Deadly Trust

by J J Cooper

  The second zip tie snapped and he was free. He reached across, found the doorhandle in the blackness and pulled on it. Nothing. The car’s frame had buckled. He leaned across Carter and fumbled for the handle on his door. After precious lost seconds, he found it and pulled. Nothing.

  Only one way out.

  He went headfirst over the front seats and cringed as his hand brushed against the exposed tissue and blood of the Maori driver. Legs pushed hard to propel him through the shattered windscreen. Shards licked at his arms, torso and legs as he worked through to the bonnet.

  Almost there. He urged himself forward and rolled into thick bushes, the wind leaving him for a moment. A pause to listen. They were getting closer.

  Jay was about to run for his life when a thought occurred. He needed Carter’s mobile phone. The phone that would be used to detonate the bomb on Simpson, along with hundreds of others.

  He clawed at the vehicle and pulled himself up. The flashlights drew closer, their beams almost reaching the back of the vehicle. Jay stumbled in the dark over rough foliage as he kept his hands running softly over the damaged bonnet. At the rear passenger side window, he glanced again towards the flashlights. Closer.

  A jagged edge bit at his elbow as he pushed Carter’s mangled leg inside and then reached in. He pulled back as a light shone across the rear window of the vehicle. Instinctively he kept his head at a lower profile, reached in with both hands and grabbed at Carter.

  He grasped the expensive tuxedo and a hand pawed at him.

  Crater let out a groan.

  Jay’s heart raced and he made a mistake. He’d reached too far across Carter. His left wrist too close to Carter’s face. Teeth sunk deep into the angelic face of his mother: a vicious gouge into the tattoo on his wrist. He gritted his teeth, but couldn’t hold back an anguished cry.

  In an instant, the light hit the rear window again. A shout.

  And a gunshot.

  Too high.

  Jay felt for Carter’s face and then jammed a thumb hard into one of his eyes. It was Carter’s turn to cry out.

  Another gunshot.

  Too low.

  No time for the phone. Next bullet was bound to head his way. He threw himself back as a bullet flew by like a mosquito on speed.

  A silent curse, roll and then to his feet as branches flung their way across his path – or so he imagined by the bites they were giving him.

  Two more shots at the car as Jay stumbled through – he just needed distance.

  The half-moon gave out enough light to avoid large objects, not so the undulating ground. An unseen ditch sent Jay sprawling. He held out his hands to cushion the fall, but his face still collected some fern that whipped at him. He halted with a face full of wet leaves and turned back to look towards the smashed car.

  The gunshots had stopped and he could make out the outline of the vehicle in the flashlight beams.

  Then the flashlights searched for him.

  The thick scrub lashed out at Jay as he stumbled through. No destination in mind – the goal was to distance himself from his pursuers. He paused to check behind. His racing heart beat loud against the silent night. The flashlights had faded. The pursuit hadn’t occurred. The pursuers were obviously more interested in Carter than they were in Jay.

  A sense of urgency and purpose to get to Simpson and Toni came to mind. He stepped off ... maybe three or four steps before the earth fell away beneath him.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Falling a few feet down an embankment isn’t so bad when you can see the ground below; in the dark it’s a different story altogether.

  Blood pooled in Jay’s mouth from where he’d bitten down hard to stifle a cry as a result of a broken ankle. The audible crack was an obvious indication of the break. That, and the fact Jay could feel his foot pointing in an unnatural direction. He lay in the mud of the creek bed for what seemed like an eternity, one hand resting on his boot while the other hand lay over his head, pulling at his hair. The pain was excruciating. He opened his eyes to the first rays of morning light piercing through the thick scrub at the edge of the creek. Twenty minutes to a half hour maybe, lying in pain, hoping for it to disappear.

  Unsure of his surroundings, apart from the immediate view within the creek bed, Jay couldn’t be sure of how far away help was. He scanned for two branches: one to bite down on and one to use as a crutch. The first, thankfully, was easy to find. To his right and within arm’s reach was a stick about the size of a school ruler in length and width. Across the other side of the creek bed, about five metres away, lay the second stick he was looking for. More like a branch, green leaves hung from the end. A fresh break from a large pine was evident. He surveyed the ground between him and the branch. Deciding it was too muddy to try to hop, he placed the smaller stick in between his teeth and began to crawl.

  His teeth had almost snapped through the stick by the time Jay had dragged himself to the branch. An agonising effort that had taken at least fifteen minutes to crawl the five metres. Ten more minutes until he’d caught his breath and built up the courage to attempt to stand. The thick mud clung to his clothes as he propped, then clambered upright. With his knee bent, broken ankle hanging, Jay used the stick as a crutch and carefully picked his way towards the far bank. After a short, painful rest, he shimmied on his backside up the small embankment.

  Heavy breaths and more rest, and all Jay could think about as he sat atop the embankment was the time he was wasting. Nothing he could do about the pain – suck it up and concentrate on the task, he told himself. Psychologically, it helped a little.

  The morning sun did its best to soak up the layers of dew clinging to Jay’s pants as he tripped, cursed and stumbled along at a snail’s pace through the thick terrain. He kept the creek to his right as a navigation aid in an effort to hit the road. Unfortunately, he was stumbling upstream, continually stopping when his broken ankle caught a snag and stars floated across his eyes. The hum of passing vehicles, all potential rescuers, teased as he edged closer to the road. With the last ten or so metres centimetre by centimetre on his backside and dragging his broken ankle up another incline, Jay was in survival mode.

  An eerie silence surrounded him as he hit the edge of the bitumen. No traffic. It was as if the passing motorists knew to avoid him. That’s what he told himself, anyway, as his head swayed from side to side, desperately searching up and down the winding road.

  Then the saviour came – all eighteen wheels of it.

  The outer wheels of the Mack truck travelled over the white line near the edge of the road. The same white line Jay was sitting on. Nowhere to run with a broken ankle, so he rolled and wondered if he would still be sucked back onto the road and under the rear wheels of the truck.

  But his mind was overworked and the truck had still been a distance away when the driver had spotted him and applied the brakes. There was not even a need to skid to a halt. In fact, the truck pulled up reasonably fast. Thankfully, as Jay was to later discover, the driver was heading to a quarry for a load of rocks and the truck was empty.

  A door slammed and a heavy voice called out, ‘You okay, mate?’

  Jay remained in the foetal position, still waiting for the vacuum of the passing truck.

  Boots crunched on the gravel by the side of the road. ‘You injured, buddy?’

  Then it clicked for Jay and he turned his head towards the driver.

  Stereotypically, a truck driver wears a singlet, thongs or old boots, and has a beer gut hanging over a pair of short shorts. Not this one. Probably because of safety regulations, but most drivers now are at least in high-visibility long-sleeved shirts, long trousers and steel-capped boots, as was the driver Jay stared at. Not even a beer gut in sight.

  ‘You okay? Do you need me to call an ambulance?’

  Jay started to shake his head, and then nodded. He indicated towards his ankle. ‘Broken.’

  The driver gave Jay a once-over and said, ‘By the looks of you, mate, probably more than an ankle
.’ He pulled out a mobile phone and started dialling. ‘Car accident?’ he asked as he waited for a response. No time to answer before the driver started a conversation with the emergency services operator. As the driver started to explain that there had been a car accident, Jay realised there was a good possibility that a few dead bodies in and around Carter’s vehicle would be hard to explain to local authorities on the spot. It would be all sorted out with time, but that was something Jay had little of. He held his hand up and gave a stop signal to the driver.

  The driver paused mid-sentence and raised a bushy eyebrow.

  ‘No car accident,’ Jay said. ‘Bushwalking.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fell down a gully bushwalking.’

  A disbelieving look before the truck driver shrugged and said into the phone, ‘Bushwalker. Fell down a gully.’

  The driver relayed a few more of Jay’s details to the operator and then gave his own name: Colin Pelzer. He hung up and went back to the cab of his truck. As a couple of cars pulled alongside the truck to check out the commotion, the driver returned with a bottle of water and offered it to Jay.

  ‘You know, mate,’ the driver said. ‘You may want to give a little more thought to your bushwalking story before the authorities arrive or the sightseers start asking questions.’

  Jay greedily sculled down the water and considered his response. He looked over to one of the vehicles that had pulled over on the other side of the road. An older man was pulling out a large medical kit from the rear of the sedan. There wouldn’t be much time for explanation.

  He looked back at Colin and said, ‘I’ll work on the story. In a moment there’ll be good Samaritans all over me putting their first-aid skills to work, and while that’s happening I need you to make a call for me.’

  Colin gave a quick look around and bent next to Jay. ‘Better not be anything illegal.’

  ‘Definitely not. National security matter.’ Jay had limited choice but to put trust in the truck driver. He continued. ‘My father is the head of our national secret intelligence service. You need to call him and tell him where I am. Do you have a GPS in your rig?’

  Colin nodded.

  ‘Good.’ Jay grimaced as another dose of pain shot up his leg. He noticed the man with the medical kit drawing nearer. ‘Take a drive up the road until you come to a part where it looks as if a car has gone off the road and through the bushes. Shouldn’t be too far up. Pass the coordinates on to my father. He’ll know what to do.’ Jay reached up and took the mobile phone from Colin’s hand and punched in his father’s number without hitting the send key.

  The good Samaritan pulled up beside Colin and said, ‘Everything all right, gents?’

  Colin gave him a look that seemed to come straight out of a scene from The Bold and the Beautiful – he paused far too long to be natural. Finally, he grabbed the phone and said, ‘I’m fine, he’s not. I’ve got a call to make.’

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Colin came through, and as Jay was being attended to in the back of an ambulance, a number of low-key government-type cars sped by.

  The perplexed paramedics had been given official orders to keep the ambulance and patient in situ. So they braced Jay’s ankle as best they could and administered what Jay would describe as a cocktail of painkillers. That cocktail, and the happy gas he intermittently self-administered, seemed to make time stand still and speed up all at once. The next thing he knew a gleaming Holden Monaro had pulled up behind the ambulance. Jay tried to blink away the illusion of who debussed from the driver’s seat – a grinning Bill Hunter. Jay’s father emerged from the passenger side of the Monaro, rather pale. They both made their way to the ambulance.

  Jay put the gas mask aside as the two men entered the rear of the ambulance. He and his father embraced and Jay and Bill shook hands before a word was spoken. In typical ‘spy-style’ Ed Ryan motioned for Bill to close the rear doors of the ambulance, which he did.

  Ed Ryan spoke first. ‘Where do we start, son?’

  ‘Firstly, you can explain what the hell you were doing letting this old bastard drive?’ Jay nodded towards Bill.

  ‘Never been so scared,’ Ed replied. ‘Silly bugger was going to drive by himself. I’m the fool who jumped in with him to make sure he didn’t kill himself.’

  ‘I’m still here,’ Bill chipped in. ‘You two want me to wait outside while you talk about me some more?’

  Jay waved him off and gave a grin. ‘It’s great seeing you both. But we’ll celebrate later. We’ve some work to do.’

  With that said, Jay went into detail about his ordeals since running into Carter’s hired thug and Toni at the hospital, culminating in the car crash and the unknown assailants in the other car. Ed and Bill listened intently without interrupting for questions – they knew Jay would be thorough in his debrief.

  After Jay had finished, Ed Ryan took out his mobile phone and made a call. It seemed that no sooner had he finished pressing buttons than he was talking to whoever was on the other end of the call. He asked for a status report, nodded a lot, shook his head a couple of times and then finished by saying he wanted updates every half hour at the latest.

  Ed replaced the phone in his pocket and said, ‘Carter and his two henchmen are dead. Carter had his throat slit and I guess you know what happened to the other two.’

  Jay nodded and asked, ‘The phone?’

  ‘Gone. All valuables and identification missing. Someone wanted it to look like a robbery gone wrong.’

  ‘So we work on the assumption they were after the phone,’ Jay said.

  Bill said, ‘It’s the most valuable item, even more important than Carter’s life. Whoever has that phone has Simpson’s life and that of countless numbers of others in their hands.’

  ‘Agreed,’ replied Ed. ‘We have to work with the knowledge that that’s what they were targeting.’

  ‘Which means we need to get to the seafood festival and to Simpson before they do. Whoever has the phone probably wouldn’t have had the time for technical surveillance so they’ll need to have eyes on the target. They’ll be there watching and waiting for the right moment to detonate, if Simpson doesn’t first.’

  ‘Simpson won’t,’ Ed said.

  ‘I don’t know. He thinks he’s protected against the anthrax.’

  ‘He may be, but Toni won’t let him detonate.’

  ‘Why do I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me?’

  ‘I’ll fill you in on the way. You up for the ride?’

  ‘In this?’

  ‘The Monaro.’

  ‘As long as you’re driving.’

  ‘Now that’s just plain bad manners, Jay,’ Bill said, appearing a little hurt.

  ‘Sorry, mate. Just not enough painkillers in this ambulance.’

  Bill gave a quick look around for something to throw at Jay, then thought better of it. Opening the rear doors to the ambulance, he motioned to one of the paramedics and asked for some crutches. The paramedic seemed nonplussed and retrieved a set from under the second stretcher that Bill and Ed had been sitting on.

  One of the paramedics helped Jay from the ambulance and began showing him how best to use the crutches. Jay figured he would let him do his job, even though he’d spent many a time on crutches due to rugby injuries in the past, and more recently after he’d been shot in the foot. He was practically an expert on crutches. That didn’t stop him nodding in agreement when he was supposed to at the paramedic’s instructions – just showing some gratitude.

  The painkillers had little effect for Jay when it came to the squeeze into the back seat of the two-door Monaro. Many grunts and groans before he eventually sat with his broken leg laying atop the leather upholstery.

  Bill pushed the passenger seat back into place and gave Jay a frustrated look.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re covered in mud, lounging around in a very expensive car on very expensive custom leather seats. I trust you’ll arrange for a detailed clean of m
y car.’

  ‘You charging the agency for your time today?’

  Bill gave a hurtful look and didn’t answer.

  Jay smiled through the pain and said, ‘Add it to the expense claim, mate.’

  ‘Knock it off, you two,’ Ed Ryan said as he climbed into the driver’s seat. ‘Comfy back there, son?’

  ‘Comfy as I’m gonna get.’

  Ed fired up the Monaro and pulled it in behind a police car that already had its lights flashing. The siren sounded on the escort vehicle and they hit the road at speed.

  As they headed towards the city, only slowing for idiots who didn’t want to give way to a police vehicle, Jay started to wonder what his father had meant with his statement about Toni. He patiently waited while his father worked the hands-free mobile phone, coordinating resources to converge on the seafood festival on the outskirts of the city centre.

  At the speed they were travelling, it wasn’t until they were around five minutes out from their destination that Jay had the chance to ask his father for clarification of Toni’s role.

  ‘So, what is it about Toni that you know and I don’t, Dad?’

  Ed Ryan gave a quick look over his shoulder before turning his attention back to the road. ‘Ahh ... yes, Toni,’ he said. ‘Remember the gentleman you met at the farm?’

  Jay knew his father was talking about the CIA agent, but didn’t want to mention it in front of Bill in case it broke some sort of protocol.

  Ed probably sensed his son’s trepidation and said, ‘I’m comfortable discussing the matter in front of Bill. He’s our best security consultant, after all.’

  ‘Thank you, Ed. Glad somebody respects my work ethic.’

  Ed continued to caress the Monaro at speed through the tight bends of Red Hill on the edge of the city and said, ‘You’d want to have a good work ethic for the exuberant fees you charge.’

  Bill’s hands gripped the edge of his seat. More so through the worry of his beloved car getting some kind of damage than being teased by Ed. ‘That’s some kind of gratitude,’ he said. ‘I saved your only son’s life and this is how I’m treated.’