by E. M. DAVEY
On palaeographical grounds, academics have speculated that the manuscript was written near Lake Trasimeno in Perugia.
“Why would an Etruscan inscription found by a French general be stashed on an Egyptian mummy?” Jenny pondered.
“A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” said Jake. “To paraphrase Winston Churchill.”
32
Aberlieb had nodded off again, and Jake plucked the smouldering cigar from his fingers before placing it in the ashtray.
“A mummy’s the perfect place to hide a fragile document,” he said. “The embalming process kept the linen intact for millennia.”
“Not that Napoleon got to see it,” said Jenny. “The Zagreb inscription was discovered decades after he died.”
“But clearly other mummies were found by Napoleon’s savants – enough to have written the entire Disciplina on. The Zagreb mummy was the one that got away.”
“It was a stroke of genius to look at the handwriting. So bloody clever, Jake, it’s maddening.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” He fiddled with his fringe. “Now, what do we know about the mummy itself?”
Jenny buried herself in the article. “Her name was Nesikhonsu. A rich woman with red hair who died aged about forty. A papyrus found with her revealed she was married to a priest of the sun god at the Temple of Karnak in Luxor, some chap called Pakhar-en-Khonsu.”
Jake Googled the name. “Pakhar’s mummy is in Cairo! At the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities.”
“And the bandages?”
“Jenny – it would appear the mummy’s never been unwrapped.”
Her face went cold.
“We’re at a crossroads, then.” Jake kneaded the flesh between his thumb and index finger. “Do we follow Randolph Churchill back to nineteenth-century London, or Pakhar-en-Khonsu all the way to ancient Egypt?”
A glint was in Jenny’s eyes. “How’s your Arabic?”
Decision made.
“But I don’t have any travel documents,” she added. “The CIA didn’t give me much opportunity to pack. And my clean passport’s at the charity I worked for in Bangkok.”
“So let’s lie low while your old colleagues Fed-Ex it over.”
“The CIA and MI6 are both after this thing. They might well have tracked us here. They could look up Mr Aberlieb’s web history, work out that Pakhar-en-Khonsu might hold more of the Disciplina. We can’t risk them getting to Cairo first.”
“What do you suggest? They won’t let you fly without a passport.”
“There are other ways to cross from Israel to Egypt,” she said darkly.
When Jake took her meaning his pupils widened with fear and he tugged at his hair.
“Hey!” she caught him by the wrist. “Don’t mess it up, you look good with a side parting. It was time you grew out of the whole surfer look, anyway.”
A bubble of recklessness rose up. “I thought you said stay focused …”
Jenny looked away, mouth hardening. She would not meet Jake’s eye and rejection glowed on his cheeks.
“Look Jake, I’m grateful that you came for me,” she said. “And we need to do this thing together. But for the avoidance of doubt, nothing’s changed between us. What I said on the beach still stands.”
Memories of that day were stored in the marrow of Jake’s bones. Heading for the jungle; turning back to see her standing on their balcony, watching him. A sad wave. Her face white as a china doll.
“You lost your spark, Jake, whiling away the months on that beach. Worrying about that flipping article in the Telegraph. I needed more.”
You had her, she was yours. And you threw it away.
A crushing sensation in his larynx. There was a danger he might start weeping.
“But I love you, Jenny.”
There. Said it.
“And I think I always will,” he finished.
“I’m sorry.”
An hour after the British couple departed, more visitors knocked on the door of the cottage in Yemin Moshe. Mr Aberlieb sighed and began his journey through the house. But funnily enough, it was another British couple – and if anything, this pair were even more photogenic. The girl had a vaguely Italian look, with mesmerising blue-green eyes. And her partner was an undeniably beautiful boy.
33
Now MI6 was really getting to work. Here was Davis, entering di Angelo’s cell. But the CIA man could recognise him only by those looming shoulders, for Davis wore a protective suit, mask and oxygen tank.
“Wakey wakey, sunshine!” Davis’s voice sounded as if it had been canned. “Good morning, guten tag and buongiorno!”
The American lolled on his bed. “Nice clothes, dickhead.”
“How was the scran last night, fella?”
“What?”
“The tucker. The nosh. Your fucking supper, matey. How was it?”
“It was ok.” Di Angelo explored the stitches in his scalp. “For British food.”
“Ouch, that hurt. You couldn’t taste the secret ingredient then?”
“What? What are you on about, man?”
“The human plasma in your mashed potato.” Davis clapped his hands together. “You’ve gone and got the Ebola virus, fella.”
Di Angelo sat up in bed. “You’re shitting me.”
“Contraire, mon frère. It is you who will be shitting yourself, in the not too distant.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you like.” Davis grinned happily. “But I can tell you this now. In a few days’ time you will most certainly not be – how can I put this? – fit as a fiddle.”
“If you’re for real you’re a fricking psychopath.”
Davis chuckled at that. “Let me explain what’s going to happen next, chap. Quite soon, your body’s going to detect that West African nasty we’ve put in you. But by then your immune system will have its hands tied behind its back, because the gremlins will have already battered your dendritic cells. Without them, your antibodies won’t have the blueprint they need to fight the infection, so the virus will be at it like fluffy bunny rabbits in your bloodstream. At that point your immune system will throw the kitchen sink at it – antibodies, white blood cells, all going bonkers. It’s called a cytokine storm – nuclear war in your bloodstream basically. One side-effect is that blood vessels get more permeable. Blood and plasma leak into the surrounding tissue – eyes, nose, ears. Brain. In desperation your body will release nitric oxide to regulate your blood pressure. But that’ll make your blood even thinner and cause more damage to your blood vessels. A Catch 22! Your liver will be bang in trouble too, by the way. It’ll give up making the proteins blood needs to clot, which means, you’ve guessed it, yet more bleeding. The long and the short is, you’ll be melting from the inside, fella!”
Di Angelo was trying to look unperturbed, but his gaze skittered around the room.
“At some point in all this fun and games, you’ll probably start asking me for the doses of ZMapp2 we’ve got,” said Davis. “That’s the antidote. It’s not a definite cure, but if you get treatment in time you’re reasonably likely to survive. Whether you get it will depend on how much you’ve told me about what you fellas over the pond are up to. The sooner you open your gob, the better your chances. So I would get my skates on if I were you. Sunshine.”
And here at the British Embassy in Tel Aviv another interrogation was underway. Mr Aberlieb was tied to a chair in an empty room as Evelyn Parr screamed at him through a two-way mirror. Only the jolly fat man had a stubborn streak and he hadn’t caved in, even though he had been kept awake for two days.
And here in provincial Israel were the adorable couple who had tricked their way into his home and drugged him, Alexander Coppock-Davoli and Chloë Smith (née Fleming). Only by dint of Jenny’s radioactive left heel were they able to keep up as she and Jake criss-crossed Israel, but the overall direction of travel was clear: south, south, south. Chloë’s orders were to protect them from the CIA ‘wet boy
s’ that Parr correctly assumed were in Israel. Protect, observe, let them get on with it.
Meanwhile Jacob Serval still languished in his pit, trying to get a smile out of the child as Fleet Street fulminated over the hostage crisis. In Birmingham Alec McCabe was getting used to the gurgling of his colostomy bag, books on Etruscan linguistics spread about the private room at Queen Elizabeth Military Hospital. And at Vauxhall Cross C oversaw all, one eye on West Africa, the other on the Middle East. And his boss remained ensconced in Number 10, drinking cup after cup of tea and reading George Orwell.
I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, and still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.
Reading and thinking and watching his net approval ratings tick higher as Sierra Leone went from basket case to boom-country, as the security situation in Nigeria began to deteriorate.
Only back in Cyprus, there had been a hitch in the Prime Minister’s designs. For on the third morning when Davis began taunting di Angelo, he felt suddenly dizzy. His hands went to his mask; he staggered; then he toppled to the floor like a Bamiyan Buddha blown to dust.
The odourless fentanyl derivative had been added to Davis’s oxygen tank by two Royal Military Police officers. They had been got to by the CIA, offered $10 million each and a new identity for this single deed. At that moment there was a rocket propelled grenade attack on the base – it would be blamed on the Islamic State – and in the ensuing chaos di Angelo and the traitors simply walked out of the front gate. A UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, modified to minimise radar noise, picked them up a few miles outside Akrotiri. Thirty minutes later di Angelo was in the medical bay of the USS George HW Bush, lurking in the eastern Mediterranean to facilitate airstrikes on Syria. The rescuers were in the nick of time. For that morning a perplexing ache had rolled over di Angelo’s back, and he was getting a sore throat.
In short: it was all kicking off.
34
The renegades in the eye of the storm were drinking coffee at a roadside café near Kiryat Gat, southern Israel. Sir Neil Campbell’s memoirs were on the table.
“Read the first two sentences of the book, Jenny.”
Having received two wounds, I was prevented from accompanying the Allied Armies on their march to Paris, and did not arrive in the capital until April 9. Even then, I had no knowledge of the arrangements in progress regarding the future destiny of Napoleon.
“Future destiny.” Jake nailed his espresso in a single swallow. “Does he mean future destination? Or something else?”
Campbell and Napoleon had met in the French town of Fontainebleau, shortly after the Allies had offered the emperor the crown of Elba and an income for life if he abdicated. Britain alone had objected to the terms. Jenny looked cynical, but she shifted closer to him and together they read Campbell’s account of his first encounter with Napoleon Bonaparte.
I saw before me a short, active looking man, who was pacing the length of his apartment, like some wild animal in his cell.
“Almost exactly like …”
“Rudolf Hess,” Jenny interrupted.
After Hitler’s deputy had fled to Scotland with Hitler’s copy of the Disciplina he was assessed by a British psychiatrist. And neither could forget the doctor’s first impression.
The face is that of some tormented beast. Bestial, ape or wolf.
Sir Neil’s recollections continued.
Napoleon passed high encomiums on Lord Wellington, inquired as to his age, habits etc. When I described his Lordship’s great activity, he observed, ‘He is a man of energy in war. To carry on war successfully, one must possess the like quality.’
Jake jabbed at the line. “A man of energy in war. What energy?”
But Jenny was already leaping down the page.
Napoleon paid many compliments to the British nation for their union and national feelings, in which he considered they excelled from the French.
‘Yours is the greatest of nations’, he said, ‘I esteem it more than any other. I have been your greatest enemy – but I am so no longer. I wished to raise the French nation, but my plans have not succeeded. It is all destiny.’
“Becoming quite the Anglophile,” said Jake.
Napoleon constantly expresses the sense he entertains of the superior qualities which the British nation possesses over every other. After continuing in this strain for a long time, Napoleon said France had lost all. He spoke as a spectator, without any present hopes or future interest.
Future interest.
And there was something else: a paragraph that made Jake shiver in the heat of the day.
In remarking on his confidence in his own troops, he referred to me to say candidly if it was not so. ‘Tell me Campbell, frankly; is it not true?’
I told him it was; that everyone spoke of ‘the Emperor and his guards,’ as if there was something in them more than human to be dreaded.
35
The first email had arrived a year back.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Dear Dr Maachii,
I am a private individual who is attempting to become fluent in the Etruscan language. I wondered whether you might provide me with some one-to-one tuition. I happen to be a public figure however, and I greatly value my privacy. I therefore require lessons online and anonymously. (I may also request tuition at antisocial hours.) I realise these are awkward requirements and you would be remunerated accordingly. Please let me know if you are interested.
Kind regards,
David
At first Dr Kanisha Maachii penned a refusal, but the enigmatic correspondent begged her to reconsider. That didn’t surprise her. Etruscan is an extinct language and only a dozen academics alive are fluent in the tongue; Kanisha supposed her would-be student had been turned down by every Etruscan linguist in the world. She was intrigued though, and David’s persistence impressed; still more eye-catching was the sum he suggested. So it was that, half-suspecting a hoax, she agreed.
The alarm went off at 2.45 am, plucking Kanisha from sleep and reintroducing her to a studio flat in Camden Town. She struggled out of bed, turned on her laptop and put the kettle on. Even in her pyjamas Kanisha was striking. Her mother was Scottish, her father an Iranian Zoroastrian who’d fled from the Ayatollah in 1978, and the electric light brought out reds and coppers in the black curls that spilled down her face. Her complexion was somewhere between coffee and rose and her eyes were green. Her nose was unmistakeably of the Achaemenid kings, noble and unrepentant in its dimensions.
The student was waiting on Skype, video function disabled.
“Good morning.” The greeting was metallic, warped by voice-disguising software so completely it was rendered sexless. “It’s David here.”
David Attenborough? David Icke? Kanisha smiled to herself. What a conundrum!
“So, the Mysterious Etruscan,” she said. “First up, let’s try a little test. I want to see how much you already know. Hold on, I’m sending you an image.”
There was a ping as the file disappeared into the ether, a fainter one as it landed. It was a picture of a vial inscribed with a dozen jagged letters that looked halfway between Greek and Saxon runes.
“In Etruscan first,” she said. “If you please.”
After a pause, David read: “Mlakas se la aska mi eleivana.”
“Impressive. Translation?”
Three minutes passed before her student replied, “‘I am the unguent-bottle of the beautiful Sela.’ Ha. Pretty.”
Etruscan shares no ancestry with any other known language, but there are grammatical similarities with Latin and Greek: the conjugation of verbs, changing the ends of nouns. And as the lesson progressed Kanisha became certain her pupil was a linguist.
“Can you read me something longer?” said David. “I want to hear it in full flow.”
“Sure – I’ve got a nice grave inscription here.”
Her words filled every corner of the room: a peal of sounds that elided wonderfully on the tongue, lapping against each other like waves.
“Acasce creals trachnalth spureni lucairce ipa ruthcva cathas hermeri slicacheś aprinthvale luthcva cathas pachanac alumnathe hermu melecrapicces puts chim culs leprnal pśl varchti cerine pulalumnath pul hermu huzrnatre pśl ten ci methlunt pul hermu thutuithi mlusna ranvis mlamna mnathuras parnich amci lese hrmier.”
This was a language of silver thread and war horns and the beaks of dragons, and when Kanisha finished there was silence. She fancied David had closed his eyes.
“Beautiful.” A catch in the computerised throat. “It’s like Elvish or something.”
Kanisha laughed. “Klingon, I’ve always thought. But I am a Trekkie, I freely confess it. Maybe that’s why I’m still single at thirty-three.”
“And what does the passage mean?”
“This is the epitaph of Laris Pulenas,” Kanisha boomed with mock-gravitas. “Son of Larce, grandson of Larth, grandson of Veltur, great-grandson of Laris Pule, who wrote this book on divination. He held the office of magistrate in this city.”
“Divination …”
Linguistics was forgotten as they discussed Etruscan religion for the first time. David seemed fascinated by this element of the Etruscan world.
36
“Hello, Mo,” said Jenny, something like a smile on her face. “Long time no see.”
The Palestinian with the trilby and the gold chain turned his collar up. “Is too much you asking me this time, Mrs Jenny.”
