by E. M. DAVEY
Evelyn Parr, senior MI6 case officer, stared out over Horse Guards Parade. From this high-up corner of the Foreign Office she could see right into Number 11 Downing Street. Whiteboards were visible on the lower floors, though curtains obscured the view into the Chancellor’s flat. Commonwealth flags fluttered along St James’s Park and Parr noted the film across the windows that would keep the glass together in a bombing.
“They call this the ‘Naughty Room’.” When C smiled it was only the skin moving, not the muscles underneath. “It’s where ambassadors from abroad await a ticking off when they’ve been summoned by the Foreign Secretary.”
The chamber had been designed to impose the might of Great Britain on lesser nations, and no expense had been spared on the antique furniture and embossed wallpaper. A captured Enigma machine was a reminder of past glories.
“Like waiting to see the headmaster,” said Parr, with a faint smile of her own.
Sir Dennis Amaoko had just been installed as the new Chief of MI6. He was the same age as Parr, although Ghanaian genes and an ascetic lifestyle left him looking half that. C wore a linen suit and brogues from Jermyn Street. There was something python-like about his head: the way it arched down from his collar, the smoothness of the skin. He adjusted his wire-frame spectacles and loosed another skin-deep smile.
“Feeling nervous?” C’s accent would have graced the breakfast table at Windsor.
“A bit,” Parr admitted. “I’ve never met a Prime Minister.”
“Well, don’t be. Everything you did was in the national interest. Victor’s a rational man, he’ll see that.”
There was a cough in the doorway, and there was the Foreign Secretary, Nigel Edmonds. New Foreign Secretary, new C, new Prime Minister. Parr glanced out of the window once more. The changing of the guard.
“Are we ready to go?” said Edmonds.
An order, not a question: the politician didn’t like being kept out of the loop like this. The spies were supposed to be his foot soldiers, and it peeved him that their secrets were only for the ears of his boss. Perhaps escorting them to Number 10 would claw back some authority. As they left, Parr glanced at the mural in the corridor – Britannia Pacificatrix, by Goetze. Britannia stood before a classical colonnade, lording it over supplicating allies. Even when it was painted the image had been wishful thinking, for the sun had already begun to set.
A second mural guarded the door to the Foreign Secretary’s room, and when Parr saw it her heart fluttered.
A hooded man, a scroll. The word, Silence.
Out on Downing Street she saw tourists peering through the gates, and she let silvery hair fall in front of her face. With her silver trouser suit too she resembled some sort of armour-plated warrior of the service, hardened and implacable. The world’s most famous front door opened and amazingly there was the Prime Minister himself, pulling them over the threshold in a flurry of handshakes and how-do-you-dos.
Victor Milne was the consummate post-modern politician, in that amid this age of PR-coached smoothies he was perceived to be himself. He made no secret of a privileged upbringing (St Paul’s, then Cambridge), indeed he wore it as a badge of honour. Falling in the sea may have done for Kinnock, but Milne’s stumble as he took the stage in the final election debate had merely sealed the national affection. Her Majesty’s Opposition was in a terrible mess, and Milne had romped home with the biggest majority his party had enjoyed for decades.
“Don’t just stand there gawping, come on in,” he blustered. “Have a peek around the old bachelor pad.”
The Prime Minister led them upstairs, past portraits of Churchill and Lord Palmerston, and into his private quarters.
“All frightfully formal down below,” he explained. “Let me tell you, up here’s where the real, straining every sinew graft of keeping Great Britain PLC ticking over goes on.”
The flat was stark in its modernity, but dirty plates and empty wine bottles jostled for space on the aluminium surfaces. As the Prime Minister rampaged around the open plan kitchen Parr felt a sudden warmth for him. His brown hair was unfashionably cut and despite his diminutive height he had a vague bigness without being either fat or muscular. Sloping shoulders contributed to a shambling gait, yet the whole was somehow likeable, and as Milne made tea Parr noted with professional interest how the mysteries of charisma did their work on her. He gestured to a sofa and banged mugs down on the coffee table – he’d forgotten to remove the teabags and there was an oxbow lake of tea in her saucer. The Prime Minister was a Victorianist; she spotted a study of Kipling on his bookshelf. Next to the tome was Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys.
Milne dismissed his Foreign Secretary.
“Right then,” he said once the fuming minister had departed. “Who wants to tell me what the Dickens has been going on in my Secret Service?”
The year before the election, MI6 had been gripped by a scandal. Three officers were killed – the first known fatalities on duty in the history of the service – and a fourth had vanished. A computer wizard from the Secret Intelligence Service’s listening post GCHQ was about to face trial for breaching the Official Secrets Act over the affair; much to the fury of the Guardian, this would be held behind closed doors. Fleet Street had dubbed the crisis ‘Indiana Jones-gate’, after another newspaper claimed the deaths were related to an archaeological matter. The journalist who had broken the stories had disappeared too – there was initial speculation he’d been killed. But his family weren’t making enough of a fuss for that, and neither was the father of the missing spook. So after a while the nationals decided the pair must have simply ‘eloped together’. Now Milne was to get his explanation.
C booted up a laptop. “Watch this,” he said. “And – brace yourself, Prime Minister.”
The footage was black and white; grit and solar flares pebble-dashed the celluloid. They saw a country garden, men wearing Oxford bags. Everything shook as some adjustment was made to the tripod.
“Where are we?” asked Milne.
“Mytchett Place in Surrey,” said Parr. “It was an MI6 safe house during the war.”
“Are you ready then, old man?” said a voice off-camera. Amusement lingered in the Received Pronunciation accent. “Let’s see what you can do.”
A figure wandered out in front of the lens, instantly recognisable with his caterpillar eyebrows and thickset skull.
“Rudolf Hess!” exclaimed Milne. “Hitler’s number two. That would make this – what, 1941 or something? Just after the peace flight.”
C nodded. “Watch this.”
Hess began talking not in German but some other tongue, weird beyond comprehension. It veritably bristled with clicks and pops. His eyes rolled upwards in his head; the garden seemed to darken; there was a furious explosion and the picture over-exposed in a flash of white.
“Bloody hell,” exclaimed the voice behind the camera. “I say, is everybody all right?”
When the image reformed the camera lay on its side. Blades of grass protruded in front of the lens, fluttering and out of focus. Smoke rose on the far side of the garden. The whites of Hess’s eyes were bloody, but his expression was triumphant. A hand came into shot and the film ended.
“That,” said Evelyn Parr, “was Hitler’s deputy showing our predecessors how to summon a bolt of lightning.”
4
“Why the rush?” said Frank Davis.
An MI6 assassin. Six foot three and built like a piece of agricultural machinery, with a spot of white in otherwise steel-grey hair. He seemed to have acquired a limp. Jenny grabbed a stone Buddha from a stall and threw it at him with considerable violence. But Davis ducked the airborne deity and wagged a finger at her.
“You oughtn’t to have done that, love,” he said. “Bad karma.”
The boy caught up with them, no longer so beautiful. His lip was bleeding, one cheek was grazed and he was missing a shoe. He grabbed Jenny by the biceps, but she sank her teeth into his wrist as hard as she could, where sensitive nerves l
ie near the surface. With a shriek he let go and she kicked him in the groin, pushing him backwards. She ducked underneath Davis’s lunge, then she was sprinting again.
A tuk-tuk idled at the far end of Khao San Road and the driver sat up in in his cab. But Jenny was fifty paces away and the boy was in already in pursuit. He nearly had her, she wasn’t going to make it.
A tramp was rummaging in cardboard boxes by the side of the street. He leaned in further and casually extended a leg, kicking out at a handcart of deep-fried insects sold to tourists for drunken consumption. This rolled into the path of the boy who collided with it at twenty miles per hour, becoming one with the object: a ball of white and pink that span through space before hitting the ground with a heart-rending crash. An insectoid rain was launched across the pavement, showering two ladyboys who’d been imperiously sauntering down the street. Scorpions entered handbags. Crickets sought cleavages. Their screams were atrocious and they set upon the boy as he lay dazed on the tarmac: pointed toe to the head and stiletto on a flailing hand. Davis batted the first ladyboy in the face with the back of his fist. The second he grabbed by the throat. Thais descended upon the hooligans, engorged with thoughts of retribution. As the fracas became demented Jenny collapsed into the tuk-tuk which lurched away with a clatter of two-stroke engine, front wheel briefly airborne, spiriting the fugitive away into the megalopolis.
5
A feeling of genuine alarm came over Jake as he handled the envelope, like the first shivers that foreshadow tropical illness. And sure enough, it was his name: printed on a white label in small capitals.
“Who gave this to you?” he asked.
“Someone leave it by the bar.” A massive grin, then the messenger was off.
This was serious. This might mean he had to leave, tonight. Jake tore open the envelope; four neat white cards slid into his palm, each bearing a quotation. No letter accompanied the cards, no note of the sender, but they had been prepared with obvious care. Jake’s mouth was a perfect oval as he studied the first card from every angle.
“I believe in luck. But a wise man neglects nothing which helps his destiny.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
He looked at the next.
“Great men seldom fail in perilous enterprises. Is it because they have good luck that they become great? No, being great they have mastered luck.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
Both quotes reminded him of something the Roman historian Polybius had written in the second century BC: it was by very accurately assessing their chances that the Romans conceived and carried out their plan to dominate the world. And Jake of all people knew how Rome was able to calculate its odds with such keenness.
The third also bore a quote from Napoleon.
“At Amiens I truly believed the Fates of France, Europe and myself had been fixed.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
There was one more card, and Jake swallowed before turning it over.
“I am the instrument of Providence. She will utilise me as long as I achieve her dreams. After that she will shatter me like a glass.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
Fate. Destiny. Providence. The belief in it pulsed through the Little Corporal’s every word.
6
Parr told the Prime Minister everything. How in 1933, German archaeologists discovered a tomb in northern Italy that held the remains of a prophet of the ancient Etruscans, whose civilisation was the precursor to Rome. How it also contained several scrolls, sealed into jars with beeswax. How these proved to be the Disciplina Etrusca, an Etruscan guide to divining the future through the interpretation of bolts of lightning. How Nazi scientists tested the lore and found that it actually worked. How this power had helped the Third Reich excel at diplomatic brinksmanship in the 1930s, enabling Hitler to unleash his unstoppable blitzkrieg. Lightning war.
Finally Parr described how this had happened before: for it was Etruscan augury that had enabled the cancerous growth of ancient Rome, an expansion that only ceased after the wholesale burning of pagan texts by the Emperor Constantine, who had first made Christianity the Roman state religion. But Constantine had reckoned without the duplicity of Eusebius, a scholar and closet pagan. Eusebius had hidden copies of the Disciplina throughout the Old World, leaving clues in his writings to their location. Almost two millennia later Jake Wolsey had followed them.
One might have expected Milne to have laughed Parr from the room. But he was privy to knowledge of how the last case handler had died at the height of the scandal – struck by lightning on the Tower of London. Milne sensed intuitively that what he had just witnessed was real, and he understood then the expression that one’s skin crawls.
Parr explained that Hess had become disillusioned with Nazi Germany and fled to Britain with the Disciplina Etrusca, hiding it in the Tower where he was held prisoner. He had proven to the Secret Service that he could conjure lightning bolts, but without the scroll itself, prophecy was beyond MI6. For seventy years British agents had hunted the Disciplina without success. And then this Jake Wolsey had stumbled upon a declassified document citing Churchill’s interest in the ‘ancient Etruscan matter’. The whole thing had damn near been blown into the open.
It was a few minutes until the politician collected himself. “What’s the science behind all this?”
“You might have heard of dark matter?” said Parr.
“Yes. No. Not really. I’m a man of letters.”
“Dark matter is what stops the universe collapsing in on itself due to the weight of gravity,” she said. “A theoretical concept until recently, when it was proved by a scientist at CERN.”
“Now a dead scientist,” interjected C.
“What he detected was a universe-wide grid made of tiny filaments of energy. This network acts as a super-fluid, conducting waves faster than speed of light. It developed sentience, functioning as a celestial supercomputer capable of predicting the movement of every atom in existence.”
“Developed sentience?” said Milne. “I’m sorry, but how and why would that happen?”
“In our world, things tend towards disorder,” said Parr. “For example, if I dropped this mug it would smash into smithereens and tea would go everywhere. Chunks of porcelain and pools of liquid don’t leap up and form themselves into a cup of tea. But at the level of the atom and the quark, the reverse is true. Particles tend to order themselves. Now, imagine a near-infinity of filaments, arranged on a matrix the size of the universe – with thirteen billion years to develop. This CERN guy reckoned the emergence of sentience – of consciousness – was a certainty.”
“Foretelling the fates of men was a …” C looked troubled. “A game that it played. And this was the prescience Bronze Age Etruscan augurs learned to tap into. It spoke in energy, its own mother element. In bolts of lightning, to be precise.”
“Why were Hess’s eyes all bloody?” asked Milne. “The man looked absolutely monstrous.”
“It seems to be a side-effect of communing with the Network,” said C. “The capillaries burst.”
Prime Minister Victor Milne sat for a long time, chin on his hand like Rodin’s The Thinker.
He was remembering the Scottish Referendum.
There had been lightning over Westminster that night too, but curiously not a drop of rain. This country he loved had already thrown away the largest empire the world had ever known; that vote could so easily have shorn it of another third of its size on top. Milne recalled how powerless he’d felt after a shock poll put the nationalists ahead for the first time. Each day as he crossed Westminster Bridge, Big Ben had seemed smaller. Diminished.
Never again.
And on the day of the EU Referendum there was lightning over Parliament again. History was turning. An idea had just occurred to him – he would see how far he could run with it.
“Look at this, Prime Minister,” said C.
It was CCTV footage. Jenny crouched beneath the Gherkin, leafing through a scroll; Jake set fire to the manuscript and it was consumed.
“A c
orner of paper survived,” said C.
“Papyrus,” interjected Parr.
“We carbon dated it to 800 BC – the same age as the bones in northern Italy.”
“So the journalist actually found it,” said Milne, and it was possible to observe something beady in his eye, something appraising. “He found a … an instruction manual for predicting the future – and it’s lost.”
“There is also this.”
C passed Milne the Telegraph’s story about the Peace of Amiens. The politician spotted the Etruscan at once.
“Does this mean another copy’s out there? And Boney had it? The Little Corporal?” He guffawed, colour returning to his face. “Saucy French rapscallions! Always something up their sleeve.”
“We don’t know for sure,” said C. “The scroll Napoleon’s carrying might have been a figment of the painter’s imagination.”
“It says in the article that the words on the scroll don’t correspond to any known Etruscan inscription,” said Milne.
“That’s true,” said Parr. “We’ve checked.”
“Nonetheless …” Milne leaned inward, the ghost of a smile on his face. “You can’t deny Napoleon cut quite a dash in his day.” He paused. “Well, come on then, why did you do him in?”
C’s face was neutral. “Do who in, Prime Minister?”
“Michael Beloff, the guy who bought the painting. He was a donor of ours, you know. I sat next to him at the Lord Mayor’s banquet this year, for Pete’s sake.”
“That, um, that – ah.” C rubbed his nose. “That wasn’t us, Prime Minister.”
Milne tugged at his hair. “Don’t hold out on me, why kill the man?”
“We didn’t do it, sir,” repeated Parr.
“Then who the hell did kill him?”
“I’m afraid we don’t know,” said C.
Milne’s gaze flitted between the two spooks before settling on Napoleon. “The French? Kept hold of it since Bonaparte’s day?”