chapter forty-nine

La Loma

The six-seater pitched dramatically as it turned out from the northern tip of San Andres and began its descent into the interior. Frank put aside his briefing papers on nuclear warhead proliferation and instead concentrated on the green rainbow of mangrove swamp that swelled below, threatening to swallow the plane whole. Tropical climes heated his epidermis but chilled his Norwegian soul, and at this moment he longed for air-conditioning and vodka. The plane shuddered, as if sharing his hunger, and then quitened as the engines seceded to the airstream. The wing-flaps sucked in air and the wheels eased down. Sooner than expected there was the glorious double-thump against soil and Frank had arrived in San Andres.

Frank had been chosen for this covert meeting precisely because of his illegal history. In South America he had been at the centre of a lucrative trade in modified cocaine, and the CIA had seized upon this as the perfect cover for their necessary dialogue in the region. He had hoped for some protection in the form of highly trained agents, but all he had was his reputation and wits on this small Caribbean island. Despite the climate he felt utterly cool and collected: he would fulfil his mission and also use the opportunity to enrich himself. Old habits die hard.

Upon leaving the plane he realised that the Contras were not feeling as relaxed as he. Automatic pistols rose to meet him along with dark focussed eyes. Eight sets of tightened lips beneath impressive bigotes enabled him to evaluate himself as a potential threat. This was familiar stuff; although the familiarity did not take away from the immediacy of the threat. 

“Buenas tardes. Quiero encontrar mi primo,” he said, hoping, but not expecting, that an emissary of his so-called cousin was amongst his welcoming committee.

“Venga.” Frank could not identify from which moustache the order had come, but all of the pistols rose as if each had spoken. The Contras parted to reveal a black Mercedes Benz with even darker windows. Recognition swept through his organs like an allergy. Here was his cousin; and here was the future: his personal future. He had known that his rebirth was due at some time this decade; but now he could taste it. The CIA expected him to progress their agenda, and he would do so as long as it suited him, but they had afforded him the perfect introduction to someone who he needed vitally.

The back door of the Mercedes opened, held open by the beige glove of Alejandro Iglesias. Frank refused the Contras a smile as he slid into the air-conditioned interior.

“Hace gran tiempo” said the drug Baron. He had lost weight; more than was healthy. His cigar was similarly thin, and the tobacco was no longer of the highest quality. The President would be pleased to know that his policies had produced this effect at the highest level of the narcotics ladder. Of course it was not Iglesias’ physical state that mattered to Frank; all he required were cells from the brain.

Frank said nothing, but offered his hand. Iglesias took it and squeezed his desperation into every cell. “hablaremos”. Frank glanced at the driver and then at his briefcase. “Aqui, no. Hay un sitio privado?” The private room was just what Frank required.

The Mercedes left them outside an establishment called “Smoke City” which specialised in everything one needed to make a joint except the cannabis itself. Upon entering Frank was amused to see that it also sold sex toys, second hand copies of “Playboy” and LP records. They passed a copy of “Thick as a Brick” by Jethro Tull, piles of viscous newsprint and some impressively sized and gaudily coloured vibrators before entering the private room. As they sat down across a glass-topped desk Frank remembered the room in Los Cardales where he had eliminated the competition to the Iglesias drug empire. He had never sought to extract the cerebral foam after using the bone gas, but expediency and a sense of symmetry demanded it this time.

He separated the map from the other briefing documents and spread it across the table. “This is the area we are interested in” He let his thin index finger rest briefly on the spot. Iglesias fumbled for spectacles and, failing to find them put his face close to the paper in order to read the tiny print. “La Loma; I know it. This is a region of high land beyond the town. There are few houses, just a few shacks. For this reason we have used it to carry out business in the past. Why do want this land?”

“I cannot tell you that today,” replied Frank. He removed the envelope from his breast pocket, “but we hope that this will cover the expenses of securing the site for us until we are ready to begin the next phase of this operation.” Iglesias let the envelope rest on his hand, as if assessing the value of the notes it held by weight. He then opened it and examined no more than the corner of the first note. He breathed out slowly; these were notes in denominations that even a seasoned drug baron could only dream of handling.

And then Iglesias inhaled the gas. Frank forced the face down over the cube. The Ecuadorian, although not as strong as he had been when they worked together was still much heavier than Frank. Fortunately the gas had been improved over the last few years and within a few seconds Frank felt his fingers bite into the soft material that had been the skull. He pulled Alejandro’s head back and forced the cube into his throat. Now the bone had dissolved to the consistency of a ripe camembert and so he opened the head and used nail scissors to remove a section of the frontal temporal lobe and the hippocampus. He deposited the samples in his father’s brass phial and then removed the drug baron’s gun from his shoulder holster. The driver was engaged in studying the centre-fold of a mid- seventies issue of Playboy, which allowed Frank a perfect head shot. The store keeper, splattered in the driver’s blood and brains lifted his hands to heaven before sinking to his knees, but Frank placed a finger to his lips before handing him a note from the government treasury envelope. The blood that had soaked into the envelope would go some way to excusing the loss; besides the price on Iglesias’s head was twice the value of the shop-keeper’s promise of silence.

Once in the Mercedes Frank helped himself to one of Iglesias’s Dominican cigars and prepared himself for the rapture of rebirth.

Chapter Forty Eight

The Ladies Strand

Kay stood in the small parking area above the beach and made a slow and detailed visual sweep of the view. Immediately to her left, at the top of the path that descended to beach level, was a derelict house, some of the windows broken and boarded; others revealing age-shredded curtains allowing glimpses of cheap furniture. Beyond this the rolling grass surface led to a piece of land which separated the beaches at mid to high tide. The fragment of castle, just the flat front wall of a once imposing edifice glowed pink in the evening sun. Far beyond lay Kerry Head and farther again she could just perceive the mountains, violet shadows in the still air.

It was mid-August, so the beach was still busy with families enjoying the last weeks before the new school term would return most of them to West Limerick or even Dublin. Bright blue, red and yellow wind-breakers created many small compounds, like social cells; a tent the nucleus, sun chairs the mitochondria, parents and children, sometimes a dog, entering and leaving incessantly. Kay realised that she was trying to understand the biology of the beach. She certainly needed to grasp it if she were to survive.

A wide artery took water from the bath house in a winding delta to the sea. The cliffs to her right were a rigid, open exoskeleton. She felt the heart of the beach under her feet, the organ of soil which pumped the water down to that artery and eventually to the clouds. She scanned right to left now; searching for the brain, the centre of organisation and the key to understanding the sensations of the strand. She closed her eyes and let the after images form. Her memory vision had saved her life before, and she trusted it now, but the scintillation of people and waves, constant movement, constant visual noise, frustrated still analysis. She must wait.

To avoid unwanted attention Kay moved. She followed the thread of holiday makers down to the beach and walked over to the cliffs, genuinely impressed with the record of geological time revealed in the curves of strata and equally impressed by the delight of the small children playing in the pools. She saw fathers pucking balls to their children, mothers chatting as toddlers splashed and laughed together. The emptiness throbbed within. She had never known this, and knew that she could never provide such love for her own. She was not angry about it: her father was suffering beyond her comprehension for his part and her mother was gone. Frank had to die, but that was not because of her rage; there was no rage. Frank had to die because if he did not, then he would surely kill her.

A sign warned that the caves at the head of the beach were tidal and should not be entered. Life guards patrolled and made sure that once the tide had turned, which it now had, this rule was obeyed. Kay moved back up the beach and entered a cave mouth that did not join the system. Hidden here she waited for the tide to reach her. By the time the water lapped around her feet it was twilight. She moved to the entrance and looked out. The beach was almost empty, the lifeguards gathered in their cabin under electric light. The water rose. When it was at her waist the light in the cabin went out.

She stripped, tucking her clothes into a groove in the rock and swam out and along the line of cliff face. She soon arrived at the cave which did lead to the sea and felt the boom of the water swirling within. She had to dive to get through the entrance and then found herself in the system. The apparent pitch darkness soon yielded its secrets to her sensitive vision. She felt the danger; it was immense, and she rapidly explored the cave system, the waves sending the water level all the way into the arched roof-space more and more frequently. She was hurled against sharp granite, felt the blood seeping into the sea and the salt into her veins. The exchange numbed her. She was not going to let drowning do Frank’s work for him, so she kicked hard against the wall and fought her way to the cave mouth. This was now completely submerged, but somewhere in front of her. The force of the waves was greater than anything she had experienced. She dived again and again, but the relentless power pushed her further from the cave entrance.

She dug her fingers into the ceiling of the rock and pressed her cheek to it, gasping for the last air. The only possible route was now to go with the flow of water, but that only led to the solid core of the cliffs. She knew that she was about to die, and rather than her whole life, just one moment came back to her; so vividly that rather than the cold water and colder rock, she felt the warm hard space behind her father’s hi-fi system. His voice and Frank’s formed from the distant crashing of the sea in the cavern, and as they bled their victim her consciousness failed with his.

There was no sound, no light and no motion as the water crushed her into the final, unyielding geological crease. She became, temporarily, akin to the fossils that studded the strata.

Chapter Forty Seven

White Curve

Sixteen large jars were accommodated upon the black granite surface of his balcony; their backs to the white wall and the shimmering green of Central Park. Frank hated the closed anonymity of the laboratory; his original place of work remained the cavern, and he could only work in nature, not removed from it. This much he shared with his father. However, where Oskar had concerned himself with minerals and carbon chain fuels, Frank’s chemistry was all about the mechanisms of life, and more recently, of death.

The sixteen jars contained 15 month old cultures of his cells. Developed in the nutriment they now resembled ivory babies, and for a moment Frank considered the possibility of finding a cerebral activator for each, and of somehow apportioning his current essence amongst them, so that Frank V would be a multiple. Sixteen was in fact a power of two, and so, if repeated, the growth of the number of Franks would be exponential. He would attain a million entities in only five generations. He smiled at the absurd thought. Frank had only one point of reference, and that was himself; it would be anathema to have to share, even with himself.

These sixteen potential Frank babies were all doomed to die. It was the entire point of the experiment that they should die. The virus that Frank had added to the nutriment was designed to disable the organism’s biological defence mechanisms. The virus would not kill the host; it would instead enable nature’s own products to destroy the subjects. There were of course millions of bacteria available to act as pathogens, but Frank wanted to maximise the efficacy of his virus, so it was his aim to employ the most common agents to bring about Spong’s miserable end. In fact Frank had named his virus after its primary target, and was now ready to infect them with sixteen everyday inconveniences. He retired to the kitchen and some excellent Jamaican coffee where he intended to finalise his choice of common communicable diseases. He had the first scalding sip in his mouth and the American Dictionary of Infectious Diseases in his hands when the intercom announced a visitor.

Helen entered the apartment the way a rainbow enters the space between the clouds and the sodden earth. She materialised, and it was almost impossible to tell where she touched the ground, but her presence brought joy even to Frank’s Nordic soul. The bottle of Bushmills was firmly grounded on the table and followed by a packet of Chesterfield cigarettes and a sheaf of papers.

“Look at this Frank; just take one look at this! We have really made it big now!”

Frank gently prised the cigarettes from beneath the papers and lit up. “We?”

“We, yes we: Jack and Ellsworth and Robert; even that Stella guy. Everything Robert says about the future of art; that it’s real and in four dimensions. MOMA are going to put us right out there: Sixteen Americans. Just read it Frank.”

Helen collected two heavy glasses and filled them generously while Frank took his mind from microbiology and focussed on the words before him. It was a press release for a forthcoming exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Helen was not to be shown, but many of her circle were, including Jack, Robert and Ellsworth. Frank thought of Jack and then, of course, of Spong. The pages were snatched from his hands.

“Just listen to this: an unusually fresh, richly varied, vigorous and youthful character. They love us Frank. Nous sommes arrivés, as they say back where you come from.”

“That’s not Norwegian, but I get the idea. So how does Ellsworth feel about this?”

“You can ask him yourself, there’s a big press party going on right now: everyone is there, you can....can...” Helen’s speech was cut off by a sneeze which exploded into a paper towel “ask him yourself”. Helen looked around for the garbage can, but Frank offered his thin fingers.

“I’ll look after that. Give me a minute and we’ll go down there, it should be entertaining”. He left her with the whiskey and went out to the balcony. It was neither scientific nor rational, but Frank had sixteen samples, it didn’t matter if one were to be compromised. The virus was in a sealed dish and he extracted 10 ml in a syringe. He opened the stopper of the fifteenth jar and pushed the tissue down into the nutriment and injected the virus.

“What the Fuck is that?” Helen was standing by the glass door, staring at the line of jars.

“It’s an experiment.... with forms. They are just models”

Helen, shaken by the ivory babies, clutched to the offered idea. “Sculpture, that’s so fucking European. I suppose it’s to do with the war, or the cold. Let’s get out of here and have some fun!”

Frank was rather dreading meeting Jack again. He had only one heart to break, and Jack had broken it. Spong would definitely be there however, and that would give him something to focus his hopes and his hate upon. He took Helen’s hand in his and their shared rainbow descended in the elevator towards the pot of gold, the cauldron of his mighty vengeance about to be realised.

Chapter Forty Six

Cuckoo

The keeper of the cloakroom was well into his eighties, and his entire demeanour radiated confidence that no matter what seismic shocks were to run through German society, some things would never change. He knew too much of the appetites of the regional aristocracy, captains of industry and even the new regime, to fear his daily salary, vastly inflated by commissions would ever be threatened. And so it was that he kept a pile of daily newspapers on a table by his desk: mostly local, but also some international; a few days old but in The Pepperpot, uncensored. The Reich, which had come to power by manipulation of information offered to the masses, allowed a free press here. It was an intellectual marker that divided the haves from the have-nots, and it also demonstrated to the club members that the Reich recognised them and expected their loyalty.

Amused by the token of complicity Frank picked up the London Times and was delighted to find the crossword hardly filled. He needed something to engage him and separate him from others as he stalked his prey. His prey was at once the writer he had been sent to engage in conversation and also those planted in the club to observe him. Frank was not so naive as to believe that he had been released from the camp without the authorities making sure that he could not flee. He sat at a table slightly away from the bar, ordered a bottle of Paulliac and addressed himself to the crossword puzzle. He quickly established three facts: his intended target was not yet in attendance, the position of the man sent to spy on himself, and the fact that there were two other bodyguards in the club. These were both female and so unlike his shadow did not look as if they were terrified of unwelcome advances from the clientele.

Watchers recognise other watchers; so he had to make himself not a watcher rapidly in order to conserve his advantage. It was time to let his non-existent hair down, and so Frank began to flirt. He listened for an accent that was not German, and was rewarded with something close to home: Finnish. He lifted the bottle and approached the source of the northern inflections. These were three men in their late forties, discussing hydro electricity.  Frank knew that using their native language would gain him access to the group, and since his mother was Sami he had no difficulty in joining them.

“Coal, coal coal; this is all they talk about! Sure they have tonnes of it in Germany and in.... the larger Germany, but what we want Herr Hitler to consider is the future. When the Reich reaches out to Russia, as it must despite all the guff spouted at Stalin, then he will need an endless source of energy. We have it! Right next to the Russian border. All we need is the Reich to build some generators and lay some cables.”

The speaker was short, with prematurely thinning hair which he combed in the style of the Fuhrer. He wore a heavy Swiss watch, and his eyes were heavy with alcohol and bright with cocaine.

“Do you mean that Germany can take Russia with electricity?” asked Frank, sipping his Paulliac to avoid the powerful vodka offered. The man put his arm around Frank’s shoulders and brought his red lips to Frank’s ear.

“They will be fucked if they don’t have it! We just need to convince one man,” and he shot a glance at the women Frank had identified as bodyguards, “one, very important man, and Finland will be a major power in the Reich.” He let his tongue rest against Frank’s earlobe, waiting for the response. Frank let his hand fall below the table and brushed the man’s stiffening penis. Frank felt his own penis rise, but not because of this flirtation: he sensed a means of escape, and intended to use it. He rubbed the cloth beneath his fingers and the man almost gasped. This was his ticket to freedom, and he was enjoying its purchase.

“I can help you, I think. Where can I meet this important person?” He let his hand rest.

“He is in one of the private rooms, with a .... with a friend. Would you like to go to the private rooms?”

Frank had his plan now. He let his fingers run the length of the man’s penis. “In the right company, I would be delighted.”

The man looked over to the bar and an agreement was made. He stood and pulled Frank up by the hand, which he then quickly pressed back to his groin. A ten million Mark note changed hands and they swept past the two female bodyguards into the private area beyond the bar. Frank looked back at his shadow; he was clearly disturbed by the proceedings, but in very unfamiliar surroundings. Frank hoped that he would have enough time before his shadow hit the panic button.

The private rooms were not just a number of cubicles devoted to sex, there was a bar area in which the normal social behaviours were abolished. Frank’s partner indicated a man sandwiched between two Asian boys. “That is the Fuhrer’s supplies advisor. We will talk to him when his mouth, and ass, are free. Let us have some champagne, since I note you prefer the French style.”

“I love to feel it fizzing in my throat,” replied Frank, giving the man’s penis a gentle twist. The man opened his trousers at the same time as ordering the champagne, and Frank felt the tight testicles. He let his finger dip into the anus “But let us go to one of the rooms to enjoy this properly.”

Ten minutes later Frank found himself in a deserted lane, one thousand million marks in his pocket, blood on his fingers, semen in his ass and free of the concentration camp. It had been an excellent evening all round

Chapter Forty Five

Happy Birthday

Since his discovery of the cavern Oscar had spent many months extracting rock samples. These he subjected to the conventional analyses, and then more refined examinations which he developed in response to the unique qualities inherent in the structures. He invariably brought Frank with him when he visited the site, and while the father plumbed the geological past, the son was creating the biological future. This was a very personal future, and Frank, even as he approached his ninth birthday, had no intention of sharing his discoveries with the distant world.

As Oscar ventured more deeply into the strata that the cavern contained, Frank slipped into the space that his father could never enter and there floated organic matter, secretly obtained from the larder at home. With each day that passed it seemed to Frank that home became less the sturdy hut built upon the permafrost and more this dark geological womb. The black water of the pool was like a magnet to him, and he had offered it small parts of his life. It had begun with a piece of paper upon which he had listed the geological periods in the order described to him by his father. He had watched the ink separate into sub divisions of colour and infect the entire surface of the paper. His fascination was so intense that he hardly heard his father calling for him, and was surprised to see the patina of panic upon his father’s flesh evaporating as the son revealed himself, worming out of the hole.

“What have you been doing?” Oscar demanded.

“Playing: I have a little cave and I pretend it is my laboratory,” Frank replied. His father smiled, no doubt delighted by his son’s use of the scientific term.

“That is good, Frank, but do not go too deep into your cave,”

“Of course not father; it is very small anyway, and there are no interesting rocks.”

According to the rules of the Kørner household that was enough: the father was satisfied that all was well, Sylvia would never know about the cave and Frank was free to continue his childish games.

That night Frank tried to calm himself towards sleep by envisioning the spreading ink; the names of the eons, dissolving in the black pool. Calmness eluded him however, because he already had a sense, an image in fact, of the cold geological past giving way to the eternal warmth of life. At this point he became an experimental biologist; the greatest biologist of his time, and his futures were presented to him. He knew a little of Darwin and Wallace because his father made sure that along with physical necessities, the intellectual nutrition was also delivered from Norway. His father had concentrated on the work that justified Baronet Lyell’s theories concerning the age of the earth; but now, as the still eight year old Frank tried to sleep, it was the mechanism of evolutionary change that illuminated his very particular future. During that sleepless night, he conceived of a series of experiments that were to make him, quite literally, immortal.

Over the following weeks Frank deposited carefully selected organic samples into the pool, dated them and recorded their appearance at regular intervals, both with drawings and fine measurements using his father’s micrometer. With a week to go before his ninth birthday, that is to say on February 20^th 1870, he was able to dispense with the micrometer. Each of his samples had begun to grow exponentially, as the cells were doubling in number exactly as the zygote does in the natural way. Frank even detected signs of cell specialisation. It was as if the parts of a potato or a herring were growing into the original life form.

It was eventually his birthday. Sylvia was delighted by such events and Oscar, realising this, wished that Frank would spend the day with his mother, preparing a special cake and a stew of venison for the evening celebration. Frank had already decided upon his birthday present to himself, although he did not yet realise how enormous this was to be. He struggled to find a way to accompany his father to the cavern. In the end it was only by pretending that he had left his favourite plaything, an oriental globe, in his little cave that he managed to avoid the baking and return to the cold heart of his future.

Oscar drew the sled up against the wall of the stone mound and they entered the cavern. “I will collect my samples and then we will be straight back home for the party,“ he said “I won’t be long, for we must not upset your mother on his wonderful occasion.”  Frank didn’t need much time. He squeezed into the hole and carefully removed the blade from his pocket. He had expected that he would have to close his eyes as he cut himself, but in fact he watched with a detached  fascination as he removed his boot and sock and excised a small lump from his heel. He dropped this into the pool and somehow knew that this was at once his ninth and second birthday.

Chapter Forty-Four

What Have I Done To Deserve This?

Ever since the nurse had sedated her upon admission to the child psychiatric hospital, Kay had been experiencing changes to her vision. The most obvious symptom was a sensitivity to light that pained her eyes and seemed to clog her brain, so that she couldn't concentrate. Recently, shutting her eyes had failed to bring relief because the images remained; initially as sharply defined as when her eyes were open, only gradually blurring and reluctantly fading. It had got to the point that she only knew that she had closed her eyes by paying close attention to the muscles needed to draw together the lids; there was no change to her vision. This would make life rather difficult under normal circumstances, but Kay’s present circumstances were far from normal. She was detained in the hospital; kept under fairly heavy sedation and isolated. Her only human contact was with the three nurses who shared the 24 hours in shifts and the psychiatrist; Dr Corner.

There were other unusual optical experiences. In dim light, as she moved her head towards an object, it did not grow in her field of vision smoothly, but flicked from image to larger image like a sequence of still photographs shown too slowly to form an animation. Also, when reading she suffered from a strange form of double vision, as she received the words at slightly different times from each eye. This in turn produced an echo in the narrative which stopped her from immersing herself in the text. Overall she recognised that the changes were not solely in her eyes, but also in her brain and the nerves connecting the two.

And then there was the way this all related to her nightmares; which would now be tormenting her whilst both sleeping and waking were it not for the sedation. As if upon a second surface, mostly obscured by the insistent screen of reality, the old malign characters prowled about her, accompanying the nurses who attended her, and most tightly bound to the thin form of Dr Corner himself. The drugs kept her from a terrifying world, but she knew she could not remain in this somnolent suspended space forever. She needed help and she needed to fight for her own sanity, and the only help to hand was Dr Corner.

Except that Dr Corner was already known to her before he had manifested himself as her psychiatrist. For some years he had been one of the most evil of the creatures who moved through her broken nights. How could she trust him to cure her when he had spilt so much blood before her? He seemed to stand above her, as he had countless times before, holding the tiny golden cup of black blood, his lips smeared with it, already browning with oxygen. He pressed her back against the bed and anointed her forehead with the liquid. He whispered in a language which she did not know; but she felt the meaning and was afraid.

“Talk to me Kay”.

Why could she understand him? He always used the other language. She closed her eyes, but of course his image hardly flickered. If she could understand him now was she becoming one of them; losing her humanity?

“Talk to me. I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me”. Frank managed a slight encouraging smile. Behind him the diagonal lines, shadows of blinds, turned on the wall. She felt the breeze. With the breeze came the dark flapping wings, carrying the others: the black-haired, uniformed dwarves, the zombies, with transparent skins, and always, the wolf.

“You can’t help me. You can only harm me,” she muttered.

And with the extension of the sentence came the really important question, which she did not voice: “why have you not killed me?” And with this came the sensing of a protector. She was, for at least a while, safe here. As long as she did not give away some information which they needed, or as long as someone outside lived; she would be safe.

She opened her eyes and regarded the psychiatrist. She saw his bald head and thin features, and yet she also saw an older face, the cheeks red with consumed whisky, and another, like that of a clown, and more. She turned her head and the items in the room fractured and spun against the shifting origin. The bed upon which she lay seemed a dentist’s chair. The breeze that entered the room bore icy precipitate. Above was infinite space, and the greenish whorls of the Northern lights.

This wasn't an eye disease, it was a power of a greater vision, and she needed it in order to understand and survive.

Chapter Forty Three

Banna Strand

The opening of the garden door was carried out with a discretion that meant only one thing: Professor O’Connell was meeting with one of his co-conspirators. Frank polished the interior of the phial until it glowed, and having examined his reflection, which appeared huddled against the interior surface, secured the airtight cap. He did not want any stray bacteria compromising the transfer that was to take place; to mar O’Connell’s Easter Offering of his mind and knowledge. The phial was carefully set down beside the tools that had been selected from the professor’s own collection. These would open the skull and remove the required substance. He felt his heartbeat quicken in anticipation of the energising ritual that lay ahead, rather as the diner relishes the flowing blood in a rare steak. He could taste the cerebral foam and the musty assurance of the quivering nutriment.

But first he must complete the other steps in his march to a perfect rebirth. He had to ensure that none of O’Connell’s colleagues lived to threaten in any way his new existence. He turned to the rows of test tubes and proceeded to fill each with the greenish gas. This resembled the bone gas in every respect but one: this gas would not melt the bones of its victims. Instead Frank had added a substance that would enrage the subject and cause them, if under stress and bearing arms, to inflict the maximum harm upon their enemies. The test tubes all full and sealed, he packed them carefully into the rough sacks which Clarke’s boys used to deliver the Sunday papers. This was the agreed method for getting the gas into the strategic locations which the committee had identified. The committee expected the gas to kill hundreds of British soldiers, police and informers, leaving them free to take over the major buildings and proclaim the new state.

Frank had already identified the British informer who most concerned the committee, and had used that connection only once: to impart the name of a diplomat and a beach in Kerry to the authorities, and to arrange for O’Connell to be unavoidably late leaving his house when the rising occurred. The door slammed, and the sound of a bottle of single malt being dragged from the press, opened and then heavily set upon the desk in the room below followed with the same fortissimo. Frank wiped his brow to erase any hint of foreknowledge from his appearance and went to meet O’Connell.

The professor was pouring a second large measure when Frank entered the room. “I take it you have received some intelligence. Is this drink a celebration of the day to come?”

O’Connell lifted the cut glass tumbler to his lips and drank with a sharp hissing sound before looking at Frank.

“Hardly a celebration. That liberal idiot has been taken in Kerry. The German’s are not going to help us. The Lord alone knows what Casement will tell the British now.”

“Surely this cannot stop the rising?”  Frank sat down opposite the doctor. “Are we not agreed that he nation will rise once Dublin is secured?”

“That is the hope, no, the belief of the committee, and many men have died to bring us to this point. However, German arms and German troops to cower the constabulary across the nation would strengthen us in our resolve.”

“But we have the gas. I can manufacture a great deal more by the morrow. All we need are couriers who know how to use it and the British forces will be more easily routed than by rifles in the hands of the idealistic but inexperienced.”

O’Connell shook his head, not in disagreement, but in an effort to dispel the fumes of whiskey that filled his head. “Is that possible, Frank? I thought it took weeks to make the vapour.”

“Indeed, it took weeks to develop the system. However, the system now exists and I can produce as much gas as necessary. Please tell Pearse. I will work through the night if it will further the great cause.”

He professor stood and grasped Frank firmly by the hand. “By God, I will. Mr Kørner. I thank you; the people of a free Ireland thank you. This will not be forgotten.” With that he was gone. Frank poured himself a small glass of the whiskey and enjoyed its cloying aroma and heat on the tongue. Now his only concern was that O’Connell would return here and not remain with the others until the rising began. In that case he planned to tell whoever came to collect the gas that here was a problem that required immediate attention from the professor. It would give him less time, but he was still confident of success. It would be a long night, and he needed to be alert. He had a book on the relative motions of bodies in space by a German physicist. Ideas that he knew were to be imminently developed in a new paper. He wanted to be able to grasp its burden and so set to the pleasant task of revision. His thinking passed from English to German, and from mundane strategy to cosmic processes. He was content.

Frank’s attention was wrested from the calculations, based on familiar stuff by Poincaré. Someone was shuffling beyond the garden door. O’Connell or a street urchin, come to collect the sacks of bone gas? For a second Frank shared the fears of discovery with the conspirators. Then he heard the heavy breathing of the professor; the professor alone. The game could now begin in earnest. The key grated in he lock. Turning, the cuboid of an iron alloy murmured in response and gave ingress to a dishevelled but ecstatic academic. Ice, familiar Arctic ice crystallised in Frank’s blood as he rose. One hand offered in greeting, the other weighing he knife.

Air, blood and digestive enzymes gurgled as Frank slit the throat. He manoeuvred the body into a chair and applied the device to the left nasal passage. A single upward blow with the mallet sent the blades into the brain. The pages of “Zur Elektrodynamik Bewegter Körper” rustled as Frank set the blades spinning at higher speeds than the lobotomising process they were designed for demanded. Now he broke through the other nostril and inserted a thin rubber tube. He placed the other end of the tube in his mouth and sucked until he tasted the bitterness of cerebral matter.

The foam that was O’Connell’s forebrain was carefully siphoned into the phial. This was then placed in a larger thermal flask, purchased by the former Frank from an excellent Parisian purveyor of household goods for Meursault’s mental matter. Café Délice was a label that hardly did justice to the liquid it contained, but for Frank this was as precious as life itself: in fact it offered him he morning jolt of immortality. He removed the body to a large trunk in the basement, bathed and dressed in clothes more suited to his destination. Equipped with his precious cargo and a diplomatic letter, the reward for the information supplied to the British informer, he walked from the asylum towards the docks as he sun rose on the day of the Easter rising.