New Pompeii

by Daniel Godfrey

  “They bring everything here – the food, the money, the iron and the bricks. They even brought you. They seem to be the only way in.”

  “And out.”

  “Really? The only people we’ve seen leave are the men who control the mosquitoes… your ‘heli-cop-tors’.”

  Nick nodded. “How many of your people know about the villa?”

  Barbatus shrugged. “That information only matters if I let you go, and your people ask you.” The duumvir let his eyes flick upwards. “So let’s finish exploring. If it’s true you know nothing about these houses, you can just set up a meeting with your people and I’ll leave you alone.”

  “All right.” The wooden stairs flexed under Nick’s feet. It was the first time Barbatus had expressed any interest in meeting with McMahon and Whelan.

  The layout of the upper level of the townhouse also mirrored that of the House of McMahon. Four rooms led off the balcony above the atrium. A narrow walkway extended out around the peristyle. Nick moved to the first room – the equivalent of Whelan’s – and pushed open the door.

  Someone had been living here. Probably Samson. Behind him, he sensed Barbatus prowling.

  “I’m told there are rooms like this at your villa.” The duumvir entered, then stepped into the en-suite bathroom. There was the sound of running water. “Clever,” he shouted. “The water is hot. I shall have to tap the spring.”

  Nick made no comment. With the duumvir distracted, Nick started searching the bedroom. Cato was an unspeaking presence behind him, breath continually whistling out of his always open mouth.

  And then he found them. A collection of notebooks in a neat stack underneath the desk. Nick started to flick through one. Sure enough, it contained Samson’s original notes. The handwriting was appalling, but the content matched what he’d already read on his tablet. And there were additions. Little notes in the margins.

  “What’s this?” asked the duumvir.

  Nick turned, and found Barbatus examining a large flat-screen television attached to the wall. He was also holding a tablet computer, and had started to give it an exploratory shake.

  Nick walked over and switched on the television. It showed views of the town, directly fed by NovusPart’s security cameras. He picked up the remote control and flicked between camera angles.

  “You know how to work this?” asked Barbatus. He didn’t look shocked. It was almost as if Nick had shown him something completely ordinary. “You’ve seen something like this before?”

  “Yes,” said Nick. “McMahon has a similar device.”

  “It’s a trick. A very clever trick.”

  “An oracle,” said Cato, clearly more impressed than his boss. “And one that actually works.”

  “Yes,” continued the duumvir, suddenly thoughtful. “And I can see the advantages. He can see where everyone is… See where the crowds are starting to turn nasty. Ha!”

  The security feed was showing the forum, where a large crowd was standing outside the Temple of Jupiter, witnessing another sacrifice to the gods.

  “Look at those fools,” said Barbatus. “Slaughtering bulls like they mean it. We could put the haruspices out of work at a stroke!”

  Nick smiled inwardly, reminded of the politicians back home when they turned up to the occasional church service – usually at Christmas or Easter – while clearly having no appetite for organised religion. “What about those worshipping at the Temple of Isis?” he asked.

  “Those bastards had better keep a low profile.”

  “There have been problems at the temple?” He was interested to see how Barbatus would spin the disturbance Whelan had told him about.

  “Yes. As Naso told you, when things are going badly, people look for someone to blame. And people getting on their knees in front of an Egyptian goddess put themselves at the top of the list.”

  “They don’t seem too happy about worshipping the Emperor, either. There are no crowds at the Temple of Fortuna Augusta or the Temple of Vespasian…”

  It was clear Nick had touched a nerve. Barbatus issued an audible growl. “You forget I’ve met the Emperor,” he said. “He’s real enough.” After a pause, the duumvir shook the tablet. “And what does this do?”

  “Give me a second,” said Nick. He took the device and flicked it on. When the tablet loaded, he realised it had all access rights enabled. The video screens, maps of the town, the GPS tracking system… and the internet. He could even get on to his email. Look at Who’s Where.

  He tapped the screen and brought up his profile.

  Who? Nick Houghton. (NovusPart.)

  Currently working for NovusPart.

  Where Been? [Expand]

  Where Now? Unknown. Probable location: New Pompeii.

  “What are you doing? Show me!”

  Nick looked up. Barbatus was visibly angry, his face red. And then it clicked. The television may have been an alien system, but at least it was easily understood. After all, it was like looking into an oracle’s pool. But a tablet computer… the internet… They were going to take some explaining.

  He opened the GPS mapping application. Dots appeared on the screen. “The system tells you where certain people are at any one time,” he said.

  “Show me the full town.”

  Nick zoomed out, then turned the tablet round to show Barbatus.

  “Thirty,” the duumvir said. “You have thirty people.”

  Nick saw that he was right. The GPS system was tracking thirty people. There would be more at the villa. Maybe another twenty or so. Not many more. So that made perhaps fifty people. Not enough to hold the town.

  And Barbatus knew it.

  60

  “TELL ME ABOUT Harold McMahon.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sure you do. What was he like?”

  “He was just a kid.”

  “Talented?”

  “He was at the best university in the country…”

  “If Cambridge only took geniuses, then it would be a fairly empty place. Most people there just make up the numbers. Especially now it’s gone back to being a rich kids’ finishing school.”

  Kirsten hesitated. “I didn’t see any of his work, I just emptied his bin.”

  “But what was your impression?”

  “He was lazy. He wasn’t often in his room but when he was, he stank of alcohol and takeaways. He must have missed a lot of lectures.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “He didn’t say much. I got the occasional grunt of thanks.”

  Harris considered this. “What was his relationship like with Whelan?”

  “Whelan was the exact opposite. He was almost always out. Whenever I did see him, he was either dressed like a soldier—”

  “Officer training corps?”

  “Yes.” Kirsten smiled at a memory. “Or he was exercising. I remember once going into his room to change his bedding. He was doing sit-ups. He carried on the entire time I was in there. By the time I left I could tell the strain was killing him – but he wasn’t going to give up.”

  “A strange pair to run a company together?”

  “They’d been allocated rooms in the same court.”

  Harris was silent for a few moments. “They both had rich parents,” he said. “Whelan’s father was old money. Had ties to the government. McMahon senior made a more modest fortune from machine parts.”

  Kirsten nodded, but there was a doubt nagging at her. “Aren’t you going to ask me about Joe Arlen? Octavian?”

  Harris looked back at her, his face blank.

  “I always heard them referring to him as Octo,” she explained. “Everyone expected him to win the Nobel Prize. I suppose he’s done that by now, hasn’t he?”

  Harris smiled, sympathetically. “Joe Arlen isn’t important. He retired to live the simple life, à la Howard Hughes. We hear from him occasionally, but no one’s seen him for years.”

  61

  “ARE YOU ALL right?”

  Nick
looked up. He was back at the House of Barbatus in one of the cubicles leading off an unused atrium, a guard at the door. Calpurnia stood looking at him from the doorway.

  “You don’t look frightened,” she said.

  Nick let out a breath. “I’m not,” he replied.

  “Then you’re crazy.”

  Nick gave a shallow smile. He felt for his belt, which was now safely back around his waist. “I think for the moment your father needs me. He already sees the advantages offered by the tablet.”

  “Knowledge is easy to acquire, Pullus.”

  “Not so easy to use.”

  “Now you sound like a Greek,” she said, not without a hint of contempt. She considered him awhile. “Do you know much history?”

  Nick’s smile grew. “A little,” he said.

  “Well then you’ll know that when we first went to war against Carthage, Rome had no fleet. Not one ship. And certainly no sailors. But by the time we’d won, we controlled the water from Hispania to Persia.”

  Nick didn’t reply. Barbatus’ dismissive attitude of Calpurnia seemed more and more ridiculous. She edged inside. The guard posted on the door looked over his shoulder then turned back to stare out over the abandoned atrium. It was clear Barbatus was occupied elsewhere, and until the meeting with NovusPart was brokered, the game continued. Despite what Calpurnia might think.

  “You’re keeping yourself busy.”

  Nick looked down at the notebooks he had brought from the House of Samson, and nodded. The professor’s use of convoluted Latin was made more complicated by his terrible handwriting. But they would tell him more than the sanitised version on his tablet. Even if a lot of the information was turning out to be rubbish. Because Nick had been right about one thing: Rome hadn’t been the professor’s first love, not by a long shot. He seemed obsessed by the Third Reich. And one question in particular that seemed to come up again and again. What would have happened if Hitler had died prior to 1933? Who would have taken over?

  Goebbels? Goering? Hess? Himmler? Or none of the above? Would they simply not have been able to embody the same toxic mix of hope and hatred? Would the darkest chapter in world history simply not have happened?

  “The work of my predecessor,” he said, indicating the notebooks.

  “Ah, yes. He wanted to know about everything we did before the ash started to fall.”

  “Your father thinks he was murdered.”

  “He was. I saw the body.”

  Nick hesitated. “It was brought here?”

  “Yes.” She paused. Examining him. “What does the name ‘Perkin Warbeck’ mean to you?”

  Nick shrugged. “It sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it. Why?”

  “Your man was found with a wax tablet. Most of the writing had been ruined. But there was one bit that made sense: Who is Perkin Warbeck?”

  Nick let the cogs in his mind rotate, but came to no conclusion. Calpurnia seemed to detect the blankness in his face. “When we last spoke,” she said, this time in ancient Greek, “you offered me the truth. But you don’t know it, do you?”

  It took a while for Nick’s brain to switch tracks. To place the language and decipher her pronunciation. The guard at the doorway glanced again over his shoulder. Nick caught his look of puzzlement. He clearly didn’t speak Greek.

  “I did what I thought was right,” he said. “And I still hope to find what you’re looking for. What we’re both looking for.”

  Calpurnia smiled. “You speak better Latin than you do Greek.”

  “Perhaps. I didn’t know what would happen to Felix.”

  “I believe you.”

  “I just couldn’t take the risk they’d hurt you.”

  “But you could take that same risk with him?”

  Nick winced. “I didn’t mean it like that.” He tried to change the subject. “Your father seems to inspire loyalty in his men.”

  “Yes, they are loyal,” she said. “But only because they are scared of him.”

  “Scared?”

  Calpurnia continued to smile, but her eyes suddenly seemed to lose their focus. “Tell me, Pullus. What sort of town do you think Pompeii is?”

  Nick shrugged. It was a miracle. An archaeological miracle. But as for the type of town it had been at its peak, he simply didn’t know. A jewel in the crown, or another pebble on the shore?

  “A trading port,” he said. “A town where the rich took their holidays.”

  “One thing that rich men like is security,” Calpurnia said. “And trade brings violence. So let me ask you another question. What sort of a man do you think the emperors trust to run such a place?”

  Nick didn’t reply.

  “You maybe don’t know, but my father was first elected when I was just a baby. The men in charge of the town at the time tried to stop him. They invited my mother to a dinner party – and then they wouldn’t let her leave. Unless my father withdrew from the race.”

  “Your father got elected though, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your mother?”

  “They killed her.”

  Nick hesitated, but he sensed the story hadn’t quite finished. “And the men who did it?”

  “My father scraped a small hole in the ringleader’s skull. He did it slowly. Carefully. Kept him alive and screaming. Then he filled his cranium with molten lead until it flowed out through his eyes.” For a second, Calpurnia’s gaze met his, and Nick felt his entire body shudder. Her voice sounded so cold. So detached. But, of course, she wasn’t speaking from memory. Someone must have told her. Let her know Barbatus had allowed her mother to die, and then had gone on to murder his opponents. “The Emperor Gaius once said: ‘It’s not enough they die; they have to feel themselves dying’.”

  “Caligula was a madman.”

  “The Emperor Gaius was once duumvir of Pompeii, just like my father is now. And if he doesn’t get what he wants, it will end badly for you.”

  “He’ll attack us?”

  “He’ll butcher you, and all your friends.”

  Nick looked towards the guard. “Then I’d better not fail.”

  62

  “DO YOU THINK he does it often? Take people from the timeline?”

  Harris didn’t reply.

  “But you think there were others, don’t you? Like me?”

  “Undoubtedly. Just not very often, and so damn difficult to prove.”

  Kirsten hesitated. “Why do you say, not often? How can you be so sure?”

  “How would McMahon know he wasn’t removing someone who’d done something that was to his own benefit? Like you, for instance. The risk would be too great. Every time he rolls the dice, he risks losing everything.”

  “And then what?”

  “Pardon?”

  “After I’d been taken. What did you think they were going to do with me?”

  Harris paused a second. “The news is full of people claiming to have been dumped on the streets of London.”

  “And no one cares about that?”

  “Most have been proven to be crackpots. The same people who a few years ago would have been claiming they’d been abducted by aliens. No, what’s more interesting is the quantifiable phenomenon of people going missing. Kids mainly. After all, a child that goes missing creates a lot less consequential disruption than an adult. They are quickly forgotten.”

  Kirsten’s lip curled. “Not by the parents.”

  “No. And you’re right that a few parents manage to keep their loss in the headlines for years. But several hundred children go missing every year, and what do you hear of them?”

  Kirsten quietly shuddered in her seat. There was something beneath Harris’s cold reply. Anger.

  “This is personal for you, isn’t it?” she said.

  Harris didn’t respond.

  “Who did NovusPart take?”

  Harris didn’t reply.

  “Did McMahon take your son?”

  “No,” came the soft reply. “He took my bro
ther.”

  Kirsten didn’t say anything. The words of the man in the canvas coat rattled through her mind. No. Not a kid. A woman. She had surprised him. And the only distraction they’d provided was a handful of toys. Something to play with, after the paradoxes emerged.

  “They reach back and remove people when they’re children,” she said, her eyes losing focus. And they must still be doing it, because they were keeping the basement in Chaderton Court under close observation. They were waiting for their prey to arrive. “But if they’re only children…”

  “They used to say you can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea. Except now they can remove a person before they’ve even conceived of that idea. Remove anyone who would shut them down.”

  Kirsten didn’t say anything. There was something nagging at her: McMahon probably didn’t know she’d been transported because the action had removed the causation. The timeline had been altered.

  “Will you come with me,” she said. “To see my parents?”

  Harris’s eyes dropped to the desk. No words. But he’d said everything.

  One more day won’t matter.

  “You won’t, will you,” said Kirsten. “Because you can’t.”

  “They died about eight years ago,” replied Harris. He didn’t look up. “I’m sorry.”

  Kirsten swallowed. Her breath suddenly coming too fast. “And my sister?”

  “The same.”

  “How?”

  Harris looked up, his eyes heavy.

  “How?” Kirsten repeated, barely containing her anger.

  “A bus crash.”

  “You said you were going to take me to them…”

  “I meant the memorial garden,” said Harris. “You’d been through a lot, Kirsten. I thought it would be best to tell you after you’d at least orientated yourself.”

  “So you had my best interests at heart?”

  “Probably not. But I didn’t keep you in the dark to hurt you.”

  63

  IT WAS THREE hours before Barbatus reappeared, the tablet in his hand. Cato wasn’t with him. It suddenly felt like there was more sand in the bottom of the hourglass than at the top. The helicopter would soon be on its way.