Her nose wrinkled when she hit the lobby. It always smelled of old socks and stale cigarettes, even though it was a no-smoking facility. And presumably the other guests used the laundry facilities. In the distance, she could make out the crunching noise of some raunchy dance tune, the clinking of glasses and silverware, the forced merriment of so many people trying to relieve themselves of the burden of living in a necropolis. She had no desire to explore whatever level of desperation waited in that direction.
Moving through the vaulted lobby, past the gift shop to her left and the pool to her right, she took a quick turn down the corridor leading to the hotel’s gym. It wasn’t crowded at this time of the night, but nor did she have it to herself. Two women were chatting while using the elliptical trainers, barely raising a sweat. In Caitlin’s opinion, if you had the breath to flap your gums you weren’t training hard enough. A couple of guys were pounding through the miles on the treadmills. She’d have picked them for military because of their haircuts and physique even if they hadn’t been wearing PT shorts with the emblem of the USAF printed on them. She was glad her own gym clothing was civilian. She didn’t fancy having to play the Murdoch role with those two. The other users down here she lumped into two broad groups: government and business travellers. All of them huffing and puffing in a desultory fashion, grinding through the same exercises they’d probably been doing for the past ten years. No doubt they’d train at half intensity for about a third of the time they actually needed to before rewarding themselves with a pig-out at the hotel buffet.
Still frowning and feeling bleak, Caitlin started her routine under the black cloud that had settled in over her. She began with a quarter-hour of dynamic stretching before taking the last of the cross trainers and blocking out the inane chatter of the women beside her. It would’ve been easier if she’d had a music player and some headphones, but she didn’t like the way it was possible to zone out when wearing those things. Zoning out was the enemy of situational awareness.
After half an hour she was sufficiently limber to attack the weight stations, which she did with a vengeance for the next hour and a half, mixing up weight training with bursts of high-intensity cardio intervals. One of the air force types did his best to attract her attention, but she froze him out. She wished she could’ve worn her wedding ring to warn these creeps off, but for a field agent, that telltale golden band screamed: Weakness. A pressure point. A chink in the armour.
Isolation was her armour and Caitlin’s was restored by the time she’d finished and was heading back up in the lift, just after ten. Again, it would’ve been nice to have indulged in something as unremarkable as a hot tub, but she had no desire to have to shut down anybody foolish enough to talk to her. And she still had hours of work to get through before she could even think about sleep.
The same security man was standing outside her room, with his feet planted on the carpet like a statue personifying iron steadfastness. She’d have preferred it if he’d been moving around a bit rather than perfecting his North Korean border-guard stoicism. Less chance of boredom and vaguing out. But she thanked him anyway, and said goodnight once he’d supervised her entering the access code and voiceprint.
After a session in the room’s glass and marble shower unit, she was soon propped up in bed, in her dressing gown, ready to start work again. The first file she picked up was from the Inspector General of the Department of Reconstruction and Resettlement, bearing a title in bold red print - Case Note: Baker Lake/Madison/Pieraro/TDF-Bravo 2/14, ivet/13CC.
She sighed. These poor bastards again.
This was exactly the sort of thing Caitlin had not wanted to deal with in her agitated state earlier in the evening. Jed Culver had red-flagged four files like this, where homesteaders had not simply been forced off their farms, but they’d been murdered also. Like the other three she had lined up to read, the Pieraro case was interesting because witnesses had survived. In all four instances, they spoke of attacks by ‘road agents’, who reminded Caitlin of the irregular forces used by third-rate villains like Slobodan Milosevic when they wanted to bring terror to bear, but with a convenient degree of separation from themselves. The road agents, unlike the Serbian militia she had encountered a couple of times, did not present as an irregular arm of state policy. Blackstone condemned them and occasionally even caught a few and executed them. But, she noted, those executions were always carried out summarily, in the field, far from independent verification. No road agent had ever faced trial in Texas, which amounted to a significant absence from the public record of Fort Hood’s oft-repeated insistence that it took the matter of banditry within the Federal Mandate seriously.
Caitlin sipped at her cool water. The Pieraro file was thick. Investigators had pored over everything except the site of the atrocity, which had since been allocated to another family. They’d also conducted interviews with Miguel Pieraro, his daughter Sofia, and interestingly with four other subjects who’d arrived in Kansas City with the Pieraros. A woman, Maive Aronson, and a teenage boy named Adam Coupland, both survivors of a Mormon party that had been driving a herd of cattle to market when set upon by a gang of road agents; Trudi Jessup, a civil servant in the federal government’s food security program; and a Marsha Gross, described in the case note as a ‘camp follower’ of the gang that had attacked Aronson’s party.
‘And thereby hangs a tale, I’ll bet,’ Caitlin said to herself.
Even though she was only doing this research as an exercise in due diligence, to better inform herself about the administration she had been tasked to infiltrate, Caitlin found herself drawn into the story of homesteaders being forced off their land and into flight. She couldn’t help but sympathise with Pieraro’s anguish; his need to choose between avenging himself on the agents and getting his sole surviving child to safety. She thought him a man crushed between the weight of two worlds.
Before she became too deeply enmeshed with the narrative, the Echelon agent called room service and ordered up a pot of coffee and an omelette.
‘Miles to go before I sleep,’ she said to the empty room. But it wasn’t all bad. She had forgotten about Bret and Monique again.
28
NORTH DARWIN, NORTHERN TERRITORY
‘I understand you went for a swim this morning, Mr Shah.’
‘The weather, Detective, it is very hot this time of year.’
Julianne, keen to stay in character as the dutiful junior lawyer, held her pen poised over an old-fashioned legal pad, even though Downing was recording the whole interview on a microcassette. Shah had answered the policeman’s loaded question happily enough, but did not offer to elaborate. It seemed unlike him to play silly buggers with the law. Not for the first time, Jules wondered what the hell was going on here.
Detective Palmer, a powerfully built, thirty-something man wearing what looked like a bespoke suit, leaned back in his gas lift chair and regarded the old Gurkha as if he were an interesting crossword puzzle.
Alerted by Downing, Jules had spied the chairs, six of them in total, as soon as they’d entered the interview room. She recognised the model as a Herman Miller ‘Aeron’, a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of sit-down technology. They were positioned around a long hardwood table. A large mirror threw back their reflections from one wall at the end of the room. Undoubtedly, an observation area stood behind it. But otherwise, the interview room in no way resembled the grim, concrete boxes in which suspects usually found themselves. She had no doubt that somewhere in this building such a space would exist, probably three or four of them. Shah and his legal team were enjoying gentle, kid-gloves treatment, it seemed. Nevertheless, Palmer still wanted to know what he’d been doing down at the Gonzales Road Marina when the Rhino’s boat had blown up.
Jules just hoped nobody would recognise her from the scene. That would have taken some explaining, given she was supposed to be Piers Downing’s assistant.
‘Did you know any of the victims, Mr Shah?’ asked Palmer. ‘Did you have some rea
son for being down there?’
‘The man who was injured, the one I helped pull back to shore, his name is Rhino Ross. He is a friend of mine.’
Jules felt a pulse beating slowly and powerfully in her temple. If he explained too much about his connection to the Rhino, her own role in bringing them together might be exposed. Still, the detective seemed satisfied that Shah had admitted to being at the marina and knowing the victim. She had to admire her Nepalese friend for having the sense to play a straight bat. Her natural inclination when dealing with the authorities was to bury them in bullshit. But Palmer would undoubtedly have been making enquiries over the last couple of hours.
‘Do you believe there might be some connection between the attempted bombing at my house and the attack on Mr Ross today?’ Shah asked.
Palmer pressed his lips together as though forcing himself to remain quiet. ‘Investigations continue. But if you know of anything that might explain why two refugees should be targeted like this, I’m all ears.’
‘I object to the term “refugee”,’ Downing interjected. ‘Mr Shah is a respected and highly valued member of this community.’
‘We respect all the members of our community, Mr Downing,’ said Palmer. ‘Whether they’re black fellas who’ve been here for ten thousand years or reffos who blew in last week, we treat them all the same.’
Jules wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that. Was it sarcasm or sincerity? He had an excellent poker face.
‘My point exactly,’ countered the lawyer, choosing to bet on sarcasm. ‘Is there some reason you dragged my client and myself down here? I’m not sure why we couldn’t have had this conversation by telephone.’
‘Bringing people together, Mr Downing, that’s what I’m all about.’ Palmer leaned back again and crossed his legs. He looked like he might be settling in for the duration. ‘And what brought you and Mr Ross together, Mr Shah? Did you have some reason for visiting him at lunchtime, just before he was blown up? Or was it more of a pop-in visit - a friendly call? You know, just before the fucking bomb exploded.’
Julianne was doing her best to paraphrase the questions in note form, but she’d never learned shorthand and most of her note-taking at college consisted of jotting down phone numbers and the addresses of parties. Part of her, the last remnants of childhood’s trusting naivete she supposed, wanted to be done with the facade and tell Palmer all about New York, the attack in Texas, the Romanian who tried to knife her in Sydney, about Cesky, and Acapulco, and how the two bomb blasts that had gone off in this city over the last week were probably tied in with them. But Shah, who knew all this, revealed nothing to the police officer. And Jules trusted him far more than she did Detective Palmer, in his beautiful hand-stitched suit. So she scratched out her notes, and kept her mouth shut.
‘I would have liked Mr Ross to work for me,’ said Shah. ‘He is a good man and in my business they can be hard to find. But the Rhino, he is very much an individual. An old-fashioned American. He prefers to set his own course. There is no telling this kind of man.’
It was obvious that Palmer was dissatisfied with the answer. He regarded his interviewee with a stony face for at least two seconds.
‘You must surely have some idea of why somebody wants you dead,’ he said eventually. ’Both of you dead.’ His voice took on a harder, embittered edge with every word. ‘Because that’s what we’re talking about here, mate. Somebody has your number. Both you and Mr Ross. And it defies belief that you don’t have any idea who that might be. Come on, give it up. We’re not in court. There’s no fucking rules of evidence to worry about today.’ The detective threw a hostile glare at Downing before continuing. ‘What I do have to worry about is some dickhead running around town blowing up fucking reffos. I’m not having it, Shah. Not on my fucking manor. I don’t know who or what you think you’re protecting, but it’s certainly not your family. If that bomb had gone off at your place the way it was supposed to, your wife and your two daughters would be dead now.’
Jules expected Shah to stiffen at the taunt, and she did see Downing move as if to placate his client. But the old warrior didn’t react at all. Rather than having to calm him down or restrain him, Downing instead picked up a pen and scratched a meaningless doodle onto the yellow legal pad in front of him. Covering his own precipitate reaction.
‘Can we safely assume then, Detective Palmer,’ he said without looking up from the pad, ‘that you haven’t the foggiest idea of why somebody attacked my client? At his home. Would it be the case, Detective, that you don’t even have a lead to be getting on with, since the surviving bomber died without talking? So, is it the case you thought you might have Mr Shah in here this afternoon to see if he could do your job for you?’
Unlike Shah, Palmer did not hide his irritation. Two distinct spots of colour rose to his cheeks, fairly burning with resentment, as he glared at the lawyer.
‘If your client could answer a perfectly simple and reasonable question, it might give me a lead, Mr Downing. But for some reason he seems to have not a single thought on the matter of what connection there might be between the attempted bombing four days ago, and the actual bombing of a known associate of his today. A bombing in which a woman was killed. A good woman, a wife and a mother who will be very much missed by her family.’
The policeman’s face was suffused with angry blotches now. Jules had to take a deep breath to still a swirl of dizziness as an unwanted memory, vivid and gruesome, arose before her eyes. A man cradling the headless body of a woman, his wife, in a foul slick of blood at the marina … She shook herself ever so slightly in an effort to clear the image from her head.
‘Or might it be, Mr Shah,’ Palmer continued, oblivious to her reaction, ‘that bombs explode and people die around you so fucking frequently, it’s barely worth remarking on? I wonder if we shouldn’t be looking at the issue of your security licence. It might be that the background checks weren’t nearly thorough enough, and we’ve missed some unsavoury connections somewhere. The sort of connections we don’t need in this city.’
Julianne felt Downing tap her foot twice with his shoe: Pay attention.
‘That sounds remarkably like a ham-fisted attempt at intimidation, Detective,’ he said, making a great play of looking at the microcassette recorder rather than the police officer. ‘You do understand that my client is a member in good standing of the Chamber of Commerce, the city’s Business Roundtable, and the Free Port Development Authority’s Commercial Consultancy Board?’ He emphasised the last point by cocking an eyebrow at Palmer - a gesture that would go unrecorded on the audiotape, of course.
‘Mr Shah is not some barefoot coolie just off the boat, Detective Palmer. And, unlike some other contractors I could mention, his business is run in an exemplary fashion. I know that because I have oversight of the administrative requirements. Shah Security has never been breached for unauthorised lethality, collateral injury or property damage. You will find all his documentation is in order, including the quarterly reviews by the FPDA’s audit and risk management bureau. The Free Port Development Authority has no reason to find fault with Mr Shah or his operations and his licensing fees are fully paid up. In advance, I might add.’
Rather than reminding the cop of who paid his salary, it only served to enrage him still further.
‘What I know, Mr Downing, is that this city is overrun with security contractors and bottom-feeding mercenaries, and suspending the licence of one for refusing to cooperate with the police isn’t going to make a blind bloody bit of difference to anybody. Except Mr Shah, of course.’
As hard as it was to keep up with and write down the exchanges flying across the hardwood table, Jules persevered. She took a moment to glance up at Shah, however, to see how he was doing. The soldier-turned-businessman remained impassive. Palmer was making a concerted effort to break him down, but Downing was spoiling all of his attacks.
‘When last I checked, Detective, the licensing of military-grade security contractors in the N
orthern Territory was not the responsibility of the local police. Final authority rests with the federal government, and they act on advice from the Free Port Development Authority. I will stand corrected, of course, but I don’t think the development authority is even required to consult with you on such matters.’
Surely Downing had pushed it too far now. Palmer looked as angry as Julianne had ever seen a man look without reaching for a weapon. A vein throbbed dark and purple on the side of his neck and he jutted his chin at the Falklander like a gun turret. Shah pre-empted him before he could fire back a reply.
‘Is there any news of my friend, Detective?’
Palmer stared at him, uncomprehending, for a heartbeat.
‘Mr Ross … Rhino,’ Shah added. ‘We have had no word of him since the explosion. I understand he was evacuated to one of the American ships in port. I wonder if you might have any information about that or his condition.’
The big policeman gave his head a quick shake - not to answer the question in the negative, more to throw off his surprise at it. He patted his jacket pocket as if searching for something. ‘Sorry, I ah … Just give me a second, would you?’
Palmer pushed himself back from the table and stood up to leave, exiting via a door next to the one-way mirror.
‘What the fu -‘ Jules began.
Downing tapped the back of her hand with two fingers and shook his head, almost imperceptibly. He rolled his eyes around the room. They were, of course, still being observed.
Jules nodded and did her best to tidy up the appalling mess of notes she’d scribbled all over her legal pad. She circled a few questions she had written down for herself. Who had informed Palmer that Shah had been down at the marina? Was it significant that the cop didn’t seem to know who she was? Why had they been dragged into the station to answer a couple of questions that, as Downing had pointed out, could just as easily have been dealt with over the phone? The obvious threat to Shah’s business - was it credible? Did anyone stand behind it, or was Palmer overreaching?
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