The Chosen Seed (4 page)

‘Who do you want to talk about?’ Dr Cornell asked plaintively. ‘I don’t know anyone around here. They don’t talk to me.’

Cass was willing to bet the neighbours gave this blight on their pleasant landscape a wide berth. They might not speak to him face to face, but they’d sure as hell be on the phone to the council, the police, anyone who would listen, demanding they
get something done about him
.

‘Alan Jones,’ Cass said. Across the road a young woman pushing a pram along the pavement stared over at him. He kept his face turned towards the door. He didn’t need any unwelcome attention.

‘Hello?’ There was silence on the other side of the door and Cass gritted his teeth in frustration. This negotiation was shaping up to take some time – time that Cass didn’t want to spend standing out on a doorstep with passers-by watching his every move. The last thing he needed was for someone to call the police because the crazy old man at Number 29 was being bullied by some bastard who wouldn’t leave him alone.

‘Go away.’ The aggressive edge was gone; Dr Cornell now sounded like a schoolkid, not sure if his friends were taking the piss or being serious.

Cass leaned in closer, his nostrils filling with the scents of rotting paint and damp wood. Being anonymous wasn’t going to work with Dr Cornell. The man was too paranoid. ‘I’m Alan and Evie Jones’ son,’ he said quietly.

‘Their son’s dead. I read it.’ More shuffling on the other side. ‘I read it in the papers. He’s dead. All of his family.’

‘I’m their other son. Now please let me in – I need your help.’ He didn’t want to think about what state his life had
come to if he was begging an old recluse like Dr Cornell for help. He pressed his ear against the door and listened. If Dr Cornell was calling the police then he had about ten minutes to get away. This was a residential area, and his running wasn’t up to much with his shoulder as damaged as it was – not that running would do him much good against a search helicopter. Basically, if Dr Cornell
was
ringing the police, then he was well and truly fucked. The only thing he could hope for was that Dr Cornell had a reputation for being a mad old time-waster and whoever took the call wouldn’t pay him any attention.

The seconds ticked by. Finally there was a rasping screech and a bolt was pulled back on the other side, then keys were turned and chains were unhooked and, eventually, the door opened an inch. Cass stared into the suspicious faded blue eye that peered out.

‘You’d better come in then,’ Dr Cornell said after a long moment, and opened the door only just wide enough for Cass to get through, then slammed the door shut on the outside world and set to work resecuring his home. Cass looked down the corridor. The walls were lined with paper-stuffed carrier bags and piles of newspapers.

‘I haven’t sorted those yet.’ Dr Cornell still had his back to Cass as he turned the last of the keys, so he must have expected a reaction.

Cass was surprised to find the lights were on and it was warm inside; somehow he was still paying his utility bills. The man’s appearance was a surprise too; though his clothes were worn, they looked clean enough, and he was clean-shaven. How he managed it amidst all this mess, Cass couldn’t figure out. Maybe the upstairs of the house was normal. He doubted it somehow.

‘Come into my study.’ The old man led him down the
corridor. ‘You should be hiding. They’ll all be looking for you, you know.’

Cass didn’t answer. It didn’t surprise him that Dr Cornell knew about his problems, not with this many newspapers filling the hallway.

‘What are you looking for in all this?’ he asked.

‘Information.’ Dr Cornell waved him into a room on the left and busied himself removing papers from a buried armchair before nodding Cass into it. As he started clearing a second for himself Cass looked at the towering piles of books and papers surrounding him: he could see natural history, geography, astronomy, astrology, religion, even the history of Christianity. Some were so old he couldn’t distinguish the titles. There were folders, too, with handwritten labels: New York, Syria, the Middle East, Moscow, and the largest had London printed on a tatty sheet of paper and underlined several times in felt-tip pen. But it was at the wall opposite Cass found himself staring longest. It was covered in photographs and newspaper cuttings, pinned and Sellotaped and Blu-Tacked, with barely a scrap of wallpaper visible beneath the mass of paperwork.

Could that really be—? Cass stood up and took a closer look; it was definitely Mr Bright and Mr Solomon, together in one photograph. The two men were walking side by side across an airstrip. Both had hair slicked back in side partings and their suits had a baggy quality that belonged in the nineteen forties. They were tilting their heads towards each other and talking intently.

He scanned the rest of the clippings. They covered everything from the formation of The Bank to old reports of the Jack the Ripper slayings, an apparently random mix of political, business and criminal news. Surely Dr Cornell
couldn’t believe that the Network had been involved in all these things?

He looked back at the newspaper pictures and photographs. There were some of men he didn’t recognise, but one of Mr Bright and another man had been taken in New York, perhaps in the sixties, and there was a very old copy of a photograph from around the start of the twentieth century, of Mr Bright and Mr Solomon standing on either side of a tall, broad, dark-haired man. Cass could see he was strikingly handsome, despite the grainy quality of the image and his ageing face. The three were laughing at the camera as if they had just been told the biggest joke. Cass frowned. Where were they?

‘That was the opening of the London stock exchange in 1854. It had just been rebuilt,’ Dr Cornell said, as if reading Cass’ mind. ‘The one in the middle – I’ve had no sightings of him for years, not much after the turn of the century.’ He stood close enough that Cass could smell the mint on his breath. At least he brushed.

‘He’s the one, though: the key figure – the leader, if they have one. Although Castor Bright seems to have stepped into his shoes. It’s hard to get photos now. I don’t go out, not any more. And they’re more careful.’ Stuart Cornell’s eye twitched and he turned away from the board. He picked up a bottle and found two glasses behind a stack of box-files and poured them both a drink.

‘They want to take my papers. My evidence. They always say they’re from the council, but I know better.’ The old man tapped the side of his nose.

The glass looked clean enough and Cass figured he had enough antibiotics racing round his system to cope with any unwelcome bacteria. He
needed
the drink – he felt almost breathless. Here was someone else who knew about
Mr Bright and the strangeness that surrounded him. He took a long sip of the whisky. What would Dr Cornell have thought if he’d seen how Mr Solomon had died? Most likely that would have completely tipped him into madness …

He looked closely at the old man. There was no glow in his eyes, not even a flicker of silver like he’d seen in Hayley Porter’s mother’s. Whatever the gold and silver lights meant, they were no part of Dr Cornell’s life.

They want to take my papers
. Cass was pretty sure he knew who the professor meant by
they
: the same
they
his dead brother Christian had been referring to in the note he left Cass:
THEY
took Luke.
They
was the Network. Whichever way life twisted and turned, it always came back to Mr Bright and the Network. He smiled grimly to himself. Looking at the mess here, in Dr Cornell’s case, it might well be the council.

‘Why were you so fascinated with my father?’ he asked.

The professor sat in his chair beneath the pictures of the men who held both Cass and him in their thrall and sipped his drink. ‘Why are you so fascinated by my fascination?’

The eyes were sharp. This was going to be trickier than Cass had first expected, when he’d arrived and seen the state of the place. Dr Stuart Cornell was not the nutjob he’d first imagined, nor was he totally delusional. And he was obviously capable of insightful thought. But he was paranoid – though Cass knew he had good reason to be – and what he didn’t want to do was push the man over the edge.

‘Was it because of his association with this man?’ Cass pulled out one of his own pictures, the photograph of his parents with Castor Bright. ‘The man you have all over your wall?’ His photo had been taken in South Africa, before he was even born. Cass had found it in the envelope Christian had left for him at their parents’ house. In the picture, the
three were standing under a sign that read THE SOLOMON AND BRIGHT MINING CORPS.

Dr Cornell scrabbled for the picture, but Cass held it firm. A slightly manic light had gone on in the man’s eyes and Cass doubted he would ever give the photo back if he handed it over. He compromised, holding it close to the professor’s face and letting him study it before putting it back in his pocket.

‘Nothing is true,’ Dr Cornell said finally, leaning back in his chair. ‘The world is on its head.’

‘What do you know about Mr Bright and the Network? Why are they so interested in my family?’

‘They’ve really played you, haven’t they?’ Dr Cornell laughed slightly. ‘I’ve been watching.’

‘But who are
they
?’

Dr Cornell raised his glass, then lowered it without drinking and got to his feet. He started pacing in the small cleared area. The agitations were clearly returning.

‘Things have changed. Since that one disappeared.’ He jabbed a finger at the image of the stranger between Mr Bright and Mr Solomon on his wall. ‘The whole world’s changed, can’t you feel it? So many advances, and yet a sense that it’s all crumbling, don’t you think?’

Cass shrugged slightly as Dr Cornell stared at him for a response.

‘I think they’re starting to come unstuck. They’ve never looked outside of themselves before – not like they did with your father and mother.’

‘And what about my father and mother?’ He needed to try and follow Dr Cornell’s track.

‘You’re looking at the details.’ Dr Cornell’s head twitched in a rapid shake. ‘All wrong. You need to look at the forest, not the trees.’

Cass wondered how a man who lived like this, who was obsessed with the details, could make a statement like that.

‘The thing is, I don’t really care about the forest – the bigger picture; whatever it is that has brought you to this.’ Cass gestured at the mass of information that surrounded them. ‘Mr Bright took something that belongs with me, and I want it back. And I want to fuck with him and his Bank a little along the way. What I want to know, and I think you can help me here, is why my family is so important to him? You were pretty much stalking my dad for a while, but I’m guessing he wasn’t the real focus of your attention.’ Cass spoke calmly and stared at Dr Cornell, trying to focus him.

It seemed to work.

‘I don’t know why
your
family exactly. Back then I had two other people researching with me. They’re gone now.’ The professor’s face darkened. ‘We knew they were looking for someone – someone special. They’d been looking for a long time, since that one in the middle disappeared from sight. Others had vanished before, but not like him. They became more active after that.’ He jabbed a finger at Cass. ‘I tried to warn your father, I really did. First of all in the Middle East when I was on a research trip, but they were starting to lure him in by then. I even went to South Africa, but I couldn’t get near them, neither he nor your mother. Bright made sure of that.’

Dr Cornell perched on the arm of his chair. ‘When he moved back to England and settled in Capel-le-Ferne, I knew he must have had some kind of falling-out with Mr Bright and his people. I thought then that maybe he’d join me in trying to get to the truth.’ His jaw clenched. ‘I needed someone like him, someone who’d been on the inside – who could maybe get back inside for me.’ He let out a long, tense sigh. ‘It didn’t happen. He wouldn’t even speak to me – just
called the police every time I was within a mile of him.’

His father had made a deal with Mr Bright – he had sacrificed his grandson Luke – for the freedom of his immediate family, so Cass wasn’t at all surprised that Alan Jones had kept away from Dr Cornell. He would have been desperate not to upset the balance of the bargain he’d struck, and every time Dr Cornell showed up it would have reminded him of the terrible thing he’d promised to do. Cass’ stomach churned with mixed emotions. Cass was of the opinion that Alan Jones had probably been a better person – or at least a more honest one – before he’d found religion and started forgiving everyone for everything. He wondered if his father ever realised that the only person he was really trying to forgive was himself.

‘They destroyed me.’ Dr Cornell’s voice had dropped and now he was almost whispering. ‘They got me discredited at the university, made me a laughing stock, leaking some of my research in dribs and drabs so it looked ridiculous. Everyone was saying that I was like David Icke, talking about crazy alien conspiracies, and by the time my paper was ready, no one would look at it.’

‘Alien conspiracies?’ Even with everything he had seen with Mr Bright and Mr Solomon, that was a claim too far. He almost smiled.

‘Everything’s perspective,’ Dr Cornell muttered. ‘
Everything
. What you see depends on what you believe. It’s all semantics. We live in a world built on a lie. You have to approach everything you see from that starting point.
Nothing is as it seems
.’

‘What lie?’

‘If you find the truth, then you will have the power to destroy them.’

‘The truth about the Network? The Bank? What?’ Cass’
head was starting to hurt. They were talking at cross-purposes. He’d hoped to get answers, but all the professor had been able to deliver were riddles.

‘The Bank?’ Dr Cornell’s eyes were alight with a new fire. ‘The Bank is nothing – it’s a front, a useful tool, that’s all. They have always had things like The Bank – perhaps not so global, but other institutions, just the same. But you can use it to dig into them, or
at
them, if you can get inside. Your brother was, wasn’t he?’