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  Somna continued, ‘The Corneliae had official custody – we found the court papers. The mother married some years ago and made a financial settlement on Sextus, but he hasn’t touched a solidus of it. He refuses to see his mother. He has an original view on the role of women and men.’ Somna paused and looked up from her report. She didn’t meet Conrad’s eyes, but glanced away for a few moments and scratched the back of her neck with her index finger. I’d never seen her betray a moment of unease like that. She rubbed the top sheet of paper between her fingers.

  ‘In what respect?’ Conrad prompted.

  ‘He is a patriarchalist.’

  Sepunia gasped. I heard a sharp crack. Conrad’s hand was holding the remnants of a stylus. He stared at Somna with an intensity that should have incinerated a block of Aquae Caesaris granite, a tense, frozen expression on his face despite the angry flush. Somna’s grey gaze flickered back at him, but she refused to give way. Daniel stared at Conrad but said nothing. Muted vehicle noises from outside and a footfall outside Somna’s door gave us some kind of anchor in the real world.

  Conrad cleared his throat. ‘Is this a personal opinion or do you think Caeco shares it?’

  ‘At this stage, we don’t know. Do you want me to push this line of investigation?’

  ‘Given that you think Caeco must be ideologically driven, I think it’s highly relevant.’

  After a full minute’s awkward silence, Somna signalled to her aide who started playing the footage from the public surveillance feed.

  ‘Watch the figure in the pale jacket,’ Somna instructed. I recognised Caeco entering a bar on the Dec Max: he walked with that same smooth, purposeful movement he’d used in Aidan’s office. The images speeded up to ten minutes later, and three more men arrived at three- to four-minute intervals. The date was a month ago. Fast forward to a week ago and we saw Caeco enter the main Macellum colonnade and sit in one of the outdoor cafés. Same men, but much clearer pictures.

  ‘This one,’ Somna highlighted a tall, brown-haired man, ‘is a provincial curia employee called Cyriacus from Brancadorum; next to him is one Pisentius originating from Castra Lucilla.’

  Conrad and I glanced at each other. Our summer villa was at Castra Lucilla. A coincidence, surely?

  Somna looked directly at me with her unnerving stare. ‘Is he known to you, Captain?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, feeling pinned down in my chair like a dead butterfly in a museum case. ‘No, I don’t know the name at all. I’ll...I’ll ask our steward, just to be sure.’

  Her gaze swivelled back to the screen and I relaxed. ‘We haven’t ID’d the last one yet, but I feel we’ve made good progress.’

  Nobody moved for a few seconds.

  Sepunia coughed and broke the tension. ‘We’ll dig out a bit more on Sextus and run a full check on these two,’ she said. ‘It’ll be interesting to see if they have any ideological stance.’

  Conrad moved at last, reaching over to pick up his el-pad from Somna’s desk. ‘I suggest we meet the same time tomorrow to check progress,’ he said in a low voice. ‘My office, unless you have any further screenings of the local low life for us, Colonel?’

  ‘Thoughts?’ It took me a minute to register Conrad was addressing me, not Sepunia or Daniel, as we walked back to his office. His face was pale, but otherwise he appeared to have recovered from his earlier shock. Apart from the revulsion any Roma Novan would have, it must have hit Conrad deep inside and unleashed the horrors of his childhood; his rebel stepfather had been the arch-patriarchalist.

  ‘Well,’ I glanced at Sepunia, ‘if the IS comes up with information suggesting they share ideology then we’re playing in a different ball game altogether. Ideologicals are historically both ruthless and blind. They’re convinced of their cause and don’t mind destroying anybody else on their way to achieving it.’

  As soon as Conrad had disappeared along the corridor, and Sepunia trotted back downstairs, Daniel grabbed my arm and half-dragged me along to his new office.

  ‘What?’ I asked, once he had closed the door. I rubbed my arm, exaggerating a little.

  ‘Why did they all go into retreat-into-the-cave mode back there? And what the hell happened to Conrad?’

  ‘Ah.’ I could see the curiosity raging in his eyes. ‘Tell me, Daniel, what do you understand by the word patriarchalist?’

  ‘Something about the role of men and them taking the lead in the family, I suppose.’

  Like me, Daniel had been raised with standard Western values, but more so as his first family was very traditional. His Uncle Baruch was the head of the family and Daniel’s widowed mother, even though she’d been the elder brother’s wife, deferred to him when the chips were down. Being a sophisticate from New York, I’d thought it was old-fashioned and repressive until I thought about Aunt and Uncle Brown with their Midwestern family culture.

  I caught myself staring out of the window. Like that was going to help. How could I frame this so it’d make sense to Daniel? When Apulius had left Rome in the fourth century with his daughters and followers and headed out from Italy into the mountains, they needed to make radical changes to survive. So women took over social, economic and political life, and the men fought to ensure the colony survived. In the end, both sons and daughters put on armour and picked up blades in the struggle to defend their new homeland.

  Inevitably, reversing values was a struggle. It took several generations to become entrenched, but Apulius the founder, his daughters and granddaughters enforced it. He’d married a Celt from Noricum, where women participated in decision-making, fought in battles and directed families’ property. Her four daughters had inherited her qualities in spades.

  I sighed. None of that would help explain to Daniel how threatening the patriarchalists were. I went for the summarised version. ‘You know Roma Novans have lived almost since the founding with women running the families. It’s not just their history; it’s in their heads, their blood. Apart from that, they’ve seen how poorly other cultures have treated women and children over the centuries. Patriarchy is abhorrent to them, as a system and a personal value. That’s why they wouldn’t let Christians or Muslims in. For them, patriarchy is close to a perversion. They’ve fought hard to defend their way of life, and rejected anything that threatened it.’

  ‘I can follow that, but why did Conrad have that weird turn? I know he’s big on doing the proper thing, but I thought he was going to pass out.’

  ‘So did I.’ I chewed my lip. ‘Keep this confidential, okay? Some of it’s common knowledge, some not.’

  He nodded.

  ‘About thirty years ago, when Conrad’s stepfather Caius launched the coup and made himself the so-called First Consul for a year and a half, he introduced a pretty brutal male-dominated regime. Quite a number of women didn’t survive it. Three female heads of family were executed on trumped-up charges within the first few months. My grandmother nearly died and was in hospital in Vienna for six weeks. Eventually, resistance groups united with exiles and retook the country piece by piece. I don’t know how they found the courage to do it.’

  I paused and looked down at Daniel’s untidy desk.

  ‘Conrad was only nine at the time and had been living under Caius’s roof six years before that. He was beaten by Caius every day to “man him up”. That was his personal pattern of men in control. The gods know what other abuse he suffered. That’s why his reaction was so strong.’

  Daniel leaned against the edge of the desk, looking puzzled. ‘I never thought about it. I don’t feel particularly disadvantaged as a man.’

  I just laughed at him, lightening the mood. ‘You have too much fun to notice!’

  He looked relieved to be distracted and drop the subject. When Conrad and Nonna started discussing politics or some philosophical theories on winter evenings at home, Daniel usually closed the door and left them to it.

  Finished with my history lecture, I went to check on Fausta and Drusus in the strategy office and found chaos. Surround
ed by boxes, some half-opened, piles of racking struts, shrink-wrapped cupboards, chairs, cabinets and a cabling crew, they were beaming. Drusus, el-pad in hand, was directing another arrival – two of Manlius’s people with a huge situation screen. This was more than good. I told them to carry on with it; they were perfectly competent.

  ‘Just message me when it’s safe to come back in.’

  XII

  Promptly at 13.00, I knocked on Conrad’s door.

  ‘Come!’ He was frowning at the screen, tapping on his keyboard as I entered. He finished and looked up at me. The fine lines fanning out from where the upper and lower lids of his eyes met seemed deeper in the strong white sunlight. A sign of getting older? He had a good eight years on me. Today wouldn’t have helped.

  ‘Are you okay now?’ I asked.

  ‘Stop fussing, or I’ll pull rank on you.’ He wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t care if he did. And he knew it. But his semi-joke reassured me. A little.

  ‘So what can you give me from your analysis?’ His voice dropped a half-tone.

  ‘I strongly suggest that you visit the palace and check out the security for the children, that you meet with Silvia and advise her of a possible threat.’

  I dragged out drinking my water.

  ‘Next,’ I said, studying the arm of my chair, ‘whatever you do, make sure there’s at least one, preferably two independent people who can see you at all times when you are in the same place with her. Write everything up in detail, not just your personal digital diary, but hard copy. Store a copy of everything in your lock box.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  Nobody had a higher security clearance than he did. He was responsible for the personal and political safety of the head of state. More binding still, Silvia Apulia was not just the imperatrix to him; he was the father of her three children.

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘Oh, come on! You can do better than that.’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ I blurted out. ‘Juno help me, I don’t know how to describe it. I saw you threatened, in danger, but I can’t tell how. You were also seen as a possible threat.’ My voice fell to a whisper.

  He said nothing. He picked up a pen from his desk tidy and tapped the end on the dark leather top. The repetitive staccato became unbearable. Then he turned it and started on the other end. His face was hard like a concrete mask. I cleared my throat.

  ‘Any more?’ His voice was clipped; he was back to professional and analytical mode again, but his face was flushed.

  ‘You know DSAs don’t always give results on demand.’ I started to feel resentful. Sometimes they were a little obscure, but so far in my life they had proved one hundred per cent true. Some appreciation would have been good.

  Looking for an outlet for his fury, something in my expression must have kept him from making me the preferred target. He flung back into his chair and murdered the roller-ball.

  I knew everything was wrong, all wrong, and I had an almost uncontrollable urge to run.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’ll go up to the palace now and check the security thoroughly. I’ll take the primipilus with me and Paula Servla.’ He gave me a sardonic look. ‘Do you think they’re sufficiently credible babysitters?’

  ‘Well, having all three of you descend on them all at once will frighten the shit out of the guards there.’ I tried to keep my voice light, but wasn’t too sure I’d succeeded.

  ‘You know something?’ He fixed his gaze on me. ‘You’re a real Cassandra sometimes.’

  Itching to move, I went to the gym downstairs for some hard circuit training, followed by a kilometre on the outdoor track. Despite pushing my pace so my breath seared through my lungs, making my eyes water, it didn’t distract what was pounding through my mind. My gut instinct was to keep running. Now.

  As I sweated back inside, one of Sepunia’s staffers found me. ‘Captain Mitela? Captain Sepunia would be grateful if you could call by her office this afternoon,’ he said. ‘She said it’s not urgent, just interesting.’

  What had Sepunia dug up that she couldn’t leave until tomorrow’s meeting? And what exactly did she mean by interesting?

  Half an hour later, I knocked on the door frame of her office, a friendly smile on my face.

  ‘Hi, Carina. Come in and sit down,’ she said, as cheerful as I appeared. I shut the door and waited for her to speak. She dropped the happy look, glanced at me almost furtively, then glued her eyes back on the paper in her hand. She wasn’t very tall, and fidgeted around like a little brown mouse in front of a stalking cat.

  ‘When we were searching the safe in Sextus’s house, we found an envelope marked “Sympathisers”. One of my people was logging the contents – mostly letters and message printouts – and putting a list together. She was somewhat taken aback to find these. Any comments?’ She shot me a speculative look.

  Two photos showed a group of people in full formal dress filling a magnificent hall. Domus Corneliarum. I recognised it from the last gathering of the Twelve Families. In the foreground were my grandmother, Livia Cornelia, Laetia Volusenia, her daughter Marcella and Claudia Sella, Julia Sella’s aunt, and me. A rough circle had been drawn around my head in red marker. In the top photo, I was slightly turned away, accepting a drink from the waiter who was…Sextus. No. The second photo was similar, but included Imperatrix Silvia Apulia. My face was turned at a more direct angle as if I was in serious conversation with Sextus.

  Hades.

  ‘I don’t know what to say – I don’t pay attention to each and every servant that hands me a drink,’ I said coldly. That probably sounded snooty, but that was how it was. Maybe Sextus had wormed his way onto the staff list for the big bash at Livia Cornelia’s. Maybe he was curious about his mother’s family after all. I hadn’t had the slightest murmur of recall about him when I first went to Aidan’s office. And my memory was pretty good.

  ‘The photos look like part of the batch taken for publication. Anybody could have accessed them via the public pages of the Twelve Families’ site,’ I said. ‘C’mon, Sepunia, this is the kid fantasising with some fancy graphics package.’

  ‘And the letter?’

  She stretched out, but held on to a single sheet, handwritten in blue ink. The sloping, hurried scribble looked exactly like mine. I read it through twice. A big lump of lead landed in my middle. It was supposed to be from me saying that Conrad and I had been impressed by Sextus and wanted to hear more about his ideas. Would he please like to contact me and arrange a time to meet?

  I stared at the letter, caught somewhere between dismay and shock. Why in Hades would Conrad be remotely interested, with his history?

  ‘This has to be a forgery,’ I said when I’d recovered my voice. ‘I always use black, when I write something. Not something I do often.’ I shrugged. ‘And we have our own hand-milled paper, not this everyday stuff.’

  ‘Perhaps so, but you understand I have to submit it to full forensic examination.’

  A shiver ran through me. I felt a noose tightening, not only around my neck but Conrad’s too.

  ‘Of course,’ I agreed. What else could I say? Somebody was mounting an attack on the Mitelae. Nonna and I thought it would be financial or digital, and she’d had yet another layer of BI security programs installed. I hadn’t anticipated anything from the inside, or so personally directed. My heart started to thump as the adrenalin responded to the threat.

  ‘I need you to write this out in front of witnesses so we have a comparison,’ she added. She gave me a typed version to copy from so I couldn’t make a deliberate effort to miscopy. For all that Miss Innocent look in her green eyes, she’d prepared this well. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, look directly at me.

  Whoever was running this operation had done an excellent job. I had to assume the letter would be a good forgery, too. But who wrote a letter by hand these days? I heard the door open, and a senior staffer set paper and ink pen on the desk in front of Sepunia then stood to the side, watching me. She headed it “
Agreed witness copy – comparison only” and pushed it towards me.

  ‘Now what?’ I asked as I put the pen down ten minutes later.

  She bagged the copy letter and handed it to the staffer who went off to process it.

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t say any more until I see the results in about an hour. Please return to your office and wait until I contact you.’

  She couldn’t have spoken more coldly. If it were me, I would have had me suspended from duty and confined to barracks.

  Her mistake.

  I hurried up the corridor to Conrad’s office. I needed to warn him. Empty. Of course, he’d gone to the palace. I stood there, chewing my lip. Conrad’s exec, Rusonia, was impassive, as usual. I didn’t know her well enough to leave a message – she’d think I was crazy. I gave her a tight smile, slipped back out into the corridor. I texted him in encrypt: ‘Code 5. Emergency. Meet me stat fav resto.’

  I prayed he’d pick it up immediately. If I was being paranoid, the worst result would be embarrassment and possibly a verbal reprimand. If not, I wasn’t going to wait for a trap to close on us.

  I went to the locker room, gathered some things into a small backpack. I walked up to my old desk in the general office which, miraculously, had not been reassigned. I leaned up against the inside curve and spent two precious minutes talking and laughing with the guys there and, still bantering, felt behind the vinyl edging strip. It was still there. I broke a fingernail easing the tiny chip out. No reaction from any of the others. I sat down on the chair and logged on to my account. It hadn’t been barred, but I had to assume the Intelligence section was already monitoring it.

  I slipped the chip into a card carrier and initiated a timed destruct sequence on the whole account. It was a cute program Fausta had made up for me when I worked undercover with Apollodorus. The bonus was that it would eat itself up once it had finished. Normally, nobody would notice, but what was normal now? I reckoned I had a safety margin of eight minutes left.