Red Centre

by Chris Ryan

  Pirroni spoke a few more words into the phone and then cut the connection. He took the pistol out of his waistband and sat down to wait.

  The doctor landed his helicopter in front of the house and was walking through the door within less than fifteen minutes. He was a confident figure in the distinctive grey overalls bearing the flying doctor emblem. He put his medical bag on the floor beside Heather’s still body, and saw the dead spider where Pirroni had squashed it.

  ‘Looks like a Sydney funnel-web,’ he said, and squatted down. ‘A male as well, I reckon. Nasty.’ He opened Heather’s left eye and peered at the pupil. ‘It’s good you got the spider, so we know what anti-venom to give. Although there aren’t many as bad as this. We’re going to need to take her in. We’re a bit low on fuel because I rushed straight here from another call, but don’t worry, I’ve got enough to get her to the hospital.’ He took a needle out of a sterile wrapper and located the vein in the crook of Heather’s arm. ‘It’s only ten kilometres.’

  Pirroni considered his options. He had planned to take the helicopter and get as far away from Daintree as possible before the tape was shown and he was at risk of exposure. But he couldn’t do that on ten kilometres worth of fuel. Still, the flying doctor would have his uses.

  Pirroni took the pistol out of his waistband and hid it in the armchair. He got up and squatted down next to Heather.

  ‘We’ll get her right,’ said the doctor. He inserted the needle in Heather’s vein and fixed it with surgical tape. Then he attached a short tube to the needle and hooked that tube to a longer, flexible one attached to a bottle of saline. One side of the tube was sealed with rubber to allow drugs to be mixed in with the saline going into Heather’s vein. The doctor took an ampoule from his bag.

  ‘What’s in that?’ said Pirroni.

  ‘Anti-venom,’ said the doctor. ‘In the old days there wasn’t much we could do, but if we give this to her and get her to hospital she should be fine.’ He took a sealed syringe from his medical bag and tore off its wrapper.

  ‘Is it powerful?’ said Pirroni.

  ‘Too right it is,’ said the doctor. Using the hypodermic needle he pierced the rubber seal on the ampoule and drew up the liquid into the body of the syringe. ‘You wouldn’t want to be given this if you weren’t sure what spider it was. The wrong anti venom is as bad as the bite itself.’

  ‘Could it kill you?’

  ‘Definitely. Even though she’s in a bad way, I have to give the first dose slowly through a drip as she could have a bad reaction.’

  Pirroni moved closer to Heather. He put his hand to her forehead and frowned with feigned concern. As the doctor started to inject the anti-venom into the saline drip, Pirroni pulled Heather’s arm away violently. The doctor fell forwards. Pirroni grabbed his wrist. With his other hand he grasped the syringe, levered it out of the doctor’s fingers and jabbed it into the doctor’s thigh, ramming the plunger down.

  The doctor yelled and struggled. Pirroni discarded the spent syringe and caught both his wrists, leaning over to pin him to the ground with his weight. The doctor’s face began to turn blotchy; he gulped for breath. He tried to knee Pirroni in the ribs, but the kicks were weak and Pirroni ignored them. A hoarse, rasping sound came from deep in his throat and Pirroni could see through his open mouth that his tongue was becoming fat and swollen. Pirroni continued to hold him down and felt the strength drain out of him as his airway narrowed and then closed.

  After ten minutes Pirroni was satisfied that the doctor had stopped breathing. He released his hold and went to sit in the armchair. He picked up the pistol, just in case. Then he checked his watch and settled down to wait. The doctor’s heart would stop soon. Pirroni turned his attention to Heather, who lay on her back where Pirroni had left her, mouth gaping. Her chest was no longer heaving and she had stopped making the desperate gasping noise as she tried to drag air into her lungs. Her eyes were open, but they were still and dull, like pebbles.

  Presently, Pirroni got up, took hold of the doctor’s arm and pulled him onto his back. The man’s eyes stared up. Pirroni checked for a pulse. Nothing. He manhandled the corpse into a sitting position and began to unbutton the flying doctor’s suit.

  A few minutes later Pirroni emerged from the house wearing the flying doctor uniform. The helicopter was in the drive. Its grey livery and emblem mirrored the colours of the uniform. Too bad it didn’t have enough fuel to get clean away. Pirroni ignored it and went towards his jeep, tossing into the back the doctor’s bag and a large, heavy holdall. He had a back-up plan.

  8

  WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING

  Hex, perched on the end of the bed in his hotel room, was working his computer magic. The others sat in a semicircle on the floor in front of him, waiting. A selection of websites were at Hex’s fingertips. He was the digital shaman, able to unlock secrets with the computer codes at his disposal.

  He scanned through the sites he’d found, his expression grim. ‘I do hope that isn’t Pirroni,’ he said. ‘If it is, he certainly won’t be happy that he’s been found. And he looks like real trouble.’

  Hex continued to flick through the websites. ‘All the stuff we’ve seen before . . .’ He clicked through more links. ‘Oh - here’s something new. MI5 set up an ambush for him at a flat in London. They thought they’d got him when he was visiting some student. Four armed police were sent to arrest him. The student let them in and the police told Pirroni to put his hands up. Instead he got his gun and killed all four of them before they could fire a single shot at him. Every bullet between the eyes.’

  Amber whistled softly.

  Hex was still tapping away. ‘Hmm . . . This is good. Visible distinguishing marks . . . Oh.’ Hex looked at the screen, surprised. ‘He’s got a tattoo on his left forearm. Did our man have a tattoo?’

  Alex looked at Amber. ‘Amber, did you see anything?’

  Amber racked her brains. ‘No, I don’t think so. I’d have noticed something as obvious as a tattoo,’ she mused. ‘Wait a minute - he had a scar, like a burn—’

  Li finished the sentence for her. ‘Like he had had a tattoo removed?’

  Amber nodded. ‘Could be.’

  Hex rattled over the keys again. ‘I’ve found another picture. This is a bit naughty, but it might be interesting.’

  ‘Er . . . a bit naughty?’ said Amber. ‘In what way?’

  ‘It’s a secure website.’ Hex was more interested in the protocols of hacking than in batting double entendres back and forth. ‘Hopefully it’s the police arrest photo.’ The screen flashed up a picture. Hex looked at it closely. ‘Yeah,’ he said after a moment. ‘This is better than the other one. It’s full face.’ He swore under his breath.

  ‘What is it, Hex?’ said Alex. Hex handed him the palmtop. Alex looked at the picture. To the others watching him his expression was unreadable. He handed the palmtop to Paulo.

  Paulo looked at the picture. He nodded very slowly to himself.

  ‘Nice catch, Paulo,’ said Alex quietly.

  Paulo passed the palmtop on. Li and Amber looked at the picture in silence. Amber felt a shiver run down her spine. This time there was no mistaking it: the face in the picture was definitely the man they had seen in the car park the day before.

  When it got back to Hex, he began typing again. ‘Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. Let’s see who’s in US Penitentiary Beaumont in Texas.’ The screen bleeped a few times. ‘Ah,’ said Hex, ‘you think you can keep me out with a few passwords?’ He flipped into another window and accessed another website.

  Hex, like all expert hackers, had developed some powerful software tools, but to save space on his own machine he had hidden them away on servers all over the World Wide Web. When he developed or updated a tool, perhaps for encryption, decryption or password cracking, he would hack into a site, assess the level of security and hide the program in a secret passworded area only he could access. So adept was Hex at covering his tracks that the owners of these serve
rs had no idea they were hosting software that belonged to an outsider. The advantage to Hex was that instead of carrying around dozens of programs and updating them regularly, he only had to store the addresses.

  He typed in a barrage of commands and waited. ‘Here it comes,’ he said in a low voice.

  Paulo was watching Hex’s expression closely. ‘What have you found, Hex?’

  But Hex was already on his feet. ‘The screen’s too small to say for sure. I’ll see if I can get some larger hard copies.’ He was out of the door before anyone could say anything.

  ‘How’s he going to do that?’ wondered Amber.

  After five minutes Hex came back with two sheets of A4 paper. ‘I spoke sweetly to one of the girls at reception and explained I needed some printouts.’ He handed one to Paulo. ‘This one’s the arrest photo.’ He passed over the second one. ‘And this one is from the prison in Texas.’

  Paulo put the two pictures on the table and looked at them in silence. Hex had blown each of them up so that it filled an entire sheet. The faces were similar, with the same Mediterranean eyes and upturned mouth. Superficially, they could be the same person. But having seen the man in the flesh made all the difference. To Paulo, the prison photo looked like a different person, but he couldn’t say exactly why. The man in the arrest photo looked detached and cold. The man in the prison photo had an expression of keenness. But surely it had to be more than just a question of mood.

  Li, seeming to read his mind, put her finger on the crucial detail. ‘One of them may have been made to look like the other by plastic surgery. But the man in jail in Texas uses his face in a different way from the man in the arrest photo. You can see by the lines around his eyes and mouth, the way he habitually smiles or frowns. They are different people.’

  Amber shuddered as her encounter with the man in the car park came back to her. ‘That means Sancho Pirroni got someone to take his place when he went to jail.’

  Hex’s fingers pounded the keys like machine-gun fire. ‘I think it’s time to e-mail all this to a few people,’ he said.

  Pirroni took the road into the rainforest. He drove fast, and made the two-hour drive in one and a half hours. He knew he had reached his destination when he came to the convoy of trucks. The vehicles that had been queuing at the tiny petrol station were now standing in a line beside the road.

  A thickset man in a security guard uniform peered into the car. Pirroni reached for the flying doctor’s hat lying on the passenger seat beside him and showed the badge to the guard. The guard stepped aside and waved him on.

  Pirroni found a place to park and cut the engine. He put on the hat and checked in the jeep’s rearview mirror that it was pulled well down. He hefted his heavy holdall out of the back seat and over one shoulder, then took his doctor’s bag and slammed the door shut. He looked around for a friendly face.

  A technician was walking away from the catering truck, sipping at a plastic cup of iced coffee. Pirroni went up to him. ‘Which way to the tape store?’ he asked.

  The technician looked bemused. ‘The tape store?’

  ‘My colleague left something here when he was up earlier.’

  ‘Has someone hurt themselves already, Doc? Jeez, that was fast going.’

  ‘It was a health and safety check for the crew,’ said Pirroni. ‘My colleague loaned a videotape on snake bites - that sort of thing. I need to collect it.’

  The technician was still puzzled. ‘As far as I know, everything’s in the one location. We’re not allowed to disturb the rainforest too much, you see, on account of there’s only a few million acres of it so one beer can could destroy the whole ecosystem or something. So anything your mate left here would be at the control room, I guess. Or they’ll have thrown it away.’

  ‘Which way is the control room?’ said Pirroni.

  The technician pointed. ‘Just follow the cables, you can’t go wrong.’

  Thick black rubberized cables snaked out of two of the lorries and into the jungle. ‘Thank you,’ said Pirroni. He began to follow them. A few metres from the road they were lifted off the jungle floor on stout pegs driven into the ground, so that they formed a kind of handrail that threaded through the trees.

  Already a path was being formed where personnel were constantly passing back and forth from the trucks to the control room. Here under the trees, visibility was limited. Stout tree trunks were crowded in, making it difficult to see very far ahead, and the light that filtered through from the canopy above was dim and green.

  Pirroni was on his guard, looking and listening as he walked along. He heard footsteps coming towards him and stopped. A man in shorts and a big bush hat bustled past him, ticking off boxes on a clipboard. He glanced at Pirroni and nodded. ‘G’day.’

  ‘G’day,’ said Pirroni in return. He watched the man go before relaxing his grip on the gun under his jacket.

  Pirroni came to a couple of chemical toilets; beyond them was a large wooden structure on stilts. This must be the control room. The cables looped up into the trees, and when he followed them with his eye, he saw they were bundled together and tethered along the side of the building. Out of long habit, he stopped as soon as he had a good view and committed the features of the building to memory. Then he walked all the way around it to check it thoroughly. There was one exit - a wooden staircase. It led up to a gantry like a veranda, with a simple wooden balustrade. It was about five metres off the ground - high enough to be difficult to escape from if jumping was the only option. The trees were too far away to be used as escape routes. Looking at it from underneath he noted that it had a simple wooden floor, no trap doors. The only hole was the access point for the cabling. A window overlooked the camp, where Pirroni could see a group of people moving round a central fire.

  He listened for a moment. Anyone walking about in the control room would be easily audible on the wooden planking. He heard the scrape of a chair, and then another from a different place – there was more than one person in the room. Pirroni waited a little longer but it was not possible to tell how many people were in there. As he heard no footsteps, he figured they were probably all sitting down.

  He did another circuit of the building, looking up at the roof. There were no obvious hatches that could be used as entry points - none that he could see, anyway. He made a mental note to check the ceiling as soon as he got inside. But for now it looked as though the only way in or out was the one door.

  Pirroni hoped he would not need any of this information. But old habits died hard. In all his adult life, he had never entered a building without making sure he knew exactly how other people could get in and how he would get out – and where he would go afterwards.

  He walked to the foot of the stairs and began to climb.

  Two female technicians were in the control room, plus a face Pirroni recognized: Jonny Cale, a famous TV presenter. The technicians didn’t even glance up as he opened the door. They were obviously used to comings and goings all the time.

  A bank of television screens filled one wall about a dozen of them. The pictures showed different views of the jungle camp. Pirroni noted that the contestants were seated on logs around the camp fire, waiting for something to happen.

  It was Jonny Cale who spoke. ‘G’day, Doc. Have we killed one of them already?’

  One of the technicians, who was wearing a black baseball cap, tittered softly and Jonny Cale caught her eye. The other technician concentrated steadfastly on her work.

  Pirroni smiled at Jonny. ‘I won’t disturb you for long. I am looking for a health and safety tape. My colleague left it here earlier.’

  Jonny didn’t remember a health and safety tape but he never thought to question the man as he seemed so confident and certain. ‘Ah, well . . . a tape,’ said Jonny. ‘We’re up to our eyes in them. Could be anywhere.’ He smiled broadly, as though he expected to get a laugh, and looked round at the two women.

  Pirroni kept his voice pleasant. ‘If you don’t mind, I’m in a hurry.’


  The technician in the black baseball cap swung her chair round. ‘It’s probably been put away somewhere by mistake. We’re filling tapes all the time. The ones we’ve recorded today are in that rack there. Once we’ve edited them into a programme they’re moved to one of the vans.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Pirroni squatted down beside the rack. There was some equipment between him and the technicians, which gave him good cover should he need it.

  Jonny stood up. ‘Well, I must love you and leave you, I’m afraid. Time to give this lot a briefing about the game. I’ll be talking to camera three - that right?’

  ‘Fine, Jonny,’ said the technician in the baseball cap.

  Jonny gave the room a dazzling smile and exited.

  There were two tapes in the cupboard, both with labels that indicated they had been used that afternoon. Pirroni looked up. ‘The one I need is not here.’

  ‘Oh well, perhaps it’s got mixed up among the edited tapes and gone to the van,’ said the technician in the baseball cap. ‘That’s back the way you came, then one of the security guards will direct you. Sorry about this.’

  The other technician, who had not spoken until now, looked up. ‘Unless Interpol got it.’

  Her colleague looked blank. ‘Interpol? What are you talking about.’

  ‘Maybe it was when you were having your break. About half an hour ago some guys from Interpol came in and said they needed to investigate some of our tapes.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I swear on my signed Jonny Cale poster I am not.’ Both women burst into a storm of mischievous giggles.

  ‘No, seriously,’ said the technician in the baseball cap. ‘Give.’

  ‘Well, these guys came in, flashed around a big badge with a heavy silver thing on it and said they were seizing the tapes. They didn’t say why. They were armed as well - one of them had this pistol in a shoulder holster.’

  ‘Wow. Were they good-looking?’ The technician’s eyes goggled. She glanced at Pirroni. ‘Sorry, Doc,’ she said, laughing. ‘Sounds like Poirot beat you to it. Still, it does mean they’ll know what to do if they get a snakebite now, I guess! Won’t be quite what they were expecting . . .’ Pirroni laughed too. He stood up. His priority now was to get out unobtrusively. ‘Thanks for your help. I’ll check at the van on my way out anyway.’