‘Yes, I do believe you might be sweet on me. Or perhaps it’s my batty sister who takes your fancy.’
‘It is you, it is you, sweet Abigail. But do bid farewell to Edwina for me. I thought she would have returned from the rose garden by now.’
Abigail shook her head. ‘She may well have set off to fetch you a tea-rose, George, but if she remembers to come back at all, she’ll probably be bringing a shoe.’
‘She’s not that forgetful, surely.’
‘She has her moments. Ah, speak of the fairy here she comes. And what did I say? She goes off for a rose and comes back with a boy.’
George Gantry looked horrified for a moment but collected himself into a guffaw, fortunately before Abigail noticed his lapse. Batty Edwina West had indeed returned with a boy, and that boy happened to be Jesse-Jay Baggett. And while it mattered not if the Lieutenant-Governor was seen out and about with a citizen on the public streets of Houston, an identifiable connection with the lad was probably not sensible. Bluffing, however, had won Gantry many a game of high-stakes poker so…
‘Jesse lad,’ he said, ‘I thought you were catching up on the club paperwork in the Humvee.’
Jesse-Jay, his eyes wide as if he’d been caught by an old lady he’d not seen coming, said, ‘I was sir. But then I was abducted,’ he raised an eyebrow at Edwina, ‘by this lady who insisted I come have some tea.’
‘Oh Edie,’ Abigail chided.
‘I couldn’t leave the poor boy sitting in that tank, Abigail. And you, George, you should know better than to exclude anyone from our hospitality. I mean, you wouldn’t have left the President sitting in your tank the other day, now would you?’
Gantry shrugged. ‘Now that would have been tempting indeed.’
‘I wish you had,’ Abigail said. ‘Now at least do the courtesy of introducing the boy before you leave, George.’
‘Of course. Mrs Abigail West, Miss Edwina van Louden, this here is a young constituent of mine, Jesse -Jarvis. He ah, is a member of the Texas Star Brigade, a kind of boys’ club of which I’m the sponsor.’
‘Oh how nice,’ Edie said. ‘Are there more like you then, Jesse?’
Jesse-Jay shrugged. ‘There used to be more of us.’
Nuevo Laredo, Mexico
Tuesday 11 am
Scott was staring up at the upholstered roof of Laura’s car while she drove the streets of Nuevo Laredo, a picturesque town south of the Rio Grande; or the Rio Bravo, as the locals on this side of the Rio called it. He wished he was still sleeping. Right now he felt sapped of energy and for a second wondered if he was unconscious, or dead, until with a supreme effort he managed to open his mouth. ‘Aargh.’
‘Oh very eloquent Scott,’ Laura noted, then went on with her travelogue. ‘This here town has a 12-hectare commercial area designated for legalised prostitution; called Boy’s Town. It’s basically a walled nocturnal playground of cantinas, restaurants, brothels, ‘cribs’ for freelance hookers, and transvestite bars.’
‘That’s nice, Laura. Are we going there now then?’
‘No Scott, we’re going to the police station.’
‘That would’ve been my next guess.’ Scott had slept most of the drive to the border and then woken up long enough to crash again in their motel - most pleasantly in the arms of Laura Serrano. Since then he’d been awake and asleep and awake all morning, while Ms CIA drove around looking for the American couple who had ‘dropped the dime’ on the software pirates. It transpired the elusive couple were 21st century hippies, or 20th century left-overs and, if they were even still in Nuevo Laredo, there were many places they’d been known to hang out. At least that was according to each of the people Laura had spoken to so far. Each had simply passed her on to the next joint. Sometimes literally.
‘You smell like marijuana,’ Scott said.
‘You should’ve smelt the place I just spent an hour in. On my own, while you slept in the car. Some research assistant you turned out to be.’
‘Hey, when the CIA puts me on their payroll I’ll be happy to sit around with dope heads and exchange ‘wows’. Why are we going to the police station?’
‘Because I think something might have happened to our tipsters,’ Laura said, as she parked the car and swung her legs out the door. ‘I’d like you to come with me this time.’
‘Okay,’ Scott said, joining her on the footpath. ‘But how come you want me to come in here, but didn’t care about the dope den?’
‘Let me see?’ Laura smiled at him. ‘Pot heads versus Mexican police, where would a girl feel safest.’
‘We don’t need no shtinking badges,’ Scott said.
‘Exactly. Come on.’
It took Laura precisely 67 minutes to get it out of the local police chief that Jake Collins, one of her lost hippies, was under police protection. The man and his partner, expat Australian Celia Bridle, had been the victims of a shooting the day before. She had not survived the incident in the very early hours of Monday morning; he was in a stable condition in the Nuevo Laredo Hospital. The Chief then helpfully provided a Deputy to accompany Laura and Scott to the hospital, so they wouldn’t have to spend another hour getting past the guard to see Señor Collins.
Jake Collins, as it turned out, was in the process of trying to check out of the hospital against the advice of the doctor and the wishes of the Deputy on duty.
Scott watched as Laura secured the scene by offering to buy everyone coffee at the café next door. Five minutes later the cops were happily sitting up at the counter, and Laura and Scott were seated in a booth with a grief-stricken survivor.
‘Now you guys turn up,’ said the man who looked like a tie-dyed General Custer. ‘We contacted you over a week ago. We told you some serious shit. We waited for you to contact us back. And then the evil little ferret turns up, tells us he’s been sent to ‘get us’ for informing on some brigade, or something - to the F-B-I and the C-I-freakin-A - and then he shoots us. The guy just shoots us.’ Collins pointed to his chest. ‘The only reason I’m not dead - dead too - is because I was wearing a shitload of weed, packed in a thick leather case, under my shirt.’
‘Do you want us to arrange to get you out of here and back to the States, Mr Collins?’ Laura asked.
‘What do you mean ‘arrange’, sweetheart? And don’t call me mister; my name’s Jake. I go back and forth over one of those bridges every week. I’m an American, no one ever asks questions. Hell, no one asks the Mexicans I take with me anything neither.’
‘Can I ask you something, Jake?’ Scott said.
‘Be my guest,’ he said, as the waitress delivered their coffees.
‘I may be wrong, but I’m guessing your business is a supply and demand one. So I’m wondering why you would approach the CIA about anything, let alone software pirating.’
‘The FBI. We rang the FBI not the CIA,’ Jake said. ‘And why? Because Celia said it wasn’t right that Americans were obviously buying guns and shit in order to harm other Americans. Now, it took an Australian to make me see the truth in that. Also, to be honest, I wanted to put a certain lying sonofabitch out of business.’
‘Guns?’ Laura repeated.
‘Yes,’ Jake nodded, adding a fourth spoon of sugar to his cup. ‘We had dinner, about six months ago, with a now very ex-associate, Wendell Burke,’ Jake spat the name. ‘He is a pirate of music and games and movies. At this meal, there was also an Arabian called, Assad bin Something; and these two rattlesnakes, Jesse and Mike, from Texas. They were talking paranoid bullshit about how the government is selling America to the Russians or the Jews or the Martians. I kinda tuned out.
‘But they’d come to see my now ex-friend about this game that he’d got special for them, which had instructions for blowing things up. Again, you know, I wasn’t really listening. I thought that’s what you did with all them games; you know, blow shit up.
‘But then they - the Texans - and the Saudi dude also got to talking real guns and explosives, as in the purchase of. That’s when Ce
lia and I chose to be elsewhere. We don’t, didn’t, like guns as such - and now I reckon that was a premonition.’
‘Did you see this game they were talking about?’ Scott asked.
‘I’ve got a copy. Wendell gave it to us, along with some movies and shit, about a week after that meeting.’
Laura sipped her coffee. ‘Where’s Wendell now?’
Jake shrugged. ‘Cheating the hell out of folks in Stateside Laredo.’
‘Have you seen any of the other men since?’ Laura asked.
Jake Collins gave her a look. He pointed at his chest again, and repeated the look. ‘The wiry little ferret named Jesse shot me and killed my Celia. If you find him, I’ll go anywhere to testify against him; but I do not actually want to leave Mexico unless I have to.’
‘You really only contacted us because you had a beef with this Wendell Burke, right?’ Laura said.
Jake rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah. But Celia was right, even if it got her killed; and it did get her killed, which means she was right. Do you think maybe they were the dudes that blew up Dallas?’
‘That is a definite possibility, Jake.’
‘Then she was doubly right and so I’ll do whatever you need.’
‘Okay, I have some surveillance photos taken at Fort Hood the day of the attack there, which I’d really like you to look at; see if you can ID this Jesse or Mike.’
‘Sure,’ Jake nodded. ‘Oh hey, the other guy came back in between.’
‘Who, Mike?’ Laura queried.
‘Yes. I was having lunch with Wendell, about a week before he became deserving of my revenge, so that’d be three weeks ago, when Texas Mike came by to pick up something Wendell was holding for him. He had another guy with him that time. Can’t remember his name but,’ Collins shut his eyes, ‘he was driving a truck with the name Mc, McSomething; McTeal, that’s it. It was on the door. No idea if it was his.’
Laura was smiling as she shook her head.
‘Yeah, I know,’ Jake said. ‘Surprising that a hippy dope-head would even remember what day it is let alone details like that. But it’s a gift, my memory. The only one I’ve got.’
Chapter Forty-Eight
HF Learjet 45, en-route Sydney
Wednesday 7 am
Jana woke with a jerk as the Helix Foundation’s bizjet was dumped into an air pocket and neglected to climb out of it again. She swallowed hard, lifted the window slide and squinted down at land and water, water and land.
‘You had a nice little snore going there,’ Gideon commented. She was sitting across the aisle, such as it was, in a matching leather recliner. The cabin of the Bombardier Learjet had ten such seats: two opposite the galley, and four in two club-squares. Eight of the seats were occupied by Ruth Jardine, three of her Redbacks (four counting Jana, which they were already doing), two SAS troopers and an America CIA agent. The flight crew, or rather the lone pilot, was still sitting just where Jana thought he should.
She raised an eyebrow at Gideon. ‘Did you know you laugh in your sleep?’
‘It’s the only time I’m amused by anything,’ Gideon said. ‘Where are we?’
‘Somewhere over southern Malaysia. You slept through the pit stop in Bangkok.’
‘Uh-huh. And we’ve only got one pilot, right? Are you sure he’s still awake? What happens if he passes out from exhaustion? I know, don’t tell me, one of you Redbacks will take over. As long as you don’t expect me to have to land with only garbled instructions from the bell tower.’
Bell tower? Gideon’s frown was getting deeper the more Jana babbled. ‘Jana, time out,’ she said. ‘You won’t have to land this thing, ever, okay. Coop or I will do it. We are the co-pilots.’
‘Of course you are.’ Jana eyed Gideon suspiciously. ‘Is there anything you don’t do, Bryn?’
‘Cook. I do not cook.’
Jana’s attention was hijacked by a commotion at the front of the jet, four metres away. Triko and his unbelievably ocker brother Jason, aka Mudge, were apparently doing the universal brother thing and arguing over a toy.
‘Jason, you may well have liberated this from the terrorists.’
‘No, that was me,’ the American, Dwayne Kennedy interjected, ‘Mudge just carried it.’
‘Whatever! The point is Mudge wouldn’t know the first thing about plugging it in.’
‘That’s enough, children. Be nice, or Ruth will send you outside to play,’ Ruth said.
‘How did Jason get to be so much more of a yobbo, than Triko?’ Jana asked Gideon. ‘They were both born here.’
‘Beats me, but it’s scary isn’t it. I’m going to scrounge some coffee, want one?’
‘Yes please.’ Jana watched Bryn squeeze forward to the galley and noted, that although she’d removed the long over-shirt and vest, she was still wearing the rest of her undercover outfit of comfy boots and baggy men’s pants.
Jana scowled. The moment they’d got within cooee of Rawalpindi, on the return journey, she had ripped off the burqua that Bryn had deemed the most appropriate disguise for ‘a short blonde chick trying to go unnoticed in an Islamic country’.
Admittedly the head-to-toe garment had been of a lovely blue material, but she now knew it had been completely unnecessary. In fact, as Taxila was a good couple of hours east of the now virtually locked-down Peshawar, they all could’ve traipsed around like regular tourists in jeans and jackets.
It had taken them two hours, there and back from Islamabad airport to retrieve Jason, Simon and Dwayne; or, as they seemed to prefer: Mudge, Spud and Kennedy. The American had apparently not taken to the nickname the Aussies had given him.
Jana realised all the boys were now squabbling about something. She ignored the stupid notion that everyone gathering at the front of a small jet might just tip it forward on its nose and decided to join them.
Triko had plugged the TekBox Kennedy had lifted from the terrorists’ hotel room into the plasma screen on the cockpit wall. An already-loaded game sprang to life and for some reason, known only to boys and other nerds, they all cheered. Jana and Ruth exchanged mystified glances. Gideon was obviously used to it.
‘Oh cool, GlobalWarTek,’ Triko said.
Brody looked disappointed. ‘What? I can’t believe this is what those murdering bastards were doing all that time. Are you sure it was the only disk in the room, Bamm-Bamm?’
‘Far as I could tell,’ Kennedy said. He was the only passenger still reclining, as he had to keep his injured legs elevated. ‘Mind you, it was only during my last visit to their den of evil that it was actually playing. And I didn’t exactly have long to search the room before, you know, it wasn’t one anymore.’
‘Hang on, this is wrong,’ Coop said, prising the control pad from Triko’s hand. ‘Look at this guys; this is not WarTek proper.’
‘Weird,’ Triko said. ‘And who’s the dude with the beard?’
‘And why is he doing a Moses, and lecturing those troops in,’ Mudge began.
‘In not English?’ Coop finished.
‘How can you even know all this after only two minutes?’ Ruth asked.
Coop turned side on, so he could talk to her while also pointing to things on the screen. ‘GlobalWarTek is a battle game with a contemporary, almost futuristic setting. So first up, there shouldn’t be a long-haired wizard wandering around the war zone at all - let alone one directing the armies; and especially not one giving those orders in Arabic or Urdu or Klingon or whatever he’s speaking.’
‘It could just be foreign translation of the game, Coop,’ Gideon suggested. ‘After all it was that Ashraf guy who was playing.’
‘Yeah, but it still wouldn’t come with Moses-Merlin here.’
‘Or all that graffiti and, wait,’ Triko said. ‘Go left, go left, there. What the hell?’
Brody frowned. ‘Oh boy.’
‘Shit,’ said Coop.
‘Far out,’ Kennedy added.
‘What? What?’ Ruth and Jana asked.
‘The game map is India and Pak
istan, not the subcontinent,’ Gideon said.
‘That statement doesn’t make sense, Bryn,’ Ruth said.
‘Even if it did, so what?’ Jana asked.
‘So the fair dinkum GlobalWarTek game is played in computer-generated environments that resemble the real world only in terms of the shape and size of continents and landmasses,’ Coop said. ‘It has recognisable seas, oceans and major rivers, and looks like a map of our world, but isn’t at all.’
Jana must have continued to look blank.
‘The WarTek world isn’t a copy of ours,’ Triko said, ‘at least not in terms of political divisions. It uses the landscape but not the human divisions we’ve placed on it. It doesn’t, correction, it shouldn’t feature real-world borders, recognisable countries, 21st century geo-political entities.’
Gideon gestured to the screen. ‘In other words, it’s okay for that to be a map of the subcontinent. It’s not right that it shows the borders between India, Pakistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan; and it certainly shouldn’t have real cities.’
Coop used the keypad to scroll through game. ‘Iran, Saudi Arabia, over to Italy; oh, it only goes as far as the UK. It seems to be a wedge, north of the equator and between Ireland and the Bering Strait.’
‘Anyone dare to guess what the multi-coloured glowing spots might mean?’ Mudge asked.
‘There’s a red one near the French border,’ Ruth said. ‘And I gather that too is a border that should not be marked.’
‘You got that right, Ruth,’ Triko said.
Coop panned back towards Pakistan. Peshawar had a matching red dot; as did Istanbul, Rabat and Khartoum. ‘Real real-bad things happened in all those places in the last year.’
‘I’m afraid to point out the blue dots,’ Ruth said.
Gideon itemised as Coop panned across the map. ‘London, Paris, Riyadh, Tokyo.’
‘Can you um retreat?’ Ruth asked.
Coop smiled. ‘Where to Ruth?’
‘The place where the wizard was wizarding,’ she said. ‘Not everything there was in Arabic.’
‘Rashmana? What’s that? It’s everywhere,’ Jana said.
“Bugger,’ said Gideon.
Redback Page 34