by Chuck Dixon
“Fuck the Senate. Ass-licking parasites, the lot of them,” Gratus struggled to stand, realizing that he was stark naked.
“A robe! Get me a robe!”
The lictor held up a white cotton wrap with a yellow border. The prefect punched his hands free of the sleeves and gripped the robe closed about his waist with a fistful of fabric. He staggered barefoot to a terrace that overlooked his courtyard in time to see a group of riders trot their mounts through the open gate. The scuff of steel-shod hooves on the tiles made Gratus’s remaining teeth grate painfully.
The shadows in the courtyard stretched toward the seaward end of the house. It was morning. No surprise then that his visitors were of the military class. Only soldiers were mad enough to be up and about at this indecent hour. The men dismounted, including an aquilifer bearing the red banner of the Roman Senate topped with a brass laurel wreath and spread-wing eagle. The guard wore black leather smartly trimmed in white piping. The men stood whisking dust from their leathers with the fly swatters made from horse’s tails that were necessary accouterments for any who traveled this pestilent land.
The last to step from his saddle had a military bearing despite his simple dress. He wore a common tunic of hemp that left his arms bare and the kind of leggings favored by legion cavalry. Only his fine soft-skinned boots gave away his station as the leader of this delegation. The only other feature that made him remarkable was a gleaming scalp entirely bereft of hair. The man shaved his head in the fashion of legion lifers. A man who commanded troops but wished to be seen as one of them.
A pandering fool, Gratus thought. How fitting that he arrived under the banner of the preening whores of the Curia.
With the unwelcome assistance of the lictor, Gratus made it to his foyer in time for the entry of the bald man and a pair of his guard.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” Gratus said in a tone meant to convey that the visitors’ arrival was neither pleasurable nor welcome.
“The pleasure belongs only to the legate in Antioch, Valerius Gratus,” the bald man said with a presumption of familiarity that the prefect found infuriating.
“What word does he send?” Gratus grumbled.
“That you are to vacate this residence and return to Rome by the swiftest conveyance and shortest route you can manage,” the bald man said, handing a scroll tied with a purple ribbon to the lictor, who accepted it with gravity.
An Imperial decree. Gratus’s mind swung between anxieties over what being recalled to the capital upon orders from Tiberius might mean and a white-hot rage at the impertinence of this bold stranger in his fancy boots.
“And who shall serve as prefect in my absence?” Gratus managed a snarl.
“I shall take that station permanently as of this moment.” The bald man met Gratus’s gaze with cold defiance.
“And might I know your name, you brazen bastard?” Gratus squealed, his fear taking voice.
“Pontius Pilatus,” the man said with maddening authority.
51
Paris in the Now
An early snow fell like feathers from a slate-gray sky closing low over the city. The flakes melted within seconds of touching sidewalks and rooftops and were hardly noticed by pedestrians, except for a few who raised umbrellas purely out of reflex. Tires swished on the busy streets now made damp with melt. Passing cars created updrafts that lifted the flurries in swirls and eddies of white stipples. Drivers set their wipers at low to brush the swirling wisps from their view.
Daniel and Sydney Hochheiser of Alberta, Canada were wheeling a stroller past storefronts bright with the color and lights of seasonal decorations. Their son lay bundled and reclining in the basket of the stroller, looking up with wide eyes at the snowflakes dropping through the blinking multi-hued glow of bulbs strung over the street. Music blared from unseen speakers, playing songs of the season unfamiliar to the couple, such as “Petit Papa Noël” and others, like “Le Petit Renne au nez Rouge,” recognizable by melody.
“I always hated Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” Caroline said. “But it actually sounds lovely in French.”
“I know what you mean. But no one murders rock and roll like the Frogs,” Dwayne said.
She hugged his arm closer and pressed her cheek to his shoulder.
“You actually made good on your promise of pure vacation time in Paris,” she said. “And at Christmas.”
“I don’t remember ever making that promise. But we have a clean slate again. We’re brand new Canadians. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.”
“What do you think when you see the decorations and hear the carols?”
“I think mission accomplished.”
“Morris says that there’s really no way to tell if that’s true or not. We can’t know if events would have played out exactly as they did without the part the team played in it.”
“Your brother will find his stocking filled with coal one morning.”
“Morris isn’t what I’d call a believer.”
“I know. I’ve heard him and Chaz going round and round about it,” he said, levering the stroller gently off a curb. They crossed a broad avenue, the tourist crowd swirling around them at a brisker pace. Dwayne and Caroline moved in their own time.
When they reached the opposite curb, he tilted the stroller back. Stephen sat up, gripping the wall of the stroller to peek over the side. Caroline broke her grip on Dwayne’s arm to press him back and re-cover him with the blanket. The infant tore the knit toque from his head and threw it to the damp sidewalk with a laugh. Caroline stooped to retrieve it and brush it on her coat.
“He’s a terror,” she said, pulling the cap tightly on Stephen’s head and tying it in place under his chin.
“That’s my boy.” Dwayne grinned.
“Do you feel cheated? Stephen is eight months old. You missed all that time with him.”
“I missed his first words. That sucks. But I knew married guys on deployments so long their kid was nothing but a belly bump when they left. By the time they got back, the kid ran to meet them at the airport.”
“Do you think it matters at this age?”
“To me? Hell, yeah. To him? Time means nothing.”
“You can make almost any mistake right if you try hard enough. But you can never make up lost time,” she said.
“You see that on a t-shirt?” He glanced at her.
“I heard someone say it. It stuck with me.”
“Sounds like some gloomy shit, Caroline.”
“Language,” she said, nodding to the baby.
“Sorry. Gloomy merde. That better?”
They turned onto Avenue Bosquet and mid-block, Caroline stopped before Number 33.
“This is the place you told me about?” Dwayne said.
The ground floor was a storefront for a mobile phone store now. A second entrance had been added to allow access to apartments or condos on the floors above. A row of mailboxes was visible through the heavy glass of the entry door. A pair of bicycles leaned against a wall of the tiled hallway.
“It’s not the same,” she said. “Everything changes. That’s the way it should be, I guess.”
“Unless we have to change it back.” He smiled, but she didn’t see it. Caroline could not turn to him, could not let him see her face. She knew it would betray her thoughts of the last time the two of them stood here, a time Dwayne would not recall as it had not happened to him yet.
“Excuse me,” a voice addressed them in English. “I hoped to find you here.”
They both turned. Dwayne stepped forward to place himself between the stroller and the man walking toward them from the shadows of a shuttered bakery.
Samuel.
Dwayne knew better than to offer his hand.
Samuel’s gloved hands hung at his sides.
“I wanted to thank you for making sure Caroline and the baby got away safe,” Dwayne said.
“Perhaps it balances the unpleasantness in Judea,” Samuel said and met Carolin
e’s pleading eyes. “In any case, it matters a great deal that we keep your child safe from Neal Harnesh.”
“We’re good for now? Or are you here with another warning?” Caroline asked, eyes shifting to the street and behind them.
“This is a secure place and time. Sir Neal’s agents are impeded for now. They will pick up the threads soon enough.”
“We didn’t just happen to run into you window shopping,” Dwayne said.
“No. I am here to ask you and the others for a favor,” Samuel said.
“I can’t speak for the others, but I’m here for whatever you need, Samuel. I owe you a debt I’ll spend a lifetime repaying. What’s the favor?” Dwayne asked.
Samuel regarded them both with a grave expression before answering.
“To go back to Nevada and get my father.”
Afterword
A Few Historical Notes
This is a work of fiction. Thus, I made a lot of this stuff up.
There were no Twenty-third or Thirtieth Legions in the Roman army. I wanted to spare any legion that did exist the embarrassment of having their ancient asses kicked by four guys and a girl. And to step around any true scholars who would race to point out that any real legion I might have chosen had never been in Judea or had been trudging through Hispania at the time of this novel.
Everything else about the legions is from all the reading I’ve done over the years. Blame Tacitus if I got something wrong. I think he has a Facebook page.
Little is known of Valerius Gratus, the Roman prefect of Judea at the time of Christ’s youth. I’m sure he wasn’t a heroin addict, and have no proof he was a pedophile. But every good story needs a hero, a villain, and a wretch. Poor Gratus fills that last role. I’m pretty certain he wasn’t a nice guy. Nice guys didn’t get sent to Palestine back then.
And I have Pilate taking over for him a few years earlier than that actually happened.
The life of Jesus between his birth and his early adulthood are a tabula rasa. Other than ancillary legends (like the ones the nuns taught us) created long after the fact, we have no knowledge of his life. And we certainly have no idea of what he looked like. I have a sneaking suspicion he looked nothing like Jeffrey Hunter. I specifically avoided directly portraying Christ, since it was not dramatically necessary to my story, and I’m not out to offend anyone.
As for the siege of Paris in 1871, I took some liberties there. The events I portray did happen. The barrage, the horrific counterattack attempted by the citizens of Paris, the crowning of Kaiser Wilhelm I at Versailles are all real events. All I did was to telescope them into a shorter period of time. Things moved swiftly from siege to surrender, but not as swiftly as I present here. And, moving beyond the events of the novel, the Prussians did eventually occupy part of the city, as agreed upon in the very civilized surrender terms between the two armies. It was a brief occupation, and France eventually agreed to pay an enormous amount of money to get the Germans to go home. Otto von Bismarck got what he wanted out of the war—a united German state. Things would not go so easily the next time these nations clashed.
And unlike Lee Hammond, I did not read Bill O’Reilly’s book.
Chuck Dixon
Helldorado
The story continues with Helldorado, book four in the Bad Times story from Chuck Dixon.
They left a man behind. 100,000 years behind.
Another chapter in the popular time travel thriller series Bad Times by bestselling author Chuck Dixon. Lee, Jimbo and the rest of the hard-fighting Rangers go back to prehistoric Nevada to find the man they left behind on their first mission.
This epic quest brings them into dangerous encounters with giant predators long extinct. But the most dangerous of all these animals is man.
Back in the present, one of their team is abducted by a mysterious billionaire seeking to grow his fortunes with the use of the scientific miracle known as the Tauber Tube.
Also, their benefactor from the future shares a startling secret.
Order now at Amazon and through Kindle Unlimited.
Levon Cade: The Complete Series Omnibus
FROM BEST-SELLING AUTHOR, CHUCK DIXON, COMES THE LEVON CADE SERIES – A CAN’T-PUT-IT-DOWN VIGILANTE JUSTICE SERIES.
Levon Cade left his profession behind to work construction. He just wants to live an anonymous life and be a good dad to his daughter. But when a local girl vanishes, he’s asked to return to the skills that made him a mythic figure in the shadowy world of counterterrorism.
Follow Levon and his daughter while they go on the run from the feds and a growing army of enemies that Levon makes along the way.
“Levon is bad ass. Makes Jack Reacher seem like crossing guard.”
Available Now at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited
From Chuck Dixon and our friends at Wolfpack Publishing
About the Author
Chuck Dixon is the prolific author of thousands of comic book scripts for Batman and Robin, the Punisher, Nightwing, Conan the Barbarian, Airboy, the Simpsons, Alien Legion, and countless other titles.
Together with Graham Nolan, Chuck created the now iconic Batman villain Bane. He also wrote the international bestselling graphic novel adaptation of J.R.R Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
His first foray into prose, the SEAL Team 6 novels from Dynamite Entertainment, have become an ebook sensation. He currently scripts GI Joe Special Missions for IDW publishing as well as the Pellucidar weekly comic strip for ERB Inc.
He calls Florida home these days.
You can connect with Chuck here:
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