Franks

Connie was used to Franks going out at funny times. Franks knew that, because after ten years of marriage he could feel her every thought, awake or sleeping. He had no belief in telepathy, but he nevertheless enjoyed certainty that two people could get to know each other so completely that each might as well be inside the other’s head. Like siamese twins sharing a brain, he thought, loving the way her dark curls fell and spread themselves so naturally over the pillow’s smoothness. Deeply, beautifully asleep, she stirred slightly, exhaled, then resumed her even, regular breathing, her olive skin lithe, warm, perfect, ready, right now. At the thought of coming back to Connie, later that autumn morning, he felt himself stir ever so slightly. “Not long,” he whispered, half-aloud. “I wish I could stay. But it has to be done now. No backing out. I didn’t have a choice.”

The night was cold, the unquiet air slightly damp, smelling of soil and trees and forest-wild wind, as he started up the car and headed slowly down the country house’s long driveway. The dashboard clock showed 2:58am. Not long till three, the hour of the devil’s traditional appearance, his age-old taunt to the trinity. The full moon threw the November branches’ jagged shadows onto the Merc’s windshield. He reached the road, was out from under the trees, and he accelerated toward what he had to do. Franks strained to put the task ahead out of his mind while he drove, with the same level of success as the man who tries his utmost not to think of a blue banana.

It was just under five miles to the disused railway tunnel. The tracks had been taken up decades before, when the railway line had been rerouted in the 1960s, through another part of Harecastle Hill whose rock had been too tough for the limited technology of the 1800s. Franks’ destination was the old south bore, 1,766 yards long, following the course of the old canal tunnels below it. Specifically, his quarry lay below the gravel trackbed, in the third drainage shaft that had coursed groundwater downward from the railway tunnel into the dark waterway beneath. Dry now, beneath the oily stone chips, the brick-lined hole came into view as Franks pulled up his face mask and shone his flashlight from side to side. In response to the light, the wailing started.

“Hey, get me out! Please! Pleeeease, mister! Get me out! I’ll do as you say, I promise. Just get me outta here! GET ME OUT!”

Franks set his jaw into a callous, uncaring grimace. He had tied the child by its hands, over its head, and suspended it over this death pit, the rope secured to the horizontal bars of the vent shaft above, some six hours before. He had known the boy would be OK. Krohl had made that clear, along with everything the latter needed Franks to do. The child’s feet just about touched the narrow ledge where the 19th century engineers had hit a limestone outcrop. Now, the captor’s toes curled over the shaft’s lip. He pointed the flashlight downward. Wide, anxious, brown eyes, beneath a tousled, dark fringe, latched onto his. “PLEASE, mister, Get me out. I’ll do anything you want. Anything. Just don’t leave me here in the dark any more. GET ME OUT!”

Franks remained impassive, staring down. Vision preternaturally acute, he saw every bead of sweat on the twelve-year-old’s forehead. Six hours without water or food, in the dark, buried in a dank railway tunnel, barely standing on a narrow ledge, suspended over an old underground waterway beneath. What imagined nightmare could come close to this hellish reality? The boy must be near the limit of his endurance. Most adults would have been. Yet, children were so resilient, Franks had often observed.

“When I’m ready,” he said, quietly.

Silence, save the omnipresent water’s steady, metallically echoing drip, drip, drip. Franks drew his diving knife from its holster, at his belt, the bright blade burnished to flaming brightness in the flashlight’s glare. He turned the blade slowly as the child’s eyes grew round in terror. Presently, with a delay Franks mentally calculated to concur with the distance from the boy to the stagnant canal eighteen feet below, a new, lighter, faster drip plinked for a few seconds, in harmony with the troubled ground’s ancient bleeding.

Clicking the flashlight off, Franks crunched his way back to the tunnel mouth, ignoring the pitiful cries that receded behind him. Ten more minutes ought to do it, then he would walk back to the shaft, stand over the boy and cut half-way through the rope. Once the boy showed he was terrified beyond anything he had ever experienced or imagined, Franks would ask him if he had learned his lesson. If he had, Franks would haul him up, stick him with the syringe still safely capped and padded in his left trouser pocket, place his unconscious form at the tunnel portal and make an anonymous call to the police on the single-use burner phone he brought along for the purpose.

On the train up to London the next morning, Franks had read the online newspapers. The boy had been found by the police, who were keen to trace the caller who had alerted them, or to hear from anyone with information. He had regained consciousness and was recovering well in hospital. Franks knew the boy would tell police about the masked man who had jumped him on his way home after football training and held a chloroform pad over his mouth. He would tell them he had never got to see his assailant’s face, but the man had tied his hands and made him stand on a narrow ledge in a smelly, wet underground place, that he later realised was an old tunnel. The man had left him there for hours and hours, then he had come back, injected him with something that had sent him to sleep, and he’d woken up in an ambulance.

What twelve-year-old Hansen Prior would never share with the police, nor with anyone, not even his parents, was the series of solemn promises Franks had exacted from him, just before setting the boy free. Franks had left the petrified child in no doubt that, if the promise were broken, he, Franks, would be back, and next time it would not just be a few hours alone underground.

As the express pulled into Euston station, Franks’ phone vibrated. The Transport for London app told him that there were delays on the Jubilee Line at Westminster tube station because of an electrical fault. Westminster tube station was Franks’ intended destination. Instead of scowling, Franks smiled. Those around him on the train could not know that the electrical fault had been arranged to coincide exactly with the arrival of Franks himself.

Picking up the Jubilee Line at Green Park, Franks boarded the last car of the train, via the single door next to the vacant, rearward-facing driver’s cab. Anyone watching him - and he was sure no-one was - would have seen him casually checking his phone. However, instead of Facebook or Instagram, Franks’ screen showed a timer, counting down, with thirteen seconds to go. As the digits neared zero, Franks’ hand edged nearer the door that led to the cab, which he knew had been left unlocked for him.

Four zeroes. As planned, and as Franks expected, the lights winked out and the train began to slow. The wholeness of the dark reminded Franks of the dank, disused Harecastle railway tunnel, with its buried network of culverts and channels, the parallel, dormant canal tunnels just a few feet below. In every real sense of the word, those old passageways had been haunted, by Franks, and by his young captive, Hansen Prior. The concrete-lined bore of the Jubilee Line was about to be haunted too, by a real, live human, in just a few seconds.

Londoners were hard to rattle, Franks thought, as he silently slid the door handle down and slipped into the cab, pulling the door to behind him just as the emergency lights flickered into dingy, dirty white life. No-one in the rear car had cried out when the lights went out, nor apparently batted an eyelid. A moment later, full power came back and train began to move once more. Before then, Franks was out of the driver’s door and away into the tunnel, avoiding the live conductor rail and making for the concealed doorway in the tunnel wall that only a very select few knew existed, and even fewer were able to open.

As a boy, Franks had always smiled with a jingoistic suspension of disbelief, when Roger Moore’s James Bond had met up with Desmond Llewellyn’s Q, his fully equipped, futuristic laboratory lurking in yet another unlikely location, hidden in plain sight of the unsuspecting world. The head quarters of Crysphere, the UK government’s research project into reliably predicting the future, was just such a hidden laboratory. When Westminster tube station, with the deepest platforms on the Jubilee Line, had been constructed, in the 1990s, a large cuboidal void known as the ‘station box’ had been sunk well below the level of the tracks and platforms, ostensibly to provide a mechanism for injecting concrete to reinforce the foundations beneath the nearby Elizabeth Tower, the iconic London landmark that houses the bell known as Big Ben, along with its instantly recognisable four-faced clock. Otherwise, the credulous media were told, subsidence from the excavations could cause the tower to tilt, compromising the structural integrity of a world-famous, national monument.

The true purpose of the station box was to house the biggest, most complex and most power-hungry bank of quantum computers ever built. Franks mused upon this as the elevator descended. The doors slid open and, instead of Q exasperatedly exhorting double-oh seven to pay attention, there was Krohl, smiling broadly across his huge, bear-like face. He slapped Franks heartily on both upper arms; the latter hoped he was not showing the resulting stinging pain on his face. In Krohl’s guttural Afrikaans grunt, his name sounded more like ‘Fadinks’.

“You did it,” the musclebound man-bear grunted. “Well done. Come with me and take a look at the new forecast.”

Krohl led the way down the austere, yet clean, grey concrete tunnel. Invisible beams scanned their faces; double doors hissed apart, as if to admit Captain Kirk. Instead of the bridge of the starship Enterprise, they stepped into a vast hallway of whirring fans and blinking LEDs. Unlike Q division, with its multitudinous white-coated, clipboard-toting technicians, Crysphere’s core of operation was fully automated, Krohl and Franks the two representatives of all mankind, deep down in that super computerised cave.

Krohl approached a standing desk and typed briskly on a keyboard. The plain wall before him lit up, becoming a floor-to-ceiling monitor screen.

Laplace forecast report:

Subject: Hansen Prior

Global threat level: Green, reduced from death watch scarlet.

Forecast updated, current config indicates existential crisis averted.

Alert closed, situation resolved. Condition normal.

Laplace, Franks knew, was the semi-officially adopted nickname for the array of quantum computers that occupied most of this hi-tech cavern beneath London. Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, the 18th-century Newton of France, had mused that an omniscient supernatural being, possessing knowledge of the precise state of every particle in the universe at a given moment, could forecast with complete certainty the state of every such particle in the next moment. That dataset would enable the being to predict the state of everything in the moment after that, and so on, ad infinitum. In short, Laplace’s Demon, as the postulated entity came to be known, could predict the entire future of the world with absolute reliability.

No-one in Laplace’s time, least of all Laplace himself, believed that the demon actually existed, nor could exist. Philosophers, then and now, decried Laplace’s argument, citing the demon as the embodiment of determinism, a model of the universe that left no room for the reassuringly human unpredictability of free will. Though no more than an armchair philosopher, Franks had always opined that there was no way to prove that free will was not an illusion; he had long harboured sentiments that the deterministic world of Laplace was a pretty good model of reality, and that if man could not tell whether his experientially actual free will was real or illusory, then that distinction did not matter, for it would look the same either way to every living human.

Two weeks previously, Krohl had contacted Franks, to activate him for a mission of supreme importance. Activation without the option to refuse was part of Franks’ contract with Crysphere. The Laplace system had flashed up an alert, maximum urgency, level ten red. That meant, Krohl had explained, an end-of-world scenario within thirty years, with a very narrow time window for corrective action. Specifically, Laplace forecast the child-on-child murder of Auberne Lydia Romagne by Hansen John Prior, at a time when both would be aged fourteen years. The victim, as per a longer range forecast by Laplace, had she survived to adulthood, would have become the first female president of the United States of America. Her removal from future history would allow the election of Dorsten Hubert Tonks, whose bungling would lead to whole-world armageddon within three years of his being sworn in.

Krohl had queried Laplace to the nth degree, running simulation after simulation, eventually narrowing the turning point down to a series of emails to be sent by Prior to Romagne, after the former's family relocation from London to Washington DC in two years' time. There would be a late-night encounter, a physical altercation that would end with Romagne’s murder. If Prior could be diverted from his email campaign, the safety of the future lady president and the wider world would be assured.

The rest, by the time of Franks and Krohl’s latest subterranean meeting, was already history. Prior had caved in and sworn to Franks, on that oily, damp old trackbed, that he would stop stalking Romagne online; that he would forget her and never bother her again. The success of Franks’ persuasion was borne out by Laplace’s updated forecast, in which the civilised world was not destined to end within the first century of the third millennium. Now, neither man had the stomach to comment on Franks initial response to the mission brief. He silently recalled that he had told Krohl where to shove his child-torture gameplan, before Krohl had gently and inexorably convinced him, and Franks had reluctantly accepted the assignment which he had then successfully carried out.

Emerging onto the rainy pavement outside Portcullis House, inhaling the sweet, damp, safe summer air, Franks gazed at the lights reflected along the river, and wondered what his next remit might turn out to be.