The Three Most Wanted Read online

  “THAT WILL DO, Major Everington!” The judge had turned purple. “Henceforth, unless you have something relevant to say, you will be silent!”

  “But you keep telling me to talk…”

  “SILENCE!”

  The judge looked so absolutely livid Bane started choking and a snort of laughter escaped me as well.

  “The prisoner is overwrought,” the judge continued, poison poorly-concealed in his tone. “The prisoner must have a few minutes to rest. The court is adjourned for thirty minutes. Take him out.”

  The guards stepped forward but, last vestiges of calm suddenly disappearing, the Major hurled himself from the chair, screaming incoherently and leaping up at the Perspex like a wild animal. He fought them every step of the way as they dragged him out—I had to look away.

  An impromptu news bulletin—a special “Margaret Verrall escape case” update—came on to fill the gap. They showed truckloads of soldiers combing the forest around and beyond the railway lines back in the French department. If it’d occurred to anyone to rethink the assumption that we couldn’t have boarded an unboardable train, they weren’t telling the world.

  The two soldiers from the van were fine, the other two under observation in hospital with severe concussion. It sounded like the EuroGov playing it up as much as they could, though, because there were a couple of shots of the brave soldiers sitting up in bed and they looked pretty healthy to me.

  “Bastards,” said Bane.

  But he snugged me closer, a whole coil of tension draining out of him. So he hadn’t smashed their skulls, Deo gratias. Good thing his arms weren’t as strong right now as they used to be.

  “And now, back to the trial of Major Lucas Everington...”

  They shuffled the Major back to his seat, staring vacantly into space.

  I winced. “Doesn’t look like he knows what’s going on any more.”

  Then, horror of horrors, they began dealing with my rescue from the lab and soon I was curled up almost in Bane’s lap, shuddering more than the Major.

  “Major Everington, do you have anything to say?” demanded the judge before long. I glanced at my watch. Almost five o’clock.

  The Major didn’t seem to hear.

  “Fine, I will have to adjourn the session. Take him away.” The judge raised his gavel and the guards reached for the Major’s arms. The Major shot out of the chair and slammed into the Perspex.

  “No! I did it! I did it!”

  ***+***

  20

  KAKISTOCRACY

  “Whatever it is you say I did, I did it!” the Major screamed. “All of it! I rescued… rescued whoever. I killed the snails, I’m sorry, I did! They were eating my plants so I killed them all… I smuggled elephants, I bought chocolate—it was very good, but I put it in mousetraps. Anything, please… I did it… please… please… please…” He started whacking his head on the screen in time with his words. “It was my fault, it was my fault, it was my fault...”

  I looked away, stomach churning.

  “Smuggled elephants?” snorted Bane. “He’s going to keep kicking them in the teeth until he hits the very bottom of the rope, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, thank you for that graphic description!”

  “Sit down, Major Everington.” A frustrated look covered the judge’s face despite his satisfied tone. “The court has heard your confession.”

  “If you can call that a confession,” muttered Bane.

  “Am I therefore to understand, Major Everington, that you wish to change your plea to Guilty?” continued the judge.

  No reaction. The guards pried the Major from the Perspex and dumped him back in his chair, but he just went on whispering, “It was my fault,” over and over, rocking to and fro. Was he even talking about the escape?

  “Major Everington, are you trying to convey that you wish to change your plea to Guilty? The escape was your fault, yes?”

  The Major’s attention seemed caught for a moment by these words. He stared at the judge and shook his head earnestly, giving a rather surprised, “No, not that.”

  The judge actually turned a faint green color, said quickly, “The jury will go out to consider their verdict,” and whacked his gavel down hard, as though daring anyone to object. Terrified the Major would retract his confession a second time?

  The jury filed out and despite that flash of semi-lucidity from the prisoner, it quickly became clear the judge was worrying for nothing. But he might have waited a long time to extract a clear “Guilty” from the man who now stared into space, hands moving systematically and drool running unnoticed down his chin. In his own way, the Major really had beaten them. Forced them to break his mind before breaking him, thus ensuring they never got the proper confession they wanted. Stubborn, stubborn bastard.

  Filing back in after a token couple of minutes, the jury sat looking anywhere but at the madman drooling and potting his imaginary plants in the dock. They’d found him guilty. What a tremendous surprise for all present.

  The judge made a lengthy speech about the importance of a fair sentence and the need to review all the facts to achieve the aforementioned, finally announcing that the date for sentencing would be determined within the week.

  “Huh,” I snorted. “Trying to be all unhurried and fair with the final legal steps. Like we don’t know what the sentence will be!”

  “Well, they’ll be desperate to salvage some face from this farce,” smirked Bane.

  When the guards tried to take Major Everington out, he clung to the chair so tightly they picked it up and took it too. He obviously didn’t weigh a lot. The judge left, the jury hurried shamefaced from the room, and it was over. The station went back to news.

  “That has got to be their worst show trial ever,” said Bane.

  “Perhaps it’ll stop them from being quite so keen on them in future.”

  “I don’t know, they’ll probably just choose their victim a bit more carefully.”

  “Well, maybe...” I broke off as the newsreader’s words registered.

  “…the main headlines. Six soldiers have been killed in the derailment of a munitions’ train in the north of the department. The Italian Resistance have claimed resp…”

  Bane switched off the TV with a quick flick of the remote. I looked at him. He looked at me. “Well, hearing about it isn’t going to change anything, is it?”

  True. But all six soldiers probably hadn’t died in the crash.

  “I really don’t like the Resistance,” I muttered.

  “Keep your voice down! D’you want to attempt another few hundred kilometers on foot?”

  “Calm down! I’ve had my orders.” I put my head on his shoulder for a moment or two, but kept shifting restlessly. “Shall we go and sit with Jon?”

  Bane sighed, as though he’d not been able to settle either. “Nap with Jon, maybe. We’ve an hour before dinner.”

  When we’d hobbled to Jon’s room Bane stretched out on the narrow stretch of bed to Jon’s left, I climbed up on Jon’s right and rested my head on his shoulder, careful not to knock his leg. He looked no different than earlier, white and still.

  “The doc was here when I woke up.” Bane sensed my anxious thoughts. “Had him on a drip—salts and liquids—he’d given him a blood transfusion too. He’d lost so much. But he said he’d pull through. Probably quite quickly. I was right about the leg. Flesh wound. He took the bullet out. Jon can keep it as a souvenir.”

  He pointed to the bedside table. Sure enough, a little scrap of innocuous looking metal lay there.

  “I’m sure he’ll be delighted.”

  Bane just laughed, and after a few moments began to snore. I shifted my head on Jon’s shoulder and let my eyes close. He didn’t smell right: strange sheets and strange clothes, but he was still Jon. Surely a bad idea to leave him lying here alone...

  “Ah, here you are.” A musical Italian voice jerked me awake. Luciano stood in the doorway, Carla looking over his shoulder.

  “We’ve
enough beds for you all,” she said pointedly.

  “We just thought it might be better for Jon to have us with him. Subconsciously, y’know,” I said.

  “You know, you might be right,” said Luciano. “He’s certainly not in good shape. We’ll bring the other beds in here.”

  Carla rolled her eyes and walked out.

  “Time to eat,” said Luciano, and followed her.

  “See, that wasn’t so hard,” I muttered to Bane, then clenched my teeth to keep from gasping in pain as I eased off the bed.

  “You get away with it ‘cause you’re a girl,” snorted Bane, wincing as he straightened. “From me? Rampant paranoid suspicion. Wasn’t going there.”

  “Fair enough. Let’s go and eat. I’m not sure what happened to that plate of pasta, but I’m starving.”

  I managed to make it back downstairs without whimpering. The meal was—surprise!—pasta, with a more complicated sauce than the one we’d had from the fridge. Guest or not, I could concentrate on nothing but the heaped plate in front of me. Bane, having made more headway with his food deficit, found time to talk to our hosts in between bites, but for a long time the murmur of voices barely penetrated my happy munching.

  Our hosts: Luciano was in charge, Carla and Francesco his lieutenants. I’d not heard Lanzo’s and Ruggiero’s voices for some hours. No doubt they lived in their own homes, like the rest of the cell; the other three must be too compromised. No wonder they knew how to travel without passing through road blocks.

  “You’re just content to leave your country under the oppressor’s boot?” Carla’s raised voice drew my mind from the food. “Have you no honor?”

  “Honor?” retorted Bane, “My honor is more concerned with making sure my fiancée isn’t cut up to fix those who’ve already lived their span of years! My honor is more concerned that people cannot say I believe in a God without dying for it! My honor thinks the woman who conceives a third child without purchasing the necessary permit shouldn’t have that child slaughtered inside her!

  “My honor objects to the EGD saying those of different races cannot love one another! My honor objects to the Stable Population Committee requiring every adult to enter into a registered breeding partnership before the age of thirty regardless of their personal feelings or situation! My honor despises the stranglehold that kakistocracy has on business, keeping their supporters rich and everyone else poor…”

  “That… what did you call them?”

  “Haven’t heard that word before, huh? Kakistocracy. It’s Old Greek for ‘worst possible government.’ But in short, my ‘honor’, if you want to put it like that, finds all that—and more!—far more important than simply being able to say Britain or Italy again.”

  “We say Italy now!”

  “Please yourself! They’re departments at the moment, so that’s what I’m calling them. I’m not getting in trouble calling a spade a hoe when it is actually a spade!”

  “How horticultural,” sneered Carla.

  Bane slammed his fork back down on his plate. “How can you think changing what the departments are called is more important than ending the murder and misery of millions?”

  “If we were a sovereign nation again we could make our own laws! Do away with the bad ones!”

  “Well, yay for you! When’s that going to be? You lot have been at it for almost a century. A century. It’s not working, so let’s try it some more? Very clever.”

  “And what would you suggest? Here I thought you were almost one of us!”

  “I was,” said Bane, quiet but firm. “Almost. Happily I thought better of it.”

  “Why?” Luciano spoke equally quietly, cutting off Carla’s scornful snort.

  “I went on a raid on a factory with my local cell. They shot all four guards.”

  “Good for them!” said Carla.

  “They killed four ordinary, decent men, doing ordinary, decent, socially acceptable jobs. Working hard to support their families. Four sons, four brothers, four husbands, four fathers, gone. And yes, one of them was a father: his daughters are called Lily and Rosy, his wife, Katie.”

  “Well, if he would work for…”

  “No! That is not an argument. Do you work? Do you pay taxes? Why don’t you shoot yourself, huh? You pay them with one hand and kill them with the other!”

  “I don’t pay taxes,” snarled Carla.

  “Then I’m guessing you haven’t got a family. It’s awfully simple when you’ve only your own life to throw away, isn’t it?”

  “And what do you propose?” scoffed Carla, waving towards me with a piece of bread. “You going to pray the EuroGov to its knees?”

  “It’d do a damn sight more good than what you’re doing!”

  “What would you propose?” asked Luciano softly. “Cut off the head of the snake? Kill the High Committee itself?”

  “A, it’s been tried and it’s a quick way to die. B, it wouldn’t solve anything. They’ve a large enough party that their places would be filled quickly enough and nothing would change.”

  “Kill them all.” No smile on Luciano’s face now.

  “Logistically unfeasible and in my opinion, a very bad idea.”

  “A bad idea?”

  “Yes, a bad idea. What’d happen if you suddenly removed the entire power structure? The whole of the continent would dissolve into multiple bloody civil wars. And much as I hate to say it, compared to that, we’re better off as we are.”

  “So exactly what would you suggest, then, Signor-not-Resistance, not-Underground?”

  “Work from the inside. Get the really important things changed, get power shifting back to the sovereign nations.”

  “How?”

  “Leverage. The population itself. They’re the only force which can hope to influence the EuroGov. The government can’t kill them all—they’d have nothing left to rule.”

  “The population will not rise up. We’ve had ample proof of that.”

  “It won’t rise for you. Whilst you’re murdering their relatives, you’re as much the enemy as the EuroGov.”

  “It won’t rise for anyone. It’s too cowed.”

  I swallowed my last bite. “They’ll rise. Sooner or later.”

  “Ah.” Carla threw up her hands in mockery. “Signorina Silver-tongue speaks!”

  I ignored her and so did Luciano. “Why do you think that?” he asked me.

  “Because history says so. The people always rise in the end. The problem with the EuroGov is they’re clever. They never touch the innocent—not unless they fail Sorting. They make absolutely certain a person who behaves themselves has no need to go around afraid—a person anyone else is going to care about, anyway.

  “But they work very hard indeed to maintain the fiction of being a democratically elected government. ‘Cause people are afraid, but it’s action they’re afraid of. So people play along with that fiction. You must’ve heard them. ‘Oh, they’re a bit corrupt, but they are democratically elected.’ Or, ‘I don’t agree with everything they do, but the other parties are even worse.’”

  “They run all the parties!” spat Carla.

  “I know that. You know that. Any reasonably well educated person who’s prepared to face up to the truth knows that. But there’re a lot of people who’d rather not face up to the truth. Because if they face up to it, they feel they ought to stand up to the government, and it’s only that which gets you in trouble. So the people will rise, but who knows when. Because they won’t be rising for self-preservation, as they do against a dictator: they’ll be rising for their consciences.

  “But Bane’s right, they won’t rise for you. Your mindless slaughter makes people side with the EuroGov. And you may not like it, but that’s the truth.”

  Carla looked like she’d spring across the table and stab me with her fork. So much for not offending anyone.

  “Interesting,” said Luciano calmly. “I don’t agree. I cannot accept the way things are. To me, to not fight against it would be unthinkable
. But at least you both have an opinion, which is more than most people.”

  “A quailing, cowardly opinion fit for old women,” snorted Carla.

  “Carla,” said Luciano rather patiently. “Margaret Verrall may not be prepared to pick up a gun and fight with us, but if we can get her into the Vatican, she will sit there and stab people’s consciences with the sharpest quill she can find. Can you really not see how useful that is? She will whip up opposition and some of it will join us, not her.”

  I looked down at the table, embarrassed. “You have a rather high opinion of my quill.”

  “We’ve read the book. So’s half the world, by now. It’s making people think, and there’s nothing the EuroGov hate more. Would you like to know how many new recruits we’ve had since it was published?”

  I swallowed. The law of unintended consequences... “Actually, I’d rather not.”

  “Fine. But take it from me, your quill is sharper than you think.”

  I shrugged.

  Carla threw up her hands. “You went and won the PostSort Competition, you stupid Pregatore!” Italian for “Pray-er”? Clearly a derogatory name for one of the Underground. Diplomacy obviously not being Carla’s strong point.

  Perhaps fortunately, the conversation turned to less controversial topics and by the time Bane and I made it back upstairs after the meal, Luciano and Francesco were carrying the second extra bed into Jon’s room. Save us falling off and bashing our bad arms in the night.

  The warm plasterwork glowed in the sun. Jon’s chest moved steadily against my cheek and I lay quietly, enjoying the warmth and the morning silence. Luciano’s acceptance of our difference of opinion had actually been quite reassuring.

  Shame Jon hadn’t been there. Or perhaps a good thing! He’d some pretty well-developed opinions on the subject as well: we’d have been there all evening! No wonder Bane knew every argument in the book. Though Bane’s own views had shifted and hardened noticeably since that ill-fated night at Wearmfell Factory. In a reassuring direction.