FIREFLY aka musical phones

Written by Henry Porter & Reviewed by Detective Dru

Jason Bourne lords over this prologue as an unnamed Syrian refugee boy is thrashing in the water, his raft capsized. Instead of being discovered by a fisherman, he sees a baby floating and heads for it, promising to take care of it for no other reason than karma. He smells woodsmoke so he knows the shores are close. Men on two jet skis approach. The boy meets another boy and they perform some ruse to both get on some cargo ship headed to Greece with only one ticket. Paul Samson, apparently our protagonist, lives in Cedar, an Arab restaurant in London his family runs.

Peter Nyman from special ops directorate arrives and asks Paul to come back for just one more op. How original.  Nyman wants Paul to find this boy in Greece, because he’s the only one that can identify two terrorists that ISIS is after.  Paul arrives at a refugee camp where the boy was last seen to talk to the resident shrink Anastasia. She says he’s a boy genius but that he’s escaped a second time, likely to head for the ports and ultimately the Syrian border to seek asylum in Europe. He keeps fleeing because he saw the terrorists at the camp entrance and they threatened him.

Thanks to a documentary crew at the refugee camp, Paul’s now able to circulate a photo of the boy through intelligence agencies, though he’s careful to exclude the boy’s name Naji.  Naji gets caught trying to cross into Macedonia and is held by Greek authorities. He escapes (again) and two Africans offer him secret overnight safe passage across the border for 40€.

Paul is finding people that have seen the boy so he’s on the right track.  Naji happens to be at the same camp, though him and Paul don’t meet.  Paul deduces that Naji is entering each country illegally because despite his legal Syrian refugee status, he would still be detained because he's underage.  Naji found Joseph the Ghanaian to help him cross another border at night. They’re through the fence when he hears the voice of the same terrorists pursuing him. He bolts from Joseph.  He hides and sleeps in the nearby forest, but hears Usain and Ibrahim, the two terrorists, calling his name.

Paul is told by his new ally Sonia that he has a local contact Vuk to rely on.  The intel team puts together a plan to find the terrorists. They’re the priority, not the boy. The boy finds his group again and gives some impassioned speech about why he must travel with them and not solo, despite his refugee status. It’s probably somewhere around here that the plot begins to betray itself.  It just feels like revision after revision that led to so much double-crossing of the audience’s expectations in order for the story’s architecture to hold up to the heavy lifting it will be required to do in later pages.  Some is to be expected – it’s a spy novel after all – but everything in moderation.

Naji thinks the man Joseph has been trying to rob him every night while he sleeps.  Turns out it was the villain Aziz, not Joseph the previous nights. Aziz stole his phone and took off. Naji’s group treks north and stops at a service station on the Alexander the Great highway. While Naji naps, the rest of the group leaves with a smuggler. Naji convinces the cashier to let him sleep in the bathroom for the night.

Paul Samson is now following the phone Aziz stole instead of honing in on Naji. They reach it and Paul knows Aziz is really Mohammed, some high ranking IS commander. He eventually admits he knows of Naji and he stole his phone but did not kill him. Aziz also suffers from tuberculosis. London contacts Paul and tells him a chopper is going to meet with him. Macedonian officials will take Aziz and they found some DealerXPT contact on Aziz’s other phone for Paul to check out.

The truck that left earlier without Naji crashed and killed the migrants. Naji is bitterly relieved. He plays flute outside the service station for change. Some weird dude watches until Ibrahim and Usain appear with their leader.  They try to coax him into their truck, but he hops in the car with the creep and they speed off toward Serbia with the truck following.  The truck and the creep play cat and mouse driving. The creep reveals he’s a rapist cop, so Naji is trapped. They lose the terrorists and pull over to a hiding spot. Naji stabs him and steals his car before he runs into Ifkar, some random dude that speaks Arab amongst all the Germans. They follow his dog north, because why not?

Paul arrives at the gas station and reviews footage, giving him the crooked cop, Naji and the three terrorists. Upon transmission of the intel, London has clearly lost interest in the boy and focused on the IS, to Paul’s chagrin.

There’s a whole side plot with a woman that Paul was tracking before Naji, and it’s all really pointless so it won’t get any ink here.  But understand that she committed suicide, so we’ve given Paul a reason to blame himself for things when the plot requires that characterization.  Then Paul suddenly meets with this deceased’s brother in the midst of his time sensitive chase, only for the man to be sorrowful but grateful for Paul’s efforts.  And then he agrees to lay some large horse bet for Paul, because that’s totally the kind of believable thing that these two would discuss. Then Paul goes to the site of Naji’s rapist cop whose location he magically deduced, and immediately confirms that’s where crimes went down as well as dead bodies must be buried nearby (all off his magical hunch) He lets Vuk know about the cop stuff he found so easily, despite the cop’s injuries contradicting Paul’s theory as well as the cop’s made up alibi making the news. Paul then immediately finds the blue Opel that everyone is looking for and sees large tire marks next to it. He lets Vuk know and continues his hunt for Naji.  So now we’re tracking three open cases that Paul is juggling.

Naji and Ifkar and Moon (the dog) stop to fish and camp. Naji tells his story about his dad being tortured by government and Naji repairing phones, which is how he got Al Mussafra’s attention initially. Once he saw Naji’s hot sister, he became obsessed with the family. Naji worked on the commander’s phones to encrypt them all while stealing money and intel from him, which El Jefe now knows about and is why they pursue him.  But weren’t they also pursuing him because he was the only one alive who could positively ID them all, just like the authorities? 

Chapters eleven and twelve are not subtle with their crammed in character development. A character’s mom calls out of nowhere to tell him to have children, while Naji’s new dog friend fights off a bear.  What a wild sentence.  Most of these chapters now feature the characters all telling Paul over and over to leave the pursuit of the boy alone.  Also please hand your phone over to the British embassy today.  Paul ignores them all and finds Naji via binoculars but also sees two men trailing him.

Paul continues to track Naji and calls Naji’s sister to tell Naji what to do, as that’s the only way he can communicate with him at the moment. The author is jumping back in time now, but it’s a bit too much because it’s so jarring. Can’t go from concurrent to chronological with these rotating POV chapters, especially since we jumped much further back in Paul’s POV - more than two or three chapter’s worth of time from Naji’s POV.  Reliving events through alternating character’s eyes can be an enjoyable ride, but not at the expense of cohesive storytelling.

Naji reaches some village and his phone rings finally. It’s his sister who convinces him to call and trust Paul. Naji calls, but is immediately attacked by the two followers earlier who shoot Ifkar and Moon. In the struggle the one limps into the woods with the cop’s phone that Naji was using, so he’s back to no comms now.

Let’s try our best with chapter fourteen.  Samson is annoyed with Vuk because the two terrorists now have the phone, though it’s the creeper cop’s phone not El Jefe’s phone like they think. They amass in the Pudnik village, Paul arrives, calls the number of the confiscated phone and deduces who they are by the ringing phone. He nods off (naturally) and in the morning Sonia calls again with her repeated refrain, (Jesus Christ) then officers show up to arrest him for being illegally in country. Paul unloads all three? phones to Vuk before he was arrested.

Naji leaves Ifkar and Moon in a small camp to heal and heads to village. Nurses try to treat his graze and detain him, but he escapes with med supplies. He coincidentally runs into the mother of the baby he saved in the beginning (how utterly convenient) which of course allows him to call his sister with the lady’s phone, only to find out his other sister is dead now. He returns to his camp to find an old couple foraging. They offer food, medicine and shelter for the three and Naji complies.

Meanwhile, Paul is interrogated and deduces that Macedonian authorities want Naji because he can identify the pedo cop which they don’t want public. Paul is escorted to the airport for deportation but a doppelgänger takes his place and he gets in a car with the shrink Anastasia. Give me a break Blofeld.  She was dropped off by Vuk who now works for Denis, the rich horse bet laying brother of the female from Paul’s previous case. They arrive at the hotel to resume their Naji search where Vuk is waiting with – you guessed it - another phone.

Paul and Vuk and Denis and Anastasia are at the market on the lookout.  Naji rides to the market in the AM with the old man who is selling his foraged mushrooms.  Old man is suddenly too drunk to drive out of nowhere. Wtf. Naji sees Ibrahim and bolts. They ride the tractor back home but Anastasia chases it down, but not before losing her phone. This book is OBSESSED with phones, phone batteries and poor connections. There might as well be an app named Plot Armor that Mr. Porter can just download onto all of these phones so that his artificial tension never wavers.

But wait, there’s more!  More phone crap, that is. Authorities are interested in Naji again because they figured out he hid stuff on one of the fifty phones in this story. They all get back to the farmhouse. Things are improving, but El Jefe and three others show up just as Naji is starting to cry for his father.  El Jefe ties Ifkar and the shrink up in the barn and ties the old couple in their bedroom. He tries to force Naji to kill his two friends but he refuses. Then Naji bluffs that the data El Jefe seeks is on some time release website that he must log onto or it will self-release all incriminating names or some nonsense. This story has become a mockery of itself.  Also some friend of Naji’s sister suddenly remembers that they’re a spy, and magically relayed location info to Jefe at the most devastating moment possible. Retroactive plot armor is the redheaded step child of regular old plot armor.

Paul gets to the farmhouse with Denis but gets captured. Now they’re all tied up and Naji sees his own phone when they empty Paul’s belongings. Somehow, Paul clocks this, and creates a distraction by trying to escape. Ibrahim attacks him, but then El Jefe deduces that Paul was creating a distraction on purpose? So that’s how he figured out it’s the boy’s phone in Paul’s pocket. Downright atrocious. Then of course Denis miraculously shows up in the nick of time to shoot everyone (all headshots while hostages are being used as shields it must be noted) and then a whole bunch of good guy helicopters arrive two seconds after the shootout. This story quite literally got worse with every syllable in the third act.

In the epilogue, Naji debriefs the EU on what’s on his magical plot repellant phone, then removes his own access to it. By the way, remember all the horse betting crap that never paid off? Denis calls Paul to tell them the horse came in! Who gives a fuck, right?  But what a perfect palate cleanser to such an awful tasting meal.  Smartphones have become so destructive to our culture that they’re literally making books worse.