Alchemist (10 page)

He noticed also that there seemed to be no unattractive, handicapped or overweight employees, and that the only non-whites were either in Security or menial jobs. There was a uniformity, as if everyone had been hired from a restricted intellectual, personality and appearance band. Or maybe it was the artifice of the building's interior that had this effect on employees after a length of time?

Although just at the start of his second day, Conor had already begun to doubt whether anyone other than Charley Rowley, and a long-haired lab technician called Jake Seals, had any spark of individuality about them. If the science of cloning
were more advanced, it wouldn't take a big leap of imagination for him to believe almost everyone else had been cultured in a laboratory from a specific formula.

Conformity
, Conor thought as he buttoned his coat against the biting wind and hurried across the lot. Science was about discipline; about systematic observation, experiment and measurement. And yet medicine was always acknowledged as being such an inexact science. By dressing the company up with strange rules and tough procedures, perhaps Bendix Schere felt it could convey the impression to the world that its particular knowledge of medicine was more exact than it really was.

He glanced up at the sculpted windowless edifice of the building, and felt a certain respect despite himself. Then he walked up the marble steps, through the electronic doors and into the white marble interior of the lobby atrium, which was almost deserted. He showed his ID to another guard, swiped his smart-card on a security turnstile and walked across to the lifts.

They were all in use, and as he stood waiting he tried to make out his reflection in the burnished copperplate of a lift door, and checked the knot of his paisley tie.

He was dressed smartly but conservatively, in a plain navy double-breasted suit, white shirt, and navy Crombie greatcoat. His hair had been rearranged by the wind and a couple of gelled locks were standing vertically. As he smoothed them down with his hands, he was suddenly conscious of being stared at by a young woman in her late twenties. She was standing beside him, watching him with a look of amusement.

He shuffled his feet and dug a hand in his coat pocket awkwardly. She was quite a bit shorter than him, with a fashionable frizz of long blonde hair and an assertively pretty and intelligent face. A lift announced its arrival and they stepped in; several more people followed. The young woman smiled at him a little triumphantly as if she knew she had caught him out, but there was a hint of interest also. As the crowd jostled them closer together, he smelled the musky scent she was wearing and found it distinctly sensuous.

He looked at her again. Gorgeous greeny-blue eyes full of warmth and humour. She stood out, she was definitely from a different mould. ‘Rebellion' was stamped all over her.

The lift stopped on the fifth floor and two men in white overalls got out. The doors closed again. Conor found himself trying to sneak a glance down at her legs but her trench coat blocked his view. ‘Like it here?' he asked her.

‘In the lift?'

He was slow this morning, the jet-lag seemed to be knocking him and it was a second before he got the joke and grinned. ‘Sure – I guess the lift's pretty special. How about the rest of the place?'

‘So far. We're still just moving in at the moment. My father and I.' She had a nice voice, confident, punchy.

A couple of people frowned at them. Staff were advised not to converse in the lifts. Security; you never knew who might be in there with you.

She glanced away from him, distracted by some thought that seemed to be troubling her, then caught his eye again and they exchanged a brief silent smile. He shot a surreptitious look at her hands and noticed she was wearing no wedding or engagement ring. Then they stopped at the eighth floor, one of the genetics labs, he remembered, and he watched her step on to the green carpet and walk jauntily away, his eyes staying on her until the door closed.
Nice
, he thought.
Very
,
very nice
.
Sparky and approachable
.

The car began to rise and a few seconds later halted at the twentieth floor, which was to be his home for the foreseeable future. The door of the lift opened on to a small reception area staffed by an attractive but frosty young woman who was seated behind a row of monitors on a console, typing.

‘Good morning, Mr Molloy,' she said, without even looking up from her screen. Good looks, but cold as ice. He smiled and tried to sound as pleasant as possible.

‘Good morning – ah –' Her name momentarily escaped him. Then he remembered. ‘Miss Paston.'

Bendix Schere operated a system of anonymous secretaries. Some offices were already equipped with voice-activated word-processor systems, but most correspondence and document
generation was produced by secretarial pools with whom the rest of the staff rarely had contact.

The system, Rowley had explained, was simple. There was a dictation icon on your computer terminal screen. You clicked on it and dictation controls appeared. You then dictated a letter or document the usual way, before keying in a command to send it down to the secretarial pool. A short while later, the typed letters or documents would come up on your screen and you could key in any changes or corrections yourself. Any letters would be automatically signed for you by the computer and your copy would be stored on disk.

Miss Hoity-toity still hadn't looked at him, and he walked past her desk, inserted his smart-card into the door behind her, then punched in his code. The lock clicked and he pushed the door open.

Each directorate was colour coded. Group Patents and Agreements (GP & Ags) came under Research and Development and therefore shared the same emerald-green carpeting and pale green walls as the laboratories. But in contrast to the futuristic feeling of the rest of the building, the Group Patents and Agreements Department looked as if it had been there for ever.

It was a labyrinth of narrow corridors lined with cramped offices, and open-plan areas with desk cubicles squeezed too closely together. Despite being spread over three floors, the Department was urgently in need of more space. And although it had all the computerized equipment it needed, most patent work was still carried out on paper and there were filing cabinets wall-to-wall, many of which were decades old. Whole areas were shelved like libraries, and crammed with reference texts.

Even some of Conor's new colleagues looked refreshingly old-fashioned: serious, sedate men in various shades of grey suits with various shades of greying hair, and ties of the wrong colour and width. It seemed to him that any fashion sense in the Department was vested with the women, who looked smart and elegant. And like all patent offices, its studious atmosphere belied the fact that this was the hub around which global fortunes revolved.

GP & Ags was presided over by a team of British and international patent lawyers and patent agents. No product that Bendix Schere invented, developed, bought or tried to sell was of any use to it unless it owned and controlled the patents worldwide, and the Department's role was to get the most comprehensive patents it could – both to protect the company's own products and to block the competitors'. This meant not only rigorously defending the patents, but also using every trick in the book to get their life extended. In extreme cases from time to time they obtained new patents on old products by carefully reformulating those products.

In most countries the limit on patents ranged between seventeen to twenty years, but with annual profits of over £500,000,000 coming in from each of its most successful patented pharmaceuticals, every extra year that could be gained meant massive extra profits for Bendix Schere.

Conor's office was next door to Charley Rowley's, and as he passed by he could see the open briefcase on the desk, indicating that his colleague had beaten him to it. He would apologize later for his time of arrival, he thought, as he stood outside his own office, punching in the code number. Virtually every single door in the Bendix Building had a security combination lock: to reach restricted access areas, such as the laboratories, and the Group Patents floors, a smart-card had to be inserted into a slot as well. From his experiences yesterday, Conor was already finding moving around the premises a real bore.

His office was not much bigger than a cupboard. A gerbil would feel pretty claustrophobic in here, he thought; but at least it was better than open plan, which meant no privacy. He hung his coat and jacket on the rear of the door, squeezed past three steel filing cabinets and the paper shredder and eased himself behind his desk.

For security purposes, wastepaper baskets were strictly forbidden. All unwanted paper had to be fed into the shredders. Bulkier items had to be put into black garbage bags and pushed into a chute, on each floor, down to the basement incinerator. It was a sackable offence to leave any
paperwork whatsoever, other than incoming correspondence, on a desk in an unattended office.

The only extraneous items on Conor's desk this morning were a fresh Manila envelope addressed to him, and a crimson leather-bound book, which was embossed with a gold line-drawing of a small boy under a halo, kneeling in prayer. The accompanying wording read: ‘The Bendix Schere Creed'.

Conor had looked through the book yesterday in disbelief. All new employees were meant to read it from cover to cover. It told the story of how the company's founder, Joshua Bendix, had made his first fortune peddling invisible ink made from lemon juice. There was even an illustration of the original bottle.

It went on to detail the deeply Christian ethos in the formative years of the company, back in the 1880s. Conor had read that there used to be regular morning prayer assembly for all employees. And Joshua Bendix had decreed that ten per cent of all profits should be donated to charity, a practice that was continued to this day.

What the book did not reveal, Charley Rowley had told Conor quietly, when they had slipped out for a pub lunch, was that such funding was used exclusively to set up and control charities dealing with the specific chronic diseases and ailments for which Bendix Schere manufactured pharmaceuticals.

He picked up the envelope, which had already been slit open. He had been informed of this practice, and he wondered if there were security teams employed to read everything that arrived. Somehow he doubted it. The envelopes were probably opened to discourage any correspondence of a personal nature being sent to staff, or between staff.

He shook out a wodge of estate agents' particulars, together with a note from the Relocation Officer who had visited him briefly yesterday – an awesomely efficient young woman called Sue Perkins, who'd discussed the kind of apartment he could afford on his salary. She had first identified on a map the areas that would best suit him. She had then pointed out, to his amazement, the shaded zones that marked the parts of London where Bendix Schere employees were encouraged,
but not contractually bound, to live. She'd advised him, however, that it was likely to become mandatory to live in these areas at some point in the near future.

Now, already awaiting him were twenty potential apartments from which he could draw a shortlist. He put the envelope into his briefcase to read at home that night, switched on his computer terminal and logged in.

The first thing that appeared on the screen, as it would do each morning, was a sinister form titled: ‘Colleague Data Sheet.' In it were boxes on which everyone was supposed to enter the names of their immediate colleagues, and further boxes for them to tick – assessing those same colleagues on neatness, confidence, competence, how they handle themselves with other people, and company loyalty.

He debated what to do for a moment, then entered Charley Rowley's name and gave him a couple of points short of the maximum possible, not wanting to appear to be either sucking up or too indiscriminate. After this he clicked on the icon to open his internal eMail box. There was one message waiting:
‘9.15 meeting. 20th floor Boardroom. Pick you up a few minutes before. CR.'

His mind returned to the blonde who had got out at the eighth floor, and he thought about her for a few minutes. He'd ask Charley Rowley who she was.
Just moving in at the moment
, she had said. Her father and herself. There shouldn't be too much of a problem identifying her – Charley Rowley seemed to be a walking encyclopaedia on the place.

Yes, she would definitely be worth tracking down.

Bill Gunn walked slowly around the forty-seventh floor ops room of the Bendix Building, completing his regular daily check on all the equipment. He had a team of thirty technicians beneath him, many of them university graduates,
but the Director of Security still liked to inspect everything himself. Old habits died hard.

This particular habit went back to his early days as a wireless operator in the Signals Corps of the Paras. Never trusting any piece of electrical equipment on which his life might depend, he would dismantle and reassemble it himself prior to any operation; that was the only way he could be certain it would give no trouble. And for the same reason, he always unpacked and repacked his own parachute.

A thick-set forty-eight-year-old of below average height, he had an impassive face with
military
stamped all over it and brown hair cropped only marginally longer than a crew cut. Somehow he always looked out of place in a suit, despite having worn one for the past twenty years. Like many trained fighting men, he had tunnel-vision loyalty to his paymasters, but at Bendix Schere there was something else, quite different, bonding him to them.

He had been recruited into the SAS and then into GCHQ at Cheltenham, the eyes and ears of the British Government's Intelligence Services. There he had been involved in anti-terrorism: setting up, operating and improving surveillance systems of the foreign embassies based in Britain, as well as of key buildings in potentially hostile countries like Russia, Iran and Iraq. It had been invaluable for his learning curve. When Bendix Schere had quietly head-hunted him nine years later, he was one of the most informed surveillance experts in the world.