by E. M. DAVEY
“They didn’t exactly see 1940 coming,” said C. “Or the German offensive in 1914. Or Bismarck’s invasion come to that. If Napoleon did have a copy, he lost it. He must have – or why invade Russia?”
“Don’t march on Moscow, Bernard Montgomery’s first rule of war,” muttered Milne.
“As far we can ascertain, nobody’s had enough of the Disciplina Etrusca to master full-on augury since the thirties,” said Parr. “And then it was only by pot luck – obtaining a ‘master copy’, so to speak.”
“So who’s been chucking lightning bolts at my donor? The Chinese?”
Again Parr saw it: a piercing avarice, shining through that shell of bonhomie. Milne had taken on board knowledge that would shake the world view of most men to its foundations and barely broken stride.
“It’s a possibility,” she said. “One of their operatives got her hooks into Wolsey a couple of years back. She almost certainly obtained enough text to do … what Hess could do.”
“Of course, we can’t rule out that the bolt that killed him was sheer coincidence,” said C.
“Lightning doesn’t strike twice,” said Milne, leaping to his feet and pacing the flat. “Tell me about this blasted journalist then. Whatever his name was, Jake-something. What became of him?”
“He’s in Thailand,” said Parr. “As is our awol spy, for that matter. They think they’re in hiding, but we know exactly where they are.”
“In any case, I wouldn’t worry about Wolsey,” said C. “The man’s a total shambles. Recovering alcoholic, scatty as hell.”
“He does have three qualities that are rather problematic though,” said Parr. “Number one, he abides by a very strict code of principles.”
“So do we all, I should think,” Milne interjected.
“But we are guided solely by the national interest, are we not?” said C. “The greatest good for the British people. This Jake Wolsey is more of a … how shall I put this?”
“A sandal-wearing, limp-wristed pinko?” suggested Milne.
“Your language, not mine – but yes, spot on. Second problem, he’s a talented historian. Covered all sorts of historical topics for his newspaper, before he began going down the slippery slope, that is. And third problem. The sandal-wearing, limp-wristed pinko is rather gifted at spotting things other people miss. He found in a matter of weeks what the best and brightest in our organisation had sought for decades without success.”
“Why haven’t you just bumped them off?” said Milne.
Parr took a sip of tea and winced at the tannin; the teabag floated like a collapsing yacht. “We’re attempting a more cerebral approach, sir. Wolsey’s going nowhere. The hope is that we might turn his gifts to our advantage.”
They discussed the case a while longer, then C asked Parr to leave so he could discuss an unconnected matter.
“Best of British luck to you,” said Milne. “Evelyn, isn’t it?”
As Parr departed she heard him begin, “Now then, what about all this unpleasantness in Sierra Leone …”
7
The Peace of Amiens; the electrocution of Michael Beloff. They had to be linked to the arrival of this sinister little delivery. Jake smoothed the stubble on his cheeks while he took it all in. Could Beloff have dispatched the cards? Is that why he was struck dead? Beloff might have found cuttings of Jake’s reportage from two years back, made the connection to that painting of his. Yet Beloff was not an intelligence agency … and if bloody Beloff could find him here MI6 would have rubbed him out months ago.
But somebody knew he was there.
It was by very accurately assessing their chances that the Romans conceived and carried out their plan to dominate the world.
Jake searched ‘Napoleon and Polybius’ on his smartphone and a Google Books entry filled the screen.
Bonaparte eagerly read works of history, particularly Polybius. Fascinated by the ancients, he read every book on Greece and Rome he could find, and became increasingly impressed by the Caesars.
When Jake Googled ‘Napoleon and ancient Rome’, the search engine was overloaded with hits. With growing consternation he read how after seizing power Napoleon had styled himself ‘First Consul’, mirroring the consuls who once ruled the Roman Republic. How, like Augustus, he had next proclaimed himself emperor. At his coronation Napoleon had been crowned with a laurel wreath like the Caesars of old, clad in a robe the Tyrian purple of Imperial Rome. Notre Dame was decorated like a Roman temple, and as their standards the soldiers bore bronze eagles, like those that Roman legionaries had once planted around the Mediterranean. Jake pressed his palms into his eyes, hard. Last time he had engaged with this madness he’d nearly been killed. His career was ended, he was a hunted man. He shouldn’t be Googling this stuff at all – Jenny would have had a fit. She’d insisted the Etruscan in Napoleon’s scroll was coincidence, a classical flourish by an artist with an overactive imagination, perhaps. And yet some macabre fascination drew him back.
A nameless dread was in Jake’s stomach as he typed, ‘Napoleon and lightning’. His finger hovered over search.
“What is it, Jake?” Chloë peered at the cards.
“Nothing much,” he mumbled. “Just a load of random stuff about Napoleon.”
“Weird.” Her arm trailed around his shoulders like a creeper as she tried to glance at his phone. “Hey! Why won’t you let me see? Too busy emailing all your other girlfriends?”
“Don’t be silly.”
If Jake told her the truth she’d think he was insane. Maybe he was insane.
“Don’t look stressed out, man,” said Chloë. Have a beer. You’re on a tropical beach, Jesus.”
“For the millionth time, I don’t drink. It doesn’t agree with me.”
Only when Chloë wandered off did he press search. As page after page of hits filled the screen he felt real fright for the first time: beginning in his gut, rising up the back of his throat.
This was Napoleon after putting the Austrians to the sword in 1800:
We have struck here like lightning. Great events are about to take place.
Next, a line from a French propaganda sheet that is thought to have been authored by Bonaparte himself.
Napoleon flies like lightning and strikes like a thunderbolt.
A third quote hit Jake between the eyes. It was 1814, the war was lost, and Napoleon’s regime stared into oblivion. And he had told his marshals:
The sacred fire is extinct.
Yet it was all so circumstantial. And the conclusion that presented itself couldn’t be true. Because if Napoleon had possessed the mastery of lightning prophecy, why did he lose a battle?
Had Jenny sent him this stuff? Was Jenny looking for it again? She could hardly post this material on the message board – sending it here would be safer. It had to be her. That meant he was trapped here, waiting for more. Jake held his head in his hands and a few hairs came away in his fingers. He was definitely looking a bit thinner on top.
*
Later that day Jake checked out the Huffington Post. At the request of the Sierra Leonean president, Britain was sending in the troops. The United Kingdom would restore order until Ebola was under control; an advance party of Royal Marines was already ashore. The template was Tony Blair’s crushing of the West Side Boys in 1997: a humanitarian intervention, in the land of blood diamonds. Union Jacks were being paraded through Freetown by the locals, a red carpet for the former colonial power.
In an indefinable way this story nagged at him too.
8
Eleanor Thompson studied her friend down an expanse of Kensington dinner table. His name was Jacob Serval, and there was something leonine about him. The rugged bearing, the auburn stubble. Serval looked hard and he was harder than he looked: if he was a lion, it was one of the scarred old campaigners of the veldt, battle-worn but dangerous. However his poise – elegant, indolent, one arm draped across the table – more recalled the domestic cat. He looked fantastic in that white shirt, several b
uttons open to reveal a bronzed chest and a virile explosion of hair. Thompson was a married woman, yet she felt a sordid shiver of lust as she took in a man she could never have. Serval was brooding about K2 again, evidently. Oh, how she wished he’d never set foot on that infernal mountain.
Earlier that evening Serval had been chatting with ease to Fiona, a blonde creature her husband knew from university. Fiona was captivated by him – hair flicks, all the works – and Thompson hoped Serval would reciprocate, might find something worth pursuing in life again. But soon he’d lost interest, staring out of the window while her husband droned on about the London property market. Occasionally Serval would incline his head and smile, as if to say, fascinating, really, how very interesting. But Thompson knew he was replaying what happened on that bloody mountain – and how swiftly everything had fallen apart.
Jacob Serval was once the up-and-coming explorer in Britain. Armed with only an iron resolve, he had walked the length of Siberia, departing from the Urals in March and emerging in Kamchatka before winter set in, gaunt and wounded but alive. It was one of the last great feats of exploration. With his dashing looks and aristocratic connections, media interest had come easily. A trek to the source of the Amazon had followed; then two years ago he had tackled K2. With him in the Himalayas was that foolish Australian boy who would be his downfall. The kid had masked altitude sickness during the ascent, desperate to make it to the top. He began dying before Serval’s eyes. They were too high, no descent could be fast enough to save him. So the Australian begged Serval to continue without him, to summit for them both.
Carrying on was meant to be Serval’s tribute to his partner, but the papers didn’t see it that way. When it emerged he had abandoned a dying man for the summit, Serval went from the dashing young thing of British exploration to a callous careerist. The sponsorship dried up, the expeditions petered out. And now he had that look about him. The look of the hunted. The man was barely recognisable.
Only Thompson was wrong – Serval wasn’t back on K2 at all. He was thinking about the man whose life he’d ended the previous night.
MI6 had first encountered Serval in a pub near his Kensington bachelor pad a few months after K2, wearing a tatty polo shirt, drinking alone on a weekday afternoon. The meeting was by chance, but at once the recruiting officer knew he was in the presence of an individual who was as hard as steel and could move at any level of British society – both qualities the Secret Intelligence Services had ample use for. He had been trained up in counter-surveillance and the art of violence, then seconded to a team at the forefront of the organisation’s realignment under the new government. No longer was MI6 to be concerned solely with gathering information. It was undergoing a swing of the pendulum back towards the role it had during the Second World War: an organisation also charged with engineering desirable results by covert means.
And so to last night’s murder.
For a rabid Anglophobe, the Sierra Leonean foreign minister certainly enjoyed the finer things west London had to offer. A plump but energetic man, Frederick Simpson Turay was in the capital on one of his spending sprees when his file was passed to Serval. The ‘bump’ Serval crafted went like a dream. One of Turay’s vices was a taste for fast cars, and he had hired an Aston Martin DB7 for his stay. So Serval had acquired a 1964 DB5 from the government’s car collection: Bond’s ride, he noted, relishing the grim little irony. Serval tailgated his target into the carpark of The Dorchester and pulled up next to him, complimenting Turay on his taste in matters automotive. There was a further ‘chance encounter’ in the hotel bar; they got chatting about cars; Serval bought the politician a drink.
Several single malts later the conversation moved on to high-class prostitutes and the three grams of cocaine Serval had obtained from MI6’s ‘drugs and thugs’ desk. They relocated to Turay’s suite to await the appearance of two non-existent hookers. But Turay did not know the cocaine was 99.7% pure. It was soapy and hard to cut, the chandelier light reflected green and violet in its suds as Serval cut up two gargantuan lines. Nor did Turay notice when the Englishman blew out through his banknote instead of sniffing in, obliterating his own powder.
According to European Union guidance the fatal dose for cocaine is 1.2 grams, although in some individuals death occurs at considerably lower levels. And in the event it wasn’t necessary to force him – Turay blew his own head off willingly. He was dead by cardiac arrest within the hour. Serval slipped away; the Met swiftly confirmed they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the death; drug users were warned to be on guard for a very pure batch of cocaine.
This was the reason for Serval’s catatonia at the dinner party. There were grounds for the assassination: Turay had been blocking the British intervention in Sierra Leone. Liquidating him would enable British soldiers and doctors to save many people. But that didn’t lessen Serval’s desolation that evening. His actions, his hands, his artful plan, had ended another man’s life. He had never killed before.
Serval necked half a glass of St Emilion and helped himself to more. He wouldn’t find any plonk this decent out in Sierra Leone, that was for sure. For new orders had come through. And he was flying out to Freetown the next morning …
9
MI6 had messed up. The beautiful boy (his rather splendid name was Alexander Coppock-Davoli) may have joined The Firm after Jenny’s departure, but the spymasters had overlooked the fact that his vetting took place while she still worked there. That, and her photographic memory. Two years after passing him in a corridor on the way out of Vauxhall Cross, and she had recognised him instantly.
As per the plan, Jenny left a coded message on the website to warn Jake that MI6 were on to them. Then she planned her route out of Thailand. The aromatherapy practitioner from Leeds had been rumbled, so Jenny considered the remaining two identities in her possession. Jamila Ahmed, a Brummie mother-of-one, was the first. The UK passport Jenny’s GCHQ contact had created before his arrest contained a convincing array of stamps from Pakistan and one from Saudi Arabia; he had erased any trace of their creation from MI6’s files. Jenny could keep the contact lenses in and fake tan would do the rest. Or there was Frances Dunlop, the flame-haired Scottish lawyer who had plied her trade in Bangkok for two years now, on paper, at least. An easier disguise to pull together in a rush. Jenny assembled her shopping list: smart clothes, proper shoes, glasses, wig. Plus make up – she needed to be paler. And at Bangkok’s MBK Centre you can find almost anything.
The key to avoiding man-hunters is random behaviour, so Jenny caught a tuk-tuk towards the mall, got off at a busy intersection and took a motorbike taxi back the way she had come. She hopped on a second motorbike taxi, hopped off and rode the Skytrain the last two stops.
A European took an interest from the far side of the carriage. Middle-aged, wispy brown hair, pointy nose; rather like a scarecrow. Male attention wasn’t unusual for Jenny, but to be on the safe side she extended a foot just before the two sets of sliding doors shut so that hers stayed open, but not his. She nipped off the carriage before he could alight and the train pulled away. (An old trick, but a good one.)
Alec McCabe spoke into his wrist. “She’s got off, too fast for me to follow.”
“Damn it!” Frank Davis was astride a motorbike half a mile away. “GCHQ, can you assist?”
In Cheltenham three of the UK’s top computer geeks monitored CCTV cameras controlled by the Thai police.
“It’ll take a moment,” said GCHQ. “These systems are just arcane …”
“I’m approaching the station,” said Davis. “Where did she head next?”
Back in the West Country the jabbering had risen to a crescendo.
*
Once the biggest mall in Asia, the MBK Centre has since embraced a trajectory of shabby decline. The towering metallic box was fed by walkways down which tourists journeyed towards commercial nirvana. Jenny surfed between them, walking with illogical slowness. If she had a tail, he would be detached from
the flow. At an internet café she bought a plane ticket to Israel, then she began perusing clothes stalls. From an upmarket shop she selected two trouser suits, three shirts and a charcoal skirt; at an optician she bought a display pair of horn-rimmed spectacles that lent her a librarian’s mien. Finally she headed towards ground level, leaving a trail of radiation with each tread of her left foot; a trail that vibrated invisibly behind her like breadcrumbs threaded through a forest of people.
Six months previously, Coppock-Davoli had let himself into Jenny’s apartment and injected a microgram of polonium 210 into the heel of each pair of shoes he could find. This was the radioactive element that killed the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London, laced in his tea. But polonium produces only alpha particles, and even a sheet of paper placed between isotope and body will prevent harm. That was why Litvinenko’s killers had been able to fly all the way from Moscow in close contact with the poison before eliminating him. MI6 could follow her every movement with radiographic scintillators and the rate of decay told them when she had been at a spot with atomic accuracy, just as the Met retraced Litvinenko’s last footsteps around London. Davis and Co had been playing Hansel and Gretel all around Bangkok ever since; only by this expedient had a small team kept up with an operative of Jenny’s guile. Then Beloff was killed, Coppock-Davoli got spotted and Parr ordered that Jenny’s radioactive leash be replaced by something more corporeal.
“Got her,” shouted GCHQ. “She went into a shopping centre called Mahboonkrong.” There was a murmur in the background. “MBK for short. How fast can you get there?”
“I can see it now,” Davis shouted into the blare of horns.
“Me too,” panted Alexander Coppock-Davoli. “I’m approaching by foot from the north.”