Mind Control: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 2) (25 page)

The wooden steps climbed into the dark to where there was a little landing before the stairs turned a forty-five degree angle for the final four steps to the floor above. Light shone from the entrance, like a beam from heaven. Michael walked up into the unknown.

The upper room of the pub might once have been a function room or a meeting room, but clearly hadn’t been used for that purpose in years and had become little more than a store room. It was a vast space the size of the pub downstairs, illuminated by harsh strip lighting that revealed the true state of the scratched and peeling paintwork. It was filled with old tables and chairs piled on top of each other along with dumped cardboard boxes of miscellaneous stuff. One had an old electric heater sticking out of it and another was topped with a piece of scraggly Christmas tinsel. Judging by the grime that had accumulated on top of them, no one had touched them for a very long time.

Michael stood on the bare floorboards in the centre of the room and concentrated his perception. Still he sensed no one. He wondered if the meeting was real, or perhaps the person he was due to meet was late. He pulled his phone from his pocket and checked if he had any messages, but there were none. He thumbed through to recent calls and chose the number Orlov had used to call him. It rang. And rang. Until it clicked onto a recorded message in Russian. Michael disconnected.

Something rattled at the far end of the room. Beyond the furniture, half hidden by the legs of upside down tables, he saw there was a door with a sticker on it in green Cyrillic lettering. The door handle rattled again and opened, to reveal Andrei Orlov, standing at the top of a metal fire escape. Orlov stepped inside, negotiating a wiggly path between the junk, to face Michael in the centre of the room. He looked different than he had done the previous day in his apartment. It wasn’t just that he had brushed his hair back neatly from his face, or that he had replaced his granddad cardigan with a smart, black showerproof coat. There was something else that Michael couldn’t articulate.

“Thank you for coming,” said Orlov in his impressive, but heavy accented English.

“Is your friend here?” asked Michael, still not perceiving anyone else close by.

“My friend is a little nervous. He wants to make sure you have brought no one with you and that you have no recording devices. You need to hand over your phone.”

Michael looked down at the phone he was still holding. He didn’t want to part with it – even though he had no one to call in a country where he knew no one – but he perceived no malice from Orlov, so handed it over.

As Orlov secreted the phone in his pocket, Michael realised he perceived very little from Orlov at all. No malice, no nervousness, no anticipation like he might expect. There was just a pleasant contented feeling, muffled like he was perceiving it through a veil.

He pushed deeper and the veil fell away.

He expected a rush of Orlov’s emotions and thoughts, but his perception slammed up against a wall.

“You’re blocking me.” He spoke his realisation out loud, staring with disbelief at the Russian he knew wasn’t a perceiver, but had somehow closed off access to his mind.

Michael pushed harder. The barrier was weak and cracked enough to let out one overwhelming feeling from Orlov’s mind: remorse.

It was a trap. There was a perceiver somewhere close by, hiding their presence by shielding their mind while also masking Orlov’s thoughts and feelings to lure Michael in. “You lied to me.”

“No! Why would you think that?” said Orlov, but his mind was open now. Michael felt Orlov’s guilt and his nervousness, and heard his thoughts tumbling in Russian, probably hoping the whole thing would be over soon. It meant whoever had been blocking him knew that he had been discovered.

The sound of heavy footsteps behind him made Michael jump. He turned to see two men enter from the stairs, led by the barman whose bushy moustache now appeared sinister rather than ridiculous in the bright strip lightning. He looked into their minds and saw the same blankness he had seen in the gang who had left him to burn.

Footsteps on metal climbed from the fire escape into the room. They belonged to another two men, their minds blank and their bodies blocking his exit.

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.