by E. M. DAVEY
C said nothing.
“The jewel in the crown,” Milne continued. “But to get her back, hypothetically speaking of course, my brinkmanship would have to exceed anything done by a statesman since – well, the thirties, I suppose. So we stake everything on Wolsey. On Africa and the Disciplina Etrusca. You must have someone else with a silver tongue who can go back to Freetown for us and finish the job?”
“Actually, yes,” C began.
But Milne’s mind was already running onto the next thing. “You’d better take me through what was discussed at today’s committee,” he said.
C detailed targets suggested for the first round of air strikes in Nigeria; the plight of fifteen British oil workers being held by the Islamists; intercepts of communications between worried Eurozone heads of state. Their allies, nominally.
“Ah, Europe,” said Milne. “What a shower. Thank the lord for the innate good sense of the British electorate. Do you know, ours was the first form of world government since the Roman Empire that actually worked. And incidentally, the denarius was Europe’s last effective single currency.”
C wondered for the first time whether the Prime Minister was clinically insane. But there was no turning back now – his best chance of avoiding The Hague was to see the damned thing through.
He decided on levity. “Well, let’s hope for a global coup d’état. With you playing the part of Queen Victoria perhaps, Prime Minister?”
“I did not usurp the crown.” Milne had executed another frightening change of mood; he was paraphrasing Napoleon and C knew what was coming. “I found it in the gutter. I picked it up with my sword. But it was the people of the Commonwealth who placed it on my head …”
72
Reach out and take it!
Stealth tactics, distraction, feints and intimidation; nothing was off-limits in this campaign of aggravated burglary. The monkey had been prowling around Jake’s tent in ever-decreasing circles as it plotted food raids. Now it stole along a branch to where a pomegranate quivered on a length of vine, where Jake had hung it to test the creature’s intelligence. The monkey yanked the creeper and judged it at the limit of its bodyweight. It sat on the branch, scheming away.
Go on!
Greed got the better of caution as the monkey reached for the creeper again. Suddenly a second monkey appeared from stage left, barrelling across the ground and leaping into the air to snatch the pomegranate like a slam dunking basketball player.
Jake heard Jenny turn a page in her tent.
He sighed, left his own tent and padded down a lightly wooded slope. Two zebra rested their necks against each other in an apparent act of love and their foal picked its way through the tree trunks with ballerina grace. He’d always assumed zebra were essentially horses with stripes, but up close he saw how unearthly their markings were, the untameable look in their eyes. These were beasts. How wonderful to be back in Africa. At the bottom of the slope Lake Tanganyika stretched before him: an inland sea of calmest pewter surrounded by hills that hummed with emerald. Wavelets lapped a spit of orange sand; it was a paradise, and he felt a stab of sympathy for John Speke, half-blinded when he reached this spot.
After landing in Dar-es-Salaam they had caught an internal flight to western Tanzania, completing in two short hours a journey that took Burton and Speke eight months of suffering. In Burton’s day, Kigoma was an Arab slaving settlement – now it was a town of single-story buildings scattered over steep hills. This was the wild west of Tanzania, where the only white faces were aid workers and two miles into the bush you could find mud huts and cottage gardens, families living much as they would have done in Burton’s day. Jake hired the most powerful motorbike he could find, an old 300cc KTM off roader, and they rode out to the forested campsite with its permanent tents. Here they would encounter few locals (and be invisible from space).
Across the water Jake could see the mountains of eastern Congo, black bastions whose severity was somehow suggestive of the land they guarded. He turned north, towards Burundi – there was fresh unrest in that ever-troubled state too.
“I know where it is!” Jenny’s voice carried through the trees.
She was sitting up in her tent, her eyes shining. Since arriving they had been scouring Burton’s published journals for a literary X marks the spot.
It’s a puzzle. And the words are the clues.
“I know where it is,” she repeated.
Burton had recorded his walk inland from the coast with a ‘compass traverse’, a linear diagram giving a description of the topography at mile intervals and a compass reading whenever obstacles forced a change in bearing. At his most northerly point on Lake Tanganyika there were coordinates and a symbol resembling an eye.
“The point where he turned back,” said Jenny. “And look at his journal entry for that day.”
Burton’s handwriting was minuscule, individual letters little more than a bump.
A gale appeared to be brewing in the north here – the place of storms. We landed at a steep ghaut, where the crews swarmed up a ladder of rock. It was one of those portentous evenings of the tropics, a calm before the tempest, unnaturally quiet. The sky was dull and gloomy, glimmerings of lurid lightning cut by light masses of mist.
“The place of storms,” Jake reflected. “Portentous indeed.”
“What’s a ‘ghaut’?”
“Like the Indian ‘ghat’ – a river used for bathing. So we’re looking for a small river with a bathing spot on the shores of Lake Tanganyika with a natural set of rock steps.”
“And we have the coordinates – let’s hope Burton’s measurements were accurate.”
“He was in the army,” said Jake. “Map-making was taught to all officers.”
“Should be simple, then …”
Six hundred miles away, Parr and Davis boarded a flight to Kigoma; Serval was on a British Airways flight over the Red Sea. Jenny was correct that MI6 had not found them, but the Americans were in the country too. And they had more precise intelligence.
73
Trutnvt.
Such a brutish word, to describe the divine – it was like something a troll would be called. Now it obsessed Kanisha. She thought about trutnvt on the Northern Line; she thought about trutnvt as she lectured; it came to her in her dreams.
First, the benign lighting, and this shall serve as a warning.
David had not invented the passage. The form and metre were beyond reproach, the archaism too authentic. And the ritual corresponded with all known sources for the period. Most importantly, her intuition told her the passage was authentic – and as any Bonham’s expert will tell you, whether it feels right is the litmus test. Only a dozen scholars alive could have attempted such a forgery; it would have been easier to fake the Hitler Diaries. Which meant David had acquired the most dynamite Etruscan passage that had yet come to light.
Who was he?
Not from an established institution, that was for sure. There would be no need for the cloak-and-dagger stuff; a museum or university would be singing it from the rooftops. More likely David was a private collector. Or an amateur archaeologist who had uncovered something extraordinary but wanted to hold on to it.
Was there more?
This was the pertinent question. And she couldn’t let David’s find be lost to the study of serious archaeologists. This was her shot at greatness. A direct approach would scare him into breaking contact; whatever he’d found would be lost to archaeology. So she prepared a trap.
A midday lesson for once: Kanisha was at a café on Great Russell Street. David read Etruscan perfectly now – but goodness, how he fretted about pronunciation. Although nobody knows for certain how it sounded, Kanisha had been sharing the best guesses thrown up over generations of research.
David studied a perfume bottle. “‘Mi suntheruza spurias mlakas’. I am the little container of Spuria the beautiful.”
“Good. But we don’t think they pronounced ‘th’ like we do. It’s a solid ‘t’, and
the ‘h’ is a bit windy. ‘Sun-tuu-eruza’. Think of the Cockney in My Fair Lady, pronouncing the ‘h’ on words where it’s supposed to be silent. Like honourable.”
“Thanks, Kanisha, that’s bloody useful.”
Bloody. So David was a Brit. Or antipodean, come to think of it. And useful – odd choice of word in the circumstances.
“By the way, there’s a webpage you might be interested in,” she said. “It’s got some interesting stuff on Vegoia.”
“Oh really?”
The Prophecies of Vegoia held a fascination for David – all that talk of natural borders.
“It’s on the King’s College London website,” she said. “One of their lecturers was Vegoia mad. He died a couple of years back, sadly, but his research is still online. I’ll send you a link …”
Skype is so secure that even Foreign Office staff use it. But perhaps David could be induced to visit an external website. A tracking device could be added to this page: a few lines of code that would record a visitor’s IP address, their unique location on the internet. Kanisha didn’t know a thing about computers, but her brother Bastavary worked in IT and agreed to help.
A new website would be suspicious, so Bastavary launched a ‘brute force attack’ against King’s College London’s server, spamming its server with millions of numbers and letters until it found the administrator’s password. After a few hours, they were in. They created a new page about Vegoia with a bit of metadata attached instructing it not to be indexed on any search engine. That meant nobody could find it without being sent the link directly – whoever clicked on that page was their man. It only remained to see whether David would bite.
74
The dinghy bounced and skipped across the water, its outboard motor a high-pitched buzz in the hot still air. Jake was at the tiller – boats were his dad’s thing so he knew how to handle one – and Jenny studied the map on her phone as they closed in on Burton’s coordinates. Equatorial sun seared through a thin wash of cloud, turning the day into a haze so that the waves glinted a milky yellow. They hugged the Tanzanian side of the lake, a tangle of fishing villages strung along ruddy bays, the occasional cargo ship rusting on the sands. Naked children played in the water and fishermen punted dugout canoes.
“Another mile if Burton’s coordinates are accurate,” said Jenny.
“They will be.”
Jake let the sun warm his face. He had the sudden conviction they would find the Book of Thunder here. They would burn it, that very day. They would celebrate; Jenny would come back to him.
“Look there!”
Jake followed her finger to where a stream issued into the lake, like a ribbon of brass in the sunlight threaded down the hills. When he saw the rocks half way down he felt as if his heart had been clenched in a fist. It was exactly as Burton described. Jenny had caught the sun, but there was a blush of triumph on her face too.
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” she said. “Absolute first rate investigative journalism.”
Now Jake’s own face turned red. He landed the boat, immediately spotted by three children who sprinted toward the foreigners. But the parabola of the two older boys’ run converged and they hurtled into each other, heads colliding with an audible crack. One burst into tears, the other started laughing, and the tiny one charged straight through the middle before leaping into the air and wrapping his limbs around Jake with a delighted shriek.
*
A fishing village was strung along the river. One hut was an old cargo container with windows cut into it; another was made from oil barrels cut into strips and hammered straight, their circular tops lining the gunnels like the shields of a Viking ship.
“Such resourcefulness,” said Jake.
“We explore?” Jake ventured to an old man who was repairing fishing nets.
“Hakuna matata,” he replied.
As they walked away Jake grinned. “They actually say that here? Excellent.”
They were singing as they walked to the river. It means no worries, for the rest of your days …
Nobody was swimming and soon Jake saw why. Two eyes protruded from the water, like black marbles shrink-wrapped in greyish skin.
“Up periscope,” said Jenny with a faint smile.
The eyes retracted and the whole lake swelled as the hippo moved off.
“Subtle,” said Jake.
“A master of subterfuge.”
Villagers gathered as they examined the outcrop. One of the children held a corner of Jake’s shirt proprietorially, tears drying on his cheeks. There were natural handholds and grooves in the rock, leading down to the river.
“We landed at a steep ghaut,” intoned Jenny, projecting like a poet. “Where the crews swarmed up a ladder of rock.”
“We’re standing at the exact spot where Burton turned back,” said Jake. “The furthest any European had penetrated into Africa at that time.”
“Place of storms,” said Jenny reverentially.
They had expected to find Burton’s initials, or that eye symbol from his notepad. But the rock was devoid of markings.
“What if it’s beneath?” said Jake. “We’ll need dynamite.”
“Don’t be an idiot. How could Burton and Speke have shifted a rock this big?”
“I’ll tell you what I’d have done,” said Jake. “I’d have buried the Disciplina and planted a tree. Something with longevity.”
“Look around you.”
The riverbank was overgrown with bamboo and the occasional acacia, but nothing close to a century old.
“Anyway, what do you think would happen to a big tree here?”
Two fishermen sitting on a dugout canoe smiled and waved. Jake willed his brain to action, looking from notebook to the landscape and back to the notebook. Nothing. He opened a biography of Burton, looking up the infamous decision to turn back.
He paused.
His chin fell to his chest.
He sat down heavily on the riverbank, feet crashing into the water.
“Idiots.” Jake laughed, long and hard and bitter. “We’re total idiots.”
“What do you mean?”
“It can’t have been Burton. He’s nothing to do with Palmerston’s ‘additional activities’.”
“But he has to be!” Something akin to anger in her voice. “All the Etruscan connections, the letter to Randolph Churchill.”
“Coincidence.” Jake’s laugh had turned blasé, like someone told a daft joke. “All coincidence, my dear.”
“But how do you know?”
Jake turned to face her. “Because Burton came here in 1858. And the invoice for travel expenses we found in the Foreign Office was dated 1865. The dates don’t match up.”
She sat down beside him. “We are idiots.”
The littlest child blew a raspberry at them.
75
Freedom. Democracy.
Chloë stared at the words daubed on the hull of a fisherman’s boat. But the paint was peeling and the jagged outline of a British warship lurked offshore.
“Are you ready, dear?” Dame Dot Whalley was the new governor of Sierra Leone. “Now might be a good moment for introductions.”
Any sense of tranquillity vanished and the hubbub of the reception was in Chloë’s ears again. The Queen’s Birthday Party: a red-letter day in the Foreign Office calendar. An annual bash is thrown at every embassy to strengthen bilateral relations between the UK and its guest country – though in this case of course, those distinctions were blurred. Whalley had chosen a showy beachfront restaurant outside Freetown for this year’s celebration, where the breeze made the climate manageable for men wearing suits. The Sierra Leonean elite mingled with British businessmen who had done well from the new order. The chief executive of British Petroleum was there – it was drilling offshore – as was the boss of British American Tobacco. Waiters bore canapés (lobster or rare beef on miniature Yorkshire puddings) and Pimm’s was served; the tinkling of a grand piano weaved through the b
odies. British soldiers kept the beggars and amputees at a respectable distance.
Chloë glimpsed the president’s son talking to a Royal Marines major, evidently bored.
“There he is,” said Whalley. “Into battle, dear.”
The governor was statuesque, feet planted wide apart, sky blue blazer with portcullis pin signifying her time as an MP. With her pleated skirt and impressive bosom she had the air of a headmistress.
The last two days had been a whirlwind of forms to be filled in, medical and dental checks, political briefings. Chloë was glad to be off the Etruscan case. She’d hoped for something a bit less … nasty. Then with sinking heart she’d been told to get close to the president’s son.
Is that all I’m good for?
The job had come from C himself though. It had to be important.
Whalley touched the target on the elbow. “Alex? This is Chloë Aspinal, my new second secretary.”
Alex Conteh beamed. “It is my pleasure! Please, welcome to Sweet Salone, Chloë.”
He was short with a very round head, rumples of skin piled up on the cranium.
Chloë allowed her hand to be cupped with both of his. “A pleasure to meet you too, your excellency.”
West African ‘Big Men’ expect the obsequies laid on thick.
“Chloë’s here to look after our mining concessions,” said Whalley, following the script. “I thought you might be a good person for her to know.”
“But of course!” cried Conteh. “This is my little concern too. My father’s mining company, I have run it for him for five years now.”
“And I think I’m right in saying that you both studied English at Oxford,” said Whalley.