Michael turned back to Orlov, the only other person in the room with a free mind. “What’s going on?”

  “Prosti mne,” he said in Russian. Michael didn’t understand the words, but he recognised the feelings behind them. He was sorry.

  The men from the fire escape and the stairs closed in on him with slow steps like zombies.

  “Why?” said Michael.

  “My family,” said Orlov as he thought of a woman and three children. The people from the photographs on his mantelpiece cascaded through his memories. He loved them and he missed them; forced to live, as he was, in a single person’s apartment. In the mess of his emotions, Michael wasn’t sure if Orlov had betrayed him to save his family, or betrayed him so he could be allowed to live with them again.

  Orlov stepped aside and the men closed in.

  Michael looked around, desperate for an escape route. All he saw was piled rubbish, solid walls and men coming towards him.

  “Come out and face me!” Michael cried into the air. “I know you’re there, perceiver.” Whoever it was may have been able to keep their distance when sending in their programmed thugs, but they couldn’t have blocked Orlov’s mind without being close by, and Michael was relying on that. “Well? Where are you?”

  Silence answered him, broken only by four sets of Russian boots clomping on the wooden floor. Close enough for Michael to see into their dead eyes. And past them to the daylight coming from the open fire escape door.

  He made a break for it.

  Dashing for the light, he took one step of freedom before a strong Russian hand gripped his arm and yanked him back; lifting him as he swung him round. Both arms were pulled behind his back as he wriggled in the grip of two strong hands and his feet kicked out against air.

  “Help me! Help me, please! I’m up h—”

  Cloth was pushed into his open mouth, stifling his scream. He tried to push it out with his tongue but more cloth was placed over the top and – even though he tossed his head to stop them – tied at the back so the gag was in tight. Inside, he was still screaming, but outside all that anyone heard was a muffled, “Mm mm mmm!”

  The last thing he saw was the cold look from the moustached barman, before a black bag was placed over his head and tied securely with rope around his neck.

  The world went dark. Sound was deadened. His own voice was silenced.

  He struggled, but there was no breaking the grip of the four Russian programmed men as they dragged him away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–THREE

  IN THE DAZE of semi-consciousness, he felt the cold of the hard floor beneath him and the slimy damp of his own drool on his cheek. There was a musty smell in the air and the perception of someone familiar close by.

  Michael’s eyes squinted open to see the blurry white of ceramic floor tiles on which he lay and which had leached the heat out of him until he was as stiff as a corpse.

  He moved, just a little, causing a rush of pain to run through his body. He heard himself groan.

  “Michael?”

  A man’s voice. A recognisable voice. The familiar perception now identified; it filled his mind with love and concern.

  “Dad?” he heard himself say.

  Michael lifted his shoulders, and despite the pain from his aching body, pulled himself to a sitting position. A room no bigger than the one he lived in back at Galen House, enclosed him with white featureless walls. A narrow window high up behind him let in a crack of daylight and a closed door ahead of him suggested the rest of the building that lay beyond. Beside him, a grubby thin mattress from a child’s single bed had been thrown on the floor and, in front of him, there was a plastic bucket that smelt of piss.

  He leant his back against the wall and heard a chink of metal. Looking down, he saw a handcuff on his wrist was attached to a thick, unbreakable chain about a metre long that ran to a second cuff secured to a cast iron radiator.

  A gentle hand touched his shoulder, the only warm thing in the whole room. It was Brian Ransom, still in the same suit he had worn in court, but his tie and shoelaces had been taken away. His beard had grown wild in the days since he had been kidnapped and his face had paled to match the grey of his hair. He was also chained to the radiator. He made no attempt to block his emotions, conflicted as they were with relief at seeing Michael and anger that he was there. Underneath was a fear, for himself and for his son.

  “Michael, what are you doing here?”

  “I came to find you,” said Michael.

  “I wish you hadn’t.”

  Considering their current predicament, it was a wish Michael feared he was soon going to share. “Where are we?” he said.

  “Moscow, I think,” said Ransom.

  That seemed right. He didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious, but he didn’t think it had been long enough to take him out of the city. He remembered being bundled into some kind of vehicle as he desperately tried to breathe through his nose inside the bag over his head until he passed out, possibly from some kind of drug. He felt pretty shitty, but he would have probably felt even worse if he’d been travelling for days.

  “What do they want?” said Michael.

  “The secret to perception,” said Ransom.

  “There’s a secret?” said Michael.

  “The boy who questioned me seems to think so.”

  “Boy?” It had to be James Hetherington. “An English boy about fourteen years old with hazel eyes – a perceiver?”

  “You know him?”

  “We’ve met,” said Michael.

  “I can’t perceive him,” said Ransom. “He’s too strong.”

  “As strong as me,” said Michael. “Stronger, maybe.”

  “What does he want with you?”

  Michael shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps he thinks I know something. Perhaps he just didn’t like me coming to Moscow.”

  “I don’t like it either,” said his father.

  Michael realised the ache in his bladder was getting stronger and it had nothing to do with the stiffness from lying unconscious on the floor. “I need a pee,” he said.

  Ransom pointed to the bucket.

  “Really?” said Michael.

  Ransom nodded.

  Michael pulled himself to his feet. The chain attached to his wrist stretched out just long enough for him to stand over the bucket. Embarrassed, he turned his back on his father and emptied his bladder, watching the arc of yellow as it fell into the well of stale urine already there. When he had finished, he did up his fly. His body was relieved, but his mind was disgusted.

  “Sit on the mattress with me,” said Ransom. “It’s not so cold here.”

  He did so and found it wasn’t so much warm and soft, as less cold and hard than the floor. Opposite him was the door; ostensibly the only way out. His chain was not long enough for him to even reach the door handle, so he leant his back against the wall and cursed himself for being stupid enough to get himself caught.

  Ransom put an arm round his shoulder. Michael initially shrunk back from him, but there was something comforting about the warmth from his body and from his mind and, after only a moment, he relaxed against his father’s side. He dropped his barriers around his perception and allowed his own disorientation and fear to mingle with the concern and anxiety coming from his father.

  ~

  MICHAEL LIFTED HIS head at the sound of the turning door handle.

  James Hetherington stepped into the room with his mind totally closed behind his impenetrable blocks. Looking clean, fresh and well-rested on the outside, he brought with him the perfume of modern toiletries, accentuating the otherwise musty smell of stale human sweat that pervaded the room. He relaxed back against the doorframe, placing his hands casually in his trouser pockets, knowing he was safe at more than a chain’s length from his captives.

  What’s he doing? Michael thought.

  I don’t know, I can’t perceive him, Ransom replied.

  Michael tried to see the rest of the building through the open door, but it was just a corridor with another white-painted wall on the opposite side. It was soon obscured by the barman with the bushy moustache as he turned from the corridor and into the room: his face and his mind both still blank, and a single instruction in Russian looping in his head. In his hand, he carried a padlock.

  Walking straight past Hetherington as if he wasn’t there, he approached Ransom, who flinched as the barman reached out to him. He didn’t touch him, instead he took hold of the chain which secured Ransom to the radiator.

  “What are you doing?” said Ransom, addressing his question to Hetherington.

  “You’ll see,” said the boy. “Infuriating not to be able to perceive someone’s intentions, isn’t it?”

  The barman pulled two parts of the chain together and secured them with the padlock, creating a loop. It effectively shortened the chain and restricted Ransom’s movements.

  “Michael is your son, isn’t he?” said Hetherington.

  Ransom said nothing.

  “I perceive he is,” said the boy.

  Michael had his blocks up to stop his thoughts being perceived, but Ransom wasn’t as strong as him and, worn down by days of incarceration, he put up little resistance.

  “What of it?” said Ransom, his mind desperately wondering why his chain had been shortened.

  Without warning, the barman grabbed Michael’s elbow and dragged him by his arm across the floor. Michael scrambled to stop him, but his feet slipped on the tiles. At the halfway point, the chain pulled taut and yanked at his wrist, preventing the barman from pulling him any further.

  “Michael!” called Ransom. He reached out a hand to help him, but the shortened chain stopped him from getting very far.

  “It was very good of your son to join us in Russia,” said Hetherington. “He can be my bargaining chip.”

  The barman reached into his back pocket and pulled out the handle of a penknife. With a flick, a blade extended and Michael felt its steel at his throat.

  He gasped, the sharp movement enlarging his larynx and pressing his neck into the blade. He forced himself to take shallower breaths as he frantically searched with his perception to understand what was happening. All he sensed were the barman’s looped Russian thoughts and his father’s terror.

  “What are you doing?” cried Ransom.

  “You wouldn’t tell me how you created a generation of perceivers,” replied Hetherington. “Which made me realise you needed more persuasion.”

  “It was the vitamin pills,” said Ransom, desperately. “Everybody knows that.”

  “But how?” said Hetherington. “What did you put in the pills that turned ordinary children into perceivers?”

  “The scientists did it, I don’t know how.”

  “Do you really want to play this game?” said Hetherington, his voice playful, like he was enjoying it. “Do you want to lie to me while you watch your son’s throat being slit?”

  Michael’s body was yanked round so he faced his father square on and the blade was pressed closer to his neck. His shallow breaths became faster as he felt the steel break skin and a drip of warm blood flow to his collar.

  “You’re a perceiver, you know I’m not lying!” pleaded Ransom. “I owned a pharmaceutical company, I paid people to do the science, I didn’t do it myself. I can’t tell you what was put in those vitamin pills, because I don’t know!”

  “Then show me.”

  “Anything. Just don’t kill my son.”

  Hetherington left his position by the door and walked over to where Ransom was kneeling by the radiator. Ransom opened his arms wide. “Perceive me,” he said.

  Even though Michael’s body was under the barman’s control, his mind was free. It allowed him to sense his father’s mind – which he tried to do subtly so no one would feel it – as Hetherington probed with his perception.

  Tentatively at first, then deeper. Ransom released any remaining blocks and left himself open. Hetherington searched through all the random rubbish of the man’s mind, down into his memories and back to a time when he was supervising the vitamin pill project. He pulled out images of scientific reports with reams of text and pages of coloured graphs.

  Michael sensed Hetherington’s impatience. The boy grabbed Ransom’s head – both hands clutching at his temples – and pulled him close. Hetherington locked his eyes with him and leant in closer until their foreheads almost touched. Ransom did not resist as Hetherington violated deeper and deeper into the centre of his mind. Too deep for Michael to follow. So deep that it hurt.

  Ransom cried out and clenched his head – his larger adult hands over the top of the smaller child hands of his jailer – pain piercing his mind. He wanted to wrench the boy’s hands away, but the fear of what would happen to Michael if he did, stopped him. His moaning became a wailing. Hetherington still pushed.

  “Stop!” cried Michael. “He doesn’t know anything else!”

  Hetherington was locked inside Ransom’s mind. He probably didn’t even hear. He certainly didn’t care.

  Ransom swayed, his head only held upright by Hetherington’s hands, as the boy’s perception burned through his consciousness.

  Michael – helpless in the barman’s grasp – feared it might kill him. He didn’t know if a perceiver could strangle another person’s mind to death and he didn’t want to find out. Looking around the cell for something – anything – he could use, he saw only the mattress, the bucket and the radiator. Even if they could help, he couldn’t reach them. His arms flapped uselessly at his side as more blood dripped from his neck.

  Ransom let out a final weak scream.

  “Dad!” Michael yelled.

  The bucket flew at Hetherington with the force of a football being kicked into goal. Urine spilled out in a stream of yellow which splashed over his body.

  The shock caused him to let go of Ransom and the connection with his mind was suddenly severed. Ransom collapsed onto the mattress.

  Hetherington turned to the barman, his shirt dripping with piss. “What the hell are you doing?” His anger so loud, it echoed off the walls and floor.

  The barman seemed confused, he lessened his grip on Michael.

  “Well?” Hetherington demanded.

  “Ya ne znaynu,” answered the barman.

  Hetherington let out a cry of frustration. He kicked the bucket at his feet and it went spinning across the room, spilling the last showery drips of urine as it did so, before it collided against the opposite wall and crashed to the ground. Still furious, Hetherington kicked Ransom who lay barely conscious and groaning on the mattress.

  “Come on!” Hetherington ordered the barman. He stomped towards the door, walking with his legs wide like he had just pissed himself.

  The barman let go of Michael. The knife was suddenly no longer at his throat. Michael fell forward onto his hands and knees.

  Behind him, the door closed and he was left in the room with his father, wondering what the hell had just happened.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–FOUR

  SO MUCH URINE had been spilt in the room that Michael could taste it. There was a puddle of it drying in front of him and the mattress next to him was soaked with it. Every time he breathed he couldn’t help but take in its rancid particles which had evaporated into the air. No one from their little prison had bothered to come in and clean it up, they hadn’t even moved the bucket back in case the prisoners had to use it again. They had just left them to sit in their own filth.

  The only acknowledgement that they were living human beings came with the delivery of plastic mugs of water and an anaemic-looking cheese sandwich which the zombie barman had brought them. Michael knew he needed the food and hydration, but every time he thought about eating or drinking it, he tasted his own piss in his mouth.

  Ransom’s head rested on Michael’s lap. He had fallen unconscious after Hetherington had left the room, and was going in and out of a dream state. At first, Michael slipped his perception into his father’s dreams, trying to find out if Hetherington had done any damage, but he only glimpsed his father’s nightmares. Normal, he hoped, for their current situation.

  He kept thinking about the bucket. Hetherington had clearly blamed the barman for throwing it over him, or for allowing Michael to kick it at him. But the more Michael re-ran the events in his head, the more he was convinced that no one had touched it. Like the wires back at the derelict office, the only thing that had touched the bucket was his mind.

  Ransom stirred and moaned.

  “Are you okay?” said Michael.

  “Headache,” he mumbled.

  Michael was relieved. Ransom had both understood his question and answered it coherently: a good sign.

  Ransom pulled himself to a sitting position, clutching his head with one hand, as full consciousness brought full-on pain. Michael had been perceiving him to try to ascertain if he was all right, but pulled out when he realised the headache was too much to share.

  “What happened?” said Ransom.

  “He almost killed you,” said Michael.

  “You can’t kill people with perception.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Ransom wasn’t up for a discussion, he just clutched his head and moaned.

  “Here,” said Michael, handing over a plastic mug of water. “This might help.”

  Ransom took it and gulped. “Thanks.” He passed it back, half-emptied, dropped his hands to his lap and leant the back of his skull against the wall.

  “Did you give him what he wanted?” asked Michael.

  “I gave him what there was. I have a bioscience degree, so I understand the research, but I couldn’t replicate it. Not without the genius of the people who worked for me.”

  “So he didn’t find what he was looking for?”

  “His frustration was all over my mind. He kept pushing and pushing, looking for something that wasn’t there, then there was a sudden terrible smell and he pulled out.”

  “Someone threw the toilet bucket over him,” said Michael.

  “Really?” Ransom laughed, it was so ridiculous. “Ow!” He clutched his head.

  Michael indicated the puddle in front of them and the upturned bucket against the far wall.

 

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