The Enemy Within

by Tim Ayliffe

‘Focus on the people. The faces.’

  Bailey rubbed his eyes, trying to focus as he watched the video for a second time. He caught sight of Benny Hunter and his crew but there wasn’t much else.

  ‘Fuck it.’ Bailey bashed his fist on the table. ‘There’s got to be something. Again.’

  The video started for a third time and Bailey was staring so hard at the screen that for a split second his vision went blurry.

  ‘There!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Give it to me.’ Bailey grabbed hold of the laptop and used the keyboard to scroll back a few seconds. ‘You’re kidding me. What the hell’s he doing there?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That guy.’ Bailey leaned forward, tapping the screen on a freeze frame of Hunter with his arm around a guy that Bailey recognised. Hunter had the man in a headlock, tapping his cheek, speaking into his ear. Smiling. ‘The young bloke with Hunter. Russell. His name’s Russell Ratcliffe. He lives in my bloody street.’

  ‘He’s a member of Hunter’s Freedom Front?’

  ‘No idea.’ Bailey pushed back his chair, standing up, rubbing his eyes. He looked at his watch: 5.46 am. ‘What do we do? Wait until sunrise then bang on their door?’

  ‘We’re not waiting for the sun.’

  Before Bailey had a chance to respond, Ronnie was charging up the hallway towards the front door. Bailey grabbed his keys and set off after him, doing his best to close the front door quietly behind them so they didn’t wake Annie and Louis.

  ‘Which house?’ Ronnie was speaking over his shoulder because Bailey still hadn’t caught up. ‘Which house, bubba?’

  ‘Wait!’ Bailey grabbed Ronnie’s arm, making him stop. ‘Hang on a second, would you? We can’t just go charging into my neighbour’s house demanding to speak to their son.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What’s the game plan? What do we say?’

  Ronnie was almost a foot taller than Bailey and he was looking down, scowling. ‘I know exactly what I’m going to say. I’m going to tell them to get their kid out of bed so he can tell us everything he knows about Benny Hunter and why they look like best pals.’

  Bailey had given himself a chance to think and he knew that Ronnie was right. The most recent post they’d read about Australia Day was disturbing and if there really was something coming – another act of violence – then they didn’t have much time.

  ‘Okay. Okay.’

  They only needed to walk another twenty or so paces before Bailey pushed open a wrought-iron gate, leading Ronnie past the tall hedge that separated the Ratcliffes’ townhouse from the street, up the steps to their front door. Ronnie pressed his finger on the doorbell, holding it down, a loud buzzing noise echoing inside and outside too.

  ‘I think that’s probably long enough,’ Bailey said after the bell had been ringing for at least ten seconds. ‘I’m pretty sure they know we’re out here.’

  The sound of footsteps and a light coming on inside the house confirmed it.

  The door flung open and Jenny Ratcliffe appeared, dressing gown pulled tight across her chest, squinting at the lamplight on the porch, a startled look on her face.

  ‘John?’ Jenny’s panic turned to confusion at the sight of Bailey standing there with a large man beside him. ‘What are you doing here? Something wrong?’

  ‘Hi, Jenny. Sorry to disturb.’

  Bailey did his best to sound polite.

  ‘Who is it, Jenny?’

  Bryce Ratcliffe’s voice sounded from the second floor, followed by footsteps as he made his way down the stairs in a pair of boxer shorts and singlet.

  ‘It’s, it’s our neighbour. John. John Bailey and…’

  Before Jenny had finished her sentence her husband appeared beside her at the door. ‘Bailey? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ Bailey said. ‘We’re wondering if we can come in for a minute. Need a quiet word.’

  ‘What about? What’s happened?’

  Ronnie cleared his throat. ‘Where’s Russell?’

  ‘What?’ Bryce said. ‘What’s this got to do with our son? Has something happened? And who are you?’

  ‘I’m Ronnie.’

  Bailey held out his arm, blocking Ronnie from getting any closer. ‘Ronnie Johnson. He’s an old friend of mine and he’s been helping me with a story that I’ve been working on. An investigation. It’s why we’re here. I think Russell may have gotten himself into some trouble. Is he here? I’m so sorry about the time. Bloody early, I know.’

  ‘It’s not even six in the morning,’ Bryce said, clearly miffed. ‘Couldn’t this have waited until a more reasonable hour?’

  ‘Where’s your son?’ Ronnie asked again.

  ‘He’s not here,’ Bryce said, gripping the door with his hand. ‘Are you going to tell me what this is about?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  Ronnie was answering questions with questions, impervious to the concerned looks on the faces of the parents inside the house.

  ‘Staying with a friend. He’s twenty years old, not a boy any more,’ Bryce said, looking at Bailey. ‘Why do you want to speak with him?’

  Ronnie went to say something but Bailey cut him off. ‘I’ll explain, Bryce. Honestly. If you’d just let us come in for a few minutes, there’s something you need to know.’

  Bryce’s shoulders slumped and he loosened his grip on the door, opening it a fraction wider, stealing a look at his wife, who was standing behind him hugging her dressing gown. ‘Okay. But please be quiet. We’ll go into the kitchen. Our daughter’s asleep upstairs.’

  The two unwelcome guests followed the Ratcliffes down the hall and into a lounge area that adjoined the kitchen. Bailey could see the backyard through a large bay window, the moonlight shining on a neat garden, lawn and small wooden shed. The Ratcliffes’ block must have been two or three times the size of Bailey’s and he imagined that his little townhouse would have probably fitted on their back lawn.

  Bryce switched on the light, killing the view outside, gesturing to a flower-patterned sofa. ‘Take a seat.’

  Bailey and Ronnie sat down as instructed, waiting for the Ratcliffes to do the same on the identical sofa on the other side of a glass coffee table.

  ‘So what’s so bloody important that you felt the need to ring my doorbell at stupid o’clock?’

  Bryce hadn’t softened his stance during the short walk from the front to the back of his house and he clearly wasn’t about to offer them a cup of tea and a biscuit.

  Bailey cleared his throat, tapping Ronnie’s leg to let him know that he’d kick things off. ‘There’s no easy way to tell you this. Russell’s been hanging around with some pretty unsavoury characters.’ Bailey paused, knowing he was dancing around the words that he needed to say. ‘White supremacists. Neo-Nazis. A group that may be responsible for the recent spate of racially motivated violence.’

  ‘What?’ Jenny gasped, her right hand touching her lips. ‘Russell isn’t involved in anything like that!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I know this is difficult to hear,’ Bailey said, ‘but it’s true. We need your help to find him because we have reason to believe more violence is being planned. Some kind of attack. We don’t know. Russell may be able to help us. He may know things.’

  ‘No. No. You’ve got this wrong,’ Jenny said, looking at her husband, who was sitting beside her in stony silence. ‘Russell wouldn’t be involved with those people.’

  ‘I know this is hard, Jenny.’ Bailey was trying his best to persist with a diplomatic approach that would have been irking Ronnie. ‘We’re not guessing here. We have footage of Russell with a guy called Benny Hunter. They don’t just know each other, they’re friends. You may have heard of Hunter. He’s been in the news. He’s a white supremacist who leads a group called the Freedom Front. Russell was with Hunter earlier in the week. Did you know that Russell went to see Augustus Strong speak?’

  Jenny was shaking her head, not wanting to believe what she was being told. ‘No.
No. Not my Russell.’

  Bryce put his hand on his wife’s leg and left it there. ‘Jenny. Jenny, wait.’ He was shaking his head. ‘We knew that Russell had changed. We knew it, Jenny. We did.’

  ‘No, Bryce. Don’t.’

  Jenny started sobbing.

  ‘Where’s Russell, Bryce?’ Ronnie joined the conversation. ‘Clearly you know something and, being honest with you, I’m losing patience. Fast.’

  ‘What is it exactly you do, Mr Johnson?’ Bryce said, defensively.

  ‘This and that.’

  ‘Ronnie and I are old friends,’ Bailey said, trying to deflect attention away from any more questions about Ronnie’s curriculum vitae. ‘He’s had a lot of experience with situations like this in his old job in… in law enforcement.’

  ‘As the man said, we have good reason to believe something violent’s about to happen,’ Ronnie said. ‘It’s time for you to tell us everything you know about your son.’

  ‘What d’you mean by something violent?’ Bryce said.

  ‘That’s a question we can’t answer because it hasn’t happened yet.’ Ronnie was getting more blunt with every second that passed. ‘A Black man was murdered in Bankstown last night. Another kid’s in a coma after he was bashed at the pub up the street. More violence is coming. Something bigger. Worse.’

  Bryce was glaring at Ronnie. ‘Like what?’

  ‘I’m not going to sit here speculating with you, pal,’ Ronnie said. ‘You saw what that white supremacist maniac did in Christchurch. Fifty-one people dead. The Walmart massacre in El Paso. Twenty-three dead. You getting it?’

  Bailey liked how Ronnie recited precise numbers. Not rounding up. Not rounding down. The exact numbers of people who died. Like every victim counted.

  ‘You don’t seriously think that –’

  ‘We don’t know anything for sure,’ Bailey cut in. ‘All we know is these people have the capability to do something very bad.’ He was thinking about the guns. ‘That’s why we need your help. Why we need to find Russell. He may know things. He may not. But right now he’s a link we need to find.’

  Jenny stood up, almost shaking. ‘Bryce, can I have a word? In the kitchen?’

  ‘Sit down, Jenny,’ Ronnie said. ‘No one’s going anywhere. You’re hiding something. I can see that. Russell may not have done anything wrong. He may be the good boy you think he is. But it looks to me like you’re protecting him. Now answer the man’s damned question. Where the hell’s your son?’

  Jenny sighed, sitting back down. Shaking. ‘We haven’t seen or spoken to Russell in days, okay? He took off from our holiday house at Blueys. Said he was coming back to Sydney. We don’t know what he’s been doing. Who he’s with.’

  ‘Darling, we need to tell them.’ Bryce let out a long breath, reaching for his wife’s hand, clasping their fingers together. ‘We need to tell them what we found.’

  Jenny was nodding her head, resigned to what was about to happen, needing a moment to prepare. She cleared her throat, laughing nervously, knowing there was no humour to be found. ‘Like any mother, I do my fair share of snooping around. Cleaning up, mostly. Gathering his dirty clothes, replacing them with clean ones. That’s when I might sometimes take a look. See what my boy’s been doing in his room.’

  ‘And?’ Bailey said.

  ‘The bloody internet. YouTube. Russell would sit around all day and night watching videos.’

  ‘What kind of videos?’

  ‘I don’t know… videos about conspiracy theories. Things like that. You know how young people are these days. They hate authority. Questioning everything and anything.’

  Jenny was sounding like she was already making excuses for her son.

  ‘Tell us more about these videos, Jenny,’ Bailey said. ‘What was he watching?’

  ‘I can’t believe this stuff’s allowed to stay up there. They sound so convincing. People with their own channels. People who ramble about philosophy. Immigration. History. War. Russell watched hours of this stuff. Hours and hours. And I also found a book.’

  ‘What book, Jenny?’

  ‘Darling, tell them,’ Bryce said, calmly.

  ‘The book’s called The Great Replacement,’ she said. ‘Written by someone called Camus.’

  ‘Renaud Camus.’

  Bailey had learned all about Camus during his research about where far right extremists get their inspiration.

  ‘Yes. A Frenchman,’ Jenny said. ‘I started reading the book. It was quite confronting. John, you know him. Who is he?’

  ‘Renaud Camus is a conspiracy theorist who believes the white European population is being replaced by people from the Middle East and Africa. He’s often cited as an inspiration for far right nationalist groups. And terrorists.’

  Bryce’s face almost matched the white wall behind him. ‘There’s more. Jenny, tell them.’

  ‘Jenny?’ Bailey said. ‘What else did you find?’

  ‘Printouts of manifestos. The one by that Australian man in Christchurch. The boy in Texas you mentioned.’ Her voice was cracking as she held back tears, like sharing this information had made her realise how potentially dangerous her child had become. ‘We were going to talk to him. We were –’

  ‘What? You never confronted him?’ Ronnie didn’t bother hiding the fact that he was judging them. Whether it was through love or weakness, Jenny and Bryce had failed in a basic duty to society. Protect one another. Do everything within your power to stop bad things from happening. Protect good people from getting hurt. For a guy like Ronnie Johnson, they’d just crossed a line. ‘How long ago did you find this stuff?’

  ‘A few weeks, it wasn’t long,’ Bryce said. ‘But it’s not like we did nothing, either.’

  ‘What’d you do, Bryce?’ Ronnie didn’t bother trying to conceal the contempt in his voice.

  ‘I told an old acquaintance of mine. Someone in the Australian Federal Police. He said he’d talk to Russell, find out whether he was just getting a little carried away, or whether there was really something for us to worry about.’

  A name was blaring in Bailey’s mind, but he had to be sure. ‘What was the name of the policeman?’

  ‘Commander Dominic Harding. We went to school together. He was the year below me. I asked around and we had mutual friends. Someone put us in touch and he agreed to have a quiet word with Russell. They met a couple of weeks ago and Commander Harding called me to tell me there wasn’t anything to worry about. That Russell was just a young man still learning about the world, discovering himself.’

  ‘Did he now?’ Bailey said.

  Harding. The guy was everywhere. In everything.

  ‘Okay, Bailey. We need to move.’ Ronnie knuckle-tapped the table. ‘Bryce. Jenny. You need to tell us right now if you have any idea about your son’s whereabouts. If I learn you’ve omitted anything, I won’t believe it was an accident. And when I come back here you’re going to see a side of me that you can’t imagine possible for someone who has ever worked in the law.’

  Even Bailey was shaken by Ronnie’s words and Bryce looked like he was about to wet himself.

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ Bryce said, sheepishly.

  ‘Get it out, Bryce,’ Ronnie growled.

  ‘Not long after we found those manifestos, I put one of our old phones in the glove box of Russell’s car so I could track his movements.’

  ‘You what?’ Jenny said to her husband, obviously unaware.

  ‘For chrissakes, Jenny!’ Bryce leapt to his feet, squeezing his eyes tightly shut, placing his hands on his head, rubbing his temples. Taking a moment. He turned to look at his wife, who appeared to have shrunk in size on the sofa. ‘I wanted to know where our son was disappearing to late at night. I had to know. For him. For us. I’m his bloody father.’ He took a breath, calming down. ‘I activated a tracking program. Just like the one in Russell’s phone when he was at school.’

  ‘Is the phone still active, Bryce?’ Bailey asked.

  ‘No. The battery died a wee
k or so ago.’

  Ronnie breathed out hard. ‘You were monitoring his movements. Where’d he go?’

  ‘Nowhere that made any sense to me.’

  ‘Was there an address where he visited more than once?’ Ronnie said. ‘I need you to think, Bryce. Think hard.’

  ‘There was one place. A house.’

  ‘Where, Bryce? Where was the house?’

  Ronnie got to his feet, pulling a small notepad and pen from the inside pocket of his jacket. Slamming it down on the coffee table.

  ‘Write it down.’

  CHAPTER 36

  A band of dark grey clouds had transformed the morning, drawing a curtain on the moon and everything else up there, turning Sydney black. The sun would be rising soon but it wasn’t going to get a look-in today because an almighty storm was gathering.

  No rain yet. Not a drop.

  But the air was hot and thick with moisture and the sky was shimmering with electric light. The change was coming. Bailey could hear it whistling in his ears, feel it in his bones.

  ‘I’m driving.’

  ‘Fine,’ Ronnie said, stopping on the footpath beside his Prius. ‘I just need to grab something from the rental.’

  Ronnie popped open the boot, grabbing a black bag with one arm, his bicep bulging with the weight.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Things we might need.’

  Ronnie slammed the boot closed, locking the car, and resumed walking along the footpath towards Bailey’s wagon, not wanting to engage in a conversation about the contents of his bag. Bailey wasn’t much interested either. He knew that Ronnie had a gun in there. Or guns. He also knew that Ronnie knew how to use them. They were about to knock on the door of a house that was connected to a white supremacist group and a shipment of automatic weapons. Turning up empty-handed would have been a bad idea.

  ‘Wait in the car,’ Bailey said, unlocking Ronnie’s door. ‘I need to go inside.’

  ‘Why?’

  Bailey left Ronnie’s question on the footpath and slipped inside the house, quietly opening the door to the room where Annie was sleeping alongside her son.

  ‘Pssst. Pssst. Annie?’ he whispered. ‘Annie, you awake?’