‘And that’s his issue,’ said Jules. ‘Hard to believe a bloke who’s done so well out of the last few years would faff around like this just to settle an old score. But that’s his nature as I understand it and . . .’ She paused, wondering how best to put this.
‘Yes?’
The Land Rover grunted as Ganesh took them onto the Stuart Highway, heading north, and picked up speed as they passed the headquarters of the Free Port Development Authority, the real power in the city. A huge, soaring structure of blue and gold glass that was somehow narrower at the base than up on its top floors, it reminded Jules of a rolled-up newspaper.
‘He lost a daughter,’ Jules began. ‘She didn’t make it to Seattle.’
‘I see,’ said Shah, his face unreadable. ‘Did she die in Acapulco, in the collapse?’
‘No. They were on a refugee boat with about a hundred or so other Americans. It wasn’t much of a boat. Not like the Aussie Rules, I’m afraid. It foundered off the coast south of Washington state. A lot of people drowned, apparently. Cesky was lucky to get most of his family ashore, but his smallest girl didn’t make it.’
‘I see,’ Shah said again.
‘Oh God, Shah,’ she blurted suddenly. ‘You remember what it was like. We couldn’t have taken Cesky. He would have led a mutiny within a few days. That’s what –’
The former NCO held up one, huge brown hand.
‘You are not to blame for the death of the child, Miss Julianne. I remember discussing this Cesky with Mr Pieraro after we had escaped Acapulco. He told me he faced down Cesky because he knew the man would have brought us all to grief.’
‘Yeah – Miguel,’ sighed Jules. ‘He was a good bloke . . . Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’ve been so fucking selfish. Cesky will have Miguel at the top of his list. Unless he’s saving him until last. Shah, I have to warn him.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘I have absolutely no idea. I know he and his family were here for a while, in Australia. They were working on one of the government farms down south. I heard he’d applied to go back to the US, as a settler. Well, not back, you know, but . . .’
Shah grunted and lifted his shoulders as a signal that she should move on.
‘They’ve been in the US for a few years now. Homesteaders. Running cattle, of course. I wouldn’t know how to begin looking for him. It’s not like the old days. You can’t just open a phone book. It’s more like the really old days of the bloody Wild West. He’s probably on some ranch in the middle of an awful fucking cowboy movie somewhere. Contactable only by smoke signal and pony express.’
As she began to babble, Shah patted the air in front of him, making a shushing gesture. A couple of police cars screamed past, their blue lights and sirens going.
‘I have contacts in both Seattle and Fort Hood,’ he said. ‘They are both customers, although I must admit, Governor Blackstone is the more reliable. He pays in cash, whereas in Seattle they often try to haggle concessions on salvage as payment. It is most difficult. But I do have contacts. If Mr Pieraro is registered as a settler, I am sure I can find him and you can get a message to him.’
‘Thank you, Shah,’ she said, feeling some measure of relief for the first time that day.
The traffic thickened up but flowed more swiftly as they headed out towards the airport, leaving behind the stop-start driving of the city proper. For a while there was very little sign of the great changes that had remade the face of Darwin in the few years it had been operating as a tax-free entrepot and more recently as a home port for the Combined Fleet. The suburbs were older, more settled, with less evidence of rapid redevelopment. Out near Darwin International Airport, a long stretch of the highway was bounded on the southern side by light manufacturing and wholesaling businesses. A huge pornography supermarket painted bright yellow and pink nestled in next to rival pool-pump vendors and a piping supplier. Out of her window, on the northern side, Jules could see an enormously fat military plane parked on the tarmac at the airport. Light armoured cars bounced down a rear ramp while, in the background, giant bulldozers scraped away at the red earth to build the new, third runway.
‘It’s a pity about those morons blowing themselves up at your place, Shah,’ she said. ‘Not that I’d have wanted them to succeed, of course, but it would’ve been useful to have had a chat. Three times these buggers have had a go at me and I’ve never yet been able to confirm they were Cesky’s hires. Except for one idiot in New York who gave it away before Barbie slotted him.’
‘How so?’ asked Shah as they pulled up at an intersection. Two more Land Rovers pulled in and flanked them. Shah nodded to the drivers, his drivers, and Jules tried to spot Birendra, but he didn’t appear to be in the small convoy.
‘How’d she slot him? . . . No, sorry. Silly question. You mean how did he give it away? The cartel guys opened up on us as we were heading to a prearranged address, where our entirely fictional client had promised there was fortune and glory awaiting us if we could retrieve some documents from a safe in his apartment. Well, not his apartment. He was a lawyer supposedly representing a man called Rubin. Said Rubin had papers giving him drilling rights over some part of the Sonoma field, off the US West Coast.’
‘Did you investigate the claim?’
Jules smiled bitterly. ‘Our investigation consisted of sneaking into New York and getting our arses shot off. Look, I’ll admit, my due diligence wasn’t the best. But it was a plausible story. Establishing exactly who owns what in America right now is a nightmare. Anyway, long story short, we were duped into a free-fire zone by this Rubin character, or his pretend lawyer at least, and there was a team waiting for us near the apartment we were supposed to clean out. Neat, really. I mean, who’s going to notice two more dead bodies in New York? They could’ve dropped anvils tied to elephants on us from the top of the bloody Chrysler Building and nobody would’ve batted an eye. But anyway. They thought they had us and one of these losers called out, “Mr Cesky sends his regards!” Would have been all over red rover if Commando Barbie hadn’t stuck her psychotic, perky little nose in at that point.’
The car grunted forward again and they turned off the main strip into a warren of dusty streets, crowded with light trucks and four-wheel drives. It was a busy part of town, if not the most salubrious locale.
‘You mention this commando named Barbie, again,’ said Shah, looking intrigued. ‘Surely Barbie had a name tag if she was a soldier? A unit patch? Did Mr Rhino not take note of his rescuer?’
Jules smiled, but she was tired and distressed and the gesture faded before reaching her eyes. ‘Again, sorry, Shah. We’ve been picking it over for months now. “Commando Barbie” is just a nickname I gave her. I have no idea who she was, but I’d bet the family silver – if my family still had any – that she was no garden-variety squaddie. She was too good for one thing, and she was operating alone, deep in the badlands. She went through our would-be executioners like a dose of salts, and for a while I thought she might very well neck us too, just for the sake of convenience. No name tags. No unit patches. Just urban-combat battle dress and enough artillery to kit out the Brigade of Gurkhas, with a few whizz-bangs left over for shits and giggles. She never gave us a name, but in the helicopter I thought I heard one bloke call her Cate, or Katie, or something like that.’
The trio of Land Rovers rolled past the Winnellie Hotel-Motel, which seemed to be enjoying full occupancy, to judge by the car park full of pick-ups and utility vehicles, and then turned right into a dogleg corner. A high steel fence, topped by razor wire protected the compound into which they drove. A pair of armed guards, both of them looking like ex-Gurkhas as well, waved them in. The men wore kukri daggers at the hip, although the submachine guns both carried impressed Jules more.
‘The ruse of sending you to New York is interesting,’ said Shah. ‘Quite an elaborate cut-out scheme. If Cesky is behind this, he will be standing well behind. He has much to lose now, being such a prominent figure. I wonder who is acting as his
agent, assuming a now respectable businessman would not hold meetings in his office with potential contract killers.’
Jules shrugged. ‘Couldn’t tell you. Maybe the same guy who fronted us on behalf of Rubin. Who knows? But Cesky’s not that respectable. He’s in construction, for God’s sake. My father dealt with a few of them, said they were all crooks. The unions, the bosses, the companies – all of them. And Cesky wasn’t shy about putting muscle on the street in Seattle when Kipper led his little people’s uprising back after the Wave. He made quite a show of it, I heard. Having dealt with him just briefly, Cesky didn’t strike me as being squeamish about using the strong arm to get his way.’
The three heavy vehicles pulled into parking bays on a dirty concrete slab outside a remarkable office that had been constructed from shipping crates. Jules had heard of apartments in Europe fashioned the same way before the Disappearance, but they were high-end architectural experiments. This looked like frontier engineering. Shah’s headquarters was literally pieced together from metal shipping containers like a giant’s Lego set. He’d had doors and windows cut out; one container had been dropped on top of another, which had been joined end-on-end with a third. The old Gurkha saw her examining the unusual arrangement and smiled.
‘We took over this lot when building materials were in very short supply in Darwin,’ he explained. ‘This was cheap and very easily run up. It works well, although the air-conditioning is a heavy power drain.’
‘I can imagine,’ she replied, as they stepped out of the chilled interior of the vehicle. The oppressive, damp heat of the tropical afternoon slammed down and wrapped itself around her in a heavy shroud. The compound covered a few hundred square yards, and three newer buildings, all sheds, were of more conventional appearance. She had half expected to find a small regiment of armoured cars, even tanks in here, but instead she saw only more off-road vehicles. Land Rovers, a few anonymous sedans, and flat-bed pick-up trucks loaded with crates and strongboxes. At least half of the personnel were Nepalese, like Shah, but the rest, maybe a dozen or so that she could see, were a mix of locals and imports.
‘Come through,’ said Shah, leading her towards the sliding glass door that gave entry into the reception area of his security firm. ‘We shall have some tea, and get properly reacquainted. We have had no chance to do so yet, with the rush of the day. And then we shall set ourselves to determining whether this Cesky creature truly is behind the attempts on our lives and what we might do about it.’
Jules followed him inside, where he was immediately besieged by members of his staff, all with urgent demands on his time. At least in here the air was noticeably cooler and drier.
‘Okay. I could murder a cup of tea,’ she said, more to herself than anyone else.
But beyond that, she had no idea of how to proceed. Henry Cesky might be a crazed revenger, but he was smart, rich and increasingly powerful. He was also a major and very public supporter of the President of the United States.
24
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
Jed Culver was surprised to find himself nervous. Not wetting-his-pants nervous, but more anxious about attending a meeting than he had been in a long while. He was not the sort of man who was prone to unproductive worry and doubt. When he found himself without information, he sought it out. In a situation where he lacked control, he would fight and scheme and work away until he had it. That was why James Kipper valued him as a sword and shield. He did not blanch from the hard necessities, yet as he hurried down the hallway, flanked by his aides, a feeling not unlike indigestion gnawed at him. He recognised it for what it was. Anxiety.
He told no one, of course. Allowed no sign to show on his face or interrupt his stride along the corridors of Echelon’s headquarters in Vancouver. The office was unremarkable, resembling any other civil-service facility. The accents were mainly Canadian and American, although leavened by occasional British and Australian voices and once the unmistakable strangled vowels of a New Zealander.
He was satisfied to see that some standards were maintained here, at least. Like him, everyone was dressed in proper business attire, the men in suits and ties, the women in a wider selection of smart office wear. Kip’s well-known preference for casual clothing hadn’t made much of an impact here, apparently, even though Vancouver and Seattle had grown so close as to become one, in many other ways.
‘Mr Culver.’
Jed looked up from the briefing paper he’d been skimming. One of the reasons Echelon ran such a tight ship was standing in front of him, waiting outside a conference room. Wales Larrison, Deputy Director, Special Clearances and Research.
‘Ah, Director Larrison.’
‘Glad you could make it, sir,’ said Larrison. ‘We don’t get many visitors from so far up the food chain dropping in on us.’
‘I hardly need to,’ Culver replied. ‘Unlike so many of my other charges, you don’t cause me problems. You solve them.’
‘We try.’ The director shrugged. ‘If you’ll follow me, we’re in here today. No staffers, of course.’
Jed felt, rather than saw, the way his two aides bristled at the dismissal. Even hailing from a much-reduced White House, the young men and women who fetched and carried for him were little different from their forebears. Their own importance loomed very large in their consideration.
‘Of course,’ said Culver, defusing any issue with a wave of his hand. ‘Mike, I’ll need the President’s revised schedule for his APEC trip by this afternoon, if you think you can shake that out of the trees over at State. Sally, you go too. It might need both of you yelling at them to wake someone up over there.’
The aides nodded and hurried away to tend to the very important business of making phone calls and establishing just how much more important they were than the people they were talking to.
‘That’ll keep ’em happy for hours,’ he said.
Larrison murmured something to his own aide, a young Welsh woman, to judge by her lilting tone. She made a few notes in a folder before gliding away to attend to whatever villainy her boss had just set in train. When the two men were alone, the Echelon spy chief used a magnetic key to open the solid-looking double doors to the conference room.
Jed set his features to disguise the acid burn in his stomach and stepped through to take his meeting with a killer. That wasn’t the reason for his anxiety. Rather, he knew that by being here he was disobeying a direct order from the President of the United States. He’d done as Kip had asked, by bringing the FBI in on the link between Ozal’s shipping company and Blackstone, but he hadn’t pressed the issue with them, hadn’t made it a priority. The Bureau didn’t have the resources to assign strike teams of special agents on the whims of a political operator like himself, and he trusted them to take their time, working slowly and methodically away at the documents he had provided.
In the meantime, the Chief of Staff would do what he’d always done. He would take control of events, even at risk to himself. He knew there was only one person he trusted to strike hard and fast at Blackstone’s newly exposed weak point. And she was the only person in the room when he and Director Larrison entered.
A young woman, maybe thirty – Jed was increasingly thinking of people in their thirties as young. Her features struck him as handsome rather than pretty. She wasn’t masculine but all the lines and planes of her face seemed very cut and angular, like an athlete who had stripped their body fat back to a single-figure percentage. He was aware of his own very generous belly pulling at the buttons of his waistcoat. He hated himself for doing it, but before he could stop himself, he’d tried to suck in his stomach.
‘Ms Monroe,’ he said, nodding as she looked up from the table, where she’d been reading through a sheaf of papers. Most normal people, he imagined, would’ve been drawn to the view outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. Downtown Vancouver stretched away to the river and the North Shore Mountains in the distance and sparkled under a fierce winter sun. Monroe appeared to have drawn a curtain
specifically to block the vista, or more likely to block any view from the outside, even though he knew the glass had been treated with a film that turned it into a mirror when viewed from the street.
Special Agent Monroe stood up, but waited for Culver to move towards her and extend his hand. Her grip was strong, but it was the rough, calloused texture of her palm that he noticed. It felt like he was shaking hands with a violinist whose second job was bricklaying.
‘Mr Culver,’ she said. Her voice put him right back inside the conversation she’d had with Kip as she flew into the Battle of New York, looking for Baumer. She’d been dressed in black combat coveralls and shouting over the roar of a C-130. She had been angry too, he recalled. Dangerously angry. In person, her voice was quite soft and she spoke with a distant, ironic tone that made him feel as though he’d already been judged.
‘How’s your family, Ms Monroe? Bret and . . . Monique, isn’t it?’
‘Do you care?’ she asked flatly.
‘Caitlin . . .’ growled Wales Larrison.
The assassin sketched a lopsided grin that went nowhere near softening her features.
‘I was just wondering.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Culver,’ said Larrison, frowning at his senior student. ‘Agent Monroe can be unusually and unjustifiably difficult at times.’
Jed blew them both off. His smile was genuine. The ‘you got me’ grin of an old-time grifter caught out by his mark.
‘No. It’s fair enough, Larrison. Like I give a fuck about her family. We all know I read the briefing sheet before coming over here, to give me some personal stake to play when we met. I care about Ms Monroe’s personal affairs as much as she cares about mine, no doubt – minimally, and only so much as it impacts on our business. So, Ms Monroe, how is your family? Are they safe?’
Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 Page 24