Alchemist (67 page)

‘Yes,' Daniel said without hesitation.

The Magister Templi nodded. ‘The right quality of linen will cost hundreds of pounds a yard. Then you'll need brass for your censers, gold for your athame and for all your tools. I warn you, a single ounce of pure gold costs as much as a motor car.'

‘The money's no problem.' Daniel looked back at him confidently. ‘No problem at all.'

Tuesday 29 November, 1994

Conor faced Monty across the small table in the snug of her local pub. ‘Bendix Schere
own
it?' he said. ‘The multi-storey car park?'

‘Do you have a better theory? The address of the registered office is the same as the Bendix lawyers'. Seems too much of a coincidence to be anything else. And the guys in the booth looked more like security guards than car park attendants.'

‘I guess –' He pushed his Budweiser a few inches across the table as if moving a chess piece. ‘Maybe there aren't enough spaces in the lot and they needed some more. You know – could be some kind of executive privilege to get your car parked indoors – nicer in winter.'

‘Crowe and Rorke both have chauffeurs. And the other Directors' spaces have been in use most of the time I've passed them.'

He pushed his hands through his hair. ‘So what exactly did this Mrs Smith say again?'

Monty told him.

Conor echoed the crucial words back at her. ‘
He say that's where the entrance is
. And you think that could be the entrance to our six missing floors? So whatever's down there can only be accessed either by lift from the Directors' floor or through the multi-storey car park?'

‘So it seems.'

He offered Monty a cigarette, clicked his lighter for her, then lit one himself. ‘Maybe it's where the Directors go to watch porno movies,' he replied.

She grinned. ‘They must have a big supply if they need six floors.'

‘Perhaps it's only five – doesn't the hydro count as one?'

‘Maybe. OK, so five then,' she said.

He studied Monty for a moment. She was dressed in a loose black jacket, white blouse and black short skirt. She looked immensely attractive and very vulnerable. He reached across the table and squeezed her hand. ‘That was brave of you, taking a snoop, but I don't know if it was too wise.'

‘No one saw me,' she said. Then she hesitated, thinking about the two attendants themselves, and their monitors. Then about the camera that had panned down at her in the fire-exit passageway behind the hydro. ‘I mean – I'm an employee – I'm entitled to go down to the hydro, there's no regulation forbidding that.'

‘We're beyond regulations, Monty. We're already sticking our heads inside the jaws of the tiger; when you're doing that it's not too smart to squeeze its balls at the same time.'

She smarted at the rebuke, then tapped ash off her cigarette, unnecessarily. ‘I'm intrigued. I'm more than intrigued, I –'

‘Yes?'

She tried to tap more ash off. ‘I'm sorry, maybe I was out of order, but I – had a hunch, I suppose.'

He said nothing.

‘Don't
you
want to know what's down there?' she asked. ‘Aren't you curious?'

‘I want to know a lot of things, but digging around some place that Bendix Schere has gone to a great deal of trouble to hide is not going to get us anything except unwelcome attention. Until your father comes up with a result, it's vital to keep a low profile, OK? We want to be invisible. We're just good company employees doing our work.'

‘Like Charley Rowley?'

He swilled the beer around in his glass. ‘Charley Rowley bucked the system all the time.'

‘And they tolerated it until he went too far and started snooping into Maternox?'

Conor picked up his glass. A beer mat stuck to the bottom of it detached itself after a few seconds and tumbled into his lap. He pointed to it and said, ‘See that? Same thing here. Was he pushed or did he fall?'

‘It's an amazingly fast change of story.'

‘And so very plausible,' Conor said. He smiled sourly. ‘The problem of the non-swimming Charley Rowley neatly sidestepped.'

‘Did you speak to his girlfriend, or any of his relatives?'

He opened his arms in a gesture of frustration. ‘I spoke to his mother. She's very sweet, but I couldn't get a word in edgeways. She was under the misapprehension I was calling to explain the mistake, and she told me someone from the company had already been to see her about that. She's just devastated by her loss. Full stop. Says she fully understands how the details went awry, particularly in a foreign country.'

‘Hawaii's hardly a
foreign
country. It's a state of America.'

‘You want her number? You try talking to her.'

‘I will.'

He shook his head. ‘You won't get anywhere – think it through. BS will have its ass covered by now. Maybe if you sent a private detective out there for six months with a couple of hundred grand in cash, he
might
uncover a wrinkle. But the moment he did, he'd go the same way as Rowley.'

‘You really think the company's that thorough?'

He gave her a look of feigned surprise. ‘Good evening, pretty girl, what planet are you on tonight?'

‘I'm on earth but I think I'd rather be somewhere else.'

‘You'll find Washington a good substitute.'

‘Yeah, I'm looking forward to going.'

‘Nice city, shame about the people. One in every ten humanoids there is a lawyer; the other nine are either muggers or politicians, and the only way to tell them apart is that the muggers are less crooked.'

‘I'm surprised Bendix don't have an office there.'

‘They do. Well, close by in Maryland – their largest plant in the US. Stick a pin, blindfolded, in a map of the world and you'll probably hit a Bendix site.' He smiled and drained his glass. ‘My Washington meeting's come forward a day – I'll be leaving for it on Tuesday. You're coming out Thursday, right?'

‘Daddy's worried about getting finished by Thursday – and he can't leave the analysis unattended. He's prepared to cancel Washington if necessary.'

Conor stiffened. ‘You can't do that, Monty, you have to come.'

She smiled, uneasy suddenly. ‘
Have
to? I mean, I'd really like to – and I'd love to be over there with you, but this is more important, surely?'

‘I was followed down here tonight,' he said quietly. ‘When I stopped to find my cigarettes, I saw a car sitting back a few hundred yards that wasn't there when I pulled up. I noticed it drive past ten miles later when I stopped for gas. Then I saw it behind me again when I stopped on purpose.'

‘Where is it now?' she said, alarmed.

‘Lurking out there in the night, somewhere,' he said.

‘What a horrible feeling,' she said. ‘It frightens me.'

It was Monty that Conor was frightened for too, not himself, but he didn't want to say so, didn't want to spook her more than she already was. She was taking everything pretty well at the moment, staying calm, protected by a deep reservoir of her own resources. She needed her senses to be sharpened and alert, not blurred by fear. ‘That kind of thing doesn't frighten me,' he said. ‘It annoys me. Makes me bloody angry. I don't like my privacy invaded.'

‘Nor me.'

He covered her hand with his own, pressing it firmly, and looked directly into her eyes. ‘Monty, you have to come.'

She sensed something that she could not identify, as if her antennae were picking up the scent or vibration of danger. ‘Why?'

‘Do you trust me?'

She hesitated, then more emphatically than she really felt at that instant, said, ‘Yes.'

‘Then please believe me.'

Wednesday 30 November, 1994

Click. The channel changed. A siren wailed, tyres squealed. Click. The channel changed. ‘But I love you, Edward,' a woman implored. ‘I've always loved you.' There was a bang as a handgun fired. Click. The channel changed. The roar of a crowd. ‘Lineker has possession, he's passing it across to –' click. It changed again. Two women were screaming at each other in Italian; subtitles ran along the bottom of the frame.

Click. The screen went mercifully blank and silent.

‘God, there's such dross on television.' Nikky slung the channel selector down on her bedside table. She gulped some wine, picked up her Mario Vargas Llosa novel, read one paragraph, then closed it noisily and rummaged through the pile of crumpled magazines strewn across the bed, which they had not removed before making love an hour or so earlier.

Gunn, part of his midriff covered by a sheet, aware that he had drunk too much, lay engrossed in his thoughts, trying to ignore Nikky's irritating attempts to distract him. Conor Molloy and Montana Bannerman were becoming an increasing problem and it was bothering him greatly.

The Bannerman woman had been sniffing around behind the health hydro. She had circumnavigated the exterior of the building. She had been to Winston Smith's home again. Then she had gone into the multi-storey car park. She sure as hell had not done that by chance.

He did not like it, did not like it one little bit. Maybe tomorrow he'd get the budget he was after, but he had his doubts. In the meantime he was having to run a makeshift surveillance using overtired staff on overtime. What he wanted was a tight, invisible web, not a team who were so exhausted they were likely to make mistakes. Bugs were now in place on the subjects' home phones and their office phones were on full monitoring. It was vital they did not know they were being followed; he wanted to do nothing that would put them on their guard.

Whatever it was they were up to, he wanted to be able to deliver it on a plate to Crowe. He not only wanted to score a few badly needed points, he was also keen to see how the Chief Executive would react to the news that his darling scientist's precious daughter had been a very naughty little girl. He liked the idea of Crowe being forced to take action that he did not really want to take. Crowe revelled in making other people squirm. Give him a week or two, and he would have Crowe squirming nicely all by himself.

The computer systems manager Cliff Norris had still not come up with any trace of Conor Molloy having dialled into the Bendix system. Gunn suspected the bastard was not looking very hard, if at all. He had recently overruled Norris on some new hardware he wanted, and the systems manager was not a happy bunny about that.

Norris was a breed that Gunn did not like or understand. An arrogant anorak. Most of the tekkies were like that and he had little choice but to live with them. Crowe had accused Gunn of losing his grip and he was right. He had been losing it, but he was feeling a lot more positive now. He had a feeling that Molloy and the Bannerman woman had come along at just the right time for his career prospects.

He was losing his grip on Nikky also, but he was less sure about how to deal with that, or how much longer he could cope with all her demands. Except that he was still hopelessly besotted by her.

‘Gosh!' she said suddenly. ‘This guy – drowned in Hawaii.'

He turned towards her, startled, and saw she was reading the latest issue of the Bendix Schere in-house magazine.

‘Where the hell did you get that?'

‘Your briefcase,' she said simply.

‘You picked the lock?' he said.

‘It's only a dumb combination; a child of four could handle it.'

He snatched the magazine out of her hands. ‘That's confidential – employees only.'

‘Lucky employees, it's really exciting reading!
Bendix Schere building new factory in Malaya. Maternox sales up sixteen per cent in Brazil. German director of Research and Development raises five
thousand marks for Bosnia in bicycle charity race
. This is sphincter-gripping stuff, soldier.' She snatched it back. ‘
Sir Neil Rorke states that as a tribute the company will donate twenty-five thousand pounds to Mr Rowley's favourite charity
. Well, well, how much more exciting can a magazine get?'

‘Read enough now?' Gunn asked her drily.

‘Sated. I'm utterly sated. What more could a girl ask? Two terrific orgasms followed by a night in bed with the Bendix Schere magazine; you really know how to treat a girl, soldier.' She slipped a hand under the sheet and fondled his genitals. ‘Not much activity left down there. How about going out for a curry – no, how about Mex? I really fancy
fajitas
.'

‘I'm bushed.'

‘Some food'll perk you up. I'm feeling hungry and horny.'

‘Well, you could always sit on the street with a cardboard sign hung from your neck: ‘Hungry and Horny – Please Feed and Shag Me.'

She thumped him in the stomach. ‘I
don't
think that's funny. Now, come on, let's get up.'

‘Niks, it's a quarter past eleven. I'm shattered and I have to be in at dawn to finish a report for Dr Crowe.'

‘For such a big, tough guy, how come you're so frightened of this Dr Crowe?' She tugged a crushed copy of the
Evening Standard
out from under Gunn, which was folded open at a picture of Crowe in the business pages. ‘Look at him, he's such a weedy thing, and he's got a face like a sick rattlesnake.'

Gunn grinned. ‘That's flattering him.'

She stared at Crowe again and screwed up her face. ‘Yech, he gives me the creeps. How many people did he kill to get to the top of the heap?'

He turned to face her, electrified by the remark. ‘
What
did you say?'

‘Well, looks like a killer. Did you ever kill anyone, soldier?'

‘In the Falklands.'

‘And in Belfast?'

He shook his head. ‘I'd have liked to kill a few there, but I didn't get the opportunity.'