already beyond redemption and only months of reading nothing but the Bible and constant prayer would give him any possible hope of salvation.

It was a perfect night. Clear with a waning moon; the waning moon was essential, the book said; a sabbat would have been even better, even more powerful, but the next sabbat was weeks away and he couldn't hide the rabbit any longer.

He stood in his dressing gown and observed the moon through a gap in the curtains, watched it hang above the rooftops at the end of the garden, felt the cold glow of its light on his face like a draught, and tried to feel the energy the book said it would give him. Then he squinted at the big round clock on his mantelpiece, and could just make out the time: 11.10. Obeying the instructions in the book, he had bathed with a handful of salt added to the bath water; now he was clean, purified.

His parents had been in bed for an hour. He was desperate to urinate but had forced himself not to go. Silently he opened his door and peered out at their bedroom a few feet across the narrow landing, checking for a telltale band of light
below the door, but there was none. Darkness. They were asleep.

He closed the door, shaking with nerves, and carefully laid his candlewick bedspread like a draught excluder along the bottom, pressing it tight so that no light would show through on the other side, then draped his dressing gown over the top of it. It was time to begin. Had to go ahead with this now. Was
determined
to do so. In spite of his terror of being caught.

He started by removing the candle from under the neat pile of his shirts in his dresser. It was a lumpy, uneven object he had fashioned himself from melting down a household candle in a tin over the stove when his mother was out, and mixing it with boot polish. It was not a perfect black, more a blotchy charcoal grey, but it was the best he could do.

He struck a match, glancing nervously towards the door as it flared and shadows jumped around the room, then lit the candle. He waited for the flame to take hold, then tipped the candle to allow some drips of wax to fall into a saucer, and stuck its base down firmly. There was a funny smell, sharp, like burning paint, which he assumed must be the polish, and he hoped it would not wake his parents.

From beneath his mattress he removed the large square of black cloth cut from a blackout curtain that had been inside a trunk in the attic, then a discarded brass poker he had come across on a bomb site and had polished up, followed by a mug of salt and a cup of water he had taken from the kitchen. He draped the cloth over the small table by the window and set the candle on top of it. Beside the candle he carefully placed his penknife with the large blade, sharpened to a razor's edge, open; and then the poker, which was his ceremonial sword.

Next he took the piece of white chalk which he had stolen from school, tied a two-foot length of string securely around it, and with a thumbtack he pinned the other end of the string to the centre of the floor. Keeping the string stretched tight, he drew a circle four feet in diameter. It should have been nine feet, according to the books, but the room was not big enough to allow it. Less scientifically he drew a pentagram inside the circle.

Taking the mug of salt, he carefully poured a small amount
all the way round the circumference of the circle, leaving no gaps. When he had finished, he put several pinches of salt into the cup of water, closed his eyes and blessed it with the end of the Lord's Prayer, then sprinkled the water across the floor, the walls and the curtains, covering every section of the room.