Perfiditas (8 page)

He looked relieved to be distracted and drop the subject. When Conrad and Nonna started discussing politics or some philosophical theories on winter evenings at home, Daniel usually closed the door and left them to it.

Finished with my history lecture, I went to check on Fausta and Drusus in the strategy office and found chaos. Surrounded by boxes, some half-opened, piles of racking struts, shrink-wrapped cupboards, chairs, cabinets and a cabling crew, they were beaming. Drusus, el-pad in hand, was directing another arrival – two of Manlius’s people with a huge situation screen. This was more than good. I told them to carry on with it; they were perfectly competent.

‘Just message me when it’s safe to come back in.’

XII

Promptly at 13.00, I knocked on Conrad’s door.

‘Come!’ He was frowning at the screen, tapping on his keyboard as I entered. He finished and looked up at me. The fine lines fanning out from where the upper and lower lids of his eyes met seemed deeper in the strong white sunlight. A sign of getting older? He had a good eight years on me. Today wouldn’t have helped.

‘Are you okay now?’ I asked.

‘Stop fussing, or I’ll pull rank on you.’ He wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t care if he did. And he knew it. But his semi-joke reassured me. A little.

‘So what can you give me from your analysis?’ His voice dropped a half-tone.

‘I strongly suggest that you visit the palace and check out the security for the children, that you meet with Silvia and advise her of a possible threat.’

I dragged out drinking my water.

‘Next,’ I said, studying the arm of my chair, ‘whatever you do, make sure there’s at least one, preferably two independent people who can see you at all times when you are in the same place with her. Write everything up in detail, not just your personal digital diary, but hard copy. Store a copy of everything in your lock box.’

‘Are you serious?’

Nobody had a higher security clearance than he did. He was responsible for the personal and political safety of the head of state. More binding still, Silvia Apulia was not just the imperatrix to him; he was the father of her three children.

‘Completely.’

‘Oh, come on! You can do better than that.’

‘No, I can’t,’ I blurted out. ‘Juno help me, I don’t know how to describe it. I saw you threatened, in danger, but I can’t tell how. You were also seen as a possible threat.’ My voice fell to a whisper.

He said nothing. He picked up a pen from his desk tidy and tapped the end on the dark leather top. The repetitive staccato became unbearable. Then he turned it and started on the other end. His face was hard like a concrete mask. I cleared my throat.

‘Any more?’ His voice was clipped; he was back to professional and analytical mode again, but his face was flushed.

‘You know DSAs don’t always give results on demand.’ I started to feel resentful. Sometimes they were a little obscure, but so far in my life they had proved one hundred per cent true. Some appreciation would have been good.

Looking for an outlet for his fury, something in my expression must have kept him from making me the preferred target. He flung back into his chair and murdered the roller-ball.

I knew everything was wrong, all wrong, and I had an almost uncontrollable urge to run.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’ll go up to the palace now and check the security thoroughly. I’ll take the
primipilus
with me and Paula Servla.’ He gave me a sardonic look. ‘Do you think they’re sufficiently credible babysitters?’

‘Well, having all three of you descend on them all at once will frighten the shit out of the guards there.’ I tried to keep my voice light, but wasn’t too sure I’d succeeded.

‘You know something?’ He fixed his gaze on me. ‘You’re a real Cassandra sometimes.’

Itching to move, I went to the gym downstairs for some hard circuit training, followed by a kilometre on the outdoor track. Despite pushing my pace so my breath seared through my lungs, making my eyes water, it didn’t distract what was pounding through my mind. My gut instinct was to keep running. Now.

As I sweated back inside, one of Sepunia’s staffers found me. ‘Captain Mitela? Captain Sepunia would be grateful if you could call by her office this afternoon,’ he said. ‘She said it’s not urgent, just interesting.’

What had Sepunia dug up that she couldn’t leave until tomorrow’s meeting? And what exactly did she mean by interesting?

Half an hour later, I knocked on the door frame of her office, a friendly smile on my face.

‘Hi, Carina. Come in and sit down,’ she said, as cheerful as I appeared. I shut the door and waited for her to speak. She dropped the happy look, glanced at me almost furtively, then glued her eyes back on the paper in her hand. She wasn’t very tall, and fidgeted around like a little brown mouse in front of a stalking cat.

‘When we were searching the safe in Sextus’s house, we found an envelope marked “Sympathisers”. One of my people was logging the contents – mostly letters and message printouts – and putting a list together. She was somewhat taken aback to find these. Any comments?’ She shot me a speculative look.

Two photos showed a group of people in full formal dress filling a magnificent hall. Domus Corneliarum. I recognised it from the last gathering of the Twelve Families. In the foreground were my grandmother, Livia Cornelia, Laetia Volusenia, her daughter Marcella and Claudia Sella, Julia Sella’s aunt, and me. A rough circle had been drawn around my head in red marker. In the top photo, I was slightly turned away, accepting a drink from the waiter who was…Sextus. No. The second photo was similar, but included Imperatrix Silvia Apulia. My face was turned at a more direct angle as if I was in serious conversation with Sextus.

Hades.

‘I don’t know what to say – I don’t pay attention to each and every servant that hands me a drink,’ I said coldly. That probably sounded snooty, but that was how it was. Maybe Sextus had wormed his way onto the staff list for the big bash at Livia Cornelia’s. Maybe he was curious about his mother’s family after all. I hadn’t had the slightest murmur of recall about him when I first went to Aidan’s office. And my memory was pretty good.

‘The photos look like part of the batch taken for publication. Anybody could have accessed them via the public pages of the Twelve Families’ site,’ I said. ‘C’mon, Sepunia, this is the kid fantasising with some fancy graphics package.’

‘And the letter?’

She stretched out, but held on to a single sheet, handwritten in blue ink. The sloping, hurried scribble looked exactly like mine. I read it through twice. A big lump of lead landed in my middle. It was supposed to be from me saying that Conrad and I had been impressed by Sextus and wanted to hear more about his ideas. Would he please like to contact me and arrange a time to meet?

I stared at the letter, caught somewhere between dismay and shock. Why in Hades would Conrad be remotely interested, with his history?

‘This has to be a forgery,’ I said when I’d recovered my voice. ‘I always use black, when I write something. Not something I do often.’ I shrugged. ‘And we have our own hand-milled paper, not this everyday stuff.’

‘Perhaps so, but you understand I have to submit it to full forensic examination.’

A shiver ran through me. I felt a noose tightening, not only around my neck but Conrad’s too.

‘Of course,’ I agreed. What else could I say? Somebody was mounting an attack on the Mitelae. Nonna and I thought it would be financial or digital, and she’d had yet another layer of BI security programs installed. I hadn’t anticipated anything from the inside, or so personally directed. My heart started to thump as the adrenalin responded to the threat.

‘I need you to write this out in front of witnesses so we have a comparison,’ she added. She gave me a typed version to copy from so I couldn’t make a deliberate effort to miscopy. For all that Miss Innocent look in her green eyes, she’d prepared this well. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, look directly at me.

Whoever was running this operation had done an excellent job. I had to assume the letter would be a good forgery, too. But who wrote a letter by hand these days? I heard the door open, and a senior staffer set paper and ink pen on the desk in front of Sepunia then stood to the side, watching me. She headed it “Agreed witness copy – comparison only” and pushed it towards me.

‘Now what?’ I asked as I put the pen down ten minutes later.

She bagged the copy letter and handed it to the staffer who went off to process it.

‘I’m sorry. I can’t say any more until I see the results in about an hour. Please return to your office and wait until I contact you.’

She couldn’t have spoken more coldly. If it were me, I would have had me suspended from duty and confined to barracks.

Her mistake.

I hurried up the corridor to Conrad’s office. I needed to warn him. Empty. Of course, he’d gone to the palace. I stood there, chewing my lip. Conrad’s exec, Rusonia, was impassive, as usual. I didn’t know her well enough to leave a message – she’d think I was crazy. I gave her a tight smile, slipped back out into the corridor. I texted him in encrypt: ‘Code 5. Emergency. Meet me stat fav resto.’

I prayed he’d pick it up immediately. If I was being paranoid, the worst result would be embarrassment and possibly a verbal reprimand. If not, I wasn’t going to wait for a trap to close on us.

I went to the locker room, gathered some things into a small backpack. I walked up to my old desk in the general office which, miraculously, had not been reassigned. I leaned up against the inside curve and spent two precious minutes talking and laughing with the guys there and, still bantering, felt behind the vinyl edging strip. It was still there. I broke a fingernail easing the tiny chip out. No reaction from any of the others. I sat down on the chair and logged on to my account. It hadn’t been barred, but I had to assume the Intelligence section was already monitoring it.

I slipped the chip into a card carrier and initiated a timed destruct sequence on the whole account. It was a cute program Fausta had made up for me when I worked undercover with Apollodorus. The bonus was that it would eat itself up once it had finished. Normally, nobody would notice, but what was normal now? I reckoned I had a safety margin of eight minutes left.

Back in the locker room, I abandoned my uniform. I stowed my gold eagle badge in my pants pocket. I needed it to clear security at the exit. I sauntered down the corridors as casually as I could manage, my heart in my stomach. Normally three and a half minutes from locker room to exit, each second seemed ten times longer. I was sweating as I approached the security gate – the last barrier. My heart thumping, I put my hand and eye up to the readers and waited for the take-down.

Nothing. The reader pinged and I was out.

‘Hold a moment, Captain,’ the security guard called. She was porting a bullpup and stood two metres away.

I took a breath, and forced myself to turn back. ‘Yes?’

‘You forgot your side arm.’ She stretched out her hand with my Glock.

‘Thanks.’ I stuffed it in my leather jacket pocket as casually as I could manage, hoping she couldn’t hear how loud my heart was pumping. ‘Sorry, it’s my daughter’s birthday today, and my mind was off on a trip.’

‘No problem, ma’am,’ she said. ‘Got my own.’ She smiled. ‘Hope it goes well.’

I faked an answering smile, collected my bike from the garage and, piling on the revs through the security gate, fled the barracks.

Part II: Pulcheria Redux

XIII

I found the nearest parking garage, slipped into its blind spot and changed. I dug out a long curly wig from my backpack. It wasn’t wonderful, but enough to deceive the passing eye and, more importantly, the public CCTV. I unclipped the surface panels off my bike and threw them under the trader’s van in the next bay. Levering the false tooth containing my mic took a minute or two. I could hardly see in the bike mirror in the poor light, but I felt the stab of pain as it came away. I wiped away the blood dribbling down my chin. The earpiece was easier to extract. I stuffed them, my cell and my gold eagle badge – all trackable – into a digital franked mailer addressed to the PGSF office and threw it into the first mailbox I found. I’d buy a day or two as it went through the automated mail system.

I barrelled along the inner ring road to a suburban post office. In their private box room, I collected the contents of my safe box: four thousand
solidi
in cash, a special cellphone made by Brown Industries in Eastern America, and a thin metallic mesh cloth which I carefully pinned in place under my tee to shield my left shoulder and upper arm. I raced back to the city centre to a second post office and deposited the unwanted items in another lock box. By now, my bike was too exposed and, regretfully, I dumped it in a parking lot in the middle of the Dec Max.

I trembled with the tension rippling through me as I completed each step of my escape route, but enjoyed a guilty frisson of excitement at playing hooky. Maybe Lurio was right that I’d been born to be either a great counterspy or a great criminal. Both had their attractions.

Filled with numbers the scarabs would love to have, my BI supermobile was now recharged from the bike. BI – Brown Industries – was the specialist defence electronics firm I’d inherited from my father, something that had triggered me running for cover in Roma Nova seven years ago. As majority shareholder, I had full access to the candy store, and I’d taken my pick. After the deep cover operation a few years ago finished, I’d packed my handset in a shielded bag and hidden it in the safe deposit drawer. I’d deactivated the network but, being paranoid, I’d kept the ultimate control key. This was not something I had shared with either the DJ or PGSF when I transferred in. I had to hope the encryption level was still good. I breathed out as the screen showed “Activated” when I entered the key code. It had been seven years. I dialled.

‘
Salve
, Pollius. How’s your knife?’

Silence. A cough.

‘Pulcheria?’ A voice croaked.

Was he having a heart attack?

‘Live and kicking.’

‘Gods! What can I do for you?’

‘Can I come over now? I need a small procedure done, urgently.’

‘Now? Are you alone?’

‘Yes and yes. Problem?’

‘No. Just surprised.’

At his door, I repressed the instinct to turn my head and scan for watchers. I just trusted my peripheral vision which was pretty near 180 degrees. Besides, I had changed my appearance yet again and now wore a red leather jacket, taupe chinos and a scarf bandeaued around my head.

Pollius came to greet me himself. ‘Delighted to see you again,’ he gushed, faking it. He instructed the bored receptionist to hold all calls and ushered me into his ultra-chic consulting room.

‘Pulcheria,’ he stated simply. The smile dropped off his face.

‘I hope I didn’t startle you.’

‘I was told they’d put you away for good.’

‘Hmph, it sometimes felt like it!’

His deep-set eyes didn’t hide his curiosity, but I knew he was too cautious to push it.

‘I’m not going to disrupt your new life,’ I said, careful to reassure him. ‘I’m pleased to see you’re prospering, though.’ I panned around his room.

‘Your severance payment was very generous.’ He showed me his office with mini-operating room attached. ‘I do small surgery, fine cosmetic work mostly – it’s very lucrative.’ He smiled, gradually relaxing. How many patients had sat at the Italian grained oak desk in his elegant office, wondering how much their consultation would cost? Did they know Pollius was expert at digging bullets out of bleeding bodies?

‘I need a small favour. Can you extract a tracker?’

He tensed. ‘Not a penal one?’

‘No, personal security.’

‘Let me see the site.’ He slid into medical mode as I stripped off my jacket and white tee. He raised an eyebrow when he saw the mesh. I quickly slid it into my jacket pocket.

‘In the fold under the shoulder joint.’

He had me lie down on the operating table, found the tiny tracker with his scanner, and daubed the area with an incredibly cold liquid. I felt the scalpel slice my flesh, but with no pain, followed by a sucking sound. He gel-sealed the wound, padded the area and we were done. Ten minutes flat.

‘I’ve never seen one of these,’ he commented as he cleaned and bagged the tiny thing before handing it over.

‘Yes, well, forget you ever did,’ I replied. ‘Do you have a protective mailer I could have and a plain envelope to put it in?’

I thanked him and left. I had been under twenty minutes. I walked three blocks and posted the tracker back to Domus Mitelarum. How easy it had been to slip back into that efficient camaraderie with Pollius. All he said when I went was ‘Go carefully’, our old valediction.

I made my way to the Onyx, Conrad’s and my favourite restaurant, where I’d told him to meet. I walked past on the opposite side of the street, then dove down a side alleyway but stayed in line of sight of the restaurant’s large plate glass window. Using the scope from my pack at nearly max focus, I could see into the restaurant. Nobody apart from the server. I leaned back against the plasterwork. No message on my cell from Conrad even to tell me I was wrong. Had he received my text? If he had, he would have been here or at least called or messaged. Although I’d sent the text from my other cell, the one I’d mailed back, the system was cloud-based. I would have received his reply. Just to be sure, I double-checked I’d reconfigured the supermobile correctly, but I knew I had.

I didn’t dare phone the PGSF building, even with the reactivated supermobile. Who knew if the encryption was still unbreakable after seven years? Unlikely. They’d track me within minutes. I glanced at my watch. It wasn’t two hours since I’d left. It could hardly be classed as desertion. Yet.

This was a trap, I was sure; a really clever one where somebody had gone to a heap of trouble to make sure it was well-sprung.

I had to find somewhere safe and contact Nonna. She would protect the children. She would let Olympus collapse before letting them come in harm’s way.

I found Dania, in her bar just off the Via Nova. I raised my brows at its new look: stylish indigo and silver decor, with beautiful glass and ceramic mosaics. She must have given in and taken professional advice. The bar area was starting to fill up now the sun had set. I wandered up to the marble counter, perched on a stool and ordered a dry white wine. I heard a few foreign accents: tourists soaking up the Roman atmosphere. No sign of security or scarabs.

After a few sips, I made my way to the back, pretending to look for the bathroom but I snuck upstairs. I passed the rooms, looking for the office. Red LEDs on old-fashioned swipelocks showed some were occupied. Ah, a codelocked door. I knocked and smiled at the spyhole.

The door opened two centimetres to show part of an elaborately dressed blonde head.

‘
Salve
, Dania.’

‘Venus’s tits! Pulcheria!’ Dania’s jaw dropped open so far I thought I’d have to apply first aid.

‘Can I come in?’

She flung open the door, grabbed my arm and pulled me into a welcoming hug. Unlike the cautious Pollius, she beamed with genuine pleasure to see me. Thank Juno. But then, Dania knew exactly who I was.

‘I need a place to hide out for a bit. Do you think—’

‘Well, obviously,’ she replied, cutting me off. ‘What have you done now?’

My narrow room at the end of the corridor was painted in a nauseous shade of pink with pictures that would have made an old Imperial Roman blush, but it had a unique advantage – it gave onto the fire escape at the back.

After Dania closed the door, I threw my pack on the chair and dropped down onto the bed. I didn’t stop shaking for some time. The adrenalin had worn off and I was cold, tired and hungry. But I couldn’t face the risk of going down to the kitchens to forage for something. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes.

In the pitch-black of the night, I woke in a sweat exactly twelve hours after I’d left Conrad’s office. I replayed every detail in my mind. The frown on his face had been so deep, almost stamped into his skin when he’d heard my DSA results. Surely he’d had my message. Why hadn’t he joined me at the Onyx? We could have worked this thing out and cleared it up together. Half of me wanted to slink back and take the harsh consequences, but the other half hoped to the depth of all Hades that I’d been right to run.

The next morning, I’d patched my split self together. I went down to breakfast and caught an odd look or two. None of the girls and neither of the two live-in male staff said anything beyond
salve
. They carried on reaching for food, drinking coffee and swapping dubious remarks. I took only coffee – my stomach was still sore from worry acid.

Dania had found me a plain tunic and skirt; my newly-dyed hair fell loose on my shoulders. She announced with a casual wave of her hand that I was her cousin from the country who would be staying a while, but not joining the team. I endeavoured to sound innocent and unworldly. I helped clear breakfast away, trying to blend in as grateful poor country mouse happy to do domestic work for richer, more glamorous cousin.

I stayed hidden upstairs for the rest of the day, logging on via Dania’s system, scouring the newscasts, blogs and public portals for the
custodes
and PGSF. I sent one innocuous-seeming email fixing to have coffee with a friend. As I hit send, I sat back, hoping it would still work. In desperation, I then sent an email to Conrad’s personal account from a web-based encrypted account. I didn’t dare risk it being tracked back to Dania, but I had no reply. I hardly slept that night.

The next morning, I murmured I was going to look at the market and did she want anything? Dania raised an eyebrow, but said, ‘Go carefully.’

At the Macellum, I browsed one or two stalls in the outside market, bought a cheap scarf, a linen bag and another pair of sandals. A scruffy market porter leered at me from between two booths. I responded with a nervous smile – he was just perfect. He beckoned, and I slipped in to join him. He squeezed my waist and pulled me into a room at the back, looking for all the world intent on a quickie.

‘Really, Flavius, you don’t have to look as if you’re enjoying it so much.’

‘Oh, come off it,’ he said. ‘It has to look authentic.’

‘Just behave,’ I warned and pulled myself away. ‘You have no idea how relieved I am that the fallback system still works.’

‘Isn’t that the point of the coffee messages?’ He raised his eyebrows.

‘Sure, but still... Okay, report.’

‘When you hopped it two days ago, the legate said you must have gone home. When you didn’t turn up the next morning, you were posted AWOL.’

‘That was quick,’ I said. ‘Too quick.’ I frowned at him.

‘Well, they’ve ramped the alert level up to red plus. They all came out the emergency senior staff meeting with thunderous faces yesterday. Petronax is crowing like the arse-ache he is. He took over because your going AWOL was classed as a massive internal security breach. The legate has a personal guard tagging along with him everywhere at Petronax’s insistence. One of the internal security lot I’ve never seen before. Sepunia’s people are working under the direction of Petronax’s tribe and nobody’s happy.’

Gods! Was Conrad under suspicion? I swallowed the sour taste in my mouth. ‘What’s happening on the investigation?’

‘Nothing that I can find out. There are no leaks, no gossip. Nobody from the legate’s or Major Stern’s response teams is on the investigation and your ART has been dispersed and reallocated. Paula’s been posted to the palace guard, and I’ve been put on standard guard detail.’

Again, that was fast, like it was planned. Twenty-plus of the most effective guards were excluded. Tainted by association?

‘Isn’t there anybody we could pressure?’

‘No, I’ve been through them all in my mind. C’mon, be serious, you know they won’t leak. You wouldn’t, would you?’

‘Okay.’ I sighed. ‘We’ll have to do it the traditional way.’

I rubbed my face to heighten the colour, mussed up my hair a little and stumbled into the street and back to Dania’s.

Back in my horrible little room, I worked at correlating the past twenty-four hours with my deep scan analysis.

Fact number one: I’d been ambushed by the photos and letter obviously planted at Sextus’s house – a trap designed to throw me off the investigation, discredit and immobilise me, preferably in an uncomfortable jail like the Transulium.

Fact number two: it had worked to a certain extent. I was on the outside but, on the plus side, I was free.

Fact number three: I’d had to reactivate some of the old Pulcheria network. The suspicion entered my mind that maybe this was the objective so it could be exposed. Not very likely, but I kept it on the table.

Fact number four: three of the best teams had been taken out of the loop, including my own ART which had successfully caught Sextus and Martinus Caeco. That was beyond bizarre.

Fact number five: my analysis had projected a threat to the imperatrix, not just personally but in her function. And Conrad would soon be in the frame. Was he under guard or protection?

Although I should, I didn’t follow the political trends closely. Voting in the Representatives and Senate elections was the extent of my political activity. But one thing I did know was that the military was subordinate to the civilian administration – that went back centuries. Sure, there are always whiners and moaners, people with unrealistic aims or non-orthodox views – that was normal and, I guess, healthy – but nothing had shown up on the security screen before I’d left to point to any movement to overthrow our political structure.