Alchemist

  She looked with growing anxiety at the soft, warm glows in the windows of the houses, some flickering with the reflections of television screens; she glanced at the cars parked outside, recent models, small and mid-range mostly, first and second cars; it was a cosy, affluent little estate.

  Turned right again. The lights behind turned right also, following relentlessly. She braked sharply, cursing.

  Cul-de-sac.

  There was a small turning area dotted with parked cars. The MG’s turning circle was not good enough to make it round in one arc. Monty had to stop, reverse, go forward again. Then she stared, surprised, into the orange day-for-night street-lighting.

  The headlights had gone.

  She halted the car in mid-turn, wound down her window and pushed her face into the cold air. Somewhere close by a dog was yapping. She studied the gleaming silhouettes parked along the kerb as the MG’s exhaust rattled against the underside, blotting out any chance of hearing another engine. Her eyes scoured the parked cars, looking for one with a lone figure at the wheel. Complete stillness. No one out walking. The orange light and the emptiness gave a feeling of unreality, as if she were in a ghost town or on a movie set.

  She completed her turn and drove at a crawl past each of the parked cars. Approaching a T-junction now, she checked out the last two vehicles. Both were dark and silent.

  The lights that had followed her into the cul-de-sac might just have been one of the estate’s residents returning home, she realized. But if so, why hadn’t he, or she, got out of their car?

  She tried to remember the sequence of random left and right turns she had made. She had turned right into the cul-de-sac, she recalled, yes, definitely. She turned left and accelerated. Then right, then right again. Four more turns and she was pulling back on to the main road.

  She watched the mirror. Nothing followed her out of the estate. The orange glow faded into the distance and was gone. Nothing was pursuing her now; only the darkness of the night and her own anxiety.

  Monty slowed sharply at the 30 m.p.h. limit sign as she came into the suburbs of Maidenhead. She passed the familiar landmarks of a petrol station, a squat concrete and glass church, a parade of shops, and turned left into the leafy avenue where she had lived all her childhood.

  The houses were all detached and substantial, set well back from the road, a few with security gates, others heavily screened by mature shrubs and trees. Most of them, like her father’s, were Edwardian mock Tudor; but his was one of the least grand. And although it had six bedrooms, most of the rooms were small, so it never really felt like a mansion inside.

  Over the past years since her mother’s death, Monty had watched the house slowly deteriorate into its present forlorn state. It looked better arriving at night, like this, when you could not see it so well, she thought.

  Not for the first time, she wished her father would find someone and marry again. That was what he needed. Then she smiled at the irony of her thoughts. Here she was, worrying as usual about how to find him another wife, when all the time he was fretting that she was nearly thirty and had no steady boyfriend. She was debating whether to tell him about Conor tonight, but felt it was too soon. Her whole world had changed since Monday evening, but she did not feel the time was right to talk about it yet.

  She was still, in her heart, unsure about where Conor was really coming from. She was hooked on him, she knew that, totally and utterly; some part of him was present in every thought she had. Yet she did not know the man, and there was a certain air of mystery about him that both excited her and scared her.

  Scared her because she could not read him; could not gauge whether this was a wild fling for him that he might in due course burn out of his system. Could it even be that he had a girlfriend, or, worse, a wife, back in America?

  She still knew almost nothing about his background, other than that he had been brought up by his widowed mother, who dabbled in the occult and made a modest living as a clairvoyant. Whenever Monty had asked him about his father, he had always changed the subject. He seemed a closed book on so many things; she had not even been able to get him to talk about the scary dream he’d had.

  As she parked and climbed out of her car she looked behind her into the darkness but there was nothing untoward. She walked up to the porch and let herself in with her own key.

  ‘Hi!’ she called out, noting that the normal musty smell of the house was overpowered tonight by the appetizing aroma of a stew, and she was pleasantly surprised that her father had actually remembered to put dinner on.

  He had a daily who prepared his meals, because he was helpless in a kitchen. Dick Bannerman could have split the atom more easily than boil an egg.

  ‘Daddy, hi!’ Monty called out again.

  In the silence that again greeted her she felt a momentary prickle of unease. The landing light was on, and she looked up the stairwell, then climbed edgily up. She saw that his study door, at the end of the corridor, was ajar.

  ‘Daddy! Hi!’

  Silence. Just the faint hum of the computer which he left on permanently.

  A board creaked beneath her step increasing her unease. She walked the remaining few paces quickly, pushed the door further open and peered in.

  To her relief, she saw her father seated at his desk, engrossed, only the light of the anglepoise and the glare from the screen relieving the darkness of his study. Not wanting to give him a fright, she called softly. ‘Daddy!’

  He raised a hand in acknowledgement, without turning round. ‘Hi, darling,’ he murmured, then gave the familiar signal with his hand that he was not to be interrupted.

  She walked over and looked at the screen and glanced down the lines of genetic code displayed there, but they were almost meaningless to her. She knew that genes for all living organisms, from plants to human beings, were made from the same four basic compounds, called bases: adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. And that they were referred to in genetic coding by their initial letters, A,C,G,T. And she understood that every single human gene is a sequence of these bases, some a few hundred long, others several thousand. From there she could grasp that there are three billion bases in the complete DNA block of a human being’s forty-six chromosomes. And that every single cell of a human body contains a complete DNA block.

  But because of her very elementary understanding, Monty still struggled with much of the field of genetics. Her father had repeatedly explained certain areas over the years, but not everything had rubbed off. She understood the principle, that human genes were the body’s blueprint, that they gave the instructions for the embryo human being to develop from a single cell egg, and for the adult body to replenish and repair itself.

  She also understood that when she cut her hand, the genes in the cells surrounding the damaged skin gave the instructions for new tissue to grow, the same as they gave instructions for her hair to grow, for her blood to replenish; and she knew that when genes went wrong and stopped functioning, or went into overdrive and functioned too much, people got sick with anything from minor ailments to life-threatening diseases like renal failure or tumours.

  Sometimes genes seemed to stop functioning of their own accord, or go crazy after years of working fine; and some which had been dormant for years suddenly got switched on for no explicable reason. Her father believed that sometimes it was life-cycle changes like adolescence, puberty, pregnancy, menopause, that switched genes on and off – and sometimes it was external influences, such as pollution, stress, trauma. Like all genetic scientists he was forced to concentrate on specific fields, but he was a man of sufficient vision, and sufficient impatience, not to get ensnared in one specific avenue.

  Despite his obsession with avenging her mother’s death by defeating the breast cancer genes, he had always worked on several related areas of genetics simultaneously. And there was an ethos about this field of research that deeply appealed to him: through the Human Genome Project, research scientists in every country were linked to each other,
sharing databases by computer, in a co-operative venture the likes of which had never been seen before in the world of science. For the first time, almost the entire world was united on a single scientific project. That communal sharing of information was what excited him most about the entire field of genetics.

  As Monty watched him now, he tapped his computer keys and cursed. ‘Something doesn’t make sense to me here,’ he announced angrily.

  That makes two of us, she thought. Then she looked fleetingly at the large silver-framed photograph of her mother and herself which stood beside the screen. Looking at her mother’s wild frizz of blonde hair, and the way she was giving a cheeky grin for the camera, Monty was startled by a sudden realization of quite how like her mother she was starting to look.

  Her father spoke again, without looking up, still exasperated. He was beginning to look old, she observed with sadness; his body seemed to be shrinking; his shoulders were closer together than she remembered and his back looked less muscular.

  ‘Crowe’s got it wrong! It’s not the way to express this gene,’ Dick Bannerman said. ‘The man doesn’t know what he’s bleating on about.’

  She moved towards him, put her hands lightly on his shoulders. ‘How knowledgeable is Dr Crowe, Daddy?’

  He tapped in a command, ignoring the question. ‘See that? Recombinant DNA! I told him we should use liposomes rather than a virus on this experiment. Two whole days of my time he’s wasted.’ At last he looked at his daughter. ‘Bloody man has a lot of opinions based on erroneous research, but he won’t accept anything, always wants to see it.’

  ‘He doesn’t believe you?’

  ‘Treats me like a bloody student! Don’t know why he bothered taking me on, half the time. Don’t ask me what goes on in his mind – he seems to have some damned hidden agenda, but I’m buggered if I know what it is.’ He turned his attention back to the screen.

  Monty frowned at the words hidden agenda, thinking about the missing six floors on the plans, and the Maternox capsules; her mind also conjured up the names she’d seen on Conor’s computer screen that morning. Eumenides. Medici. Polyphemus. Troubled, she examined the study. It was her favourite room and the only one that felt lived in these days. The walls were covered in pictures – one of them was an autographed black and white photograph of a much younger Dick Bannerman, in a dinner jacket and looking happily sloshed, standing between Francis Crick and Jim Watson, the discoverers of DNA.

  In pride of place, surrounded by a large amount of bare wall, was the colour photo of her father, in white tie and tails, being presented with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. She had travelled to Sweden with him, just two months after her mother had died. She remembered the band playing, the applause, the pride and sadness she had felt for him then, and felt again now, tonight, seeing him so alone, ageing, and growing increasingly bitter towards Bendix Schere – which only a few months ago had seemed to promise him so much.

  Hidden agenda. The words resonated in her mind. ‘Like me to get you a drink?’ she asked.

  ‘I think we’ll eat in a minute – I’m hungry. How was the drive down?’ He spoke without taking his eyes from his figures.

  ‘OK,’ she said distractedly. ‘I’ll go and get supper ready.’

  ‘Mrs Turnbull’s laid it all up – just have to take the stew out of the oven, I think she said.’

  ‘It’ll be a little while,’ Monty said and went downstairs. She knew full well he would not have read his housekeeper’s instructions and would have forgotten something.

  The dining room was freezing as always, the dancing flames of the fake coal fire providing the illusion of warmth rather than any actual heat. She sat at one end of the oval walnut table, in her mother’s place, and her father faced her at the other.

  They ate the oxtail stew in silence for a while. When her mother had been alive, this room had felt quite different, a real log fire always burning in winter, the table laden with food and flowers, buzzing with the conversation and laughter of the distinguished guests they regularly entertained. It was as if when she had died, she had drawn the life from the room and taken it with her. Even the silverware, which used to sparkle on the sideboard, was conspicuously depleted, the best pieces stolen in a burglary five years previously.

  Monty was missing Conor. He was in her mind every single minute. After the last three nights it would be strange sleeping alone again; and in her old childhood bed.

  ‘Tell you who really gets my goat at Bendix,’ her father was saying, pouring more red wine into his glass.

  ‘Who?’ she said.

  ‘That bloody Slick Willy of an American lawyer.’

  She felt as if her heart had turned to stone. ‘Conor Molloy?’

  ‘You know – that chap from Patents who joined us for lunch last week. I don’t know what his bloody game is – keeps hovering around me, picking my brains all the bloody time. Drives me nuts.’

  A piece of green bean went down the wrong way and Monty gulped some water, then coughed. ‘Probably not his fault,’ she said finally.

  ‘I know where he’s coming from. He’s one of those clever little shysters who’ve found ways of getting round the patent office examiners. He’s into patenting gene sequences – that’s why the company have brought him over here. They want to see just how much of human life can be patented – and they think I’m easy pickings.’ He put his wine glass down angrily. ‘Christ, this Molloy man’s a bloody junior, green around the gills – they haven’t even got enough respect for me to bring in a major player! Do they think I was born yesterday?’

  Monty smarted, wanting to rise to Conor’s defence, and groped around for a reply. ‘I think you’ll find it’s Dr Crowe who’s the problem, Daddy. I’m sure Mr – Mr Molloy just has to do what he’s told.’

  ‘Oh, sure. He’s just obeying orders, right? What is he? The commandant of a concentration camp or something? He’s a thinking human being; no one has to do what they’re told. I never have.’

  Dick Bannerman seemed happier for having said his piece. But Monty had lost her appetite, and she refused when she was offered second helpings.

  Her father ladled some more stew on to his own plate, then asked, ‘You’ve had no joy with the missing psoriasis and diabetes files?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I put those diabetes files in the Stacks myself,’ he said.

  ‘The archivist says they couldn’t have been removed without authorization.’

  ‘Bloody witch, she is. Creepy woman.’

  ‘Very.’ She thought for a moment. ‘We’ll have back-ups on disk or tape, so it’s not too disastrous. I’ll print them out for you.’

  ‘I’m not worried about replicating the work – I’m worried about who the hell has got their hands on it. I’m happy to share my research with anyone, but I’m buggered if I’m having it stolen.’

  Monty waited whilst her father ate again, and sipped her wine. ‘Daddy, what are you doing this weekend?’

  ‘Working on this psoriasis stuff – doing my prep for Headmaster Bloody Crowe.’

  ‘At home?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘I just wondered if you were going into the old lab at all?’

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t have any plans to. Actually, I find it a bit bloody depressing there now.’

  Good, she thought silently.

  69

  Honolulu. Saturday 26 November, 1994

  White horses glinted like tin foil on the dark blue Pacific. The pilot announced over the intercom that the line of hotels crammed shoulder to shoulder behind a strip of white sand was Waikiki Beach. Pearl Harbor, he said, was a little further on, around the point. It was twelve noon local time and the temperature on the ground was a warm twenty-five degrees Celsius. He hoped to welcome everyone back to American Airlines again soon, and wished them a nice day in Honolulu.

  Charley Rowley sat in his upright seat, belt fastened, last cigarette of the flight crushed into the tiny ashtray, tiredness from the long
journey and too many Bloody Marys starting to gain on him. The Boeing bumped a couple of times as it slowly lost height, banked slightly to port, and his view of the island was temporarily replaced by a view of the starboard wing. He watched it with equal lack of interest.

  In the arrivals lobby a placard bearing his name was held aloft by a fair-haired man in pilot’s uniform. By his side was a short, dark-skinned man, neatly attired in a chocolate brown shot-silk suit and white loafers.

  The pilot immediately took his suitcase and briefcase, and the short man held out his hand.

  ‘Mr Rowley? Don Sontaree, President of Bendix Hilo. Welcome to Hawaii. Ohahu – as we say!’

  Rowley took his hand; it was small and slimy, like his voice. ‘How do you do?’

  ‘You had a pleasant flight?’ Furtive eyes raked Rowley’s face.

  ‘Yah, was OK, thanks.’ He was a little surprised to be greeted by the president of the company in person.

  ‘Good! We go straight on. First time in Hawaii?’

  Fellow passengers all around him were being draped in garlands of scented flowers. Rowley followed the two men through the throng and into a stretch limousine. It took them on a ride of less than two minutes to another terminal and pulled up beneath the awning. A few minutes later they were out in the bright sunlight again, climbing into a large helicopter that was waiting amid an assortment of executive aircraft on the apron. Heat shimmered off the concrete and the fuselages, but the wind kept the temperature to a level that Rowley, in his linen suit, found comfortable.

  In the passenger compartment the president courteously insisted that Charley sit by the window.

  ‘Please, we have very special views in Hawaii.’

  They buckled their seat belts and the rotors began turning. ‘No one has given me any real briefing – what’s this trip all about?’ Rowley asked.

  The Hawaiian smiled. ‘All in good time. I think you are going to find yourself playing a very big part in our future. It is a great honour for you that you are here, you know …’