Secrets of the Last Nazi (32 page)

‘For saying you were my fiancée, or for agreeing to marry?’

‘Both.’ She kissed him again, then looked at his bandaged head, and his plastered legs.

‘I love you, Helen,’ he whispered, relieved.

‘You won’t be chasing old Nazis anymore, now, I hope?’

‘He wasn’t a Nazi. Stolz was just trying to make sure his secret didn’t go to bad people. That’s why he swapped the Sarin for water, and why he left insulting clues about Hitler. All his life, he kept those records about Hitler dodging the draft and steering clear of the trenches. He could have destroyed them, but Stolz’s second secret was that he hated what the Nazis stood for. Perhaps did during the War, too.’

‘And his other secret was about the planets?’

Myles nodded.

Helen frowned, concerned. ‘You know, I told my editors to do a story on it – on all the amazing coincidences between planets and human events. None of them took it. It’s not going to run.’ She looked baffled, as if a bizarre editorial process had decided to miss out on one of the greatest scoops of the century.

But Myles knew why - he remembered what Glenn had said. Helen’s editors probably understood what would happen to their reputations if they told the truth. ‘Helen, it means people won’t learn how to predict their future from the planets. But is that really bad?’

‘Well, what did Stolz predict for you?’

‘Two days ago, his machine said that, today, my girlfriend would ‘cease to be’.’

Light glinted into Helen’s eyes from the ring on her finger – a ring she had bought for herself, knowing Myles was too much of a misfit to buy it for her. ‘Then, Myles, I guess it came true. I
have
ceased to be your girlfriend. I’m your fiancée now.’ She smiled, tucking her hair behind her ear. Then emotion burst all over her face as she realised she was with the man she was going to marry.

Myles put his hand through her hair, letting it rest on her neck. His future was standing beside him, and it was the only part of the future he wanted to know.

H
elen was
about to press ‘confirm’ when the doorbell rang.  She frowned as she checked her watch, not sure who it could be. Standing up, she leaned towards the window, and peered down onto Pembroke Street.  There, beaming up at her, sweating and recovering his breath, stood her fiancée. 

She smiled back, then shouted down to him, ‘Did you do the whole route?’

He nodded. She raised her eyebrows in admiration, then turned to press the entry buzzer, and listened to his footsteps bound up the stairs, two at a time.

She kissed him as he came in through the door, then made a show of wiping his sweat from her cheeks. ‘Still OK with the leg?’ she asked, noticing a graze on his shin as she said it.

‘That’s just from where I tripped near the lecture hall,’ he explained. ‘They’re both fine.’  He squatted down on his haunches, proving he could stand up again without pain.

‘Good,’ she said, beckoning him over to her computer.  ‘So how about trekking through the mid-West for our honeymoon?’

Myles smiled again.  ‘Shouldn’t we plan our wedding first?’

She was about to answer when the phone rang.  She pulled a face, then picked up the receiver.  ‘Hello?’  She slumped a little when she recognised the voice.  ‘OK – he’s right here,’ she said.  ‘Simon Charfield,’ she mouthed silently, as she passed the phone over.

Myles took the phone, slightly fazed. ‘Er, hello?’ he said before a pause. 

After a few moments he began to concentrate on Simon Charfield’s questions. ‘Ah, well,’ he began answering, ‘It certainly had a great impact.  A forerunner to modern chemistry, it led to the discovery of oxygen, explosives… it also caused the death of King Charles the Second, who experimented with it - if he hadn’t died, Britain might not be a democracy.’

Then she saw him frown.

‘Really?  Are you sure?  They might be faking, you know,’ cautioned Myles. 

Helen mimed a question, asking him what it was about.

Myles put his hand over the receiver.  ‘Terrorists performing alchemy,’ he whispered in reply, before concentrating back on the phone call.

Then she saw him nodding. 

‘Of course, I’m very curious.  If someone really can make gold then….’ Another pause, then, ‘What exactly to do you want me to investigate?’

Myles looked at her admiringly as he waited for the answer.  Their eyes connected.  He winked lovingly. But she knew what would happen next.

‘OK, Simon,’ he said.  ‘Tell me more…’

T
hank
you so much for reading
Secrets of the Last Nazi
. I really hope you enjoyed it.

And, if you’ve got this far, you’ve probably realised both secrets are true. They are.

Hitler really was a coward in World War One - he managed to spend less time in the trenches than almost any other private in his regiment. And, despite all his rhetoric, he ducked out of military service for Imperial Austria at least three times. The Nazis managed to hide these facts for years. Many people were hoodwinked, and some respected journalists in the West even colluded in the myth.

It’s also true that planets can be used to make accurate predictions about human affairs. Like Glenn, I don’t know how or why, but they can. In February 1988, I saw someone use the Saturn-Neptune cycle to explain exactly what would happen to communism the following year – including the precise week that the Berlin Wall would come down. If you say ‘that should be impossible’, then I agree with you, but that doesn’t stop it being true.

Several top Nazis knew this truth, including Himmler, Hess and Goebbels – probably others, too. Unfortunately, my investigation ran dry when I tried to discover more about Nazi research programmes, and what they had found out – the evidence had been destroyed or hidden. I hope the fiction parts of
Secrets of the Last Nazi
give you some idea about the intrigue around all this. I’m still expecting the evidence in this book to be distorted, and to be attacked and ridiculed personally for presenting it – statistician Michel Gauquelin really was harried to his death for exposing some of it.

Writing can be lonely, and connecting with my readers when the story is told is both enjoyable and important. If you did enjoy
Secrets of the Last Nazi
and have an opinion on the story, I’d be delighted to read it in a review, no matter how short. I love reading reviews and always appreciate the fact that people take the time to write them – even if you only put down a few nice words. They also help other readers discover my books for the first time, especially if you are kind enough to give me lots of ‘stars’.

As for Myles Munro, he has more ‘impossible’ truths to discover -
The Last Prophecy of Rome
is
coming soon
. If you’d like to
keep up-to-date with all my latest releases
, just sign up here:

Thank you so much for your support – until next time.

Iain King

• @iainbking
  

R
ome
, Italy

I
t was
the wrong place for a holiday.

T
he crowds
, the hassle, the noise….

W
orst of all
: the constant reminders of war.

M
yles wanted a break
, but knew he wasn’t going to get one here.

He had read about Rome as an undergraduate: just one term to cover the whole Roman Empire. He’d forgotten most of it now. The lectures, the lecturer and that old history book – it all seemed so long ago.

What he remembered most were the other students. Some of them were very unusual, one of them more than the rest. The one he would never forget…

He looked around and tried to be impressed.

So this was Rome.

He gazed at the magnificent statues: gods, emperors and senators. He saw the Coliseum, 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 citizen’s plump. Stores once filled by harvests from across the sea, until barbarians overran the land which is now Libya...

Myles tried to let the monuments change his mind, but they couldn’t. Everything about the greatest empire the world had ever known was shaded by one single truth: that it was brought down.

Rome declined and fell: everybody knew that. But that most famous fact hid an enigma. Perhaps the city’s greatest puzzle – the riddle of Rome.

How was the world’s greatest superpower - the most sophisticated civilisation of its age, an empire for more than a thousand years – defeated by a bunch of homeless barbarians?

Rome’s wonders would always be overshadowed by the mystery of how they were lost.

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 Helen.

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. Will our civilisation end this way?

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

Their eyes adjusted to the gloom. The only light came from the single window in the centre of the ceiling. They moved towards the middle of the patterned marble floor, directly below the window. 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 the worship of all the gods - long before Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and tried to bring the whole Roman Empire with him.

Bang

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

He couldn’t tell, but 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 ‘Are you 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. He had been a lone civilian advisor. 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 still 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.

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.

Helen was right.

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 Café 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.

Just routine - it was only a drill.

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 near a second-floor window.

The man lifted his glasses.

Myles caught his eye and saw a sinister look. 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.

‘Quick. It’s a bomb,’ Myles insisted. 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 away!’ 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: everyone hurried away. 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 a safe distance if the Englishman’s warning was right. They all watched: half-curious, half-alarmed.

Myles had become alone in the street. He looked up at the window. The man holding the cardboard box was looking nervous now.

Suddenly he left the box to swing on the rope and darted into the building.

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

This was one terrorist he was determined to catch…