To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II)

by Crichton, Edward

  Maybe even their own lives.

  I’d offer more on the campaign, but we only have sketchy information at this point, and no details pertaining to the battles themselves. I just wanted to point out how important it is to draw Agrippina away from the legions and let men like Vespasian and Galba take over. I wasn’t sure how to do that, but I had a hunch that if we were to go after one of her precious orb’s she might have something to say about it.

  So, we needed the orb, and that’s where Gaius and Marcus come in. Over the past few weeks, we’ve had intermittent contact with them via a series of dead drops we’ve established throughout the city. Their dispatches assure us that they’re close to locating the seller of the orb. Once they do, they’ll let us know and we’ll go from there. Hopefully, we can just buy it, but something tells me it won’t be that easy.

  Oh, I guess I should also mention Helena and I are finally… finally… back to normal. More or less. We… made up a few weeks ago, and she’s become a wonderful stress reliever. On another positive note, she hasn’t lost an ounce of that craziness she brings with her to the bed…

  What the hell am I doing?

  Go read a romance novel.

  As I put down my pen, I promised myself that was the last time I ever mentioned Helena and I in the journal. The thing was supposed to be a historical record of what was happening with us in case we never make it home, not a novel, and hopefully, once I got more details on the orb itself, it will become a technical manual for how the troublesome thing works. With some luck, if someone finds both manual and orb should we be unable to destroy it, they’ll be smart enough to leave it well enough alone and get rid of it.

  Still, it was probably nice to give it a more personal touch – make it more interesting for the ladies. They loved a good romance story. I wasn’t quite sure if what Helena and I had was “good” or not, but I, at least, thought it was special. Besides, if we let Santino write the whole thing, we’d run the risk of alienating anyone above a fourth grade reading level and I still wanted a movie deal out of the whole thing.

  Closing the journal yet again, I secured it and tossed it to Helena. She was sitting on our bed, keeping herself busy with something while I’d been writing at the table. Santino sat opposite me, balancing his knife on a fingernail. I watched him flip it in the air and catch it by its grip.

  We were bored.

  After our run in with our black clad nemeses, the three of us had limited our time outside of the apartment to a minimum. It was frustrating, because I couldn’t visit my lovely lunch location, and I knew the meat-on-a-stick vendor had to miss me. The only time we went out was to get food and supplies, alone, and we never went to the same place twice. We did whatever we could to keep our identities hidden, knowing Agrippina’s ninjas, for lack of a better term, were probably out there looking for us.

  Night time was a different story.

  Between midnight and dawn, against our Roman friends’ advice, the city was our playground, and we took to it like Batman in Gotham City. Like modern day free runners, we’d climb, run and leap our way around the rooftops and walls, patrolling the city. We kept to the shadows, but we weren’t perfect. It was only a few nights after Gaius and Marcus came to our room that we started hearing rumors on the streets about mysterious ghosts that scampered around on people’s homes and disappear the moment they were noticed.

  High praise.

  But we weren’t just having fun. We were training and reconnoitering the city, working out bodies that had sat idle for far too long and looking in every nook and cranny we could find. We planned every escape route back to our room and every hideaway we could duck into at a moment’s notice. If we had to run from those ninjas again, we didn’t want to end up cracking anymore ribs in the process.

  There was also the possibility that we would need to obtain the orb through more scrupulous means than a simple monetary transaction. If things went down the way we suspected they would, it would be at night, some place secluded, and there was absolutely no chance we would pull it off without a hitch. Statistics never lie, and since we’ve been in Rome, nothing ever went the way we planned.

  It was currently 2330, and we were getting ready for our next nocturnal prowl. Boredom had been the only thing on the menu for the past ten hours, and now we were getting antsy. It was hard to explain the adrenaline rush that comes with anything we do, but back home, as a SEAL, my time spent in the field had been some of the most exhilarating of my life. The amount of terror, anger, testosterone, and bullets that flowed freely during those missions had made my blood boil, and after every successful mission, the only thing I wanted was more.

  I loved and hated what I did. It reminded me of a quote from the Roman poet Catullus who wrote:

  “I love and I hate. Why do I do this, you ask? I know not, but I am tortured by it.”

  Living in a world consumed by war left few options to find fulfillment. One could sit back and wait for the inevitable or one could fight, waging an ever losing battle to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. It was a bleak reality, and even though I despised killing, even when necessary, I couldn’t deny the rush I felt every time the bullets started flying.

  It invigorated me like nothing else.

  Doing what we’ve done here in Rome was no different. Running around on rooftops, trying to avoid detection and spooking small children who just happened to be glancing out their window was just another way for me to get my kicks. Helena and Santino felt the same.

  Santino had been in the military a few years longer than I had, and being a member of Delta was the ultimate adrenaline rush. The guy would walk into enemy territory and meander around like he was a local, trying to gain intel as he went. Exposed and alone, it had to be the most nerve wracking job on the planet.

  Helena, on the other hand, had lived a life of luxury and opulence, even though it had hardly been a life worth living at all. Her first taste of combat, and the rush that went with it, came with our first operation back in 2021. She hadn’t been involved in the infiltration part of the mission, which had its own kind of tension, but she’d told me months later, after we had gotten to know each other better, just how much of a rush it had been. She’d shot two wild drivers with two fantastic shots, and combined with a half dozen more conventional shots earlier in the night, had been the first kills of her life.

  She hadn’t been happy with what she’d done, but she did admit a certain amount of pride in her endeavors. She’d participated in an operation meant to capture or eliminate a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and had single handedly protected the lives of her teammates. Now that was something to be proud of, and she’d grown hard over the years, perhaps, in some ways, too hard. But at least she found a way to keep on loving me.

  Without that, I had no idea where I’d be in this world.

  Probably dead.

  ***

  The boredom was killing me.

  So much so, that as my mind sat idle, unconsciously reminiscing about countless things, it was unable to register the fact that my chin was about to slip off the hand that supported it. A few seconds later, when it finally slipped, my mind had no explanation. I looked around, thankful that neither Santino nor Helena were paying me any attention. Helena had her back to Santino and me, slipping on her combat fatigues, while Santino tried to flip and catch his knife again, only to let it slip through his fingers. The knife implanted itself in the wooden floorboards and he snapped his fingers in defeat before retrieving it. He put it back in its sheath.

  We were bored and antsy.

  Then, all of a sudden, we heard the sound of overly seductive women trying to ensnare their next meal ticket. Not soon after came a series of insistent knocks on our door.

  I immediately reached for Santino’s HK416 beneath the table.

  We weren’t expecting company tonight.

  “Wait!” Santino said emphatically, leaping from his chair and over the table in the direction of the d
oor.

  He walked carefully towards it and put an ear against it. I looked at Helena, who had put on her combat fatigues and was now leaning against our wardrobe, her arms crossed. She looked at me and shrugged.

  Santino reached out tentatively and returned the knocks, two quick ones, pausing briefly before a third one. Almost immediately, a reply knock sequence came back, four knocks with a pause in between the first and second ones. Santino whistled the tune to “Hail, Britannia” with each knock.

  I rolled my eyes while Santino opened the door. Gaius and Marcus rushed through.

  “See,” Santino said as he closed the door behind them. “These guys must watch their spy movies.”

  I ignored him and picked up my chair and moved it to the other side of the table, offering it to one of the Romans. I moved over to sit on the bed and Helena joined me while Santino sat with our visitors at the table.

  “So?” I asked. “Any new developments?”

  “Yes,” Gaius answered. “We’ve found the seller and have already arranged a meeting with him.”

  “Great!” Santino exclaimed. “We’ll get the thing tomorrow, have one last meat-on-a-stick, and be home in time for the Fourth of July.”

  “It’s not that simple,” both Gaius and I told him at the same time.

  I looked at Gaius. “Wait… why not?”

  “You didn’t think it was going to be as easy as walking up and purchasing it, did you?” Marcus asked.

  “Well, no,” I replied. “Things are rarely that simple.”

  “And they certainly won’t be now,” Gaius intoned. “Had we been the ones to track down the supplier, it may have been, but we were not. Another Octetus did. However, we were able to later inform the dealer that another buyer is present in Byzantium. You. He now expects to auction it off to both parties two nights from now.”

  “I assume the other buyer is one of your fellow Praetorians?” Helena asked.

  “Correct,” Gaius answered. “However, he has yet to be informed of this, and I do not look forward to telling him. He is an angry man.”

  “So we’ll have an opportunity to bid for the orb two nights from now,” I said, mostly to myself. I rubbed my chin with my hand before directing my attention back at Gaius. “You should know that if we are to participate in this auction, we will come ready. If we see any of your friends sneaking around, putting one of us at risk, we will kill them.”

  Gaius and Marcus exchanged glances.

  “We know,” Gaius answered, “but we also feel that we owe you this opportunity. Even at the expense of our partners.”

  “Honestly,” Marcus interjected, “we have no feelings of friendship towards those men anyway. We are but a few of the remaining original Sacred Band, as most of Agrippina’s new band replaced those who Caligula enlisted. We have trained with them, yes, but in that time, Gaius and I always felt something off about them. Most of Agrippina’s new Sacred Band seem… odd, in some way.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “They’re ruthless bastards,” Gaius answered for him. “Before Agrippina, Caligula’s Praetorians were honorable men. Men with valor and principals. Men from the legions. But Agrippina’s recruited her new Praetorians from prisons and the streets, looking for criminals, cutthroats, and thieves.”

  “If I were you, I would be more afraid of being killed by them, than by anybody else,” Helena offered.

  “One would think, yes,” Gaius agreed, nodding approvingly at her. “But the empress is not stupid. She still has many loyal and honorable men in high places that keep this new breed in check.”

  Made sense.

  “Where and when’s this auction going down?” Santino asked, back to business.

  “Two nights from now, an hour past midnight, outside the hippodrome at the southeast side of town,” Gaius answered. “The dealer asks that each party only bring one representative, but with the range of your weapons and your communication abilities, that should not be a problem for you.”

  I smiled. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Good,” Marcus said, getting to his feet. “We have to go. We can’t be gone long.”

  “Wait,” I said, leaning back over the bed and grabbing a gear bag from behind it. I picked one up at random and rummaged around inside before I found what I was looking for.

  “Take these,” I said, holding out two small devices, each the size of a wallet. “If you find yourselves on the rooftops during the transaction, attach these to your clothing and open the shutter like this…”

  I demonstrated how to open and close the shutter, which kept a rectangular bulb at the top of the blocky device hidden when closed.

  Both Romans accepted their gifts, turning them over in their hands questioningly.

  “Thank you, Hunter,” Gaius said tentatively, “but what are they?”

  “Here,” I said, holding out a pair of NVGs for them to wear. I nodded at Santino, who doused the candles we had burning, plunging the room into darkness. “Put these on.”

  I couldn’t see the Romans now that the lights had gone out, but when they managed to successfully place the goggles over their eyes, I heard one of them stumble into the door, while the other almost knocked me over, surprised at their newfound ability to see in the dark.

  “This… this…” Marcus started.

  “Is amazing,” Gaius finished, his head glancing about wildly as he tried to drink in as much detail as he could. I waved in his direction, and he quickly came to his senses.

  “Now,” I said, “as you observed earlier, with normal eyesight, this device appears to do nothing. Now, watch with the night vision on.”

  I opened the shutter on one of the infrared strobe beacons, and waited for the reaction. I couldn’t see a damn thing, but with the help of NVGs, the infrared strobe must have been flashing as brightly as lightning for the two Romans. Infrared strobe beacons were worn by pilots in case they were shot down, and carried by soldiers either for rescue purposes or simple identification at night.

  Exactly how I intended Gaius and Marcus to use them.

  “The strobe emits a very bright light with those goggles on,” I explained. “If you wear these, we will be able to see you, and we won’t shoot you.”

  “At least we’ll try not to,” Santino said in the dark.

  I sighed and waited for Santino and Helena to relight the room’s candles, while Gaius and Marcus removed their NVGs and handed them to me. I traded them for the beacons.

  Both men still looked stunned.

  “You continue to amaze us, Hunter,” Gaius said. “If this sphere is able to send you home, wherever that may be, maybe you will consider letting us come with you?”

  I thought about it. Both men were bright, capable men, but the immense cultural shock that would come with living in the 21st century might be too much. If anything it would be an interesting experiment, I guess, but I suspected the combination of hamburgers, women in thongs at the beach, Ferris Wheels, and football would be too much for the Romans to handle.

  Besides, I wasn’t even sure they could make the trip at all.

  “I’ll think about it,” I told them.

  They smiled at my consideration and left without another word. I closed the door behind them and turned to face my companions. They waited patiently for me to retake my position next to Helena on the bed.

  “So, what do you think?” Santino asked.

  “I think it’s the best chance we’ve got,” I replied. I looked over at Helena.

  “I agree,” she said wearily, probably still unhappy that we were once again purposefully risking our lives.

  I squeezed her knee in support.

  “But remember,” I said, “no matter what happens, we can’t go home yet. Not only do we need to contact the rest of the team, but we still have to deal with the other orb as well. Whatever happens, we destroy this one first.”

  Both of them nodded, and mused silently for a few minutes.

  “It’s gonna be just like old times,
” Santino said.

  I nodded silently in agreement. This had to be a military operation like we’d never performed while in Rome. Everything we’d done down here had been off the cuff, haphazard, performed with an overconfidence developed from our vast technological superiority and unique skill sets. We’d never gone into a mission with anywhere near the level of detail as had become routine for operators back in the U.S., but this time, everything had to go off perfectly. Agrippina’s ninjas were too unpredictable for us to go in halfcocked. We needed to set the stage, write the rules and make sure each participant stuck to our script. It’s what we were trained to do.

  No more playing dress up trying to fit in with the Romans like cocky ass clowns.

  The thought made me nervous, but another emotion worked its way through my body as well. It was the feeling of excitement mixed with fear I always felt before a mission back home. It was the feeling that reminded me to get ready for the danger, for the adrenaline rush was sure to come.

  I hadn’t felt it so intensely in years and I couldn’t deny that I liked it.

  I really liked it.

  ***

  Two nights later, I was doing exactly what snipers did best.

  Waiting.

  But at least I felt both comfortable and safe in my sniper hide – a place on a field of one’s choosing that offered elevation, a clear view of an area and plenty of room to dish out some punishment from. Hides could be anything from holes in the ground to bombed out deli stores, a simple rooftop or even a five star luxury suite.

  As long as it kept a sniper hidden and in a position to kill bad guys, it was a hide.

  The comfort I felt was like slipping into an old pair of shoes, one that I had loved so much but had temporarily misplaced. Although I had kept up on my target shooting over the years, practicing when the opportunity arose, finding time to seek out, locate and customize a hide was something I hadn’t done since I was still a resident of the year 2021. It surprised me how happy it made me because it wasn’t something I’d relished back then. Yet, as I lay here now, I felt safer than the times as a kid when I’d sneak into my parents’ bed after a scary dream.