LITMIR.BIZ

       IV

      Holding to the promises he’d made himself was not easy. Not when there were so many simple pleasures to be had from the power he’d gained; pleasures he made himself forfeit for fear of depleting his little strength before he stole his way to greater.

      His first priority was to locate a fellow quester; someone who could aid him in his search. It was two months before his enquiries threw up the name and reputation of a man perfectly suited to that role. That man was Richard Wesley Fletcher, who’d been – until his recent fall from grace – one of the most lauded and revolutionary minds in the field of evolutionary studies; the head of several research programmes in Boston and Washington; a theorist whose every remark was scrutinized by his peers for clues to his next breakthrough. But his genius had been flawed by addiction. Mescalin and its derivatives had brought him low, much to the satisfaction of many of his colleagues, who made no bones about their contempt for the man once his guilty secret came out. In article after article Jaffe found the same smug tone, as the academic community rounded on the deposed Wunderkind, condemning his theories as ludicrous and his morals as reprehensible. Jaffe couldn’t have cared less about Fletcher’s moral standing. It was the man’s theories that intrigued him, dovetailing as they did with his own ambition. Fletcher’s researches had been aimed at isolating, and synthesizing in a laboratory, the force in living organisms that drove them to evolve. Like Jaffe, he believed heaven could be stolen.

      It took persistence to find the man, but Jaffe had that in abundance, and found him in Maine. The genius was much the worse for despair, teetering on the brink of complete mental breakdown. Jaffe was cautious. He didn’t press his suit at first, but instead ingratiated himself by supplying drugs of a quality Fletcher had long since been too poor to afford. Only when he’d gained the addict’s trust did he begin to make oblique reference to Fletcher’s studies. Fletcher was less than lucid on the subject at first, but Jaffe gently fanned the embers of his obsession, and in time the fire flared. Once burning, Fletcher had much to tell. He believed he’d twice come close to isolating what he called the Nuncio, the messenger. But the final processes had always eluded him. Jaffe offered a few observations of his own on the subject, garnered from his readings in the occult. The two of them, he gently suggested, were fellow seekers. Though he, Jaffe, used the vocabulary of the ancients – of alchemists and magicians – and Fletcher the language of science, they had the same desire to nudge evolution’s elbow; to advance the flesh, and perhaps the spirit, by artificial means. Fletcher poured scorn on these observations at the outset, but slowly came to value them, finally accepting Jaffe’s offer of facilities in which to begin his researches afresh. This time, Jaffe promised, Fletcher wouldn’t have to work in an academic hothouse, constantly required to justify his work to hold on to his funding. He guaranteed his dope-fiend genius a place to work that would be well hidden from prying eyes. When the Nuncio had been isolated, and its miracle reproduced, Fletcher Would reappear from the wilderness and put his vilifiers to flight. It was an offer no obsessive could have resisted.

      Eleven months later, Richard Wesley Fletcher stood on a granite headland on the Pacific Coast of the Baja and cursed himself for succumbing to Jaffe’s temptations. Behind him, in the Misión de Santa Catrina where he’d laboured for the best part of a year, the Great Work (as Jaffe liked to call it) had been achieved. The Nuncio was a reality. There were surely few less likely places for labours most of the world would have judged ungodly than an abandoned Jesuit Mission, but then from the outset this endeavour had been shot through with paradox.

      For one, the liaison between Jaffe and himself. For another, the intermingling of disciplines that had made the Great Work possible. And for a third the fact that now, in what should have been his moment of triumph, he was minutes away from destroying the Nuncio before it fell into the hands of the very man who’d funded its creation.

      As in its making, so in its unmaking: system, obsession and pain. Fletcher was too well versed in the ambiguities of matter to believe that the total destruction of anything was possible. Things couldn’t be undiscovered. But if the change that he and Raul wrought on the evidence was thorough enough it was his belief that nobody would easily reconstruct the experiment he’d conducted here in the wilds of Baja California. He and the boy (it was still difficult to think of Raul as a boy) had to be like perfect thieves, rifling their own house to remove every last trace of themselves. When they’d burned all the research notes and trashed all the equipment it had to be as though the Nuncio had never been made. Only then could he take the boy, who was still busy feeding the fires in front of the Mission, to this cliff edge, so that hand in hand they could fling themselves off. The fall was steep, and the rocks below plenty sharp enough to kill them. The tide would wash their blood and bodies out into the Pacific. Then, between fire and water, the job would have been done.

      None of which would prevent some future investigator from finding

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