New Pompeii (37 page)

Whelan didn’t say anything; one eye was swollen shut and the other concentrated on the floor.

“And what would
your
route to madness have looked like?” Nick paused. Thinking about the one piece of the town that still didn’t fit. “The empty townhouses? Not for the children, who were to be given away, so…?”

Whelan flicked his one seeing eye up. Nick could still sense some pride in him. “You’ve already seen my big idea,” he said, his voice bitter. “If you were on a plane that was plunging towards the ground, how much would you be willing to pay for your salvation?”

Nick nodded, understanding. He thought back to the restaurant – his first meal with Whelan and McMahon – and the protestors. He remembered what Whelan had told him:
People only have one chance to live. The world doesn’t have the resources for two
. He wondered what the protestors would say if they knew the rich might have access to the ultimate form of life insurance.

“You needed somewhere to keep them out of sight,” he said. “The price of their rescue was to keep hidden. To stop you being overwhelmed by dissent, to stop the chaos of people turning up to claim their property years after their deaths.”

Whelan didn’t answer. In the silence, Nick heard footsteps approaching. He just had one last question for Whelan. “So what did the guy in the helicopter tell you?” he asked.

Whelan took a long, rattling breath. He sounded like he was drowning. “The spy was a woman in her fifties,” he said. “Working somewhere in the town. Which doesn’t fit the description of anyone we employ here. Though I suppose Maggie would be the closest.”

Nick nodded. Calpurnia appeared at his side. “My father will grant you safe passage to wherever you decide to go,” she said. “But we both very much hope you will decide to stay.”

Nick gave a half-smile, glancing back at Barbatus. “We?”

“
I
hope you will stay,” she corrected. “After all, your good judgement saved my life when they came for Felix. I can’t help but feel I owe you a debt.”

Nick thought of his father, and what waited for him at home. The world was about to change, and he needed to decide whether or not he wanted to be at the centre of it all. “And you?” he asked her, casting another quick glance towards the
duumvir
. “Will you stay with him?”

“Yes.” Calpurnia’s voice was tinged with resignation. She stopped to massage her stomach and the baby within. “I belong to him. But it won’t be long before I’m joined by little Marcus.”

“Named after your husband?”

Calpurnia nodded silently and then looked down at Whelan, her mood darkening but her voice soft. “He will tell us his secret to control time.”

Nick tensed, but then remembered that it all revolved around this. Those in the future, protecting their path to power. From Arlen. From McMahon. From Whelan. He looked over at Barbatus, and wondered what sort of emperor he’d become. “Do you think he’d be able to cope with that much power?”

“It’s a rare gift to wield the sword and be remembered as a great man and not a tyrant,” she said. But then she lowered her voice, as if something amusing had suddenly struck her. “But perhaps, in the future, a woman might rule?”

Nick grunted.

“So if you’ll translate for us one last time,” said Calpurnia, returning her attention to Whelan. “We need your friend here to tell us everything he knows.”

“And if he refuses?”

“Then, first, we’ll drill a hole in the top of his skull…”

“Y
OU DIDN’T TELL
them.”

Nick shook his head. The
taberna
was nearly empty. He sat at the back with Kirsten, and sipped a small cup of heavily watered wine. “No,” he said. “They think I killed McMahon.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Because Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK, and Princess Di’s driver was drunk.”

“I don’t understand.”

Nick thought about Ronnie. “The simplest explanations are usually true,” he said.

“Oh. I see. Then thank you.”

Nick let his eyes close for the briefest of seconds. He’d only just dropped the tablet. Only just turned back to face McMahon when the scream erupted and the
murmillo
’s sword pushed its way out through McMahon’s stomach. Behind him stood Kirsten. Who’d grabbed the weapon from the floor and taken her revenge. “I thought you were going to kill me too,” he said.

Kirsten smiled. The tension broke. “It was already too late. There would have been no point.”

“But you killed Samson.” He tried to spot any emotion in her face. But perhaps she’d always been difficult to read. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

“He’d started to panic about the plan. Thought it wouldn’t work, even though he wouldn’t explain why. Just kept on going on about Perkin Warbeck.” She looked at him. “He wouldn’t even tell me who that was.”

Nick took a deep breath.

“You know, don’t you?”

“Yes, but it’s not really my era.”

“Spit it out, will you?”

“Okay,” Nick said, trying to recall his boyhood history. “So when Edward IV died, his two sons were locked in the Tower of London for their own protection. They soon went missing and Edward’s brother became Richard III.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“Perkin Warbeck turned up, years later, claiming to be one of the missing princes. He was an imposter, of course, but if he’d attracted supporters it could have brought down Henry VII. Which means no Henry VIII, or Elizabeth I. It was obviously something that was niggling at Samson in his last days here. I think he’d noticed the missing part of the NovusPart triumvirate. And it mixed with another hobbyhorse of his: how would the world have turned out if Hitler had been killed before 1933? It’s just that McMahon was never really Hitler. There were three of them at the start, and McMahon was the number-two guy. Goebbels, maybe. Not Hitler.”

Nick cleared his throat. Having now heard Kirsten’s side, he hoped the final form of the puzzle was now correct. All those years she’d been skipping forward in time – and she’d been able to see two very different slants of history: one where the survivors of Flight 391 had been saved, and one where they’d been murdered. And all had been down to the presence or absence of just one man. “McMahon and Whelan removed Arlen from the timeline just after they removed you,” he said. “And Samson was worried that, by killing McMahon, you would cause Arlen to re-emerge.”

Kirsten nodded in silence. “I don’t remember him as being any sort of threat.”

Nick didn’t say anything. He couldn’t help wonder at what point the Romans knew Caligula had gone mad. At what point he’d stopped being the golden boy of Rome, and at what point they’d known they needed to act. “What do you remember?”

She looked at him sadly. “I just knew him as a kind, sweet-natured guy. And given that they took him and when, I suppose that’s how I can still remember him, isn’t it?”

M
ANY PEOPLE WERE
involved in getting this book published, and I would like to express my thanks to every one of them. My mum and dad (Maureen and Andrew Godfrey) provided the invaluable first wave of proofreading and encouragement. The team at Cornerstones (Helen Bryant, Kathryn Price, Ayisha Malik, Sophia McDougall and Will Mawhood) supplied advice on the story’s first and second incarnations. Sophia’s input in particular helped identify which parts of the story needed to be shown the axe and what could be further developed.

A big thank you to my agent, Ian Drury (Sheil Land Associates), for helping me nail the ending, and for the amazing speed with which he found my novel a home at Titan Books. And, of course, many thanks to my editor Miranda Jewess and everyone at Titan (Lydia Gittins, Philippa Ward, Chris Young, Natalie Laverick, Cath Trechman and Sam Matthews) for taking a chance, offering me a contract, and for their enthusiasm in turning my manuscript into a finished book. I was also delighted with the cover designed by Martin Stiff (Amazing15) which I think perfectly captures the concept of
New Pompeii.

Finally, thank you to everyone who supported my self-published efforts over the last few years. The positive feedback really did help get this one finished and accepted. Cheers!

D
ANIEL
G
ODFREY LIVES
and works in Derbyshire, but tries his best to hold on to his Yorkshire roots. He studied geography at Cambridge University, before gaining an MSc in transport planning at Leeds. He enjoys reading history, science and SFF. The sequel to
New Pompeii, Empire of Time
, will be published in June 2017.

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