The Napoleon Complex

by E. M. DAVEY

  “Why do you think we never built an American Empire?” Deissler chuckled.

  That was why Hitler had been a shambling wreck by the end of World War Two, why similar afflictions had been visited on Napoleon – both had violated the natural borders of their realms. Here was another cruel little irony of the Network. As it toyed with men, treating rulers as its marionettes and their kingdoms as its playthings, their realms tended towards empire – just as subatomic particles arrange themselves into order. Yet this expansion would also be their downfall, and they were punished atrociously for it. An old line on Fate came to Jake, penned by the Roman scholar Boethius.

  Such is a game she plays. And so she tests her strength.

  “If the Victorians had obeyed Vegoia, Britannia would still rule the waves,” said Deissler.

  And Jake saw how indeed it was the very act of expansion that had brought the British Empire to an end. With the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s, Britain became over-extended. The Boer War began, the barbarity and concentration camps making colonialism unpopular at home for the first time. Socialism arose hand in hand with disgust at colonial excess, and the greatest empire in history disintegrated in two decades flat. Thus was the prophecy of Vegoia fulfilled.

  Jake remembered something Gladstone had said of territorial acquisitions.

  It ought to be understood that they are new burdens added to the old, and in augmenting space they diminish power.

  Gladstone had identified the results without understanding the process.

  Something else was bothering him: the parallels between Hitler and Napoleon.

  History rhymes.

  Why was this important?

  “We didn’t go invading a whole load of countries,” Deissler was saying. “All we wanted was to do was uphold the peace – and make lots of money while we were about it. We finished off the USSR without firing a shot! Sure, we didn’t always get things right. When it came to Pearl Harbor and Vietnam, the politicians just went right ahead and ignored the warnings, they wouldn’t believe our own soothsayers. Just like the Romans refusing to accept Hannibal could cross the Alps, or Napoleon in Russia. Oh, the arrogance of man. But the augurs are always proved right in the end. And all our agents who’ve sacrificed their lives trying to stop your crazy Prime Minister finding the Disciplina and messing shit up? They were doing it for peace.”

  “They’re heroes,” said di Angelo quietly.

  “You killed Beloff too,” said Jake.

  “Sure did,” said Deissler. “He was getting too close.”

  “The perfect murder weapon,” said di Angelo. “What the hell detective would suspect a lightning bolt?”

  “Hey, Jennifer,” said Deissler. “Why don’t you take your sunglasses off?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Deissler aimed his gun directly at her face. “Go on – you’re underground. You’ll be bumping into things if you’re not careful.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Take ’em off,” he growled. “Or I’ll shoot you in the face.”

  Jenny’s hand rose and hesitated, rose again.

  “What’s the matter?” said Jake. “What is it?”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  She removed her sunglasses, but her head was bowed and still she avoided his gaze. Finally she looked up. She turned to face him. Her eyelids were closed. Then she opened them, and at once Jake’s world was destroyed and everything he had known to be good and believed in was revealed as a lie.

  Her eyes were blood-red too.

  99

  Evelyn Parr burst into the cave and opened fire. But it was as if Deissler knew she was coming, for he wheeled on the spot and blew off her cheekbone, opening a sickening grotto right through her head. Deissler put the next one between her eyes. In the confusion Jenny snatched up a Kalashnikov and let rip with a bright yellow belch of fire, raking the cave. But Deissler had disappeared. Jake made it to cover and peered around the rock as she advanced, crosshairs sweeping the darkness.

  Jenny was a fulguriator.

  She’d had the Disciplina Etrusca all along.

  The betrayal was monstrous. But suddenly it made sense: why she had pulled away from him, that other thing she had going on.

  I’ve been thinking about the future. I need to do something with my life.

  But how could this be? As he watched Jenny pace down the cavern to face her destiny, he had the answer. And he saw that he was the idiot, for all his purported brains. She had a photographic memory. When they had found Rudolf Hess’s manuscript at the Tower of London, she’d leafed through the scroll, storing every symbol. Now he thought about it, she’d had a wobble even then, as the enormity of what she was holding hit her.

  With this document we could do whatever we wanted. We could clean out Monte Carlo, go into politics. We could be powerful beyond our wildest dreams.

  How had she learned Etruscan? That he couldn’t say.

  Deissler popped out from behind a rock and fired. But before pin hit firing cap Jenny had side-stepped the bullet’s intended path. He ducked back into cover and she fired at a stalactite above him. It happened again – Deissler was moving before the bullet struck the needle sharp chunk of stone, sending it spiralling murderously downwards to the spot he had just been standing in. That’s when Jake understood what was going on, and he felt the skin on the back of his neck turn icy with rising dread at witnessing the preternatural. There could be no lightning bolts down here. But the winner of the duel had already been decided. That was why both gladiators had bloodied eyes. Both had taken the auguries that morning, foreseen every move; knew what evasive action to take. As to the victor, the Network had kept that detail for its own amusement. But both of them knew this was a contest they had to fight. There could be only one fulguriator, one devotee alone to command the favour of the Over Power.

  Another mystery was revealed to him: Jenny in Vienna, with a bottle of wine. She wasn’t meeting an old flame at all, she was making offerings, appeasing the higher sphere like the prophets of old in the hope it might lead her to what she sought.

  It’s not you, it’s me.

  You are a good man, Jake. Sometimes I think I’ve been so stupid.

  And the lightning they had witnessed by Big Ben was an augury too! There had been a roofing company on King Charles Street the next day – it must have struck the Foreign Office. The storm had made its point. That was how Jenny had known a Foreign Office document would be the key to the puzzle.

  Agreed additional activities.

  She’d worn sunglasses the next day, now he remembered it. And in Kigoma when they had watched lightning over the lake, she had sensed the CIA’s approach. He’d put it down to intuition, gleaned from years of field work. But if Jenny could read the heavens, how did she not know that the CIA had it all along?

  Such is a game she plays.

  Jake heard once more that laughter: grating, guttural. Mildly amused.

  Not a click, not a pop, but a nothing.

  He was inside the Network, floating through an infinity of stars that pulsed and chattered to each other. The whole grid trembled at some mighty calculation, then the helices became ordered again, gliding silently past on all sides. A shadow was projected upon the constellations, like cancer in an X-rayed lung.

  A man in a hat.

  Napoleon.

  The Network juddered, the image shimmered away, only to reform into a lither figure, his arm outstretched in a ramrod salute. Adolf Hitler, the second to unleash hell on earth with the Book of Fate. Still the dots of light streamed past; the structure was rotating and the stars became streaks of white, racing around him like lightning bolts.

  A third figure emerged.

  Sloping shoulders, diminutive height.

  Jake was on the cusp of recognition …

  Not a click, not a pop, but a nothing.

  Jake was lying on his back in the grip of high fever. The cave walls contorted with hallucination: a leering face, a s
et of gaping jaws. A trickle of blood escaped one eye as he let his head fall sideways – to see Deissler remove the pin from a hand grenade. This time Jenny did not see it coming. The cave rocked with the detonation, devastatingly loud in the hard space. Part of the ceiling collapsed and Jenny was smashed to the floor by the rock-fall, her Kalashnikov buried.

  “I win,” said Deissler.

  The Network had chosen.

  100

  As Jake slipped into delirium, one thought returned with crystal lucidity: that the lives of Hitler and Napoleon were lived as in a mirror.

  Both adored their mothers but feared their fathers. Both were foreigners in countries they led to catastrophe.

  Both had health problems, especially with digestion. Both were corporals, brave in battle. Both loved art.

  And still the similarities tumbled down like tarot cards. Both admired Great Britain, and saw their dreams of world domination break upon that unprepossessing island of stubborn men and women. Trafalgar foreshadowed the Battle of Britain, just as Napoleon’s march on Moscow augured Hitler’s insane gamble. Both walked the same path of brilliance, adoration, hubris, overreach. Both believed in the ‘triumph of the will’, and more than that, in Destiny. Both would be cursed for all time. An umbilical cord linked these two men from different ages, like those invisible fronds connecting dark matter across the universe.

  Why was this important?

  Because there was another. That third figure came back to Jake, still shadowy and unknowable.

  “The British Empire is under Providence the greatest instrument for good the world has seen,” said Deissler, snapping Jake from his reverie. “Your Lord Curzon said that, at the end of the nineteenth century. Just a shame you got greedy.”

  Deissler’s trigger finger tightened; the hammer lifted. A tiny tongue of steel was all that separated Jake from death.

  Say something, quick.

  “Ten saecula.”

  The finger relaxed; the hammer lowered. “What?”

  “Ten saecula. Ten lifetimes. According to the Disciplina, that was the allotted period given to any civilisation before the wheel of history turns. Before a newer, brighter people take over. It’s a timetable. It can’t be bargained with.”

  “What of it?”

  “Do you really want the Disciplina in existence when America’s time’s up? That freedom and liberty you think you’re protecting? It’ll be destroyed for certain.”

  Di Angelo stirred.

  “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,” said Jake. “Whoever wields that thing becomes a tyrant sooner or later. Napoleon started off enlightened. And how did he end up? Perhaps Frederick the Great put it best. That monster choked out of hell.”

  Hell. Where Jake had just been: cruising through the Network at the speed of light.

  “It’s the Devil,” he said with dawning wonder. “The Network is the Devil.”

  Deissler’s eyelids flickered as he confronted the truth.

  “But Faustian pacts come with a heavy price,” said Jake. “Which makes Napoleon …”

  “Antichrist,” croaked Jenny, who was sprawled on the bedrock. “Oh god, what have I done?”

  “And Hitler …” Jake whispered.

  “The Second Coming.”

  There was rage in Deissler’s eyes, the compulsion to end life.

  “And a Third,” said Jake, knowing these were his last words. “I’ve seen him. Foretold, like all things are. A new dark age.”

  Made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

  Deissler closed one eye and winced. He was at point blank range. He could not possibly miss.

  A final gunshot filled the cave.

  101

  Blood spurted from the side of Deissler’s skull like a jet of struck oil. He toppled over sideways, gargled for a bit and then expired. Behind him stood Damien di Angelo, smoke rising from his Beretta.

  You just carry on doing your bit for freedom and goodness, son. That’s all we ask.

  The rake-thin Baltimore man cast his gun aside. For a time the only sound was panting – and the far off drip-drip-drip that had continued all along.

  “I’m sorry,” whispered Jenny.

  Jake did not reply.

  “I’m sorry, Jake. I wanted to be somebody. I didn’t realise how evil it is.”

  Jake fought to remain compos mentis in the gathering cytokine storm. “If you’d memorised Hess’s copy, why come with me?” he said. “Why risk everything to find Napoleon’s manuscript too?”

  Her wordlessness spoke of great shame.

  “Why?” he shouted.

  “I wanted to possess it alone.”

  He knew then that no apology could be enough, no remorse could save her. At some level the Network had corrupted her absolutely. Like a recovering alcoholic, she could never be free.

  “But you didn’t know about Stanley,” said Jake, confused again.

  “I asked so many times – but the Network kept it from me.”

  Such is a game it plays.

  “We’ve got to get rid of it,” said di Angelo. “Our copy. America’s copy …”

  “Where’s it kept?” asked Jake.

  “Diego Garcia.”

  “The naval base?” Jake spluttered. “But that’s technically part of the UK, we leased it to you! Pisstakers.”

  “Chosen for the remoteness and the frequency of storms. We’re brewing up lightning in the middle of the Indian Ocean three times a week, man, whenever a request comes from Washington. Why do you think we forcibly removed all the inhabitants? I’m telling you, some freaky shit goes down out there.” He laughed. “That island’s the subject of a million YouTube conspiracy theories. Shame nobody guessed the one that just happened to be true.”

  Steam rose from Deissler’s matt red corneas and di Angelo glanced down at him with distaste.

  “Washington only keeps one fulguriator,” he said. “A single interlocutor, to best curry the Network’s favour. They’ll be choosing another soon.”

  “Why did they send him here?” said Jake.

  “To defeat the other.”

  Somewhere in the darkness Jenny was sobbing.

  “The Third Coming,” said Jake. “I think I know who it is. Our Prime Minister. At some point the US will have to stand up to him. It’s like Winston Churchill said. The Americans will always do the right thing, when all other options are exhausted.”

  “There’ll be war,” whispered Jenny. “War in the English-speaking world.”

  “Well we can’t do a goddamn thing about that,” said di Angelo. “What are you gonna do, assassinate the man?”

  “I don’t know,” Jake admitted.

  Jenny struggled to her feet, hair dishevelled, face besmeared with blood and dust.

  “And there’s one more copy,” she said.

  A shockwave went through the cave.

  “You’re shitting me,” said di Angelo.

  “Where?” Jake snarled. “Where is it?”

  Jenny smiled sadly, pointed to her own head. “In here.”

  She took a few steps back, frightened but resolute.

  “What are you doing?” said Jake, voice turning to fear.

  “I am going outside and may be some time.”

  “You don’t mean …”

  “I don’t trust myself any more. I’m sorry, Jake.”

  “Stop her,” Jake begged di Angelo. “I’m too weak to stand.”

  But the CIA man merely folded his arms and shook his head. “Woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do.”

  “Don’t be a bloody idiot, Jenny!” Jake shouted.

  Jenny continued edging backwards. She was almost out of the cave. “The stuff from the flakturm, in Vienna. I buried it in Gibson Square – it’s a park in Islington. Beneath a yew tree in the north-west corner.”

  “I don’t want it!”

  “I wish I could go back and do it differently, Jake. Oh I wish I could go back and do it di
fferently. We were made for each other.”

  And with that, Jenny Frobisher departed to face her destiny.

  Only then did Jake whisper to himself: “No we weren’t, Jenny. No we weren’t.”

  102

  Jake didn’t know how much time had passed. His body was on fire. His headache was so appalling he couldn’t think and the nosebleed was unceasing. He vomited half a pint of blood, felt the clots clogging up his throat. Death could not be far off now. He could barely see.

  “They gave me Ebola,” he managed, though he was unsure whether di Angelo still there. “That guy’s got an antidote …”

  As di Angelo stood over Serval’s corpse, the slain explorer was like his reflection on the surface of a lake. The upstanding and the fallen.

  Di Angelo passed Jake the drugs.

  “Don’t touch me,” hissed Jake.

  The American smiled grimly. “I’ve already had it, dude.”

  He got Jake to his feet and helped him out of the cave. It was early morning, the African sky feathered with cloud turning a soft flamingo in the rising sun. They sat and Jake cried for Jenny, biting his hand, shoulders juddering, his tears cutting scarlet tracks down his face. Yet this was not the raging grief of a man who had lost the love of his life. She was a different person to the Jenny he thought he knew.

  Some Livingstone came to him.

  The chief is believed to possess great power of divination, even of killing unfaithful women.

  What was prophecy and what wasn’t? He no longer knew.

  When Jake looked up he was astonished to see di Angelo weeping too. A phone was in his hand.

  “What is it?” asked Jake.

  The agent looked away. “Jeez, sorry man. Just had a bereavement. Someone who’d been ill, for a long time.”

  Freedom and goodness.

  But di Angelo was no longer crying; instead he wore a look of frightening determination.

  “We’re going to get you fixed up,” he said. “Then we’re gonna do this thing.”

  Jake’s phone buzzed. It was an email – from Chloë of all people, she of the beach. And she was telling him extraordinary things.