Professor Lucius Strahlung finally became fully awake. For several days he had been drifting in and out of a confused state of consciousness; a mixture of moments of comparative lucidity and long periods of outlandish dreams and nightmares. Now, though, he was really awake. He was lying in a hospital bed. An intravenous drip was fixed to his left arm and above his head he could see a monitor recording regular events that he assumed were to do with his heart rate and breathing. His head and throat were sore and when he gingerly explored them with his right hand he could feel dressings protecting the parts that were hurting. Later he was to learn that he had had two operations: one to remove a blood clot from his brain and the other to insert a breathing tube into his throat to keep him on artificial respiration in the intensive therapy unit where he had lain unconscious for several days. He had in fact, been moved back to his present room only a few hours earlier. As he became more aware of his surroundings he realised that a regular sighing noise which he had at first assumed to be emanating from some medical equipment was, in fact, the sound of someone snoring. Slowly and painfully he turned his head to one side and there in the corner of the room he saw a muscular figure slumped in a chair. The man was young and darkly handsome and was dressed in a uniform, but it was not a medical uniform – and doctors and nurses did not normally have handcuffs dangling from their belt and machine pistols resting on their knees. The professor began to analyse his situation. He was obviously recovering from some operation but why was he being guarded! And from whom? Slowly, fragmented memories began to piece themselves together as his mind attempted to reconstruct his life and situation. The most distant memories came back first and most easily. His repressive childhood in South America with his over-protective mother and his arrogant father; both had been immigrants from war-torn Europe, his father fleeing from retribution for suspected war crimes. Luke’s childhood memories were dominated by recollections of his father’s sneering comments and sardonic wit, and by the dread of incurring his wrath and the cruel and unusual punishments that would inevitably follow.
At university Luke had excelled in his chosen subjects of physics and mathematics and he had followed an illustrious academic career, his researches into the physics of light culminating in his being appointed professor at one of the most prestigious departments in Brazil. He had, however, inherited many of his father’s unpleasant qualities and his academic progress was marked by ruthless ambition and complete disregard for the rights and concerns of his fellow workers. When eventually he was appointed Chairman of his department after the unexpected death of his principal rival under somewhat mysterious circumstances, the predominant emotions among his colleagues were those of fear and apprehension rather than respect and admiration. As his mind moved on to his time running the department more recent memories began to return. He could now vividly recall the day he first found his brilliant young researcher, Lucinda Angstrom, experimenting with an invisibility robe that she had invented using materials found only – where was it? – yes, found only in a remote crater deep in the jungle.
Luke’s recollections were interrupted by the sound of the door opening and a nurse entering. The snoring ended abruptly. Luke was determined to continue with his thoughts, however, so he quietly closed his eyes and pretended still to be asleep. The nurse glanced at the ever-flickering monitor above the professor’s bed.
‘He’s improved,’ she said to the policeman in Portuguese, the principal language of Brazil. ‘I think he’ll be coming round soon.’ The policeman gave a vague grunt in reply. In the dream she had so rudely interrupted he had just been about to score the only goal in the match in the last minute of extra time to win the world cup for Brazil and he found football a great deal more interesting than nurses, especially this one.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she continued coyly. ‘If he wakes up I’d hate to be alone. A beast like that …’
Luke forgot all about his reminiscences. The policeman wasn’t here to guard him from others. He was obviously here to guard others from him. He listened intently as the nurse continued.
‘Funny that – his heart rate suddenly changed when I just spoke – he’s definitely coming round. Please don’t leave me alone with him. When I think of that poor girl – and all those others he was going to maroon to die in that remote place …’
‘Just a minute,’ said the guard who realised he was going to have to postpone winning the world cup until this chatterbox was silenced. ‘He hasn’t even been tried yet. For all you know he could be innocent. I’m just here to make sure he doesn’t escape before standing trial. And should you be speaking like that in front of a patient? He might be able to hear you.’ The nurse was affronted by this dig at her professional competence.
‘I think I’m better qualified than you to decide what he can and can’t hear,’ she retorted huffily. ‘And you must be the only person in Brazil who thinks he isn’t a cold-blooded murderer. Oh, and don’t think I don’t know you were fast asleep when I came in. Some guard!’ She swept out, throwing back a final shaft across her shoulder. ‘And, by the way, you snore like a pig!’
Luke’s mind was racing as the nurse’s comments caused memories to come flooding back. ‘That poor girl’ was of course Lucinda Angstrom. A pity he had had to kill her; she’d been a nice kid, but if he was to succeed in taking the credit for her incredible scientific discovery and making himself the richest man on earth by abusing the power of making himself invisible at will, there had really been no other realistic option. After pushing Lucinda off the cliff into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean he had stolen her invisibility robe and all her research data, only to discover that he could not make any more invisibility clothes without obtaining supplies of the raw material, photogyraspar, from which they were made. This was vital, for the stolen research data gave no indication as to how long the original invisibility robe would retain its power. He had discovered that the ore from which photogyraspar was obtained came from a remote prehistoric crater deep in the Amazon jungle and had used a gang of criminals to get him to the crater and assist him in mining supplies of ore. His plan had gone well up to the point at which a group of explorers, including a young girl of thirteen, had landed their plane in the crater where the ore was being mined. A series of adventures had ended in all his fellow criminals being killed by animals and he had become dependent on using the explorers’ help to escape from the crater. He had pretended to befriend them with the intention of taking their pilot hostage and leaving them marooned in the crater. The pilot he had intended to kill once he reached civilization and then he would be free to make unlimited use of his knowledge and the ore he had acquired… Luke stopped short in his thoughts as he desperately attempted to recall the final moments of his stay in the crater. He was aware that a head injury (and that, it was now obvious to him, is what he must have sustained) could cause loss of memory of previous events, and particularly those immediately preceding the injury. He also knew that this memory loss could be permanent. In his case, however, it was vital that he should remember as much as possible of his final moments of consciousness or he might never know the results of his studies in the crater. As he struggled to recall the events of that day he gradually became drowsier and eventually fell asleep to the monotonous sound of the policeman snoring.
The next morning Luke woke early and immediately started once again to try and remember the events preceding his accident. He tried to be logical. The two things he would have needed to take from the crater were his research data on invisibility – the original material he had stolen from Lucinda and the results of the additional research he had conducted in the crater – and the actual ore from which new robes could be made. He recalled loading all his data onto a USB memory stick from his computer but where had he concealed it? Of course! He suddenly remembered that he had hidden it in a false cavity in the heel of his shoe. It was vital that he regained his clothing. But what about the ore? He remembered that in the crater he had filled a box with highly concentrated ore that had turned out to be so heavy that he had found it impossible to move on his own. Whatever had happened to it?
Just then he heard voices. Opening one eye he saw that a new nurse had come in to change his intravenous fluids and was chatting to the guard – a different one from yesterday.
‘So what happened to him?’ the guard was saying.
‘Apparently he walked backwards into a propeller,’ the nurse replied. ‘He was lucky not to have had his head cut off.’
‘Must have given him quite a turn just the same,’ joked the guard as he turned back to his newspaper.
Luke, who had hurriedly closed his eye again, listened to this exchange with interest. That was it! The nurse’s remark had triggered a hidden memory. He had held Julian, the pilot, hostage at gunpoint and was about to force him to help load the crate full of ore onto the plane when all had gone black. But that meant… with dawning horror Luke realised that he must have failed in his attempt to obtain ore from the crater. Without fresh ore all his research data were useless and his dreams of power and riches would come to nothing. He obviously needed to work out a very careful plan.
A fortnight later Luke sat in his room waiting for his first visitor. He was now feeling much better but he found the continuous presence of the guards intensely irksome and couldn’t wait to escape. With any luck that would be very soon, especially as the detective in charge of his case was due to come and interrogate him the next day and he told himself he had better things to do than to waste time telling a pack of lies to some half-witted local plod. His request for his clothes and shoes to be returned had been politely refused – even the police seemed to have worked out that it would make it easier for him to escape if he were dressed – but he had at least established that his possessions had been kept and were in a locker outside his room. His request to telephone his housekeeper for some personal items such as a toothbrush and dressing gown had been approved, though the call had been carefully monitored. His housekeeper, Frau Schadenfreude, was an elderly German widow who had worked loyally for the professor for years and, despite her name, she had refused to believe any of the scandal she had read about him in the newspapers. She seemed delighted to hear his voice and listened carefully as he told her where his spare washbag and new dressing gown were to be found. She was very impressed when he told her that he had bought the gown in London’s Savile Row. She would have been even more impressed to know that the ‘dressing gown’ was, in fact, the very first invisibility robe that the professor had stolen from Lucinda on the day he had pushed her off the cliff. After using it to assist some criminals to escape from jail and then create a second robe, he had concealed it in his flat against just such an eventuality as this one.
When his housekeeper arrived at the hospital the guard searched the bag she had brought with her and after confiscating some nail scissors and tweezers from the washbag allowed her to see the professor. The soft invisibility helmet, an essential part of the kit, was masquerading as a shower cap in his washbag but the guard didn’t seem to appreciate that the Professor’s thinning wisps of grey hardly necessitated such an item.
During his period of convalescence Luke had perused the newspapers and read the accounts of his capture. Apparently the family he had intended to maroon in the crater, including Julian the pilot he had intended to murder, had returned safely to civilization. None of the accounts he had read referred to the exact location of the crater, simply using phrases such as “a remote jungle valley” or suchlike. There was no mention anywhere of invisibility robes or of prehistoric animals and the professor rightly concluded that the family had decided to keep these secret. He himself was described as “recovering in hospital from a serious injury, under constant police supervision.” Because of the severity of his injury he had, apparently, been transferred from the Amazon hospital where he was first taken to a top neurosurgical centre in Rio. According to the news articles he would, when fit, be questioned concerning the murder of Dr Lucinda Angstrom, the attempted theft of a plane, the taking of a pilot hostage and the intent to leave a family abandoned in a remote location where they were unlikely to survive.
His chat with his housekeeper confirmed all he had gleaned from the newspapers and he thanked her for her loyalty while reassuring her that the vicious slander to which he had been subjected had originated from what he described as “eco-nuts and anti-German pressure groups”.
After she had left Luke put his carefully thought-out plan into action. He took his dressing gown into his small bathroom, put it on and then let out a cry of anguish as though he had suffered some serious injury. The guard rushed in (the door had no lock) to find the room empty. The tiny barred window, a few inches wide and large enough only to admit a cat, was open. The guard ran out and unlocked the main door to Luke’s room in order to call for assistance. He did not feel Luke brush past him. As the guard spoke frantically into his mobile and sounded a general alarm Luke casually removed an axe from the fire cuboard and split open his locker door. With trembling fingers he opened the secret compartment in the false heel of his shoe. To his unspeakable relief the little memory stick that contained everything he had ever stolen or discovered about invisibility still nestled securely in its hiding place. He slipped the precious gadget into his pocket, retrieved his house keys, wallet and other possessions, put on his shoes, then walked round the corner, past the guard frantically phoning for help at the nurses’ station, out of the ward through a door fortunately propped open for ventilation, down the stairs and out of the hospital.
The professor had to get back to the crater if he wanted to be sure of future supplies of photogyraspar. The problem was that, as far as he knew, only two people knew where the crater was: the criminal pilot Biggles who had first taken Luke and his gang there, and Julian Fossfinder, the amateur pilot from the family Luke had tried to take hostage.
Biggles was now dead, killed in the crater, and Julian was obviously not somebody who was going to tell the professor how to get back to the scene of his crimes. Luke knew, however, that Biggles had given some samples of ore to Lucinda’s boyfriend, Peter Flint, a geologist at the university, and hoped that Flint might have established where the crater was, to obtain further samples for his own research. Luke had spent a great deal of time in hospital considering this problem and had decided that his best – possibly his only– chance of finding out the location of the crater was to explore Flint’s office for information. After leaving the hospital he returned to his flat which was, as he had suspected, under constant police surveillance. Still invisible, he smashed a window at the end of the corridor leading to his apartment and when the policeman went to investigate he slipped through his front door and quickly retrieved the keys to his university department. He then went to the university and from a concealed compartment in his desk removed the keys to Flint’s research laboratory and the password to his computer which he had stolen from Lucinda. The password wasn’t really necessary – the professor was an IT wizard who could hack his way into almost any computer system – but it would certainly save him time.
Soon he was sitting, invisible, at Flint’s computer searching for any reference to the pilot and the crater. Within moments he found found Inspector Colarinho’s e-mail to Flint informing him that the crater was now a prohibited zone.
Luke slammed his fist on the desk and swore in frustration. Now he could never get back to the crater. He felt all his dreams and aspirations ebbing away. As for the postscript asking how Peter was coping with the situation concerning Lucinda – well personally he couldn’t care less about the effect Lucinda’s death had had on Peter Flint. As he scrolled down further through Flint’s correspondence, however, he read, with a flood of relief, the letter that Flint had received from London concerning a possible alternative source of the ore in Africa.
No sooner had Luke printed off this page with its vital map reference than his attention was caught by a final outgoing e-mail to Julian Fossfinder, copied to the Bonaventures:
Hi Julian,
Thanks a million. You’ve saved me a great deal of time, money and trouble.
Peter Flint.
What in heaven’s name was Flint thanking Julian for, Luke wondered. If he had happened to walk ten yards along the corridor into Flint’s lab he would have found out and saved himself a great deal of trouble for there, in the middle of the floor, stood the very box of concentrated ore samples that Luke had himself laboriously collected and saved back in the crater. With those samples, and the priceless information he already possessed in his USB stick, the professor could have fulfilled all his evil ambitions and the world would have been a very different place. But the course of history turns on the most trivial of circumstances and the professor didn’t go into the next-door laboratory simply because he was unaware of any reason to do so.
He closed down the computer, put his hands behind his head and sat back to think over what he had learnt. The Congo. Of all the places on earth. What an extraordinary stroke of luck for the location to be the one place where his cousin could help him – a cousin, moreover, who owed him a favour. Well, he told himself, he was certainly due a lucky break. He looked at his watch and did a rapid calculation of time zones. It was early evening in Central Africa. Perfect. He picked up Flint’s phone and rang international directory enquiries. A few minutes later he was through to a number in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Please may I speak to Mr Moriarty; you can tell him it’s Luke calling.’ There was a short pause, then Moriarty came on line.
‘Hi Luke.’
‘Hi Hans.’
‘What news?’
‘Good – for both of us, I think,’ said Luke. ‘Do you remember the favour you asked of me some time ago?’
‘I certainly do,’ came the reply.
‘Well, as you know, I was unable to help at the time because of my accident. Can I assume that you still need a great deal of money to solve your little problem?’
‘Yes, I…I need it more than ever.’ Luke was pleased to hear the note of desperation in the man’s voice; it would ensure his full cooperation.
‘Well, by a curious chance my money-making operation has been switched to your part of the world. I should be able to give you what you need within a couple of months. Oh, and just to remind you – we’re talking millions here.’
‘That’s fantastic,’ said Hans.
‘There’s just one problem,’ Luke continued. ‘I’m going to need your help. I need you to bend a few rules and bribe a few officials. I’ll need some mining and extraction permits and some mineral export licences. Oh, and I may need some visas if I use helpers. All these documents will have to be fake because we’d never get approval for real ones – even if we had the time to wait for them. Are you OK with that?’
There was no hesitation on his cousin’s part.
‘That won’t be a problem,’ came the quiet reply. ‘I’ll fix anything you need, whatever it takes, as long as you can give me the dough as quickly as possible.’
‘Good’ said Luke, ‘We’ve got a deal. I’ve got a few arrangements to make and I’ll ring you back as soon as I know what I need.’
‘Luke…’ Luke thought he heard a stifled sob on the other end of the line. ‘…Luke. Thanks. You’ve really saved my bacon.’
‘Auf Wiedersehen, Hans!’ came the brief reply.
After he put the phone down Hans (or John as he was known to his local associates in the Congo) poured himself a large drink from a cabinet on his office wall and sat back in his chair. Maybe, at last, this miraculous phone call would bring an end to the nightmare that had haunted him for the last six months. John held a very responsible position but had one secret weakness which was gambling, a vice which had recently put him into a position from which only a large sum of money could retrieve him. Although he and Luke had only met on a few occasions, the cousins were linked by an indissoluble family bond. Towards the end of the second world war Hans’ father, a senior German naval officer, had managed to arrange a passage to Brazil on a naval ship for his sister, Luke’s mother, and her husband who was anxious to leave Europe before the allies charged him with war crimes. Over the years the families had kept secretly in touch and the young cousins, though not knowing the details, were always acutely aware that Luke and his family owed Hans’ family a great deal.
When Hans had faced ruin through his gambling habit he had rung Luke in Rio and pleaded for his help. As it happened he had rung at a most propitious time, for it was just after Luke had stolen Lucinda’s invisibility robe with the intention of making himself a fortune from her discovery. To bail out his cousin and repay the family debt of gratitude using a tiny part of the prodigious wealth he expected to possess was no issue and Luke had readily agreed.
Reading of Luke’s crater accident in the news had been disastrous for Hans who saw his hopes of escaping ruin shattered. Now, however, it seemed as if Luke was still on track for saving him: and this time he could return the favour. Bribing some corrupt local officials to fiddle a few mining concessions, and issuing some fake export licences were all in a day’s work for Hans.
He finished his drink and returned to work with renewed vigour. He couldn’t wait for the next communication from his cousin.