Mind Control: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 2) Read online

  MIND CONTROL

  ~ Perceivers Book 2 ~

  by

  Jane Killick

  A science fiction telepathy thriller

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE POLICEMAN DESPISED Michael. The feelings of contempt and anger leaked out of Sergeant Anthony Patterson like a bad smell that tainted the air of the interrogation room. He knew Michael was a perceiver, he knew he could sense his emotions and read his thoughts, but Patterson made no attempt to hide what was going on in his head. He didn’t believe Michael had any business poking his mind-reading powers into police work and he wanted Michael to know it.

  Patterson was a thin, haggard man who looked ten years older than his thirty years, and wore a crumpled grey suit that looked like he’d slept in it. He sat at a wooden table in the centre of the interrogation room surrounded by its stark white walls that reflected the light back onto him. Michael sat in one corner on a hard plastic chair that made his buttocks numb, with his gaze resting on the black rubber line of a panic alarm that ran round three sides of the room. Above, at diagonally opposite corners of the ceiling, the two frog-like bulbous eyes of surveillance cameras watched and recorded everything they did.

  Patterson scratched the side of his head through his wiry ginger hair and looked up from the file of notes in front of him. Across the table was the third person in the room: a terrorist suspect called Jerome Tyler. The teenager, who had been picked up in the street with a bag of explosives on his back, was the person Michael was supposed to be perceiving. Tyler was probably not much older than Michael’s seventeen years and had never been in serious trouble before or done anything to get himself noticed by the anti-terrorist unit of the Metropolitan Police. Until his arrest.

  Michael perceived Tyler’s thoughts whispering across his consciousness. While Patterson’s mind raged like a stormy sea breaking on the shore, Tyler’s were like the gentle lapping of waves on the sand. Perceiving him was like listening to quiet background noise.

  “Jerome Tyler,” Patterson addressed him. “I have to remind you that you are under caution and you have declined your right to have a solicitor present. Do you understand?”

  There was hardly a ripple on the calm sea of Tyler’s mind. His only movement was to shake his overgrown brown fringe out of his eyes. His hair, dark against his pale skin, was the one mark of individuality about him. His clothes had been taken for forensic examination and he had been issued with a set of light grey sweat top and pants that almost camouflaged him against the white decor of the interrogation room.

  “Where were you taking the explosives, Mr Tyler?” said Patterson.

  Inside Tyler’s mind, Michael sensed that he heard the words, but there was no reaction.

  “You are facing very serious charges, Mr Tyler. It would help you if you answered my questions.”

  Tyler said nothing. He thought nothing. He continued to sit in his chair doing nothing.

  “You were carrying four pounds of plastic explosive when you were arrested,” said Patterson. “That’s a lot of sophisticated hardware for someone your age. Do you want to tell me where you were going with it?”

  Tyler’s mind stirred. “Going?” The waves of his thoughts swelled and raced to the shore.

  “Yes, where were you going?”

  Images flashed in Tyler’s head: of a bus stop sign attached to a concrete post, a graffitied Perspex bus shelter and the red flash of an approaching double decker bus with a number 10 written on the front. “I need to go,” he said.

  “Go where?” said Patterson.

  This was not the question Patterson needed to be asking. He needed to ask if Tyler had planned to blow up the bus, like the suicide bomber who killed thirteen people on a London double decker back in 2005. But Patterson didn’t know anything about the bus, he was just a norm who couldn’t read minds and only knew what the suspect’s words and body language told him.

  Michael focussed his perception, pushing past Tyler’s surface thoughts. But still, Tyler thought only of the bus. Tyler imagined himself leaning out from the bus stop, stretching his hand out into the road to hail the number 10 and seeing it pull up beside him. He imagined he would ignore the driver, touch his Oyster card to the detector and look for a quiet place to sit by the window. He didn’t think about the explosives in the rucksack on his back, he didn’t wish for terror or mayhem, he wasn’t thinking about any allegiance to a god or a cause. He wanted only to sit quietly on the bus. And he wanted it desperately.

  “I have to go now!” said Tyler.

  “Tell me where you need to go,” said Patterson. “I can help you.”

  Michael tried, but he couldn’t see a destination in Tyler’s head. Tyler’s mind was stuck in a loop of getting on the bus.

  Tyler jumped to his feet, scraping his chair across the floor as it was pushed out behind him.

  Patterson stood too. “Sit down, Mr Tyler.” He flashed a look up at one of the cameras, as if to tell the people watching that he had the situation under control. At least for the moment.

  “You don’t understand, I have to go!” said Tyler. He looked around the room, searching for a way out. He saw the door, a single brown wooden panel in an expanse of white, but also saw the policeman who stood in his way.

  “Mr Tyler, you need to sit down.” Patterson took a step towards him, gesturing with his hands for him to calm down.

  Michael perceived the adrenaline rush through Tyler’s body, giving him the power he needed to leave the claustrophobic room.

  “If you sit down, we can talk about it,” said Patterson in a soothing tone.

  Tyler’s body appeared to capitulate as he took a step back towards the chair, but Michael perceived this was a ruse. He thought about shouting out a warning to Patterson, but he was supposed to be the observer and so said nothing.

  Tyler reached out as if to bring his chair back to the table, but he was really pulling his arm back to take a swing at Patterson. Patterson saw what Tyler was doing too late to stop the fist striking his stomach. The policeman cried out as Tyler ran for the door.

  Michael’s perception was filled with Tyler’s elation as he flung open the door and ran out into the corridor. Michael slammed his hand onto the panic strip on the wall and – somewhere else in the police station – an alarm screamed.

  Patterson was already out of the room and shouting after his fleeing suspect. Michael – his perception of Tyler waning as he lost his line of sight – walked to the doorway. He clutched onto the doorframe as he looked down the length of the corridor: a corridor of other closed doors that led into other interrogation rooms where other police officers questioned other suspects.

  Halfway down, Tyler was running. Running hard like his life depended on it, with his arms and legs whirling in desperate circles. In his mind, the same words tumbled over and over: I have to go, I have to go, I have to go.

  Two steps behind him, the older and taller Patterson also ran. His jacket flailed out behind him and the sound of his heavy shoes striking the floor echoed around the walls of the narrow space, as he closed in on his prey.

  Tyler looked towards the end of the corridor where a final door blocked his exit. Memory flashed in his head of when he was first brought in and a uniformed police officer swiped a pass card to open the lock. It meant the door was security controlled and he had no way to get past it. In those milliseconds of realisation, his running slowed.

  Just enough for Patterson to reach out for him.

  Michael perceived Tyler feeling the claw of a hand grab his sweatshirt and yank him back. I have to go,
I have to go, Tyler’s thoughts screamed.

  His body tried to keep running, but he was trapped in his clothes which were trapped in Patterson’s hand. His arms and legs thrashed, he slipped and fell forward. Patterson lost his grip on Tyler’s sweatshirt and he belly-flopped to the ground.

  Tyler’s jaw struck the floor. It split in half with a crack that echoed around the walls and thrust a spear of perceived pain through Michael’s head.

  Michael pulled out his perception as quick as he could, leaving the after-pain firing through his neurons.

  In the corridor in front of him, Tyler was screaming and writhing on the floor as Patterson crouched on top of him with a knee in his back. He grabbed Tyler’s arms and forced them behind him. Two uniformed officers flung open the security door and took over from Patterson, securing Tyler’s wrists with a pair of handcuffs. They pulled him to his feet to reveal his face smeared with blood which had left a pool of red on the floor. Tyler, still struggling and screaming, was led away to the cells.

  Patterson leant back against the wall and took a deep breath. He looked back towards the interrogation room where Michael still stood, gripping onto the doorframe. Michael did not like the way he looked at him. It was probably just as well that he had blocked his perception of what Patterson was thinking.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MICHAEL RETURNED TO the camp which had been his home for the past two years. The car stopped at the metal gates that secured the complex from the outside world and he remembered how he used to feel uncomfortable when he looked through the grill of the bars into the landscaped grounds of neatly trimmed grass and weedless herbaceous borders. But he now regarded it as normal. The soldier on the gate in camouflage fatigues with a rifle slung across his shoulder checked his identification, and that of his driver Hodges, and waved the car through. Michael didn’t even look at the soldier’s face anymore. The young man might have been a machine by the way he carried out his duties in regimented fashion. Only if Michael opened his perception would he get a glimpse into the soldier’s humanity, but he had no wish to know the man behind the uniform and so he kept his mind free of thoughts that weren’t his own.

  Hodges drove to the Galen House, a newly constructed building designed to house young perceivers like Michael. It was a regimented house for a regimented army regime: with two rectangular concrete blocks on either side of a central porch made of toughened glass and a tiled pitched roof. To the left, the equidistant square windows on the first floor indicated where the perceivers’ accommodation was, including Michael’s room. Above it was a second storey with larger windows belonging to a series of offices and training rooms. To the right there was the one long window which let light into the communal area.

  Hodges watched as Michael got out of the car and walked the tarmacked path to the porch. Officially, the man’s job was to provide transport, but unofficially Michael knew he was there to keep an eye on him. Hodges had received training to hide his surface thoughts from perceivers, but he wasn’t very good at it and Michael had easily found the information in his mind. He also inadvertently discovered Hodges suffered from post-traumatic stress from his time serving in Iraq with the Royal Anglian Regiment which, in turn, had led to a bitter divorce. It was at that point that Michael withdrew his perception and decided not to pry any further.

  Michael automatically increased his filters as he walked inside Galen House. It was necessary to block out the unwanted jumble of other people’s thoughts, but also to make sure his own mind wasn’t open to the other perceivers who lived there.

  He heard the chatter of the others before he saw them. There were nineteen perceivers assigned to Galen House, all of whom had avoided the cure by agreeing to work for the government in whatever spying capacity they decreed was in the country’s interest. As part of their training, they had been put through their paces by an army sergeant who taught them everything from assembling a rifle, to conducting military manoeuvres and ironing their uniform in the prescribed manner. It was supposed to instil discipline and loyalty, they were told. Not that Michael was particularly disciplined or loyal, but he made a good show of it.

  All of the others were there, sitting in twos, threes and fours around six regimentally-spaced dining tables in their regulation casual uniform of grey T-shirt and trousers. Some of them were still children – the youngest thirteen, the oldest seventeen – and all were talking across food trays of half-finished army catering. The smell of curry, vegetable lasagne and cod mornay might have been appetising if the aroma of the night’s offerings weren’t mixed together. The others turned to look when Michael walked in, dressed in civvies and fresh from his assignment. He was among the first few of the Perceiver Corps to be deployed in the field and, naturally, they were interested.

  “How was it?” shouted Peter from the table at the far end, through a mouthful of mashed potato. The sixteen-year-old perceiver was the loudest and most bolshie of all of them. Unusually short, but physically adept, he claimed the combination made him especially attractive to girls.

  Peter’s question made Michael stop, halfway between the entrance and the dining tables. He didn’t need to open his perception to know that the others probably had the same question. “You don’t want to know,” he said to the room.

  “Aww, come on!” teased Peter. “Don’t be such a skank.”

  Michael frowned at him. “You really want to know?”

  Murmurs from the others confirmed that they did. He could tell many of them had already opened their perception.

  “Okay,” said Michael. He dropped his filters and played back the memory of Tyler crashing to the floor and feeling the crack of his jaw shooting pain through his body.

  Eighteen teenagers winced and immediately shut their perception back down again.

  Cries of, “Michael!” and “Whaddyado that for?” rose from the group. Michael smiled and buried the memory again. Served them right for being curious.

  Michael retrieved his dinner from where it was being kept warm on the rack brought from the catering building and took it over to where his best friend, Alex, was sitting.

  “That was mean,” said Alex as Michael sat down beside him.

  “They asked for it,” said Michael.

  “Even so …” said Alex.

  Alex was a year younger than Michael and, unlike him, had embraced army life. He was athletic, sported a muscular frame and beat almost everyone at anything that involved running, climbing or crawling under barbed wire. He was less good at intellectual challenges, but was a fast learner and a strong perceiver. They got on because, like Michael, he didn’t have much of a family to speak of. Alex came from a home with an absent father and a mother with mental health problems, so life at Galen House was the most stable he had ever had.

  Michael forked over his chicken curry with the lacklustre movements of someone who wished he had ordered the fish. After the day he’d had, he wanted something bland not spicy.

  Alex waited as much as thirty seconds before he said what he was desperate to ask. “Are you going to tell me what happened or not?”

  Michael chewed on a piece of spicy chicken and swallowed. “I was thinking not.”

  Alex lowered his voice. “Seriously, Mike, was it okay?”

  “They were norms,” said Michael. “Norms hate perceivers.”

  Alex nodded as if to say he understood.

  Something entered the edge of Michael’s perception: an anxiety – distant at first – but getting closer.

  The others sensed it too, as it got closer and became strong enough to break through their everyday filters. The chatter of the people and clatter of cutlery stopped. They all turned to face the door.

  The squeak of highly polished leather from military boots and the click-click of the heels of a woman’s shoes announced the arrival of two people into the building. Through the door first was a young woman. Like the perceivers, she was a teenager – maybe fifteen or sixteen years old – her naturally tall body made taller by t
he four inch heels on her black calf-length boots. All her clothes were black. A black baggy coat hung in folds over a black T-shirt with a half-obscured slogan and black skinny jeans which hugged her shapely legs. Even her hair was jet black, hanging straight from a middle parting down to the tops of her shoulders. It made her face look even paler than it might otherwise have been, despite the make-up she had applied to give her cheeks a red glow and her lips a strong shape of glossy maroon.

  As soon as he touched her mind, Michael knew she was a perceiver.

  Her anxiety intensified. What are they looking at? she thought.

  It was a thought strong enough for them all to perceive. But still, the perceivers kept looking.

  Beside her, having walked through the door almost unnoticed, was Sergeant Norman Macaulay, the officer in charge of the Perceivers Corps. He was a small man, in his forties and slightly overweight but otherwise in good shape, who had lived and breathed the army since he joined up at the age of sixteen. He always wore a dress uniform: khaki trousers and shirt ironed to within an inch of their lives, tie meticulously tied with a Windsor knot and a jacket which he kept smooth and buttoned unless he was sitting down. On his chest were a collection of medals which he wore proudly, but never talked about. He dressed like this, rather than in fatigues like many of the officers on the base, because he believed the uniform gave him authority. Michael knew this because he had perceived it from him. He had perceived everything about Sergeant Norman Macaulay over the months since he had met him, as had – he was sure – every other perceiver in the room, except the new girl.

  “This is Pauline Sarkis,” said Sergeant Norman Macaulay, or ‘Norm the Norm’, as the perceivers called him.

  Some of the perceivers mumbled a ‘hello’, others offered a slight wave. Pauline stretched her glossy maroon lips across her teeth into a forced smile.

  “Do you want some food?” Norm asked her.

  “I ate on the train,” she almost whispered. Her mind showed a memory of nibbling at a sandwich which had gone stale at the edges, while the English countryside sped past outside the carriage window.