Alchemist Read Online Free PDF Page B

bonds rather than registered share certificates, making the identification of its stockholders as impenetrable to outsiders as access to its buildings.
    The engine of Monty’s MG rumbled as a security guard inside a mini fortress checked for authorization, then handed her two green lapel clips and opened the high steel gate in front of them.
    She drove into the vast parking lot and headed, through the ranks of immaculate-looking cars, towards the visitors’ bay against the far perimeter.
    â€˜Doesn’t anyone ever drive these cars?’ her father murmured. ‘They’re all bloody spotless.’
    He was right; the cars looked as if they’d been driven straight from the showrooms; it was only the registration letters that gave away the fact that they weren’t all new.
    â€˜Maybe someone’ll clean this for us while we’re inside,’ Monty said, staring at the grime on the white bonnet. She had bought the MG second-hand ten years ago and still loved it dearly. But pressure of work during the past year, and the strain of always juggling their resources, had left her with not even enough free time to give the car the thorough clean and polish it deserved.
    The Bendix Building, as it was called, looked as if it had been hewn from a single block of electric blue steel. It rose steeply into the sky, a sleek complexity of razor-sharp lines and dark recesses that gave it, from some angles, the hint of a medieval fortress. Walking across the lot towards the main entrance, Monty could not decide whether she liked the architecture or not, and recalled the controversy when the building had first gone up.
    It had its own white sound acoustics equalizers, an artificialdaylight system combined with ionizers, which the architects claimed gave a better
feelgood
factor than any natural sunlight environment, and which had been proven to increase productivity. And there had been the sinister rumours. Why, people had asked, had Bendix Schere felt the need for a headquarters without windows? What did they want to hide? Was it simply a design statement? An experiment in futuristic architecture? Or were they performing macabre animal experiments behind those sculpted walls?
    It was a mild autumn morning, and neither Monty nor her father wore a coat. She had been debating for several days how to dress for this meeting. In the end she had settled for her black velvet jacket, a white silk blouse, with a jungle-print Cornelia James woollen shawl, a black short skirt and shoes with a medium heel to give her a little more height. She had been described in a newspaper, several years back, as her father’s ‘petite’ daughter. She had tended to avoid flat shoes ever since.
    At five feet four inches, there were many times when she wished she was taller, but she had no actual quarrel with her legs. She had been blessed in that department and knew it. It was her hair that was the least predictable part of her appearance: a mass of tangled blonde tresses that buried her shoulders, and which was naturally frizzy. There were some days when it looked great, dynamite even, but there were others when it acted like someone had sprayed it with weed killer.
    Monty had inherited almost all her features from her Norwegian mother and after even the lightest exertion her complexion became a picture of Scandinavian health and vitality. But she knew only too well that after months of a long wet winter it could look horribly sallow and pasty.
    She was aware of so much she had inherited from her mother, not just in looks but in tastes also. Most was welcome, but one thing was not: ever since the diagnosis of her mother’s illness, Monty had carried at the back of her mind the knowledge that one particularly unwelcome gene might have come with the bundle handed down to herself. But she rarely dwelt on it, allaying her fears with the hope that advances ingenetic science might find a way of dealing with it before anything