Perfiditas (3 page)

‘What made you think of using the cards?’

‘Gut feeling. If you get it wrong, the other guy just thinks you’re crazy but, in this case, it was a hundred per cent right. He’s under constraint. That’s obvious. He wants help, but can’t ask for it openly.’

‘Why don’t you hand it over to the
custodes
? They’re perfectly capable of sorting it out.’ He shrugged.

‘I feel responsible. He’s one of my informants, and he’s given me some good stuff in the past. I can’t drop him.’ I glanced at Conrad. ‘I won’t use official hours.’

He waved his hand, dismissing my offer.

‘I have to talk with Aidan away from his minders. He nodded at the
Work
card, so I guess it means a client meeting at his office, minders or not.’

IV

“Amorak” was still on my mind at breakfast next morning. I mooched around silently, helping myself to food from the side, nearly putting eggs on the same plate as my fruit. I studied the caramel patch from the drops of coffee I’d spilled on the linen tablecloth as it seeped into the fibres.

‘Something we said?’ asked Daniel.

He’d lived with us since Conrad had sponsored his formal transfer to the PGSF. He occasionally visited his family in the Near East, but he was so firmly entrenched into Roma Nova life I think he forgot them sometimes.

‘Sorry, something on my mind and I know I should know it.’ I sat down beside him. ‘Daniel, what does “amorak” mean to you?’

‘You mean like anorak, a coat, or anorak, a nerd?’

‘I don’t think so. Aidan said “Decima Amorak” all in one, like it was a name. Decima is tenth, but amorak isn’t a Latin word.’

‘Put it into Quaero Vox then,’ Conrad said without looking up from his paperwork.

I bit my lip. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

I tapped on my el-pad lying at the side of my place. We were early to breakfast and my grandmother wasn’t down. She forbade anything but eating and talking at the table. I sighed. She was right: it
was
bad manners fiddling with work stuff at mealtimes, but we lived in the real world.

Daniel made a face at me as I spoke into the mic. I tried a second time, avoiding his eyes. The two words together gave a “Not found”, but the second word alone gave the perfect result.

‘Well?’ said Daniel.

I panned my smile between him and Conrad. ‘Aidan is third generation Irish, isn’t he?’

Daniel did an impatient twirling thing with his hand.

‘Decima obviously refers to the tenth hour but, in Gaelic, “amárach” means tomorrow.’

Coffee in hand, I plunked myself down at my desk in the main office at just gone seven thirty and ploughed through messages. After reducing them to half, I glanced at my watch. Aidan should have arrived around eight so I dialled.

‘Good morning.’ I said in an older, accented voice, ‘is that Hirenses Associates? I have an appointment around ten o’clock this morning. Could you just check, please, dear?’ Then I pretended I was talking to somebody else at my end so she couldn’t ask my name.

‘Caterina Mac—,’ she stumbled, ‘Macatari?’.

‘Hallo, yes, sorry. That would be MacCarthy, dear,’ I corrected. ‘Irish name, you know, like dear Aidan.’

Daniel mimed a vomiting gesture beside me while I listened to the receptionist’s confirmation. I looked away, ignoring him, and focused on the far wall.

‘Thank you, dear, and goodbye now, until later.’

‘Gods! Is that the best Irish accent you can do, Carina? It was pathetic!’

‘Oh, shut up and go play soldiers!’

He grinned, gave my plait a gentle tug and took off.

I had a while before the appointment, so I gave my team their orders for the day. Getting the strategy room equipped meant going up to bat with the quaestor. I groaned inwardly. Anybody responsible for issuing equipment and resources was mean with them, but the quaestor used the cunning of Mercury to guard his stores. I’d give the first shot to Drusus, a young logics graduate; not the most aggressive or even competent soldier, but the owner of a scissor-like brain. His team buddy, Fausta, had a mixed past as a black hat hacker, but only I knew that. When she’d realised she could play with the entire national encrypted security system, she’d reformed on the flip of a gold
solidus
.

I tasked them with listing and costing. Fausta belonged anonymously to several strategy gaming groups on the web so had the expertise to find what we needed. Kid-in-a-candy-store syndrome might break out, though. Drusus would pour a cold draught of realism on her enthusiasm and I would end up with a balanced requisition list.

In the field room, I selected clothes and accessories, packed them and made for the south concealed exit.

‘Going somewhere interesting, Captain?’ the guard called out as I headed for the great outdoors. I was dressed in my preppy shopping outfit, complete with designer carrier bag.

‘Yah, people to see, lunch to do.’

He smiled and gave me a quick salute.

I entered the largest department store in the Macellum quarter from the eastern street side, changed in the restroom upstairs, and rolled up my preppy kit into a plastic holdall of the type used by more mature citizens. Back on street level, I exited through a cloud of perfume in the beauty department into a large outdoor square.

Colonnades built in the sixteenth century provided shelter, encouraging shoppers to linger in front of faceless models wearing twenty-first century suits, weekend casuals and impossibly elegant gowns, all encapsulated in a fantasy world behind glass. The pillars supporting the colonnade were perfect body-width for watching people. Unfortunately, perfect also for the bad guys to loiter behind.

The large plate-glass windows on the south side reflected my disguise as a middle-aged woman dressed in a beige pleated skirt, green corduroy jacket and sensible shoes. The shoe inserts gave me a genuinely painful hobble. The worn stone sidewalk wasn’t helping. I reached the office of Hirenses Associates, took a deep breath to steady myself and went up to the first floor.

‘Good morning, dear,’ I said as I approached the receptionist. He wore that gawky, unfinished look of late adolescence, so no more than eighteen, I guessed. ‘I’m Catherine MacCarthy. I’ve come to see Aidan.’ I gave him an anxious smile over the top of my spectacles and hovered in front of the reception counter.

‘Oh, yes. He’s nearly ready. Please take a seat.’

I scanned the small room. The leather couch offered a soft landing, but I chose a plain upright chair. Parallel windows let in light through bamboo-slatted blinds. Landscape prints, mostly mountain scenes, hung on all four walls. Even down to the lifestyle magazines overflowing over the edge of the little table, everything looked as menacing as a packet of vanilla cookies.

‘Have you been long with Aidan?’ I asked. ‘He must be a lovely man to work for.’

He glanced up, looked across to Aidan’s door, then back to me. Nervous rather than wary.

‘His auntie, my cousin,’ I continued, ‘said I should look him up if I became a bit lost when I moved here. Is he very busy?’

‘He’s occupied with a special client now, but I’m sure he was happy to fit you in.’ The boy looked flustered, seeming not to know what to do with his eyes. He looked down again, his fingers tapping on the desk, not his keyboard.

The inner door opened, and a compact, muscular man emerged and crossed to the reception counter. He knocked the pen off with the edge of his jacket cuff, glanced down at it, but ignored it. When the boy said a few words to him, the man tilted his head up and looked down his nose at him. His deliberate movements and fixed gaze carried an intensity which to me radiated menace, but the boy didn’t react in any way. I heard him make another appointment for the afternoon, a double. Was that usual? Aidan worked at Mossia’s gym every afternoon as well as some evenings.

I coughed and the man’s head whipped around. He focused his pale-brown, almost bleached, eyes like lasers on my face. I dropped my gaze, clutched the holdall on my lap and shrank back as a normal person would. Through my lashes, I saw him assessing me. A second later, he dismissed me, turned and left.

I released my breath, with a little ‘Oh’.

‘Are you all right?’ the boy asked.

‘He was a bit scary, don’t you think? Why did he look at me like that?’

‘I’m sure everything’s fine. Perhaps Martinus Caeco can be a little abrupt but he’s a very good client.’ Suddenly, the expression on his face stiffened. He stopped speaking, and a faint red tinge spread over his cheeks. His head went down, and he fiddled with the appointments screen.

When I called under two hours ago, the receptionist had been female. When had this kid taken over? He clearly wasn’t a trained receptionist. And he hadn’t answered my earlier question about how long he had worked with Aidan.

‘Catherine! Welcome.’

Aidan came out of his inner office, walked up to me and kissed my cheek. I whispered in English. ‘Your Auntie Marie’s cousin.’

‘How are you getting on? Settling in?’ he replied, his English a weird combination of Irish and Latin accents. ‘How is Auntie Marie? I owe her an email, you know.’

His skin had lost the grey look, but was still pale. His smile was wide and fresh. But it didn’t reach his dark eyes. He drew me into his office and shut the door behind us. The smile vanished as his face crumpled. We sat down in two of the leather easy chairs clustered around a small oak table set off with a vase of tiny, perfect white roses. Looking straight at him, I started prattling, showing him a letter, supposedly from Auntie Marie but on which was written
Camera – blink once, listening bug – blink twice
.

He blinked twice.

‘I know I came to see you about feeling homesick, Aidan, but can you help me first with my new mobile phone while I’m here? It’s quite confusing, and I can’t switch it over to English. You have no idea how useless you feel when you’re old.’

‘Please don’t worry, Catherine, or feel embarrassed. I’ll sort it out.’ He looked at me as if I was insane.

‘Here it is then.’ I laid a cellphone on the table, then a small cloth-covered shape. I moved the roses away, opened the shape to reveal a crystalline pyramid and placed it exactly between us.

‘Okay, Aidan,’ I reverted to Latin, ‘this pyramid device confuses sound waves. We probably have five to ten minutes before laughing boy out there comes in with a coffee, urgent message or whatever. Any way of shaking them off so we can talk more?’

‘No.’

‘Okay. So what’s all this about?’

He stared at me, saying nothing. I saw he was finding it difficult to process the difference between what he was seeing and what he was hearing.

I touched his hand. ‘C’mon, Aidan. Talk.’

He swallowed. ‘Gods, where do I start? In short, I got into debt gambling. Poker.’

My turn to stare at him. I only hoped my mouth hadn’t fallen open. Aidan was known for his uncanny luck with cards. Some said he used a complex system, cheated or could read minds.

‘They must have some really sophisticated system – I couldn’t see it. They gave me a week to pay. Three days later, they said I could cancel the debt if I found out some information for them from inside the PGSF. Somehow they knew I had a number of clients who were scarabs or military, but I told them I didn’t know their real names or what unit they were in.’

True, we all used nicknames at the gym; Aidan only knew me as Bruna, also my nickname inside the PGSF. With a membership ranging from the prominent and powerful to anybody who could pay the fees, Mossia insisted on aliases for all members. If you recognised somebody, you had to act as if you didn’t know them. Weird, but that was the price of membership.

‘If I didn’t come up with it,’ he continued, ‘they said they’d kill somebody I knew and make sure I was blamed. Right now, one of my clients is in hospital with a broken leg and collarbone from a car accident. As a demonstration, they said.’ His body didn’t move a muscle, but from the agony in his eyes he was burning up inside.

‘So who did you target?’

‘You and your friends looked like good prospects. I worked out you had to be something. Too bright – and bossy – to be an ordinary foot soldier. I didn’t know whether to tell you the lot, or do what these thugs wanted me to, but when they started minding me twenty-four seven, I was trapped. I had to get somebody’s attention – I was desperate. I wrote that letter to Mossia, put the token in and posted it in among the bills. I knew it would make her explode. I hoped enough to try and find you.’

‘But who did you target specifically?’

‘Tacita.’

Tacita? Shit.

A knock at the door. The next second, the handle moved and the door started to open. I grabbed the pyramid, stuffed it in my pocket and quickly replaced the perfect roses in the centre of the perfect table.

I picked up the cell and smiled at Aidan. ‘Thank you so much, dear, for stopping that awful whine. You have no idea, it was driving me mad. Is there any chance I could have a glass of water now?’

‘Of course, Catherine.’ He smiled. ‘Yes, what is it, Sextus? You know I’m with a client.’

‘Of course, Aidan Hirenses, I apologise for interrupting you, but there is an urgent call from your afternoon appointment. He insists on speaking to you now.’

‘Well, I’m not finished with my client. I’ll have to call him back.’ Aidan was childishly defiant. So was this Sextus one of the minders? If so, Aidan couldn’t afford to rile them.

‘Don’t worry, dear,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait outside while you take your call; then we can finish afterwards. You must look after your important clients. Your Uncle Brian always said so. And he was forty-five years in business! Your young man can find me a drink while I’m waiting.’

Sextus looked more than annoyed, but he was in a corner with no escape. In the reception area, he stomped over to the water machine.

Five minutes later, Aidan emerged, paler and shaken. He gave me a quick, nervous smile. ‘Catherine, I’m so sorry, but we’ll have to finish for today. Let me book you in for tomorrow.’ With his back to Sextus, he gave me a pleading look.

‘We’re rather busy tomorrow, sir,’ said Mr Helpful.

Aidan pulled the screen round so he could see for himself. ‘Does eleven o’clock tomorrow morning suit you, Catherine?’

‘Well, that would be wonderful, if you’re sure that’s convenient.’

‘It is. Let me see you to the door. That’s the least I can do.’

Sextus rose and tried to intervene, but Aidan was already walking me downstairs. He paused in the tiny lobby before the street door, breathed ‘Thanks’ and pressed my hand. He glanced at the door, then back up the flight of stairs. Sextus was standing at the top, arms crossed like a parent when a child comes in past midnight. Aidan’s face closed, his shoulders dropped, and he dragged himself back up the stairs.

But Tacita?

Tacita – silent, or clever – was her nickname. In true life, she was Major Marcella Aburia. We’d recently gotten to know each other; I’d introduced her to my battle practice group at Mossia’s gym. Although not a natural action woman, she’d surprised herself, and me, by enjoying it. At least, that’s how I’d interpreted her huge grin and bright eyes at the end of the session despite her gasps to recapture her breath.