Alchemist by Peter James Page A

offered the best genetics opportunities in the world. Also, Merck had wanted to send Molloy to California, and he didn’t want to live on the West Coast. A perfectly acceptable explanation. Bendix Schere offered him the chance of a couple of years working in England. Conor Molloy had liked the idea of that. No problemthere either. The man was single, heterosexual, wanted to see a bit of the world before settling down. All the reasons Conor Molloy had given were solid.
    So what the hell was it about him that just did not quite add up?

12
    Monty Bannerman’s anger boiled over into fury as she held the letter in her hand and read it through yet again.
    What bastard had done this? And on whose authority? She glanced at her watch. 10.30. Her appointment with Sir Neil Rorke was for eleven. Well, he would have to sort this out, good and proper! She drew in a deep breath, trying to calm herself; she’d been in a rage ever since the letter had arrived at their old laboratory yesterday morning, even waking several times during the night and fretting about it.
    Thank God she had been there and had opened her father’s post. If he’d seen this, he would’ve gone berserk. As it was he had wondered where Walter Hoggin, their Chief Lab Technician, had been all day, and she’d had to lie, telling him he was off sick.
    The takeover by Bendix Schere of Bannerman Genetics Research had finally been agreed and signed eight months ago, but the transition was not proving easy. Numerous experiments
in situ
were too delicate to be moved, making the relocation from Berkshire University to the Bendix Building in London a laborious process that would go on for several months yet.
    Mountains of paperwork needed to be gone through for Bendix Schere’s Group Patents and Agreements Department, currently the bane of her life. And all because the patent agents and lawyers needed to see and read, in some semblance of order, virtually
every
scrap of paper relating to
every
experiment that had ever been carried out at Bannerman Genetics. So almost everything that had been filed at herfather’s lab now needed entering on to the Bendix Schere computer system. There was a clerical pool available to do this tedious work, but so much required untangling and deciphering that Monty was ending up finding it easier to do much of it herself.
    Since late February Monty and her father had been dividing their time between their old lab and their sumptuous new premises on the eighth floor of the Bendix Building. Monty had found it to be a very strenuous period, in which she’d had to draw constantly on all her resources of courtesy and diplomacy, not least because she found the Bendix Schere team less helpful than she’d expected. Rather than welcoming the arrival of someone of Dick Bannerman’s calibre, many of the staff gave the impression that they resented the intrusion of outsiders.
    And her father had been continually testing the nerve of the Board of Directors, to see how far he could push them. So far, every request for the purchase of equipment sent to Accounts for authorization had come back approved – even if the £300,000 for Cray gene-sequencing computer hardware had taken a month and several tricky meetings. Bendix Schere was not into wanton spending binges, but it was prepared to throw money at anything that had a real chance of producing results and beating the opposition.
    Up until now, the company had not put a foot wrong in its dealings with Dr Bannerman. Tetchy as he had been at the start, and filled with misgivings about their bureaucracy, he’d had to admit that Bendix Schere had behaved honourably.
    He even confessed to Monty that it was a relief to have a regular pay cheque instead of continually scrabbling to find the money every time a bill arrived at home. In fact they were both on reasonable salaries now – with the added bonus for Dick Bannerman of a percentage share in any profits