Her heart thudded hard. “But you don’t think he did it.”
“Not even before you told me about the Palestinian. Ghenghis Bob pushes the whole theory into the realm of the possible. The understandable.”
“You believe me....” Her heart was racing now.
“I think I’m the only one who does,” he said softly.
This time the silence was mutual, growing between them, throbbing with possibilities.
Steve was the first to speak again. In the same low voice, he said; “I’m on duty, Montana, and desk-bound for today.”
She understood what he wasn’t saying as clearly as if he had shouted it at her.
It was all up to her.
Chapter Nine
When Montana reached Yallingup after a wild three-hour drive down from the city, she found it buzzing with alarm.
She stopped to buy gas at her usual garage. Roo, the young guy who worked casual hours there, was bursting with the news. While he pumped gas, he brought Montana up to date on the latest breaking headlines, including the fact that the outlaw the police were looking for had actually threatened Roo himself.
“At my other job,” he said, nodding across the street toward the café. “He sat at the table, cool as a cucumber and made me tell him everything they were saying about him. But when the cops showed up he was off like a shot.”
“My goodness!” Montana exclaimed, to encourage him to give up more information.
Roo did give more, all about how the outlaw had run amok in the center of town. The police had thrown up cordons and barriers and were combing the bush for him. They’d called in volunteers.
And dogs.
Roo winked at her. “Not to worry, though. Gerry, back there, has his old thirty-two rifle under the counter. Just in case.”
“Aren’t thirty-twos illegal here?”
Roo snorted. “Who gives a shit about that?” His eyes were shining, his face glowing. Clearly, this was the most exciting day of his year.
Montana drove slowly down the coast after that, stopping at all the usual surfers’ beaches, looking for anyone she knew. The problem was twofold. It was a weekday and she had no idea what the people she knew in Yallingup and Margaret’s did during the week. Some of them worked. Some of them were seasonal surfers and lived elsewhere. Others commuted from the city on weekends, like her.
The beaches were mostly empty—not even swimmers were out. It was the middle of a blazing hot afternoon and the heat pulsing at her from the overhead sun was like standing in front of the open door of a furnace. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, she thought, quoting Noel Coward to herself. And let’s not forget Caden Rawn is out there somewhere, too.
At Smiths Beach, she found Jacko sitting on the sand staring at the waves, his long Malibu board beside him. Perched on the board was a battery-powered boom box, with the radio tuned into the local FM station.
She dropped her pumps onto the sand and sat down beside him. “I hear there’s trouble here and in Marg’s.”
Jacko lifted his brow at her appearance. It was a mild reaction considering that no one here had ever seen her in anything but cotton skirts and tops, bathers or a wetsuit. She was wearing a three-piece Armani, her hair was up and she wore makeup.
“It’s that guy, Caden Rawn, that they’re chasing,” Montana said.
“They’re not giving names over the radio.”
“But it’s him,” she assured him.
Jacko’s lips thinned. Then he nodded. “And you let him go.”
That stung because it held a core of truth. She had encouraged him to run away. But she didn’t have the time to explain why and she didn’t know Jacko well enough to give him the full story. “He just laid out five guys coming after him with knives. I was supposed to stop him by myself? It’s not like you stuck around.”
Jacko looked away.
“Listen, that’s not why I’m here. I’m looking for someone else. Do you remember the guys in the corner of the room, closest to the washroom doors?”
“Someone besides Rabbit?” Jacko’s eyes narrowed. “You know Rabbit’s dead, don’t you?”
“Was he a good friend of yours?”
Jacko shrugged. “I’d have a hard time calling him any sort of friend at all. It’s not like he was into surfing. He just always seemed to be...around. You know?”
“Don’t feel too sorry for him, Jacko. He was dealing.”
Jacko shrugged. “So?”
“Not just the fun stuff. Smack, crack, meth. All of it and more.” She wrapped her arms around her knees. “I think he was into some very heavy stuff. The heaviest. Worse than the smack, even.”
“What could be worse?”
“I’m not sure and you’ll have to trust me for a bit until I am sure. That’s why I need your help now. Do you remember those guys in the corner, during the fight?”
“Is this what you do? For a living?”
She hesitated. Then; “No, Jacko. I’m being truthful with you because I like you. I’m way out on a limb here. Professionally and personally. My day job gives me access to unique information and that is why I’m in a position to follow this through, but this is not my job. I’m not a spy or anything. I’m just a clerk at the consulate. I process passports and visas and bail Americans out when they get in trouble with the local laws. This is something totally different.”
“And you can’t or won’t tell me what it is?”
“Bit of both,” she freely admitted. “If I’m wrong, I’m going to feel like the world’s biggest idiot. I’d prefer that you keep thinking well of me, because if I do have this wrong, then getting busted back to the States will just be the beginning of what I’ll have to face.”
His eyes narrowed again. “But you don’t think it is nothing, do you?”
“No, I don’t think it’s nothing at all. I’m scared, Jacko. If I’m right, then this is so big I’m not sure I can do it by myself.”
“You? You’re scared?”
She could feel herself blushing and looked away. “You were in South Africa when all those terrible things were happening. Apartheid. Right?”
He took a deep breath. Let it out. “Right.”
“Were you scared, when it was all happening? Were you afraid to do anything about it?”
He kept his eyes on the waves. “I was just a kid.”
“So you were scared, then.”
Slowly, he shook his head. “Nope. Truth is, I didn’t really know it was going on. It all seemed to happen behind the scenes. You could walk down the street, see people going about their lives...perfectly normal, right?”
She nodded.
“We were all blind to it. It wasn’t just the kids who were too young to understand. It was the adults, too. It was easier to just not deal with it. It all happened where you couldn’t see it, so you didn’t have to deal with it if you really felt that way. So people were blind to it.”
“Why were they blind?”
“Perhaps they were scared, like you think, but I don’t think so. I think that mostly, they just couldn’t believe things like that could happen in their own town.”
Chill fingers walked up her spine. “Jacko.”
He turned to look at her, his painted eyes etched with a remembered pain.
“I think that’s what’s happening to people here.”
He tapped his thumb against his lip, absorbing that one. “If you do need help, ask me. You hear me?”
She was absurdly touched. “Thanks, Jacko. But you’re not Australian or American. You’re not even part of this.”
“Don’t be bloody stupid,” he said at once, his very blue eyes blazing. “You’re in it, right?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then that’s all the reason I need. Same goes for anyone here.”
She blinked. “Oh....” It was all she could manage. She simply had not considered it in that light before. “Thanks, Jacko.”
“Anyway,” he said roughly, pushing a hand through his
hair. “The guys in the corner. What about them?”
“You remember them?”
“The long-haired hippie from the throw-back commune on Highway Twelve and the Harley granddad—you know, the one that rolls his own smokes and has yellow fingers and teeth?”
She nodded. She knew who he meant and the reminder popped an image of the moment the pair he’d just described had looked at each other in bewilderment when the man fighting Caden Rawn had called out in Arabic.
“The third one,” she said. “He’s the one.”
“Don’t know him. But I’ve seen him here and there, oh, for about a year now. He doesn’t show up often but he has a way of just appearing. You know?”
Again, she nodded. Jacko was the perfect person to tap for this sort of information. He was an observer who stayed on the sidelines, taking mental notes. “Any idea where he lives?”
“Not in town. Not Yallingup. But he doesn’t have a car—leastways, he doesn’t have a car that he brings into town.”
“You think he walks in from somewhere?”
“Maybe. But that’s not a surprise around here.”
What he meant was that the area was not just a Mecca for surfers, but also for a vast range of alternative-lifers, dropouts, those who wanted to live off the land, pseudo-religious communes, straight communes and lots of people quietly going about the business of living away from the madding crowd.
Realtors in the area made a fortune buying up farming land and subdividing it into tiny parcels. If the land had trees on it, so much the better. With the wild coastline and the huge tract of national park running across the peninsula acting as a buffer, it was a sure bet that metropolis-style living would never reach them here.
Heading into town on foot, on a horse, on a bicycle or even on a donkey cart wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows around here. You’d more likely get a polite nod of acknowledgement for your conservationist behavior.
“So he walks in from somewhere?”
Jacko looked out to sea, his eyes narrowing again. This time, it was against the dazzle of the sun bouncing off the waves. “Got close to him once. I like camping...but you can’t ever forget that smell in your clothes. Wood smoke and damp. He reeked of it.”
A bush man.
“If I found him, I could try following him back,” she said thoughtfully.
“You any good in the bush?” Jacko asked.
“Are you?”
“Not me. I’m a city boy. Jo’burg, born and raised.”
“Well, I’ll just have to get by. Give me some places to start. Where do you remember seeing him before, apart from the Pink Galah?”
“The supermarket, with a couple of his mates. The camping store. Harvey’s Hardware on the corner. The health food store. The library. He’s likely to be in town today, too.”
“Because of his friends in the hospital?” She already knew he had been there, at least once. She stood up and brushed beach sand from her suit. “I’ll float around, see what it gets me.”
“I’ve been sitting here thinking about his friends in hospital. How they all got there alive, then started dropping off the perch.”
“One killed himself.”
“Did he.” It wasn’t a question. Jacko touched his lips in the same thoughtful way. “They’re saying Rawn went back to finish the job off. They say he snuck into the hospital and arranged it all. But I watched most of that fight. He was all over the top of them. Even five to one. He could have finished them off right there and then and if he had a decent sense of self-preservation, he should have. It would have saved him a pile of trouble. But he left them alive. So why go to the trouble of sneaking into the hospital later?”
“Maybe because it wasn’t him that went to the hospital later.” Montana had been playing with this idea from a different angle—if Rawn had no reason to do it, who did? Someone who didn’t want the world to know that the men in the hospital weren’t westerners, perhaps? No other explanation stood the test of reason.
“You’re going to stay here?” she asked Jacko.
“‘Til the sun hits the sea. Then I’ll take in some waves. Then I’ll go home and worry about you being safe. Be careful, okay?”
* * * * *
Montana’s gut said to try the library first, but the supermarket and the main street arcade were closer, so she sacrificed instinct for efficiency and quartered both locations for thirty minutes each. No luck. As she strode back to her car, she realized that she’d have to plant herself at the supermarket all day to actually spot Ghenghis Bob there, if he even came in that day. The chances of him being in the store at the exact moment she happened to swing by were astronomically small.
It made the library an even better likelihood. People tended to linger there. It was also the odd man out in the list of places Jacko remembered seeing Ghenghis Bob. Everywhere else was supplies oriented—the supermarket, the main street shopping mall that featured clothing and camping equipment stores, more food stores, a health food store that she finally realized was a good place to pick up basic medical supplies. The pubs, of course. Then the library...for what? Terrorists didn’t usually thirst for knowledge. They considered their knowledge already complete and beyond question.
She parked in the public car park attached to the library, although for a moment she weighed up the advisability of parking so openly. But if Ghenghis Bob had taken any notice of her at all, he would have mentally placed her as part of the local surfing scene, so to start sneaking around now would alert him.
She wished briefly that she’d stopped by her flat and picked up weekend clothes. The Armani suit would make her stand out, down here. Marg’s was a sarong and tee-shirt town.
There was nothing she could do about it now.
It was surprisingly busy in the library, for a weekday afternoon. She took stock of the people in there, as she pretended to browse the fiction stacks, and saw the pattern. Lots of people were reading at the tables; not as many were actually checking out books. In summer, the majority of the spiked population in Margaret River was transitory—tourists camped for a couple of weeks or the summer, or for the Christmas/New Year break, surfers in for one of the series of surfing competitions that ran almost year round, and the semi-permanent population that were checking Marg’s out for a year before committing to the lifestyle. A good portion of the permanent population would be resistant to owning a library card—it would put their names and addresses on an official database.
Therefore, most of the library visitors did their reading at the tables.
So much the better. Montana moved to the big revolving towers of magazines and periodicals and placed herself in a position where she could scan the tables. She’d had a very good look at Ghenghis Bob from across the room on Sunday night. She’d spent longer staring at his grainy image on the computer this week. She was confident she could pick him out from across this room.
He wasn’t at the tables—not that she could see from this angle. There were information pamphlets in a stand on the other side of the room and from there she could get a glimpse of the three men whose faces she hadn’t been able to see in profile or in full.
She made her way around the room, making it look casual. Halfway around she saw there was a whole other wing to the building. It was an ‘L’ shape and the wing had banks of computers in carrels. Every single one of the computers had a user.
She spun around and slipped into the non-fiction stacks to give herself time to think, as ideas blossomed rapidly. Of course, of course. The computers. They’d have Internet access. What better way to stay in touch with the world at large? A free email account on one of the more popular sites. If he kept closing down the accounts and moving onto another one every few weeks, it would make him virtually untraceable. Free code would take care of the possibility that someone might casually trip over the account and read the contents.
Her heart thudding at double-time, Montana eased her way down the stacks, running her fingers along the spines, pretending she w
as looking for something.
The last stack held history books. On the other side, the side facing out to the computer area, were reference materials, encyclopedias and dictionaries. She stayed with the history books and peered through the space between the tops of the books and the shelf above. By moving along the stack and by reaching for books on upper and lower shelves, she could see virtually everyone at the computers.
He was at the computer in the farthest corner. There was a pillar behind him, hiding most of his screen, and the carrel took care of the rest. Montana would have to walk up right behind him to see his screen and he would likely have another screen he could flip over to if someone tried it.
Montana blindly opened a book and thumbed through it, trying to figure out what she should do next. Obviously, she had to follow him. It was beginning to dawn on her that she was the wrong person to be doing this. She had no training for it, no idea of traps and pitfalls even a rank beginner in the intelligence game would know to watch out for. She still didn’t know if this really was Ghenghis Bob or some poor slob who happened to look a lot like him.
“Gut instinct,” she muttered to herself. She’d been running on gut instinct all day, and the only time she’d come off the rails was when she hadn’t listened to it. So play the odds. If she followed him and he turned out to be a used-gnome salesman on holidays from Outer Mongolia, then she could go back to work and let Nelson kick her ass as she deserved.
But if he wasn’t...
Damn it, he wasn’t a salesman. She knew he wasn’t anything of the sort. He’d stood and watched five men with knives try to kill an unarmed man and he’d been completely unmoved by it. The fifth man had used Arabic to appeal to him. The words were enough to condemn him. “We weren’t told he was a trained fighter!”
This was Ghenghis Bob.
So don’t screw up, Montana. You’ve found him, you don’t have time to go get professional help and if he figures out he’s being followed then he’ll be gone and no one will be able to find him again.
No, no, you stupid idiot! You’re not thinking like a terrorist who’s used to killing, who thinks all westerners are a waste of oxygen. He’s not going to do a bunk. Not if he thinks it’s just one person following him—a beach-bum surfer chick, at that.
Terror Stash Page 10