Napoleon's Gold: A Jack Starling Adventure

by Guy Roberts

  ‘Deschamps is after the gold too, Jack.’ Cleo explained. ‘Whatever David knew, Deschamps wants to know. He’ll find out who you are soon enough… and then, if you’re not careful, he’ll capture you – or kill you – or both.’

  She turned and clambered on. Jack risked a look over the edge of the guttering into the street far below. A yellow-coated MET police officer was shouting into the radio of his bullet-riddled car. The van had vanished and the wail of police sirens could be heard approaching from every direction.

  ‘Jack,’ her voice called out quietly across the rooftop. He turned back to look at her. She was standing by an opened skylight, her body illuminated by the light streaming upward.

  ‘Your brother was a good man.’ Her voice was tinged with sadness. ‘You should finish what he started. But if you go to the police,’ she shook her head, ‘then Deschamps will be unstoppable.’

  Jack looked at her, surprised by the choice of words.

  ‘Unstoppable?’

  She nodded. ‘Unstoppable.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Jack frowned. ‘You’re spinning me a story here and I’ve got nothing to go on.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s right. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That David’s dead?’ Jack moved toward the skylight.

  ‘Yes, Jack, that David’s dead. He was a good boss. And for something else.’ She shrugged.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, Jack.’ Her green eyes seemed to envelop him, searching, hopeful and resigned all at once. ‘Fight Deschamps all you like. Lock him up, make the world a better place. But the gold?’

  A wicked smile suddenly flickered across her face. ‘The gold is mine.’ With that, she vanished downward, pulling the skylight shut behind her. Jack cursed and leapt across the last few feet to the skylight, his fingers gripping at the window frame and pulling at it in a rage. The modern fixture stayed firm and he punched at the treated glass uselessly. Cleo glanced up from within, waved at him with a smile and vanished from sight.

  ‘Dammit,’ Jack snarled, rolling back to look at the night sky. At least there was no sign of anyone else clambering the roof tops after him – the second man shooting at him from the stairwell must have escaped in the van when the police arrived. That left Jack a very few seconds of calm thought. Cleo had already vanished into the night. He had no doubt she would have had an escape route carefully thought out – the police might not even know she had been there. Yet she had given him a name. Deschamps. If she had disappeared, then perhaps Deschamps could be found instead. Jack pushed her from his mind and focused on his own situation. He knew the police would be after him soon enough. His passport was in his backpack on the table down below and no doubt it would trigger a huge police search – and once Jack was found all urgency would vanish from the case. It would be easier to blame him for David’s death than to find the real killers. Any thought of going to the police for help was pointless. The priority now was going underground and vanishing from the streets of the busiest capital city in Europe. That was the only way to stay free long enough to find Deschamps. The gold, if it existed, could wait.

  Jack let his years of military training come to the fore. He thought of himself now as fugitive in a hostile city. Every action must be considered. Anyone on the street could be a threat, any refuge could be a trap. His years as a soldier came back to him. The Special Air Service regimental training school had drummed into him the need for caution, care and concealment. The first step was to get off this rooftop and down to ground level. He counted to three slowly and deliberately, then rolled away from the skylight and into action. He had been scrambling across these rooftop tiles as a child, decades before. There had been little change in their construction since then – Cleo’s skylight escape route notwithstanding. He carefully levered his body up the slick tiles and slid onto the other side of the roof, away from the noise and confusion in Dorset Square. From there he clambered down a drainpipe to reach the ground. By the time his feet were on the pavement his course was set. Long ago Jack had been a British soldier trapped in Afghanistan, surviving for a month in Kabul hunted and alone. I’m in London now, he told himself, how difficult can it be? He strode into the darkness of London’s backstreets without a backward glance. A police wagon was sent to secure the rear of David’s townhouse, but by then Jack had already become a shadow in the night.

  0200 hrs (0100 hrs GMT) 14 June 2015, Rue de Passy, 16th Arrondissement, Paris.

  GR 48.857847, 2.280398

  The bespoke cell phone was held stationary in its master’s hand, its touch-screen panel the only illumination in the room. The screen showed a captured image of Jack Starling’s passport page, a picture transmitted from London seconds before. The room was dark, the open windows on one side of the room giving the man a fine view of slumbering Paris. Despite the early hour the man’s mind was wide awake, savouring the anticipation of the unknown. It had been a busy night, yet of all the 12 million citizens of the Parisian metropolis, only he knew of the deadly events unfolding in the far-off British capital. Despite the tension, however, his breathing was slow and calm. Fifteen minutes had passed since his telephone call to the murderous Reynard. Fifteen minutes for Deschamps to reflect on the secrets waiting to be found that night.

  One Starling is dead, he mused thoughtfully. And now another Starling has entered the fray. He stared curiously at the picture. Who is this Jack? What is his mettle?

  It had been an expensive but necessary step to hack the high tech alarm system David Starling had recently installed in his town house; the system had been remotely deactivated, allowing Reynard and his men to enter the building and catch David Starling by surprise – and then the system had alerted Deschamps to the mysterious visitor later that night. The return to the town house had not been handled smoothly - a firefight, one man dead and the London police alerted to the situation, angry that one of their own had been fired at. But at least Reynard had taken the backpack from the table in the entrance hall, a move which delivered Jack’s passport – giving them a name and a face. A contented sigh drifted from Deschamps lungs. Clearly Jack Starling knew something. Why else would he have been there? Whatever secrets David Starling had told his brother would find their way to Deschamps eventually. Secrets always did.

  A door opened on one side of the room, throwing a soft shaft of bedtime light into the darkened study. The curves of a beautiful woman were visible in the room beyond.

  ‘Not now.’ Deschamps’ tone was brutal, dismissing the girl before her naked form could cross the threshold. She flinched wordlessly and backed out of sight, softly closing the door in her wake. Stillness returned.

  Deschamps weighed the moment, considering what he could do to bring the mysterious Jack Starling to heel. Who knew what David Starling had told his brother? Who knew what clues Jack may have found in those minutes before Reynard’s men arrived? Deschamps needed the gold, which meant he needed Jack Starling to be captured by Reynard, not the police.

  Deschamps sighed languidly. The best help was always the most expensive, especially in the murky world of criminality. He flicked the cell-phone open and quickly drew up an internet browser. Cradling the phone in one hand, he opened the google.fr homepage and typed out four words: Deschamps seeks the Termite. A moment later the search phrase was flittering out into the fathomless reaches of the internet. Deschamps leaned back to wait. The Termite was expensive, but was the best at what he did. It was the Termite that had allowed him access to David Starling’s home security system and it would be the Termite who would help him track Jack Starling. Deschamps gazed out across night-time Paris, his mind ranging across a sleeping city whose dark streets and dark souls were mere reflections of his own twisted nature.

  Sixty seconds passed before the phone vibrated with an incoming call. Deschamps flicked it open to look at the caller ID. The phone was brand new, specially designed to be without electronic signature or recordable memory. It was, according to his IT division, entirely untraceable or cor
ruptible… and yet the word ‘Termite’ appeared on the touch screen to identify the incoming caller. A sardonic smile curled Deschamps’ lips. The mysterious Berlin hacker was showing off, it seemed.

  Deschamps smile faded away as he lifted the phone to his ear.

  0300 hrs 14 June 2015, Central Corridor, Whitehall, London.

  GR 51.503721, -0.126270

  The slender old man walked calmly down a subterranean staircase beneath the Whitehall Government precinct. Perfectly pressed suits are rarely worn at 3am in the morning, but Sir Johnathon Fairchild was always impeccably dressed, no matter the time or crisis. Fairchild’s mind, however was subtly turning over the implications of David Starling’s death.

  Walking through the shabby underground corridors of Whitehall at such a quiet time was enough to remind the Chairman of COBRA just how empty and powerless such places could really be. It was people that mattered, not places. There was none of that thrilling buzz of staffers and experts, no gaggle of public servants and policy advisors swarming and swooning around their ministers like mayflies, clutching iPads and scanning opinion polls. Sir Johnathon knew it was people that made power, and therefore it was people that truly mattered – yes, information flowed ceaselessly through such corridors in capital cities around the world, but it was people – staffers and politicians, bankers and executives – who turned that information into action – protection, or punishment, profit or failure. The emptiness of the long corridor allowed the slim figure to stalk quickly and quietly toward his destination, alone but for his worries and the occasional blue-dressed cleaner pushing a vacuum cleaner or carrying rubbish-filled red bags marked for incineration. Elgar’s Opus 39 drifted into his mind and he began humming Pomp and Circumstance to himself as he walked. Fairchild’s surname suited him – although over seventy, his figure seemed strangely child-like and frail, as if ready to be blown away in a strong gust of wind. The look belayed his surprising vigour. The wave of shining white hair on his head was as thick as it had ever been. When he smiled, which was often, his patrician face seemed elfin and unnaturally youthful. Those who had earned his approval were reminded of Alec Guinness – calm, wry and wise; some even went so far as to call him Obi Wan Kenobi – but only behind his back.

  He paused to hold a door open for a cleaner and her trolley.

  ‘Sir Johnathon, thank you.’ The woman smiled with pleasure.

  ‘Mrs. Hirani.’ Sir Johnathon bowed his head with a smile before he swept onward, turning down a flight of steps to find an armed soldier standing impassively before a nondescript door. The guardsman inspected Sir Johnathon’s proffered ID card carefully, then pressed a recessed button. The door swung open after a moment’s delay, revealing another guard who also inspected Sir Johnathon’s ID card with equal care. He nodded cordially to both and then stepped forward into his domain. Cabinet Office Briefing Room A – popularly known as COBRA – was a place where information and authority met, where the leaders of Britain came to decide how British power was to be used. As Chairman of COBRA Sir Johnathon could draw on the resources of every government ministry to provide intelligence and advice to the Prime Minister of the day. It was from COBRA that Margaret Thatcher had ordered the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War and that Tony Blair had coordinated British troops in Afghanistan after the Twin Towers were destroyed. Both had gone from Downing Street long ago, but the rise of COBRA as the decision room of British national security was assured. The murder of David Starling was not such a national crisis, of course, but Starling had been the second in command of the room, after Sir Johnathon himself and the nature of his death was enough to attract COBRA’s swift attention.

  The room was hushed and mournful. Three intelligence officers were hunched around a table poring over piles of information, while the computer screens on the far wall were rotating through a variety of crime scene photographs taken minutes before at Dorset Square. Sir Johnathon scanned the room for a moment, recognising each one of his staff with approval, particularly the young lady interrogating a computer screen with a steely eye. Michelle Highgrove was one of his handpicked officers, an anointed daughter of the Whitehall machine. As ever, Highgrove carried herself with a gratifying mixture of grace and competence. A close-up photo of David Starling’s body appeared on the screen behind Highgrove’s shoulder and Sir Johnathon sighed at this confirmation that his protégé had been slain. Sir Johnathon had taken great care to foster a cadre of elite civil servants within COBRA and David Starling had been his star recruit – a genuine Mycroft Holmes of the 21st Century. Starling’s death was a serious blow to the British state. It smacked of mystery and murder at the highest levels and was quite enough to justify COBRA coordinating the investigation. Sir Johnathon himself was confident no British entity had struck David Starling down, which meant any number of foreign powers might be responsible. Sir Johnathon was already compiling a list of possible suspect nations – France, America, China … but none of them seemed as likely as Russia – not only had David Starling been working on the latest Russian problem, but murder was a well-known tool of Russian statecraft. Only nine years before, in 2005, the FSB, the brutal successor to the KGB, had poisoned a Russian dissident, Alexander Litvinenko, with radionuclide polonium-210, a lethal radioactive substance. A Russian assassin had simply splashed a glass of the poison across Litvinenko’s chest in a crowded London restaurant. It had looked like nothing more than a spilt drink, but had doomed the dissident to a slow, inescapable death. The murder had raised headlines around the world. Despite this, however, Sir Johnathon hated to draw a conclusion with incomplete data. The death of David Starling had to be demystified before blame could be apportioned and action taken.

  ‘Poor David.’ Sir Johnathon allowed himself a moment’s melancholic sadness. The workings of Starling’s intricate brain had been a glorious wonder to behold.

  ‘Murdered,’ a sweaty voice came from behind him. Sir Johnathon turned his head sharply. A lumbering man stepped forward past the guardsmen at the door and Sir Johnathon slid a smile onto his face that he did not feel. The man entering COBRA was a near opposite of the fastidious civil servant. Where Sir Johnathon was slight, elegant and patrician, the shambling political staffer before him was broad-shouldered and overweight, burdened with the heavy jowls and laboured breathing of the chronically unfit. His eyes, however, were alight with cunning and ambition.

  ‘Anthony Brice.’ Sir Johnathon greeted the staffer cordially. ‘I’m glad to see the Prime Minister’s office has chosen to monitor this situation so closely.’ He saw Highgrove glance up from her computer screen, assess the situation without expression, then return to the scanning of information. Discretion Sir Johnathon thought for a moment. Good.

  ‘Monitor? Hell, we’re running this investigation,’ Brice declared. ‘Or I am, at least. The lead British negotiator on the latest Russian crisis has just been killed by his own brother? You bet the Prime Minister’s office is taking over – the orders came through to me thirty minutes ago.’

  Sir Johnathon’s careful control was jarred. ‘I’m sorry, you say David was killed by his brother?’

  Brice gestured toward the computer screens. A new image was shown: a scanned picture of Jack’s passport recorded by the Immigration officers at Heathrow Airport.

  ‘The moment we heard David was dead we did a search for his next of kin,’ Michelle Highgrove spoke up as Sir Johnathon stared at the screen in consternation. ‘Jack Starling arrived at Heathrow from New York last night.’

  ‘And David Starling is found murdered only a few hours later. Quite a coincidence – I think not.’ Brice ambled toward the conference table at the centre of the room, pawing at an iPad for more information. ‘This Jack is a lethal character, from what information I have. A Major in the SAS, skills in shooting, explosives, survival. Dishonourable discharge in 2004. He spent the last ten years drinking along the East Coast of the USA, until he suddenly decides to fly into London.’ Brice swiped a dismissive finger under his nose. ‘
Next thing we know is his brother is dead. Sounds like a nasty character.’ he concluded.

  ‘But how do you know Jack was involved?’ Sir Johnathon’s brow was furrowed with tension.

  ‘He arrives in town the same night his brother gets killed? I would say that’s a pretty big clue,’ Brice’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. ‘CCTV footage from the London Underground shows him getting off at Marylebone Station, right next to David’s house on Dorset Square. Finally, Sir Johnathon, the responding police officers were fired upon as Starling and his cronies made their escape.’ Brice sniffed. ‘Overall I think that’s a pretty clear link – Jack Starling was flown in to get inside the house and kill his brother without a fuss.’

  ‘His cronies? You said he arrived alone. Who started shooting?’ Sir Johnathon persisted. ‘I’ve already read the briefing paper about the incident, it said there were reports of pistol fire from David’s building, leading to the police arrival… but David Starling was murdered with a knife, so who was shooting who, and why?’

  Brice stared at the older man for a moment, a smile hovering around his face.

  ‘The Russians,’ he declared at last.

  ‘The Russians?’ Sir Johnathon grew alarmed. Brice seemed to be making dangerous leaps of logic without any proof or evidence.

  ‘Come on, Sir Johnathon, it’s a classic fucking set up,’ Brice continued dismissively. ‘The Russians recruit Jack to get close to his brother, kill the guy, then double cross Jack so no one would think it was the Russians in the first place. The only reason they used Jack was because the Russians wanted him as the fall guy. Jack kills David, then the Russians kill Jack – or try to – and leave his body there as a red herring while Russia gets off scot-free. Everyone thinks Jack was working on his own and the case is closed. This is the sort of double cross they learn before breakfast in the bloody FSB, or whatever they’re calling the KGB these days.’