“God, you sound like death. Don’t you dare come anywhere near here until you’re better. Seriously, is there anything you need—food, medicine, anything like that?”
“No, thanks. I’m just going to stay in bed until it’s gone.”
Angela and Bronson had discussed their plan on the train to Cambridge the previous evening. She was using a public phone because that left no trace—Bronson knew that switching on their cell phones would locate them to the nearest few yards immediately, so both of their Nokias were in his overnight bag, their batteries removed as a precaution.
Angela made one more call, then she walked back along East Road, stopping at the bakery along the way.
“Here,” she said, as she walked into Bronson’s hotel room and passed him a small paper bag. “I bought a couple of pastries to keep us going until lunch.”
“Thanks. You made the calls?” Bronson asked.
Angela nodded. “Roger will be fine. He’s paranoid about any kind of cold or flu.”
“And Jeremy?”
“Well, I called him and passed on the message. I explained about Mark and that we think his death had something to do with the inscriptions. I warned him he might be a target too but he laughed it off. He still thinks that the verses are meaningless to anyone in this century.”
Bronson frowned. “I wish I could believe he’s right,” he said. “Well, you did your best.”
“Right,” Angela said, brushing crumbs off her lap. “Let’s get started. Have you had any thoughts?”
“Not really. The problem with the Occitan verses is that they seem tantalizingly clear in what they say, but I’ve got no idea about their actual meaning. So I did just wonder if our best option was to start with the Latin inscription—or rather with the initials below it—and see if we can identify the man who ordered the stone to be carved.”
“That makes sense,” Angela said. “There are a couple of cybercafés not far from here, full of unshaven, scruffy students probably accessing high-quality porn sites.”
She paused and looked critically at him. “You’ll fit right in.”
Bronson had opted for a rudimentary disguise. He’d stopped shaving, though it would take a couple of days before his beard became really noticeable, and had discarded his usual collar and tie for a sloppy T-shirt, jeans and trainers.
Ten minutes later they entered the first of the Internet cafés Angela had identified.
Three machines were available, so they ordered two coffees and started trawling the Web.
“Are you happy with Jeremy’s suggestion about the ‘PO’ standing for per ordo?”
Angela asked.
“Yes. I think we should just take that as established and try and find out who ‘LDA’
was. The other thing he suggested was that the carving was probably first century A.D. And, Angela, we have to be quick. After what happened to Jackie, I’m only staying on this machine for an hour. Whether or not we’ve found anything by then, we get up and leave. OK?”
Angela nodded her agreement. “Let’s start the simple way,” she said, typed “LDA”
into Google, pressed the return key and leaned forward expectantly.
The result didn’t surprise them: almost one and a half million hits, but as far as they could see from a quick scan, none of any use unless you were searching for the London Development Agency or the Learning Disabilities Association.
“That would have been too easy,” Bronson muttered. “Let’s refine the search. Try and find a list of Roman senators and see if any of them fit the bill.”
That was easier said than done, and by the end of the hour Bronson had allotted, they’d found details about the lives of numerous individual senators but no list they could peruse.
“OK,” Bronson said, with a quick glance at his watch. “One last try. Put ‘Roman senate LDA’ and see what comes up.”
Angela input the phrase and they waited for the search engine to deliver its results.
“Nothing,” Angela said, scrolling down the page.
“Wait,” Bronson said. “What’s that?” He pointed at an entry entitled “Pax Romana”
that included a reference to “LDA and Aurora.” “Try that,” he said.
Angela clicked on it. On the left-hand side was a long list of Roman names, below the title “Regular members.”
“What the hell is this?” Bronson wondered aloud.
“Oh, I know,” Angela said, scrolling up and down. “I’ve heard of this. It’s a kind of online novel about ancient Rome. You can read it, or write material for it, if you want. You can even learn quite a bit.”
Bronson ran his eyes down the list of names, then stopped. “I’ll be damned. Look—is that serendipity or what?” And he pointed at the name “Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus” about three-quarters of the way down. “The contributors must be using the names of real historical Romans.”
Angela copied the name and input it into Google.
“He certainly was real,” she said, looking at the screen, “and he was a consul in sixteen B.C. Maybe Jeremy was wrong about the age of the inscription. It could have been fifty or so years older.”
Bronson leaned over and clicked the mouse. “It might be even simpler than that,” he said. “It seems this was a fairly common family name. On this list there are nine people all called Domitius Ahenobarbus, five of them with the first name Gnaeus, and the other four Lucius. Three of the four named Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus were consuls: the one you found in sixteen B.C., plus two others, in ninety-four B.C.
and fifty-four B.C.”
“What about the fourth Lucius?”
Bronson clicked another link. “Here he is—but he looks a bit different. ‘Like the others, this man was born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, but his full name was Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, also known as Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus. Just to complicate things, when he ascended the imperial throne in fifty-four A.D., he took the name Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus.’ ”
He scrolled down, then chuckled. “But he’s better known to us as the emperor who fiddled while Rome burned.”
“Nero? You think that inscription might refer to Nero?”
Bronson shook his head. “I doubt it, though that does fit better with Jeremy’s estimated date. He suggested that the initials probably referred to a consul or senator. Just say for a moment that the inscription was prepared on Nero’s orders—wouldn’t it be more likely to read ‘PO NCCD,’ to reflect his imperial name?”
“Perhaps the inscription was carved before he became emperor?” Angela suggested.
“Or maybe it was intended to be personal, to emphasize that whoever had carved the stone knew a lot about Nero, and maybe was even related to him.”
“We’re out of here,” Bronson said, looking at his watch and standing up to leave.
“So you reckon Nero’s worth another look?”
“Absolutely,” Angela agreed. “Let’s find another cybercafé. ”
II
They walked the quarter mile or so to the second cybercafe’ Angela had located earlier. This one was almost empty, presumably due to the time of day, and they sat down at the PC at the end of the line, closest to the back wall of the cafe’.
“So where do we go from here?” Angela asked.
“Bloody good question. I’m still not convinced we’re even on the right track, but we’ve got to start somewhere. Look, forget ‘LDA’ for the moment. Jeremy suggested that the other letters on the stone—‘MAM’—were probably those of the mason who carved it. But what if there’s another explanation?”
“I’m listening.”
“This is a bit tenuous, so bear with me. Assume that the ‘PO LDA’ does mean ‘by the order of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus,’ and that we are talking about Nero himself.