The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  For Sarah

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  First published in 2017

  Copyright © Tony Jones 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  Print ISBN 978 1 76029 500 4

  eBook ISBN 978 1 76063 906 8

  Cover design: Luke Causby/Blue Cork

  Cover images: Mark Owen / Arcangel (front);

  AdobeStock (back); Tony Jones (Ben Dearnley)

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Author’s note

  Acknowledgements

  1.

  Saturday, 16 September 1972

  The figures on the platform blurred as the train gathered speed through Central Station.

  He saw women in spring dresses and men in short sleeves. Sea Eagles’ fans in maroon and white, and others in the Roosters’ tricolours heading out early to the rugby league grand final. A platform guard, a Chinaman in a white shirt, mothers and children.

  Mothers and children! A girl’s face flashed by. No matter how many times he had steeled himself against this thought, these people were real.

  Two boys skylarked in the open doorway of the red rattler, holding on to the poles and leaning out of the carriage as it rushed towards the tunnel. They laughed as the wind lifted their hair. Their mother yelled at them and at the last moment they ducked back inside before the tunnel closed around them.

  Upright columns loomed and passed one after the other—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—and he blinked at the assault on his eyes, forced to look away. It was an odd, nostalgic discomfort: he remembered looking through these windows as a child on his way to the city, the warm bodies of his father and mother pressed close on either side of him.

  The train rattled and bucked and he tightened his grip on the two shopping bags, cradling them between his legs against the movement. He glanced again at his old wristwatch. 10.50 am.

  He looked at the other passengers in the carriage. Had they noticed anything about his movements, something furtive? No, no one was watching him.

  Several of the men on the other side of the carriage were reading newspapers; the woman directly opposite was clasping a handbag on her lap, avoiding eye contact, as if in a doctor’s reception, waiting for some shameful procedure; a boy and his girlfriend whispered to each other, heads together. They were all preoccupied, enclosed in invisible fields of disregard.

  Save the mother, who followed her boys’ every move, ready to intervene to prevent catastrophe. She hadn’t noticed the man with the shopping bags sitting next to her, though he was surely her worst nightmare. He whose senses were so completely engaged and raw and—yes, he could say this—primitive. He registered that, despite her alertness to the obvious dangers to her children, her instincts were dulled. She saw the cliff’s edge but not the lurking predator.

  In the close confines of the tunnel, the racket through the open doors and windows drowned out all other sound. As the noise peaked, the carriage lights suddenly flickered off. The ensuing blackout was accompanied by shrieks and howls as the straining mechanics and couplings, the metal-on-metal scrapings and the electrical contacts produced the sounds of a torture chamber while the decrepit red rattler barrelled through the darkness. If all the passengers screamed at once they would barely be heard above the din. He truly felt like screaming, actually, but he suppressed the urge as though holding back a sneeze.

  When the lights came back on he glanced again at his watch. He told himself not to but it was irresistible. Its imperfect mechanism was like a heart beating too fast. The damn thing was gaining time, moving ahead of itself, ahead of the schedule. He sensed an acceleration of the coming events and took out a handkerchief, wiping sweat from his face. He shouldn’t do that either, but the faulty watch was making it all worse.

  There was a long squeal of brakes, the noise confined and then cavernous as the train thrust out of the tunnel and into the urinous light of Town Hall Station. Green tiles and dark bodies. A muffled station announcement as people rose in the carriage around him. So did he, jerkily in the sudden deceleration.

  He had a shopping bag in each hand and stumbled against the mother, who was now beseeching her sons to wait. The boys ignored her, springing off the still-moving carriage and letting the momentum carry them through the crowd and straight on to the escalator. The mother caught his eye, and he saw a panicked look before she bustled her way to the door.

  He moved in her wake through the parting crowd, which opened as if in response to the mother’s distress. He used her momentum to drag himself along and on to the escalator, saving time now, gaining on his watch. The woman’s thick hips rolled in a steady rhythm as she stomped up the moving stairs.

  The boys were waiting at the top and she rounded on them, grabbing the younger one by the ear and slapping the older one’s cheek. He kept walking, registering a small shock as he passed them. His own mother had never hit him. She’d had a dark mist around her, disappearing before he was the age of either of these boys.

  Not now! Put that memory away …

  He switched the bags to one hand, pulled out his ticket and passed through the barrier before rebalancing his load.

  The underground concourse was full of people and he joined the flow before peeling off to the public toilet. Once inside he edged past men facing the stinking urinals and moved along the row of cubicles to the furthest empty one. He locked himself inside, sat on the toilet seat and took a deep breath. The door in front of him was scored with obscene messages and a crudely drawn cock above a phone number. He grimaced, pulled out his handkerchief, wiped his brow again and dried his hands. He held his right hand out on a horizontal plane. Steady, no shakes.

  He opened one of the shopping bags, took out the old towel that covered the contents and laid it on his knees. He reached down and gently removed a heavy brown package swathed in tape. Attached to the top, and wired to batteries and detonators, was his most accurate watch. Now he set the timer, put the live bomb back in the shopping bag, and covered it up again. Then he repeated this procedure with the bomb in the second bag.

  When he s
tood up it was too quickly. Dizziness. He sat back down, closed his eyes and took slow, deep breaths.

  He visualised the timing devices. He had constructed them himself with utmost care. A perfectionist and highly skilled in this art, he had repeated the procedure of setting the timers in training. But despite all his precautions, his mind turned to Tomislav Lesic. He thought every day about Lesic, whose legs had been blown off when a bomb he was carrying exploded in a quiet street in Petersham.

  Lesic had been an amateur and a fool. His own method was infallible.

  He opened his eyes and checked the time. 11.08 am. He stood again, slowly this time, and flushed the toilet. He picked up the shopping bags. He felt the weight of them down into his boots.

  *

  No one took any notice of the man with two shopping bags climbing the stairs out of the station. He blinked in the sunlight, adjusting his eyes before looking up at the Town Hall clock. 11.12 … That can’t be right!

  He set off briskly through the shoppers and sightseers. Everything had an odd intensity. Families and groups of young people on their way to the cinemas, to Chinatown, to Paddy’s Markets; heavy traffic on George Street; crowded buses throbbing beside him; impatient drivers trying to beat the lights; children teetering along the edge of the footpath.

  He walked downhill towards Haymarket, focusing so intently on the journey that his vision narrowed to a tunnel. He had taken the route before and timed it. It was only a block and a half to number 668, the Adriatic Trade and Travel Centre, his first target.

  He knew the proprietor, Josip Martin, would be there. The man’s real name had been Marijancevic, before he changed it. He had watched him working in the agency, had mapped his work habits.

  He had set his mind to kill Martin.

  His motivation was simple enough. Tito’s regime was evil. Martin was a tool of the regime—a communist who made a living from party contacts in the Belgrade bureaucracy. Martin’s job was to facilitate connections between Australia and Yugoslavia: to arrange tickets, visas, permissions and political contacts for businessmen and tourists.

  For such activities they had designated Martin an enemy. In November last year a splinter group had planted a bomb outside his agency. It exploded in the middle of the night, but it failed to bring his business to a halt. Today the Brotherhood would settle the matter once and for all. They had chosen him to do it. The honour outweighed his fear.

  Josip Martin was busy with a customer and didn’t pay much attention to the man who came into the premises carrying shopping bags, only to leave soon afterwards with only one. Nor did he notice that the missing bag was now concealed behind a chair at the front, next to the shelves displaying tourist brochures for the different regions of Yugoslavia.

  The man walked out of the centre with a colour pamphlet. He tucked it into his coat pocket, checked his watch again. 11.14. He was behind schedule and quickened his pace towards Haymarket. It was two hundred and fifty metres to 736 George Street, his next target. His mission half-complete, he was anxious to be rid of the second shopping bag.

  He reached the Adria Travel Agency and went straight inside. The Serb, Risto Jadorovski, sat at a desk, talking on the telephone. Jadorovski waved to him, indicating that he should take a seat. A young woman was behind the shop counter. She smiled at him. She was a pretty young thing. He hesitated, staring back at her. Then he put down the shopping bag, turned and walked back out through the glass door.

  Jadorovski finished his call and looked up to see the man leaving. He got to his feet, surprised to see the fellow quicken his pace. The puzzled proprietor instinctively felt there was something wrong and rushed to the front of his shop, peering up the street at the retreating figure. The man had started jogging towards Chinatown.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jadorovski noticed the shopping bag leaning against the large plate-glass window facing the street. He picked it up and ran outside, calling to the man. But he did not look back.

  Jadorovski was still standing on the footpath when the first bomb at the Adriatic Trade and Travel Centre exploded. He turned as the flash and roar rushed towards him. The shock wave almost knocked him off his feet. Building materials arced over George Street within a cloud of smoke and dust. Panicked drivers wove about as rubble pelted their cars, thumping the bodywork. Shards of shattered glass, from the high windows on either side of the street, rained on to the footpaths.

  Those in the middle of this deadly downpour covered their heads. A woman was knocked to the ground by falling objects. Other bodies lay prone on the pavement. As cars reached the outer edge of the blast zone, some accelerated past Jadorovski towards Railway Square. Other vehicles pulled over close to where he was standing and spilled wide-eyed occupants on to the street. As the cloud began to dissipate, Jadorovski found himself staggering towards the blast site. His ears were ringing.

  It was then that he realised he was still carrying the shopping bag. He stopped, frozen in the middle of the street. He was covered in a film of dust. Slowly, he put the bag on the ground and bent down to look inside. An old towel concealed the contents. He lifted it and saw a watch, wiring, a brown package.

  His mouth opened in horror. He wanted to run away as fast as he could, but there were people everywhere. At last Jadorovski found his voice.

  ‘Get back! Get back, all of you!’ he screamed. ‘It’s a bomb!’

  The effect was immediate. People ran headlong in every direction away from the locus of the panic. An explosion, a madman with a foreign accent, another bomb. Where are the police? The abandoned shopping bag, so banal in any other context, was now an object of fear and revulsion.

  Jadorovski heard a shout and turned back towards the agency. His young assistant was running towards him. Without warning she plucked up the bag and carried it back into their doorway.

  ‘Jana, what are you doing?’ Jadorovski yelled, chasing after her.

  ‘We have to put this away from the people,’ she said, hurrying through the shop and out the back door. She placed the bag down on the empty footpath in the rear lane and came inside again, pale and shaken.

  ‘Thank God it didn’t explode.’ Jadorovski took her by the shoulders and hugged her. ‘That was very brave.’

  ‘We should tell the police,’ she said, her voice quavering. ‘Before anyone walks past it.’

  ‘The children from the ballet school upstairs,’ Jadorovski cried. ‘We must get them out. I’ll go up there. You find a policeman.’

  They ran back into the chaos on the street. From different directions came the sounds of approaching sirens. The wounded on the ground at the site of the explosion were now being attended to. A group of men were carrying a bloodied body out of the building on what looked like a blown-off door.

  ‘There!’ Jana called, pointing to the flashing lights of a police car. She ran towards it.

  Jadorovski rushed to the street entrance of the ballet school and bounded up the stairs. He arrived breathless at the top, pushed the doors open and found inside a band of tiny angels staring back at him. There were more than twenty young girls in white leotards and frilled skirts, but the wall mirrors seemed to duplicate their numbers.

  The teacher had her back to him, staring out the window into George Street. There were other windows at the back of the studio. Right over the lane.

  ‘Hello,’ he called to the teacher. ‘I’m from the shop downstairs.’

  Jadorovski lowered his voice when he reached her.

  ‘That was a bomb that went off up the street and there is a second one behind this building,’ he rasped in an urgent whisper. ‘We have to get the girls away from those back windows and to a safe place.’

  ‘My God! How do you know?’

  ‘There’s no time to explain. It could go off at any time.’

  ‘But it’s terrible out there. Where can we take them?’

  ‘Let’s get them into the stairs first, away from the back of the building. The police will be here soon.’

  The
y moved the excited, chattering angels into the stairwell and sat them three by three on the steps. Jadorovski told them to wait there and ran back out on to George Street.

  A police car was now parked in front of the agency. Jana was speaking to a policeman while his partner shouted into the car’s radio receiver. Other police arrived and Jadorovski showed them where the girls were sheltering.

  After a radio call to Headquarters, the tiny ballerinas were swiftly evacuated over George Street. An unmarked police car pulled up next, disgorging two detectives. By now a small crowd of onlookers had gathered, having heard news of a second suspicious device.

  One of the plain-clothes men positioned his car across the entrance to Parker Lane and ordered the area to be cordoned off. The elder of the detectives pulled the uniformed men aside and issued a series of instructions. Two constables climbed back into their car and set off at high speed with the siren screaming.

  The old detective beckoned to Jadorovski. ‘A word with you, mate. Your name is?’

  ‘Risto Jadorovski.’

  ‘Yador-offski, you say? Tell me how you spell it.’

  The detective, taking a note as Jadorovski spoke, scrutinised the older man suspiciously.

  ‘Where you from, mate?’

  ‘I came here from Yugoslavia many years ago. I run the travel agency here. We were targeted. A man was behaving strangely in the office. Then I found the shopping bag inside and I saw the man running away.’

  ‘We’ll talk to you about all of that soon enough, but it sounds like you’re the only one who’s seen inside this thing. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, well, I think my assistant, Jana, might have seen it too. She’s the one who put it in the back lane. Away from the people.’

  ‘I’ll get to her in a minute. First, tell me exactly what you saw in the bag.’

  As Jadorovski recounted his story, ambulances began arriving at the bombsite. Paramedics and police had set up a triage and the worst cases were rushed from the scene.

  ‘It’s just awful,’ Jadorovski told the detective. ‘We can’t let this happen again.’

  The detective looked at him grimly. ‘I want you to try and think back. Did you see anything at all on the watch—a metal pointer, something like that, which might show what time it was set to explode?’