“Think of it as mercy,” Frost said.
Two shots, one bullet in each of the man’s shoulders.
The gunman rocked back with the impact and his arms useless.
His fingers dragged bloody streaks across the tiles and the discarded weapon. He couldn’t grasp it and even if by some miracle he could there was no way he could pull the trigger. Frost scanned the immediate area looking for another threat, but found none. The area was secure. For now. Cautiously, he stood to full height and advanced on the wounded man.
The stricken gunman was breathing rapidly through the pain of his wounds, and his eyes were filled with impotent rage as he watched Frost. Frost knelt in front of him.
“Fucker!” the gunman spat. The curse came with an aerosol spray of blood and rivulets of red began leaking from the corners of the man’s mouth.
Frost didn’t see any injuries that could account for this. The idiot had probably bitten his tongue during the firefight. The three wounds could well prove fatal without medical attention. It was supply and demand: while the heart kept pumping the blood kept leaking out. “Let me tell you a secret,” Frost said, quite reasonably. “I couldn’t care less whether you make it out of here. You tried to put me down. There’s only one reason you’re still breathing. I want to know who you’re working for.”
He placed the barrel of the Browning a few centimetres from the man’s forehead.
The man’s face twisted in a snarl.
His lips had already taken on a bluish tinge. His face grew paler with every passing second. He coughed. It became something else. A sound that might have been laughter. “You’re a dead man walking, Ronan Frost. You’re on the wrong side of this.”
The words were no more than bravado.
“Who are you working for?” he repeated. “How did you find us?”
His questions were met with the same death-rattle chuckle. “Finish it. I’m not going to betray—” the coughing worsened.
Frost jammed the muzzle of the gun into one of the holes in the man’s shoulder and yanked sideways, hard.
The man screamed.
Really screamed.
“So much for mercy. Now I have to hurt you.”
“Kill me. You can’t win. I’m not alone. Kill me and spend the rest of your life running. Do it. Kill me. You don’t have the balls.”
“You talk a lot for a dead man,” Frost said, and pistol-whipped the guy across the side of the face. He was unconscious before he hit the cathedral floor. Frost checked his pulse. Weak. But weak was better than non-existent.
You’re on the wrong side of this.
An odd hiss crackled from under him. Frost patted him down until he found the small handheld radio clipped to his belt. “Ghost one, report. The signal is stationary. Did you get them?”
Understanding hit Frost like a slap.
He drew out his mobile phone, holding it like it was the enemy and thumbed the button to turn it on. The signal status indicator in the corner of the display was unchanged—four bars, all full, but crossed with a diagonal slash.
They tracked my mobile.
But it was more than that.
He’d been cut off from Nonesuch.
The wrong side....
He became aware of Denison crouching down next to him, and Lili just a few steps away, her arms hugged tightly across her chest. “Give me your mobile phones,” he barked.
Denison, eyes wide, handed his over without comment. Lili just shook her head. “I don’t have one.”
Frost laid Denison’s phone on the floor next to his own, and used the butt of his pistol like a hammer to smash both devices until they were unrecognizable. Denison seemed to understand, and when Frost finished, he calmly asked: “Now what?”
Frost felt an unfamiliar anger seethe within him. He regarded his old friend. His old CO. He wanted the truth and no one was telling him it. “You tell me. Things are royally screwed here. No sword, people trying to kill us. I just shot two men, Tony, and I still have no idea why. I’ve been cut-off from my people. I’m out in the fucking cold and we’ve got nothing to show for it but a mounting stack of bodies. So you tell me what we’re supposed to do next.”
“No!” Lili’s utterance was both unexpected and unusually forceful. “Not nothing. The parchment I found...I know where the sword is.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake—”
Denison cut Frost off. “Where?”
“The parchment was a letter from Octavian himself. That skeleton belonged to a centurion who had been ordered to take Labienus, along with an entire cohort, to Britain to recover the sword and bring it to Rome, where he would enshrine it in a temple. A temple that Julius Caesar had planned to build, and which Octavian, as Augustus Caesar, would eventually complete: the Temple of Mars Ultor.” She was comfortable here, talking about this. It didn’t involve guns or war crimes. It was familiar territory. Her expertise. “We assumed that the sword was still here, still buried with Nennius. We were wrong. Labienus found it, stole it from the tomb. The Britons killed the centurion...left his body there as a warning...but Labienus and the others escaped with their prize.”
“What about all that business with the sword in the stone and King Arthur?” Frost said, trying to keep up.
“A false trail. As I said earlier, there may have been a sword in an anvil, which Vortigern claimed was the Crocea Mors, but the real sword was already long gone.”
Denison repeated his question urgently. “Where?”
“Rome, of course. All roads lead to Rome.”
Denison turned to Frost. “Ronan, you’ve done more for us than I could have hoped. I can’t ask you to stick with us...” He let the implicit request hang in the air.
You’re on the wrong side of this....
He didn’t even know what the sides were, and yet these killers had managed to use his mobile phone to track them to Saint Albans. His phone. That meant they knew who he was, knew who he worked for, which was something that even Denison didn’t know.
The wrong side....
I’ve been sold out.
Some animal part of his brain railed against that notion. The old man wouldn’t do that to him. But his rational mind couldn’t see another alternative. Who else could have given him up? He gestured to the slumped form of the gunman. “He told me I was on the wrong side of this. Why did he say that, Tony? Make me understand. Otherwise I can’t walk out of here with you.”
“I’ve told you everything I know, Ronan.”
“You haven’t.”
But there was no hint of duplicity in Denison’s face.
Whether the whole business about the New World Order conspiracy was true or not, he clearly believed it was, and that was all that mattered.
“They’re willing to kill us all to keep you from finding that sword,” Frost pressed. “It’s that important?”
Denison spread his hands. “I wouldn’t have believed it either.”
The wrong side....
What kind of crazy fucked up rabbit hole have I tumbled into?
“This isn’t going to stop until we’re dead.”
“Or until we have that sword,” Denison said.
Frost took a breath and let it out slowly. He felt a little lightheaded and realised that blood from the bullet wound in his arm had saturated his shirt sleeve beneath his jacket and was now falling in fat drops on the tile. He turned to Lili. “You can find this Martian Temple?”
Lili nodded. “The Temple of Mars Ultor. I know where the ruins are. I think I know where the sword would have been kept.”
Frost held her stare for a moment before looking to Denison. “Rome, then.”
10 Roads that Lead to Rom
Then, Rome, Italy—44 BCE
TITUS LABIENUS WATCHED nervously as a phalanx of horses rode toward him.
In the light of the half moon, he could make out little more than their silhouettes, but there was no mistaking the orderliness of the formation or the military bearing of the riders—these w
ere soldiers.
Not just any soldiers, but the elite Praetorian Guard, Octavian’s personal protectors, fiercely loyal, recruited from the very best the legions had to offer. And they were coming for him.
Not for the first time, he wondered if he had made a grave mistake in contacting Octavian. The young heir apparent had approved the idea of sending a quest to Britain in order to recover Caesar’s sword, and had even directed Labienus to travel with Marcus’ cohort of legionaries, but he had not changed the terms of Labienus’ imprisonment; the former tribune was still nominally under house arrest, still considered an enemy of Rome. The message was implicit; his status would not change unless the quest was successful.
Or until he was dead.
Labienus gripped the leather sheath in both hands. I’ve kept my part of the bargain. Will Octavian honour his?
Octavian knew that he had succeeded, knew what he carried, and yet he had not invited Labienus into the city for a formal reception. Instead, he had demanded this clandestine meeting.
He told himself that Octavian was merely being cautious, but part of him wondered if it would not have been wiser for him to cast his lot in with the senators—men who would have honoured his ill-advised decision to stand with Pompey against the self-styled dictator of Rome—or better, to simply take his prize and disappear, starting a new life somewhere far from Rome, Africa perhaps.
Too late for that now.
The horsemen surrounded him and he felt a new flush of fear as the powerful animals closed in. He could feel their hot breath on his neck. They circled him. The riders gazed down from a position of overwhelming strength. Round and around. Dizzying. But made no move against him.
Then, one of them dismounted.
“Titus!”
He knew the voice, though it had been many years since they had travelled together and the boy had grown into a man. Octavian.
Labienus stretched out his right hand, offering the customary gesture of friendship and peace. “My lord.”
Octavian did not return the salute, but instead clasped a hand to Labienus’ shoulder and guided him out of the circle of horsemen. “You have returned alone, Titus?”
“I have, lord. A great many things happened on the road.”
Octavian stared at the sheathed blade that Labienus still clutched in his left hand, held protectively against his breast. “I would hear your tale.”
Labienus nodded, and began speaking.
HIS MEMORIES OF Britain were memories of war. Ten years earlier, he had ridden at the front of an army, spent his nights in a military encampment surrounded by a sea of hardened warriors. In that respect, Labienus’ recollections of Britain were little different than any of the other battlefields on which he had fought.
Now, accompanied only by sixty legionaries instead of thousands, he felt as though he were seeing the place for the first time.
The journey across Gaul had been unremarkable. The news of Caesar’s assassination had reached the far flung settlements, but the governors and garrison commanders were wisely biding their time, waiting to see who would emerge as Rome’s next leader. No one wanted to tip their hand too soon. They told no one their true purpose, and when asked, Marcus had indicated only that their mission to Britain was diplomatic in nature, which was understood to mean that they were being sent to spy on the Britons, hence the small numbers.
They crossed the channel on a trade vessel and were met by an envoy from Mandubracias. News of their mission had preceded them. Mandubracias had not forgotten the role of the Roman legions in making him king of Trinovantes, and affirmed his friendship with Rome and Julius Caesar’s heir, but remained wary. An uneasy peace existed between the Trinovantes and the Catuvellauni, but if Cassivelaunus believed that the Romans were negotiating with his former enemy, it might mean renewed hostilities between the island’s two dominant tribes.
Under the pretext of reassuring the Catuvellauni leader that Rome had no interest in upsetting the balance of power on the island, they would be able to journey unmolested to Cassivelaunus’ stronghold, which as luck would have it, lay only a short distance from the crypt of Prince Nennius and the sword of Julius Caesar.
Cassivelaunus had not forgotten Rome either, and while he recounted his memories of the battles with Caesar in warmly nostalgic terms, even expressing sorrow at the news of the assassination, there was no mistaking the undercurrent of enmity in the hospitality of his hall. The message was clear: Be on your way, and do not return.
On the eve of their departure, Marcus and Labienus stole from the fortress under cover of darkness and made their way on foot to the sacred hill where the Catuvellauni buried their dead.
Once away from the settlement, they did not have to worry about attracting notice; the superstitious Britons may have insisted on preserving the bodies of their dead, but they kept them at a healthy distance. The two men made their way up the rutted wagon trail to the top of the hill, where they found the entrance to the Hall of the Dead.
Hidden from the view of the distant fortress, they risked lighting a small lamp before venturing inside.
Labienus wasn’t a superstitious man, and he’d seen more than his share of corpses, but those were always the freshly dead—men cut down in battle, victims of disease or accidents.
This was different.
The claustrophobic tunnels of the crypt and the oppressive stench of decay were an assault on his senses. His anxiety quickened as he ventured deeper.
He began to see figures moving in the shadows cast by the flickering lamplight.
The dead were restless.
Of course they are, Labienus thought. They were left to rot, when they should have been cremated so their souls could journey to Elysium. Pity them. Do not fear them. Pity them.
But that was easier thought than put into practice. He hurried, searching the burial niches one after the other until at last, he found the one corpse that had not been interred with a crude sword of iron.
He looked at the dead man, remembering him in all of his glory on the battlefield.
It was always so hard to reconcile the bones of a man with the man himself.
Now he was reduced. Brought to nothing. His flesh had rotted through and fed the maggots and worms until nothing more than bones remained.
Labienus bowed his head in respect, and whispered, “Well met old enemy. Sleep on.”
He hastily pried the gladius from Nennius’ bony grasp and without another word crept back up the tunnels into the air, then down the hill again, the moon on their heels.
In the morning, they departed as planned, confident that their intrusion would go unnoticed, probably forever, and rode south, following the river. It was a two-day ride at a leisurely pace, but with their prize in hand they rode hard, pushing the horses to exhaustion, stopping only when the darkness made safe travel impossible.
As the legionaries tended to the horses and established a night watch, Labienus stretched out on the ground, and with the sword clutched protectively in his arms, fell into a troubled slumber.
HE AWAKENED WITH a start.
The camp was bathed in the light of a nearly full moon.
One of the soldiers guarding the perimeter looked his way. They exchanged a nod and then the man resumed his vigil as if nothing was wrong.
Doesn’t he know what’s about to happen? Labienus thought, frantically.
But the legionary hadn’t shared his premonition of danger.
Labienus pushed himself to his feet and went in urgent search through the sleeping men for Marcus.
A chilling war cry broke the silence.
A storm of death was unleashed on the camp.
Sling stones and spears whistled out of the surrounding woods, ringing against armour and shield, crunching into bone and flesh.
The legionaries rallied, forming a shield barrier, but a dozen of their number were already down.
Labienus wore no armour but he was not unarmed.
He hefted Caesar’s sword and
stood his ground, waiting for the attackers to rush out of the darkness.
“Titus,” Marcus urged. “We cannot fail. You must take the sword. Go. Get it to Rome.”
“Flee?” Labienus understood the other man’s reasoning, but attempting to retreat through the dark unfamiliar terrain was every bit as dangerous as staying to fight.
“Take ten men,” Marcus ordered. “I will hold them here, and if I am able, join you again on the road. And if not I will see you in Elysium. Now go.”
Labienus gripped the hilt of the sword. Was this why the gods had roused him? Not to fight, but so that he could escape with the sword?
Who could ever truly know the will of the gods?
He didn’t argue with the warrior. The unseen attackers had them surrounded, but Labienus’ protectors mounted and broke through—at a cost of two more dead—and attempted to gallop south following the river. The treacherous darkness made it impossible. One horse went down, stumbling on a tree root, and crushed its rider in the fall. They left the injured man there and kept going. He would die on the roadside, alone. The man didn’t beg for mercy. He promised to delay the enemy if he could.
The sound of the nearby battle ceased.
In the ensuing silence, Labienus experienced another premonition of danger. He looked at his remaining seven men. “They will come for us.”
The legionary leading the group stared back at him, the moonlight giving his face the pallor of a corpse. “We will not escape,” he said, his voice cold and emotionless. Then he gripped Labienus’ shoulder earnestly. “But you might. Let us stand here and buy you time with our lives.”
“YOU ALONE SURVIVED?” Octavian asked. It sounded like an accusation of cowardice.
Labienus nodded, his face burning. “The only way to honour their sacrifice was to fulfil our mission. I hid in the woods until the battle was done. I stayed there for two full days, not daring to move, living on dirt and grubs, as the Britons plundered and desecrated the dead. Thereafter, I travelled only at night and made my way to shore where I found passage to Gaul.”
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