Last Prophecy of Rome Read online

  Last Prophecy of Rome

  A gripping, action-packed conspiracy thriller

  Iain King

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Epigraph

  Day I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Day II

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Day III

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Day IV

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Day V

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Day VI

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Days VII-VIII

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Days IX-X

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Day XI

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Day XII

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Day XIII

  Chapter 75

  Epilogue

  Letter from Iain

  Also by Iain King

  About the Author

  Secrets of the Last Nazi

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  To the 5,230 refugees who died during 2015, trying to reach a better life in the West.

  ‘If all the barbarian conquerors had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West… The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.’

  Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776-88

  ‘…in the course of human events it becomes necessary for…people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them…’

  From the first sentence of the US Declaration of Independence, 1776

  Day I

  One

  Rome, Italy

  It was the wrong place for a holiday.

  The crowds, the hassle, the noise…

  Myles looked around and tried to be impressed: so this was Rome.

  He gazed at the magnificent statues: gods, emperors and senators. He saw the Colosseum, where gladiators brawled and died. He studied the city walls, which tried but ultimately failed to keep out the enemy. He even visited the old grain stores, Rome’s strategic stockpile of food, which kept its citizens plump. Stores once filled by harvests from across the sea, until barbarians overran the land now known as Libya...

  Helen grabbed his arm. ‘Shall we see the Pantheon?’ she suggested. She was still trying to lift his mood, and he could tell. ‘You ought to teach this stuff to your students, Myles…’

  Myles shrugged. She was right: Rome was an empire built on war and conquest. Perfect material for a military historian. He should teach it.

  But he knew he couldn’t. And the reason why was something he could never explain to her.

  They passed a fast-food outlet, an ice-cream seller and a man hawking plastic sunglasses for five euros a pair. School groups trampled over the ancient squares. Great artefacts were being smothered by chewing gum.

  As they crossed a piazza towards the Pantheon, Myles looked up at the sandstone columns guarding the entrance, then hauled open the oversized wooden doors to go inside. Helen followed close behind.

  Their eyes adjusted to the gloom. The only illumination came from the single window in the centre of the ceiling. They moved towards the middle of the patterned marble floor, directly below the light. Then their gaze slowly fell down to the alcoves and statues around the side of the circular building. Constructed in 126AD, Rome’s heyday, this was a church built for worship of all the gods – long before Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and ordered the whole Roman Empire to come with him.

  Bang.

  Myles flinched, hunching his head into his shoulders. He crouched down and scanned around.

  No one else had reacted. A few people even looked at him as if he was odd – which he knew he was.

  Helen saw it first. She motioned with her eyes: the huge doors to the Pantheon had been slammed shut, and the domed ceiling amplified the sound.

  Myles calmed himself.

  Helen put her hand on his face, and asked if he was OK.

  He was. It was just instinctive. His body had adapted to behave that way in Helmand. It would take time to unlearn.

  The army thought it had cracked Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In a change since Vietnam and the Second World War, troops were now flown from the frontline in groups. They were given time in an isolated place where they could drink away their memories – together, with people who had experienced similar things. By the time they returned home they had already half-forgotten their wars.

  Not Myles. His experiences had been unique, and nobody but Helen had any idea what he had been through. When he saw a street, his first thought was to wonder where someone would place a machine gun to control movement. When he saw a patch of grass, he feared an improvised explosive device – a deadly IED – could be buried underneath. When he heard a bang, he flinched.

  The symptoms would be obvious in anybody else, and therefore treatable. But for Myles, an unorthodox specialist in war and a misfit by any standard, it was hard to say what behaviour was normal.

  Afghanistan hadn’t made him violent. Myles would never be that. Nor had his experiences made him hateful, which was a common expression of combat trauma. But Afghanistan had turned his imagination against him. He used to dream up solutions. Now he dreamed up enemies.

  ‘Myles, you need to get back to the hotel,’ said Helen.

  They turned around. Away from the spectacles of the long-gone empire into the commercialised narrow streets and the crowds.

  They passed a homeless man in one of the alleyways. He looked tired and hungry. Myles could tell the young man didn’t have much – unshaven and with ruffled hair, he’d probably been sleeping rough for weeks. So Myles found some change and threw it towards him. The man thanked him with a nod.

  Outside a Hard Rock Cafe they saw men and women in business suits. They were standing about and chatting nervously, like they didn’t belong there. Obviously foreign. Myles picked up their acc
ents: American.

  Some of them recognised Helen, but none of them reacted. Myles guessed they were used to dealing with famous people.

  Then he realised: these people worked in the American Embassy, which was opposite. He could faintly hear a fire alarm, which explained why they were all outside.

  Myles smiled at them. Some of them smiled back, others just ignored him. None of them were worried.

  Then he looked up to see a very large cardboard box suspended from a rope. A man in dark glasses was manoeuvring it from a second-floor window of a nearby apartment block.

  The man lifted his glasses.

  Myles caught a sinister look in his eye. He grabbed Helen’s arm and pointed. ‘A bomb,’ he whispered. ‘It’s got to be a bomb…’

  Helen tried to work out how Myles could know the dangling box contained explosives. But Myles was already amongst the crowd. ‘Move away – quickly,’ he warned. ‘It’s a bomb.’

  The Embassy workers took time to react.

  He was flapping them away with his long arms. A few started to move slowly, until two or three started to run. Then everybody began to run with them.

  ‘Helen – RUN!’ Myles could see this was the perfect terrorist trap: set off the Embassy fire alarm then blow up all the staff as they muster outside.

  ‘But Myles…’ queried Helen.

  ‘Quick!’

  Senior executives, mid-level diplomats and all their support staff: they all began to flee. Helen reluctantly moved back with them.

  They started to gather at the far end of the street. From there they could see what would happen – but not at a safe distance if the Englishman’s warning was right. They all watched: half-curious, half-alarmed.

  Myles found himself alone in the street. He looked up at the window.

  The man hauling the cardboard box was sweating nervously now. Suddenly he left the box to swing on the rope and darted into the building.

  Myles rushed over to where the box was hanging. Damn the consequences.

  This was one terrorist he was determined to catch…

  Two

  New York, USA

  Salah had told his wife nothing about what he was planning to do.

  She had been suspicious – she had quizzed him about one of the books he had been reading. But he’d managed to conceal most of the material under his baby daughter’s bed. It was the only place to hide things in their tiny New Jersey apartment.

  His best information had come from the internet. He had discovered why so many terrorists had achieved so little. Now he understood how to do so much more, since his contact in Libya had explained to him the secret of ‘smart terrorism’.

  Small terrorist attacks were doomed to fail. Blowing up a few people or a single building could be explained away as the work of a lone psychopath or a disgruntled former employee. They might dominate the news for twenty-four hours, but not much longer. A celebrity romance or a scandal on Capitol Hill would soon squeeze them off the television.

  Larger terrorist attacks also failed. For an Oklahoma bombing, a Mumbai massacre or even a 9/11 to succeed, it could only ever be known about after the event. That meant only survivors would hear about it – the very people whom it had failed to break. It just made them ever-more defiant and patriotic.

  American patriotism – the thought of it made Salah retch. They won’t be singing ‘America the Beautiful’ after this one…

  Salah had studied previous attacks against New York: the attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre with an underground car bomb in 1993; the feeble bomb attempt in Times Square of May 2010. Even planes flying into the twin towers had done less damage to America’s financial system than a few greedy traders playing with hedge funds and derivatives…

  As his contact had explained, the secret to successful terrorist attacks lay not in the devastation they caused, but in the future they forced people to imagine. Smart terrorism meant convincing the public that much worse was to come.

  Salah looked across at his wife. She was sleeping soundly. Quietly he slipped out of bed and moved to dress in the very ordinary clothes he had picked out several days before: jeans, a white shirt and a workman’s fluorescent vest.

  Careful not to wake his seven-month-old daughter, he pulled his newly acquired American passport and flight ticket from under her cot. He placed them in his daysack, along with a spare set of clothes, a toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving foam and a disposable razor.

  He’d thought hard about whether to leave a note, but eventually decided against it. She would never understand what he was trying to do. Even if she did, she would never forgive him.

  And there was a greater danger – any note might be discovered before he had done his work. Salah’s wife had been an American twice as long as him. Unlike him, she had taken seriously the mantras they were taught in citizenship classes. Unlike him, she had disowned her roots in Africa.

  Salah knew, if she discovered what he was going to do, she would report him.

  Instead of a note, he left behind his keys. He wouldn’t need them again.

  Taking a last look at his baby daughter, still snoozing serenely, he walked backwards out of the apartment. Silently he closed the door behind him, pulling it into place with a click.

  He walked down the stairs and out to his delivery van. Alone in the first light of the morning, he surveyed the vehicle, walking round all four sides to check nobody could have interfered with it. He examined the tires and looked under the hood to see the engine. Everything was still dirty, which was good: it meant the FBI weren’t on to him.

  Finally, he climbed into the driver’s seat and, taking another look in the street to confirm he was still alone, he bent down to check the device. Still strapped in place above the foot pedals: the bomb remained untouched.

  With a last glance at his family home, he turned the ignition key, let the engine settle for a few seconds, then drove off towards the centre of New York’s financial district. To Wall Street.

  On test runs over the previous weeks, Salah had noticed the scars that still marked the walls on 23 Wall Street, the former offices of JP Morgan. In 1920, it had been the site of a bomb concealed in an old cart, led by a tired horse. The carriage had been parked by a man who stepped down and left quickly – some witnesses said he looked Italian. His hundred-pound dynamite bomb had killed thirty-one people instantly, with two more dying from their wounds.

  Like the Italian Wall Street bomber of 1920, Salah would never be caught. But his bomb was different. It would not leave scars on walls, but in people’s minds.

  He crossed the bridge into New York State, along famous roads clogging up with the morning traffic. He drove into Manhattan with the sun behind him.

  As planned, the journey was taking him ninety minutes. Perfect. He spent the time focussed – concentrating on his driving, and being grateful for the money and advice he had received from his contact back in Libya.

  Finally, he turned into Wall Street, trying to stay calm as his vehicle slowed to a crawl. He heard the horns blare and watched the taxi-drivers gesticulate against the traffic jams.

  Then he smirked. The jam meant he had arrived at exactly the right time: in the middle of the rush hour, when the impact would be greatest.

  Soon he was opposite number 23, the site of the bomb blast from almost a century earlier. Here he manoeuvred his van onto the sidewalk, turned off the ignition, and put his daysack on his shoulder. Deliberately, he didn’t look again at the bomb under the dashboard. He just stepped down, onto the tarmac.

  He closed the door behind him, locked it, and pulled on the handle to check it was locked.

  Then he began walking away into the morning rush of suited bankers, city traders, treasury officials – and all the cleaners, baristas and shop assistants who worked to support them in their jobs but whom Salah knew were paid much, much less.

  He was a full two hundred yards away when he first turned around to check his vehicle again. Over the heads of the walking cro
wds, he could see it remained in place, and was not yet causing any alarm.

  No one was on to him. His contact in Libya had been loyal: the secret of the bomb had been kept.

  So Salah pulled out his mobile phone, turned it on and waited for it to register a signal.

  Then he dialled the number he had memorised. The number which would set off the most powerful bomb Wall Street had ever seen.

  Three

  Via Veneto, Rome

  The bomb dangled outside the second-floor window, which was now empty. Myles had to reach it.

  He ran to the door underneath and grabbed the handle. It was locked. He tried ramming it with his shoulder – twice – but it stayed firm.

  He looked up. The explosives were still spinning on the rope above him, out of reach. He wondered whether the terrorist could escape through the back.

  Then Myles saw someone emerging from the house next door – an old woman. He rushed over. ‘Move away – there’s a bomb,’ he warned. The neighbour looked confused. Myles tried to remember his Italian. ‘Una Bomba!’ He gestured ‘an explosion’.

  The woman put her hands to her mouth in shock. Myles grabbed her and pointed her towards the crowd of Embassy staff, huddled at the end of the road. Helen came over to guide the confused woman away.

  The house next door gave Myles an opportunity – could he run through the old woman’s house to chase the terrorist?

  Myles was about to try when the door beneath the bomb opened. He looked over – the terrorist was about to run out. Sweat covered the man’s forehead. Myles caught his eye again: this time he looked scared.

  The man sprinted down the road, towards the American Embassy staff. He overtook his elderly neighbour, almost knocking her over.