Excerpt: All Timelines Lead To Rome

This is a brief excerpt from my Nanowrimo novel.  For those of you who aren't familiar with NaNoWriMo, it's a challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of November.  I wrote a little over 73,000 words, not quite enough to finish this novel, but enough to get about three-fourths of the way done.

“It’s a volume in Livy’s ‘A History of Rome’, one of the many missing ones.”
Scott White looked at the picture of the scroll on the screen and shrugged. “You couldn’t prove it by me. I’m a New World type of a guy. I think it’s the Indian blood.” He looked at his boss, Chad Summers. “You’re sure it’s from TLZ?”
“Almost sure. If it’s genuine, then yes, it’s other time-line stuff. It’s in too good a shape to be over a thousand years old. It would almost have to be that old if it was from our time-line, and probably more like fifteen hundred years old.”
“So is it genuine?”
Chad shrugged. “If the Boston Police Department didn’t think so they wouldn’t have sent it to the Bureau. Of course they aren’t experts on classical Rome, or on forgeries of Roman era documents, so there are no guarantees.”
“Where did they get the picture?”
“From a body. A Jane Doe. It was on a chip from a cell phone camera. Boston BP is sending their investigating officer. I’ll let her tell you the circumstances when she gets here.”
“And that’s when?”
“She should already be here.”
Scott got up and walked to the window of the conference room. He looked out over the parking lot. The Chicago area office of the Bureau of Timeline Integrity occupied the third story of a generic-looking office building in a complex of similar buildings on the outskirts of the suburb of OakBrook. It was 10 am on Monday, and from the window Scott could see traffic snarled on I-53. “If she’s out there it’s going to be a while. Why are they routing this case here instead of the New York office?”
“They want something to happen. If they sent it to New York somebody would just drip coffee and donut crumbs on it and stick it in a file drawer.
Chad’s cell phone rang. “Darla Smith from Boston PD? Yeah, send her up. We’re in the conference room.”
The only thing that said Boston Police Detective about Darla Smith was her jacket. It had “Police” in capital letter across the back. Other than that she looked like a twenty-something business woman, tall and slender in blue dress pants and blue and white shirt. She managed to look businesslike in spite of hair dyed a dark purple. There was a hint of the oriental in her face.
Darla looked at the picture on the conference room screen. “I see you got the money shot there. I quietly showed it around and from what little we can check out it looks like it could be genuine.”
Chad shrugged. “The picture doesn’t give us a lot to go on, but what we can see looks like it might be. If it was Aztec or Inca I would figure it probably is real. With Roman stuff the burden of proof gets a little higher.”
“Why?”
“Scott here can get into the details with you. Darla Smith, meet Robert S. White. He likes to be called Scott and he takes it personally if you call him Bob. He’s an analyst here at the Bureau, and he’ll be the BTI liaison on the task force if we decide to form one.”
“Why don’t you like Bob? Oh. Got you.”
Scott grinned. “It doesn’t bother me now. First fifteen years it toughened me up a bit. The last fourteen and a half it hasn’t mattered much.”
Darla pulled a package out of her briefcase. “So BTI. Bureau of Timeline Integrity. I hear you get the people the FBI and the CIA don’t want and the DEA and BTF can’t use.”
Chad’s face went bland. “That’s what the FBI and the CIA might want to think. We own turf they wish they had. If it has anything to do with TLZ it comes to us. Say, I have people to see, tax dollars to spend. I’ll touch base with you after lunch.”
After he left Darla looked at Scott. “TLZ?”
“Timeline Z,” Scott said.
“What happened to “A” through “Y”?”
“As far as we know they don’t exist. Timeline Z is the only alternate time-line we can reach. It may be the only one out there.”
“So why is it Timeline Z instead of Timeline A or Timeline B?”
“It probably started out meaning something else, like the name of a 1960s science fiction show, but it kind of morphed into meaning Timeline Z when we had to get serious about it. How much do you know about TLZ?”
“It’s an alternate reality where Europeans never reached the New World, and apparently where there is still a Roman empire of some sort, though I’m kind of vague on how that works or how close it could be to the actual Roman Empire we had. It’s been what? Over fifteen hundred years?”
“Close enough. And from what I hear the TLZ version of the Roman Empire is an awful lot like the Roman Empire in the first couple of centuries AD. Which is one of the mysteries of TLZ.”
“Why did your boss seem to think that a book from Rome is less likely than an Aztec one?”
Scott pointed to a map on the wall. “See the yellow and red rectangles? Those are the portals we know of. Seven in the Western US. Twelve in Australia. One in Siberia. One in Iceland. So only one anywhere close to Europe. It’s policed heavily and well. I’m not saying you couldn’t smuggle stuff through there, but it wouldn’t be easy.”
“Could there be portals you don’t know about?”
Scott nodded. “Sure, but almost certainly not in Europe, and probably not anywhere useful.”
“Why not?”
“Power. Some places it’s relatively easy to break through the wall between the realities. Some places it would take all the power from a couple of nuclear power plants to punch a hole the size of your thumb. The weakest place in Europe proper is in Finland, but it would still take too much power to be practical.”
“I thought the French had a portal.”
“Sort of. It’s in the French Alps and they use half the power of a nuclear power plant to keep open a portal smaller than the size of my fist. It’s for national pride, not anything  useful.” Scott turned to the picture on the screen. “Your turn. Where did this come from?”
“How much did your boss tell you?”
“He said you found it on the chip from a cell phone camera. You found the chip on a Jane Doe.”
“A headless, handless Jane Doe. She was obviously murdered. The body was mutilated to prevent identification.”
“Where was the cell phone?”
“We never found it. What we found was a removable chip hidden in—well let’s just say an orifice.”
“I never heard anything about the body. You would think something like that would have hit the news.”
Darla shrugged. “It did locally. The finding of the body did anyway. We haven’t released anything about finding the chip. Unfortunately finding John or Jane Doe bodies isn’t that uncommon in most of our big cities. The chip gives us a shot at finding out who this one was, and maybe who killed her.”
“What else is on there?”
“About a thousand slides of twenty-something people having fun. I’ve glanced at all of them, but I need to go back through in detail.”
“Nothing that identifies her?”
“Not so far.”