Alchemist

  He put an arm around Monty, and she sensed him taking a deep breath. ‘I needed to bring you here,’ he said. ‘But, believe me, this is the hardest place in the world for me to be.’

  He kissed her lightly on the side of her forehead, and she could feel him trembling. ‘A lot of people,’ he went on, ‘are driven by something. They have one thing that kind of obsesses them above all else – like your father and breast cancer research, right?’

  The mention of her father sent fresh anxieties for his safety spiralling through Monty. She swallowed and nodded.

  ‘He’s a driven man, you told me that yourself – because he’s obsessed with identifying and destroying the breast cancer genes. I know what that kind of passion means. You wake up every morning with just one thought on your mind and you go to bed at night with that same thought. With your dad it’s because he watched your mother die and that’s something he can never forget. Well, I too have something that I can never forget, that’s why I understand how he feels. Your dad deals with it his way, I deal with it my way.’

  Monty was stunned into silence and on his face she could read only a moving combination of sadness and grim determination.

  The building looked even vaster close up, and it was far longer than she had realized. Some of the protesters were still chanting, some waved banners and Stars and Stripes flags, other strutted around wearing sandwich boards. The multicoloured lettering on one read: KEEP VITAMINS & AMINO ACIDS LEGAL! Another said: ABOLISH THE FDA!

  Monty turned to Conor. ‘Is this the FDA? The Food and Drug Administration?’

  He did not seem to hear her as he grabbed her case and they crossed a narrow grass strip that isolated the huge car park in front of the building from the pavement, walking past a rather faded sign that said ‘Parking By Permit Only’. Conor’s pace quickened so that Monty found it hard to keep level.

  ‘How many people have we talked to who’ve died now, Monty? Jake Seals, Zandra Wollerton, Walter Hoggin, Dr Corbin, Charley Rowley; we don’t know about Rowley, but in each case there doesn’t seem to be anyone else involved: Wollerton drives through the barriers at a train crossing; a hook drops on Corbin’s head; Seals pours acid over himself; Hoggin has a heart attack. These are all perfectly innocent tragedies when looked at individually. But when you take a collective view the ball game changes. Right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But there’s no conventional force that would make a man throw acid over himself, that would make a woman drive through a barrier in the path of an oncoming train, that would make a hook drop accurately on to a human head.’

  They’d reached a massive blue sign sited above a flowerbed that said: US DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES. A flag hung limply above it. They stopped at the base of the building, and Conor set down the suitcase, then craned his neck to see the top floors.

  Monty looked up as well, up along the wall of brown tinted glass that towered into the cirrus-streaked sky and mirrored its reflection back at them. There was an uncanny peace, suddenly, but one that suggested a thousand unseen eyes stared down at them. No traffic noise, no wind, just the solitary pinging cheep of a lone bird, then that, too, stopped.

  Conor raised an arm and pointed with his index finger. ‘You’ve asked me about my father, and I never said too much, right?’

  She looked at him warily. ‘No, you haven’t.’

  ‘This building does house the FDA – which licenses all pharmaceuticals in the United States.’

  She nodded. But the way he was speaking was spooking her; it was as though it was not Conor any more, but a total stranger.

  ‘My dad worked on the eleventh floor. That window up there, see, take a good look.’ He pointed up the towering wall of smoked-glass squares above them, and she felt giddy just looking, as if the building were moving through the sky and tumbling forward on to them.

  ‘My mother brought me here when I was a kid,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s Daddy’s window, she said to me. That’s where your daddy works.’

  He fell silent now, for some moments, before continuing.

  ‘I loved my dad. He was a big, good-looking guy – but kind of quiet, I guess. Very deep. We used to go hiking. I can picture him now, walking silently along a trail, dreaming whatever private dreams he had.’ Conor bit his lip. ‘He always wore a shirt and tie, even when we went to the game. Had a lot of old-fashioned values. One of them was that he believed fervently in the difference between right and wrong.’

  Conor had composed himself again. ‘He worked as an examiner in the FDA, and was put in charge of a product licence application for Bendix Schere. My mother used to tell me afterwards how Bendix Schere pressured him, offered him all kinds of inducements, before they began getting real mad at him.

  ‘They were wanting to patent a drug, and Dad didn’t feel they’d done enough tests. He wasn’t convinced it was safe and he blocked it. It contained almost identical compounds to another drug which when it was marketed caused more than five thousand children to be born with horrific deformities. It was called thalidomide.’

  ‘My God,’ she whispered.

  Conor resumed. ‘One day when I was eight, my mom bundled me into the car. She said we had to go see Dad right away, because he was in terrible trouble. She drove here like a maniac, left the car just behind where we’re standing right now; I remember it was an old white Plymouth.’

  His voice stiffened and he took a breath, then pointed upwards again. ‘He fell from that window, that eleventh-floor window. It was like watching a bird fly. That’s what I thought it was at first, a massive bird. Then it hit the ground and the head jerked up, and I saw it was my father; there was a look on his face that I have never forgotten. No human being ever could.’

  A whole piece of the puzzle in Monty’s mind about Conor suddenly resolved itself, but any relief she felt was numbed by her shock. Such sadness; such sadness.

  ‘We went up to his office. It was an unbelievable sight. Like a tornado had hit it: the lights were smashed, paper was strewn everywhere – and I mean everywhere; the walls were dripping wet, the clock was haywire. Yet no one else had heard a thing.’ He appealed to Monty. ‘You and I know there are things that cannot happen and which do happen. You’ve seen it with your own eyes.’

  She nodded and swallowed. The untimely shadow of a bird skittered over the tarmac. Monty jumped as if electric leads had been clipped to her chest.

  ‘All my life I’ve needed to know what really happened to my dad,’ Conor said. ‘And to find out who was responsible. Maybe you can understand now what brings me to Bendix Schere.’

  102

  London. Wednesday 7 December, 1994

  No one had had any contact with the Bannerman woman since her phone call to Levine at 1.48 that morning.

  Gunn’s collar was rucked up around his neck; the damned soft shirts Nikky insisted he wore these days always caused him problems; they weren’t designed to take ties. Irritated, he slipped his fingers inside the collar and tried to straighten it out, then he looked at the report on the screen again, which he was halfway through, but he was too distracted to absorb it.

  Montana Bannerman had vanished and he did not like the idea of that smart little bitch being left to her own devices. God only knew who the hell she would talk to next. He looked at the clock on his screen. 8.32 p.m.; Nikky would be going ballistic again but that, right now, was at the bottom of the priority scale. Half three in the afternoon in Washington and according to McLusky, Molloy was still in his meeting in the US Patent Office.

  Like hell he was, Gunn thought suspiciously. McLusky’d had Molloy down as being in his goddamn hotel bedroom all night and he’d been wrong. And still no one knew who the little bastard really was. Something had bothered him about the tone of McLusky’s voice when they’d last spoken, an hour back. Gunn had detected a chink in his confidence; more than a chink; the man had not sounded at all confident about his claims to have Molloy safely cornered.

  The wheels were beginnin
g to fall off. When he’d arrived at Dr Bannerman’s laboratory last night, he’d seen a small tape-recorder on the scientist’s desk that seemed to be running. In their rush to get the scientist out of the building they’d overlooked it, and when Gunn had returned later to retrieve it he’d found the burglar alarm on – and no tape-recorder.

  So whoever had set the alarm had also gone in and seen the goods, then taken them. And there was only one contender in Gunn’s opinion.

  Montana Bannerman.

  What the hell was on that tape? Maybe nothing. There again, maybe everything: both the scientist’s findings and an incriminating soundtrack of Gunn’s intrusion with Crowe. He tried to gauge where she might go with evidence like that. Probably not the police, something had scared her off the cops, otherwise she would have called Levine again by now.

  Slackening his tie, he cradled his head in the palm of his hand. This was nothing short of a Grade One listed balls-up.

  His phone rang and he brought the receiver to his ear, hoping to hell for good news. ‘Gunn.’

  ‘Where the fuck are you, soldier?’

  ‘Niks, I’m sorry, got some problems here.’

  ‘So many problems you couldn’t phone me? We were meant to leave here at seven forty-five. I’ve been waiting for you.’ She sounded genuinely hurt.

  ‘I’m sorry, Niks, believe me.’

  ‘Every day you have a new crisis. Why don’t you tell your Doc Crowe to go and jump in a lake and give you your life back?’

  A light flashed showing he had another call waiting. ‘I’ve got to go – call you back.’

  ‘When? Tomorrow? Next year?’

  ‘Two minutes, promise.’

  ‘Three and I start burning holes in your clothes.’

  ‘NIKS –’ He raised his voice, but she had cleared and he found himself talking to McLusky.

  ‘Not good news, Major Gunn – I thought I’d better level with you. Molloy seems to have given us the slip.’

  Gunn looked at the clock anxiously. If Nikky said torches in three minutes she meant it; the girl was nuts. ‘Mr McLusky, you are not going to do this to me.’

  ‘I’m real sorry – can’t figure it out. He’s vanished into thin air.’

  Gunn made no effort to mask his sarcasm. ‘People can do an awful lot of things, Mr McLusky, but vanishing into thin air is not one of them. They can give the illusion of vanishing, but that’s as far as it goes.’

  ‘Well, your man’s giving us a pretty good illusion right now.’

  McLusky didn’t even sound sorry; in fact, from the tone of his voice the bastard didn’t give a toss whether he found Molloy or not. It was as if the whole task was an inconvenience, a distraction that was keeping him from something more important, like a game of golf.

  Gunn reflected about the crass way McLusky had handled the initial reports of Rowley’s death in Hawaii. It had cost Bendix Schere several hundred thousand dollars in payola to keep the lid on that. Maybe he was right in his earlier assumption. McLusky was too old, had lost it. But he’d sure picked a bummer of a day to find that out.

  ‘Maybe if you can find out who Molloy really is, you can also find out where he is,’ Gunn suggested pointedly.

  ‘We’re doing all we can.’

  Like hell, Gunn thought as he pressed his finger on the cradle to disconnect, then got Nikky with fifteen seconds to spare.

  When he had mollified her he walked over to one of his tall metal filing cabinets and slid out a drawer. From it he lifted two sealed folders, laid them on his desk and opened them.

  One contained a man’s left-hand, hogskin glove, almost brand new. The other, an elegant printed wool and silk shawl with the designer’s signature, ‘Cornelia James’, in the corner. He ran a finger lightly and possessively across both objects, then picked up the phone again and tapped out a number. When it was answered he said:

  ‘Apologies for short notice, but I need some dowsing very urgently. How quickly could you get a team here?’

  Half an hour later Gunn left his office carrying the glove and the scarf. Instead of taking the normal lift down, he went through a door to which he alone had access, and summoned a quite different lift.

  When it arrived, he opened the doors with a combination of his smartcard and his palm print on an electronic panel; then he keyed six coded digits into a touch panel and waited.

  After a couple of seconds the doors closed and the lift began its rapid, near-silent descent.

  103

  Washington. Wednesday 7 December, 1994

  Monty sat numb with cold on the motorcycle pillion. She was shaken by what Conor had just told her, and even more desperately afraid for her father’s safety. Her only crumb of comfort was that she was at last beginning to understand what motivated the man she loved.

  The twenty minutes or so the journey took seemed never-ending, through suburbs, open countryside and suburbs again. But eventually Conor began to slow, then turned into an entrance way and halted in front of a steel gate, beside which was a security system with a built-in camera. He raised his vizor, pressed a button and called out above the burble of the engine: ‘It’s me.’

  After a moment the gate slid open, allowing them access to a single-storey hacienda-style property, which sat on a small plateau. Two cars were parked outside, a blue Mercedes sports coupé and a grey limousine with a chauffeur behind the wheel.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Conor said. ‘Clients – she warned me they’d be here.’ He put his helmet and gloves on his seat. Monty did the same, then turned to him.

  ‘Conor, I don’t know what the hell I’m even doing here; I should be in England looking for Daddy.’

  Conor cupped her face in his hands. ‘Honey, we’re going to get your father out of those bastards’ hands, but you have to trust me. Agreed?’ Then he went ahead and rang the bell as if he’d taken her answer as read.

  The door was opened a few moments later by a young Latin American maid in a crisp, starched uniform, who gave Conor a shy smile of recognition, and acknowledged Monty with a polite glance. ‘Please, you come in, your mother just finish meeting.’

  As they stepped into the open-plan, split-level interior, Monty felt as if she had entered a temple or an art gallery rather than a home. Candles were burning in sconces on the walls and in tall wrought-iron holders on the floor. The air was lightly perfumed, either by the candles or joss sticks, and strains of New Age music reminiscent of lapping waves played from concealed speakers. The effect was that of total tranquillity.

  The walls were hung with abstract paintings, many featuring religious symbolism, and bizarre sculpted figurines sat on plinths, table tops and in various alcoves. Monty heard voices, then a group of people came round a corner and headed towards them: three men in business suits, and a tall, striking woman in black who gave Conor and herself a brief smile of acknowledgement in which she signalled she’d be with them in a moment.

  Monty watched, fascinated by this paragon’s appearance. In her mid-fifties, her long dark hair was flecked with silvery streaks that seemed more like highlights than any consequence of age, and her fine, classical features might, when their owner had been only a few years younger, have stared out from the front cover of Vogue. In her face and build Monty could see a strong family resemblance to Conor.

  ‘OK, so New Mexico by January, right?’ one of the men said, in a Texan accent. ‘We’ll start the test bores and see what gives.’

  ‘The last twelve months have been very impressive,’ another said. ‘Have a very happy Chrismas.’

  ‘And a prosperous New Year,’ replied their hostess.

  ‘With your help I’m sure it will be,’ came the reply.

  She smiled and inclined her head regally. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘You’ve performed miracles before.’

  Her expression clouded a little. ‘No, gentlemen, miracles are what we call things we cannot explain, science is what we call those we can. I practise science, not miracles.’

 
The trio departed. As the maid held the door for them, the woman turned her attention to Conor.

  ‘Hi, Mom.’ He gave her a kiss on the cheek, which she accepted stiffly and without reciprocating, more as if it were a tithe received from a serf than a greeting from her only son.

  ‘Let me – er – introduce you,’ he said, his normal confidence seeming to desert him. ‘Montana Bannerman – ah – this is my mother.’

  Monty stood, slightly unnerved herself now, unsure whether she should extend her hand. ‘It’s very nice to meet you, Mrs Molloy.’

  The woman shot a glance at Conor then looked, unsmiling, back at Monty. ‘It’s Donoghue, actually. Tabitha Donoghue.’

  Confused, Monty trawled her memory, wondering whether she had made a gaffe. Perhaps there’d been a remarriage and Conor had not told her? Or she hadn’t remembered?

  Conor blushed, then pushed a hand through his hair.

  His mother turned back to him. ‘Are you keeping the bike here overnight?’

  ‘No – I promised Dave Schwab I’d drop it back this evening.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t want you leaving this house tonight; I intend closing the circle. If you have to get it back, do it now.’

  Conor looked at Monty. ‘OK – you stay here and have a rest – I’ll be half an hour, maximum.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  He shook his head. ‘You look frozen and beat; relax and have a hot bath.’

  Although she was feeling exhausted, Monty began to peel off the motorcycling suit with reluctance, on balance preferring to go with him than to be left stranded here with this strange woman.

  Tabitha Donoghue said something to the maid in Spanish, who immediately picked up the small suitcase which Conor had carried in for Monty.

  ‘Juanita will show you your room; I guess you’ll want to have a little rest and freshen up. Do you like tea or coffee?’

  ‘I’d love some coffee.’

  ‘Join me in the lounge when you’re ready, through there, no hurry.’ Conor’s mother indicated the way with a slender, heavily jewelled hand.