by Mark Furness
Todd had a special phone in his possession and I had the number.
BACK AT THE HALLIDAY’S flat, I sent an email just after sunrise, using my old telephone handset and email address:
Hi, Jack. Just put the kids and Kate on the flight back to Australia. No further progress on Baker. I fear the trail is going cold. I think I’ll stopover in Delhi on my way home. Malcolm Halliday wanted some of his ashes splashed in the Ganges. I’ll let you know when I’m booked. Cheers, Gar
I phoned Steele on my new phone and briefed him on my improved employment status and my two-faces protocol.
“Your life’s starting to read like a cheap thriller,” he said. “Let’s get the ending right, hey.”
About an hour later, my old phone rang. The screen showed No caller ID. I figured it was Ms Hoodie following up her job offer. I hoped she’d seen my latest email. I let it ring out.
I packed my bag and headed for Heathrow Airport with Dick Callahan as my chauffer. I knew I could trust him to keep a secret, especially if I told him I was flying to India.
After Dick dropped me outside the Air India gate, and I had watched his taillights disappear into the throng of traffic departing the airport – with him, I had no doubt, gossiping hands-free into his phone to anyone who would listen – I strolled past the check-in queues until I got to the gate for China Southern. Once I’d cleared security, there was ninety minutes until my flight to Shanghai departed. I found a bar and a tall stool and sipped the first glass of plain coke and ice I’d imbibed in years.
End – Under Eden. Part 2
THANK YOU FOR READING UNDER EDEN. Part 2: Freefall.
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If you would like to read the Complete Edition of UNDER EDEN (Parts 1-3), it will be released in Amazon Kindle bookstores worldwide on 30 November 2018. Just click on these links to go to your store and pre-order now: US Canada UK Australia
Part 3: Red Box. Series Final will be published in Amazon Kindle bookstores worldwide on 28 November 2018. Pre-order in your store here: US Canada UK Australia
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In Red Box ...
Gar Hart flies to Shanghai, China and teams up with Jack Darling – after putting his children, Alice and Hugo, into what they hope is a safe house in Ireland.
Now Hart and Darling – assisted by Claire Styler in Sydney and Sarah Kerr in London – deepen The Citizen’s knowledge about the source of the global fortune controlled by John K Baker. But another fierce and ingenious opponent is rising. This woman is every bit as lethal as Charles East’s deceased ex-army minder, Oscar ‘Silver Dog’ Petersen.
Hart needs his father’s gun more than ever.
In the riveting conclusion to UNDER EDEN, discover why Hart returned to the remote Blue Mountains outside of Sydney following his trip to China, and what happens in the aftermath.
THE OPENING CHAPTER of Red Box follows:
AS THE jet from Heathrow climbed to cruising altitude, I read an old letter from Nasim Naama, written on Libyan Investment Authority letterhead, to John K. Baker at Cavalcade. Sarah Kerr had sourced the letter, but from whom she still wouldn’t say. Naama wrote that he looked forward to meeting Baker in Vienna, Austria, to discuss the China investment proposal relating to Red Box Telecommunications that you described at our last meeting.
It was late afternoon local time when I bumped down on the tarmac at Shanghai Pudong International Airport. I expected a long immigration check upon entering a nation of 1.3 billion people, and a city of twenty million plus, but the officials simply opened the airport flood gates and humanity poured in. Less than thirty minutes after landing, I was plucking my bag off the luggage carousel, and a few minutes later, I strolled through customs. The officials seemed to be picking off dodgy characters using their intuition, or tip-offs, pulling them into windowless rooms and shutting the doors. My heart skipped a beat when a smiling Asian man in a light blue safari suit, wearing a badge on a lanyard, waved at me and blocked my path. I’d been heading for the taxi rank. Secret police? Ms Hoodie’s local man?
“Welcome, Mr Hart,” he said, holding up a blown-up passport photo of me, cheaply printed on A4 paper. “Mr Jack sent me.”
He tried to take my bag. I phoned Jack.
“Mr Sang is okay,” Jack said. “He’s our regular driver, and his English is good, but he may pretend otherwise.”
Jack warned me to be careful what I said in front of Mr Sang, especially inside his car, because Mr Sang was regularly invited to drink tea with a local police chief. Drinking tea was code for being managed by the authorities. Jack suspected Mr Sang had been coerced to hide a recording device and radio transmitter in his car to eavesdrop on the conversations of his mostly foreign passengers, but there was little point switching drivers, Jack reasoned, because the next man or woman he hired would just get the same invite to tea with the police chief.
We sped out of the airport onto a flyover freeway thick with trucks, buses and cars, where no driver indicated to change lanes, a manoeuvre they practised with hair-raising frequency, working on instinct and anticipation, as far as I could tell.
We cruised past sky-scraping electricity towers that looked like they could walk. Cheek-by-jowl with these creatures of steel and wire stood endless lines of high-rise concrete boxes, their balconies aflutter with shirts and sheets, underwear and towels. About an hour later, we swept down a ramp into the streets of the central city teeming with people on bicycles and motor scooters that swept around us like schools of fish avoiding a bigger animal. Traffic lights seemed to be pure decoration because neither pedestrian nor vehicle obeyed them. I’m not a great fan of rules, but some are handy. Survival here was going to demand my rapid adaptation.
The Darling’s rented house was in the leafy, low-rise French Concession district of old Shanghai that was popular with foreigners. The London plane trees that lined the streets were in heavy leaf. The driver stopped in front of a high masonry wall painted a sickly lemon colour, stained with grime, and topped with rusty barbed wire and sharpened steel stakes. A solid-panel, steel security gate built into the wall began rolling sideways. Mr Sang motored onto a circular, white gravel drive and parked in front of a terracotta-tiled path that led to the red, double front door. Within seconds of stepping from the air-conditioned car, my sunglasses had fogged and sweat trickled down my forehead, stinging my eyes.
“Enjoying our weather, Gar?”
Hitomi, Jack’s Japanese wife, was standing in the open doorway, looking cool in all ways, as usual. Her cat-like physique was dressed in a loose, white t-shirt, cotton shorts, barefooted, her black hair bob-cut.
“Like a dose of scarlet fever,” I called, collecting my bag from the boot. My shirt and jeans had stuck to my skin by the time I hit the doormat.
She led me into the air-conditioned cool down a tiled passage to the kitchen and gave me a cold, damp flannel she kept in a plastic box in the fridge. I draped it over my face. The humidity was normal for this time of year, she said. Jack was on his way home in a taxi. Hitomi showed me to their guest bedroom and left me to unpack, shower and change.
I found Hitomi again in the kitchen. She offered me green tea and condolences for the death of my father-in-law. We talked about Alice and Hugo. I just said they were holidaying with their grandmother. If Jack had told her about Hugo’s assault, she didn’t let on and I didn’t raise it.
When Jack arrived, he didn’t want tea. He pulled two cold bottles of Tsingtao beer from the fr
idge and three frosty glasses from the freezer. I had consumed only water and coffee all the way from Heathrow to Shanghai, my first alcohol-free trip in all the flights that I could remember.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Moderation and relaxation,” said Jack, “not abstinence and fear.”
I took the glass of beer and it tasted as good as it looked. The three of us sat on a sofa around a low table in the living room. Jack was in a strange pond for a pale fish born in chilly London. Hitomi skolled her beer and left for work. She owned and managed a Japanese restaurant located a few blocks away named the Blue Ring, which was popular with foreigners looking for a change from the local cuisine.
Jack sat beside me while my two phones picked up a local telco network. It was probably overkill, but I manually selected a different telco for each phone. Any communications that mentioned Baker or East, and that we wanted to keep private to The Citizen, we were confining to the new email addresses our tech’s had assigned to Claire, Cliff, Jack and me. Steele had my new email address too, and I saw that while I had been in flight, he had sent me an audio file.
“Want to listen?” I said to Jack.
“Play away.”
Voice 1: Mate, he’s got to stay cool.
Voice 2: He’s losing it in that jail.
Voice 1: If he tells, were fucked. Dead fucked. Does he want to do a few more months or put us all in a coffin?
Voice 2: I think he needs help.
Voice 1: You’ve got to persuade him. He’ll get bumped if he doesn’t smarten up. They’ve told me they already have people in Sydney limbering up for the job.
The recording ended. I phoned Steele. He answered. I put him on open speaker so Jack could listen.
“Who was it on the tape?”
“Bart Hills was taking the call. Don’t know who the other voice is,” said Steele.
“Could it be Christ?”
“Maybe.”
“Date?”
“About two months ago.”
“Cops have this?”
“Not that I know.” Steele sounded flat.
“You all right?”
“Karen’s left me. She’s got a bloke.”
“Who?”
“Some middle-aged prick she met at the gym. She’s moved in with him and his brother: single blokes.”
“Two of them?”
“Don’t worry,” said Steele. “I’ve got an imagination.”
“Speaking of pricks, how’d you go chasing up my dead man at Moon Hill?”
That perked Steele up. It sounded like he was reading from the police incident report.
“The shot man wearing the kangaroo mask was Seth Vagner, 42, a South African citizen working in Australia as a security consultant to the businessman Charles East of Double Bay in Sydney. Vagner was a former South African Special Forces commando. He died when a single .300 Winchester Magnum bullet, fired from a rifle at a distance of 89 metres in twilight conditions, pierced his forehead just above the left eye. The shooter was George Arnold Williams, 19, of Tangleton. Vagner had been wearing a papier-mache mask of a kangaroo’s head. Mr Williams, a licensed kangaroo hunter, believed he was shooting at a wild animal. According to Mr East, Vagner had taken a two-day vacation to whereabouts that were neither known, nor of interest to him. Police were now investigating possible links between Vagner and a murdered Sydney psychiatric nurse named Bruce Tyson whose passport was found in Vagner’s car near the site of the shooting.
Steele had a final twist: post-mortem examinations revealed the chemical compound “psylocibin” in Vagner’s blood. He had ingested alcohol and the extract of magic mushrooms before he was shot. Tests revealed traces of the cocktail in an empty tequila bottle found on the ground beside Vagner’s body.
“Remember what I told you about Tania Watson’s Angels Tears tequila?” I said to Steele. “If you’re going to knock up a yarn about this, leave her out of it. That dopey prick must have swiped it off my kitchen bench.”
An hour later, Steele emailed me a preview of his front page story in tomorrow’s The Sydney Daily News. Most of the page was covered with an artist’s impression of a standing man wearing a kangaroo mask on his face under the headline: Kangaroo Man’s Deadly Trip.
There was no comment from Vagner’s employer about his chauffer’s lethal, hallucinogenic journey into the Australian bush. I was elated that Steele had named East in public though, and in the tabloid Daily News to boot. That would set his toffy-nosed friends whispering behind his back.
I phoned Ireland before I went to bed. May family had arrived safely in Portroe. Todd, Kate informed me, “appears capable”. Hugo and Alice had re-discovered reading books made of paper, and board games also made of paper. Todd was taking them all trout fishing the next day. Hugo said their protector had a snub-nosed machine gun in his bedroom, following which I asked Todd if he could practice some discretion in displaying his arsenal. I phoned Sue Sinclair in Sydney and checked on Fish. She was patting the hairy brothers who were eating peeled slices of fresh apple and watching Shrek2 on TV. When I went to bed, I battled the feeling that this was too good to last ...
AGAIN, THANK YOU FOR reading UNDER EDEN. Part 2: Freefall.
If you enjoyed it and could leave a book review in your Amazon store, I would be very grateful. Reviews are vital to spreading the word to other readers – and helping authors like me to earn a living and write more stories. Please click on these links to review in your store: US Canada UK Australia
If you would like to read the Complete Edition of UNDER EDEN (Parts 1-3), it will be released in Amazon Kindle bookstores worldwide on 30 November 2018. Just click on these links to go to your store and pre-order now: US Canada UK Australia
Part 3: Red Box. Series Final will be published in Amazon Kindle bookstores worldwide on 28 November 2018. Pre-order in your store here: US Canada UK Australia
UNDER EDEN. Part 2: Freefall
Copyright © Mark Furness 2018
Published by Liquorice Light Publishing 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or retransmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the copyright owner.
All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.