Mind Secrets: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 1) (31 page)

“Come!” said a voice inside.

Cooper opened the door. And there, sitting in the executive chair, behind the executive desk, was John Pankhurst. The Prime Minister, with trademark bright tie of orange and blue stripes, beckoned them forward. “Come in, come in.”

Michael wasn’t aware he was standing with his mouth open until the guard shoved him forward.

Cooper stood awkwardly to attention. “Michael Ransom, sir.”

“So I see,” said Pankhurst. “Do take a seat, Mr Ransom.”

It took a second for Michael to realise the Prime Minister was talking to him. With tentative steps, he moved away from the guard and put his bum in the seat on the near side of the desk. It was awkward to sit with his arms behind his back, so he perched on the edge of the chair.

“Bill, we don’t need those cuffs, do we?” said Pankhurst to Cooper.

“Sir?”

“I mean, I’m in no danger from the boy, am I?”

“With respect, sir, he did once stab me in the stomach.”

The Prime Minister looked across the desk at Michael. “You’re not going to stab me, are you?”

It took a moment for Michael to realise he was supposed to reply. “No, Prime Minister.” He hastily added, “Sir.”

“There you are, then,” said Pankhurst.

“If you’re sure, sir,” said Cooper.

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Bill. As I understand it, it’s his mind that’s the real threat to me, not his arms.”

“Yes, sir.”

Cooper ordered the guard to remove the cuffs. Michael felt the relief of his wrists being free of the metal and his back being able to rest firmly on the chair.

“Thank you, Bill. You can leave us now.”

“Sir?”

Michael perceived Cooper’s unease at being ordered about in his own office. And being ordered to do something he didn’t want to do, at that.

“Is there a problem with your ability to understand English today? It’s a simple request. Go away.”

“But, sir—”

“You can post a guard outside the door if it’ll make you feel any better. I promise I’ll yell if the young fellow tries to stab me.”

Rankled, Cooper nodded and departed.

The door closed. Michael was left to face the Prime Minister. He concentrated on the man. There was none of the fear he had possessed back at Ransom’s house. He was confident, in control, at ease. His thoughts, though, were strange. Tuneful, even:
I was strolling in the park one day, in the merry merry month of May
…

He was singing in his head.

“I’m told,” said Pankhurst, “if I think about nonsense, like having a song playing in my head, it can block your perception.”

“Well,” said Michael. “Perceivers occasionally pick up strong surface thoughts. If the song is the thing you’re thinking about …”

“Quite so. But you are different. Bill Cooper tells me you’re stronger than most.”

“He tells me that too,” said Michael.

A smile from the Prime Minister. “You can pick up more than thoughts on the surface?”

“Surface thoughts are easy for me. Going deeper is … hard.”

“But you can – go deeper, I mean?”

“I suppose.”

“That’s what worries me.” The Prime Minister stood from the chair, turned and looked out of the window. “Come and look at this.”

Michael didn’t move. It didn’t seem right somehow. The whole meeting was kinda surreal.

“Well, come on,” said Pankhurst. “I’m not going to throw you out from the first floor.”

Michael did as he was told. It meant he stood next to the Prime Minister, so close he could smell his aftershave.

“Look at those people.”

Michael looked out at the complex below. A group of four teenagers in khaki left the building opposite and turned right; two men with rifles slung over their shoulders stood guard at the gate; a woman driving a red car headed towards the car park.

“They have many things on their minds,” said Pankhurst. “They’re wondering how they can get through the day without upsetting the boss, what they’re going to cook their children for tea, how they’re going to pay the mortgage this month.” He pointed to the woman getting out of the red car. “Perhaps she’s wondering how she’s going to tell her husband she’s pregnant.” He pointed to one of the guards at the gate. “He might be wondering how he can get through the day with a hangover, his colleague might be thinking about how he hates guard duty.

“But you can tell none of this from looking at them,” Pankhurst continued. “It’s private to them. The thought that other people might be able to see what’s in their head – it scares them.”

“Why are you telling me this?” said Michael. “Are you trying to convince me all perceivers should be cured?”

“Maybe I’m trying to convince myself.” The Prime Minister, suddenly reflective, turned away from the window and leant back against the glass. “You said some things at your father’s house that made me think. All this time, I’ve listened to people like Bill Cooper and my advisors and … well, I only listened to adults, really. I never listened to people like you.”

Michael perceived the man was being genuine. He’d really come to listen. Michael stepped back from the window and hopped up to sit on Cooper’s desk so the two of them faced each other again.

“You should speak to Jennifer,” said Michael. “She’s the voice of perceivers.”

“Yes, well, Jennifer Price’s profile is a little public at the moment. If I met with her, it’d be all over the press. Whereas I can come to this facility and no one blinks an eye. Even my own staff think I’m in a private meeting with Bill Cooper.”

Pankhurst shifted his position against the window and self-consciously fiddled with his tie. “It was one of my staff who called him, by the way; when I was at your father’s house. He recognised you or Jennifer. Sorry about that.”

Michael had wondered how Cooper had known he was there. Not as if it mattered now. He was more interested in why the Prime Minister had come to see him. “There was something I said that made you think?” prompted Michael.

“Hmm,” considered Pankhurst. “You said, ‘what happens to the teenagers when they grow up and have babies?’ In all the briefings I’ve had, it was never a question I asked. I wish I had now.”

The man was worried, and he made no attempt to hide it. There was no song in his head, just the thought that he’d screwed up. That, in offering a solution to the problem of perceivers, he’d made the situation worse. That ‘the cure’ was no cure at all. That all it did was sweep the issue under the carpet. And it would taint his legacy forever.

“You’re thinking the problem won’t go away,” said Michael.

Pankhurst frowned. “I’m thinking you should stop perceiving me and answer your own question: what happens to the teenagers when they grow up and have babies?”

“I don’t know the science of it, all I know is that there were perceivers out there, like my father, before all this fuss about teenagers started. You didn’t know about it because they hid it from everyone. I inherited it from my parents, I don’t know if teenage perceivers will pass it onto their kids.”

“But the cure—”

“Doesn’t cure anything,” said Michael. “It blocks perception. It doesn’t take away the genetic trait that made them perceivers in the first place.”

“So curing teenagers won’t solve the problem long term,” said the Prime Minister, thinking aloud.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Michael. “But that’s not really the point. The point is, the cure isn’t a solution. We haven’t got a disease. What we have is another sense, like hearing or seeing. It’s normal for us. It’s like—” Michael tried to think of an example “—it’s like how they used to treat disabled people: lock them up in an institution and forget about them, keep them out of sight because they’re not ‘normal’. Don’t let half the population vote because they’re women. Don’t sit next to that man on the bus because he’s a different colour. I thought we’d moved on from that.”

“Are you accusing me of being a bigot?” The thought appalled the Prime Minister.

“You thought you were doing the right thing,” said Michael, trying to be conciliatory.

But Pankhurst wasn’t ready to give up the argument, not yet. “Some teenagers want to be cured, you can’t deny that.”

“It’s like Jennifer said,” explained Michael. “You need to give people a choice. Don’t force them to have the cure. It’s not just ‘a little injection’ like they say on the advert, you know. It goes into our heads and stops part of our brain from working. It takes away one of our senses – like someone had poked you in the eyes and blinded you.”

The Prime Minister was taken aback. “It’s not that bad.”

“Have you seen it happen to one of your friends?”

No
. Pankhurst allowed the thought to betray him.
I can’t imagine
.

“Jennifer isn’t the same person I used to know,” said Michael. “I don’t think she ever will be.”

A ringing burst from Pankhurst’s jacket. “Blasted hell!” He delved into his inside pocket and pulled out his phone. “Yep?” he said, putting it to his ear. “Just finishing up … No, no, I’ll see you over there … Right … Five minutes.”

He hung up. “I need to go, otherwise I’ll be late for my next appointment, or so they tell me. Thanks for our little chat.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Michael.

The Prime Minister didn’t know. He didn’t say it, but he didn’t need to. He pushed away from the window and strolled over to the door. He poked his head outside. “You can take him back now.”

The guard came in brandishing the handcuffs. Michael’s esteem fell. One minute he was being treated as a personal advisor to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the next he was being treated as a common criminal. The guard forced Michael’s hands behind his back and secured the cuffs to his wrists in front of Pankhurst, adding to his humiliation.

The guard led Michael to the door.

“Wait a minute,” said Pankhurst.

The guard halted. Michael turned round.

“I understand Bill has offered you a job.”

“Yeah,” said Michael.

“You should take it.”

Michael had no intention of taking Cooper’s skanking job.

Pankhurst smiled. “If perceivers are here to stay, like you suggest, then we’ll need people like you. Strong perceivers who can put their skills to good use, to help the country.”

“I told Cooper I’d think about it.” He’d told Cooper no such thing, but it sounded like the sort of thing he should say to the Prime Minister.

“Then think about saying yes,” said Pankhurst. “I don’t know you at all, Michael, but I know your father. The idiot may have lied to me about being a perceiver, but he’s been a friend to me in the past. So I can only assume the best of you. And, I have to say, Michael, this is no life for you.”

“What choice do I have?”

“You can take the job. From where I’m standing, it’s the best choice.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

MICHAEL WAS OVERWHELMED
by the vastness of Westminster Hall. Its stone walls were as high as ten men standing on each other’s shoulders and reached up to a vaulted wooden ceiling. So spacious, it was like being in a shopping mall, except it was built in medieval times, centuries before the word ‘shopping’ was invented. At the other end were stone steps that spanned the width of the hall and climbed the two metres to the next level, where a most magnificent stained glass window sparkled with coloured light. Not so much a window, more a wall – floor to ceiling – of thousands of blue, yellow, green, red and purple glass pieces radiating in the sunlight behind. With such majesty that it made Michael realise what a small, insignificant human being he was.

Just, he suspected, as the craftsmen who made it had intended.

Michael walked the length of the hall and climbed the stone steps. At the next level, he turned left to where two policemen in shirt sleeves stood guard at a stone archway that led into a different room. He perceived no animosity from them. They nodded and he walked through.

The buzz of other minds greeted him. Curious, awed and a few excited – but all unthreatening. He shut out their thoughts – some of them in German, others in Japanese – and continued walking. A souvenir shop on the left offered to take his money in return for little trinkets, but its lure was nothing to the history all around him. Oversize stone statues of historic figures in the wigs and breeches of times past stood watching from the sides. Giant paintings depicting the scenes of ancient battles and long-dead aristocracy filled the walls. All of it illuminated by stained glass above, and the electric bulbs of half a dozen chandeliers.

A tour guide surrounded by a group of schoolchildren was explaining, “… when King Henry VIII moved out of here in the sixteenth century …”

Michael walked on into the central lobby. After the vastness of Westminster Hall, and the opulence of St Stephen’s Hall, it seemed oddly small. He walked across its floor of patterned tiles to where a man in a frock coat greeted him. The man looked entirely at home in his traditional outfit of white stiff-collared shirt, white bow tie and black waistcoat with a golden seal resting where his belly button was.

Michael showed him his ticket.

“This way, sir.” He opened an ornate door of solid wood for him to pass through.

Inside, it was plain and functional, like some kind of servants’ entrance. Stone stairs, covered in modern carpet, led up to a younger man in a frock coat who directed him to a cloakroom area. Michael handed over his rucksack to a similarly dressed woman, who placed it in a pigeonhole behind her and, in return, gave him a round plastic tag with the number 45 on it.

He was directed through another door, and another corridor, into a gallery of green padded benches overlooking the debating chamber of the House of Commons.

Jennifer sat in the front row, watching the MPs file into their seats below. Her hair was as sleek and black as ever, and her body disguised beneath her large coat. Michael made his way towards her. As he did so, a face topped with shocking blond hair peered out from the other side. It was Otis. He smiled at Michael – perceived him coming, probably – and gave Jennifer a little nudge.

“Michael!” she said, her voice uninhibited.