The Chosen Seed Read Online Free PDF

he could hope for was that Dr Cornell had a reputation for being a mad old time-waster and whoever took the call wouldn’t pay him any attention.
    The seconds ticked by. Finally there was a rasping screech and a bolt was pulled back on the other side, then keys were turned and chains were unhooked and, eventually, the door opened an inch. Cass stared into the suspicious faded blue eye that peered out.
    ‘You’d better come in then,’ Dr Cornell said after a long moment, and opened the door only just wide enough for Cass to get through, then slammed the door shut on the outside world and set to work resecuring his home. Cass looked down the corridor. The walls were lined with paper-stuffed carrier bags and piles of newspapers.
    ‘I haven’t sorted those yet.’ Dr Cornell still had his back to Cass as he turned the last of the keys, so he must have expected a reaction.
    Cass was surprised to find the lights were on and it was warm inside; somehow he was still paying his utility bills. The man’s appearance was a surprise too; though his clothes were worn, they looked clean enough, and he was clean-shaven. How he managed it amidst all this mess, Cass couldn’t figure out. Maybe the upstairs of the house was normal. He doubted it somehow.
    ‘Come into my study.’ The old man led him down thecorridor. ‘You should be hiding. They’ll all be looking for you, you know.’
    Cass didn’t answer. It didn’t surprise him that Dr Cornell knew about his problems, not with this many newspapers filling the hallway.
    ‘What are you looking for in all this?’ he asked.
    ‘Information.’ Dr Cornell waved him into a room on the left and busied himself removing papers from a buried armchair before nodding Cass into it. As he started clearing a second for himself Cass looked at the towering piles of books and papers surrounding him: he could see natural history, geography, astronomy, astrology, religion, even the history of Christianity. Some were so old he couldn’t distinguish the titles. There were folders, too, with handwritten labels: New York, Syria, the Middle East, Moscow, and the largest had London printed on a tatty sheet of paper and underlined several times in felt-tip pen. But it was at the wall opposite Cass found himself staring longest. It was covered in photographs and newspaper cuttings, pinned and Sellotaped and Blu-Tacked, with barely a scrap of wallpaper visible beneath the mass of paperwork.
    Could that really be—? Cass stood up and took a closer look; it was definitely Mr Bright and Mr Solomon, together in one photograph. The two men were walking side by side across an airstrip. Both had hair slicked back in side partings and their suits had a baggy quality that belonged in the nineteen forties. They were tilting their heads towards each other and talking intently.
    He scanned the rest of the clippings. They covered everything from the formation of The Bank to old reports of the Jack the Ripper slayings, an apparently random mix of political, business and criminal news. Surely Dr Cornellcouldn’t believe that the Network had been involved in all these things?
    He looked back at the newspaper pictures and photographs. There were some of men he didn’t recognise, but one of Mr Bright and another man had been taken in New York, perhaps in the sixties, and there was a very old copy of a photograph from around the start of the twentieth century, of Mr Bright and Mr Solomon standing on either side of a tall, broad, dark-haired man. Cass could see he was strikingly handsome, despite the grainy quality of the image and his ageing face. The three were laughing at the camera as if they had just been told the biggest joke. Cass frowned. Where were they?
    ‘That was the opening of the London stock exchange in 1854. It had just been rebuilt,’ Dr Cornell said, as if reading Cass’ mind. ‘The one in the middle – I’ve had no sightings of him for years, not much after the turn of the century.’ He stood