Alchemist (54 page)

Kingsley. Caroline (Mrs)
. This was the woman from whose home Monty had obtained the six Maternox samples. Her symptoms and those of her baby were consistent with the three above. Conor crushed out his cigarette and scrolled on:

His eye went back to the name
Sterling
. That rang a bell.
Anna Sterling
. Wasn't that the name of Monty's friend? He lit another cigarette, thinking back to the conversation he'd had with her, but could not be certain. Then he looked at the report again: ‘
Phase One Status
'.

What the hell was going on?

His hand was shaking slightly as he brought the cigarette to his mouth. His original thought had been that Bendix Schere was trying to cover up a faulty batch of Maternox that had been released by accident. But this wasn't an accident he was looking at here, it was deliberate. Something scrupulously planned and monitored. He read further:

INTERIM CONCLUSION
: Inherent instability resulting in random mutations. 100% failure rate with identical symptoms. Many positive factors. Strongly urge postponing of the commencement of
LATONA
Phase One pending further results and analysis. There is insufficient information to date on which to make firm conclusions
.

Conor noticed there was no name attached to the report. Very sensible, he thought acidly. He would not want his name on a report like that.

Latona
. He read down the rest of the file but could not see the name. Curious, he entered a search for it. After a few moments the announcement appeared:

Latona Phase One file pages under construction. Access not possible. Commencement date scheduled 31 March 1995
.

He got up and walked up and down the tiny room a few times to clear his head. He felt like he'd just opened Pandora's box.

He tried searching for further information by entering a series of key words and names, including
Crowe, Farmer, Gunn, Medici Information
and
Polyphemus
, but they yielded nothing.

He saved the Medici file on to his hard disk, carefully encoding it himself in case someone got hold of his Power-Book, then he switched off his computer, disconnected the modem, replaced the phone jack, and pushed the bed back against the wall. He'd had his sixty-five pounds' worth and was ready to leave.

Downstairs in the lobby he settled his phone bill and went outside.

He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he failed to notice the man in a fleece-lined parka with his collar turned up against the night chill, standing a short distance down the road.

The man waited until Conor had climbed into his car and started the engine, before sauntering casually up the steps of the hotel and into the lobby.

Monty tried to keep calm, driving through the housing estate which she had never been to before as if she knew exactly where she was going. She made a right, then a left. The headlights behind did the same.

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.'