Dark Oceans

by Mark Macrossan

  * * *

  An hour and a half later, he was finally on an overland train heading south. He was heading, indirectly, for the only haven currently open to him. He supposed he’d been caught by the odd CCTV camera, so he was taking no chances: he was making his way to Lucinda in what one might call a roundabout fashion. Headed away from Victoria first, rather than towards it. And when he eventually arrived in Newhaven, he’d take a few detours there too. All of which might, with any luck, help him sleep a little better that night.

  Militating against a good night’s sleep however, was his recollection of that terrifying dash through Soho. He didn’t look around once, and even though he was no longer sure whether he could hear a pursuer or not, he could certainly sense one. Passing through Piccadilly Circus, he ran into the Underground, to make them think he was getting a train there, and then burst out into the fresh air again on Piccadilly, shouldering away whole families at a time, and ran all the way along the crowded footpath to Green Park, where he caught his first of many trains.

  Outside, at the green edges of Greater London, light rain showers were sweeping past the window. Wet weather gear would have been useful, but he couldn’t think of everything.

  How was he going to contact Isla now? Assuming she was still alive. They’d probably missed their chance, he and Isla. He had no contact details for her, and he knew she wouldn’t be able to contact him either: he’d taken Alastair’s advice and kept his cyberspace profile invisible. He pulled out his laptop anyway, in the hope that an idea might present itself.

  He went into the only mail account he now used, an anonymous Google account, and he checked for messages in the vain hope that it had somehow slipped his mind and he’d been clever enough last night to give his account details to Isla.

  As it turned out, he did have a message waiting, but it wasn’t from Isla. It wasn’t spam either. Not judging by the specificity of the language. It was from an equally anonymous account – the server was unrecognizable – and it read simply:

  There is nowhere to run to, Jonathon Marriner.

  I will erase you from the whole earth.

  I will hunt you to the end of Time.

  You will never sleep again. With one exception… your final sleep, when you never wake up.

  One more sleep.

  87. 17° 44' 31" S 168° 18' 51" E

  (Grand Hotel and Casino, Port Vila, Vanuatu)

  9.30am Vanuatu Time (22:30 UTC)

  Monday, 28 October

  And now it was no more sleeps, because she was here!

  Or almost. The guest in Room 405 of the Grand Hotel and Casino was in a state of high excitement. His girlfriend was flying in today, the sun was shining, Vila Bay was dazzling and it was difficult to imagine how anything could spoil his day.

  Funnily enough, the conversation that he subsequently overheard went some way towards doing just that. It took a lot to spoil Nick’s day, though, and a mere conversation was never going to be the thing do it. Unless it was on the floor of Parliament that is, but Canberra was nearly three thousand kilometres away, thank fuck.

  Nick was on his balcony soaking up the rays, juice in hand, when he heard a man and a women suddenly emerge onto the balcony of the next room, Room 404. It sounded as though the woman had just arrived. She was saying something in another language, possibly Russian, and the man interrupted her.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Keep it in English.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘At all times. Just in case.’

  ‘Yes, OK. You’re right.’

  The accents were hard to pick: the woman’s sounded European or Russian; the man’s was trickier – European also, maybe French, but there was a hint, too, of educated English. Nick would have loved to have been able to get a look at them – especially after their conversation got going.

  ‘So how was last night?’ the man asked, with a sarcastic edge in his voice.

  ‘It was… manageable.’

  ‘I’ll bet. You managed to… what… accommodate him well enough then?’

  ‘Shut up Dominique. You know I had to do it.’

  ‘No, you had to do him.’

  Hello. Russian, Nick decided. A Russian prostitute.

  There was a pause, some rustling and then

  ‘No,’ the woman said.

  More rustling, something fell off a table.

  ‘No!’

  The movement stopped. Silence.

  ‘Just wait,’ she said. ‘After, we’ll have all the time we want.’

  ‘Sure. Look. Lena. I was only joking before. You and I, we’re…’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’re my… You’re my number one. My most trusted. Sometimes… It’s true, sometimes… I feel… I feel you’re the only one I can trust.’

  A pause.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to lose you,’ the man added.

  ‘Don’t worry about it Dominique. You won’t. They’d have to kill me. I’d die for you, you know. I would.’

  Another pause.

  ‘You know Irwin’s dead,’ the man said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just heard. Fuck.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We think it was that woman he was living with. Isla. And possibly something to do with… Now there was another Irwin stuff-up. The million pounds that he lost, that he somehow sent to that London barrister. Jonathon Marriner. So it looks like he was involved as well. Marriner. Fucking barristers, eh? Fuck. But never mind. Our man in the Met, Stephens, he’ll see to him. Nigel never misses.’

  Pause.

  ‘Apart from losing my London brigadier,’ the man went on, ‘you know what else? His apartment was checked out and… no Destino photo.’

  ‘The one…? The one Song took of…?’

  ‘The carving. In the Destino.’

  ‘Oh…’

  ‘Nothing there, not in the safe, nowhere. That photo… It could have been enough. I saw them both, the Decagon and the carving. Not at the same time, but I remember… You know, my memory, it hasn’t.… My face may have changed, but not inside.’

  ‘I love your face.’

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘It’s true,’ she said, with a calm voice. ‘I do.’

  There was a pause, and the man spoke again. ‘I’m one hundred percent certain the carving was a copy of the design on the Decagon. Or part of it.’

  Nick heard the woman sigh.

  ‘It could have been enough,’ the man said.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘These designs, if you have enough to go on, they draw themselves. You can extrapolate them.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Out to infinity. All we needed was enough to start with…’

  ‘Mm. And the carving…’

  ‘So what it means.… It’s all the more reason we need to get that Decagon back.’

  Another silence. What is this “Decagon” they keep mentioning?

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the woman said. ‘I’ll get it.’

  The man grunted.

  ‘It’s a pity, then, that we got Brad to destroy the old ship,’ she said.

  ‘Brad?’

  ‘Hanson. The Broome cop.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Right.’

  ‘We could have got him to take another photo―’

  ‘Anyway,’ the man said impatiently. ‘We’re going to get the Decagon back aren’t we? So it won’t matter, will it.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll get it.’

  It was the man, this time, who sighed deeply.

  ‘Speaking of Song,’ he said. ‘Have we heard anything?’

  ‘About Roy? Yes. All taken care of. Yesterday morning―’

  ‘Good. Choose more carefully next time, will you?’

  ‘Dominique…’ The woman’s voice was soft with a hard edge. Or was that hard with a soft edge?

  ‘Song’s been doing good work.’

  ‘He has.’

  ‘Where did you find that guy?’ the man asked. ‘No, don’t tell me. But he’s good. Bangkok, Sydney.
Western Australia, he certainly seems to take… pleasure in his work.’

  ‘You mean what he did―’

  ‘I mean all of it’ the man interjected.

  ‘…with Lydia and Aleks?’

  ‘With them, and dealing with those nosey forensics guys.’

  Western Australia, forensics guys… Nick had read something in the paper back home – it would have been only a couple of days ago – about some forensics officers turning up dead in Broome. Could this be them? This was some serious shit…

  ‘Lydia and Aleks…’ the woman said. ‘That was partly me. I wanted them to suffer. I wanted them to really pay for their disloyalty. And I told him… I told him he had to make sure that bitch Lydia was totally humiliated.’

  ‘He certainly did that.’

  ‘I can’t believe her. After all these years. We were best friends!’

  ‘Well obviously you weren’t.’

  ‘We were! And she goes and does that.’

  ‘Hm.’

  Silence. The woman sniffed. Or it could have been a snorting laugh. Who were these people?

  There was a long pause. Nick was wondering whether he shouldn’t be trying to record this.

  ‘One thing’s for sure,’ the man said. ‘We wouldn’t have got past first base without that British woman’s work.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘At the British Museum. The Brits, for all their cock-ups, they can be useful sometimes.’

  There was another pause, and then the man added:

  ‘We have to get that Decagon.’

  And there it is again. The “Decagon”.

  ‘First things first,’ the woman said. ‘Right now we have a plane to catch.’

  ‘Yeah. OK.’

  There was movement, and Nick listened as the couple retreated into their room and closed the sliding door.

  Wow, Nick thought. Jesus Christ.

  What do I do? Go to the cops? But where, here or in Australia…?

  But hang on, what am I thinking, am I insane? Jenn is about to arrive you idiot. Think. If I were to report this, news of our affair would be all over the papers. And wouldn’t they have fun with that on the floor of Parliament.

  Bad idea. Wake up Nick.

  88. 50° 47' 25" N 0° 0' 0" E

  (“Lucinda”, Peacehaven, East Sussex)

  12.30am Greenwich Mean Time (00:30 UTC)

  Monday, 28 October

  Jon woke up suddenly – and was immediately grateful for it too, because the dream had been particularly unpleasant, if not particularly unpredictable.

  He was being chased by the grey-suited detective, Detective Stephens, through what he’d thought at first was London, but it looked more like Paris. He was running down a deserted cobblestone street with Stephens in hot pursuit, like a lumbering, heavy-pawed lion running down its prey, and then the cobblestones started sinking, as if the road were a marsh, and the stones softened and turned into clumps of clay, until it was all just heavy mud he was trying to run through, and he couldn’t pull his feet out… He looked behind to see Stephens, with a big grin on his face, bearing down on him in a small boat with an outboard motor, and he couldn’t escape and the boat continued to bear down on him until it hit him, and ran over the top of him, entombing him in the mud and carving him up with its propeller…

  Being awake though wasn’t such a huge improvement.

  Outside, as if mirroring the state of his mind, the night was in turmoil. Heavy rain and gusting winds were making havoc. He always slept with the blinds open and he didn’t have to get out of bed to be able to see that someone nextdoor had left the washing on the line in their backyard. The way the clothes flapped around, it looked like there was a man hanging there, frantically waving his arms about, struggling to free himself while being choked by an invisible force.

  89. 17° 42' 6" S 168° 19' 10" E

  (Port Vila Airport)

  At the same moment…

  11.30am Vanuatu Time (00:30 UTC)

  Monday, 28 October

  Disturbingly, things were beginning to take on the properties of a dream. Everything was supposed to look different in the daylight, tropical or otherwise, but it was nearly midday and he was still screwed.

  Ruart was standing in the modest surrounds of the departure lounge of Port Vila’s airport and the previous night’s wild excesses were very much in the picture, with Lena, the object of his unbridled carnal desire, sitting opposite him, legs chastely crossed, reading a magazine. The wisdom of taking this trip, even if it was only a night, was beginning to wilt under scrutiny. He was no closer to finding Drayle, or learning anything else about him – this woman was as circumspect as she was titillating – and “only a night” had a hollow ring to it when you looked at how quickly things had changed on the “only a night” that had just passed. With a one night stand, you had a chance of pretending to yourself it never happened, but make it two… There was a reason no-one ever called it a “two-night stand”.

  What had he been thinking? If you could even call it that. Could he blame the equatorial heat? But he knew what had happened. When he agreed to this trip, he’d been lusting after Lena without being fully conscious of the fact, or of how much it was steering his actions.

  Like a puppet on a string.

  It was painful to recall now, but after Lena had left his bungalow (and it wasn’t clear to him why she couldn’t stay, but maybe it was a Roy thing), in his exuberant, post-coital, obsessional mood, he’d thought of that sixties song, “Puppet On A String”, and googled it, and sang along to the YouTube clip like the drunken Frenchman on holiday that he was. Now, though, he was starting to see the ugly side. So yes, in that sense, things did look different in the light of the day, cold, warm or temperate.

  With these sobering thoughts in his head, Ruart looked up and saw Lang on the other side of the lounge, talking to someone in an animated way. He wondered if it was a friend, but something told him it was business. Maybe because the other man was a severe-looking Asian. And suddenly Ruart had a sense of déjà vu, with this man in a tropical-style short-sleeved shirt and large gold watch appearing from nowhere…

  Déjà vu or maybe just dreamt up, because after he looked away for a moment, distracted by an announcement, he looked back again and the man had gone and Lang was browsing the souvenir stand very much on his own.

  It was that moment, more than any other, that told Ruart there was definitely something wrong – but if you’d asked him to explain it, he wouldn’t have been able to.

  90. 19° 31' 54" S 169° 26' 49" E

  (Mount Yasur, Tanna Island, Vanuatu)

  5.30pm Vanuatu Time (06:30 UTC)

  Monday, 28 October

  When they arrived at the rim of the volcano, Mount Yasur, with daypacks on their backs, it was still almost an hour before sunset and Ruart was able to get his first good look into the heart of an active volcano with its lava lake. He also found that his mind was running off on a frolic or two of its own. It was doing some strange things, for sure.

  As he stood there on the dark and barren, rock-strewn moonscape, watching the clouds of ash and vapour billow skywards – and listening to the deep, intermittent, explosive booms that echoed around the crater walls, seemingly emanating from the earth’s very core itself – he suddenly caught himself imagining a large chunk of molten rock being blasted out of the magma below and landing on Lena.

  An uncomfortable dynamic had developed on the way to Mount Yasur. On the flight from Port Vila, and then the hour-and-a-half-long overland journey by four-wheel drive from their resort on the west side of the island (the three of them were sharing a bungalow apparently, which promised to be interesting), through a lush and variable tropical world of plantations, grasslands, rainforest and mountains, Lena had remained steadfastly cold and aloof towards everyone, but towards Ruart in particular. For his part, he’d done nothing. He was convinced that something was going on between Lena and Lang. Meanwhile, Lang had simply continued with his annoying over-friendlin
ess. As a weapon, he suspected, rather than a shield. And the more he thought about this side-trip to Tanna and his fling with Lena the night before, the more regretful he became. His tank of passion was rapidly emptying and his tank of remorse was overflowing.

  And now, a little late perhaps, he was becoming increasingly aware of the danger he’d placed himself in. Not only was there a reasonable chance that Lena was connected to Drayle somehow – and he already had his ‘sparky coincidence’ with the death of Lena’s friend Lydia in Western Australia – but it was beginning to appear highly likely that Lang was connected too. And maybe they “had him sussed” as the expression went; maybe they could see his game. Perhaps, in other words, he’d created a little problem for himself in more ways than one.

  Of course, the chances of a rock actually landing on Lena were too remote for serious consideration: he didn’t believe in luck, and he’d long ago learnt to discount long shots when you had your evidence sorted and knew the odds. But what was interesting to him wasn’t so much the possibility of the rock scenario actually happening, but rather the fact that his mind was going there in the first place.

  Because his imagination then threw up another idea: if Lena were to slip – an easy thing to do on this crater rim, there were loose edges and steep precipices everywhere – and if she were to tumble down into the crater and into the roiling lake of magma at the bottom, and if no-one were to see it happen, her body would be engulfed and dissolved in an instant, beyond reach of discovery or recovery or identification. And just as Lena would disappear, never to be found, so would, maybe, Ruart’s guilt. His guilt, that is, vis-à-vis Marine. (Whether it was guilt, or a fear of being caught out and other complications, was a question for another time.) A little footnote: as Lang was with them, he would have to fall in with her, for such a clean result (sorry, my friend). There were few people on the volcano that particular day, and of the ones that were, none was on their side of the rim, or even within sight of it, so there’d be no witnesses. Especially not once the sun set. No witnesses, other than Ruart.