by E. M. DAVEY
Jake glanced at a more elderly specimen. “But we could get a car for half that …”
“And do you want to break down halfway across? Look, if you’re worried about the money, don’t be. There are always ways.”
He caught her eye but not her meaning. Mo refused to accompany them; Jake had the sense of standing on the last toehold of safety before swimming a gulf of sharks. He started towards the driver’s door.
“What do you think you’re doing?” said Jenny. “I drive.”
He summoned jauntiness and strolled to the other side.
It was the indifference in her voice that hurt him, the presumption he would obey – as though he were a teenage cash-handler at a toll booth. He couldn’t work out if it was hauteur by design, or worse: how she considered him now. They eased out of the terminus, through a roadblock manned by soldiers left slack-jawed at the sight of westerners entering Islamist territory. A tarmac road arrowed through a desert of kopjes that boiled with stone. Jake was reminded of Ethiopia, their drive through bandit territory two years back. This was infinitely more dangerous.
He mustered a grin. “Once more unto the breach.”
“We’ll be fine.”
She stamped on the accelerator and they roared into the jaws of the Islamist death cult.
*
No wisp of green, no glint of water. The desert was torn through by hernias of jagged red rock; it had a destructed, devastated beauty. The only signs of life were the Bedouin tents, but even these had an abandoned air, doors flapping listlessly in the desert shimmer. Jenny kept up a constant hundred miles per hour, the car bounding and skipping on its tyres; Jake let his eyes relax until the mountains became a single smudge of speed. He had the vision of a spectral army with Napoleon at its head, marching in the other direction to defeat in the Levant, as yet without mastery of the Book of Thunder.
Sir Neil’s diaries jiggled on his lap. Bonaparte was at Fontainebleau, saying his last goodbyes before the journey to the Mediterranean.
Napoleon was in the habit of receiving regularly The Moniteur and hearing everything that went on at Paris; he felt bitterly the sarcasms that appeared in the newspapers about himself. He gave away manuscripts etc. to different officers, and directed others to be transmitted to favourites.
“Wait a minute …” said Jake. “It says he ordered for ‘manuscripts’ to be transmitted to favourites.”
Jenny’s gaze darted from road to page and the car oscillated on its course. “What does it say next?”
In contrast with the treatment he had received from the Provisional Government of France, Napoleon spoke in grateful terms of the liberal disposition evinced towards him by the Ministers of HRH the Prince Regent, although he has always been the avowed enemy of the British nation.
“It almost reminds me of Hitler,” said Jake. “You know, that weird respect he had for the English throughout the war.”
And here was another parallel between the great monsters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Napoleon has frequently spoken to me of the invasion of England, and stated that he never intended to make the attempt without a superiority of fleet to protect the flotilla.
It presaged exactly Hitler’s stillborn invasion of Britain, foiled by the Hurricanes and Spitfires of the RAF. Jake stared from the window as the lifelessness flew by.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” he muttered.
They passed a few burned-out cars. Then it was a crucifixion, the victim reduced to no more than blackened fibres by the sun, stretched out across the frame.
“This is a horrible place,” said Jenny.
Jake retreated to the diaries.
Of Napoleon’s conveyance to Elba on a Royal Navy ship-of-the-line, Sir Neil had written:
The Russian and Prussian Commissioners accompanied the rest of the party on board the HMS Undaunted, but they quitted the ship before she weighed anchor, as their instructions did not allow of their proceeding further.
“So the only Allied commissioner who accompanied Napoleon to Elba was a Brit,” said Jake.
Two vehicles appeared in their rear-view mirror.
“Who are they?” said Jenny. “Can you get a proper look?”
One Toyota pickup truck, one BMW saloon, the black flag of ISIS fluttering madly from a passenger window. Through the pall of dust Jake glimpsed masked men.
“Oh Jesus, they’re jihadis. Holy crap, Jenny.”
She inched the speed higher and the truck fell back, but the BMW responded with a jerk of pace – then began drawing sickeningly closer. An assault rifle was dangled from the passenger window.
Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack!
Bullet holes danced across the windscreen and they ducked to avoid the fusillade. Jenny was steering blind and the car shimmied on its tyres. When she peered over the bonnet it was to see a burned-out oil tanker scissoring across the road, galloping to meet them. She pulled hard left. Jake was slammed against the door, head snapped to one side by the G-force. The Mercedes lurched off the road, and for five petrifying seconds it was on two wheels, flirting with letting go and launching itself into a roll.
They were on a knife-edge of gravity.
With a crunch the car was back on four wheels. The windscreen shattered, the cockpit became a gale; wind and sand and bits of stone whizzed into hair and eyes, and Jake gritted his teeth as shards of windscreen sliced his ear, his gums, an eyelid. The Mercedes still flung itself across the desert, redoubtable, noble as a chariot. But chunks of rock rent its underside in a cacophony of bangs and their speed fell away. The impact was audible above it all. Too late had the dust clouds thrown up behind them parted before the BMW. The oil tanker approached with vindictive speed and the driver hit the barrier at 120 miles per hour, compacting the saloon into a block of tangled metal. A cascade of steam and dust was launched into the air; the pickup rounded the barrier and set off across the desert, better suited to rough ground than the saloon.
Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack!
Wing mirror taken off, dashboard smashed to pieces, headrest pulped in a blizzard of foam. There was a terrifying bang, right under Jake’s feet. The back left wheel became an oblong and they began wobbling along at high speed.
“Blown tyre,” shouted Jenny.
Now sixty miles per hour, now fifty, now forty. Before them lay only desert – the nearest mountains were five miles distant. Still the car lost speed. Even if they made it to the ridge and lost the gunmen in the ravines the heat was a death sentence of its own. Now thirty miles per hour. Twenty-five.
“We’re goners,” said Jake. “We’ve had it for sure.”
“Be calm,” said Jenny. “Whatever happens next, we’re more likely to live if we keep our heads.”
As the stricken vehicle coasted to stationary, Jake turned to look at their would-be executioners. So he was looking right into the driver’s eyes when, apropos of nothing, the pickup exploded into a ball of billowing orange flame.
40
“Gosh, that was a bit exhilarating.” Victor Milne was on the edge of his seat and gripping the armrests. “Let’s watch it again.”
Once more the GCHQ operations room admired the crazed curve of the Mercedes as it hurtled across the desert; the impact of the BMW; the debris as it was catapulted over the tanker like spray on a harbour wall. The technician cut from the satellite feed to the Reaper drone’s camera. It was black and white footage, barren topography slipping silently beneath as the murderous device overhauled the two vehicles with ease. A corkscrew of smoke was visible as the Hellfire missile descended and the screen whited out.
As Jake and Jenny had begun their traverse of Islamic State territory, Milne was addressing the floor at Honda’s factory in Swindon.
“This country was once the factory of the world,” he cried. “And with the whopping new docks we’re making in the Thames? Having thrown off the shackles of the EU? With a workforce as brilliant as you lot? There’s no blooming reason
on earth it shouldn’t be so again.”
There was a murmur as Milne punched the air. He was the first politician since Thatcher to truly connect with blue-collar aspiration, with Essex Man. There was something of Disraeli in the one nation politics he espoused; in his opportunism too. Although unlike the Victorian statesman, ideology could be glimpsed behind the pragmatism. Then C’s message arrived and with masterful discretion his spinners wrapped up the visit.
The nearest place to monitor the action was GCHQ, and Milne was driven at high speed to that giant aluminium snail, curled up on the edge of the leafy Gloucestershire countryside with its antennae twitching. Now he watched rapt as two figures emerged from the Mercedes. (There was a crater where the pickup had been.) Jake lay on the ground, the heaving of his lungs visible from space.
“Do you know why I decided to get into politics?” asked Milne as Jenny removed the spare wheel from the boot.
“Go on,” said C.
“To prevent things getting broken.”
The spymaster prepared for a monologue.
“I’ll never forget something my uncle told me,” Milne began. “As he was carving the lamb, he said this. It’s just not good enough to turn out and vote every five years and spend the rest of the time twiddling your thumbs, while wretched bloody do-gooders set about wrecking the joint. You have to actually get out there and stop it happening.”
“And if the wheel’s already come off?”
Jenny’s repair was complete.
“Well, you put it back on again.”
Food arrived from Pizza Express, and Milne and C sat like old pals before the cup final as the Mercedes crossed the Suez Canal. The car stopped at a roadblock; policemen inspected the bullet holes; cash changed hands and they continued.
“Corruption,” said C. “Originally meaning, ‘rotten’. Such a good word for it, I’ve always thought.”
“Nations have their illnesses, as people do,” said Milne.
“A Napoleonic quotation, if I’m not much mistaken?”
That earned the politician’s most indulgent smile.
“And is Britain sickening in your opinion?” asked C.
“Oh, for more than two saecula, now.”
The spymaster frowned. “Saecula?”
“Sorry, classical education getting the better of me. It’s an Etruscan word. Two lifetimes.”
“Talking of sick nations, this Sierra Leone situation needs a decision.” C used his glasses as a conductor’s baton, emphasising each syllable. “Our man’s health will be failing. We really ought to get him out.”
“Not yet. The coltan raids have abated – this frightful Jason Bourne chap must be at least considering his proposal. Get him on side and we’ve sewn up half the country. Don’t let the clamour in the press bother you – the Telegraph just wants an excuse to knock up one of those fun hostage rescue graphics. You know, the ones with all the arrows and explosions and little cartoon helicopters.”
“Respectfully, Prime Minister, you’re not the one in a malarial latrine.”
Milne snorted. “Now, what’s the security situation in northern Nigeria?”
“Business as usual. Barbarians on the rampage, girls unable to go to school, beheadings all over the shop.”
“Can the Nigerian Army regain control?”
“Not with Ebola to contend with too,” said the spymaster.
“Great Britain has a responsibility in that part of the world,” sighed Milne. “It’s part of the Commonwealth, after all. I wonder, Dennis, I wonder.”
“What do you wonder, Prime Minister?”
A martial gleam had come into his eyes. “I wonder whether we shouldn’t have another little war of our own …”
41
Everything in Cairo acquired a golden aspect in the sunlight: monuments, streets, buildings, faces. It reminded Damien di Angelo of looking through yellow sunglasses, and only when the CIA man rose above the sprawl did the effect diminish. From the spire of a Downtown minaret, gold faded into the steel grey of a hundred thousand clapped-out Fiats. Di Angelo could discern the Pyramids of Giza through the haze – where Napoleon fought a battle, where he did not, in fact, shoot off the sphinx’s nose. The streets below him were a multitudinous drone of horns, arguing and mingling with each other; the city smelled musty, like an old cupboard in the summer.
Di Angelo was no longer infectious. He wore robes and a headscarf around his face and a latex callus mimicked the ‘prayer bump’ acquired by the devout through friction between forehead and prayer mat. Once again his disguise had been too good for Frobisher – and Wolsey was only interested in whatever the heck book he was reading.
That morning Frobisher had collected a package from some dive hotel on the Midan Talaat Harb. The receptionist had revealed the stamps were from Thailand: new documentation, di Angelo surmised. Frobisher confirmed this by purchasing a hijab and emerging, newly olive-skinned, from the Marriott Cairo.
Maryland’s decision came through in late afternoon as the targets were ambling about outside the Egyptian Museum.
Di Angelo had inveigled himself into a gaggle of old-timers playing draughts. Behind him the traffic ground around Tahrir Square, a few protesters straggled about. The museum itself was pink and foursquare, embellished with columns, and pharaohs and lions dotted the courtyard, like the concourse of a junkshop. Egypt had more of this stuff than it knew what to do with. Di Angelo watched children playing with foam pellet guns, dodging the rockets as they came arcing by.
A newspaper story came back to him.
EDGEWORTH – The family of a US soldier left brain damaged after he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq harbor fears his fate was completely avoidable.
Second Lieutenant Andy Carlson was injured four years ago in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad. But his father’s now revealed they were only ambushed after corrupt local police forewarned the insurgents …
Di Angelo realised he had closed his eyes. When he looked up Wolsey and Frobisher were still studying the upper floors, and the journalist pointed at an open window. Hell, if he didn’t know better he’d say they were casing the joint. Di Angelo stayed in position as the pair entered. Six CIA agents followed them into the building. At 7 pm Frobisher re-emerged, blending so perfectly with the sea of demure Egyptian women spilling from the museum that he nearly missed her.
Wolsey didn’t come out.
Di Angelo watched as the last museum-goers got evicted. The sun fell swiftly; the doors were locked; the windows of the museum were filled with darkness, segueing from orange into black. He smiled: it promised to be an interesting evening. The journalist was still inside.
*
After the theft of a £30m van Gogh from Cairo in 2010, it was decided that Egyptian museums should adopt new security protocols. One of these was the immediate reporting of alarms directly to the police chief of Cairo. And Babnouda Fanous was in for a very bad night’s sleep.
When he was awoken for the first time, Fanous did not hesitate. He was a Coptic Christian, which meant the blood of the pharaohs flowed through his veins – how he reviled those philistines who’d looted the Egyptian Museum after Mubarak’s downfall. But when he arrived, a dozen police cars already there, it was to learn of a false alarm. A laser had been tripped in the east wing, CCTV footage had been consulted (all the cameras were functional these days) and nobody could be seen. Everyone went home.
An hour later the alarm went off again; the dozen police cars and Babnouda Fanous returned. The same laser had been tripped, but the CCTV showed no intruder on the ground floor. One wag suggested it was Tutankhamun himself. Fanous guffawed, pointed out that King Tut was on the first floor, and they all went home again.
Fanous’s humour deserted him the third time it happened and he arrived at 4.30 am in a towering rage, dressed no longer in his police uniform, but tracksuit bottoms and an old shirt. The laser tripwire was misfiring again. That gallery contained nothing too valuable – a stone sarcophagus only a forkli
ft truck could remove and some pre-dynastic pottery – so Fanous ordered its alarm to be disabled. His son graduated from medical school the next morning and he didn’t want to look like crap in the photos.
As Fanous placed his head on the pillow for the third time, an unpleasant thought occurred to him. Wasn’t there access to the storerooms from that gallery? The police chief considered the dilemma. There was nothing priceless in the basement either. And besides, even if an intruder did get down there, hundreds of laser tripwires formed an invisible thicket between the basement and the nearest exit from the museum. Fanous fell asleep thinking how he would tell his friends that his eldest son was now a doctor. Perhaps he might become a surgeon one day. Or even move to Europe?
42
As Jake felt the form of a reed in the darkness he sensed the fall of a hammer onto a chisel more than two millennia ago. The angle of inflection, the ring of bronze on stone; the scent of dust and sweat on an artisan’s hand. A kinetic instant, frozen in granite, the author forgotten. A duckling, a vulture, a finger, a hand holding a stick and a seated man. This was hieroglyphic braille, though Jake could not know he was touching a word as old as civilisation.
Itja.
Thief.
Jake lit up his phone and the interior of the sarcophagus was illuminated pale blue, the hieroglyphs cast into dramatic relief. It was 5.30 am. Time to try again. On hands and knees he heaved the lid ajar, an Atlas beneath clouds of stone. But this time when he threw a paper ball from the coffin, he was greeted only by the rattle of paper onto marble. No longer was the museum transformed into noise and light.
He emerged into the gallery.
Cabinets of black and red pots lined the room and funerary urns were dotted about, each big enough to accommodate an adult male, leering faces contoured into the clay. As Jake padded through the room the exhilaration of the cat burglar was in him, a child’s thrill at treading in a forbidden place. A doorway led down to the cellars, wherein dwelt the mummy of Pakhar-en-Khonsu. The door was locked. The gargoyle on the nearest urn gurned at Jake through the gloom, urging him on. He took two steps backward and kicked the door in. A splintering noise, the shriek of old metal, the scent of brittle varnish flaking away. No alarm sounded, and he descended.