What payment can even righteous aims exact in their achievement?

Dark Pupils is a novel about three university students who murder the president. It is a novel in three parts.

Part one: The deed…
Terry, Peter and Rachel are experiencing reoccurring nightmares and other symptoms as the opposition party conditions them for their exploit.
On the eve of the assassination the students experience a group delusion, followed by the death of their friend Marie. These events coupled with the drugs they have been taking, trigger their activation and ultimately the murder of Walter Thisgo, the Treoraí of Ireland.

Part two: The Plot…
The three escape through tunnels below the city of Dublin, led by Terry's estranged father Oscar, a homeless man who attempts to save the students from their fate.
In hiding in the Wicklow Mountains, miles from the citizens that are now creaming for their blood and the medication they now badly need, the students begin to unravel the plot and their part in it; their own parents have delivered them into this predicament and they can see no way out.
During this period the love between Peter and Rachel grows whilst in a fit of madness and jealousy Terry abandons his father and his friends to return to Dublin and betray them to the authorities.

Part three: The two trials…
The judgment of the three students is quick and moot, the media having already decided their fate. On the eve of their sentencing Walter Thisgo, more alive and far younger than he should be, visits them. Thisgo tells the three how he usurped his father's political position and person many years before. He explains that the staging of his death using his father as a victim was necessary to immortalise the Progressive Party state he has nurtured, and destroy that remained of the public's belief in the old Regressive Party.
In payment for their sacrifice, Walter Thisgo promises to return from hiding when the scandal has died down and take the three with him to exile.
The dark pupils are sentences to life in a mental institute where they remain in that vain hope that Thisgo will return. Terry is the first to crack, even with all his fathers efforts to the contrary he takes his own life, leaving Peter and Rachel alone to wait.
In the end Walter Thisgo does return, a Jesus like character in a white limousine, he arrives at the hospital and takes Rachel and Peter to exile, where Terry and Marie await their arrival.
This is, of course, one final fantasy shared by the two as they slip towards death, a year's dosage in their stomachs, while Walter Thisgo - our narrator - sits in exile, bitter and indignant. He has the blood of his father, the students and his sister Marie on his hands, and for what? To see all of his work undone with time and Ireland returned to its former corrupt self.
He was a fool to think that anything righteous could come from the manipulation of others.

The End