Napoleon's Gold: A Jack Starling Adventure

by Guy Roberts

  ‘I told you to act the moment they were in range.’ Sir Johnathon spoke with icy calm, his eyes boring into Brice’s face with stiff outrage.

  ‘Bullshit!’ Brice declared. ‘Without your distractions, we would have caught those two terrorists days ago!’

  Sir Johnathon’s eyes narrowed but he kept silent.

  ‘In fact,’ Brice’s eyes narrowed with fury, ‘I can see it all now. You’ve been trying to subvert this operation since the beginning. It’s some sort of Machiavellian ploy! Well, no more!’

  The room had gone quiet again, every staffer watching the confrontation from the corners of their eyes. The Naval Commodore stared open-mouthed from his position at the table.

  ‘Guard!’ Brice roared, the far door opened and a security officer stepped smartly into the room.

  ‘With the authority of the Prime Minister’s Office,’ Brice’s voice raised theatrically, ‘I revoke Johnathon Fairchild’s security clearance. He is to be escorted from this complex and placed under arrest on suspicion of treason!’ Brice grabbed a gulp of air. ‘House arrest! House arrest now! Escort him off the premises immediately.’

  There was a moment’s stunned silence.

  ‘Sir...’ Highgrove’s voice was shocked as she tried to voice a protest.

  ‘Now!’ Brice bellowed. Sir Johnathon gave Brice a dismissive glance and walked calmly from the room, the security guard trailing disconsolately in his wake. Brice stood watching them leave, his heavy chest sucking air in and out.

  Sir Johnathon could feel a slight frown marring his patrician face as the doors to COBRA closed behind him. The underground corridors of Whitehall were filled with the usual flurry of staffers and officers and somehow the news of his fall from grace was racing ahead of him like an unseen herald of woe. Many looked away in discreet embarrassment, while others stared at him earnestly, willing him to feel their support. None crossed his path. Unclean, unclean, a leper comes! Sir Johnathon pushed the morbid thought aside and strode forward undeterred. The fire in his eyes had vanished and a dangerous watchfulness now flickered under his lids. A faint smile began to play around his lips as his usual equanimity returned. Had anyone dared to lean close to him as he passed, they would have heard the faintest humming of the 1812 Overture.

  The door to COBRA shut behind Sir Johnathon and Brice heaved a sigh of triumphant relief. One foe had been utterly vanquished, at last. Now for the other two. He turned back to the silent, watching room and dozens of eyes snapped back to their computer screens.

  ‘Right.’ Brice heaved his shoulders upright with all the majesty and aplomb he could gather. ‘Those two Russian agents have been free long enough.’

  One heavy finger swung out to point at the image of Jack and Cleo speeding down the River Thames.

  ‘Arrest those two,’ Brice declared with a thunderous growl. ‘Now.’

  Every monitor in the room went black.

  1205 hrs 16 June 2015, River Thames, London.

  GR 510509119, -0.115920

  ‘Are you ok? Are you hit?’ Jack stared anxiously at Cleo as he tossed the empty pistol into the bottom of the boat.

  ‘I’m ok,’ Cleo nodded her head frantically. ‘I’m ok.’

  Jack paused a moment by her side, quickly running his eyes across her limbs and torso in the search for any tell-tale sheen of shiny dark red that would flow from a bullet wound. There was nothing.

  Whispering a prayer of thanks, Jack looked back at the Victoria Embankment. A haze of dust was slowly settling over the scene, but he could make out Cleopatra’s Needle, upside down, its base thrusting upward from the Thames like a lonely and gigantic chopstick. The thin wail of sirens was audible across the water as scores of emergency vehicles raced toward the scene from all along the Embankment. The shooters had vanished – Jack suspected the villainous Reynard would have managed to escape despite Jack’s theft of his speedboat.

  Jack looked up and down the river. There was no sign of any police helicopters or Water Police, but Jack knew they could not be far away. He looked over to where Cleo stood gripping the wheel of the speed boat. The glamourous blonde was shaking slightly, Jack realised. A look of fear was on her face.

  He quickly stepped to her side and took hold of one of her hands, prising it away from the wheel and squeezing it carefully. Cleo stared at him intently and Jack held her gaze reassuringly as he slowly reduced the throttle of the sleek cruiser.

  ‘Are you ok?’ He asked the question again more slowly. She nodded, but kept trembling. Jack was proud to see that she was mastering the wave of fear and shock that was washing through her system.

  ‘I’ve never been shot at before,’ she admitted after a moment, trying to laugh at herself as she wiped a tear away from one eye with the back of her hand.

  ‘You did fine,’ Jack smiled. ‘You were amazing. I’ve seen troopers with years of training who couldn’t have handled that the way you did.’

  ‘I was terrified.’

  ‘Yep,’ Jack nodded. ‘That’s normal. But you’re alive and so am I.’

  Cleo took a deep breath and nodded, then ran a hand through her hair and busied herself grabbing a stick of lipstick from the pocket of her jeans and skilfully applying a one-handed dab. The move seemed to calm her down instantly. ‘My God,’ she muttered. ‘I stink of cordite.’ The minor problem of gunpowder residue seemed to help focus her on their immediate situation. ‘Do you know where we’re going?’

  Jack shook his head, then looked down in surprise. A pair of neat round holes were visible on the side of his Manchester United hoodie; a bullet had shot past so close to his skin that it had left these two little holes in the garment like a pair of matching cigarette burns. Two centimetres to one side and he would have been left writhing in gut-shot agony on the floor of the boat. The close call was unnerving.

  ‘We need to get out of here but I have no idea where we can go,’ he declared, pushing the thought from his mind.

  ‘Pity.’ Cleo took a deep breath. ‘Right now I would kill for a long hot shower and a big stiff drink.’

  ‘Me too,’ Jack agreed with a smile, though his eyes kept scanning the river and the skies. ‘But every policeman in the city will be after us now. We’ve got to get off this boat and under cover, but after that scene by Cleopatra’s Needle I doubt we’ll get far.’

  ‘Give me a few moments.’ Cleo said decisively, then nodded toward the stout wooden box pulled from the monument. ‘I’ll drive the boat, you crack that box open and find the clue. We won’t get anywhere if we have to lug the whole thing around with us.’

  Jack nodded and pulled the box onto his lap. It was about a foot square with a simple bronze clasp on the front and he was relieved that it opened without incident.

  The interior was crammed with artefacts and Jack suddenly realised how much history had been carried in the stout wooden box. At the top was a pile of newspapers dated 12 September 1878, the day the capsule was emplaced, Jack supposed. He moved them carefully to one of the seats of the speedboat, then did the same again with an old map of the city, a railway guide and three bibles. The next thing he pulled out was a folder of twelve black and white photographs of women posing for the camera.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ Cleo sounded mildly outraged. ‘Page 3 girls from the 1800s? That was worth keeping?’

  Jack grinned, glad to see she was recovering her poise. ‘Don’t be jealous.’ He went back to the box and pulled out more papers, a cut-throat razor, some carved wooden toys and a tiny bronze statue of the monument.

  ‘Anything?’ Cleo asked impatiently.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jack frowned. ‘There’s so much stuff in here, it could be any one of them. It’s like sorting through your grandmother’s stuff from the back of the attic.’

  ‘Well, keep looking,’ Cleo cautioned, ‘we need to get off this boat ASAP,’

  Jack rolled his eyes at the instruction and reached back into the box.

  ‘Wait!’ His voice was tinged with excitement as he drew a
slender wooden case from the depths of the box. It was the same shape and size as the one they had pulled from the base of the Napoleonic Statue. Jack prised the box open with his fingers and slipped his thumb onto the scrap of paper it contained before it was blown away across the Thames.

  He sighed in relief and held it up to Cleo. ‘We’ve got it.’ He declared. ‘It starts with the letter O, then the numbers 8-3-2-9-1-2-1,’ he read out the code before thrusting the paper deep into his pocket for safe keeping.

  Cleo looked across at him and grinned. ‘Then we’re nearly there.’ A helicopter thundered past toward the site of the ruined Needle. Jack frowned in concentration.

  ‘Time to move.’ He looked around the banks of the Thames. ‘We need to get rid of this boat as fast as we can and then we need to find a place to hide out.’ He looked across at Cleo. ‘You’re the local. Any ideas?’

  Cleo smiled confidently. ‘Way ahead of you Jack.’ She revved the throttle and twisted the boat toward the far side of the river. ‘This way.’ The engine roared as she pushed the boat across the centre of the Thames. Jack thrust the scattered items back into the wooden box and let the clasp fall back into place. He looked around for a moment, enjoying the keen fresh air of the Thames as Cleo raced the speed boat down river. The gloomy tower of the Tate Modern slipped by, dwarfing the nearby Globe Theatre. Jack glimpsed St Paul’s Cathedral just before they passed beneath the strange steel webbing of the Millennium Bridge. As he looked south Jack took a double-take at a slender metal spire that dominated the skyline.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ Jack shouted over the rushing water.

  ‘Our destination!’ Cleo responded. ‘The Shard.’

  Jack was mesmerised by the sight of the gleaming skyscraper. ‘I’ve never seen it before. It’s bloody massive!’

  Cleo nodded. ‘Opened to the public last year. The tallest building in Europe!’

  Jack shook his head in amazement. ‘So how do we get there?’

  ‘Like this.’ She steered the boat further eastward and passed London Bridge.

  ‘There,’ Cleo pointed, ‘London Bridge Pier. We can get ashore there and let the boat drift away.’

  Jack looked downriver, to where the grey bulk of a cruiser lay at anchor. ‘What about HMAS Belfast?’ He pointed at the museum ship in warning.

  Cleo shrugged. ‘If she sinks, she sinks. Frankly, darling, I’m more worried about you and me getting ashore without getting nicked.’

  ‘Something tells me you have a plan?’ Jack asked.

  Cleo grinned and pulled a cell phone from her pocket. ‘David left this for me to find when I came back from Europe. He called it an STD. I don’t know what that stands for.’ She flipped it open and looked at him in warning. ‘Apparently all I need to do is turn it on and it will send out a pulse scrambling every electronic eye in central London. One use only, with a fifteen-minute duration.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ Jack frowned in frustration. ‘Why didn’t you pull that out earlier at Trafalgar Square and save me walking around with my jaw out like a Neanderthal? My face is still sore from that little stunt.’ Jack glared at her.

  ‘I told you,’ Cleo tutted, ‘it only lasts for fifteen minutes – and it’s not exactly subtle. Once it’s over, everyone in town will be looking in our direction. David said it was a weapon of last resort – something to screw up the electronic eyes of any government officers that might be after us and give us a chance to get under cover.’

  ‘Well, after what happened on the Embankment I bet COBRA is watching us right now.’ Jack peered at the cell phone curiously. ‘So how does it shut down the system? Electronic attack?’

  ‘Viral,’ Cleo said. ‘It locates itself via GPS, then communicates directly with the CCTV computer network and ruins all data transmission for cameras within two miles of the signal. After fifteen minutes the signal dies, but the missing footage can’t be retrieved. They won’t know what hit them.’

  ‘What happens when they find the phone?’ Jack asked.

  Cleo shrugged. ‘They won’t. The phone self-destructs at the end of the fifteen minutes. Five grams of RDX, apparently – enough to disintegrate the phone without damaging its surroundings.’

  Jack raised his eyebrows, impressed at the power of the innocuous looking phone.

  Cleo grinned. ‘Ready to go?’ Jack returned the smile eagerly.

  ‘Well then let’s rock!’ She pushed her thumb into the side of the phone. The screen lit up, showing a fifteen-minute counter that immediately began counting downward. Cleo pushed the throttle down and the sleek motorboat raced toward the pier, reaching it in seconds. Jack clambered onto the floating dock and turning back to give Cleo a hand. She nestled the phone in the corner of the cockpit then pushed the throttle gently forward. The engine burbled gently and began pushing the sleek motorboat downstream at a quick walking pace. Cleo ran down the length of the boat and leapt nimbly across onto the pier, refusing Jack’s proffered arm. They paused for a moment and watched the wood-lined pleasure boat as it motored gently away downstream, the time capsule left snug in one corner of the luxury seats.

  ‘Well, gets get a move on,’ Cleo declared. ‘We need to get out of sight while the CCTV cameras are still blind.’

  Jack grinned. David had chosen well the day he took her on as an assistant. They raced up the pier toward the southern bank of the Thames, Jack snatching a glance at the Shard building as it towered above them. He was suddenly aware of the CCTV cameras scattered here and there, peering down from buildings and street lights. He could only hope that Cleo was correct and that his brother had somehow ensured that the ceaseless monitors could be outsmarted. It was only a few minutes before they were at the base of the shining edifice. Without breaking her stride, Cleo led them through glittering glass doors into a spacious, light-filled lobby. Pulling a card from her pocket, she swiped it through a device against one wall and an elevator door opened smoothly by her side. Wordlessly they entered, both conscious that the signal from the cell phone might be reactivated at any moment, turning their escape into a dangerous dead-end. The doors of the lift finally slid shut and they both heaved a sigh of relief. Cleo swiped the card again and the lift thrust itself upward. Jack felt his stomach hang heavy for a moment as the acceleration began and after a few moments his ears popped from the change in pressure as they rocketed upward.

  ‘So, where are we going?’ Jack asked. ‘And where on earth did you get that card from?’

  Cleo smiled. ‘I have a friend that lives here. He gave me the swipe card a while ago. He lets me keep some clothes here and use one of the spare bedrooms whenever I feel like it.’

  ‘Nice friend.’ Jack said shortly. He was surprised to find himself resenting their mysterious benefactor.

  ‘He’s all right.’ Cleo declared diffidently. ‘Bit of a Francophile. Spends every summer in the south of France eating cheese and drinking wine. Which means that his London apartment is the perfect hideout.’ The elevator decelerated and Jack felt a moment of disconcerting weightlessness before the doors slid open smoothly to reveal a marble-filled foyer. One wall was floor to ceiling glass, giving Jack an excellent view over the southern side of London.

  ‘Come on,’ Cleo instructed, then strode confidently across to a solid double door on the far side of the marble chamber. There was an electronic beep as Cleo entered a code into a discreet keypad and then she was pushing the door open with her shoulder, beckoning him forward with her other hand. Jack followed her through into the apartment. A moment later the door shut behind them and they were sealed off from the prying eyes of the outside world. Jack paused in the vestibule, almost overwhelmed by the luxurious opulence before him. The main room of the apartment stretched away along the full breadth of the building, with wall-to-wall windows on one side showing off the city to its best advantage. A spiral staircase in one corner led to a second level balcony, while whole suits of armour and vast tapestries were hung here and there along the wall.

  ‘Pretty nice, wouldn�
�t you say?’ Cleo asked.

  The furniture was a mixture of elegant antiques, soft and welcoming and ultramodern utilitarian steel. Together, they created a pleasing contrast and an atmosphere of relaxed content underwritten by near-limitless wealth.

  ‘He’s in finance,’ Cleo explained.

  ‘Humph,’ Jack grunted. The expense of the place was confronting. He tried hard to push down the sudden jealousy he felt toward their absent host.

  ‘Well,’ Cleo pushed past him deeper into the apartment. ‘There’s separate bathrooms and showers upstairs and a bar over there. Help yourself. It’s too risky to go out on the streets again until 10 or 11 o’clock. I say we rest up now and in a couple of hours settle down and try to figure out the next step of the puzzle. We have one clue left.’ She started toward the staircase.

  ‘Cleo,’ Jack called out her name awkwardly. She stopped and looked at him curiously.

  He was not quite sure what he wanted to say and so instead he stared at her awkwardly.

  ‘Thank you,’ he declared eventually. ‘I couldn’t have made it this far without you.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s all.’

  A smile spread across Cleo’s face and her face seemed to glow.

  ‘That’s all right, Jack.’ She looked at him for a moment before her smile transformed into a mischievous grin. ‘I know you’re right. Without me you wouldn’t have made it out of Aldershot!’ Jack grinned as she teased him.

  ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me…’ she bowed gracefully, then turned and paced up the staircase like a puma. ‘I’m going to go have a long, relaxing and civilised bath,’ she declared as she vanished upward.

  Jack watched her go, trying not to laugh. He was still cautious about fully trusting Cleo, but he did like her and he was confident that she would remain around until the final clue was discovered. Until then, he knew treachery would be pointless – and was therefore an irrelevant worry. Instead, he put her out of his mind and gazed out across the city, walking along the glass wall of the apartment and looking out at the streets of the capital spread out before him. The Thames unrolled like a dark ribbon, cut here and there by bridges. Iconic buildings sat like tiny toys – the Millennium Dome, London Bridge, the Tower of London and even the London Eye – each one bathed in the brilliant afternoon sun. Eventually Jack turned away from the view and walked back to the staircase toward several doorways. Opening one at random Jack discovered a cavernous library lined with books. He gave himself a few moments to scan the bookshelves and was impressed by the breadth of reading and interests covered. Whoever the owner of this place was, his library looked very readable – and was clearly based on interest, not mere display.