The visa desk at Bole International Airport was a glory of bureaucracy. Six elderly men wearing bobble hats brandished forms, each with his own stamp to be stamped or sticker to be stuck. The queue took an epoch and when Jake thought it was over they were sent back to the beginning so each actor in the farce could tick off the others’ contribution. It was an infinite staircase of a border control, and Jake knew he would like this country.
His newspaper was on sale in an airport kiosk, and with a rush of excitement Jake saw he had the front-page byline – the first he’d had in three years. But his face darkened as he read the copy. The story he’d wanted to tell was that all this violence was down to an archaeological fixation at the top of MI6. But every mention of ancient history had been expunged. The top line was that the security services were in some way involved with the Topkapi shootout, with a female agent shot dead nearby. She was named as Jess Medcalf. The claims were attributed to ‘sources close to MI6’, and at the end it said additional reporting by Marvin Whyte.
Niall Heston had refused to sanction a trip to Ethiopia to pursue some “damn fool hunch” – and he had only relented to Jake’s request for two weeks’ immediate leave after a review of his personal security was carried out. The resulting risk assessment ran to seven pages. Jake wasn’t dissuaded. This was the biggest story of his career; he was young and unattached – if ever there was a time for swashbuckling, dangerous journalism it was now.
They emerged from the airport, blinking at the magnificence of an African morning. Ethiopia is in the tropics, but Addis stands at twice the height of Ben Nevis. The altitude counters tropical sunshine, so it was pleasant beneath the sun but cool in the shade. The capital was comely by the standard of African cities, high-rises interspersed by greenery, with entire city blocks abandoned to baobabs and warka. Dome-shaped mountains ringed the metropolis and eagles patrolled above. Jake had anticipated the bedlam of a Mumbai or a Bangkok, yet there was little hassle, most people lolling in the shade. The shantytown parted to reveal agricultural land. Women wearing headdresses tilled the fields; a river choked with rubbish cut through the pastures, while cannabis plants nodded in the breeze.
Florence was nervous – “this is Africa” – so for a soft landing they checked into the Addis Hilton, a brutalist 1970s megalith. The embassies nearby were guarded by teenagers with AKs dressed in mismatched uniforms. But something was missing. There were no guards outside the big houses, no machinegun posts or razor wire. Addis was not Johannesburg.
Jake and Florence planned their next move in a restaurant. Ethiopia lay before them, a land of deserts and mountains so inhospitable it had taken Europeans two millennia to conquer it. For the twentieth time Florence studied the prose. But Eusebius’s pointer was oblique to the point of uselessness.
Others interpreted passages of scripture, and unfolded their hidden meaning, while those who were unequal to these efforts presented mystical service for the Church of God. I myself explained details of the imperial edifice and endeavoured to gather from the prophetic visions fitting illustrations of the symbols it displayed.
“What does that even mean?” she asked.
“It definitely sounds relevant,” said Jake. “Hidden meanings in scripture, prophetic visions and so on.”
“But it’s too dense to make any sense of it.”
“That phrase, ‘the imperial edifice’,” said Jake. “I haven’t seen it anywhere else – it’s a little odd. But trying to single out a site from those two words?”
Florence groaned. “We haven’t a hope.”