Gladiatrix (31 page)

‘Cel. Celly maybe.' I tried them. Nothing.

‘What about the meaning of the name?'

‘I've already tried that. “Star”. “Heaven”… None of them work.'

He chewed a full lip. ‘If the file's about Celeste, then Victoria is thinking like a mother when she uses it. What would a woman in your time …'

As soon as he started asking, it clicked.

‘You mean, she used something like a nursery rhyme?'

‘I don't know the term — but if you mean something a mother would say, or sing to a baby, then yes. Are there any about stars?'

Of course. I sang softly, ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star …'

I put in ‘Twinkle.' The file opened and a subdirectory appeared …

‘What happened?' Alex leant over my shoulder, angling for a better view.

‘You were right.' I was staring at the phactor, still in shock. ‘That password worked. It's open …'

When I stopped speaking, lost in running my eye across the first few items of the detailed directory, he prompted me again. ‘What's in there?'

‘Everything to do with the kidnapping of Celeste!' I couldn't believe it.

‘There's a copy of the original police report. The evidence file …' I said to myself, ‘That makes sense.' The eight-digit title for the locked file was the case number used by San Francisco Homicide.

I beamed at him. ‘Constan was wrong. She believes Celeste is still alive.'

It was all there, the whole San Francisco police dossier. I scanned down further. It was a long directory.

‘Here's the diary of her investigation of Uribe. Details of his organisation, a list of his people …'

‘Uribe?'

I pulled up at that. I hadn't told Alex much more than he'd needed to understand why I'd come after Victoria.

‘Uribe was the prime suspect. The one the police think took Celeste.'

He already knew what the police were. I'd had to explain that as part of my own story.

‘Uribe's like Amalfus, he ran a …' I searched for a word to replace ‘cartel', but couldn't find the right one. Keen to get back to the list, I said, ‘He ran a gang. Like the Sewer Rats. But much, much bigger and more powerful.'

Alex gave me a look of sceptical disbelief. ‘Amalfus has a longer reach than you know, Kannon. He may be a thug and wear his mother's dresses, but he's carved out a particularly juicy section of the Tiber wharves for himself. And held it against all comers. He determines what comes in, what goes out, and when. He cuts off supply, and everyone hurts. It also means he can make and break business in this city. And big money and big politics are like this.' He interlocked the fingers of both hands, bringing them up to my eye level for emphasis.

‘Make no mistake, Kannon. Whatever may change in the future, here and now, Rome is the centre of this world. And Amalfus controls its docks. So don't underestimate him.'

‘Okay.' Fair point. Alex'd obviously had enough of my world being so much more everything than his. ‘Then let's say Uribe is the equivalent of Amalfus.'

‘What's his racket?'

This was going to be hard to explain. I took a breath, and let the translator do its best. ‘He traded in an addictive substance called cocaine.'

‘Cocaine? Do we have …?'

‘No. I don't think Rome has it yet. I'm pretty sure it's native to South America, one of the new continents I told you about …'

He dismissed the impending geography lesson. ‘And it's an addictive substance?'

I was about to explain when he said, ‘You mean like tears of the poppy?'

‘Opium?'

He nodded once. The translator had done its job.

Of course Rome had opium, I'd forgotten. It'd been used in Europe since the Neolithic Age. Ancient Egypt had it. Greece too.

‘Yes. Just like that. But you can buy opium freely here, can't you?'

‘Only if you're as rich as Crassus. Most of the people that really need it can't afford it.'

‘In my time cocaine is illegal, basically because there are so many people addicted to it.' Before he could ask the obvious questions, I said, ‘Cocaine can be used in medical treatment, but it's cheap enough for the addicts to use for fun, to escape. Then, in the long run, they become physically dependent on it.'

‘And the addicts are desperate enough to buy it, even though it's illegal?'

‘Yep.'

Before he could ask the questions reflecting in his eyes, I cut that topic short to get back to Celeste. ‘Uribe comes into this via a murder case Victoria was investigating. Before she became a Time Marshal she was a police officer in the United States. She was investigating the murder of a man and his wife, when she discovered the man was hiding under a false identity.'

‘And he was hiding from Uribe?'

‘Er, yes.' Alex was quick. ‘He used to work for Uribe. But he stole from him and faked his own death, so Uribe wouldn't follow him.'

‘But Uribe found him anyway, and killed him.'

‘Had him killed. Then, when Victoria was getting too close to finding the killers and tracing everything back to Uribe, Uribe ordered the kidnapping to stall the investigation, while he cleaned up the leads back to him.'

‘Like the Hierophant.'

‘Yep. Exactly.'

‘If all this was known, why didn't the police go straight after Uribe? Find out exactly what happened to Celeste. In a deep dungeon with some sharp implements.' Justice, Roman-style.

He cocked his head. ‘What've you left out?

‘The United States police couldn't touch him. At all. Uribe was headquartered in another country. One that he and his kind basically ran.'

‘Another country.' Alex thought for a moment. ‘Which continent?'

‘Victoria was in North America, Uribe in South America.'

Alex stared at me for a long moment.

‘What, Alex?'

He was reluctant to say.

‘Come on, Alex.'

‘So where do you fit in?' He said it as kindly and gently as he could. ‘You were found on the other side of the ocean, weren't you? Why would Uribe send you all that way?'

‘I don't know, Alex. I don't know if I fit in at all.'

I hefted the phactor in my hand. ‘I'm hoping this might be able to tell me something.' I paused. ‘One way or another.'

‘So look.' Alex jabbed his finger at the phactor. ‘Stop wasting time talking to me!' He moved the oil lamp closer, so I could see.

I started going back down the directory. There was file after file on Colombia. Interviews with government officials. A list of hostages killed over the past twenty years. A map of designated fly zones for a US military incursion that happened two presidents ago. On and on it went.

Some had been used recently, others hadn't been touched for years. There was just so much detail. A flood of it. But I had no idea how it was all related, and no idea of where to start looking for answers.

Victoria was still looking, but for what pattern of events?

And then the directory ended.

There was nothing there that was remotely connected with Australia. Everything took place on the other side of the Pacific.

Tiredness rolled over me, and the screen blurred to blue and white lights. What had I expected? What did I think I'd find in here? A file with my name and address on it?

I was such an idiot.

Victoria, whip-smart detective and determined mother, was sure the answer was in South America … was still pursuing that line after all these years. Maybe had even found a solid lead there.

Maybe somewhere in these godforsaken files she'd even found Celeste, now fully grown, a loyal gangland daughter.

Where did I fit in?

I didn't.

I was so stupid! Why on earth would Uribe bring Celeste to Australia? He wouldn't. He didn't.

The Russian couple in the park. Both long-dead. Who were they to me?

I was on another wild-goose chase. One that had brought me to this crazy place.

A soul-deep tiredness weighed me inches down into the stone bench. My arms and legs hung like bags of sand.

‘Kannon?' Alex'd caught me staring at nothing. And jostled my arm.

I gulped. ‘Ah. Nothing, Alex. Just trying to work out how to sort through these damned files, which to look at first. There's a lot of them.'

‘That's crap. What's wrong?'

I searched his face and had to smile. Now he was trying to protect me from myself.

‘Everything I've seen so far is about Uribe. About South America. There are so many files, and none of them seem to lead to Australia. To me.'

His eyes hurt for me. He was searching for the right words to ease, to help.

‘Don't worry, Alex.' I shook my head. ‘I knew this was probably the way things would turn out. And, in a way, maybe it was meant to happen. Unless the NTA turn up soon, I'm the only person who can help Victoria.'

I dodged his too-knowing eyes.

More out of habit than anything, I went back to the phactor. ‘Don't ever leave a job half done,' Yuki's voice echoed. But where should I look in this morass of information?

The answer came immediately. I should follow Victoria!

Do a search to find the most recent file she'd used, and take it from there. Find out exactly what she now knew, and stare it in the face.

The search yielded a folder set up for accounts
purposes. It itemised all the plane trips Victoria had made over the past eighteen months, the dates, the flight numbers, how she'd paid for it, the cost etc …

I squinted at the screen. Gee, she'd been making a lot of trips out of the US. At the start they were all to Colombia, then a couple to Mexico, then several stops across the States …

‘I'm sick of asking that same question, but have you found something?' Alex could read the excitement in my face.

‘Hold on. I don't know what this is. Give me a minute.'

I did a search on the next most recently accessed file. It was in a subdirectory of the original San Francisco police report. Photos scanned from the Cruz house. Crime scene photos?

‘There's something strange going on here, Alex. Victoria's gone back to the Cruz case.'

He gave me a ‘I don't what you're talking about' face and hands.

‘Cruz is the name of the murdered man.' I went back to the file, but couldn't tell which photos she'd been looking at. There were hundreds of them. The bodies in position. Close-ups of the wounds. Inside the house … The path of forced entry. Nah, she could've been looking for anything. I had no choice, but to keep following the trail backwards.

The next search took me to her old police case diary, the one she'd officially kept on the Cruz murders.

‘She's definitely looking into the Cruz murders again, Alex. But I can't find anything that tells me why.'

I flicked through the report, but like the photos there was no clue as to what parts she'd gone back over.

Hmm. What could she be looking for? But this time no clear answer to that question came back to me. Fuck! I was just too tired to think.

I dropped my hands, resting them and the phactor on my thighs, for a moment of ease.

The eastern horizon was still pure black, but I could be here forever, just going deeper and deeper into these infuriating files. How long was it until dawn? Probably an hour or two if I was lucky.

I had to be at the amphitheatre and waiting for Lucius to arrive by first light. Injured or not, free or not, according to Alex, Lucius was legally bound to attend roll call there each day. If he didn't show for it, he was presumed to have done a runner from his contract. And his contract was with Augustus.

The penalty for being forsworn was death.

Sleep. I needed some sleep.

I didn't have a big margin for error. Especially now. I wasn't about to let Lucius slip through my fingers. Couldn't afford to.

Not with the initiation as the only alternative.

I held my finger ready to shut down the phactor, then a vision of the accounting file flashed into my mind's eye. Why had all those flights started a year and half ago?

Yeah! What'd happened eighteen months ago to get Victoria airborne and scrambling across so many countries again?

If she was anything like Des, she'd write everything up.

Yes. She'd created a batch of new files to record the new investigation.

I put in a search for any new files created around the time of the first series of flights to Colombia.

Ding.

And there they were. Five of them. A list of five files with the same creation date.

Yep. Something had happened to Victoria. But what?

The top of the list was just marked ‘Letter'. There wasn't much to it, and it'd been scanned in from a paper copy. But it was weird.

Words printed in sloppy, thick kindergarten letters using some kind of …

I held the screen closer. That looks like …?

The letter was printed in strips of a dirty, faded caramel material. Furry material. The kind you'd find on really cheap fake fur …

Or old stuffed toys.

There was no return address and no sender. An anonymous letter written in aging teddy bear fur.

Underneath Victoria had typed:

This letter was real. I sucked in a big breath. But who could have sent it?

Alex exploded. ‘What!'

‘Someone sent Victoria an anonymous letter. Told her to forget investigating Uribe. To look elsewhere.'

‘Does the letter say who …'

‘No,' I snapped, eager to get on to the other files.

The next one down was set up in the form of a police case diary. Des'd used the same format. Four columns. When, where, who and what. It had been used as a running note taker, with space for conclusions at regular intervals.

I started skimming it like a fiend.

Alex had given up any pretence at calm. He urged, ‘Read faster.'

‘Shut up. You're breaking my concentration.' I read on …

Okay. ‘She says that if it wasn't Uribe, then it had to be someone whose only interest was using Celeste to stall the investigation.' I looked over at him. ‘Someone who was linked to Cruz, but not necessarily Uribe.'