INCEPTIO (Roma Nova)

by Alison Morton

  Before anybody could stop me, I walked over to Lurio and struck his face with the palm of my hand. ‘What in Hades was the point of that dramatic little pantomime?’

  ‘Temper, temper, Bruna.’ He rubbed his cheek. ‘Well, it got your attention.’

  ‘Right. You like interrupting people’s vacation, rousting them out at five in the morning?’

  ‘Vacation? When you and Major Tough Guy are sneaking around a high-security area pretending to be American tourists? I don’t think so.’

  ‘I suppose you and Sentius here are looking for a venue for your next girls’ outing, are you?’

  It was so still that a mouse scampering across the guest house lobby would have sounded like a truck driving through. I took a deep breath. Conrad laid a hand on my arm and shook his head. I could see him exercising considerable effort to calm himself.

  ‘Very well, Inspector,’ he said to Lurio, ‘let’s ditch the personal. I think we’re both on the same search. Jeffrey Renschman’s escaped, and you and Sentius are trying to catch him before it gets out. You’ve even got the minister lying.’

  ‘You have been a busy boy, Tellus.’ Lurio sat down on the cushioned bench. He shrugged. ‘You’re quite right. He went missing six days ago. His tracker tag was found in his bunk. How the Hades he extracted that, I’d like to know. No matter. If word gets out, we don’t only look careless, but the whole concept of escape-proof is shot. We reckon we’ve got three, four days max left to find him before the shit hits the fan.’

  ‘We found this,’ I chipped in, and held out a plastic baggie with the scrap of yellow cloth. ‘By the stream, around a hundred metres outside the south perimeter fence.’

  He took it, turned it through his fingers and grunted.

  ‘So what do you have?’ Conrad asked.

  ‘Next to nothing. The CCTV doesn’t show anything out of the ordinary. We got zilch from interrogating the rest of his wing. They just smirked at us, the bastards. The only break was yesterday afternoon when a farmer reported lost property. The local station wasn’t interested but the farmer insisted they log it. They’re a new crew after the station was wiped out in the shoot-out a few months ago.’ He paused, glancing at Sentius. ‘Probably not used to dealing with stroppy old yokels. And it wasn’t exactly crime incident of the millennium. The farmer had first noticed the stuff gone three days ago, but hadn’t got around to reporting it.’ He flicked his hand toward his companion. ‘Sentius was making our fond farewells with the duty sergeant when the farmer came in. Turns out it was clothes and boots. So we’ve got a three day-old description.’

  ‘If he’s walked, he’d have got to the bus and railways by now,’ Sentius said. ‘We’ve put out the usual alerts and got the local teams questioning the train, bus and taxi staff.’

  Conrad and I exchanged glances. Renschman would have ensured he left very little impression and covered that with a professional’s expertise.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said to Lurio, breaking the silence that had intruded, ‘how did you know we were here?’ I had to know if we’d been sloppy.

  ‘I could say solid police work, but it was a complete fluke. Sentius recognised you leaving the curia office when he sneaked out to buy a packet of cigarettes.’

  We spent another twenty minutes throwing it around, but knew in our hearts we had nothing to go on.

  Lurio stood up. ‘Not much more we can do here. You’d better leave us to seal the border and try and contain him that way,’ he concluded. ‘It’ll come out, but I suppose we’ll live it down. Eventually.’

  ‘No, it’s not that easy, Lurio,’ Conrad said. ‘He kidnapped Carina and tried to seize her father’s business. He nearly killed her in Washington and in the park last year. He got in with Palicek. He’s a bloody dangerous black operator and a vindictive son of a bitch. Jupiter knows what else he’ll do. He’s likely to ramp it up. Apart from anything else, I’m sure he’ll come after Carina again if you lot can’t find him.’

  ‘Then why don’t we let him?’

  The three men stared at me as if I’d made an indecent suggestion.

  But none of them protested by return.

  After a long thirty seconds, Lurio said, ‘Not the stupidest suggestion you’ve ever made.’

  I was pleased I’d smacked him as hard as I did.

  LXXVII

  Sweating, feet lacerated, Renschman had reached a farm on the outskirts of the town. He crawled into a goat pen and collapsed into sleep. A faint red glow on the eastern horizon provided the only light when he staggered out, filthy, thirsty, feet throbbing. He sluiced down in a cattle trough, washing sweat and goat shit off. He crept up to the farm buildings and opened the door inch by inch. The kitchen was unlit, empty. He made for the refrigerator and seized a carton of milk. It dribbled down his chin and neck as he gulped it down. Grabbing cold cuts, bread and a bottle of water, he stuffed them in a cloth bag from the back of the door. A muffled noise upstairs pulled his glance upwards. He cocked his ear like a wary cat and waited. Nothing. He took a jacket, shirt, trousers and boots from the utility room and left on his trek to the city.

  Watching the girl’s house this time, he stayed well back from the high stone walls. Despite his thinner face with its furrowed scar across his forehead and the new beard, he couldn’t risk the software cutting through to recognise him again.

  The tall gates opened and a red car, Italian, paused in the entrance. The driver looked around, her red-gold hair shining in the early light. She wore a beige uniform shirt, military tabs and some kind of black arm patch with a gold design. He couldn’t see what it was from this distance. She turned right and sped off toward the city centre.

  He’d found her again. No longer a cop, but military. Going off to a cosy little office, pushing a few indents and travel orders around, no doubt. Poring over a computer in the Biblioteca Publica, he found the uniform. Special forces? He checked again. She must be some kind of office weenie. Sure, she’d been the bait for the drug bust, but that hardly needed such high-level specialist skills. Besides, she was a woman. All the same, he needed to be a little careful.

  LXXVIII

  Back at the PGSF, I kept to a skeleton routine and spent a lot more time out in the open. Renschman had to know we were watching for him. I wanted to sit in the park reading my magazine, waiting for him to pounce; it would save us all time and effort. Nothing had happened after a week. Was our strategy too straightforward?

  I was in the university bookshop, choosing a gift for Nonna’s birthday, when a boy came up to me and asked if I was Lieutenant Mitela. I wasn’t in uniform. He handed me an envelope. Remembering the previous letter I’d had from Renschman, I held it by the corner and dropped it into a plastic baggie as a precaution. But even Renschman wouldn’t poison a letter to be carried by a child, would he?

  I crouched down and thanked the boy. ‘Could you help me out here a little more?’

  He looked wary, but nodded. I smiled at him, took his hand and led him over to the service desk. I flashed my gold badge at the startled assistant.

  ‘Back office, please. Now.’ I glanced at the nervous face beside me, the dark eyes darting around. ‘And a glass of milk and some cookies.’

  The clerk had to tap in the entry code twice, he was so nervous. As we waited, I watched the boy demolish the honey cakes and milk. He laid the empty plate on a pile of papers on the desk and looked up at me expectantly.

  A knock on the door. I signalled the child back to hide behind the door. He scurried into the corner and folded himself into a coat hanging on the back. I flicked out my carbon fibre knife and sheltered behind the edge of the slowly opening door.

  ‘Bruna, it’s Sentius. Your alarm went off.’

  ‘Slowly, Sentius.’

  His hand came through the gap, tobacco-stained fingernails holding his ID. I breathed in relief.

  He saw the boy, now scared. Sentius pulled out a paper handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed the child’s eyes. ‘Hey, come on, come and sit with Uncle Man
ius.’

  Did Sentius have children? He knew all the moves. The child sat happily with Sentius and babbled about how he’d been given two gold solidi and a chocolate pastry by a man to deliver the note. He was only about eight or nine, poor kid.

  A patrol car brought us all to Custodes XI Station where I disinfected my and the boy’s hands. My hands in plastic gloves and a mask covering my face, I drew the letter out carefully and unfolded the single sheet. I read the two simple sentences. Horror crept up on me as I took in each word.

  Sentius snatched the note from my nerveless fingers, read it and dived for his commset. I called Conrad. ‘He has Helena.’

  Renschman had ensured I would come to him willingly, happily even. I would give him anything. I would sing and dance, and do handstands for him, for the safe return of my friend and cousin.

  She would be frightened to her core. I fussed and fidgeted around the barracks for the rest of the day. I couldn’t keep my eyes or my mind still. Renschman instructed me to meet him, alone, by the service kiosk behind the palace park theatre at ten. The same place as before. If he’d tied her up like I’d been, she’d freeze. The memory washed through me. Bastard. He wouldn’t have killed her already. No. I couldn’t let myself believe that.

  A PGSF hostage psychologist briefed me on what to expect, how to act, what to say. My Active Response Team – Flavius, Paula, Livius and Atria – plus Daniel had deployed already to the park, well hidden, ready to act. I made it clear that, the minute Helena was safe, their prime target was Renschman. I made a will, addressed to the censor’s office as well as a copy for Nonna.

  Conrad and I went back to my room. A while later, I pulled myself away from him, got up out of the bed, showered and made myself a drink. I wept quietly as I sat watching him sleep. He woke. I smiled at him. I glanced at my watch. An hour to go.

  I took some high-energy tabs and a cup of the malt and ginger drink as we waited. Conrad would drive me to the park gate.

  The moon was full and every leaf, branch and stone was outlined in sharp silver light. I wore warm walking pants, roll top with shirt underneath and fleece, with reinforced-grip sneakers on my feet. As I walked through the park gate and along the path, I was calm and prepared. Maybe it was my time.

  His silhouette emerged from behind the stone theatre semi-circle when I was around twenty metres away.

  ‘Stop.’

  His breath plumed out in the chill temperature.

  ‘Three-sixty turn, arms stretched out.’

  I complied.

  ‘Advance. Slowly.’

  I stopped five metres from him. He had a Glock semi-automatic tucked in his waistband.

  ‘Did I tell you to stop?’

  ‘I need to see my cousin.’

  ‘If you disobey me, you’re going to make me kill her.’

  ‘If you kill her then you lose me.’

  He half-turned and pulled a female figure into view, hands behind her. It looked like Helena.

  ‘Carina. Don’t—’

  He slapped her, hard. The high pitch of the staccato contact on her skin echoed in the clear night, followed by her cry and sobbing.

  I compressed the rising red flood back down.

  ‘Send her forward, Renschman. I need to see her properly and check she’s unhurt.’

  He pulled her round in a circle. Her right ankle was tied with a short rope to the lamp post by the theatre wall, so she couldn’t run. Crap.

  ‘She’s all there. You come here and she can go on her way.’

  ‘No, you’ll have us both.’

  He stooped and picked up a coil of rope, looped one end and threw the rest at me.

  ‘Guess I’ll have to reel you in. Now you do exactly as I tell you or I’ll slit her throat from ear to ear, and you can watch her bleed to death. That image will haunt you for the rest of your life.’

  He held a knife against her throat and nicked her skin enough to release a dribble of blood along the length of the cut.

  I swallowed hard and just about resisted the urge to close my eyes.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Make a nice strong double loop, with slip knots. No cheating now. Then you’re going to slide your wrists in and pull tight. I don’t want you running off before we’ve finished.’

  Shit.

  ‘Not until you cut her loose. She has to walk free the minute I put my hand through the loops.’

  ‘Dear me, don’t you trust me, Miss Brown?’

  He had totally lost it. He was completely crazy.

  ‘No. Now let her go.’

  I made the slip loops. I stared at them as if they were hangman’s nooses. I put my left wrist in and tightened it. I raised it, rope falling in a slim line so he could see. He bent and cut Helena’s tether and pushed her forward as I slipped in my right wrist and held both up. She came up beside me.

  ‘Carina,’ she whispered.

  I smiled at her and said, ‘Run like Hades.’ I watched her stumble toward the gate and closed my eyes in relief. He jerked the rope and I stumbled and fell. He dragged me across the gap and stood over me.

  ‘Now we can finish our conversation.’

  LXXIX

  He pulled me to my feet and secured the rope to a metal loop cemented into the back wall of the theatre. My wrists rested at the back of my waist.

  ‘Wire?’

  The hostage specialist had instructed me not to make any smart-ass remarks. She said I mustn’t stir him up.

  So I nodded and looked down at the ground as he pulled the wireless mesh out from under my roll top. He forced my mouth open, searching for a tooth mic. After he yanked both my ears and found nothing, he grunted, apparently satisfied. He frisked me thoroughly, professionally.

  ‘Nice knife. I think I’ll keep that.’ He slashed it through the air, leaned in and drew it across my jaw and neck. The sharp sting surprised me. I gasped. Blood trickled down my neck, inside my sweater, over my collarbone.

  He pulled a wood crate out of the kiosk and sat on it. He fished a small device with a screen out of a black rucksack and set it up. Next, he unfolded a small collapsed cup on the top, which started rotating when he switched the device on and inserted a wireless earpiece into his right ear.

  ‘I’ll be able to detect if any of your friends are foolish enough to think of rescuing you. I’ll be very disappointed if they do because I’ll have to shoot you, which will be far too quick a death. I have something much more interesting in mind for you. ‘

  I couldn’t help glancing at the listening device. It looked like something out of toy town compared with our detection field projectors.

  ‘Ah, you’re wondering where a convicted prisoner could lay his hands on this kind of technology.’ He smiled. ‘Your left-luggage facilities here are not time-limited. You never know when you might need a little stash of equipment in a foreign environment. What a wonderful country.’

  My neck and jaw began to throb. I stretched my fingers a centimetre at a time up to the cuff of my right shirt sleeve, easing the edge flap away to release a tiny titanium cutter with lethally sharp teeth. But it wasn’t the fastest technique ever.

  ‘But we’ve come to the end game now.’

  His urbane mask dissolved. His eyes flared like some feral creature. The corners of his mouth tightened downwards as his expression solidified into something harsher and destructive.

  ‘You don’t have a clue, do you? You don’t know about your hero father and his sordid little past, do you?’

  What in Hades was he talking about?

  ‘No. You don’t. Maybe I would have been a little kinder if you’d remained an innocent. But you’ve caused me so much trouble all by yourself, I’m going to enjoy destroying you for your own sake.’

  I started sawing, shifting my weight from foot to foot to mask my movements.

  He leaned back, totally relaxed, as if he were in an armchair at some country club relating his last fishing trip. He drew out a cigarette from a packet in his
shirt pocket, lit it and inhaled deeply.

  ‘William Brown, the Somalia Dawn hero, was married before he met your crazy mother. He married Donna Renschman.’ He looked into the distance. ‘My mother. He waited until she was six months pregnant. Nice story, huh?’

  I hadn’t lost enough blood to be delirious, so I must have been hearing right.

  ‘He divorced her when I was six. I left the project we were forced to live in when I was seventeen and went into the military. I heard my father had remarried – some European woman. Your mother. But he didn’t want to know me when I called one day.’

  My father would never have rejected his child like that. Would he? This shocking thought must have passed across my face.

  Renschman looked at me and snorted. ‘Oh, he was truly polite with his nice middle-class manners, but he closed me out. I was just sixteen. He gave me sixty-three dollars. Sixty-three dollars. Christ.’

  His eyes were boiling now, hard and grey. I knew what it was to be poor and unloved at sixteen. But I hadn’t become a vicious, amoral killer.

  ‘I stood on the outside step in the teeming rain. I beat on the door for ten whole minutes. Nobody answered.’ He spoke to the ground, scattering gravel with the tip of his foot. ‘I heard how rich he had become. I promised myself I would have some of that. And I would have had all of it, if you’d died when you should have.’

  He assessed me with a now-calm but granite-hard expression. ‘I can still do that now. An American court would give me Brown Industries.’ He paused. ‘Once you’re dead.’

  He was insane. No possible doubt.

  I swallowed. Juno, my neck hurt. ‘You don’t have to kill me, Jeffrey. I’ll sign it over to you.’

  ‘Too late, far too late, Karen.’

  He stood up and came toward me with the stub of his cigarette. I smelled the acrid smoke. The heat touched my skin. I braced myself for the burn, the pain. He grazed the lobe of my ear, paused and ground it out on the wall. I closed my eyes, trying to block out the smell of my singed flesh.