Alchemist (3 page)

Suddenly it side-slipped, as if the threads had been severed, stopped and steadied for one fleeting moment; then it began to zigzag downwards, half flying, half plummeting, like a shadow chasing itself, its wings flapping clumsily as if they were clawing the air.

Seconds later it alighted on the ground only a few yards from where he stood, with a thud. Its head jerked sharply up, and seemed to stare straight at him in surprise.

The boy stared back for a moment in sheer disbelief. ‘DAAAADDDDDDYYYYYYY!' he screamed. ‘DAAAADDDDYYYY! DAAADDDYYYY! DAAADDDYYYY! DAAADDDYYYY! DAAAA –'

‘Honey, it's OK, honey. Mummy's here, your mummy's here!'

Then the face of the bird dissolved into bright light.

Silence.

Conor Molloy opened his eyes, stared up at the glow of the pearl bulb in its familiar plain shade. Then he saw the bookshelves lined with his old comics, annuals, children's encyclopaedias, his tiny microscope …

The room was as he had left it a decade and a half ago; the same flimsy curtains, the dull red carpet, the white chest of drawers. The bed he now lay in was the same bed that he had
outgrown some time in his teens, but which had never been changed.

‘Conor, you all right?'

His mother's face was peering at him anxiously, her slender fingers glinting with the base metals of far too many rings, and in an instant nothing had changed. Fifteen years, more, were stripped away like bedclothes. He was a child again, a small boy saved from a nightmare by his mother.

‘Honey, darling, are you all right?'

He swallowed the lump that was in his throat and nodded.

‘You were hollering your head off.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘The dream? Was it the dream?'

He was quiet for a moment, wondering whether to admit it, aware of the rebuke it would bring once more. But he knew there was no point in trying to hide anything from her, she could always see through him. She could read the inside of his head as clearly as if it were beaming out to her from a television screen. ‘Yes,' he said.

She was fifty-six and still beautiful. Her long dark hair was flecked with occasional grey strands, but they looked more like highlights than age. Her blue eyes were still set in a fine classical face, barely different from the one that he had seen staring out from the host of mail-order catalogues and magazine ads she kept crammed away in a cupboard.

However much she might have embarrassed him as a child with her strange behaviour in front of his friends, he looked at her now and knew that he had never ceased loving her. He admired her for all that she had given him as a mother.

‘You want to go back to sleep or you want a drink?' she asked.

Conor glanced at his watch; it was ten past three. But tomorrow was the last day he would see her for a long time. ‘A drink would be good, Mom. Sorry to wake you.'

‘You didn't – I haven't been to sleep.'

He slipped out of bed and pulled on his dressing gown. As he padded towards the kitchen he heard the kettle starting to boil and smelled the sweet smoke of a freshly lit cigarette. The ranch-style house had grown in keeping with his mother's
prosperity over the years. It had started as a modest bungalow in an area that just qualified for a Georgetown address. Appearances had meant a lot to his father – he preferred to live in a small property with a good address, rather than a larger house elsewhere. His father'd had strong, intractable views on pretty well everything.

His mother made some herbal tea, ignoring the fact that Conor loathed the stuff, then took it through to the old living room that was now only used when his mother was frightened about something. In his early childhood, the room had been a conventional family centrepiece. But over the years his mother had changed it dramatically. She had had the walls and the ceiling panelled in oak, giving it a rather claustrophobic air that was further enhanced by two of the walls being covered floor to ceiling in bookshelves – packed solid with occult reference works and grimoires. Also arranged along the shelves, making access to some of the books tricky, was a vast assortment of rock crystals fashioned into bizarre shapes, and eerie bronze and stone gargoyles.

Heavy crimson drapes, permanently drawn, kept the outside world at bay. Two Burmese cats sat like sentinels either side of a gas coal fire in a crenellated hearth. This was kept burning, along with two joss sticks, day and night, all year round. A massive woven pentagram hung on the wall directly above the fire, flanked on each side by two tall black candles.

His mother had eased herself into one of the two comfortable sofas and sat serene in her long black robe. Behind her was the small wooden table where she had done her sittings. A crystal ball, a small glass pyramid and several other artefacts were laid there. On the far wall a row of voodoo masks stared menacingly down on to her computer workstation, from which in less affluent times she posted occult news on to the Internet, gave tarot readings by fax and eMail, and communicated messages for psychic healing.

A locked door between the two walls of bookshelves led into her inner chamber, where she had conducted her seances and practised ritual magic. Conor had never been permitted inside the room; and although frequently as a child he had stood with
his ear pressed to the door, he had never heard anything other than meaningless chanting.

His mother drew hard on her cigarette and blew the smoke at the panelled ceiling, which was covered in carved occult symbols. ‘Conor, I know you say your mind's made up, but I want you to reconsider one more time. I've lost too much in my life. I don't want to lose you.'

‘You're not losing me – I'm at the end of a phone, we can eMail each other every day – and I'm going to be just a plane ride away.'

‘You know what I mean,' she said, her tone becoming sharper.

He said nothing.

‘You just don't know what you're getting into. Maybe I've taught you too much, given you false confidence. Believe me, I've seen it for myself, I've experienced what they can do. Think again while you still have the chance.'

‘Mom, I'm going.'

‘You don't have to go. There are other companies – right here –'

‘Mom! We've had this out a thousand times. I have to do this.'

‘You're as stubborn as your father.'

‘I'm his son,' he said simply.

London
,
October
,
1993

‘What you have to realize is that in the past one hundred and fifty years the pharmaceutical industry has gone from selling snake oil to controlling the future of the human race. The problem is, it's still run by the snake-oil salesmen.'

Oh Christ
, Montana Bannerman thought, staring at the television monitor up above her.

‘Thieving, unscrupulous bastards, the whole lot of them!'
Her father thumped the coffee table, and the female interviewer beside him looked a little flustered.

Dr Bannerman was a giant of a man in every way; both physically tall and powerfully built, and a towering genius in science. But with his bald dome rising from a mane of greying hair, his semi-permanent rig of denims, Chelsea boots and a checked lumberjack shirt, he looked more like an ageing rock star than a molecular biologist.

Monty had tried to stop her father from drinking before he'd gone on air, but he had gulped down two large whiskies in the Sky News hospitality suite and he was now in full flood. The Rastafarian leader of the Afro-Caribbean rap group which was due on next nodded his head in enthusiasm. ‘He's right! The man is right! Wow, is he right!'

Monty smiled politely through gritted teeth. Her father was not doing much right now to endear himself to the pharmaceutical establishment on whom he depended for his funding. On whom they both depended.

‘Don't you think, Dr Bannerman, that the pharmaceutical industry has made human life very much more comfortable? It's eliminated an enormous amount of pain, it's eradicated or brought under control countless previously incurable diseases. How do you argue against that?'

‘All that is a by-product. The pharmaceutical industry is interested in one thing and one thing only: profit. If it happens to help a few people on the way, fine, so be it.'

‘And that's what you really believe?' the interviewer said.

‘That's what I was told, verbatim, by the chief executive of one of our largest pharmaceutical companies when I was a young research student. All this do-gooding stuff is crap. Look at the Nobel Prize. Alfred Nobel made his fortune out of inventing dynamite. He followed that by establishing an annual prize for peace. How much more cynical can you get?'

‘If that's the way you feel, why did you accept a Nobel Prize for Chemistry?'

‘Sometimes I wish I hadn't.' Bannerman shrugged his shoulders. ‘I'm afraid in my line of work we have to be whores, selling ourselves to anyone prepared to put up cash
for the next three years' funding.' He smiled and the true warmth of the man fleetingly shone through the storm cloud of his expression. ‘Nobel Prizes make good calling cards.'

Plug the book
,
Daddy!
Monty thought, staring at the fat hardback that lay on the table, angled at the camera but out of focus.
That's why you're there – to plug the book – not to slag off the pharmaceutical establishment!

The interviewer shifted position and leaned closer towards him. She was about the same age as herself, Monty thought, late twenties, a pretty brunette with hair in a neat bob and a businesslike suit. The tone of her voice emphasized the change of subject.

‘You are the first molecular biologist to have cracked the secret of switching on and off human genes. This has been acclaimed by the scientific world as one of the most important breakthroughs of all time. Up until now scientists have been able to identify certain genes, those related to disease and ageing, but they've not been able to do anything about them. None of the gene-therapy attempts with cystic fibrosis sufferers, for example, have yet totally succeeded. In your position most scientists might have tried to keep their work secret, but you've refused to patent your discoveries and have published them for all the world to see in your new book,
The Gene Bomb – The 21st Century Holocaust
.'

The camera zoomed in on the jacket.
Good girl!
Monty thought.

‘Why have you done that, Dr Bannerman?'

His voice was big and deep, with a slight Transatlantic accent, reflecting his obsession with Americana. ‘Because no one has the right to patent human life by patenting genes. Genes will ultimately give scientists absolute control over life, but who will control the scientists?' He thumped his fist hard on the table again. ‘Not governments – they'll be bought off. No, it's going to be the pharmaceutical industry. An industry so secretive they don't even allow you in the door. Is that because they're worried about you stealing their secrets? No! They're worried you might find out how much money they're all making, and how much money they're paying out as
baksheesh
. Did you know that in 1988 the top eighteen US
pharmaceutical companies paid out one hundred and sixty-five million dollars in bribes to doctors?'

The interviewer flinched. ‘Do you have evidence of that?'

‘Those are figures published by the US Government,' Bannerman said triumphantly.

There was a ragged cheer from the rock band who were glued to the monitor. Monty groaned silently. But the interviewer, failing to grab a good story by the nose, rapidly changed the subject once more. Monty sighed her relief.

‘I would imagine, Dr Bannerman, that at this moment you must have every pharmaceutical company in the world beating a path to your doorstep to offer you funding.'

‘And they can turn round and go straight back home, the bastards. They ignored me for thirty years and now suddenly I'm everybody's best friend. We share seventy per cent of our genes with slime mould – but I think in the pharmaceutical industry the percentage is even higher.'

Monty closed her eyes and groaned again.
The book
,
do the book
,
Daddy – we need the money!

Sure, her father had a valid axe to grind, he had a right to be bitter against an industry – and a succession of governments – that held scientists in such low esteem that it forced them to emigrate, or to spend much of their working lives scrabbling around for funding instead of concentrating on their real work. But neither was Dick Bannerman an easy man to work with or to deal with. One of the true
enfants terribles
of science. In spite of his genius, over the years he had not helped himself as much as he might have done; he was nudging sixty now, and age had not mellowed him one bit.

‘How did I do?' It was always the first question he asked Monty after any interview or speech, a sudden childlike innocence appearing in his brown eyes, as if knowing he had done wrong and not wanting to face up to it.

She backed her MG carefully out of the bay, then drove slowly towards the exit booth of the underground car park. ‘How do
you
think you did?' she replied with a smile.

‘Four out of ten?'

‘Maybe five,' she said.

‘You're being generous.'

She paid £2.50 to the attendant at the barrier, then drove into the falling darkness of the South London rush hour.

‘The interviewer was a child,' Dick Bannerman said, as if in his own defence.

‘At least she'd read the book, which is more than most.'

‘True,' he said, sounding distant. ‘Very true.'

Monty recognized the signs of her father lapsing into his own deep thoughts. ‘I think you should call Sir Neil Rorke back,' she said, continuing a discussion they'd been having before the interview.

‘Think he'll still want to speak to me?' he said wryly.