by E. M. DAVEY
“Good lad,” said Davis.
“We can’t get eyes inside,” GCHQ advised.
“Just tell us if she leaves and we’ll do the rest.” Davis produced a handheld electronic device; red and yellow bars played across the screen, as if measuring the volume of a piano recital. “She was right here, about twenty minutes ago.”
When he dashed past the internet café the coloured lines diminished.
“Hold on, hold it.” Davis retraced his steps and ran inside. “She went into this arcade place.”
The bars grew frenzied by the eighth computer. A teenager looked up wordlessly from his game.
“Go away,” said Davis.
The Thai did not move; Davis grabbed his chair and simply rolled him across the room before tapping at the keyboard.
“I’ve just emailed you from the computer she was using,” he told GCHQ. “Find out what she was up to, eh?”
“I’ve picked up her trail,” Coppock-Davoli interjected. “She was on the ground floor less than a minute ago. Went into a clothes shop. Then she … wait.” A flame of excitement had entered his voice. “She – she’s in the ladies toilets.”
Davis joined him outside the door. “Ready for this? I’ll let you be the one to take her down.”
The long handsome face was flushed. “Legend.”
A minute passed; no Jenny. Two minutes. Three minutes. Davis checked his GPS and his jaw dropped.
“What is it?” asked Coppock-Davoli.
“These toilets are on an exterior wall.”
Davis kicked open the door of the lavatory and stepped inside, ignoring the squeals of outrage. A window was propped open and beyond lay the street. Coppock-Davoli was speechless.
“Now we’ll both be in the shit,” said Davis.
Half a mile away Jenny placed her purchases in the boot of a taxi with studied nonchalance. She never knew how close she’d been to them – but that was the point of relentless evasive tactics. It was operatives whose standards dropped that got caught, she reflected with a private smile. Those who let their guard down, even for an instant.
The driver closed the boot. “Where you go miss?”
Before Jenny could answer she felt a needle enter her backside and in one swooping lurch her vision melted away like celluloid exposed to flame.
10
Full Moon Party: for two decades now the most savage night of debauchery in Asia. Jake gripped the side of the dragon boat as it closed in on the headland, scudding across the waves. A black bar of land lay ahead, the night above it awash with light and turbulent with the rumble of far-off sound systems. Fatalities were commonplace at Full Moon Party, and Jake hadn’t fancied it. But Chloë was quite insistent. They rounded the headland and he saw Haad Rin beach: a mile long, thirty thousand ravers strewn along it already. Hundreds of torches had been lit along the surf and a palisade of orange flickered over the sand.
Like Austerlitz.
Napoleon’s most famous victory. On the eve of battle Bonaparte had visited the bivouacs of his ordinary troops. Spontaneously his men had lit torches, illuminating the emperor’s path through the encampment. As Jake neared the shore he saw those flames as the Russian czar might have from the opposite hill and the bass rolling off the beach became cannon fire. The booming grew louder as they neared, cannonball and canister shot, bombarding his ears. But it was no longer cannon fire.
It was thunder.
“What do we have to do with Fate? Politics is Fate.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte
Three more quotations had arrived that morning. The same embossed card, same expensive-looking typography. On reading the first Jake was consumed by coughing, the taste of bile rancid in his throat. Thoughts of fate never left him as it was: for he already knew there was such a thing as an actual future that could be divined via bolts of lightning. And if this was so, how could there be free will? Jake was bound to his rudderless path, as surely as Oedipus must kill his own father. Thinking of it hurt his brain.
Jake tore through the deck like a crack addict at his stash. The next card bore a quotation from Bonaparte’s confidant, Joseph Fouché:
“Napoleon believed himself the son of destiny.”
And the third was from Pasquier, one of his ministers:
“In 1806, Napoleon reached the peak of his power and glory. But nothing could protect it from dangers brought about by his excessive confidence in his star.”
Napoleon’s ‘star’. Throughout his career, the emperor had constantly referred to it. What form did this star take exactly? What did he mean by this?
Jake felt a cool touch on his arm; Chloë’s eyes gleamed orange in the approaching torchlight, like some kind of wildcat. When she kissed him he tasted rum on her mouth, some foul Thai liquor rumoured to contain amphetamines. She’d been pressing the stuff on him all evening.
No thanks.
“You ready for this?” she said.
Jake could make out individual ravers, pagan figures with their body paint and bestial prances along the sand. “Not even in the slightest,” he said.
With a soft thunk the hull of the boat met sand and Chloë leapt over the side, pulling him after her. Jake glanced at his shins as they crashed through the knee-deep surf.
Ooush.
When he and Jenny first arrived on Koh Phan Ngan a fisherman had taken them to a deserted island a few miles offshore, a glade of palms one metre above sea level at its highest. She had loved him too then, he was certain she did; hand in hand they’d sprinted through the surf, screaming in exuberance. It was without doubt the happiest moment of his life. As he glanced down now, surf erupting up his shins so they resembled Eskimo boots, the memory came to him. Only while that was a thing of beauty, this felt sordid and wrong: like a juju priest’s mockery of what had gone before.
Why did he still love Jenny?
She was beautiful, but she didn’t know it. She was kind. She had a sense of humour; she was tough and strong and resourceful. And for some reason she had loved him back, just as fiercely. Jake had called her My One, as though of the three billion females on the planet, this was the woman fate had intended for him. He had genuinely believed it too, until she left him and belatedly he realised the universe was playing a different game. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone: the truest phrase in the English language.
Heartbreak was like a stone he had swallowed, and still the gravity of it reverberated throughout his body with its numbness. This was the opposite of the lightness he’d once felt sprinting through the surf – but now it had been forced down his throat he had no choice but to digest it, though digestion might take years and Jake feared it might yet prove indigestible. The moments when he forgot were like a splash of spring sunshine at the end of bitter winter, only for the memory of it to come gusting in once more. Cold and hard and mean and thin: the bare branches of love’s ending.
Chloë was whirling, throwing wild shapes with her body and stamping with bare feet. Every set of male eyes was upon her and she revelled in the attention, her eyes always sliding back to Jake, that wicked smile spreading across her perfect teeth which made him know that later her snakelike legs would writhe around him.
Come on, old man. You haven’t got it that bad.
Yet there was something wrong when he slept with her. It felt – and Jake was aware this was freaky – as if he was wearing some kind of mechanical suit that drove his movements, the touching and the thrusting. Like one of those wheelchairs which stands its user up at the touch of a button. Going through the motions. Yet oddly, his lacklustre performances seemed to drive Chloë to ecstasy.
She kissed him roughly. “Later on, when we get back, things will be absolutely wild – I promise you that. Just for tonight, why don’t you let go of whatever it is you’re always thinking about. You know … when you’re with me, but not quite with me.”
Chloë kissed him again, threw herself into the rave, and suddenly Jake understood why she’d packed in her job for this
sybaritic existence. Life was for the living. The music took him by the shoulders too and finally he was dancing, letting the rhythm carry him, submitting to the Dionysiac orgy.
While all the strangeness of Jake’s inner journey melted away on a tide of music and beats, the woman he still loved was being spirited out of Thailand, and world events were taking shape.
11
Frank Davis systematically led the MI6 psychiatrist through all seventy-one kills he had made as an SAS sniper in Iraq and Afghanistan. He recalled every detail: which part of the anatomy he had shot; how hairy a certain chest was; whether the person stopped moving right away or wriggled about for a bit. When Davis described the very worst things he would sigh and the hoods of his eyelids would flicker up. But his eyebrows barely moved.
“Do any of your killings trouble you?” asked the psychiatrist.
“None.” Davis was chewing gum. “No way.”
“Did your father ever hit you?”
The assassin’s head retracted, but he carried on chewing. “Never. He was a good man.”
“Have you ever hesitated before killing someone?”
That threw him. “Once, yeah.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I was in Basra. This Iraqi fella was crying for his mum and that. Most of them do to be fair, but this guy was ‘please-mummying’ all over the shop.”
“What did you do?”
“I gave him a little bit of time to pull himself together, like.”
“And?”
Davis’s upper lip rose over his gums, so they momentarily resembled dentures.
“And I shot him in the head.”
Victor Milne hit pause, freezing Davis mid-sneer. “I’ve seen enough,” he said. “The man’s an absolute psychopath.”
The Prime Minister was sitting with Evelyn Parr and C in a secure speech room at Vauxhall Cross, forty feet below the level of the Thames. It was the very chamber where two years previously Parr had first briefed Jenny on the case.
“Frank took out six Chinese secret agents singlehandedly in Ethiopia,” said C. “He’s the best we’ve got in the, ahem, ‘How To Kill People Department’.”
“We can’t replace him,” said Parr.
“He’s a nasty piece of work,” said Milne, waggling Davis’s file. “Just imagine this on the front page of tomorrow’s Times. It’s my watch he’s offing people on, remember.”
“He’s a single dad,” offered Parr. “Nine-year-old daughter. Apparently he dotes on her – collects her from school every day. All the other mums love him.”
Milne massaged his forehead and groaned.
C nodded to the screen. “He goes on to tell our psychiatrist that his life’s dream is to have a son. He is human, you know. He just happens to do a very difficult job.”
“Oh-very-well-then.” Milne’s words came in a rush. “Next up?”
“I really must protest about all this,” C grumbled. “It’s just not the way we do things here. Choice of personnel should be up to us – it’s most unusual for a Prime Minister to take such a hands-on approach. As a matter of fact, the last to do so was Blair, in the run up to Iraq.”
“And that didn’t exactly end well,” said Parr.
“To give Tony his dues, he did at least recognise that Britain can’t carry on being supine,” said Milne. “Not if it wants to retain any last vestige of Great Power status. Do you respect my judgement, Dennis?”
There was only one answer C could give. “Of course I do.”
“And what’s the top priority for our national security – the Islamic State, Putin, or finding this wretched Disciplina thingy?”
“The Disciplina,” said Parr. “Unquestionably.”
“Therefore I’d be neglecting my duties if I wasn’t across every aspect of the operation. That includes the composition of your team.”
C’s neck hung with python languor over his collar. Checkmate.
“What does this ‘Alec McCabe’ bring to the party?” asked Milne, opening the next file.
The photograph showed a gaunt man with wispy brown hair and a pointy nose.
“He’s our Etruscan expert,” said Parr. “He read classics at Oxford – apparently Greek and Latin grammar’s a good grounding for the language – and he’s got lots of field experience. North Sudan, Georgia, Venezuela.”
When Milne saw the photo on the next file he merely said, “Crikey. She’s not bad …”
He moved on to Coppock-Davoli’s dossier. “Why take the youngster?”
“He’s bright and he’s very fit,” said Parr. “Plus he’s malleable. We don’t want another Jenny Frobisher on our hands, do we?”
“Oh good lord no,” said Milne.
C produced a laptop. “Talking of which, you wanted to see the CCTV of Frobisher being taken by the Chinese …”
“Let it roll,” said Milne with schoolboy relish.
The images were high resolution. Jenny sashayed towards a taxi with an array of shopping bags; a figure descended on her from behind and she collapsed into his embrace. As the driver pulled away he looked right into the camera.
“Han Chinese, we’re ninety-nine percent sure,” said C.
“But Bangkok has a ginormous Chinese diaspora,” said Milne. “Does it not?”
“GCHQ’s been picking up chatter from Beijing too,” said Parr. “The termite’s nest is stirring, all right.”
“Can we see the face of the chap who needles her?”
“This is the only CCTV camera,” said Parr. “And his back’s to the camera the whole time.”
When Milne frowned there was something of the dowager Queen Victoria about him.
“Pull up that footage of Frobisher giving our gang the shake,” he said. “You know, before this charming Davis character started duffing up transvestites.”
C loaded grainy shots of the Khao San Road.
“Hold it there,” said Milne.
At once Coppock-Davoli was caught in full flight, his body a zig-zag that juddered backward and forward between two frames. The insect-seller’s handcart was frozen in its emergence and the vagrant’s right boot was extended, kicking out at the wagon.
“Let’s have a look at that chap,” said Milne, jabbing at the tramp with a cone-shaped finger. “Who’s he, eh? You tell me that.”
C remained very still.
“Go back to the other clip,” said Milne.
They were at the shopping centre again; Jenny wilted into her assailant’s arms.
“Same bloke?” he demanded.
“Could be,” Parr admitted. “Similar shoulders.”
Milne went back to Khao San Road, clicking away in frustration. “How does one get a closer look on this infernal contraption?”
Parr zoomed in on the plane of cheekbone discernible through matted dreadlocks.
“I don’t think he’s Chinese,” said Milne. “Too dark-skinned. He could be an Arab. Or a black chap, even. I think we’re looking at our adversary. How did he know to be there, though? That’s the question.”
“There’s something else,” said Parr. “When Frobisher was in the shopping centre she posted something on a car website. Some nonsense about the new Hyundai.”
“A message to Wolsey?”
“It has to be.”
A thought occurred to the Prime Minister. “Why didn’t we lift Beloff before someone zapped him? And his blasted painting, come to think of it?”
“There was no need,” said C. “We got a close look at the painting as it went through Heathrow after the auction. We had an academic examine the imagery in microscopic detail. We checked Napoleon’s scroll against every other Etruscan inscription in existence in an attempt to identify it. We even X-rayed the canvas to see if anything was hidden under the outer layers of paint. Everything drew a blank.”
“Beloff was unaware of his painting’s significance at first,” said Parr. “He was a Napoleon enthusiast – no interest in the Etruscans whatsoever. But something changed. Overnight he became fasc
inated with them. Googling non-stop, pestering academics, ordering books left, right and centre.”
“And a week later he was killed,” said C.
“So he found something,” said Milne. “He must have. Something in the painting, something we missed. But what?”
“We don’t know,” said Parr.
“I think you should be out there yourself,” said Milne. “To keep an eye on things personally.”
“She’ll be on a flight to Bangkok this evening,” said C.
“Perfect,” said Milne. “When it comes to manoeuvring our pawns we ought to take a leaf out of Boney’s book, no?”
“You’ve lost me,” said Parr.
“You know – his hat on the field being worth forty thousand men and all that.” A puckish look crept across the Prime Minister’s face. “But what, pray tell, was he keeping under that hat?”
12
Sitting next to Jacob Serval on the flight to Sierra Leone was a rotund Englishman in his sixties named Wally. He was ruddy, bearded and sported a safari suit. He was also extremely drunk and claimed to be an arms dealer.
Some genius had built the airport on the far side of the estuary from Freetown, and the Foreign Office considered not one method of crossing to be safe. You could go by aging Soviet helicopter, but they fell out of the sky. You could go by boat, but they sank (and there was no coastguard). You could go by hovercraft, but these burst into flames and then sank. Or – and this was the most dangerous route of all – you could go by road. The child in Serval had not died yet: he went by hovercraft.
Freetown by dawn was a scene from some grim fantasy novel. The mountains loomed from the mist in a world cast a pale grey, rearing from the Atlantic like a sea monster on its haunches. And the slums were its scales, a mass of wood and corrugated iron that teetered over the water on flamingo-leg stilts before swarming up the mountainside. A helicopter flitted along the coast with a halo suspended underneath, scanning for minerals even amid the chaos of a failing state.
Serval was no stranger to Africa, but he could not escape a feeling of disquiet at being in Sierra Leone now. The previous civil war had been diabolically nightmarish (the eating of human hearts; the trailing of intestines across the road) and already there were reports of the same. Freetown still bore signs of the last conflict: ruined buildings; a permanent UN court to mete out punishment for war criminals; a collection of amputees on their pathetic hand tricycles. Yet for all the ravages of Ebola, it struck him that this was a joyful city. School children in immaculate school uniform and bonnets toddled along; sound systems pounded out dancehall at maximum decibels. A flamboyant police officer with a brilliant smile directed traffic like the conductor of the London Philharmonic. Down Town was laid out in grid formation, but any semblance of order ended there. The streets teemed with illicit money changers and people selling SIM cards. Women with plates of fish or bananas on their heads bustled through the crowds with a roll of the hips. Hand-painted signs were everywhere, ranging from the futile – No street hawkers, No piss here – to the inexplicable: De oldies be de goodies.