Alchemist

by Peter James

  At half past seven he heard footsteps coming down the corridor and eyed the window. A bespectacled man walked past without looking in. He was an English patent agent, Charley Rowley had told him, who worked in an office next to the vending machines; they had nodded a couple of times but never actually spoken. Conor resumed his reading.

  The booming sound of Charley Rowley’s voice, greeting someone further down the corridor, interrupted him after about twenty minutes, and he braced himself. A moment later Rowley stopped in his doorway, holding a bulging briefcase.

  ‘Morning, Mr Molloy, how are we today?’ he said with the breeziness of a surgeon doing his ward rounds.

  ‘Yup, fine. How about you?’

  ‘Yah. Never better!’ Despite the brightness of his voice, Rowley looked, as usual, half dead, as if he had been up partying most of the night. His complexion was white and his eyes bloodshot. ‘How did the move go?’

  ‘Good. You must come round – have a drink.’

  ‘Like to.’ Rowley twiddled his little finger in his ear. ‘Was it this weekend I suggested you come down to the country?’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘Mind mucking in a bit? I’d forgotten we’re meant to be doing a spot of paintwork.’

  ‘Sure, no problem.’

  ‘Great.’ Rowley eyed the piles of documents. ‘Getting on all right? Need help with anything?’

  ‘One minor thing.’ Conor stood up and sidled round his desk towards him. ‘I have a problem with my terminal – not functioning. I’ve put a call into Maintenance, but it’s going to be a while before they get anyone over. There’s an urgent eMail I’m expecting – mind if I take a quick look at my mailbox on your screen?’

  Rowley yawned. ‘Better do it right now – I’m going to be on my machine all morning. It’s just your terminal – the network’s not down, is it?’

  ‘No. There’s just some glitch in mine.’

  ‘Happens sometimes, affected mine about a year ago.’

  Conor accompanied him the few yards along the corridor. He waited as his colleague slipped in his smart-card, then followed him in, manoeuvring himself quickly behind Rowley’s desk and to the left of him, so that he had an unobstructed view of the keyboard.

  Rowley sat down and switched on the terminal’s power button. On the screen appeared the command: ENTER USER NAME.

  Conor watched the screen carefully as Rowley tapped out, with one finger: Chrowley.

  Then the command appeared: ENTER PASSWORD.

  Like most systems, the password itself would not actually appear on the screen when typed, to prevent anyone else from reading it. Conor was no longer looking at the screen, but at the keyboard, glad that Rowley could only type with two fingers, and that he was only using one of them now.

  He scrutinized each key in turn as Rowley struck them: 1u1u/

  Conor repeated the sequence silently to himself, committing it to memory. It was a good password, simple, and hard to hack. Rowley had used his girlfriend’s nickname as the basis. But he had replaced the middle ‘I’ with a numerical ‘1’, placed an asterisk either side of it, and for good measure added a slash on to the end. No hacker using a program to scan names, dates or dictionary words would be able to crack it in a hurry.

  On the screen appeared: WELCOME TO THE BENDIX SCHERE ELECTRONIC SERVICE. AUTHORIZATION LEVEL 3. ENTER SERVICE YOU REQUIRE.

  There were five authorization levels on the Bendix system, which Rowley had explained to him a while back. Level One was restricted exclusively to Main Board Directors. Level Two was for senior management. Level Three was for junior management. Level Four, which was Conor’s level, and Level Five, were very limited. Conor could send and receive electronic mail, plus he could access the corporate research library which was on-line, and the company’s patents records as well as the Internet, but very little else. Level Five existed principally for the security staff to verify personnel.

  Rowley typed: MAILBOX REGISTER.

  On the screen appeared the words: WHICH MAILBOX DO YOU WISH TO OPEN

  He typed: C. Molloy.

  On the screen appeared: SORRY, ACCESS TO THIS MAILBOX IS RESTRICTED TO MR MOLLOY. PLEASE ASK MR MOLLOY TO ENTER HIS PASSWORD.

  Rowley stood up and indicated for Conor to take his chair. ‘OK, Mr Molloy, fill your boots.’

  Conor sat down and typed in his own password: stea
  Instantly his mailbox came up. He had twenty-three messages waiting.

  ‘Just get myself a coffee,’ Rowley said. ‘Want one?’

  ‘Sure – black, no sugar, thanks. I won’t take a couple of minutes.’

  ‘No worries.’

  When Rowley had gone, Conor quickly wrote down his password in the back of his diary, then scanned through the sender names in his mailbox. A couple were from Rowley himself, setting dates for meetings; there was one from Montana Bannerman and a couple from her father responding to queries, and one, which he knew would be encoded, from his mother. He would read that one later.

  Rowley came back in, yawning again. ‘Fucking good club went to last night. Must take you there. Real head-banger of a place.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Conor said, trying to mask his lack of enthusiasm. He had never been into clubbing.

  ‘They do some cocktail you get seriously stonkoed on. Bright purple. Absolute killer.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  Rowley pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers for a moment, then gave a conspiratorial wink. ‘Oh – I wouldn’t know, I didn’t drink any myself.’

  Conor looked at him oddly for a moment, then twigged: company regulations forbade consumption of alcohol less than twenty-four hours before coming to work. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘OK, all finished – get what you wanted?’

  ‘Yup, thanks, appreciate it.’ Conor stood up and Rowley took over.

  ‘Right, let’s see what the day has to offer. A little dickeybird tells me it’s going to be a bummer.’

  44

  Conor worked through lunch, taking only a ten-minute break when he left the Bendix Building to make a call from a pay phone down the road. At three o’clock he told Charley Rowley that he had to go early, because he was expecting a furniture delivery at his new apartment.

  He drove south out of London, down on to the M25 ring road, then turned south again off that on to the M23, past Gatwick Airport and on towards the coast. It was a fine afternoon but the light was beginning to fade rapidly as the car swept up through a deep cut in the South Downs, the sky turning a dark metallic blue. He put on the lights, bathing the dashboard instruments in a crisp orange glow, driving swiftly, keeping an eye on the time.

  It was twenty to five as he hit the outskirts of Brighton and pulled on to the forecourt of a pub. Squinting against the shadowy weakness of the interior light, he flicked through the pages of the computer magazine on the passenger seat until he reached the listings section with the name of the company he was looking for, and the directions he had written beside it. He re-read them, then drove on through the town centre, heading towards the sea.

  After about ten minutes he passed a forest of domed minarets on his right: the Royal Pavilion, the massive extravagant folly George IV had built for his mistress. This was his principal landmark; now he began looking out for the address he wanted on his left. He crossed a traffic light, then saw the number painted on the column of an elegant Regency terrace. ‘24’. A large sign hung from the first-floor window: ‘Minaret Internet Plc’

  He drove on past it, followed the directions he had been given to the car park. A biting cold breeze was blowing as he walked back along the seafront, past the brightly illuminated pier, clutching his Apple Mac laptop tightly and wishing he had some gloves on. Rounding the corner, he climbed the steps of number 24 and rang the entryphone buzzer.

  There was a sharp click and he pushed the door open, walked along a narrow corridor, then up a flight of steps. As he reached the top he was greeted with a warm smile by an elegantly fashio
nable young woman in her early twenties.

  ‘My name’s Bob Frost – I phoned earlier this afternoon.’

  ‘Yes, from Canterbury? Did you find us all right, Mr Frost?’

  ‘Your directions were grand.’

  ‘Come on through. Would you like some tea or coffee?’

  ‘Coffee, please, black, no sugar.’ He followed her through a long room that looked like Mission Control at Houston and into a rather chaotic office crammed with desks and computer terminals, at which a bald-headed man, a ponytailed youth and a rather fierce-looking individual with a cigarette gripped in his lips were all working in feverish concentration. Clumps of wiring like mutant spaghetti spewed between the desks into junction boxes on the floor. Keys puttered and lights blinked among the intermittent bleeps, hisses and chimes of modems connecting.

  Conor was shown to a chair sandwiched between a desk and a stack of Internet Yellow Pages, and told someone would be with him in a moment. He sat down and stared at a hand-drawn progress chart on the wall opposite him; it was in the shape of a glass tube with an orange line midway between the 7000 and 8000 marks. After a few moments a tall, slim man with long, prematurely greying hair came up to him. Wearing a green jacket over a black t-shirt, and a ‘&’ sign earring pinned to his left lobe, he sported rather conventional glasses.

  ‘Mr Frost? I’m Andy Holyer. What can I do for you?’

  The man had ‘tekkie’ printed all over him, but his manner was pleasant and businesslike.

  ‘I need an eMail address.’

  ‘No problem.’ He eyed the computer Conor was holding. ‘For a Mac?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Is that a 540?’

  ‘540 colour, yes.’

  ‘We charge a joining fee of £17.75, then a monthly sub of £14.75 – no extras and there’s no unit charging. We throw in the manual and the software. The service gives you an eMail account and full Internet access.’

  ‘And I could join up right now?’

  ‘We could add you on to the system at the end of today and get your pack off in the post tonight.’

  ‘I – er – Is it possible I could take the pack with me?’

  Andy Holyer looked at his watch. ‘I suppose if you called back between six and six-thirty that’d be OK.’

  ‘Sure.’

  The young woman who had brought him in came over with his coffee. Andy Holyer turned to her. ‘This gentleman wants to open an account, Toni. Could you take the details? He wants to get on tonight, so he’ll come back after six.’

  ‘Of course.’ She led Conor over to a quieter corner of the room, sat him beside her desk and gave him a form. He laid his laptop and coffee in a gap on the desk and studied the form. It was simple, with spaces for his name, address and method of payment, and details of the system he used.

  He filled in his fictitious name and an equally fictitious address in Canterbury, then hesitated at the payment option of cheque or credit card. ‘I’d like to pay cash – is that OK?’

  ‘No problem at all.’

  He paid for six months in advance, and she wrote out a receipt. ‘Do you have the name you want to register for your mailbox?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said with a wry, private smile.

  She handed him a form on which he wrote down eumenides, then he turned it round for her to read. As she glanced at it, then typed it into the terminal, her face remained expressionless, not revealing whether the name meant anything to her or not. ‘So your eMail address will read: eumenides@minaret.co.uk. Yes?’

  ‘Yup, that’s good.’

  ‘OK,’ she said brightly. ‘If you’d like to pop back just after six we should have everything ready for you.’

  ‘Do you have an instruction manual I can be studying in the meantime?’

  She ducked beneath her desk and produced one, saying, ‘You’re welcome to wait here, but if you turn right outside the front door you’ll find a couple of cafés where you might be more comfortable.’

  Conor glanced at his watch. It was only five fifteen. He thanked her and went off in search of somewhere to kill the next three quarters of an hour.

  The sight of the lights on in the cottage meant either that Alice had not been today, or that the strict note Monty had left her cleaning lady had got through, she thought as she drove up the pitch-black cart track. So far it had been a losing battle trying to train her daily into leaving the lights on. Coupled with the fact that on winter nights like these it was cheering to come home to a house not in total darkness, Monty thought also that the cats might be happier with some lights on, although she was not so sure about that.

  The headlights of the MG picked out the barn, revealing clearly for an instant its corrugated iron cladding and flapping sheeting, before dropping it back into an ominous silhouette. The other thing Monty did not like about arriving home in the dark was driving past the barn; for no real reason it always spooked her.

  She turned on to the hard in front of the garage, climbed out, shivering against the sudden cold of the rising wind, heaved up the garage door and drove the car in. She removed her briefcase, containing some papers she intended working on after supper, pulled the door shut, walked up to the front door and pushed the key into the lock.

  She was feeling a little down this evening. Lunch had gone so well with Conor Molloy yesterday, right up until the point when she had mentioned that Seals had cried out something that sounded like wolf, and then he had suddenly seemed to lose interest in her and retreat into a world of his own.

  She’d known he was going to be preoccupied as he had told her he was in the middle of moving; she had been hoping to get a call or an eMail from him today, though, but had heard nothing. Her father had been down in Berkshire and she had gone up to the canteen at lunch time in the hope of running into the American, but had seen no sign of him. A couple of times she had been tempted to phone him on a pretext, but had resisted. Mustn’t seem too keen, she knew.

  The two cats came running up as she entered, the way they always did. ‘Crick! Watson! Hello, boys, how are you?’ She knelt to stroke them both. As she did so, the phone rang.

  Conor Molloy? She hurried through into the kitchen, and grabbed the receiver. ‘Yeshello,’ she said, a fraction breathlessly.

  ‘Oh – er – Miss Bannerman?’

  It was a female voice that was vaguely familiar; Monty recognized the Welsh accent, but could not immediately place it. The woman was courteous, but sounded very distressed.

  ‘Speaking,’ she said, a little guardedly, and disappointed that it was not the American; although she remembered she hadn’t even given him her home number.

  There was a pause. ‘Miss Bannerman – I’m so sorry to disturb you – it’s Walter’s wife.’

  ‘Yes – yes, of course, hello. How are you, Mrs Hoggin?’

  There was a longer pause. ‘I thought you might want to know – because you asked Walter to do something for you, and you – you might be waiting on it.’ Her voice began to falter. ‘I’m afraid he had a heart attack at work this afternoon. They –’ Her voice cracked completely and Monty held on in terrible silence, fear swirling in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘They – they said they tried to resuscitate him, but that he was dead by the time the ambulance got him to hospital.’

  45

  As Conor headed north on the motorway, back towards London, the sign loomed up overhead, ‘Gatwick Airport’, with an arrow indicating the near side lane exit.

  Perfect, he thought, accelerating past a couple of trucks, then moving sharply over to the left. He drove up the ramp and stopped at the lights at the top. Amid the blaze of illuminations that marked out the sprawling buildings and perimeter of the airport, he saw several hotel signs high in the night sky.

  Any of them would do fine, he thought, selecting the Post House at random and heading down the dual carriageway towards it. He crossed a series of roundabouts, then found himself about to overshoot the main entrance. Braking hard, he swung in without in
dicating, ignoring the blare of a horn behind him, and followed the signs to the car park at the rear of the building.

  Relax, he thought. Cool it! He was as tense as hell, and clammy with perspiration. Slowing right down, he cruised the parking lot, and saw a row of empty bays ahead.

  He reversed into one, removed his briefcase and locked the car, then walked through a pair of automatic doors into the rear of the lobby and made his way to the front desk. The hotel seemed quiet; a group of businessmen, with their names on lapel badges, stood closely together as if they had been deposited on alien terrain and were waiting to be rescued. Two men in armchairs were engrossed on their mobile phones, and a glamorous brunette sat on her own reading a magazine.

  Conor addressed the young woman receptionist. ‘Do you have any rooms available – a single?’

  ‘They’re all twins, sir, but we have a single occupancy rate of forty-five pounds.’ Her voice sounded like one loop of a gramophone needle stuck in a groove.

  ‘Fine, I’ll take one.’

  She swivelled a pad of registration forms to face him. ‘If you could just fill that out, please, sir,’ then she turned her attention back to her printouts. Conor wrote the name ‘Robert Frost’ and his fictitious address in Canterbury, and paid cash in advance for the room.

  She handed him a card key inside a tiny folder. ‘If you just settle your extras when you check out. Enjoy your stay,’ she added with a vapid smile.

  Conor got out of the lift on the fourth floor, checked the arrow directions for the room numbers and made his way along to 4122. It was a blandly functional room, with twin beds and a television. Net curtains blotted out some of the glow from the airport, and the double-glazed windows muffled most of the noise.