by Gregg Loomis
The Bonaparte Secret
( Lang Reilly - 6 )
Gregg Loomis
The Bonaparte Secret
Gregg Loomis
PROLOGUE
Syria, near Damascus
October, 322 BC
All one hundred or so inhabitants of the small oasis gathered to watch a sight never before seen and unlikely to be seen again: sixty-four mules pulled what Diodorus, a Sicilian Greek historian of the first century, would subsequently describe as an Ionic tomb made entirely of gold, twenty feet long and fourteen wide. Inside, the king’s mummified body, preserved in honey, rested in a golden sarcophagus. The weight of the hearse had required specially designed wheels and suspension. Even so, six miles a day was the greatest speed it could attain.
The honor guard of one hundred Macedonian cavalry made no secret of the fact that the king was being taken home to Macedonia. He had died the year before in Babylon. The sheer size of his empire, stretching from Greece to India, had required over twelve months to divide among his generals before they could turn to the disposition of their former ruler’s remains. Chief among them, Perdiccas, had decreed the body was to be entombed next to the king’s father, Philip. The order was not entirely popular, for Macedonian tradition held the first duty of the new king was to bury his predecessor, but the king’s only son was a half-wit and Perdiccas was an ambitious man.
But no more so than Ptolemy, known as Soter, the savior, because he had been chief among the king’s generals who had saved Egypt from the tyrannical rule of the Persians. Ptolemy had his eyes on Egypt, now part of the empire. More importantly, he had his army of several thousand blocking the funeral cortege’s path northwest to Macedonia.
The villagers watched in eager anticipation of bloody entertainment as Sertice, commander of the honor guard, wheeled his horse to climb the slight rise where a single figure sat on horseback in front of a line of a dozen or so war elephants. Behind them, men armed with spears had already formed phalanxes, the Greek battle formation of close ranks and files.
Reaching the crest, Sertice removed his helmet so the other man might more clearly see his face.
He dismounted and knelt before the other’s horse. “Sir, you do me honor to join my small force in escorting the king home.”
A smile creased the weathered face of the man on horseback. Despite Sertice’s flowery words, he knew the cavalry commander was fully aware of what was happening.
“Honor is due you, Sertice. But I come to join you not in taking the king back to Macedonia but to Egypt as he wished.”
“But my orders…”
“Your orders are countermanded. Do not force me to slay my fellow comrades in arms.”
It didn’t take Sertice more than a second to make up his mind. A little over a year ago he would not have given the superior strength of an adversary a second thought. Had not the king’s thirty thousand Macedonians routed ten times as many Persians? Had the king not consistently defeated armies far larger than his own? But the king was dead, there was no clear chain of command and it had been over ten years since he had seen his wife back in Macedonia, ten years of forced marches, combat and privation until the army had finally mutinied, refusing to go farther than the Hindu Kush. They all wanted to go home. What purpose would be served by losing a hundred brave men now?
He stood, head bowed. “My life will be forfeit when Perdiccas hears of this.”
Ptolemy barked a harsh laugh. “Then come with me to Egypt. It is a rich country and I have need of men like you.” He noted the man’s hesitation. “Have no fear for your family. I will send swift riders to bring them from Macedonia to Egypt.”
With no small disappointment there would be no fight, the villagers watched the two groups merge, shift the marching route from northwest to southwest and slowly disappear over the ridge.
From the diary of Louis Etienne Saint Denis, secretary to Napoleon Bonaparte, commanding general, Army of the Nile; edited and translated to the English by Henri D’Tasse of the University of Paris Alexandria
19:01, August 23, 1799 ^ 1 We left at night so the troops would not be disheartened. Fortune had frowned upon us. After Nelson the Englishman destroyed our fleet at Aboukir Bay ^ 2 a year ago, he sailed away to Sicily, leaving Captain Sidney Smith in command of the British fleet. If anything, Smith was worse than Nelson. He defeated us at Acre and challenged the general to a duel, a madman. Control of the sea by the enemy has stalled our campaign here, so there is little choice but to leave General Kleber to make terms with the English and the Turks who joined them. The revolution at home is in chaos and the commanding presence of the general is needed there. ^ 3 With us in the longboat that ferried us out to the ship in which we will make our voyage are only a few savants ^ 4 and confidants. Three more such craft follow as a nautical baggage train. One of these the general himself loaded with only his manservant to help. In addition to a number of small antiquities, there is a parcel wrapped in sheep’s skin. From its size, I would have supposed it to be a small statue of one of the pharaohs of whom the general has become quite fond. But such an object would be carved in stone and far too heavy to be carried under the general’s arm. I asked the general what such a parcel might contain but he was understandably in no mood for trivial matters and turned my query aside with the rudest of grunts. Then, his mood swinging as abruptly as the wind, he unbuttoned his uniform tunic to show me a small gold cross he wore about his neck. Knowing his attitude toward the Church, I was obviously surprised. ^ 5 “It was given me by my mother on the occasion of my first communion,” the general said, another surprise, since he rarely spoke of his humble beginnings on the island of Corsica. “The people,” I noted, “might adversely view such an adornment.” By the flickering light of the boat’s sole torch, I saw him smile. “Such is the reason I wear it under rather than outside of my tunic. It is dear to me, not as a object of religion, but as a reminder of my origins. On Corsica I was also given life and with that life I was also given a fierce love for my ill-starred homeland.” ^ 6 He held the cross up for a moment to catch the shifting light of the torch before returning it inside his tunic. “It is but an ordinary object but one I shall always treasure greatly, along with a few others from the past. I wore it that day when, as a mere general, my epaulets still new, I defended the Convention.” ^ 7 It was a rare moment when the general actually spoke tenderly about his life before some star of destiny called him to lead his nation’s army and one I would have enjoyed, had we been attacking rather than fleeing the British.
1 The French Revolution worshipped “logic” over religion. Consequently, the Gregorian calendar was scrapped and the Jacobin system adopted. The year was proclaimed to begin on September 22, with twelve months of thirty days each. Leap year included a five- or six-day holiday. Even the names of the months were changed to words more “natural,” such as Vendemiaire, or “vintage,” for late September-October, followed by the words for mist, frost, snow, rain, wind, seed, blossom, meadow, harvest, heat and fruits. Napoleon abandoned the system in year XII, 1804. In this translation I have used the actual dates rather than the Jacobin.
2 The battle, August 1, 1798, was close enough to Alexandria that the explosion of the French gunship L’Orient lit up the night sky of the city.
3 Whether Napoleon was needed or not was made moot by his coup d’etat on November 9. In 1804 he crowned himself emperor.
4 Not only did Napoleon take an army and navy to Egypt. He included 160 “savants,” scholars in fields as diverse as botany, languages and art. One of them was the father of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal. Another preserved the Rosetta Stone for the future translation by Champollion, a feat that unlocked the secret of hieroglyphics. T
he studies of the savants were published in the monumental, multivolume Description de l’Egypte in 1809. The ancient glories of Egypt were generally unknown in Europe before then. Each volume caused a sensation.
5 The French Revolution not only overthrew the monarchy but the powers of the Catholic Church, whom the revolutionaries viewed as much an oppressor of the people as the king and nobility. The official policy of the French government even today is regarded by many as anticlerical.
6 Despite such language, Napoleon did little to further the cause of Corsican independence. The island is still French today.
7 A royalist uprising in Paris almost disrupted the National Convention. Napoleon, who had recently been promoted to general but was out of favor, was the closest officer available. He dispersed the royalists with what he would later describe as “a whiff of grapeshot,” killing about a hundred of them. Most scholars attribute his rapid rise to this incident.
CHAPTER ONE
Petionville, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
November of last year
Chin Diem, undersecretary for foreign relations of the People’s Republic of China, admired the view. Spread out below the mansion’s picture window was the city, its lights cradled below the mountain like a handful of jewels. Fortunately, far below. Far enough that the stench of open sewers, uncollected garbage and burning charcoal that had assaulted his nose upon his arrival could not reach him. Neither could the flies and mosquitoes that seemed the country’s most populous fauna. Up here the residences were multimillion-dollar mansions on multiacre lots. Their owners shopped regularly in Paris or Milan. The residents of Petionville owned over 90 percent of what little wealth Haiti possessed. And that had come largely from offshore, untraceable investments originally funded mostly from foreign aid, money that had seen the beginnings of schools, the foundations of hospitals, projects never finished as funding trickled into well-connected pockets.
There was no din of hucksters up here, selling everything from carved figures with grotesquely enlarged penises to fly-ridden food to black market-discounted gourdes, the national currency, which proclaimed itself to equal twenty-five cents American but was actually without value outside the country.
The night and distance also blotted out the movement. Port-au-Prince was a city in constant action. No Haitian, from naked children to shirtless men to skirt-wearing women, young or old, was ever still. Not unless they were squatting beside the ubiquitous charcoal fires on which they prepared every meal on the filthy, noisy streets in front of rickety shacks or apartments.
Or, perhaps, were dead.
But Chin Diem had not come to this diminutive country for socioeconomic observations. His government jet had intentionally arrived after dark, when the prying eyes of what few foreign news correspondents remained in this poverty-ridden corner of the Caribbean would be unable to see who was disembarking. A Mercedes with darkly tinted windows had met him on the tarmac and he had been whisked here rather than to the alabaster capitol building in downtown Port-au-Prince. Had anyone been curious enough to check the aircraft’s number against flight plans, a process made ridiculously easy by the Internet, they would have ascertained the aircraft, registered to a Swiss company, had departed Geneva, its previous stop.
Nothing more.
Secrecy was imperative if his visit to this humid, stinking place was to be successful. Secrecy and a great deal of diplomacy, for he was dealing with a madman, a leader of a country, every bit as volatile, egotistic and unpredictable as that lunatic China could barely control in North Korea. Fortunately, though, Tashmal duPaar, another in the dreary and endless procession of Haiti’s “presidents for life,” lacked power outside his tropical domain. He had but a small army and no nuclear weapons. In short, he lacked what Diem was prepared to provide.
It was not particularly remarkable that duPaar had managed to seize power from the duly elected president. He had been the senior officer of the country’s military. As such, he simply marched a dozen men armed with outdated but deadly U.S. Army-surplus rifles into the capitol building and dismissed the president, his cabinet and the sitting parliament. It had been an all-too-familiar move in Haiti and one of which the rest of the world, particularly America, had grown weary. Demands that the United Nations peacekeeping force withdraw were complied with in an eager expeditiousness that bespoke the futility with which the international community viewed the country. A condemning resolution ricocheted around the halls of the UN, the world’s most useless debating society. The former Haitian ambassador to the United States, along with his UN counterpart, had sought sanctuary rather than return home, and the matter had died a short and unproductive death. Countries that exported little other than their own citizens tended to attract little attention. As for the people of Haiti, they were far more concerned about the next meal than the next politician to occupy this sumptuous home above Port-au-Prince.
Diem’s thoughts scattered as an Uzi-carrying bodyguard entered the room, followed by a small black man in a uniform literally sagging with the weight of medals-duPaar.
Diem turned from the window and bowed deeply. “Mr. President.”
The president for life acknowledged him with a wave of the hand before sliding behind a mammoth, gilt-edged Boulle partners desk that made him look even smaller. “Good evening, Mr. Secretary.”
Since duPaar spoke no Chinese and the Chinese diplomat certainly knew no Creole, the blend of mangled French and West African dialects that is the language of Haiti, the men would converse in English.
Diem nodded toward the armed guard. “My understanding was that this meeting would include only us.”
DuPaar shrugged. “My enemies will do anything to get at me, even a suicidal attempt. The man is deaf. He will hear nothing to repeat.”
Chin Diem refrained from pointing out that even his casual appraisal of the presidential palace on arrival had revealed security befitting the leader of a country under siege. Nothing less than an armored or airborne division could penetrate the walls, gun emplacements and security cameras he had seen. He assumed there was a lot he had not seen, too. Instead, he indicated a French wing chair, one of a pair upholstered in blue silk that was showing both stains and its age. He raised an eyebrow in a question.
“Yes, yes, of course. Please sit.”
Chin did so, reaching into a pocket inside his black silk suit.
Instantly, he was looking down the muzzle of the guard’s Uzi. Gingerly, he removed his hand, holding a pack of American Marlboros. “May I?”
In reply, duPaar opened a desk drawer and produced an ashtray with the words Fontainebleau Hotel Miami Beach on two sides. He smiled slyly as he slid it across the desk’s inlay top. “As you can see, I, like you, have traveled widely.”
Once again, Diem said nothing as he busied himself with lighting a cigarette.
Then, nodding to a painting behind duPaar’s head, he asked, “That is a Bazile, is it not?”
For the first time the president for life smiled, showing teeth the color of old ivory. “You know Bazile?”
“I know of several of your country’s painters. Bazile reveals himself by his use of several shades of green, more green than all other colors combined.”
DuPaar produced a cigar from somewhere, bit off the end and spit out the tip. He spoke between puffs as he applied a wooden match. “The green mirrors the lushness of the country.”
Not if the pictures of Port-au-Prince’s neighboring countryside Chin had seen were accurate. The surrounding mountains were eroded dirt, the trees having been long ago stripped away to make charcoal. “I see.”
DuPaar leaned back in his chair, his feet on the desk. Chin noticed his short legs barely reached. “Well? You did not come this distance to speak of artists.”
Chin’s inhale nearly turned into a choke on the smoke of his cigarette. Most diplomatic conversations started with a compliment to the host or his country, meandered through the participants’ families and their comparative health, took a leisurel
y stroll along a simple outline of the problem to be addressed, all before the business at hand was even mentioned.
DuPaar’s feet hit the floor as he snapped forward. “I am a busy man, Mr. Secretary. Please come to the point.”
Chin Diem could not remember being addressed in such a manner, but he swallowed his indignation. His mission was to come away with what he wanted, not put this pennyante tyrant in his place.
“My country has long wished to expand its business interests to this hemisphere. We would like to begin in Haiti…”
DuPaar was leaning forward, feet firmly planted on the floor, his hands clasped on the desktop. He spoke around the cigar clamped between his teeth. “You have already begun. The company that operates the Panama Canal is owned by your government. Specifically, your army.”
The man might be crazy but he was no fool.
“True,” Chin conceded, “but the Canal Zone is quite small. Our international competitors, the Russians, for example, already are forming alliances with Venezuela, Nicaragua, even preparing to return to Cuba.”
“Countries where the United States is disliked by those in power. Chavez in Venezuela, for instance, would do business with the devil to stick his thumb in the Americans’ eyes.”
Chin shifted in his chair. “My country is more interested in economic expansion than sticking fingers in eyes. I am authorized to propose opening manufacturing plants in your country.”
“Manufacturing what?”
“Clothes, textiles, light manufacturing to begin with.”
He definitely had duPaar’s attention. “And then?”
“And then we will see.”
DuPaar made a steeple of his fingers and rested his chin on it. “And what would I get?”
“Get?” Chin pretended to be puzzled, knowing full well what the president for life meant. “You would have employment for a number of your people, money they lack today.”
