To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II) (5 page)

“Me?  What are you going to do?”

“Just do it,” I told him perhaps a little too hastily.

I ignored his hurt expression and moved towards the cowering form of the young Roman woman.  It occurred to me that I could have simply told Santino that I feared his scarred face may frighten the young woman, but my patience with his whining had worn thin long ago.  I pulled off my bag, which the Gauls had also stupidly left us, and pulled out a thin blanket.  I knelt beside the girl and tried to wrap it around her, but she recoiled from my touch, forcing me to back away.  The poor girl was so frail and beaten; I wasn’t sure how to interact with her.  I tried holding the blanket out innocently, and was happy to see her gingerly reach out and take it with a shaky hand.  I took a step back and enticed her to wrap it around herself by mimicking the gesture over my own shoulders.  It took her another few seconds before she understood what to do.

“What’s your name?”  I asked her gently, crouching a safe distance away.

She didn’t say anything.  She just looked at me out of the corner of her eyes as she trembled, the blanket covering everything from her nose down.

I reached my hand out but didn’t touch her.  “I’m not going to hurt you.  I’m here to bring you back to your mother.”

The girl’s eyes widened at the revelation, and her trembling slowly subsided.  Quietly, through chattering teeth and eyes streaming tears, I heard the girl whisper, “Julia.”

That was the name her mother supplied me. 

“Try and get some sleep,” I told her.  “We’ll take you to your mother in a few hours.”

She didn’t react outwardly, but her tears finally stopped flowing and her eyes closed before she quietly went still.  She was already asleep.  The poor girl was exhausted.  I reached out and tucked her exposed arm under the blanket, careful so that I didn’t disturb her.  She may have been kept awake for days,
probably for reasons I never wanted to think about it.

I joined Santino by the bars again.  “
What do you think?  Four hours?”

“Three,” he corrected.  “Most of these guys already look drunk enough as it is, and it’s getting late.  What I don’t get is how they expected these bars to hold us.  You blew up a
coconut just by snapping.”

“I figure they’r
e either too smart or too dumb for their own good,” I deduced.  “Either they’ve figured out we faked it somehow or else they’re just too dumb and drunk to think we can do the same to iron bars.  Either way, we win.”

“Right,” Santino agreed.  “I picked the lock by the way.”

I looked at the bars to see they were already slightly ajar.  We could leave at any time.

Santino waited for some form of acknowledgment from me, but when one didn’t come, he crossed his arms, leaned his right shoulder against the bars and looked at me.  He was n
ever one for awkward silences.

“Sure you don’t want to talk about what happened back at the tavern?  We’ve got plenty of time to burn.”

“No,” I said.  “There’s nothing to talk about, especially not with you.”

He flicked his eyebrows in
to the air and looked away.  “Well, that was rude,” he mumbled.  After a second he looked back at me and seemed to perk up.  “Hey, here’s an idea, why don’t you feel free to blame
me
for all of your problems.”

“I’m not,” I countered, amazed at how angry
I now was.  “It’s not your problem.”

“You’re damn right it’s my problem because your proble
ms always become my problems.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know what it means, Jacob.  Everything you’ve done since I’ve met you has affected my life in one way or another, and you know what, some of it ain’t good.”

I stared at him, the frustration dripping from his tone paining
me more than I thought it could.  He was my best bud, after all.  We’d had our share of disagreements and arguments over the years, sure, but he’d never said anything quite so personal before.  Different perspectives and ideas on how to run an op, definitely, but never something with so much disguised meaning behind it.  But it was more about what he had left unsaid that was the most upsetting, the implied lack of faith in the decisions I’ve made and frustration at the actions I’ve done.

Santino, Helena and I had grown so close over the first few years of our joint friendship that it seemed so insane to me now that
, suddenly, I was losing them both.

I turned and pressed my back against the bars.  I stood there a
while before smacking the back of my head against them once, and then twice.

“What’s wrong with me, John?  How did I lose Helena?  How am I possibly losing you?”

Santino pushed himself off the bars and walked towards the center of the room.  “Hey, don’t go all weepy-eyed on my, Jacob.  You know you can’t get rid of
me
that easy.  Helena, on the other hand, well, she is a woman, and they do things in mysterious ways and all that, so I can’t really be much help there.  That said, you do have a way of pushing all your personal shit on others, whether you know it or not.”

“How so?”

Santino took a step forward to answer, but the sound of his boots clinking against the stone floor jarred the sleeping girl awake.  She bolted to a sitting position, her eyes terrified at the mere sight of us.  Neither Santino nor I knew how to react, but we were lucky enough that we didn’t have to when recognition finally spread across her face.  As soon as the realization took full effect, she slumped against the wall again and was out cold.

Santino tiptoed his way back to the gate, an effortless endeavor for a man whose sole purpose in life was to remain as much like a ghost as a man could
without actually being dead.

He lowered his voice to a whisper.  “
Who planned this operation?”

“We did,” I answered.

He didn’t say anything.  All he did was continue to look passively at me.

“Okay, okay,” I relented, “I did.  I planned it.  So what?”

He raised an eyebrow at me knowingly.  “And the one before that?”

I sighed.  “Me.”

He threw me a smug grin.  “Think about it, Hunter.  You…”  Our cellmate stirred again despite our hushed voices.  The poor girl.  I couldn’t begin to imagine what she had gone through.  Santino turned his attention back to me.  “Mind if we drop it for now?”  He flicked his head towards the girl.  “For her sake?”

“Yeah,” I answered distractedly.  “Okay.”

I spent the next few hours trying to get some rest, but my mind kept wandering back to what Santino had tried to say and sleep never came.  Thoughts of a Helena who never wanted a thing to do with me kept coming to mind, scenarios where she and Santino simply walked out of my life, not with each other, just… at the same time.  That they would just leave me alone to deal with a life under Agrippina’s constant pursuit alone was disturbing.  The idea kept invading my mind bit just when I felt sleep take a more permanent hold on me, gunfire erupted from within the cavern.  It drifted into the small cell in muffled tones at first, the crisscrossing corridors breaking up the movement of the sound waves, before growing louder.  I stood up and moved to the bars again, Santino joining me.  Julia seemed unconscious, hiding beneath her blanket in the corner.

“Helena?”  Santino asked.

I tried to concentrate on the gunfire.  “I don’t think so.  She’s only supposed to rescue us if we don’t check in after nine hours.  Besides, it doesn’t sound like her P90.”

“Then, who?”  Santino asked, perplexed.

“Well, if I had to guess, I’d say it was…”

I was interrupted by a very large figure rounding the corner
to the corridor, moving towards us with an ominous slowness as dust billowed around him.  He held a torch in one hand and a very large gun in the other, and his identity became instantly known.  He was wearing his own set of night ops combat fatigues and his face was covered by a black balaclava, only a narrow slit for his eyes visible.

He looked between Santino and me before pulling off his mask, revealing the face of my favorite Frenchman.  “
Bonjour, mes ami
,” our friend Jeanne Bordeaux said, nodding to each of us in turn.  “Perhaps one day you will rescue me for a change, no?”

II

Planning

Mission Entry #2

Jacob Hunter

Valentia, Transalpine Gaul - April, 42 A.D.

The reason I ended my last entry so abruptly was because Santino, Helena and I had to take care of a little business. 

Hostage negotiation, if you will.

The original plan called for Santino and me to
infiltrate a band of thugs responsible for the death of an equestrian Roman family and the abduction of a young girl.  Our insertion had gone smoothly, but when we arrived at their hideout, our cover was blown and we had to improvise.  Jeanne Bordeaux, formerly of the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (say that ten times fast) and a former Praetorian squad member, came to the rescue.

When Helena was on supply run duty a few days ago, part of her orders had been to get in contact with him, tell him what we were planning, and ask if he’d help out.  She reported that he said he’d think about it. 
I guess we were lucky he was a quick thinker, and I was happy to see him.  He was another connection to our lost home and his mere presence was a reminder of better times.

When he arrived, Santino had joined him in clearing out the rest of the cav
e while I helped our charge, a seventeen year old girl named Julia.  She’d been stripped naked by her kidnappers and all she had to cover herself with was a blanket I gave her.  I was as careful and gentle as I could be with her, but she wouldn’t budge from her corner so I had to carry her out. Luckily, Santino and Bordeaux had done a good job clearing the cave complex.  On the way out, I noticed the leader of the group, Madriviox, dead with a neat little hole through his forehead.

He got what he deserved.

We immediately returned to the tavern we’d left from.  Helena is comforting and talking to the girl while Santino has run off with his barmaid again.  Bordeaux is at the table with me, and with him here, we can move on to the next phase of my plan.

Until next time.

I put my pen between the pages and wrapped a rubber band around the small leather bound journal, capturing the pen within.  Having spent a few years working at my college library
, I knew it wasn’t the best thing for the binding, but I was lazy and it made finding my spot again just that much easier.  Not to mention a pen.  I dropped the book into a bag and turned my attention to the large man seated across from me.

To say the man was large was like calling the Himalayas a series of rolling hills.  He was taller than me, significantly broader
across the chest and shoulders and had the build of a professional wrestle.  His sharp nose and angled chin gave him a look I always associated with the French, and his bright blue eyes, scruffy light brown hair and short facial stubble made him a pretty good looking guy.

He
’d joined the Papal Praetorians after his wife had been killed in a terrorist attack outside the Vatican, something that still haunted him deeply, and was not something he discussed very often.  It was a defining moment for him, an event that brought him into my circle of friends and subsequently to Ancient Rome.  Once Claudius was defeated, he no longer had a reason to remain an active combatant, and made the decision to explore the territory he had once called home – France.  While it was only Gaul these days, a territory that had very little in common with its modern equivalent, he had said it was where he felt he belonged.

Two years ago, Santino’s UAV, which was
almost always active and broadcasting, had picked up a data package from him.  He must have uploaded it to his computer and set it to idle transmission.  When the UAV came into range by a stroke of pure luck, it had automatically connected and received the email.  We had been on the run at the time, just passing through yet another random part of Europe, so we didn’t actually notice it until we were out of range again.

He hadn’t written much, just a simple message that he was happily married to a likewise widowed woman of German ancestry, which also means little in modern terms, and had bought a tavern near the one we were now in.  It was why we chose to come
to Valentia in the first place.  He had finished by saying he was living a quiet life of relaxation which, for the first time in many years, was completely devoid of war.  He had also written that his wife was pregnant and that they were expecting a child.

“Sorry, Jeanne,” I sa
id, forgetting my manners.  “The journal was Helena’s idea.  A way to record what we’re doing.  Just in case.”

“Not a problem,
mon ami
,” he said while sipping some wine.  I always got a kick out of the fact that despite being perfectly fluent in both English and Latin, he always insisted on throwing out a few choice French words as well.  He was a typical stubborn Frenchman.  “Although, I am curious as to what it is you’re doing.  Exactly.”