INCEPTIO (Roma Nova)

by Alison Morton

  Once they had gone, we stared in silence at the business case brimming with transparent packets of white powder. We had just committed a crime attracting twenty years’ hard labour. And who in Hades expected to survive that living death in the mines?

  I gathered up my brains, panned around the stunned faces and took a deep breath.

  ‘Right, bail out, via the kitchen passageway,’ I commanded. ‘Regroup at the house.’

  After anxious exchanges of glances and gathering murmurs of protest, Apollodorus flicked his fingers at them like he was shooing cats. They went. I hoped Apollodorus would be as compliant.

  I made the call on my supermobile, spoke one word, ‘Gracchus’, shut it and gave it to him. ‘The network will go down in fifteen minutes. Go.’

  ‘I’ll stay with you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t be stubborn. I’m not leaving you.’

  I made a big production of looking at my watch.

  ‘You now have just over twelve minutes. Don’t forget to pick up your own envelope.’

  His eyes widened.

  ‘Did you think I would leave you out?’ I stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. ‘I’ll be fine. When I get out of this, I’ll contact you.’

  He stood there, his face in turmoil, his eyes burning.

  ‘Go!’

  He paused by the door. ‘One last thing. What is your real name?’

  ‘Carina Mitela.’

  ‘No!’ He froze. Even his face refused to move.

  ‘Will you please go? Now.’

  He hesitated, rocking on the balls of his feet.

  I pushed him through the door. He glanced back once then disappeared.

  ‘Go carefully,’ I whispered at his retreating figure and shut the door.

  LIV

  Five minutes later, the street doors were thrust open, boots thudding across the polished wood dance floor. Shouts and screams from the staff, orders barked out, metal jangling, smashing open of doors and cupboards. Boots pounding along the corridor, like the thud of jackhammer road drills. Hades, they were early. My office door burst open. A dozen figures in full battledress stormed in, fanned out and trained their weapons on me.

  ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, how may I help you?’

  I sat in my leather chair behind my desk, forcing nonchalance. I played with my silver pen, not looking at the little drawings I was making on the notepad. I didn’t need to look down to know my fingers were trembling. I prayed the others had made it out.

  The green and brown figures stood still. The room lights thrust maximum lumens at their faces, deflected by black semi-visors hinged down from their helmets. The only sounds were their breathing, the involuntary creak of boots flexing, metal brushing cloth.

  ‘Don’t stand there like a load of dummies.’

  Ah, the delightful Daniel.

  One of the figures seized the business case, snapped it shut and disappeared. I was pulled out my seat, shoved up against the wall, my arms wrenched behind my back and handcuffed. I was frogmarched out, across the dance floor. I saw the staff had been herded against the wall, a cordon of armed soldiers and DJ custodes guarding them. Some protesting, some crying, some comforting others. I was thrown in the back of a Jeep-type truck with four soldiers to guard me.

  After a fifteen-minute ride bumping around on the dirty metal floor, I flinched as the vehicle jarred to a stop. Two of my captors leapt out, boots crunching on the gravel, reached in and pulled me out. I blinked against the harsh sunlight. I found myself in a vast sand-strewn courtyard, flanked by a tall block that looked like a government office, but all the people here wore beige uniform or fatigues. Gripped by my right arm, I was marched through a basement entrance door into a corridor, through a set of barred gates into an area with narrow benches on each side. An older, grim-faced soldier was working on a keyboard on a shabby desk. A smell of disinfectant, sweat and somebody’s over-strong aftershave hung around.

  Lurio had warned me this stage would be ‘challenging’. He had ordered me to maintain my cover whatever happened. He would be along shortly after the take-down to spring me, he’d said.

  An aeon ago.

  A female guard removed my handcuffs, gave me a yellow tunic, and told me to strip everything off and change into it. After an embarrassing visual body search, I was allowed to drink a cup of water, handcuffed again and pushed into a room full of nothing. I heard the clunk of the door lock behind me. I sat down, my back against the wall – not easy with your hands shackled behind you. I trembled, my shoulders contracting. I tried not to think of what was coming. But the good part was that Apollodorus and the others must have gotten away by now.

  I’d held it together in front of my captors, but their cold, mechanical handling was unnerving. None of them looked me in the eye. They handed me from one to another like I was piece of trash. I shut my eyes and started deep breathing. I focused on forcing my aorta pump to lessen its thudding, the fluids in my arteries to slow. I willed the adrenalin coursing through me to disperse. I made my muscles relax by naming them. Thank you, Felix, I breathed. When they came for me, no way would I give them the satisfaction of seeing me uptight and jittery. Or terrified.

  After a few minutes of hard concentration, I had calmed my body down. I noticed how cold the concrete floor was and the ache in my arms and shoulders, even my loose curly hair falling across my face like a black veil and getting in my mouth. Juno, it was irritating.

  Heavy footsteps in the corridor. Lurio come to bail me out. At last.

  The metal door clanked open and Daniel strode into the room.

  Hades.

  ‘Not so bloody superior now, eh?’

  Stripped of his helmet, vest and webbing, and down to basic fatigues, he was no less forceful.

  ‘That supposed to be funny?’ I said in Pulcheria’s nasal whine. ‘Or are you into pseudo-domination practices?’

  His head jerked back in surprise, but he recovered and threw me an angry look. ‘Look, you little tart, you’re in so much shit. I’d mind my mouth if I were you.’

  Then I said something extremely coarse. He frowned, his eyes blank, puzzled. So he was foreign-born.

  I heard a laugh that almost stopped my heart.

  ‘That wasn’t a very ladylike expression. What have you dragged in off the street, Lieutenant?’

  Daniel hauled me to my feet, clamping his fingers on my arm at the exact point where the previous guards had grabbed me. It was excruciating, but nothing to the agony I knew was coming. I bowed my head, begging Scotty to beam me up this instant. Even through the black mass of curls covering my face, I couldn’t mistake that cat-like movement as the newcomer crossed the room. His hand came up and he pushed my hair to one side. I raised my face to meet Conrad’s gaze.

  His eyes widened and, for an instant, his mouth opened in surprise. He stared, unbelieving. I stared back.

  ‘This is Pulcheria?’ he asked Daniel. His eyes tightened but never left my face.

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  Disbelief gave way to shock. His face hardened, eyes narrowed and tilted upwards. I saw the rage flare. His hand came up and struck me across the cheek. I stumbled, fell over, hit my head and lost consciousness.

  I woke, lying on a high, narrow bed. My left wrist was shackled to the frame. My sore face was throbbing. It brought Renschman and New York back. I’d been a child then.

  I touched my head where it hurt. Just a bump, no skin break. I dragged myself up on one elbow. I was in a small tiled room, a bedside cabinet and a drape at the side. Like a public hospital. I twisted to reach a plascard cup, the shadow of the water showing through. Bliss.

  ‘Oh, you’re awake? Good.’

  A uniformed medic approached me. I shrank back. ‘Here,’ she said and handed me two white pills. ‘Major Tellus said to make sure you took them.’

  I looked at them then back at her.

  ‘You’re in no position to query it but, for what it’s worth, they’re painkillers.’


  With a capital P stamped into them, they looked like standard panalgesics. They could have been anything. Either I would throw up, talk myself hoarse or my head pain would go. After another minute’s hesitation, I decided to take them. The good part was another cup of water.

  I lay back and closed my eyes. Where in Hades was Lurio? He told me to ‘go with the flow’, but this was turning into an uncontrollable torrent. And Conrad. Why had he hit me so hard? I hated him for that.

  The medic went away. I had to stall. My head was starting to ease, so I slowed my breathing and heart rate, straining though the last end of the headache to induce a trance. After some effort, I slid under and was gone.

  I woke up exactly four hours later with a cluster of anxious faces bending over me and no head pain.

  ‘She’s coming round. Stand back.’

  The same medic as before. She pushed her bioscanner up against my forehead and clamped her fingers on my wrist to confirm my pulse. When she shone a torch in my eyes, I automatically tracked the cheap plastic pen she moved in front of my face.

  ‘Okay, you’re fit.’ She nodded to two uniformed figures. One came forward, undid the handcuff linking me to the bed and cuffed my hands behind me. Where was I going? Why did I have to be fit?

  I was taken to a windowless room where a uniformed woman was sitting at a table. The guards pushed me down onto the empty chair on the other side of her table.

  ‘Hmm. Pulcheria.’

  She was around thirty-five, forty, and looked like a tax inspector, complete with glasses, thin lips and tight, ordered hair. Although the rest of her face didn’t show any hostility, her pale grey eyes were cold. She waited for a full five minutes before she spoke again.

  ‘Suppose you tell me why you think you’re here.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s not going to get us anywhere, is it now?’

  ‘No.’

  She looked at me intently. ‘I hope you’re not going to be difficult. You’re facing twenty, twenty-five years’ hard labour for drug dealing, so cooperation now would probably soften our attitude.’

  I laughed. ‘Do you think I’m that simple?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know, we could be here a very long time, talking together, so let’s try to move on from “No”.’

  ‘You only have twenty-seven more days to question me, so I’ll just stick with “No”.’

  ‘Oh, I think I might be able to change your mind within that time.’

  ‘Oh, I doubt it.’

  We continued like this for nearly two hours. She was relentless, like an automaton, pushing questions at me in that same dull voice. It was simultaneously boring and nerve-racking. I wanted to scream at her, if only to provoke a reaction. In the end, I used her monotonous tones against her, harnessing the rhythm of her voice. I detached my senses, tuned out the interrogator’s repeated questions, focused my whole self on my internal core, reduced my breathing, gave a sigh, rolled my eyes up and put myself out again.

  I woke in a cell, my hands free. Despite the chain attaching my left leg to the bed, I managed to use the bucket in the corner. Considerate of them to put a cover on it. A tray with a plastic cup of water and a bowl of mush had been left on the floor. After drinking half the water, I sniffed the bowl contents. They smelled like crushed vegetables, so I ate them, using my fingers. If it had some drug in and I threw up, their problem. I drank the rest of the water then lay back on the bed.

  It had to be early morning. I couldn’t tell; there weren’t any windows. In a shitty day, the worst hadn’t been the arrest, the humiliation, the being shackled. It had been Conrad. Immobile, cold, but so angry. His hand had hurt me more than physically. It would take me a long time to forgive him. But if I didn’t convince him I wasn’t a dealer, I guessed I would have a long time. I had my immunity certificate, but how could I get a message out? And be sure of avoiding one of the officers under suspicion? Nobody here knew who I really was, except for Conrad. And he’d presumed I was guilty. I was going to kill Lurio when I saw him. If he ever turned up.

  These angry thoughts tumbling around in my head were interrupted by the door opening.

  Daniel.

  ‘Get up, you little cow. You may fake it with Somna, but you’ll find me harder.’

  He gestured two guards to bring me along to the same room as before. No handcuffs this time, just a compressing grip on my upper arm. The same interrogator, presumably Somna, was sitting at the side, a clipboard resting on her lap, looking like a trainer assessing a student.

  The guards placed me a little way from the blank wall.

  ‘Arms out,’ Daniel shouted at me. ‘Fingertips touching the wall.’

  ‘No.’

  He slapped my face. I whirled around and kicked him in the groin. As he bent over in agony, I raised my fists together, brought them down hard and body-rammed him to the floor. The guards tried to grab me, but I was too quick. Screw Lurio, screw going with the flow, and screw taking what they dished out. I leapt high, landed next to the interrogator and, within two seconds, threw her to the floor. My knee in her back pinioned her to the concrete. I neck-locked her and pressed her head forward.

  ‘Stay completely still, interrogator, if you don’t want to die,’ I hissed in her ear.

  I looked straight at Daniel, who had staggered to his feet but hunched in a crouch. From the pain, I hoped. ‘Now, if I pull another two centimetres, I’ll snap off her head. Don’t be so naïve to think I won’t do it.’

  ‘Let her go, you little cow,’ he croaked.

  ‘Oh, Daniel, you are such a stupid prick.’ I threw Pulcheria’s nasal laugh at him. ‘Not even that, from what my girls tell me.’

  He was boiling by now. He took a step toward me. The guards approached one from each side in a pincer movement. I flexed my arm muscle to press another few millimetres on Somna’s larynx, which emitted a terrible rasp. They all froze. The only sound was Daniel breathing hard. Somna experimented with a tiny movement of her shoulders. I jammed my knee further into her back and she grunted. Daniel exchanged glances with the two guards. I was bracing for their next move when the door was thrown open.

  ‘Stand down, Lieutenant!’

  LV

  Conrad. I registered him on the outer edge of my vision, but didn’t unpick my eyes from the three poised to attack me.

  ‘Everybody out. Now. Recording off.’

  Daniel refused the guards’ assistance with an impatient gesture as he limped out with them, but threw a vicious look back at me. When they’d closed the metal door, I switched my gaze to Conrad.

  ‘You can let her go now,’ he said in a dead voice.

  ‘You have to be kidding. She’s my ticket out of here.’

  Unbelievably, he laughed. But it was a short, bitter laugh. ‘I don’t know where you got that illusion from. This isn’t some American movie. Somna knows she’ll have to take her chances.’

  Juno, he was hard. Or maybe they were all like that.

  ‘If I let her go, what guarantee do I have you won’t attack me? Like you did before.’

  ‘None. But if I have to come and get you, you’ll be very sorry. I can promise that.’

  His face resembled a piece of Aquae Caesaris granite. No ambiguity; he meant it. And I knew how strong he was. I released Somna. But I stepped back and stayed balanced on the balls of my feet, fingers curled, ready.

  The interrogator rubbed her neck and glanced at Conrad who raised an eyebrow. Somna turned her head left and right, slowly. She nodded and left the room.

  ‘Sit down.’

  I teetered on the edge of refusing. But the adrenalin was draining away, fatigue washing over me now, so I perched on the plastic chair Somna had used.

  He stood over me, arms folded, and eyes dark and tilted upwards.

  ‘Drug dealers can expect very little quarter from the law and none from me personally. We won’t tolerate importing tainted things from the West which poison o
ur life.’

  He meant me. My heart thumped, I thought I was going to throw up.

  ‘I don’t know how you got to this point; there are various options to deal with it. You can cooperate with Somna or not. Your choice. But she is successful within the twenty-eight days allowed almost without exception.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘No, a fact.’

  I was determined to be an exception. What did I have to lose now?

  ‘Next, if you display one more sign of threatening behaviour, I’ll have you shackled twenty-four seven.’

  ‘Then keep that moron Daniel away from me with his fucking stupid little tricks.’

  ‘And you can keep the foul language to yourself or I’ll have your mouth taped up the rest of the time you’re not answering questions.’

  ‘Proper little Renschman, aren’t you?’

  His body stiffened. He flexed his fingers. Was he going to hit me again, or worse? A few seconds later, his face relaxed and lost its ash-white colour. He laughed, maliciously.

  ‘Nice try. Clever, but you don’t get me like that.’

  A knock at the door interrupted our tête-à-tête. A guard came in and whispered to Conrad who frowned and made the guard repeat her message.

  ‘Very well. I’ll be along in a couple of minutes. Stay here, and don’t let anybody into this room except me or on my signature. No exceptions.’ He turned and looked at me. ‘Oh, and cuff her.’

  I was starting to give up on Lurio. Where in Hades was he? When I gave the codeword ‘Gracchus’ for the take-down of the drug dealers, he was supposed to ride in and rescue me. According to the operational plan, there should have been a clear ten-minute window. But the PGSF troops had arrived five minutes too soon. Now I was stranded here, my face and arms aching and sore, my defences running thin, amidst these tough soldiers determined to take me apart piece by piece. I didn’t know how long I could stall them nor how long my nerves would hold out. Not that I was going to let any of them see that I was intimidated. But if Lurio didn’t appear within the next twelve hours, I was going to scream ‘lawyer’ and screw the mission.