The Napoleon Complex

by E. M. DAVEY

  A sharp inhalation.

  That graffiti wasn’t some random squiggle. It was Arabic.

  A translation website offered up a single word in English. Short, offensive and rather like the name of the Danish king Canute. Jake snorted. But still, he was making progress – Jenny was somewhere in the Middle East. An impressive bit of intuition, he reckoned. An ancient city in the Middle East where Christians felt safe walking the street. Well, that last bit rounded it down nowadays. Another flash of inspiration: Cairo, the Coptic Quarter! But ‘Coptic Cairo and ian Hos’ drew another blank in the search engine. He stared at the six letters, willing them to yield. The second word could be ‘hostel’. But what about the first? It was a real life crossword. And crosswords were Jake’s thing, he could do this!

  When he stopped thinking about it the answer came. Christian Hostel. But there was no such establishment in Coptic Cairo. And a quick image search showed he was wrong completely – Coptic Cairo was hewn of grey stone, not yellow. Jake stared at the priest, resentful of the nonchalance in his stride.

  Where are you?

  Come to think of it, there was a Greek Quarter in Istanbul too. But Turkey wasn’t an Arabic-speaking country, which made the graffiti out of place. By association, the word ‘Armenia’ popped into his mind. He searched for images of an Armenian priest.

  “Yes!”

  Jake’s shout alerted a Chinese tourist on the far side of the café. The priest Jenny had photographed wasn’t Greek at all – he was Armenian, there was no doubt. But that only deepened the mystery, for they didn’t speak Arabic in Armenia either. Where else? In which ancient city could Christians practise freely, where Arabic was spoken with Roman letters on the signs – and an Armenian diaspora in residence too? Jake’s chuckle, when it came, was long and dry. Jenny was being held where Christianity began. He was looking at a photograph of Jerusalem.

  He stopped laughing.

  Mr Beloff was struck dead in the garden of his second home near the Wailing Wall yesterday evening.

  Now Jake’s searches became more urgent. Google Maps revealed an Armenian Quarter in the Old City; Jake switched to Street View and went exploring. But the alleyway wasn’t there. The stone was similar, the architecture, the feel of the place. Yet the flying buttress and security fence were nowhere to be seen. Jake slumped onto the desk, staring at the six letters.

  Armenian Hostel.

  It had to be! With trembling fingers Jake searched for the words, coasting upward on a sense of rising glory. But there was no Armenian Hostel in Jerusalem.

  ian Hos.

  Three vowels, three consonants, mocking Jake from the screen. What other institution might a priest be leaving? Suddenly – halleluiah, glory be! – the word resolved itself before Jake’s eyes.

  Hospice.

  There was an Armenian Hospice in the Old City.

  It stood on the Way of Sorrows, down which Christ bore his cross before the crucifixion. Jake switched to Street View and there it all was. The alleyway with its medieval flagstones, the flying buttress, which he now saw adjoined the Church of the Condemnation. And a fifteen-foot high fence, glinting with razor wire and CCTV cameras. Armed with only a photograph he had pinpointed a single spot on the five hundred million square kilometres of planet earth.

  18

  “What do you mean, he’s disappeared?” Parr had been in Bangkok for an hour and already things were deteriorating.

  “He just wandered off last night,” said Chloë down the line from Koh Phan Ngan. “I don’t know where he is.”

  Davis stared at the speakerphone. “Hopeless,” he mouthed.

  Parr had assembled her team in a secure speech room at the modernist British Embassy in Bangkok. Alexander Coppock-Davoli fiddled with his Glastonbury wristband. Alec McCabe – the nascent Etruscanologist – observed the crisis with the detached amusement of a veteran. The Queen Mother looked on in portrait form with a toothy smile, as if she alone knew the answers.

  “We nearly had him with the opium,” said Chloë. “He was enjoying it for sure. Then he announced he needed some air – and that was the last I saw of him.”

  “You were out of it too, weren’t you, pet?” said Davis.

  “That’s enough, Frank,” said Parr. “Wolsey was hardly going to try the stuff if Chloë didn’t, was he?”

  “I took my eye off the ball,” said Chloë. “I’m sorry.”

  “What about his trail?” asked Parr.

  “He left barefoot.”

  “Right, so he was out of it, plain and simple,” said McCabe. “Gone for a wander somewhere and passed out.”

  “Maybe he’s drowned,” said Davis hopefully.

  “He took his backpack,” said Chloë.

  “So he did rumble you,” growled Davis. “You must’ve given the game away while you were out of your tree.”

  “That’s enough, Frank,” Parr snapped. “Chloë’s made a lot of sacrifices on this job. She did well to string him along this long. Wolsey may be a bit shambolic, but as you of all people should know, he’s got a good eye. A rather dangerous characteristic, as my predecessor put it.”

  “He must have worked out about the shoes,” muttered McCabe.

  “I think he was just wasted, to be honest,” said Chloë.

  “What’s the latest on Frobisher?” asked Parr.

  Her trail had led to the airport; but radiation could hardly be tracked through thin air.

  “Good news,” Coppock-Davoli chipped in. “She uploaded a photograph to that website we’re monitoring.”

  “Photograph of what?”

  “A street in Jerusalem,” replied Coppock-Davoli. “We worked out where it was taken through the EXIF data stored on the …”

  “I do know how to geo-locate a photo,” interrupted Parr.

  “No harm in a bit of youthful enthusiasm, eh?” said Davis.

  “The question is,” mused McCabe, folding one leg over the other, “does Wolsey know how to do it?”

  “With Wolsey’s level of technical proficiency?” Parr replied. “I doubt it. He could no more extract EXIF data from a photograph than lay a golden egg.”

  “Could he work it out from the picture, though?”

  “Almost impossible, surely?” said Coppock-Davoli.

  “I wouldn’t put it past him,” said Parr. “Not if he’s got his thinking cap screwed on again.”

  “What now?” asked Davis.

  “Chloë stays on Koh Phan Ngan to look for Wolsey. He might be lying dead in the jungle for all we know. I’m more concerned about Frobisher – she’s considerably more compos mentis. So the rest of us are going to Jerusalem to say a rather forthright hello to this mysterious vagrant and his taxi driver chum.”

  McCabe tapped at his computer. “A Thai Airlines flight to Ben Gurion leaves in two hours.”

  Parr sighed. “Back the way I came it is then. I do too many air miles …”

  Not far away, a Bangkok Airways flight from the Gulf of Thailand touched down at Suvarnabhumi Airport. A security guard scanned Jake’s body – he was relieved and a little surprised the device didn’t beep. But an alarming thought occurred to him, and he emptied his backpack onto the floor of a cubicle in the gents to begin a fingertip search. He hovered over a photograph of himself aged nineteen on the back of a pick-up truck in Guatemala. Suntanned, bog brush hair, ridiculously childlike. It was one of a handful he’d snatched from his flat before fleeing the UK. Jake stared deeply into his own eyes: a boy who had no idea what was coming. A boy would meet a girl called Jenny and fall in love with her. A girl who would break his heart.

  His father’s feet protruded from the pile, but Jake couldn’t bring himself to look at the next photograph down. It was two years since he’d seen his parents. He decided to jettison the camera they’d given him for his thirtieth birthday – it would be easy to stow a tracking device inside it. Another minor crumb of sadness sprinkled onto a life turned upside down by the British Secret Service. Finally he examined the backpack.
>
  There was a lump in the material.

  Hard yet with a bit of give, like a packet of compacted sand. Jake shook his head in exasperation. Had it always been there? It didn’t feel like a bug. But there was nothing else for it: he cut open the material with a pair of nail scissors. A bag of white powder fell into his hands.

  Jake’s heart was racing.

  Heroin, probably, or maybe cocaine. Jake flushed the packet down the toilet and washed his hands. Again he was overcome by MI6’s malice – this little insurance policy could have seen him a resident at the Bangkok Hilton for life. Executed, even. And what was this fetish for illegal drugs?

  A Thai Airways flight to Israel departed in two hours’ time. Nice airline. But at short notice it cost a thousand dollars; a Turkish Airlines flight shortly after was half the cost. Jake wrestled with the dilemma. Every hour might be crucial. But his funds were nearly exhausted, and running out of money completely would not improve matters. Besides, he could use the extra time to better become the person in his passport.

  It would have been most unfortunate for Jake to have shared a flight with the very people who were hunting him. But his choice to fly Turkish only postponed the inevitable. They were heading to the same place; there would be an encounter. It was written.

  19

  “You know you’re off the beaten track when the women are all wandering around naked,” observed Serval.

  Captain Andrew Bracknell of the Royal Anglian Regiment glanced at his passenger and smiled. They’d been driving for two hours and it was the first hint of warmth from the gruff intelligence man.

  “They certainly do things differently out here,” Bracknell admitted. He was young and rosy-cheeked, Afghan Hound thin.

  “She’s quite fit, though,” contributed a private in the back of the Snatch Land Rover.

  The subject of discussion was a young woman wearing only a loincloth, squatting by the roadside with a bottle of freshly tapped palm wine. They were lurching down an ochre track through a mess of tousled scrub: palm trees and bush, everything very green, the far-off mountains humps of pistachio against the sky. Huts that had been torched during the current conflict stood alongside burned out buildings of yesteryear, invaded by foliage.

  A naked boy burst from the bush and ran alongside. “Ba-boo-nay! Ba-boo-nay!”

  Captain Bracknell wound down the window and merrily took up the chant, the squaddies joined in too, and the vehicle rocked on its axles with the cries.

  “Ba-boo-nay! Ba-boo-nay!”

  The boy looked momentarily perplexed before smiling again. Running and clapping, re-joining the chorus. A snort of laughter erupted from their interpreter’s nostrils.

  “What is it, Suleiman?” asked Bracknell. “Do share …”

  “Baboonay. Is meaning, ‘white man’.” The translator surrendered to hysterics.

  “So we’ve all been chanting, ‘white man, white man’?” said the other squaddie. “That is brilliant.”

  “Oh crikey,” said Bracknell. “Bit awkward.”

  Serval looked irritated. “Is this tin can going to keep us in one piece?” He rapped on the door. “Didn’t have the best of reputations in Afghanistan.”

  “Oh, we’re safe enough,” said Bracknell. “She can take a bit of small arms fire – and they aren’t using IEDs yet, thank god.”

  “Hear, hear,” muttered one of the privates darkly.

  “Anyway, the militias cleared off from this district last week,” said Bracknell. “Only wish I could say the same of where we’re headed.”

  Serval’s mind drifted to a shack bar in Freetown last night; the booming laugh of its owner when he’d voiced his destination.

  You are going to the south? They will eat you there, man. They will eat you up …

  Serval had been briefed the previous morning. The British Army – supported from the air, battle-hardened after years of war – had smashed the militias with ridiculous ease. The warring sides had dissolved into the bush; Sierra Leone was now a de facto possession of the United Kingdom. But a Liberian warlord was launching cross-border raids into a mining region called Kambui, where the diamonds came from and the coltan that went into people’s mobile phones. This had interrupted the flow of minerals; Serval’s job was to solve the problem. It must be important, for the call came from C himself.

  “Why don’t we send the SAS into Liberia?” Serval had asked. “Wipe them all out.”

  “Liberia’s in the US sphere of influence, Sierra Leone’s ours,” C replied. “We don’t want to irritate the Yanks, basically.”

  Serval laughed. “Sphere of influence? What century is this?”

  “It’s not a laughing matter, Jacob. We know that we’re in Sierra Leone to do good, but a few US senators are getting uppity. ‘Neo-colonialism’ and all that nonsense.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Serval. “The locals are over the moon we’re here – it’s embarrassing, frankly. And neo-colonialism? They can talk …”

  “Well, there it is. The warlord is called Jason Bourne – named himself after some movie character I gather. Rather an unpleasant man. He’s currently deep inside Sierra Leone with five hundred drug-addled crazies under his command. They’re camped in a wildlife sanctuary called Tiwai Island, on the River Moa. I want you to go and talk to him. It’s remote down there – thick jungle, exotic wildlife and what not. I thought the job would be up your street.”

  “Why don’t we just bomb this island sky high?”

  “Because another Liberian militia would spring up in the vacuum to carry on the plunder. Sierra Leone needs these resources if it’s ever to build itself up again. Bourne’s the regional strongman – so let’s make him one of ours. Turn him into a bulwark against other war-bands.”

  “And how exactly am I supposed to do that?”

  “Bribery? I don’t know, use your brains, that’s why we’re doing the persuading. Talk to him. Work out what makes him tick. Try and ascertain if he’s being encouraged by Washington, for a start. Give him whatever he wants, make whatever assurances he wants. Just get him on side.”

  “There’s another,” said one of the privates, hauling Serval back to the present.

  An old man squatted in the dust. His cheek had been amputated in the recent past, a mass of volcanic black scab in its place. Serval was surprised to find he had punched the car door, a reflex action.

  “And another,” said the second squaddie. “Bloody hell, look at that guy.”

  A man with no hands stood by the track, his wrists swaddled in T-shirts and a chicken nestled in one forearm. As the Land Rover passed he waved a stump in greeting.

  “Absolutely appalling,” muttered Captain Bracknell. “It doesn’t matter how often you see it …”

  As the bush grew denser signs of habitation dwindled. They passed a rusty water tank rising from the foliage like a hot air balloon, a battered WWF sign urging the locals to leave the chimpanzees alone.

  They are our friends …

  “What brings a spook to a shithole like this then, mate?” asked one of the squaddies.

  “Don’t be a silly arse, Daniels,” said Bracknell.

  Serval made no reply, his soft hair bouncing as the Land Rover picked its way along. He couldn’t pinpoint when the landscape changed into proper jungle. But when he wound the window down the rainforest was steaming and screeching with life. This was a place where every species – plant, mammal, reptile or insect – brandished spikes or fangs or deadly venom. Nature at war with itself. The explorer shifted in his seat, keen to get out there. A Chinook flew low overhead; they passed a British Army encampment, the tents a glimpse of order against the chaos of the jungle. Finally they reached the mud hut village where Bracknell had established his field headquarters. A heavy machine gun was emplaced at the far side of the settlement and soldiers played cricket on the red earth, a perversion of an English village scene.

  “Welcome to the front line,” said Bracknell.

  “Where’s this island?”
said Serval.

  “Just over there. You want to take a look now?”

  The sky was turning a richer blue.

  “I’ll have a quick squizz, if it’s all the same to you. Before we lose the light.”

  Bracknell led him through a clearing of waist-level scrub. Bamboo was rampant, each shaft as thick as the arm of a heavy-weight boxer. Serval glimpsed water through the shafts, green and steady-flowing.

  “We need to be a bit careful now, they’re not averse to taking pot shots.” Bracknell winked. “Bloody awful aim though.”

  They stole through the scrub to another machine gun post. Bare-chested squaddies sprawled in a trench, all gleaming muscle and tribal tattoos. A copy of the Mirror was handed around and (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? droned from a stereo. Fifty feet of water separated them from Tiwai Island.

  “How big is it?” asked Serval.

  “Six clicks long by three wide,” Bracknell replied. “It used to be a wildlife reserve before all this kicked off. Chimps and pygmy hippos. Everything eaten now, of course.”

  They will eat you up.

  The trees on the island were fifty feet tall and mushrooming with foliage, like a palisade of molten candles. Palms leaned close enough to the surface of the water to drink from it and a dugout canoe was roped up on the beach. The island was very still.

  “Have a closer look if you want,” said Bracknell, handing him binoculars. “But, er – only if you’ve got a strong stomach.”

  Serval peered through the glasses. What he had taken to be rope was in fact human entrails, draped across the boat. And perched on its bow, eyes swivelled in different directions, was a severed head. It was Wally, whom he had sat next to on the plane from Heathrow.

  20

  Frank Davis was not predisposed to subtlety, and this was not a hostage situation – it wouldn’t be a disaster if Frobisher ended up dead. So he had opted to go in hard. He intended to kill every one of the operatives holding Frobisher captive, and he was looking forward to this immensely. He sat in a blacked-out Jeep with Coppock-Davoli and McCabe. They wore masks, UV goggles and Israeli police uniforms which were bespoke reproductions down to the bootlaces. Each man carried a silenced MP5 machine pistol.