Foretold by Thunder: A Thriller

by Edward M. Davey

  “Hands up please, sir,” said Waits, blowing a forelock from his glasses. “If you would.”

  “And you,” Davis growled.

  The journalist lunged for the cover of a lamppost, which sprouted from its sizeable marble base a few steps down. Before Davis could retrieve his pistol he was behind the block: where the Suzuki scrambler he had hired that morning stood, engine running. Jake’s vision shimmered as he got a leg over the bike. He pulled the throttle too hard. At once the Suzuki leapt forward, front wheel rearing up into the air. Davis dived for the vehicle, catching the rail behind the pillion seat with his free hand. He was jerked clear of the stairway and for two seconds both of them were airborne, the gunman clinging to the furious machine. The bike landed a half a dozen steps down, unbalanced, leaning at forty-five degrees. Rubber met marble with a shriek and a puff of smoke; then the back tyre gripped and the bike flung itself into the air again, clearing another six steps with the second bound. It landed with a bump that re-dislocated Davis’s shoulder. Somehow the assassin held on. Jake had control of the bike now and he zigzagged down the steps, face jiggling with each bump – as though the flesh was disconnected from the skull. Tourists parted before the onrush of the machine, dropping cameras and tripping over each other in their haste. Still Davis clung on, lashed left and right behind the Suzuki like a human tail. An elderly balloon-seller juddered closer, frozen in shock. Instinctively Jake jerked the machine to the left. Their shoulders kissed and the pensioner let go of his balloons, arms wind-milling the air. Jake fought to steady the Suzuki, the marble fountain rushing to meet him. He wasn’t wearing a helmet: the impact would pulp his brains. At the last moment he threw the bike into a slide across the piazza that stripped the skin from his thigh. This was too much for Davis and he let go, slithering across the pavement as if in fast forward and crumpling into a heap. The bike spun on its side in the opposite direction and came to a halt. Terror gave Jake strength as he heaved it onto two wheels and kick-started the engine, pinning the machine between his thighs like a cowboy on a mustang. He yanked the throttle and the bike launched itself forward again, his cheeks sucked back with the g-force. Davis was already up and firing, but lack of control made the Suzuki’s turns erratic and his shots were wide. The gunman limped into the path of an oncoming scooter; menaced the rider with his pistol; dragged him off the moped by the neck; threw him to ground. Waits had vanished, the elderly prisoner with him.

  The Hispanic guy seemed to be talking to himself.

  61

  The Via dei Condotti is Rome’s most exclusive shopping street: straight, narrow and clogged with pedestrians at this hour. A pregnant mother in a puffer jacket shrieked at Jake as he jinked through. “Bastaaa!”

  The yell distracted him and when he looked up there was a middle-aged woman wearing Jackie O sunglasses directly in his path, shopping bags fanned out over her left arm. Jake snatched at the brakes and the machine squealed back to stationary with centimetres to spare.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Designer shopping bags quivered in the rubber smoke.

  “Scusate signora,” he tried.

  But the woman wasn’t looking at him any more. She was looking beyond him. Jake turned to see Davis bearing down at speed, shoppers scattering before the stolen scooter. The journalist accelerated off. One by one the labels flashed past: Prada, Dior, Gucci, Bulgari. The motorbike was twice as powerful as Davis’s scooter, but in the crowds any advantage was lost. The Suzuki cornered heavily at slow speeds, threatening to tumble over. And the scooter was in its element, threading a path through the shoppers, sailing over the feet of an elderly Roma gypsy who was begging in the road. This was another advantage the assassin held: he just didn’t care who got hurt. They burst free of the crowds, like jet planes clearing thick stratocumulus, the odd straggler darting to safety. In Jake’s wing mirror he saw the vibrating image of Davis, levelling his pistol, horribly close now, preparing to fire. There was an alleyway coming up and Jake wrenched the handlebars to the right, sending the bike into a sideways skid that sucked the blood to one side of his body. He came to a halt facing up the passage – a manoeuvre only terror could produce. The alleyway was devoid of people; he hit sixty in two seconds. Davis had become a distant figure in Jake’s mirrors by the time he emerged into the passage behind him. The journalist pulled a left, to be rewarded with another empty alleyway. This was better. The cityscape was playing to his motorbike’s strengths now. And he was mastering the bike, learning to lean with it as he cornered. Davis appeared behind him again as he reached the end of the second alleyway; the gap had expanded to fifty metres. One more stretch like that and he would have lost him, he’d round the corner before Davis came into sight. There was another turning coming up. Jake took this one at speed.

  He had the momentary impression of stalls rushing towards him.

  The motorbike went straight into a postcard stand, which flipped up into the sky like a juggler’s club. Jake’s face was smarting, but somehow he kept the bike on its wheels, a confetti of cards fluttering down onto the cobbles in his wake. The street market sold books and art and Jake was forced to slow as he wound through the punters. Now Davis was in the alleyway too; instead of slowing down he sped up. The market became a blizzard of paper as the killer bulldozed his way along. An artist was painting a caricature of two Danish girls and Davis tore through the easel, shearing the canvas in half. Ahead of Jake stood the Church of San Carlo Corso, a pedestrian walkway leading past the chapel. He tore along the pavement; bounced down some steps; rounded a corner; ran straight into a film crew. A model dived out of Jake’s way, stumbling into a camera which crashed to the ground. A lighting rig came down after it; bulbs shattered in a blinding flash. Jake weaved around the lunge of a corpulent director and raced away once more. In his rear-view mirror he could make out the paint splattered across Davis’s face as his scooter emerged into the walkway. The director rushed into the path of the oncoming vehicle, hopping from one foot to the other in paroxysms of rage. Davis went right through him, like a prince dispatching riffraff at a medieval joust.

  Jake emerged into a park dominated by a windowless cylinder of brickwork, three storeys high and two hundred feet wide. The monument was topped by a conical hillock, cypress trees dotted about the summit. Jake accelerated across the grass towards it.

  Two men holding hands wandered into his path.

  For the second time in that deranged chase he was forced to ditch the bike. He felt no pain as he slammed sideways into the earth, grazing his cheek and expelling the air from his lungs. He manhandled the Suzuki onto two wheels, swung his leg over the machine, fired it up again. A policeman appeared in front of Jake then, yelling and drawing his gun; behind him Davis’s moped buzzed into the park. The only option was to race down a shallow set of steps and into the ditch that circled the monument.

  Davis pursued him, and for a mad few seconds they chased each other around the cylinder of masonry, doing laps of the ditch. But Jake’s tyres were better suited to the terrain and he pulled away, the brickwork sliding across his rear-view mirrors until the assassin could no longer be seen. Seconds later Davis appeared in front of him. The spy was hunched forward on his moped as the grass sprayed up from its rear wheel, unaware he was about to be lapped. Jake swerved out of the ditch before Davis could spot him. The steps acted as a ramp, launching the Suzuki through the air in front of the astonished policeman.

  By the time Davis worked out what had happened, Jake was out of the park. Neither man ever knew that they had been doing laps of the Mausoleum of Augustus. Jake came out by the Tiber: here at last was a stretch of open road, and he put a kilometre behind him in thirty seconds. There was still no sign of Davis, and Jake punched the air. It had been easily the most exhilarating two minutes of his life.

  62

  Jenny Frobisher checked her watch for the fifth time in ten minutes. It was 11:45 a.m.: fifteen minutes until the rendezvous. She took a sip of espresso and screwed up her eyes. F
or her plan to work a scary amount of things had to go right.

  First, she had to be correct in her calculation that they would be facing a team of two – three at the outside, if Evelyn Parr was in Italy too. But she was certain Waits wouldn’t bring more agents on board – not with all the murder left behind them in which any newcomer was not complicit. There was always the awful possibility that he would deploy some E-Squadron personnel.

  Oh, all the major embassies have a few smooth operators I can call on …

  But after what went down in Istanbul, Jenny thought it unlikely. That had been a rapidly-developing situation, whereas the spymaster had had days to prepare for this snatch. And Waits was arrogant – he would like to think he could handle it himself. Jake’s life now depended on this.

  Secondly, Jenny needed to find an unwitting accomplice who resembled Dr Nesta. They had agonized over the ethics of this detail, but she was adamant the individual would be unharmed. Killing a civilian would create more loose ends than it tied off; Waits would scare him and let him go.

  Third: Jake had to be as good on two wheels as he evidently thought he was (though he didn’t voice this minor pride).

  Getting the bike in position without alarm bells ringing had been an issue, but they found the solution. The Suzuki was brand new, and Jenny had approached the tourist police, asking to do a photo-shoot on the steps. She’d been told paperwork was required; heavy flirtation somehow negated the need for it. The motorbike had been there since 5 a.m., with a little boy paid to polish it; every now and then the officers sauntered up to the kid and asked him when the attractive English lady would return. Jenny reckoned it looked natural enough.

  Finally, the timings had to be perfect. For public transport reasons Jenny thought it likely Dr Nesta would approach from the east, at the bottom of the Spanish Steps. So she positioned herself at the back of a café overlooking the piazza, ready to pounce on him.

  Jenny told the decoy that she was the fiancée of a longhaired blond man who would shortly be arriving at the top of the steps. Her lover didn’t even know she was in Rome; Jenny had bought him this red cap on the day of their engagement. Would the gentleman be kind enough to hand it to him, point her out in the café and pass on a message of amore? It was a story no Italian could resist.

  At noon it would be all systems go. Without question, MI6 were already in position. All in all, she was reasonably confident in her plan. Similar swoops had worked in the past, although admittedly nothing with so many variables. If Dr Nesta arrived late it would be dicey; if he was early it would be a catastrophe. Jenny didn’t even want to think about the possibility of a third watcher remaining behind once Jake succeeded in diverting Davis and Waits was occupied with his prisoner.

  Suddenly it was time.

  There was Jake, stepping into the open, walking like a man on a tightrope. Off went the decoy, taking the steps if he was walking down the aisle: a silly smile plastered over his face. To Jenny’s eyes the whole thing looked ridiculously contrived – Waits couldn’t possibly go for it. But he did.

  Then Jake was tearing down the staircase on the scrambler, Davis dragged behind him, the Italian being led away by Waits as tourists fled in all directions. Amid the mayhem a man wearing a red cap approached the piazza from the east, as she had calculated he would. Dr Giuseppe Nesta observed the scene for a few seconds before throwing his headwear on the ground and fleeing. Jenny sprinted after the scientist, slipped a disposable phone into his pocket, and it was done.

  63

  The journalist found it gratifying to see how many other clichés of spy-craft were reality. Jenny’s counter-surveillance routines were copious. She doubled back on herself, crisscrossed the street, changed bus and Metro routes exhaustively. And she insisted it was safest to meet Dr Nesta in public, where there was less chance of being eavesdropped on and more avenues of escape. On the clean phone line they agreed to meet in the old Roman forum, where they could blend in with the tourists.

  Jake tried to make a joke of it: “Should we ask him if the fishing in Leningrad is good this time of year?”

  Jenny ignored him. He could detect a sense of humour lurking somewhere beneath the surface, but it was as if it had been hermetically sealed from the world.

  They met the physicist under the shoulder of the Colosseum. For a statement of raw power the stadium retained considerable elegance in its columns and arches, yet it was brutally functional too. Jake pointed out the numerals marked over gates that once admitted the mob: Roman crowd control.

  Dr Nesta was elderly and pigeon-toed with round spectacles that seemed to exaggerate his eyes. He reminded Jake of a puffin come down from the colony to share its secrets, and looking at his shuffling walk an almost motherly sensation welled in the journalist.

  “I hope when I have told you what I must, you will not think me too mad,” Dr Nesta began. “So. What do you already know of Roger’s work?”

  Jake filled him in as they promenaded through the political heart of ancient Rome. He spoke of the trail set by Eusebius; the new inscriptions; the desperation of the men and women who hunted them. With each revelation Dr Nesta’s eyes widened until it seemed he was more eye than man. Jake left out one detail: that he believed in the same thing as Britton. Jenny had to see the proof of that for herself.

  Dr Nesta stopped under a triumphal arch erected to honour Constantine after his victory following the vision. “By this sign conquer,” he said grandly. “But it was not by any Christian sign that Rome mastered the world.” Instinctively Dr Nesta crossed himself. “Roger was killed because he realized that what my ancestors believed was … it was true.”

  Jake saw the twist of a smile pass over Jenny’s features.

  “Well, you have not run away.” Dr Nesta clasped his hands together. “That is a good start. Now I can show you the mathematics and the science to prove it.”

  “Dr Nesta,” began Jenny. “You said you had information about Roger Britton.”

  “Signora,” he interrupted, “I can tell you now that they called down a lightning strike on his head!”

  She regarded him with pity.

  “You don’t believe me, of course. Why would you? But he knows it’s true.” Dr Nesta wheeled to face Jake. “I can see it in his face.”

  Jake made no reply.

  “Let us proceed this way,” said Dr Nesta, gesturing onward. “And I shall give you the science.”

  They wandered into the Forum itself. This was where Cicero made his prosecutions and defences, where his head would end up on a stake; where Mark Antony delivered the funerary oration to Julius Caesar. And where before all that, Etruscan kings had drained the swamps and thrown up shrines to their forgotten Gods. The temples were reduced to white fingers, rising from the ground to point out the lost greatness of Rome.

  “I was engaged in the hunt for the Holy Grail of modern physics,” Dr Nesta said. “The Grand Unified Theory. You are scientifically minded I assume?”

  Jake looked awkward.

  “I did physics at A Level,” Jenny offered. “And I’m half-decent at maths.”

  “Then please interrupt if I start patronizing you,” said Dr Nesta. “You are aware, I am sure, that the two great breakthroughs in physics of the last century – Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics – cannot both be correct. They contradict each other. The search for the theory that marries the two has cost vast fortunes without success.”

  Jenny nodded. The Large Hadron Collider – a tunnel under the Swiss border through which particles were fired at almost the speed of light – had devoured two billion euros in construction alone.

  “My attempt to solve this problem led me to develop a new theory, one that combines quantum physics and relativity. It was this that led me to Professor Britton. Or, should I say, led Professor Britton to me.”

  A group of Portuguese schoolchildren clattered past – all braces, puffer jackets, perfect skin. Once the hubbub subsided Dr Nesta continued, “Relativity applies t
o things on a big scale. Snooker balls, planets, us. But a different set of rules seems to apply at a quantum level. That is to say, to tiny things – neutrons, electrons and so on. Mathematicians have always assumed Einstein’s theory of relativity was correct, so they have always tried to redefine quantum theory to fit with Einstein. I took the other approach.” He raised an eyebrow. “I threw relativity out of the window, signora.”

  “So Einstein was wrong then?” said Jenny.

  “You are cynical, of course,” said Dr Nesta. “So are my colleagues. They cannot accept it. Their brains are inured to new concepts. But I tell you, relativity is a false religion. Einstein himself admitted it. When he was an elderly man he told a friend his work would not stand the test of time. Perhaps he’d got it wrong after all.”

  “How does this relate to the Etruscans?” asked Jake.

  “I’m getting to that. Please bear with me.” Dr Nesta’s expression was both smile and grimace. “Under my theory there is no curved space-time. There is no constant speed of light. All of Einstein’s findings I refute. There are simply two types of energy – a positive energy and a negative energy. Like the Yin and Yang in the old eastern philosophies.”

  Something in this was beginning to make Jenny uneasy.

  “This idea is not new, of course,” he went on. “But it was discarded because it did not fit with relativity. Of course, now we have forsaken Einstein this does not cause a problem. Indeed, we can strike out his other great fallacy – the belief that it is impossible to create energy out of nothing.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Jenny said, “How?”

  “The answer is in the way these energies collide,” said Dr Nesta, his voice husky, as if whispering state secrets. “For centuries the maxim has been accepted that energy can neither be destroyed nor created, that it can only change form. But as I will illustrate, if positive and negative energy exist side by side, this maxim should read that energy can only be destroyed or created in equal amounts.”