There’d been nothing on the news about them while we were at the safe house. Bane dropped back into his seat, eyes on Eduardo. Eduardo’s lips turned up in a tiny, sad smile. “They are well at present.”
“Can you... help them?”
Bane’s gaze became intent.
Eduardo grimaced slightly. “Doubtful, but it’s something I’m following with great attention. They are in no immediate danger; the other boy’s condition is still too serious to allow him to testify against them.”
“And when Louis is better?”
Eduardo held up a deflecting hand. “Miss Verrall, go and get something to eat. Settle in. There will be a better time for this discussion.”
That wasn’t a no, but... doubtful didn’t sound good. Had I really expected anything else? I got to my feet and so did Bane. We’d almost reached the door when Bane stopped dead. “You’re in charge of anything to do with State Security, Father Mark said?”
Eduardo raised an eyebrow. “Correct.”
“The Rome cell of the Resistance turned us in to the EuroGov. You can’t trust them.”
Eduardo’s brows snapped together. “You’re certain?”
“Well, we didn’t wait to have it confirmed absolutely, but we were pretty sure they were planning to try and trade us for the leader’s brother and some others who’d been captured. From the way the EuroGov just shut the gates, I’d say they went through with it. The Milan cell had nothing to do with it.”
“Milan cell?”
“They brought us the last stretch to Rome. The leader was trying to talk the Roman guy out of his vile plan. Without notable success, according to Margo.”
Eduardo looked at me. “Your records only say you speak Esperanto and English.”
“Yes—and Latin.”
Eduardo nodded. “Ah, I see. Two of the most closely-connected languages in the world—but they do go and forget. Thank you for telling me this…” He waved us towards the door, other hand reaching for a phone, mind already far away down some train of—urgent—thought.
“That’s not good,” muttered Father Mark, as we moved through a sort of hall cum anteroom.
“From his expression it’s more not good than I’d guessed,” said Bane.
“Yes. The Resistance control the majority of the tunnels out of this place, and know the location of most of the others.”
Silence for a moment.
“Oh. Of course.”
Father Mark opened the door to the corridor and we stepped through.
What the...? Priests, all in cassocks; sisters and friars, in real habits; lay people in normal clothes, and more guards, were all crowding around the door.
“It’s her! Margaret Verrall.”
“It’s true, they made it!”
“They’re here!”
“Margaret, are you all right?”
“We’ve been praying for you, all three of you…”
Father Mark shepherded us through the crowd, “Come on, hungry fugitives on their way to the canteen, make way…”
Half the people followed along behind us. Embarrassing. Soon we were in a large dining hall, tucking into heaped plates as everyone sat around, watching with the benevolent enjoyment of people feeding lost puppies.
“And I thought having you watch me eat was embarrassing,” I muttered to Bane, digging into a third helping of lasagna. We’d made some headway with our food deficit in the safe house, but we were still hungry all the time.
“Please don’t eat all that just to please your fan club,” said Father Mark.
“Trust me, I’m still hungry! Is there any way to find out how Jon is?”
“I promise you, Margo, anything wrong and they’d let you know. This state is only a hundred and eight acres; it’s not hard to find people.”
“Speaking of health—Bane, pill,” I reminded him.
“Oh, yeah.” He fished the box out and took the next one.
Father Mark picked up the box and examined it. “Antibiotics? Should you be taking these with food? Oh, they’re the new type... Well, I was going to say rooms next, but perhaps hospital wing. What are they for?”
“Bear clawed my shoulder.” Bane tucked into more lasagna. “It’s healing up now, though.”
“You’d better both be checked over.” Father Mark eyed my battered face. “What happened to you?”
“A bastard SpecialCorps Captain and a train crash, consecutively.”
He shook his head. “We need one mammoth catching up session.”
“Yes. So you’re here. Where’re the others?”
“Oh, we sent the last of them on to safe towns a couple of months ago. A few very much wanted to wait here for you—Jane, Sarah, Harriet, Rebecca and Caroline in particular. But I persuaded them to go and help the others settle in.”
“Didn’t really expect to see us again, huh?” Dear Father Mark. He’d kept on waiting for his lost sheep, even though his head told him we’d never come.
“Well, I hoped and prayed otherwise, but it did cross my mind the girls might be happier already settled in a new home if or when bad news arrived. Rather than waiting here in limbo. Not much to do here, these days.”
“Did you make it here okay?”
“No major problems. A checkpoint just beyond Florence realized we were off course for Venice, and asked for our individual IDs, so—we shot all the guards with the nonLees, scrambled their computer, then I disabled the bus’s speed limiter and put my foot on the floor. We didn’t stop again until we got to the outskirts of Rome.”
I let out a breath. Definitely those few simple words concealed long hours of tortuous suspense as the bus tore along, racing to reach Rome before the EuroGov worked out what’d happened.
“How did you get into Rome?”
“Easy, we walked everyone in along the Appian Way as though we’d gone out on a walking tour. School groups don’t need much of a pass to enter or leave on foot—ours was a fake. We had it prepared before we left the British department. I thought it best not to mention it. Sorry and all that.”
“No, you were right. No point putting all your eggs in one basket.” Since we three couldn’t have posed as a school group, we’d still have needed IDs to walk in ourselves.
Giving up on the lasagna at last, I put down my fork, at which two sisters, a priest and an elderly gentleman rushed to offer me what appeared to be the entire contents of the desserts’ cabinet. I eyed the puddings regretfully.
“I’m sorry, I’m out of practice with sweet food. Another day, maybe.” I tried not to stare at the sisters’ beautiful habits. One wore brown with a brown and white veil, the other, blue with a white veil. I’d only ever seen pictures.
“Why are you three half-starved anyway?” asked Father Mark, as Bane also declined the sweet stuff.
“We spent about a month wandering around in the middle of nowhere eating nettles,” growled Bane, still munching the last of his lasagna.
“Don’t forget the bugs,” I said.
“Yeah, and bugs. Though there could’ve stood to be a few more of those around. Okay, I’m actually full.”
“All right, hospital wing, then accommodation,” said Father Mark.
“Can we see Jon?”
“I expect so, unless they’re still operating.”
Shedding some more of our well-wishers at the hospital wing door, we located Jon almost at once, tucked up in a room not far along the corridor, sound asleep. Another bullet for his collection—the last, please Lord!—lay in a little dish on the bedside table. He was connected up to some sort of drip, but compared to how he’d been at the safe house, he looked a picture of health. A monitor beeped steadily and reassuringly beside the bed.
Doctor Frederick—who’d tended Jon—dragged me off almost at once for the full check-up Father Mark had threatened. He wanted to know the cause of every last bruise and when he pointed to two particularly nasty ones on my thighs and I said, “that evil Captain, I expect,” he promptly offered me the services of a
counselor. Which I politely declined. I’d no intention of going over and over the Almost Nothing that’d happened until it morphed into Something, and I told him so.
“Well, that’s a healthy enough attitude,” he said. “However, if you find despite your best efforts it is turning into Something, as you put it, we have people who can help. Now where did you get this one?”
“Look, most of them are caused by trees, the ground, or a train, and I really can’t tell you which is which. They’re fading, anyway. I’m fine.”
He eyed my patchwork of yellow, purple and black skin and conceded defeat, going to his computer. I got my outer clothes back on as he typed.
“Well,” he said, “I prescribe plenty of food and rest and a precautionary course of vermicide since you’ve been eating raw and poorly cooked meat. Oh, do you want your implant out?”
“You can do that right now?” My heart swelled with delight.
He picked up a cylindrical gadget and pressed a button—the end opened to reveal a circle of needles and some sort of long flexi-pincer snaking out from the middle.
“Oh yes. This is precisely the same device the EuroGov use to put them in and out.”
“Yes, then.” Somehow I’d not imagined getting rid of the hated thing could be quite so simple. Silly, Margo. The EGD take them in and out all the time.
“Be aware you’ll be a bit up and down emotionally for a few weeks as your hormones get themselves back to the state nature intended. If you’re thinking now’s a good time, roll up your sleeve.”
I rolled my sleeve up at once. We were here, we were safe, and I wanted the thing out of me.
Doctor Frederick moved the cylinder end around on my arm until it beeped happily. The end opened up again and I braced myself—a prick and the next moment he drew the cylinder away, pressing a little square of surgical gauze over a surprisingly small hole.
“That’s the blighter.” He took a tiny bloody object the size of a pill from the gadget’s pincer, put it in my hand and taped the gauze in place. “Souvenir for you.”
I looked at the innocuous thing on my palm. Symbol of so much I hated. I’d carried it inside me ever since the inescapable defilement shortly after my eleventh birthday.
“I’ve a better idea.” Placing it on the floor, I brought my heel down on it, hard. Ground it from side to side.
“I wouldn’t look too closely and spoil your cathartic moment,” said Doctor Frederick dryly, when I took my foot away. “They’re very hard to destroy. Chuck it in that incinerator chute there, if you like.”
Picking the itsy-bitsy thing up, I did so. A happy warmth in my chest. I’d just removed and destroyed my contraceptive implant without the EGD’s permission. Not in the EuroBloc any more, oh no!
“Okay, you can send the boy in.”
“Bane’s status as a New Adult isn’t in any doubt, y’know,” I pointed out—with a smile—as I rolled my sleeve down.
Doctor Frederick smiled slightly as well. “All right. Send the young man in.”
“Take a proper look at his shoulder, won’t you?” I urged him. “It was oozing pus for days, he’d a fever on and off—on and off ‘cause his courses of antibiotics kept getting interrupted. I think it is okay now, but…”
“…I’ll take a good look.”
Bane was a bit longer than me, but not by much. He stumped back out and slammed the door behind him.
“Wanted to know where every last bruise came from. I told him, how should I know? I was too busy running to stop and take notes! Then he offered me a counselor, would you believe? I said what on earth for and he said ‘anger management, perhaps?’”
“Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” murmured Father Mark. Bane glared at him.
“I think Bane’s idea of anger management is punching the nearest wall,” I said ruefully.
“Well, he might consider going a little deeper into something besides the skin of his knuckles. But let’s find you some accommodation.”
After making everyone promise to let us know as soon as Jon woke up, we left the hospital wing by a different door and arrived at a little office in a nearby block with only three off-duty Swiss Guards trailing us, grinning and giving us a thumbs up or V for Victory every time we looked their way. A middle-aged sister dressed in a green habit and veil let us in and closed the door firmly on the young guardsmen.
“What can I do for you?”
“Surely you can guess, Sister Eunice?” smiled Father Mark.
“Rooms for our new arrivals. Three of them?” She looked from Bane to me.
“It will be as soon as Jonathan is out of hospital.”
“Well, that’s easy enough at the moment,” she sighed, sitting in front of a computer and calling up a floor plan. “They could take their pick, but… in hospital? Ground floor, then—yes, St. Athanasius’s suite will do nicely.”
She tapped at the keyboard for a moment, turned, plucked a set of keys from a wall of key-laden hooks and went to open the door. “If you’ll follow me… Go on, you three,” she shooed the guards away. “It’s rude to stare, you know.”
The guards, who didn’t look much older than us, stopped following, though they didn’t stop grinning.
A smile spread over Sister Eunice’s face as we rounded the corner and went down a flight of stairs to the ground level. “Everyone’s so happy you’re here, you understand,” she told me and Bane. “I’m sure all the attention must be a little disconcerting, but people are just showing their support. What you’ve achieved is amazing, just amazing, especially you, Miss Verrall.”
Oh great, yet another Margaret fan...
I quickly gave up trying to keep track of where we were. One building followed another, all interconnected and broken up with courtyards and gardens and covered walkways. Finally we entered a block through a door guarded by a very much on-duty Swiss Guard.
“This is a high security block,” Sister Eunice told us. “Persons of especial interest to the EuroGov are quartered here.”
“You shouldn’t need to worry about assassins, in other words,” said Father Mark lightly.
“Nice to know.” I hadn’t even thought of that! From Bane’s souring expression, neither had he.
Reaching a passage broken at regular intervals by doors, each bearing a saint’s name, Sister Eunice unlocked “St. Athanasius” and ushered us in. “I know you three aren’t actually related,” she said, “but Father Mark said we should consider giving you a family suite for now. We know new arrivals often have some trauma to deal with, and it can be a bit tough to transition abruptly to completely separate apartments.”
Right. Naturally, in the Vatican State, single men and women didn’t shack up or share houses the way they did everywhere else—but right now the thought of being separated from Bane and Jon sent stabs of ice-cold panic through my insides. I shot Father Mark a look of wholehearted gratitude. He was right that the three of us did need an exception, just for a while.
The sitting room we entered was furnished with old furniture of a wide assortment of styles, but looked very comfortable compared to the safe house or even François’s cottage, let alone the forest. Sister Eunice pointed to two doors on the right.
“Two bedrooms there.” She pointed to the doors along the left hand wall in turn. “Third bedroom, kitchenette, bathroom. The phone there is internal to the State; you can’t dial out into the EuroBloc. If it rings, it will be for you, so pick it up. This is basically your home for as long as you are here, so treat it as such…” She paused and sighed heavily, for some reason. “Well, I’ll leave you to settle in.”
“Yes, um, what about… rent?” It’d never really occurred to me to wonder what we’d live off. I’d been so focused on getting here.
Sister Eunice just smiled. “You’ll be found work according to your skills. We don’t use money much, here. No ‘rent’ as such; no ‘pay’ as such. You can eat in the canteen or get supplies in the supermarket, just swipe your card. A cart comes around this block wit
h milk and basics every day, as well. You can get clothes and other items in the store, as you require them. If you make excessive use of your card, it will stop working, simple as that.”
“Fair enough.” Bane looked more cheerful. No doubt he’d been worrying about how to provide.
“Father Mark will look after you,” Sister Eunice added, and left us to it.
“I wonder if we could get the EuroGov to cough up your royalties,” speculated Bane, going to look into the bedrooms.
Father Mark snorted. “I wish you luck!”
“Well, they must owe Margo a lot of money.”
“They owe the Vatican huge sums of money too, particularly for the tour bus profits, which they’re supposed to split with us, but there’s a limit to how far they’re prepared to take the whole legal fiction.”
“Or illegal nonfiction in Margo’s case.”
“Ha ha. Well, I’ll leave you to get cleaned up and everything. And yes, someone will phone you if Jon wakes up. Oh, my number…” He crossed to the phone and scribbled on a pad beside it. “I’ll come and get you at lunchtime.”
Bane and I took turns luxuriating in the bath and choosing clothes from a wheeled cabinet that looked like it would be trundled off to await the next destitute refugees as soon as we’d finished with it. I selected a couple of nice skirts to supplement Carla’s jeans, and a few tops, and a sweater as well, since winter was approaching. I hung what I wasn’t wearing in the wardrobe of the bedroom by the kitchen, leaving the two rooms opposite for Bane and Jon.
Sitting on my bed, looking at my clothes, in my wardrobe, in my room, in my apartment, in this oasis of safety in which I could legally remain and work and live for as long as I liked, stupidly, I burst into tears. I lay on the bed and cried until I felt like a wrung out dishcloth. Silly. So silly.
Wiping my eyes and sitting up again, the empty bedside table caught my eye. If only I still had my photographs! My parents were safe with the Underground—please, Lord? But who knew when, if ever, I’d see them again? They might still have photos of Kyle, Uncle Peter, my grandparents and great-grandparents, but my photos were gone...
The Three Most Wanted Page 26
