Secrets of the Dead

behind my back; he reaches past my face and grabs the rope dangling from the scaffold, twisting it around my neck. He’s going to throttle me. I struggle, but he’s stronger than me. The bucket bounces against my chest, the gravel shaking like a death rattle.

And suddenly there are shouts and light. Flames light up the broken ground. Simeon’s brought the Watch. Firm hands pull my antagonist off me. The rope unwinds; I collapse, gasping. By the time I’ve stood up, they’ve kicked my assailant pretty well into submission.

I walk over and stare down. Hobnailed boots pin him to the ground. He’s a gaunt man with close-cropped grey hair and blood trickling out of his nose. Even now, there’s a proud, superior sneer he can’t shake off his face.

‘Why did you leave the document case at the statue?’

‘My master ordered me to.’

‘Who’s your master?’

He sniffs and wipes his arm across his face, smearing blood along it. Dark eyes look up at me, resist me.

The Watch sergeant puts his boot on the man’s hand and slowly presses down. Something snaps; the man screams. Not an insensible, animal scream, but a name.

‘Aurelius Symmachus!’

XXIII

Kosovo – Present Day

‘NOT LONG BEFORE he died, Michael turned up a seventeen-hundred-year-old Roman body. I don’t know how or where. An American soldier called Sanchez helped bring it in.’

In the passenger seat, Jessop looked thoughtful. It was his car, but after three near-accidents in Monday morning traffic before they were out of Pristina, Abby had insisted on driving.

‘Dragovic, as you may have spotted, has the Roman bug,’ Jessop said. ‘He’s a nut on the subject. You know he enjoys the nickname “The Emperor”? Zoltan means “emperor” in Hungarian, apparently. Dragovic carries on like he’s Caesar reincarnated. If Michael had connections with him – which he did – and he found something left over from the Roman empire, Dragovic would be the obvious person to call.’

If Michael had connections with him. If the man you loved was corrupt and in the pocket of the Balkans’ most wanted man … The idea was toxic, too terrible to really understand. She had to keep it well away from her, locked in a glass box and handled with utmost care lest it shatter and poison her.

‘I’ve been to two of Dragovic’s houses.’ That, too, was a horrible fact. ‘Dragovic owns more Roman art than the British Museum. What could Michael have found that he’d want so badly?’

‘According to our man, the necklace you found probably dates from the reign of Constantine the Great, around 300 AD. Heard of him?’

‘Mmmm.’

He doesn’t know about the Trier manuscript, she thought. She still had Gruber’s transcription with her, folded in her jeans pocket, but she hadn’t mentioned it. After what Jessop had done with the necklace, she wasn’t going to tell him about the manuscript unless she had to.

‘As you say, Dragovic doesn’t exactly need any more art. Or money.’ Jessop stared out the window at the scrapyards and builders’ yards that had sprung up along the road. ‘But whatever Michael found must have been pretty special to get him so fired up.’

Abby turned on the wipers as rain began to spatter the windscreen. ‘Maybe Specialist Sanchez knows what it is.’

The rain was falling hard and unforgiving by the time they pulled into the car park at Camp Bondsteel. They ran up the path between the blast walls and the wire. White tank traps serrated the road like teeth. By the time they reached the guard station, they were both soaked.

The guards had changed since the day before: there was no one to recognise Abby, and no fuss when Jessop presented his credentials. A captain in a high-collared jacket met them and ushered them into a green Toyota Landcruiser.

‘You’re here to meet with Specialist Sanchez?’

‘He’s not expecting us,’ said Jessop.

‘He’s down in South Town. I’ll drive you over.’

Abby got in the back and stared out the window as they drove along wide, rammed-earth roads. Everywhere she looked, the landscape’s rolling hills had been forced into rigid grids: lines of cars, lines of huts, and straight roads connecting them.

Yet for all its size, there was something desolate about the base. They drove for several minutes, past long rows of brown huts, and barely saw a soul. There were no tanks or Humvees: most of the vehicles they saw were civilian Landcruisers like their own. On one stretch, a row of huge tents provided helicopter hangers, strangely impermanent in this re-engineered landscape.

‘Is it true you’ve got a Burger King here?’ Jessop asked the captain.

‘And a Taco Bell. I’ve been here eleven months and never eaten in either of them.’ He laughed. ‘Just like being back home.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘North Dakota.’

If he resented being shipped halfway round the world to police age-old feuds, in a country that was probably the size of the average farm back in his home state, he didn’t show it. Abby thought of Rome, and wondered if this was how the last days of the empire had been. A few men far from home, shrinking into a fortress built for greater times. Or perhaps frontiers had always been like this: lonely, removed places where barbarians lurked and the rain