Perfiditas by Alison Morton Page B

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.
    Back in the locker room, I abandoned my uniform. I stowed my gold eagle badge in my pants pocket. I needed it to clear security at the exit. I sauntered down the corridors as casually as I could manage, my heart in my stomach. Normally three and a half minutes from locker room to exit, each second seemed ten times longer. I was sweating as I approached the security gate – the last barrier. My heart thumping, I put my hand and eye up to the readers and waited for the take-down.
    Nothing. The reader pinged and I was out.
    ‘Hold a moment, Captain,’ the security guard called. She was porting a bullpup and stood two metres away.
    I took a breath, and forced myself to turn back. ‘Yes?’
    ‘You forgot your side arm.’ She stretched out her hand with my Glock.
    ‘Thanks.’ I stuffed it in my leather jacket pocket as casually as I could manage, hoping she couldn’t hear how loud my heart was pumping. ‘Sorry, it’s my daughter’s birthday today, and my mind was off on a trip.’
    ‘No problem, ma’am,’ she said. ‘Got my own.’ She smiled. ‘Hope it goes well.’
    I faked an answering smile, collected my bike from the garage and, piling on the revs