'It hasn't helped me understand anything. I don't see what it had to do with finding copper on a map.,
'Perhaps it was a demonstration and a test at the same time.' The coarseness had left Kline's voice and his manner had subtly changed, the banter all but gone to be replaced by a cool mocking. 'A silly game, yes, but I wanted to gauge your reaction to, as you put it yourself, disorientation. My life appears to be in your hands, after all.'
'Let's get on to that later. Talk to me about copper inNew Guinea . How did you locate this new source?'
'Through my mind, of course. Intuition, second sight, sixth sense, extrasensory perception—call it what you will. I look at maps and I perceive hidden minerals and ores. Even stores of raw energy. I can tell where they can be found beneath the earth's crust. Oh, I don't mean to boast—I'm not always right.
Seventyfive per cent of the time I am, though, and that's good enough for Magma. Oh yes, that's mare than good enough for Sir Victor Penlock and his board of directors.' Halloran slowly shook his head.
'You find these . . . these deposits with your mind? Like a diviner locates underground springs?'
'Huh! Finding water beneath the soil is the easiest thing in the world. Even you could do that. No, it's a bit more involved. Let's say scientific geological studies and even carefully calculated estimations point me in the right direction. I'm given an area to look at—it could cover thousands upon thousands of square miles—and I totally shed irrelevant matters from my thoughts. This room helps me do that: its emptiness cleanses my mind.' He waved a hand around at the room. By using the remote control a few moments before, Kline had dimmed the light considerably, rendering the walls and floor a pale, cheerless grey.
Halloran could now see faint lines where the screens were imbedded. He also noticed tiny sensors strategically and discreetly positioned to pick up commands from the console held loosely in the other man's hand. The room was ingenious in structure and design.
'Can you understand why I'm so valuable to the Corporation?' asked Kline, gazing down at the floor and massaging his temples with stiffened fingers as though easing a headache. 'Have you any idea how fast the developed countries are using up our resources—fossil fuels, minerals, metals, timber, even soils? We're rapidly running them down. Worldwide we're searching and digging and consuming. We've got greedy.
The big corporations don't believe in restraint: they've always done their utmost to supply the demand, with no cautions, no warnings, nothing to upset the flow of cash into their silk-lined pockets.' He raised his head and there was something sly about his smile when he looked at Halloran.
'Now they're getting scared. The harder new sources of raw materials are to find, the more concerned they get; the more expensive it is to scour those materials from the earth, the more jitterish they become.
That's what makes me Magma's biggest asset why I'm so precious to the Corporation. Even ?50 million would hardly compensate for my death,' Halloran rose and walked away, his hands tucked into his trouser pockets, head bowed as though he were deep in thought. He turned, looked back at the small watching figure.
'That's some story you're asking me to swallow,' Halloran said.
Kline's cackled laughter shot across the room. 'You don't believe me! You don't believe I can do it! All I've shown you and you think this is some kind of game. Wonderful!' He pummelled his feet on the white floor with the joke of it.
Halloran spoke calmly. 'I said it's hard to believe.' Kline became still. 'You think I give a shit what you believe? All you have to do is protect me, nothing more than that. So maybe it's time I found out how good you are.' His thumb worked the remote control unit once more and a buzzer or a light must have alerted the man outside the doubledoor, because one side opened and the bodyguard stepped through.
'Halloran here doesn't think you're up to much, Monk,' said Kline. 'You want to give him a little workout, introduce yourself?' Monk wasn't smiling when he approached.
Halloran still faced Kline. 'I don't do auditions,' he said.
'In that case Monk's liable to break your arms.' Halloran sighed and turned to meet the other man who was ambling forward as if he intended to do nothing more than shake the operative's hand. But there was a certain, recognisable, gleam in Monk's eyes.
He took the last two yards in a crouching rush.
To find Halloran was suddenly behind him.
Monk felt Halloran's foot planted squarely against his rear end, a hard shove propelling him further forward, the action one fluid movement. All balance gone, the bodyguard skidded to his knees, reduced to a clumsy scrabbling figure. He came up in a crouching position.
'Bastard.' The curse was high-pitched, almost a squeal, as though his voice-box was squeezed somewhere too low in his throat.
'Jesus, it speaks,' said Halloran.
The bodyguard ran at him.
'Felix, call him off!' It was Cora's voice, but Halloran didn't bother to look towards the doorway. He had no wish to hurt this lumbering apeman, but at the same time it was too early in the day to be playing silly games. He stepped aside from the charge again and brought his knee up into the bent man's lower ribs, using only enough force to bruise and upset his victim's breathing for a while.
Monk went down with a whoosh of escaping air and spittle from his open mouth. To give him credit, he immediately began to rise again, his face red and glowering. Resignedly, Halloran prepared to jab a pressure point in the man's neck to bring the contest to a swift and relatively harmless end.
But Cora strode between them to confront Kline. 'Put a stop to this, Felix,' she demanded. 'Right now.'
Halloran caught the brief flash of rage in the small man's eyes before it was suppressed and Kline beamed a smile of the innocent.
'Only a test, Cora,' he all but simpered. 'No harm done. I needed to know how good this guy was, that's all.'
'He wouldn't have been recommended to us if he wasn't any good,' she replied, her tone modified by now. She turned to Halloran. 'I'm so sorry, this should never have happened.' Monk was clutching his sore ribs with one hand, looking from Halloran to Kline, awaiting further instructions.
'Wait outside,' Kline snapped, obviously displeased with his man's performance. Then, to Halloran as Monk left the room with less ease than he had entered: 'You move pretty fast.'
'If he's your best, you've got problems,' said Halloran.
'Oh, he's not my best; he's my ox.' Kline rose from the dais, a quick feline movement. His eyes seemed even darker than before, and glistened with some inner thought. 'No doubt there are matters you will have to discuss with Cora concerning my future safety. She's my PA—no, much more than that—so feel free to confide in her absolutely. Now I need a shower; I'm beginning to stink.'
'You and I have a lot to go through,' Halloran said to him.
'Tell it to her. I need to rest.' It was a command and Halloran frowned.
The girl touched his arm though, and he looked down at her. Kline was already walking away, heading towards a far corner of the room. He clicked a button on the unit he was still carrying and a door that had been virtually invisible before slid back.
'Felix really does need to rest for a while,' Cora said as they watched him disappear through the opening. 'His special gift often leaves him quite exhausted.' Halloran had noticed the perspiration stain low at the back of Kline's sweatshirt as well as those beneath his arms, and his frown deepened. It was cool in the room, almost uncomfortably so. And when he had touched the small man in the darkness, Kline's skin had been cold.
He remembered that moment, remembered the shudder that had run through him.
For when his fingers had reached out and felt Kline's face in that total darkness, they had touched ridges and creases, dry, wrinkled skin that had no place on the features of a comparatively young man.
Reason told him he must have been mistaken, the shock of the moment creating an illusion, the sudden blinding light instantly wiping the image from his mind.
But now that thought—that feeling—had returned. And Kline, himself, had warned against reason.
7 KLINE'S PREMONITION
Cora picked at the salad, her interest centred on Halloran rather than the food before her. The riverside terrace was beginning to fill with office workers on early lunch break, the fine weather after such a dreary winter proving an attraction. A pleasure-boat filled with pink-faced tourists cruised by, theThames a slatey-blue again after
