Iain King
Last Prophecy of Rome
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.’
‘…in the course of human events it becomes necessary for…people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them…’
Day I
One
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 accents: 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
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.