Again Finn was plunged into hell.
Surrounded by fire, burning, suffering and gasping for expanding air, Finn desperately tried once more to scrabble up the glass and out of the flame, away from the tip of the blue cone that he knew from so many school science lessons was where the Bunsen burner was at its absolute hottest.
“ARRRRGGGGHHH!” Finn screamed.
“AHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!” Kaparis laughed.
Kaparis was in heaven. Time and again Heywood dipped Finn, encased in a test-tube, into the flame so that his boss could listen to his screams and see how long he could stand it.
Just when Finn thought the skin would burn off his back, he felt the heat suddenly relent. Giant white sheets appeared round the wall of the test-tube, the fingers of a giant white glove, and Finn scrambled up the burning incline to the cooler, top end of the stoppered tube.
The smug cliff of Heywood’s face briefly inspected him, then he was swung towards the cluster of optics above Kaparis’s head and the revolving, revolting eye.
“Oh, you do like a science lesson, don’t you, you dreadful little swot! HAAA!”
Finn had never seen such perverse delight.
Above him the screen array showed the Great Cavern. It was now a scene of frantic activity. The extraordinary submarine Finn had seen the day before had been positioned at the heart of the henge of particle accelerators and all the equipment and crates of cables were being loaded onto it. Even stranger, just outside the Kaparis chamber, Finn could see, through tents of thick cellophane, that a state-of-the-art operating theatre had been assembled, with huge lights and an array of medical equipment.
Clearly something big – or extremely small was about to happen.
“BEG ME, DRAKE!” yelled Kaparis.
Heywood shook the tube and Finn slid down the glass, wrapping his hands in his sleeves to stop them sizzling against the glass.
“ARRRGH!” screamed Finn again.
This couldn’t last. He couldn’t last. He had to throw Kaparis a bone.
“STOP!” Finn cried at the eye in the optics.
“BEG ME, DRAKE!”
“I’M BEGGING!” Finn yelled, without a scrap of shame.
The eye narrowed.
“MEAN IT!”
Mean it? thought Finn.
“Say, I BEG YOU, YOUR MAJESTY!”
“I BEG YOU … YOUR MAJESTY,” said Finn.
“AHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!” roared Kaparis.
This is ridiculous, thought Finn, but every second he was out of the Bunsen flame was worth it. The cackling was interrupted by the Siguri chief, who popped up on the screen array.
“Master, all foot patrols are now in. No sign of the girl.”
Carla! She’s alive! thought Finn, his heart briefly thumping with joy. What a girl!
The eye narrowed, the pupil blackened.
“Find her!” barked Kaparis.
“Forget it! She left a day ago,” yelled Finn. “We’re talking about Carla Salazar here. She will be long gone.”
“A schoolgirl? Oh, don’t worry, we’ll find her – probably in bits. We are days from civilisation here, and I am a patient man. You have defied me and defiled my remarkable work, but I was always going to defeat you. Do you know why?”
Finn said nothing. The tube was cooling fast. He had to resist provoking him further.
“Time, you ghastly little sprite. I have it. You have none. Time to catch you, to make you beg. Just as, in time, I will make you ALL beg – your incompetent uncle, your ridiculous grandmother …”
Finn’s heart leapt. This was the first word he’d had of his grandma in five months—
“She got away?” he couldn’t help blurting …
“I’m GLAD she got away!” roared Kaparis. “She was driving me crazy, the sentimental, meddling harpy!”
Finn’s heart could have burst. She was safe! This news was worth all the pain.
“She will be dead once I get anywhere near her! As dead as your mother!”
This was meant to wound, and Finn could see Kaparis look for his flinch. But Finn knew a thing or two about bullies from school – they always struck at their weakest point.
“You seem to have a problem with women,” Finn observed. “What happened to your mother? Didn’t she love you?”
Anger flashed through Kaparis. Anger and an image of a meringue of a woman, always irritated by him, always leaving. He could taste her contempt and smell her cologne.
“SHE WAS ALWAYS TIRED,” shouted Kaparis, “her perennial excuse. So I put her to rest …” He could see the old woman now, still griping at him as he fed the lethal injection into her arm.
“I always win in the end,” said Kaparis, smiling to himself at the happy memory.
“You didn’t win my mum,” yelled Finn. “My dad did.”
“You want to know the truth, boy? She was seduced! Lied to! Then she was betrayed!” His eyes spun and found the Ethan Drake report.
Finn looked up.
Intel. report 498090bb – Drake, E., he read as Kaparis splashed the contents across the screen array. Too many pages to take in. Testimony and timings. Scribbled notes and mad diagrams. And photographs. His dad, his mum. Pictures he’d never seen. His parents as happy, normal, young people in love …
“You want the truth about your pathetic father? He abandoned you! He threw himself into that vortex! A suicide!”
“NO!” Finn yelled back. In a family built on love and wonder, it was impossible to believe that his father had abandoned him. According to the only eyewitness, Ethan Drake as he threw himself in had said he had to save his newborn child, save Finn. What that meant though, and what had happened to him, remained a total mystery.
Kaparis pulled up the page of scribbled notes that contained the L = Place? equation.
“He was a coward! He saw the answer staring him in the face – time equals place! The breakthrough that made everything possible! Unlimited power! The chance to change the world! But he was too weak to take it! He would rather die than wield that power; he’d rather die than face life with you! You killed him!”
But Finn was blocking him out, reading as much of the notes as he could. The report confirmed most of what Kelly had told him in Shanghai, but not all. Not what Kelly had been told by Al – Al who was still traumatised at having seen Ethan throw himself into the vortex, Al who could never make it all add up.
“No … I get it …”
“You get nothing!”
He saw me in the vortex, Finn thought to himself. If time is place, and place time … What could it possibly mean? He couldn’t understand the equation or a fraction of what was in the notes, but somehow, in the most unscientific way, it felt like it made sense. His father had glimpsed something, something in the future, his son in danger …
Inside, Finn felt one wound closing over, but just as quickly another opened up as he wished with all his broken heart that he could see Al, speak to Al, to Grandma, and – more than anything and most of all – to his mother. He wished he could be back by her bedside in her final days and he wished he could say, “I know now. I think I can see it. It makes sense. In the end it can make some kind of sense.”
He looked up at the picture of her with his dad on Kaparis’s screen.
“He went to save me,” Finn told her, because he just had to tell someone. “I can find him.”
The great eye of Kaparis twitched. “No you can’t. HE’S DEAD!”
“If time is place … he could be anywhere …” said Finn, without really understanding, but feeling all the same that this was the beginning of something.
“He’s dead!” repeated Kaparis, less convinced, eyes scrawling over the pages of Ethan’s notes, the adolescent hieroglyphics. Was there something more? Something he’d missed? Panic seized his entire crippled body. Time equals place. The possibilities were too absurd, too endless. He must explore them. But he would need time, an infinite amount of time. He had wanted to keep the boy alive, to dangle him before Allenby, to torture them and him. But if the boy had seen something in the notes already …?
This was the end.
And the girl … What if the boy was right and the mountains did end up crawling with enemies? Then he would have to leave and start all over again.
If all this was true, then time was scarce, the future so very precious.
His lips pursed in frustration.
Heywood the butler, who knew when his Master needed his spirits raised, interrupted to deliver some better news.
“Sir?” he said, gently raising an eyebrow. “The party of neurologists has arrived.”
Commander Henri Clément of The Commando Hubert flicked open a knife, a lick of silver steel, and began to cut, very carefully, the way his mother had taught him.
He was concealed within a den of banked snow on the ridge opposite the monastery. He enjoyed the extreme environment. He enjoyed the existential loneliness. But most of all he enjoyed the food. For, while crawling through the undergrowth, he had stumbled on a subterranean paradise. Truffles. Three of them, each the size of his thumb.
“Mon dieu …” he gasped as the knife released the hypnotising scent. He was about to weep when his eye was caught by a sight so extraordinary he almost dropped the heavenly fungi.
A golden egg. Splitting in two …
He had to blink. Was the truffle not a truffle but some poisonous fungus? Was he hallucinating? The ruined dome of the monastery seemed to be opening like a great golden beak.
Now a helicopter was approaching fast over the mountains. Skimming the peaks – no radar alarm had sounded! And as if this wasn’t extraordinary enough – SNAP – movement! A dozen metres ahead, a figure, almost human, a bow across its back, was lolloping out of the snowbanks straight for him …
Henri had three Croix de Guerre14, but nothing could stifle his scream as he snapped open the emergency comms link to G&T Romanian Command at Kluge—
“ARRRRGHGHGHGHH!”
“Shh!” the figure insisted, stopping close enough to kiss him, a magnificent, topsy-turvy fairground face.
Shh?
“Blue 4! Confirm?” Henri heard in his headphones, but he remained speechless as Santiago dug a note out of his layers of rags.
It was written in formal flowing script—
The great dome opened and the whup-whup-whup-whup of the radar-cloaked transport helicopter echoed down the shaft into the Great Cavern. The medical party then appeared, winched down in a rescue cage.
There were three of them, escorted by Siguri. Two of them looked distinctly unamused.
“AHA!” said Kaparis, feeling his mood suddenly lift. “Heywood, put the boy aside – but not too far! I don’t want him to miss this.”
The boy must die, thought Kaparis, and soon. He would leave nothing to chance. Not now that he was so close. But before he finished him off, he must let him glimpse the glorious future he’d be missing. He must know that Kaparis had won …