Redback

by Lindy Cameron

  ‘Brenda briefed us on some strangely-coincidental evidence found in both Carthage and Paris, that’s Texas and France. Allegedly, and here’s where the rumour mill is probably spinning on its axis, the same video or computer game was found at the home of one of the Fort Hood conspirators, and also confiscated by the French authorities when they arrested the woman who, ah, befriended Justin.’

  ‘A game?’ Nathan said. ‘What kind of game.’

  Van Louden shrugged. ‘A war game or adventure game. And at the moment it’s just a coincidence, and an unverified one. Brenda, however, is paying a visit to the FBI’s Dallas Field Office on her way to Fort Hood tomorrow. It was the Dallas agents who found the offending game in Carthage. Realistically though, the connection between Texas and Europe is tenuous at best.

  ‘Atarsa Kára is, however, unquestionably the link between Groh Sitaarah, who attacked the Consulate in Peshawar, and the Brigade d’Etoile d’Euro group which bombed the train in Luxembourg.’

  Abigail spread butter on a bread roll and smiled at her brother’s awful attempt at French. It was nearly as bad as George Gantry’s, the day he told her who had killed her family on that train.

  ‘But the only known connection between them and the Dallas attacks is a game. I mean, a game; what kind of connection could that be?’ Van Louden threw up his hands. ‘Brenda said it was even a pirate version of something made in Japan for a British-American company called Blue Atlantico. They…’

  The crash of Abigail’s falling knife as it hit her plate made everyone jump. ‘Sorry,’ she said, somehow managing to keep her expression neutral and calm. Oh my Lord.

  ‘Are you okay Mother?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Yes dear, it was just a little cramp in my hand. You were saying, Nate?’ Oh my Lord. Oh my Lord. Abigail desperately needed a drink but couldn’t move her shaking hands from her lap.

  ‘Before I say anything else, please remember that everything I tell you around our dinner table tonight must remain in this house.’

  ‘Of course Nate,’ Abigail said. ‘What did you say the name of that Pakistan terror group means in English?’

  ‘Don’t think I did, Abigail. But I believe Groh Sitaarah is Urdu for Star Brigade.’

  Abigail West wanted to die - right then and there. Either that, or kill someone. No. She definitely wanted to kill someone.

  ‘And Brigade d’Etoile d’Euro,’ she said, in perfect French, ‘also means Euro Star Brigade. You’re not going to tell us now that the Dallas attacks were carried out by the Texas Star Brigade or something, are you?’

  ‘No sis, not at all,’ van Louden said. ‘Don’t believe there is such a thing. At this stage we believe the Dallas bombers belong to something called the Carthage Thunder Militia.’

  A commotion in the doorway heralded the arrival of Angela with the dessert trolley. ‘I figured you weren’t going to eat much of your dinner,’ she said. ‘But fresh apple pie might do the trick.’

  Abigail was more than relieved with the interruption. It meant she could recover from turning white and clammy all over. The awfulness roiling in her stomach, however, was a losing argument between nausea, dread, despair and rising, rising fury.

  She leant over to her sister. ‘Edie dear, I’m just going to pop out for a minute and ring George. I wanted to ask him something and I’m worried I’ll forget.’

  ‘Then you’d best write yourself a note,’ Edwina said. ‘George told me this morning that he was going to Washington until the weekend.’

  Honolulu, Hawaii

  Tuesday 3 pm

  Nick Kelman stepped out of the taxi on Ala Moana Boulevard and limped along the walkway to the world-famous Ilikai Hotel on Waikiki Beach. Like many thousands before him, he could no more not hum the surfing theme to the legendary Hawaii Five-O than stop himself from looking up towards the penthouse balcony. And he could picture him there; Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett, turning to face the aerial camera as it swept over the turquoise blue ocean off Waikiki Beach.

  Kelman made his way in through the foyer and out to the pool area. He needed a drink to wash down the painkillers that were only doing half the job they were supposed to. Still he was lucky, or so the so-called doctor in Chiang Mai had said. He hadn’t even had to dig the bullet out, because that bastard Rawley had shot him clean through the thigh. Two days later it still hurt, a lot; but he could walk and the cane was only temporary.

  He ordered a triple bourbon and glanced over at the table where one of the world’s ‘most wanted’ people sat, poolside at the Ilikai, just like any other tourist. The man was even dressed in blue jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. Kelman dropped some notes on the bar, picked up his drink and limped to take the empty seat opposite Jamal Zahkri al Khudri and his ruthless associate, Samir Krenar.

  ‘You found the place then, JZ,’ Kelman said.

  ‘No problems at all, Nick,’ Zahkri said. He smiled at the man with the red hair and then pointed at his leg. ‘But what happened to you?’

  ‘Slight altercation with an ex-colleague and my gun.’

  Zahkri narrowed his eyes. ‘But you are okay? This won’t affect anything, I hope.’

  ‘No of course it won’t,’ Kelman said. ‘The boys are on their way and I’m flying out tomorrow.’

  ‘Excellent. Then Samir and I will just wait here for the news and make plans for the procession.’

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Dallas, Texas

  Wednesday 9 am

  Laura Serrano flashed her Homeland Security ID at the duty nurse, asked to see the list of patients, then gave the thumbs up to Scott when she found the name she was looking for. The death toll from the Dallas car park bombing stood at 94, after many of the seriously wounded had later succumbed to their injuries. Nearly a week after the attack, 52 of the other 114 injured remained in one or other of the many Dallas hospitals.

  Arlington Memorial had eight still on their critical list and another 17 in relatively stable conditions. The man Scott and Laura were here to see lay somewhere between the two.

  The FBI computer performing the search for keywords had, overnight, come up with one of the three names that the hippy from Nuevo Laredo had given them. In fact all the information provided by Jake Collins had proved useful.

  Jake had gone through 265 photos, lifted from the Fort Hood surveillance footage of all civilians who had entered the base on the day of the attack. He identified the man he called ‘Texas Mike’ as the deceased conspirator, Micah O’Brien; and had also pointed out the other man he’d first met in O’Brien’s company. It wasn’t a very clear image of ‘Jesse’ but Collins swore he was the same man who’d returned to Nuevo Laredo overnight on Sunday, to try to kill him and his girlfriend.

  Nerd No. 27’s search program found a match to the third name, ‘McTeal’, that Jake had recalled was written on the truck when Micah ‘Mike’ O’Brien visited Mexico a second time. A Kyle McTeal, citizen and truck owner of Carthage, East Texas, had been a victim of the Dallas bomb.

  Laura and Scott entered a four-bed ward occupied by only one patient, who was trying to operate the TV remote with bandaged hands and his chin.

  ‘Kyle?’

  Kyle ‘Kero’ McTeal looked up expecting to see yet another nurse wanting to stick something sharp in him or make him sit on a bed pan, ready or not.

  ‘Hi, my name is Laura Serrano. I’m from Homeland Security. This is my assistant Scott.’

  ‘Homeland Security? Is that good or bad?’

  ‘Um…good?’ Laura said.

  ‘Okay. Could you turn the sound up for me? I seem to have lost half my fingers.’

  ‘Can we ask you some questions first?’ When he didn’t seem to object, Laura continued. ‘Why were you here in Dallas the day of the bomb, Kyle?’

  ‘Taking cattle to market.’ He looked at Laura with suspicion. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Well, Kyle, you live in Carthage, but here you are. How did you get to Dallas?’

  ‘In a truck.’ Kyle looked left and
right. ‘With cattle.’

  ‘Was it your truck?’ Scott asked.

  ‘Um, no.’

  ‘And where is it, this truck?’

  Kero had really, really hoped that Jesse-Jay would’ve come to take him home by now. He was afraid something like this might happen. That people would want to ask him stuff that he wouldn’t know how to explain. Kero had left heaps of messages on the phone machine at home, but had finally figured that Jesse-Jay must be hiding out.

  ‘Kyle? The truck, where is it?’ Laura said.

  ‘Well you know, I kinda forgot. Might be amenesia.’

  ‘Oh no, have you got amenesia?’ Laura repeated his mispronunciation and made it sound like a terrible disease. ‘I’m so sorry Kyle. That’s a really dangerous thing to get when, um, you’ve also lost a lot of blood.’ She pointed at his hands.

  Kero frowned. Maybe that hadn’t been such a good thing to claim. Scott wandered to the other side of his bed. ‘Maybe you parked the truck in the car park on Jackson. What do you think?’

  Kero narrowed his eyes wondering if it was okay to say yes to that, seeing as how the truck and the car park weren’t there any more. ‘Might have,’ he said, nodding as if he wasn’t quite sure.

  Laura decided it was time to bring out the big guns of confusion. ‘Well, Kyle, I don’t quite know how to tell you this, but you know your friends Micah and Jesse…’ She let the words hang for a moment hoping they’d form their own suggestion in Kyle McTeal’s not very bright mind.

  For a moment there was nothing - that Laura or Scott could see.

  Kero’s mind, however, was forming a barn-wrecking twister. She knows about Jesse-Jay. How? He’s been caught. No. Oh. He’s been killed. Maybe he was too close to the bomb when it went off early like it did. Fuck. It got me, maybe it got him. And Micah. Not Micah. Oh man, not Jesse-Jay. And the Colonel will be well pissed. Shit!

  Nothing at all. Scott and Laura glanced at each other, wondering if Kyle had gone to sleep with his eyes open.

  ‘Are they okay?’ he suddenly asked.

  ‘Not really.’ Laura made a face that said it was a hard thing she had to tell him.

  ‘I can take bad news,’ Kero said.

  ‘Micah is dead, Kyle,’ Scott said. ‘He was killed at Fort Hood, the day you lost your fingers.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Fort Hood? Where’s that?’

  ‘A couple of hours from Dallas,’ Laura said. ‘We think he went there with Jesse.’

  Kero shook his head. ‘No that’s not right. Jesse-Jay was to meet me afterwards at the Texas T-Bone. In Dallas.’

  ‘Meet you after what?’

  ‘After the bomb.’

  ‘So you knew about the bomb then,’ Scott said, playing question ping-pong with Laura.

  Kero refused to look at him. Was that a trick question? He held up his hands, or what was left of them. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘So you were going to meet Jesse-Jay but the bomb went off? Where were you?’

  Kero shrugged. ‘Just standing on a corner.’

  Laura looked at him sadly. ‘So Jesse-Jay didn’t come back from Fort Hood either. And I gather he hasn’t been in to see you.’

  Kero was not going to answer that one. ‘How did Micah get killed at this other place?’

  Scott sat on the end of the bed. ‘He was shot, Kyle. In the back of the head.’

  ‘Probably by someone who knew him,’ Laura said.

  Kero started to fidget. Hard to do when he couldn’t pick at things because his hands were all bound. Then he remembered he didn’t have fingers to pick with anymore. He wasn’t nervous of the Security Homelanders neither; no, he was edgy because Jesse-Jay once boasted to him that he’d killed a man. Like that. A bullet straight to the back of the head. ‘Mafia hitman style’ he’d said.

  ‘You okay Kyle?’ Scott asked.

  ‘You think I had something to do with the bomb?’

  May as well jump all the way in, Laura thought. ‘Yes Kyle, I’m afraid we do. And we think you realise now that Jesse-Jay has kind of left you holding all the blame.’

  Scott cleared his throat and gave her a look that asked: which left field did that spring from.

  ‘Do you want to tell us about Jesse?’ Scott asked.

  ‘Jesse-Jay,’ Kero said. ‘Jesse-Jay Bagget, my stepbrother. Son of my late Aunt Hannah from Arkansas.’

  Scott closed his eyes. Even in Deliverance territory that one would take some working out.

  ‘Your stepbrother is also your cousin?’ Laura always was quick.

  Kero frowned. ‘No. He was just my step. Didn’t even know I had an Aunt Hannah until recent. Fact, first time I laid eyes on Jesse-Jay was about seven or eight months ago when he turned up at my door with a card from Aunt Hannah asking me to give him a bed for a couple of nights. We took to each other, he had nowhere else to go, so he stayed.’

  Scott sighed heavily. ‘And the Thunder Militia?’

  ‘Jesse-Jay got me in. Put in a good word with the Colonel.’

  ‘The Colonel?’ Laura smiled and looked puzzled.

  ‘Yeah you know,’ he shrugged, ‘the Colonel of the Militia.’

  Dubb Airport, New South Wales

  Thursday 1 am

  Bashir Kali alighted from the Bergen Mining Group’s corporate jet with five legitimate Bergen employees, a dentist, a guilty-looking man in dire need of medication, and two English backpackers who, like him, were hitching a ride from Sarawak in Malaysia.

  This last leg of Kali’s journey to Australia was his third plane connection after the jeep, truck and bus he’d taken in quick succession after leaving Peshawar on Monday.

  He had most reluctantly left a badly-beaten Majid in Chandigarh, in the care of loyal members of Groh Sitaarah sworn to Atarsa Kára. His friend was devastated not to be able to perform their second Trust together but such was the will of Allah. Kali had promised to do better than his best to make Majid proud.

  The night air here in the Southern Hemisphere was cold and the wind, as he crossed the tarmac, bit into his skin. His first task in the morning would be to get some warm clothes.

  A man approached from the shadows near the small airport building, waited until the other passengers had entered, and then called Kali by name.

  It was the Emissary’s good friend from Indonesia, Mr Dumadi Arjuna. Kali smiled at the man with whom he’d carried out the successful Khartoum and New Delhi jobs; and together they walked away from the terminal building and climbed into a very nice car.

  ‘You had no trouble getting here?’ Arjuna asked.

  ‘None at all. Everything went as it should. I am amazed I could just get on and off so many aeroplanes without trouble or too many questions. Especially this last flight.’

  Arjuna laughed. ‘It is easy, because for some peculiar reason the Australians think we come in rickety boats pretending to seek asylum.’

  ‘But why would we risk detention or deportation?’ Kali asked.

  ‘Or death on the open sea,’ Arjuna laughed. ‘It is a mystery, my friend. A mystery.’ He turned the music up and began to dance in his seat as he drove.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Dallas, Texas

  Wednesday 11 am

  When Scott and Laura returned to the Dallas Field Office they found a tall, strange, dark-haired woman poking through their stuff. Not that it was their own stuff exactly but they had put it into the logical piles through which the woman was now rifling.

  They stood together outside the office that the SAC had set aside for them and realised, in the same moment, that they both felt put out by the same stupid thing. They broke out laughing.

  ‘We need counselling,’ Scott said.

  ‘We need a divorce, or whatever you do when you’re - us.’ Laura pushed open the door to introduce herself to the interloper.

  The woman smiled. ‘Ah, the CIA, the journalist. I am EAD Brenda Janeway of the NSB.’

  ‘Is that contagious?’ Scott asked, shaking her offered hand.

&nb
sp; Laura whacked his arm and then followed suit with the hand shaking. ‘Ms Janeway, from the FBI, is heading the whole Dallas investigation.’

  ‘Good,’ Scott said. When both women looked at him oddly, he added, ‘Well, isn’t it?’

  ‘I hear the two of you have made more headway in 24 hours than the whole Field Office has in a week.’

  Laura laughed. ‘To be fair, everyone else here had to sift through absolutely everything that’s come in which, as you know, has been a mountain of information. We on the other hand had a couple of clues which we ran down to…’

  ‘Make more headway than anyone else in seven days,’ Janeway said, and waved for them both sit. ‘I’d like you to fill me in on all your revelations but first I want to ask you about this.’ She held up the printout headed ‘Nerd 27 List’.

  ‘Nerd 27 is the computer geek guy I recruited to collate everything we needed; oh.’ Laura realised the Director didn’t care about him, so she explained the reason for list instead.

  Janeway pointed to a word: ‘And this is?’

  ‘Atlantes,’ Laura said. ‘It’s the name of the book, or instruction manual, embedded in the fake Global WarTek game we recovered in Carthage. The game is littered with quotes from it.’

  Janeway sighed. ‘Are these quotes, or any part of the content, similar to those in the game you brought to us, Scott?’

  ‘Almost identical, except in the language that is used. And I don’t just mean that yours is in English, and mine is in Arabic, French and English. But the way it’s presented, or phrased, is designed to speak directly to its target audience: the Carthage one to disaffected, white, mostly Christian, guns-R-us, government-hating nuts; the Cairo one to disaffected, multi-ethnic, mostly Muslim, missiles-R-us, democracy-hating nuts.

  ‘And thanks to the insight into the provenance of both Atlantes and the Rashmana, since talking to the Australians, we’ve…’

  Janeway held up her hand. ‘What Australians?’

  ‘I did warn them about that,’ said Special Agent-in-Charge Hayden. He apologised to Laura for startling her again.