Perfiditas

by Alison Morton

  ‘Enough!’ I shouted in my best parade ground voice.

  They looked up in surprise at the spoilsport. Trebatia made for the edge immediately, pulled herself out and stood at my side, dripping.

  ‘Sorry, ma’am.’

  ‘No problem, Trebatia. You have fifteen minutes to go get dressed and grab some food. We have a situation.’

  I turned my angry attention to my rampant family. ‘Right, clean this pool up. I want it empty of bodies in one minute, trash removed, the inflatables down and drying, and all this crap on the poolside gone in ten.’

  They looked at me open-mouthed.

  ‘Starting now.’

  One or two smiles of bravado, but most made their way to steps or edges. Except for two.

  ‘If I have to come in and throw you and your brother out myself, Crispus Mitelus, you’ll be spending an uncomfortable few hours in the city emergency room.’

  There was a feeble attempt at eye-staring from the two of them, but they surrendered after the minute was up. Maybe seeing me in my uniform they remembered what I did for a living. I stood there for five minutes, arms crossed, foot tapping now and again. I caught a few pulled faces as they walked past. When I pretended to look over imaginary glasses at them like Nonna did, it was remarkably effective: some of them actually scuttled out instead of walking. With the pump running at full, it would be clean and crystal clear again by the evening. Unlike the rest of my life.

  Upstairs, Junia and Macro were running a buffet service for the massed hordes – there must have been nearly a hundred of them. Gods! Where had they all slept? I dove between two cousins, startling them, and grabbed a bacon roll – I was starving. Gulping down a mug of coffee, I scanned the room and spotted Trebatia, back in her uniform, and beckoned her over.

  ‘Have you had something to eat in this madhouse?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, ma’am. I’m sorry if I was negligent – they’re such a fun crowd. I didn’t know families could be like that.’ She sounded wistful. ‘Well, a bit wild, I suppose.’ She glanced at me.

  ‘Apology accepted. I’m sorry to have curtailed your fun, but we have to go back in.’

  ‘You have the floor.’

  Conrad’s voice was neutral, but his eyes were still full of anger. I shuffled to my feet and described my findings to the others around the table. The banks of computers in the strategy room hummed, but the only screen alive was the situation board.

  ‘This is disappointing, of course,’ Somna said. ‘To be fair to Captain Mitela, there wasn’t a hint of this during all the interrogations. I have to conclude that none of the conspirators apart from Petronax and Superbus knew about this connection.’ She fixed her gaze on Conrad. ‘Obviously, Petronax is dead but, if you authorise it, Legate, we can use a chemical stimulant on Superbus to encourage him.’

  Conrad tapped his fingers on the table, all four fingers moving together like a leaf-catcher.

  ‘What’s wrong with raiding the house and terminating this criminal?’ said Daniel. He looked down his nose out of half-closed eyes and smirked at me.

  I folded my arms across my chest to stop myself marching over and slapping it off his face.

  ‘Legalities,’ said the adjutant. ‘We don’t have any proof. Look at it: we have four words from Superbus after a stressful interview carried out without a lawyer present.’

  ‘It was a perfectly legal procedure,’ I objected.

  Lucius gave me such a cynical look. ‘Sure, the Families’ Code interview is fine as an admission of guilt for the conspiracy. I don’t see any argument with that, but in respect of this new development, Superbus made his remark after the formal interview was concluded, so it doesn’t count. Valeria’s conversation with you is circumstantial. If we can nail that down, it’s enough to send the scarabs in.’

  ‘For Mars’ sake, is that the best we can do? The scarabs!’ Daniel thumped the table with the flat of his hand.

  Lucius shrugged.

  ‘Sepunia?’

  ‘I’ve started a search on this Cassia.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ll have some results for you within an hour or two.’

  ‘Very well,’ Conrad said. ‘Captain Mitela will go with you and put el-fits together. Adjutant, send somebody to fetch Valeria Mitela in and another guard to stay with her children. I want everybody to have reread the operational reports when we reconvene in three hours. Dismissed.’

  ‘Here, drink this.’

  I saw Sepunia’s hand through the crook of my elbow. I lifted my head off my hands and gave her a weak smile as the arabica smell wafted towards me.

  ‘Lifesaver. Thanks.’

  ‘You must be feeling quite depressed at the moment. Hellish, probably.’ She laid her hand on my upper arm and pressed lightly. ‘It’ll work out – don’t worry.’

  I’d spent two hours compiling el-fits of Cassia and Apollodorus. Sepunia had dredged all her sources and was only waiting for the Censor’s office to come back. They worked at their own pace. Their investigators’ branch was notoriously close.

  One of Sepunia’s staffers came in, glanced at me, then spoke to his chief.

  ‘Message from Lieutenant Longina in IS, ma’am. Valeria Mitela is here and requests support from the head of her family.’ He coughed and glanced again at me.

  ‘We’re finished here until the tax people deign to reply, so Captain Mitela is released.’

  Longina greeted me and took me along to Interview 1, the “friendly” interview room where I’d questioned Aidan several weeks ago. It seemed like several years ago now. Valeria was perched on the edge of a plain green couch, opposite Porteus and Somna. She looked very nervous, one hand playing with the fingers of the other. A mug of brown liquid and plate of untouched cookies were on the coffee table in front of her. She looked up as we entered, and jumped up as she recognised me. She clung to me as we exchanged kisses.

  ‘Carina—’ Her hand fluttered.

  ‘I know. I’m here now. It’s okay.’ I nodded at Somna and Porteus and pulled Valeria back onto the couch. ‘Have they explained what’s happening? Do you understand why you’re here?’

  She nodded. ‘I want to help, of course, but I don’t know how.’ Poor woman. She was a food technologist. She probably didn’t even have a parking fine on her record.

  ‘Well, I can’t ask you anything during the interview, but I can explain things and protect your interests and rights. When they ask you a question, just answer it straightforwardly. Take your time. If you think of anything afterward, don’t worry. Just say it, even if it’s trivial.’ I smiled at her. ‘Or even sounds stupid.’ I looked at Somna. ‘Have you begun yet, Colonel?’

  ‘Only to take ID details.’

  ‘Play it back, please.’

  She was right, but I wanted to be sure.

  Valeria repeated what she’d told me, pretty much word for word. She was a scientist and precise. By the end, she was calmer, and her voice had steadied. Somna thanked her formally and asked me to take Valeria upstairs to do the el-fit. I left her working at it with one of Sepunia’s experts.

  Sepunia looked up as I returned to her office. She didn’t say anything but handed me three printouts with the Censor’s seal. I read them through in silence and handed them back. I took several deep breaths before I spoke.

  ‘I didn’t like her then and I still don’t. Have these people never heard of the joint watch protocols?’

  Sepunia’s desktop peeped. Report meeting in ten minutes. I took a moment to go see how Valeria was doing. I dropped my hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I’ve done my best, Carina,’ she said. Her eyes looked strained, the result of staring intently at a screen without a break.

  It was good. Too good.

  I arrived at the strategy room a few minutes early. Fausta was tapping on the transparent board setting it up to enter data as the meeting progressed. I went over to her, but didn’t have time to say anything before the door opened. For once in his life, Daniel arrived early.

  ‘Huh
! Trust the girl blunder to be first here. Trying to make up for your massive error of judgement?’

  ‘This is not an appropriate time for personal remarks,’ I said, fixing him with a solid stare.

  ‘Well, your mistake was personal as well as gross.’

  Warmth flushed up my neck into my face despite all my efforts to calm it by breathing deeply and slowly. I took my place at the table. He sat opposite and grinned at my discomfort. How could he have turned like this? Life was full of disappointments, and he was one of them. Sepunia was next and sat by me, pushing some printouts at me. We stood as Conrad, Lucius and Somna appeared. Conrad looked grim and began without preliminaries.

  ‘There is no doubt Apollodorus was Superbus’s visitor that night.’ He glanced at me. ‘I can personally confirm both el-fits are accurate.’ He held his hand up at the murmuring. ‘Before we jump in heavy-booted, we need to develop our process.’ He nodded to Fausta who was hovering ready, her fingers at the starting point.

  ‘Sepunia, please.’

  ‘As the legate says, we have confirmed IDs on Apollodorus and Cassia. I was considerably taken aback by the Censor’s office admission that Cassia was a long-term undercover investigator. We had no idea. They should, of course, have advised us via the joint watch protocols.’ She looked down at her el-pad. ‘I strongly recommend a liaison meeting without delay.’

  ‘Stupid bastards,’ said Lucius. ‘What did you make of her, Carina?’

  I glanced at him. He smiled like he still wanted to know me.

  ‘Cold and heartless. And snotty. I would hate to be a subject of her investigation. I had very little to do with her, to be honest.’

  ‘Sounds like a normal investigator, then.’

  But I hadn’t seen past her outward manner. I studied the table. How could I have been so blind?

  ‘Well, according to their report,’ Sepunia added, ‘Cassia is one of their top investigators. She didn’t find any trace of evasion or misconduct. Everything had been filed, submitted or recorded right up to last month by their administrator.’

  I smiled to myself. Hermina was too efficient, and too proud, to make any mistake there.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Daniel asked, frowning at me. ‘You’re a bit too pleased she found nothing. Didn’t want to erode your share of the profits, eh?’

  ‘Daniel,’ said Lucius.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  Sepunia coughed. ‘I can’t find any match for Apollodorus. His image is not on the PopBase, there is no record of his presence under his name. No DNA, no fingerprints, no optical scan, voiceprint, health record. Nothing. So I assumed he was operating under an alias. Using the el-fits and the information from Carina’s report about the French immigrant side of his family and the mother coming from Castra Lucilla, I ran a probability analysis and got nowhere.’ She grimaced. ‘Well, 27.2% which is statistically equivalent to nil.’

  ‘But that’s well below the minimum of 40%,’ Conrad said.

  ‘Indeed. My conclusion is that PopBase has been, er, amended by a highly skilled hacker.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She looked back at Conrad with her steady green gaze. ‘Yes.’

  Nobody could speak. Apart from our own system, PopBase was the most protected digital asset in the Imperium. The only sound was Fausta’s long lacquered fingernails scratching as she updated the situation board. I glanced over at her, more to reassure her than anything. She stared back, pink blotches on her cheeks, and I knew.

  Crap.

  ‘Very well,’ Conrad said, his tone clipped. ‘We send the DJ scarabs in to arrest Apollodorus. Light back-up on standby, please, Daniel. We can hold him for questioning, take some biological data and find out who he really is.’ A red border surrounded Apollodorus’s image in the centre of the board. The interconnecting lines sprang into life, connecting to me and Flavius. Once you’d said or thought something, it seemed obvious afterwards. The truth glared out at me.

  ‘Even if it proves innocent, which I doubt, we can’t have people like him unrecorded. Sepunia, liaise with Interior about their leak in PopBase. Somna, leave Superbus where he is. I’ll speak to him myself. Dismissed.’

  I stood up with the others, pushed my chair up to the table. I felt remote from the whole surreal meeting. Strange, nobody had worried about Apollodorus before – a pragmatic acceptance that there were people in Roma Nova who weren’t pure and innocent. We owed a huge debt to Apollodorus. Maybe Conrad had forgotten he owed his life to him.

  ‘Carina. A moment.’

  Conrad’s voice was as remote as I felt.

  We watched the others file out. Fausta switched the backlights off, logged out and went to follow. As she passed by me, I stopped her with my hand on her arm. She glanced up at my face then dropped her gaze as quickly.

  ‘Well done. We’ll talk in the morning.’

  Her face was tight, but she nodded. When she’d closed the door, Conrad waved his hand towards the table.

  ‘Sit down.’

  He sat beside me, but tilted his chair at an angle.

  ‘I didn’t want to do this in front of the others, especially bloody Daniel. Jupiter, if Lucius hadn’t got there before me, I’d have taken him out and thumped him.’ He looked over at the blank strategy board. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re off the case. It’s standard procedure. I don’t have a choice.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No, and you know it.’

  The way he looked at me – through me – I knew the delicate personal links we’d been rebuilding had been severed in one cut. I suppose I was lucky I wasn’t being thrown out.

  He shot a look at me then studied the table. His mouth was drawn in a tight grim line. Crap, there was more.

  ‘On a personal level, you’re going to have to fight a full disciplinary investigation, so it’s not in your interest to stay involved.’

  More damned standard procedure.

  He stretched his hand out, but withdrew it before he touched mine. He lowered his voice. ‘I tried to deflect it, but I couldn’t argue her out of it – the senior legate has insisted you and Flavius are suspended with immediate effect and confined to barracks.’

  XXXVI

  Stripped of the right to wear my uniform, I pulled on my oldest jeans and plainest tee the next morning. I reported to Lucius’s office in the admin block and surrendered my badge. He handed me a white plastic card with an embedded optical chip.

  ‘You’ll be able to access most of the building, but not the working areas, including the guard zone. Don’t lose it, or a security detail will be on you within minutes it splits from your biosignature. Ditto if you talk to Flavius. No Internet, no phone calls out.’

  The early morning headache started throbbing harder. I’d never been white-carded. Now my colleagues would drift away, little by little, conversations about work – the thing that bound us together – would stop when I was near. Pity, embarrassment, even fear of contamination.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with myself?’

  ‘Keep out of everybody’s way, mainly.’ He leaned back. ‘Start preparing your hearing. You can access the library.’ He glanced up at me. His eyes narrowed as if giving me a message. ‘It’s neutral ground.’

  Word hadn’t got around in the mess hall, so it was no different from a normal day, except that when Flavius came in, he spotted me and instantly went back out. The proximity alarm was five metres so I hoped it was only him being careful. In the library, I logged on to my internal account and tried not to include “error of judgement” too many times in my draft defence statement.

  But had it been an error? If the circumstantial evidence did lead to nailing the case against Apollodorus, the worst was that I’d been blindsided by him. And Cassia. I had no control over their movements. Obviously, I’d tried to hack into Cassia’s account, but she’d locked it down. I’d managed to physically search her office once. Not easy when she was glued to her desk most of the time. But I couldn’t find
anything out of place, let alone incriminating. Although Apollo sometimes worked in his study, the tablinum, he most often sat in a recess in the atrium. I hadn’t known about his private retreat until after the operation. I didn’t deserve to be under this semi-ostracism. I wasn’t in a cell, but I might as well have been. Just a larger one, with people in it.

  In the ancients section in the library, I searched for examples of generals who’d been duped or made an error of judgement yet were still considered “great”. Not that I considered myself in any way great, but I’d be able to show that even the best made mistakes. I was searching through Caesar’s Gallic Wars and pulled out a heavy, purple, leather-backed volume, frayed and scratched on the spine and corners. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw Fausta’s anxious eyes in the space.

  ‘Juno!’ I hissed at her. ‘Don’t do that. What do you want?’

  She glanced to her right, but we were deep in a recess, practically invisible.

  ‘Are you going to report it, ma’am?’ she whispered.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I scratched the back of my neck. ‘Do you remember any of the, er, original data?’

  ‘No, he told me to access Po—, the program I mean, asked me to show him how to change it and seal the system. Then told me to leave the room. I tried to go back in out of curiosity, but the program had locked that entry. I couldn’t bust it.’ She shrugged. ‘I guessed I was safer not knowing.’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  She stared at me, her face miserable. She grabbed a book off the shelf, pretended to look at it. Even from where I was, I could see she was holding it upside down. She closed it and went to put it back, but her hands were trembling so much they let it slip off the shelf. The loud smack on the wood floor brought the librarian around to investigate. I darted along the row and hid at the far end. Fausta was apologising like she’d been caught stealing the book instead of dropping it. Eventually, the librarian went back to his desk.