Scales

by Anthony G Williams

  For security reasons my patients, who had followed me in a forlorn trail across the country, were directed to the nearest large town where (as one of them told me with some indignation) they were thoroughly vetted, searched, made to change clothes, metal detected and sniffed at by dogs. They were then loaded into a military bus and driven to the base, a small batch at a time.

  I was at first puzzled why the military should go to the trouble of housing me when it clearly caused them much inconvenience and concern about security. Matters became clearer the week after, when I went into a consulting room to find Richards sitting there, a bland smile on his face.

  'Which part of you needs treating? Conscience needs paralysing perhaps?'

  This only made his smile widen. 'Glad to see you're recovering your sense of humour. How are you settling in here?'

  I shrugged. 'Can't complain. They even let me into the base swimming pool at specified times, under escort.'

  His smile moderated to a nicely-judged degree of sympathy. 'Yes, I'm sorry about that, it must feel a bit prison-like. The trouble is, we have to keep you safe and that requires rather tight security.'

  'I know, I know.' I sighed.

  He brightened. 'However, I can offer you some variety every now and then.'

  I looked at him dourly. 'Like the last time?'

  'Well, not quite like that, I hope. Your involvement will be kept very secret this time, and you will be closely guarded throughout.'

  'Not even allowed parole?'

  Richards' chuckle sounded a little forced. He spread his hands wide. 'I'm not compelling you to do anything! But we do have a genuine need which only you can meet. We know that there are cells of hostile people living within this country. Some of them have terrorist training and, we have reason to believe, the equipment to go with it. The two who have attacked you so far were just the tip of the iceberg. Their organisation is very tight and difficult to penetrate, but we have accumulated evidence to suggest that they are planning a series of bomb attacks, aimed at killing as many innocent civilians as possible. We need to find them as a matter of urgency.'

  'Any idea where they might be?'

  'The evidence suggests one group in London and one in Birmingham.'

  'Big places.'

  'Yes, but there are particular areas we could start to search as they generally like to lose themselves in concentrations of people of the same ethnic origin. Do you think you would be able to pick up their – what d'you call them – emissions? If we drove past their building?'

  I thought about that for a moment. 'Very unlikely I would say. I essentially pick up emotional states – I can't read minds. If they were absorbed in a television programme or a conversation about something innocent I wouldn't be able to detect them even if they were right in front of me. Even if they were planning their actions in a dispassionate way, well, they could be planning anything. Only if they were absorbed with murderous thoughts would I stand any chance of spotting them – and then I'd somehow have to separate them out from all of the rest of the population who are feeling murderous for all sorts of reasons – an unfaithful spouse, a horse which fell at the last jump, or even a case of road rage. I generally try to block out other people's emotions whenever I'm near heavy traffic – you wouldn't believe the volume of hate and frustration produced.'

  'Oh, I would,' Richards chuckled grimly. He paused to think for a while, pursing his lips. 'They would probably be tense and nervous for much of the time, and if any of them were planning to be suicide bombers that might affect their mental state as well.'

  'Yes it would, but those aren't strong emotions and would be swamped by the "noise" of other people.'

  He looked at me. 'What about filtering? Suppose we showed you a captured terrorist we've got so you could recognise the mind-set. Could you then sensitise your receptivity, so to speak, to pick up that kind of mind?'

  That was a new idea to me, but as I thought about it I realised it had some merit. 'It's worth a try.'

  Richards looked relieved. 'All right then, I'll set that up.'

  I saw nothing of the prison from the outside since for reasons of my own security I was concealed inside an anonymous delivery van. Very appropriate, I thought, I've become a package, a commodity, to be delivered wherever I'm needed. I worried about what kind of life I was getting myself into, forever at the beck and call of those who wanted me. But Richards' request was reasonable; how could I stand by and do nothing if I could prevent terrorist atrocities?

  I was led to a familiar pattern of divided interview room with a view through one-way glass into the other side. After a few minutes a man of Middle Eastern appearance was led into the room by a guard, who stood by the door. The man looked around the room for a moment, sneered at the mirror then, before sitting down, ostentatiously turned the chair around so that he was facing the other way. That didn't concern me; he could stand on his head for all I cared.

  I carefully closed down my concentration, shutting out the background noise from the prison in order to focus on the terrorist's mind. Then I mentally reached towards him.

  Black and white. That was my first impression. This man didn't think in greys, in shades of meaning, in relative moral choices. He thought only of right and wrong. Right was his beliefs, inextricably intertwined with his religion; wrong was everything else. And everyone else. Apart from my two putative assassins, who were little more than hired guns, I had never sensed a mind so indifferent to the rest of humanity. He simply didn't care how much people suffered and how many died as a result of his actions. Whatever he did in the name of his cause was justified – nothing else mattered. The iron certainty of his beliefs contrasted with his impatient contempt for the rest of the world, for anyone not on his side.

  This was a man who would willingly kill himself, all right, if he felt this would advance his cause, especially if he could take a large number of the weak and godless westerners with him. I probed his beliefs further, and came up against an inflexible wall of fanaticism. Where any sane person was a hotch-potch of ideas tempered by doubt and uncertainty, here was just unthinking, uncritical belief. It was as if all of his critical faculties, his judgment, his understanding and empathy, had been amputated.

  I shivered involuntarily. I may have looked alien from the outside but this man was alien inside, a creature driven by hate. Richards had been right so far; he had an unmistakable mental signature. Now, could I pick that out against the background of a teeming city, filled with emotions?

  The next few weeks settled into a pattern. The first target was believed to be Birmingham, so after deferring future patients until further notice I was moved to a "safe house" in the suburbs, with the much-appreciated benefit of a private garden not overlooked by any other properties. At my insistence, arrangements were made with a local health club for me to have my usual night-time access to their swimming pool. I don't know what pressure Richards exerted, but it worked, and the owners kept well away.

  The days were spent in the back of that delivery van. The view of the interior, the noise of the engine, the bouncing of the unladen suspension and a rasp from the exhaust at certain resonant frequencies all became almost as familiar to me as the functioning of my own body. I never saw the districts we travelled through – never needed to. My normal senses were suppressed while I focused my sensitivity, sweeping like a radar scanner though the streets, sifting and discarding the myriad minds, all the time holding up in front of my mental gaze the pattern of the terrorist. I became afraid that my mind was being numbed by the endless repetition, the constant stream of emotions flowing over me.

  In the late evening of the ninth day I detected my targets - two of them, together. My sweep hit their minds with a shock; it was all there, the arrogant certainty, the coiling hate, the juvenile sense of superiority through being involved in something secret and important. They had just left a building and a quick scan showed me two more of them, high up in a flat. I sensed that the two outside were walking towards somet
hing important – there was a suppressed excitement in their minds. 'Contact.' I told the driver.

  His bored mind instantly sharpened to alertness. 'Where?'

  'Two of them, walking in the same direction, our side of the road. Two more in a flat upstairs, just behind us.'

  'Got 'em – only two within sight.'

  'They're heading towards something that matters – we should find out what it is.'

  'Right. I'll pull ahead then park up.'

  The van duly stopped a few seconds later. I kept the link to their minds, noticed that they were turning away just as the driver announced, 'they've gone down a side street.'

  Looking ahead through the windscreen I could see that we were in an urban street in a run-down area, lined by tall terraced buildings with shops and cafes on the ground floor, some boarded up and the rest closed for the night. Litter blew about in the gutters. There were few people around, and the street lighting was dim and irregular. 'I'll follow them. I can keep out of sight and still keep a mental link.'

  'You're not to leave the van. Sorry, but my orders were clear.'

  I sighed, reached forwards and touched his neck. 'Sorry about this, but I know I can do this without any fuss, sieges or gunplay. I'll be back shortly.'

  I climbed out of the van, leaving the driver silent and unmoving inside, albeit far from happy. I had half-expected a need to leave the van at some point, so I was prepared; I pulled a hooded sweatshirt over my head, put on dark glasses, darkened my skin to virtually black and quietly thanked the ludicrous fashion which made it "cool" to wear sunglasses at night. As I was making these preparations, I wondered briefly about the changes in myself. My former incarnation was physically timid and would only have run from the prospect of violence. With my capable new body had come a new confidence and determination. Then I stopped introspecting and went hunting.

  The two men were some distance down the side-street when I reached the end. I held back until I sensed that they had turned yet again, then rapidly went around the corner. The street was long and straight, dipping down before rising again to terminate at another junction. It was mostly lined with more terraced buildings, but this time lower and mainly residential. The street lighting was even worse, supplemented by glows from some of the windows.

  The men were out of sight, but a vehicle access of some kind was visible in the distance. No-one else was visible, so I raced silently down to the access, then stopped. I sensed that they were close by, examining something. I crept around the corner. The access led into a courtyard surrounded by lock-up garages of the kind available for rent. One of the lift-up doors was slightly raised, light spilling out from underneath. They were inside.

  I raced forwards again and stood by the entrance. There wasn't enough space for me to slide under the door and I didn't want to raise it – they would get too much warning. So I waited, listening to the voices speaking an unfamiliar language, until they started to move towards the door. The light went out and a loud creaking noise heralded the raising of the door. Two shapes emerged into the dimly-lit courtyard – much dimmer for them than it seemed to me, I realised, and their night vision would be gone anyway. I stepped forwards and touched them as they walked away.

  I jogged back from the garage in which I had left their paralysed bodies, a set of keys in my hand. The flat was easy to detect, on the third floor of a building which had a textiles shop underneath. The residential entrance next to the shop had a stack of bell pushes in illuminated plastic, next to name tags faded with age. The second key fitted the lock and I went in and moved up the stairs as silently as I could, remembering from some long-forgotten thriller to stand on the edges of the wooden stairs to reduce the chance of any noise.

  The door at the top was closed. I checked the set of keys – the small one was for the garage, the next was for the front door, one was obviously a car key leaving one more which had to be for the flat. I slipped it in the lock and slowly turned the key, then paused to concentrate.

  The men were together in a room, talking. I pushed the door open and went into overdrive, rushing along the corridor and into the room where they were just beginning to turn, their faces showing surprise. One of them shouted something and leapt for a bag on the nearby table but he was slow, far too slow for me.

  I looked down at their still forms, then checked the bag. The gun was short, square and ugly, a magazine protruding down from the upright pistol grip halfway along it. Some kind of compact sub-machine gun, obviously. I looked around the flat, but as I suspected there were only four beds. I went back to the car.

  Richards was coldly furious. He had come up to the Birmingham safe house as soon as he heard the news from my disgruntled driver, and marched straight into the kitchen where I was enjoyed a refreshing glass of spring water to wash down my usual meal of fruit (apple) and nuts (walnuts and brazils). Pity really, I could have done with champagne.

  He waited until the driver went off with Richards' usual pair of heavies to where I had left comatose bodies distributed about Birmingham, then glared at me with those hard eyes. 'That was an unacceptable risk,' he began coldly. 'You should have left this to us – we know how to handle such situations.'

  'And what would have happened? They were armed and alert. At best there would have been a very public shoot-out, if not a siege, conceivably even hostage-taking. I have certain abilities beyond just being your personal bloodhound – it's stupid not to use them.'

  'You are a precious asset. I can't afford to put you at risk.'

  'Then let me go back to healing my patients – they must be overflowing the town's hotels by now. If you want me fighting terrorism, then let me do it my way. I know what I can do, and believe me I'm not a risk-taker.'

  Richards paced around the room, still angry. 'We could have watched them for a while; they might have led us to other terrorists.'

  'No chance. There were only four in this cell, and judging from their mental states they were ready to strike. If they know anything more, I'll get it out of them.'

  He sat down suddenly and glared at me. I realised that much of his ill-humour was down to tension. He was responsible for countering the terrorists, and was scared of the consequences if he got it wrong – body parts littering the streets of England. He sighed and relaxed suddenly. 'Very well. You question them, then we'd better get after the London group before they realise something's wrong.'

  The next morning Richards was in a much better humour – the garage had contained a van loaded with explosives, C4 packed around with fertiliser. A simple fuze circuit was in place, leading to the driver's compartment – clearly a suicide bomb, ready to go. Maps found in the flat indicated that the target was probably the Birmingham International Convention Centre, where a conference on Anglo-Jewish relations was due to commence on the following day.

  I questioned the terrorists, whose tongues loosened after a judicious exposure to their own terrors, but they knew little of value except for a recollection of a place in London which one of them had passed through. He didn't know the address, but we were able to identify the approximate area and he revealed a key fact – a street market had been in full flow directly outside the building.

  It seemed that the London group was supposed to attack at the same time as the Birmingham cell – in two days time – to maximise the effect, but none of them knew the London target.

  Later that day we moved to east London, to a flat in Bethnal Green, and the process started again. This time there was no garden but fortunately, with the aid of the terrorist's information, it took only a couple of hours of trawling the streets to make contact.

  It was a Saturday morning and the Hoxton Street market was in full flow despite unseasonably cold weather and a steady drizzle of rain, thronged with people wandering past the stalls of clothes, towels, food and assorted electrical goods. The road was closed so we turned right and parked in Falkirk Street. Hoxton Street was lined with shops, pubs and other businesses, many with flats above the ground floor,
and I was able to pinpoint the terrorists' location only with some difficulty against the background mental noise of the scores of shoppers. The driver called up reinforcements and we sat and waited.

  'There are four of them again, similar sort of set-up to Birmingham. They're all inside, doing nothing. They seem tense but calm.' I briefed Richards when he slipped into the van. 'Presumably they'll have a garage somewhere nearby, and we've only got one day to find it.'

  'Will you know when they're ready to attack?'

  'I expect so; there's bound to be greatly heightened tension just beforehand.'

  'Then we'll have to stake out the flat and track them when they come out.'

  'Too risky – suppose they evade us and get to their van? And you're still forgetting some of my special talents. Once we've got them, I'll locate the garage readily enough. I suggest we move in this evening as soon as the street is clear.'

  He grunted and sat in thought. Suddenly I detected a change. 'I think they've received a message or something – the tension has shot up.' I waited for another few minutes, concentrating on the shifting patterns of the distant emotions, sometimes losing them in the steady roar of mental noise. Then a decision was reached. 'They're on the move!'

  Richards' mobile phone rang. He cursed and opened it, then listened intently for a minute before saying, 'very well' and shutting the phone. 'There was a call to the mobile phone we took from the Birmingham flat. Someone must have decided to do a last minute check and realised that something had gone wrong.'

  'Did they trace the call?'