The Fourth Rome (16 page)

“I don’t know, Tun. My guy talks a good game, too.”

“Did he offer to show you anything tonight? Mine did. And I’m worried that Chun’s professor already knows just exactly what
we’re looking for—maybe who we are and why we’re looking for it. You heard that toast. If he knows, he’s got to be involved
with the revisionists.”

“That’s your assessment?”

“You bet.”

“And Chun wants to stay with him?”

“Seems like.”

“Then let her stay with him. It’ll raise the ante if we pull her out. If he’s what you think, we can’t tell him who else we’re
working with, so option one is out. Option two may fly, but I’d like to go with you. Can’t I meet with your guy again and
see if we can reach a compromise?”

“You can meet with anybody you want. You’re the team leader. It’s your mission. But you and my guy didn’t exactly get off
to a flying start. He’ll take you anyway. He just doesn’t want a KGB escort. And neither do I, frankly. You’d have to ditch
your guy, fast.”

“I can’t—it would look funny. Okay. I’ll tell Chun not to mention anything about your channel. I haven’t mentioned your guy,
but I think I already told Chun’s guy about mine.”

“You think?”
If Nan had done that, there was no use in referring to Etkin as “Chun’s guy” and Orlov as hers.

“It’s been a long night.”

“With all due respect,” Grainger said, “if that’s so, then you might as well take Orlov down and introduce him to Etkin. Give
Orlov a chance to defend himself. My guy says they’ll cancel each other out. Could be. Who knows how it really works here,
this far through the looking glass? And please,
please
give Chun some amended marching orders. She wasn’t taking any advice from me, that’s for sure. She’ll put my initiative at
risk without meaning to.”

“I’ve decided. You go downrange. Go on. Get out of here. I’ll stay in the hotel until I hear from you tonight. Ask me how
I’m feeling if you’re in trouble and need help. Then maybe Etkin will come in handy. Otherwise, ask me how Chun’s doing. No
matter what happens, be back here by nineteen hundred hours tomorrow for Etkin’s dinner party.”

“I will. You have my word on it.”

“Just where is it you’re going?”

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. I’ll call. Got my gear with me. Don’t worry.” Grainger was so relieved he was nearly babbling.
“I sure hope you’ll trim Chun’s jets. I don’t know why we brought her if we can’t use her for this excursion…”

“Let me worry about Chun.” Roebeck slid out from under his aching left arm. “Get out of here. Go play in your sandbox. We’ll
say you were called away to the Embassy. Don’t trip us up.”

“I won’t.” He turned and started down the hall.

“Tim,” Roebeck called after him. “Good luck.”

“I don’t need luck,” he said over his shoulder. “I just need time.”

But it wasn’t true on this occasion, and he knew it. He was already straining the Bell curve of probability. Tim Grainger,
ARC Rider, had gotten too lucky, too fast. Now all he could do was let himself be swept along and hope his luck would last.

A
bat fluttered about Pauli Weigand’s head, then twisted into the evening sky. The little animal’s movements were quick and
the track of its flight as complex as that of a lace-maker’s needle. A number of them were out, drawn to the insects put up
by the feet of thousands of men and animals. Pickings must usually be slim for bats this deep in the forest.

“Pauli, Hannes and the other six bodyguards are leaving the camp also and proceeding up the old road,” Gerd’s voice cheeped
from Pauli’s headband. “They’re on foot. I’m following them.”

From where he sat on horseback near Varus and the German chiefs, Pauli could see Hannes and half the thugs continuing up the
overgrown track. They vanished into the brush and shadows, ignored in the milling chaos of tent-raising, cookfires, and attempts
to corral the baggage animals and cattle driven as meat on the hoof.

The troops had laid out a camp, but the march had gone too long into the afternoon for them to raise a proper palisade. The
first day had been through open country, but today the army was in forest that had virtually reclaimed the roadway Tiberius
cut on his expedition five years before.

The need to bridge gullies and pave the low spots with logs had slowed the column as a whole, but the troops in the lead still
moved faster than the mass of wagons and litters that followed over the crude surface. If this were a real military expedition,
the minimal baggage would be carried on pack mules. Half the personnel in this column were noncombatants, and at least a third
of the latter were women.

“My governor,” said Arminius. He leaned from the Roman-style saddle of his horse to speak to Varus who’d gotten out of a litter
carried by eight slaves. “Sigimer and I will return in one day or two after we’ve gathered our people. The Chauci rebels won’t
be able to hide from us, any more than they can stand against you.”

“Pauli, Istvan and his gang have moved off the road to hide in the brush two hundred meters from the camp,” Beckie’s voice
said. She was following the blond revisionist who’d gone on ahead with six bodyguards when the army halted to encamp. “I’ve
stopped ten meters from them.”

She paused, then added, “Pauli, I can see them on infrared from here, but I won’t have a shot unless they come out of the
bushes.”

The microwave pistols had no effect on the other side of a solid object, no matter how flimsy a barrier it was. The weapons
formed a difference tone at the intersection of two beams focused precisely by a laser rangefinder. Anything that reflected
modulated light would take the full force of the pulse. Unlike a bullet, the pulse couldn’t penetrate a screen of leaves to
stun the man behind.

“Well, be sure you hurry back, Arminius,” the governor said, resting on his left hand on the couch. It had a lacquered roof
and side curtains. “Otherwise your people won’t get their share of loot.”

“Oh, there’ll be plenty of loot for all!” Sigimer boomed. Laughter fluffed his blond mustache.

Sigimer rode with only a saddle blanket, as did most of the score of retainers attending the two princes. The Germans all
carried long swords, though a number of them had lances also. They wore metal helmets and slung round shields on their backs.
Without saddles they couldn’t hang the weight directly on their mounts. Medals dangled across the chest of Arminius and several
others, but none of the Germans wore body armor.

“Till I see you again,” Varus said. “And I hope we’ll be out of this damned wilderness by then.”

“Oh, you’ll forget the trees soon enough,” Arminius said. He straightened; his legs tensed to prod his horse forward with
his heels.

“I’ll ride with you for a little way, Prince,” Pauli said. “I want to take a look at the road farther on.”

“What?” said Sigimer. He glared at Pauli. Arminius kept his composure better, but there was no warmth in his expression. He
muttered a warning to his retainers. Several of them reached reflexively for their swords, but a sharper order stopped them.

Pauli rode alongside the chief. “I won’t go far. Just enough to eye the route.”

“There’s nothing to be seen different from what’s around us now,” Arminius said. “But come along, my Ubian friend. The emperor’s
man is welcome to ride with us as far as my homestead if he wishes.”

Yes, but returning might not prove so easy,
Pauli thought as he prodded his mount into motion with the Germans. The road was dangerous at anything faster than a walk.
Logs laid in a corduroy by Tiberius’ engineers were a bumpy surface when new. Five years on the damp ground left some of them
so rotten that they disintegrated underfoot. The horses stumbled frequently, making even experienced riders jerk and curse.

One way or the other, he wouldn’t be going far. The revisionists were about to make their play and Pauli Weigand had to be
close by. Beckie and Gerd could slip through the undergrowth covered by their dull capes, but a big imperial bodyguard in
armor wasn’t going to sneak along unnoticed by those he followed.

It was already too dark under the trees to see colors. The conspirators must expect to pick up a familiar trail nearby if
they were going to ride any distance tonight. The military road didn’t appear to have been used since Tiberius returned to
the Rhine along it.

The troop of mounted men rode past Hannes. The revisionist’s guards pressed to the side of the track to keep out of the nobles’
way. The man Gerd had stunned in Aliso the previous day, Hilderic, hadn’t gotten far enough clear. A rider kicked at him.
The thug cowered back, but he glared at the horsemen beneath the shelter of his raised arms.

“Who’s that lot?” Sigimer growled.

“He claimed he’s a slave dealer,” Pauli said. He spoke in German to warn all the retainers, not just those who’d learned Latin.
“He has a partner who left the camp this way earlier. Could they be enemies planning to ambush you, Prince Hermann?”

“I don’t have any quarrels with worms, Ubian,” Arminius said.

“Hannes is putting on a set of night-vision goggles,” Gerd’s voice warned.

“I think Istvan is doing the same,” Becky said. “I’m going to move closer.”

Pauli felt his guts tighten. His teammates were using the faceshields to enhance their vision. Thermal viewing let Beckie
see forms but not details through the screen of leaves. Pauli didn’t think she could safely close in on the revisionist, but
he couldn’t order her to keep clear because Arminius was right beside him.

“Hannes has radioed his partner that you’re approaching,” Gerd said. “I—oh!”

“Take them!” Pauli shouted, drawing the pistol from beneath his cloak. Still holding the reins in his left hand, he pulled
down the faceshield to improve his view of events. What Arminius and his fellows thought of ARC equipment was of secondary
importance for the moment.

Bellowing thugs with swords and clubs rushed the front of the mounted Germans. In the darkness there could have been ten times
the real number.

A figure twenty-five meters in the background braced himself against a giant pine as he sighted a weapon. It was a bad angle
for Pauli but he snapped a shot anyway. Pulverized bark flew from the tree trunk. The revisionist went down.

Horsemen and their attackers on foot mixed in shouting confusion. Several retainers jumped or fell to the ground when their
mounts stumbled. Sigimer chopped at a thug’s head, then tried to ride over the wounded man. He stabbed up into the horse’s
belly. The animal screamed and tried to corkscrew away stiff-legged. Sigimer came off his back, yelling even louder when a
hawthorn broke his fall.

Pauli wheeled his horse. Hannes’ gang had attacked the rear of the column when their fellows hit the front. Gold alone couldn’t
make men fight at odds so long. Perhaps these clan-less folk wanted revenge on nobles of the society that had cast them out,
but Pauli suspected there was more to it. The revisionists must have demonstrated a submachine gun on a dog, a sheep … or,
most likely, on a man.

Hannes and Istvan were raised as elite members of a culture that had never concerned itself overmuch with the sanctity of
human life. They’d have made sure to convince their hirelings that they were magicians: powerful enough to overwhelm the troop
of horsemen and far too dangerous to cross.

“Gerd!” Pauli called. “Where’s the other man?”

His light-enhancing faceshield made a flaring torch of what was really a foxfire quiver: powder gases burning at the submachine
gun’s muzzle. Hannes was firing from an elderberry thicket.

Three mounted retainers howled in surprise. One of them touched his chest, stared at the blood on his fingers, and slid off
his horse.

Pauli hosed his microwave pistol across the thicket, stripping patches of bark. The pulses shook individual finger-thick stems
without affecting the revisionist at the heart of the clump. Hannes knelt, replacing the magazine he’d emptied without hitting
his intended target.

Arminius cut right and left over his mount’s neck. He wore his shield on his left arm and used the sword with his right, guiding
the horse expertly with his heels. All of the footmen were down. The German chief shouted exultantly and brandished his sword.
Blood spattered from the back edge of the blade.

Pauli drove through the melee. His horse tripped on a squirming body but didn’t fall and didn’t, for a wonder, throw its rider.
Noise and the smell of blood had maddened the beast. It was ready to bolt, but there was nowhere to run on the narrow road.

Hannes straightened. He was only twenty feet away. Pauli pulled his reins with both hands to put himself between the revisionist
and the leader of the German revolt. He tried to aim the pistol but Hannes’ muzzle flash filled the whole world with red-orange
fire.

Pauli felt the blows to his chest. His horse tossed its head, then fell as if boneless. There was froth on its jaws and a
fleck of dark blood on the skull between the bulging, empty eyes.

From his viewpoint in the air above the suddenly silent battlefield, Pauli Weigand watched his body topple backward over the
haunches of his dead horse.

The revisionists’ guards burst from ambush twenty feet from where Rebecca Carnes concealed herself. Screaming murder, they
launched themselves toward the band of riders.

“Take them!”
Pauli ordered. Rebecca’s headband chirped each syllable fractionally before air transmitted the shout, syncopating the radio
transmission.

She was already aiming at the head of the blond revisionist. As she pulled the trigger, he stepped back into the shelter of
a tree four feet in diameter. Her pulse snapped a branch from a sapling beyond where he’d stood a moment before.

Rebecca stood up, so focused on dropping the revisionist that she forgot the guards she’d dismissed as a diversion for the
real assassination attempt. They
were
a diversion, but their weapons were quite lethal nonetheless. The one named Osric saw the motion and leaped for her with
a shout. He swung a club like a baseball bat with iron bands around the meaty end.