The Geneva Deception by James Twining

eyes, speaking almost to himself.
    ‘You’re going to be okay. I’ll make sure you’re okay.’
    Beep…beep…beep.
    He smiled at her reassuringly, glad that shecouldn’t see the paramedics’ grim-faced expression as they worked on the wound, the blood still oozing from her chest. He felt her hand reach for his, press something hard and rectangular into it, her grip tightening as she pulled him closer, her mouth moving under the oxygen mask.
    He bent over her, straining to hear her voice against the chop of the rotors and the rhythmic pinging of the heart monitor. He caught something, the fragment of a word, perhaps more, and then her eyes closed again and her grip loosened, allowing him to slip what she had given him into his pocket.
    ‘Come on, Jen,’ Tom called, shaking her arm gently at first and then with increasing urgency. ‘We’re nearly there now. You’re going to be okay. You just need to keep listening to me. Listen to my voice.’
    He shook her again, more roughly this time. But there was no reaction and all he could hear was the gradual, almost imperceptible lengthening of the gaps between each tone of the ECG.
    Beep…beep. Beep……beep. Beep………beep.
    ‘Help her,’ Tom shouted angrily to the paramedics. ‘Do something.’
    They swapped a glance, one of them wiping the back of his hand across his brow, smearing blood.
    ‘We’ve done what we can.’
    Far below, the city’s neon carpet unravelled intothe distance. But from up here, Tom could see that it ended, that a black line had been drawn across the desert at the city’s limits, and that beyond that was only darkness.
    He leaned forward, his lips brushing against her cheek. He knew now that it was just him and her. Him and her and the hiss of the respirator and the unfeeling pulse of the ECG’s electronic heart.
    ‘Stay with me,’ he whispered.
    For a second he could have sworn that her breathing quickened. Then the machine gave a piercing shriek. The monitor showed a perfectly flat line.

PART TWO
    ‘It is from the greatest dangers that the greatest glory is to be won.’
    Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War -
    Book 1, 144

EIGHTEEN
    Via Galvani, Testaccio, Rome
    18th March - 3.12 p.m.
    The speaker crackled into life.
    ‘Mitto tibi navem prora puppique carentem.’
    Allegra hesitated, her mind racing. She understood the Latin, of course - I send you a ship lacking stern and bow. But what did it mean? How could a ship not have a stern and a bow? Unless…unless it was referring to something else. To the front and the back? The beginning and the end? The first and the last? Latin for ship was navem , so if it was missing its beginning and its end, its first and last letters perhaps…
    ‘ Ave ,’ she replied with a smile. Latin for hello.
    ‘ Ave , indeed,’ the voice replied with a chuckle. ‘Although I can’t claim the credit this time. That was one of Cicero’s.’
    The door buzzed open and Allegra made her way to the lift, smiling. She’d first met AurelioEco at La Sapienza, before heading off to Columbia for her Masters, where he’d been a visiting professor in the university’s antiquities department. Before that, he’d spent fifteen years as the Director of the Villa Giulia, Rome’s foremost Etruscan museum, during ten of which he had also headed up the Ufficio Sequestri e Scavi Clandestini, the Office of Clandestine Excavations and Seized Objects. Unfortunately for her, these posts seemed to have provided him with an inexhaustible supply of riddles, which he delighted in asking her as a condition of entry to his apartment. A latter-day Sphinx to her Odysseus.
    As usual the door was open and the kettle boiling. She made herself a strong black coffee and Aurelio an Earl Grey tea with lemon, an affectation of his from a brief stint at Oxford in his twenties that he had never been able, or wanted, to shake off.
    He was waiting for her in his high-backed leather chair, the split in the seat cushion covered