Chapter 26 LSD

Sunday 8th August

Al and Joe walked along the deserted backstreets until they reached the corner of Station Road. They both then sat on a low garden wall and looked towards a property that was three houses along on the far side of the road.

Ten minutes passed.

A white youth appeared, walking along the far pavement. He periodically glanced about him apprehensively.

As soon as they saw the young man, Al and Joe ran towards him.

When they were about ten yards from the youth, the lad stopped and tilted his head to one side to listen. He then anxiously looked around once more.

Al and Joe stood still when the lad stopped and then moved much more cautiously towards him so their footsteps made no further sounds.

The youth turned into the gateway of the house that Al and Joe had been watching. Al and Joe followed, just a few feet behind.

The youth pressed the doorbell three times and then paused before pressing it once more.

The door opened and the three of them walked inside into a corridor.

A black youth of a similar age to the white youth spoke. ‘I was watching out the window. You weren’t followed.’

‘Have you got the acid?’

‘It’s in there.’ The black youth pointed to an open door.

Al and Joe quickly stepped around the young men and went into the room. There was a small plastic bag on a low table. Al inspected the bag. It contained perhaps ten small tablets. He glanced towards the door of the room. The table was not in the lads’ line of sight.

Al picked up the bag and quickly left the room. Joe followed him. They carefully manoeuvred past the young men without contact and headed for the open front door.

‘Where are they, then?’ Al and Joe heard the white youth say as the men stepped out of the front door onto the garden path.

‘Shit, they were there just now. Where the fuck ‘ave they gone?’

Chapter 27 Teterodat

Sunday 8th August

Sue and Ben followed Sam along the corridor until they reached a tee junction with another passage.

‘Where do we go now?’ asked Ben.

‘I don’t know. The lab in which I met John is a few doors down there on the right, but I never went into any of the other rooms in this corridor.’

Ben looked up and down the new corridor. ‘In horror movies, they always split up at this point despite you shouting at the TV for them to stay together. It’s too easy for the monster to pick them off, one by one.’

Sam smiled. ‘It’s a good point, but I’m prepared to take a chance there aren’t any monsters down here. It would be quicker if we split up and looked in every room.’

‘What are we looking for?’ asked Sue.

‘Anything that might give us a clue to anything.’

Sue started to walk along the corridor to the right. ‘I’ll start at the far door and work back.’

Ben began to follow her. ‘I’ll try this first room and meet you in the middle. If you come across any zombies with chainsaws, just don’t get involved.’

Sam turned left along the corridor to start her search in the room where she had entered the complex two days previously.

Sue opened the door of the furthest room and found a light switch. The space was totally empty. She had a cursory glance around the walls, but there was nothing to be seen. She switched off the light and moved on.

There was something in the next room – a large metal cupboard that looked like the refrigeration unit they used at the hospital for storing medication and vaccines. She pulled open the door. It was a refrigerator and of exactly the same type they had at the hospital. At first glance, the cabinet appeared empty, but Sue recalled a problem she had encountered with the unit at Lakenheath. Anything that had been put in the lowest compartment was invisible. A flap covering that compartment gave the impression that it was not a storage space at all, but part of the base of the unit. At Lakenheath, an entire box of vaccine that Sue had been looking for had been hiding in that location until a nurse who had worked at the hospital for many years had pointed out the compartment to her.

The shelves in the cabinet looked like the grids in a domestic refrigerator. They were very deep. however, and Sue crouched to double check each shelf before getting down onto her hands and knees to get a clear view of the bottom compartment.

She lifted the flap. There was something there. There was a plastic box at the very back of the compartment. The box was the size of a pack of A4 printing paper and was so far to the back of the recess that Sue wondered if someone had actually been trying to conceal it.

When she had left home this morning, she had not anticipated searching a refrigerator in some kind of secret medical unit, and so latex gloves and a mask had not been on the top of her list of items to bring. She thought for a moment about any unconscious influence that might have led her to bring that scarf. She smiled to herself. Maybe her mind had unconsciously disregarded a suggestion by Underlying Reality that she should take some PPE too.

Sue encountered Sam and Ben in the corridor. They were discussing their lack of success in the search so far. ‘It’s probably nothing,’ said Sue, ‘but I’ve found a plastic box almost hidden at the back of a medical refrigerator. As I don’t know what they were doing down here, I don’t want to touch it without PPE. That’s probably excessively cautious, but there could be pathogens on it or nasty chemicals of some kind.’

‘There’re gloves and masks in John’s office. I’ll go and get them.’ Ben walked back towards the exit corridor and disappeared around the corner.

‘Thanks for helping, Sue. I’m sure that’s going to be useful. It may already have been. I wouldn’t have thought of treating that box with proper safety procedures. I might not even have found it.’

‘I’m pleased I’m here. You know, it’s been an odd week. The second I met Ben, something seemed very right about being with him. When you explained what was going on this morning, it felt like I ought to be here. I just hope that whatever’s driving these feelings doesn’t just abandon me when I’ve done whatever it is that it wants me to do.’

‘I’m not sure that it works quite like that, and maybe your initial impressions are what destiny feels like.’

Ben came back around the corner wearing gloves and a mask that covered his nose and mouth. ‘Where’s the refrigerator?’

All the rooms they had checked lacked furniture except for the large lab where Sam had met John. They went there with the box. Ben placed it on a table, and they each found a chair to sit on.

Sue and Sam watched as Ben opened the box. Inside were around one hundred small syringes, each within its own sealed plastic packet. They did not count them, but the box looked full and “100 doses” was printed on a label inside the lid.

Sue reached for one of the packets and looked at the label on it. ‘Teterodat,’ she read.

Sam leaned towards Sue and peered at the label. ‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it. If you want it analysed below the radar, an old friend of my father was a leading pharmacologist and toxicologist. He’s retired now, but he still remembers more about drugs than any pharmacist I’ve ever met.’

Sue put the plastic packet back in its box. ‘I think we should take the whole box. We can keep it in the fridge at my place. The syringes are in a proper, safe storage box. We don’t want one loose in our pockets, and I don’t expect anyone will be coming back here looking for it.’

Chapter 28 Dharma Talk

– Presence in the here and now

Sunday 8th August

‘Good evening, everyone,’ Sam began from her now familiar position on the raised platform at the front of the main meditation hall. ‘This evening, I want to talk to you about presence.’

‘During your meditations in the last couple of days, you have all being attempting to focus your attention on the here and now – on the present moment. Those of you who are less experienced meditators, and I dare say some of you who are more experienced, will have found this a remarkably difficult thing to do.

‘However, it’s not a problem that your mind wanders off and you have to notice the fact and bring your focus back to the here and now. Even if you must repeat that every thirty seconds, it’s not a problem.

‘If there is a problem, it’s what your mind does when you notice that your attention has strayed. Do you think to yourself: “Oh shit, that’s the twentieth time I’ve started to think about the next meal. I’m a rubbish meditator. I must really force myself to stay in the present”.’

There was the sound of people adjusting position and a very subdued murmur of laughter. More people in the hall recognised what Sam had just said than wished to openly admit to it.

‘If you’d noticed your mind had wandered and had just quietly brought your attention back to the present, then everything would have been just fine.

‘The object of the exercise is not primarily to maintain uninterrupted focus on the present. That’s a goal in the distance – like travelling to somewhere far away for a holiday.

‘To reach your holiday destination, the first thing you might have to do is get to the railway station. When meditating, the first thing you have to do is watch your mind so that you can begin to profoundly understand that the thoughts and feelings which arise in consciousness are objects apart from your true subjective awareness.

‘When your mind wanders, watch those feelings of annoyance, frustration and guilt, and let them pass away. Don’t become those feelings. Watch those thoughts that you’re a rubbish meditator and that you’ll never reach Nirvana at this rate.’ More involuntary, subdued laughter rose from those present. ‘Don’t become those thoughts.

‘Getting back to my analogy about going on holiday. When you can bring your attention back to the present and not react with negative thoughts or feelings – in fact, when you don’t react at all – then you’re on the train and you’ve left the station.

‘Thank you.’

Chapter 29 A supply problem

Monday 9th August

‘We’re not going to be able to undertake phase two testing of Starchild this week, Peter.’

‘Why not, George?’

‘The supply of Teterodat isn’t available.’

‘What do you mean not available?’

‘There’s one fewer box of Teterodat than we thought. We flew the last consignment in from Mexico to Brize Norton on a military transport at this time last year. Because of the nature of the project, there wasn’t a Class A drug importation licence. It appears that the whole shipment was just described on the paperwork as “one consignment”.’

‘And there wasn’t enough?’

‘There should have been three boxes. I only ever saw two in the refrigeration cabinet at Diss. Each of those contained one hundred doses. I assumed that a third box had been stored somewhere else for use in the second phase, but apparently, there wasn’t a somewhere else. The doctor here thought we were bringing a third box with us from Diss. I thought they’d already have a box here. Basically, we have a grade one listed cock up.’

‘Bugger. Could no one in the damned delivery chain count up to three?’

‘It was all so long ago that no one who handled the consignment at the time can be sure how many boxes there were. The upshot is that we’re one hundred doses short, and nobody seems to be sure whether we even had a third box in the first place.’

‘Are none of the original two hundred left, George?’

‘Not a single one. We stopped the tests at Diss prematurely when the first two boxes were used up. We were working on the assumption that a whole third box would then be available for phase two and for final implementation.’

‘This is really serious. Is there any Teterodat left in existence?’

‘Very luckily there is. There’s still some remaining in Mexico. Everyone, including the Mexicans, thought we’d procured it all for that last shipment. We even got them to end production at that time to limit future supplies. Fortunately, they’ve turned up one last box. It might even be the one they should have shipped before.’

Peter breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank God for that. It takes at least five years to produce the drug from scratch. Our own supplies won’t be available for another two years, and no substitute’s ever been found – despite all the research our scientists have done. When can they get it here?’

‘MI6 are liaising with the CIA to get that last box of a hundred doses from the Tlalpan pharmaceutical complex in Mexico City. It’ll take a few days to arrive.’

‘OK, that’s not a complete disaster then. We’ve still got six weeks until the fourth of September. You know, I’d always worried we were running it too close to the wire. It’s unpredictable delays like this that need a time contingency.’

‘I agree that we’re cutting it fine. I would have liked to have seen a lot more tests in phase two.’

‘Remind me, George, of the last test we ran in phase one at Diss before the Teterodat ran out.’

‘It was the implantation of sub-ego imperatives in the minds of all the subjects, Peter. If those suggestions have embedded properly, Ollie Fenchurch should be starting to organise his party by now.’

‘Good. Well, at least we can monitor those results. Keep me posted if anything changes.’ Peter Rogers turned and began to walk towards the door. He then stopped and turned back towards George. ‘By the way, do you know how John Henson’s doing at the moment?’

‘Recovering, it seems. I gather he’s being discharged from hospital tomorrow, and he’s going to convalesce with his brother in Southampton.’

‘In that case, I think I’ll arrange to visit him at the weekend. I want to find out what the hell he thought he was doing by injecting himself with Teterodat. He presumably also had access to at least one dose of the drug. I can check if he knows whether there’s any more of it left here.’

Chapter 30 Trips away

Monday 9th August

Al and Joe sat in Al’s front room.

‘So, Jenny’s away until Wednesday?’

‘Yea. Can you stay that long, Joe?’

‘Lauren was keen that I did. She thought it was good for me to have time away with a friend, and it gives her a break too. On the phone yesterday, she warned me not to drink too much.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I didn’t say anything. I thought I shouldn’t mention that I wouldn’t be drinking as we were planning to take LSD, and I didn’t want to risk any complicating effects of alcohol.’

Al smiled. ‘It’s good she doesn’t mind you staying away. Which reminds me, I’ve had an email from Ollie Fenchurch.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘He was at the Bodhiisha Unit when I got there. He was discharged a fortnight after I arrived. That was just before you came.’

‘How is he?’

‘He says he’s OK. Gradually on the mend. He’s trying to get together as many of the lads as he can who stayed at the Bodhiisha Unit. He wants to plan a long weekend away. He’s talked with the lads he knew, and he’s suggested we all get in touch with anyone else we’re still in contact with.’

‘That could add up to a lot of people, couldn’t it?’

‘Maybe.’

‘He’s not inviting them all to his place then?’

‘He’s going to check the final numbers and then try to book a whole hotel.’

‘Won’t any hotel have other bookings?’

‘He says he’s looking at hotels that are due to open. There’s quite a few at any one time apparently. That way he can negotiate a cheap booking, and the hotel can guarantee high occupancy on its opening week.’

‘That’s clever,’

‘Are you up for it?’

‘Where’s the hotel?’

‘Ollie doesn’t know yet. He’s still trying to work out numbers.’

‘The location doesn’t matter, I suppose. Yea, I’d be up for that.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

Joe looked at the white tablets in a bowl on the coffee table. ‘Shall we go off on our own trip this evening?’

‘Why not? Although I’m feeling better each day, I still have that odd feeling that part of me is somewhere else.’

‘I know what you mean.’ Joe picked a tablet from the bowl, placed it in his mouth and swallowed it. ‘Do you think this will help us find that somewhere else?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ Al also took a tablet and swallowed it. ‘But what else have we got to do tonight?’