Kaye's Inselberg

The If Conspiracy

De: Damian O'Connor

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

During a chaotic UN evacuation from a 2009 Congo genocide, Tim Johnson, ex-SAS, City whizz kid and aid worker is mysteriously kidnapped, presumed dead. Two years later, John Mackenzie, fading journalist and ex-Cambridge university acquaintance claims to have found Johnson, briefly, in a hospital in Botswana before losing him again. During a chance meeting in Shanghai, Mackenzie asks the narrator, an old Cambridge acquaintance and psychologist, for his professional opinion of the incredible tale that Johnson told him of an Inselberg, a desert Shangri-La. Before the narrator can report his findings, Mackenzie too mysteriously disappears and the narrator is left pondering the wonderful story that he has been left with.
Deciding that the story is too incredible, but also too ambiguous, to be either fully believed or completely ignored, the narrator embarks on a mission to find the truth of Tim Johnson’s disappearance, the story of his initiation into a benign conspiracy run by Mr.Kaye, the enigmatic owner of the Inselberg, and his subsequent arrival at the hospital in Botswana. Plunging into the politics of the Eastern Congo and the backgrounds of both Johnson and Mackenzie, the narrator is unsure as to whether he should be psychoanalysing Johnson or Mackenzie, but meetings with the diplomat Boon and a mysterious femme known variously as Charlotte Temperley/Bemperley convince him that there is more to the story than mere fantasy. He also discovers evidence of a corrupt arrangement between UN officialdom, the Simba genocidaires and Al Queda which lies at the heart of the crisis that turned Tim Johnson from golden boy to near basket case.