by Martin Roth
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was a delivery vehicle of some kind, windowless and dank and smelling of rotten fruit, and bolted from the outside like a police divisional van. It stopped and started often. We were apparently driving through the city center. Traffic noise was heavy.
We were sitting opposite each other on a cold metal floor. I looked at Briony, her back to the van’s door, her head down.
“Thanks Briony,” I said. “Nice work. I noticed they hardly touched you. Just touched you up. You wouldn’t mind that.”
She looked at me with venom. “Shut up, Johnny.”
“Why did they put you in here with me? Trying to get a bit more information?”
“Johnny, I said shut up. I risked my life for this. For you.”
“You risked your life for me?”
Her face was dark. She looked as if she would like to stand and try to strangle me. “Listen to me, you idiot. Those men took advantage of me. They used me to get at Grant and to get at you. And Grant was my friend. He did a lot of things for me. That’s why I came to tell you. Understand? And then you asked me to help you break into La Rue and find the plans, so I did. Understand? I was angry at those men, and so I helped you. But I’m not going to let you use me, Johnny. Be careful what you say. I’m in the same danger as you.”
And of course it was true. Breaking into La Rue had been all my idea. I’d been with Briony from the time she and Melissa came to see me at the church right up until now. She hadn’t had a chance to contact anyone.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered.
We drove on, neither of us talking. It was a slow journey, with frequent stops. After about thirty minutes we halted once more and the driver and his companion got out. They were talking, though I could not hear what they were saying. I guessed we were now in one of the inner suburbs.
Then the van back door opened and the two men from La Rue stood there, one with a gun pointing our way. They beckoned for us to get out. I looked around. We had driven into a garage. It was dark and smelled of oil. It looked like any suburban garage, full of tools and shelves of boxes, with a rusting lawnmower in one back corner and a discarded sofa in the other.
I waited for the blindfolds, but they didn’t arrive. That was a bad sign. They didn’t care what we saw. They planned to kill us. Or perhaps they just hadn’t spent more than twenty years in the mountains of East Timor learning that constant paranoia saves lives.
Wordlessly, the man with the gun indicated that we should go through a door at the side of the garage. We found ourselves in the backyard of a suburban house. The yard was small and surrounded by a crumbling wooden fence covered in creepers. Next door I could see an old brick home, the pre-war kind. I guessed that we were somewhere in the western suburbs.
Our guards led us inside the house, through a cramped kitchen and then up a flight of stairs and into a bedroom with a single bed and a desk. An old blue mattress was on the bed, but there were no sheets or blankets. Nothing was on the desk, which looked to be of similar age to the house. Yellow floral wallpaper was blotched with water stains, and appeared as though it might quickly peel off the walls if I just blew too hard. A pair of shabby pleated pink curtains was drawn shut.
The men indicated that we should both sit on the bed, and then they left us. I looked at Briony and shrugged my shoulders. I stood and tried to open the door. They had locked it. I pulled open one of the curtains. The windows looked out over a long line of small suburban backyards, most with an antique metal revolving clothes hoist and a pocket handkerchief garden.
Briony came and twisted a handle to try to open one of the windows. It was rusted, but she managed to get it partially open. The space was narrow, but I reckoned both of us could have squeezed through.
“Do you think it’s a trap?” she whispered.
“But why? So they can shoot us trying to escape? That doesn’t make sense.”
“This place is hardly a prison. What’s going on?”
As if in reply we heard shouting, then the door was unlocked and one of the men came racing in, his gun at the ready. He was followed by an instantly recognizable figure. He looked at us both.
“Just can’t get any decent hired help these days,” said Tom Traherne, boss of the Prophetic Edge. “These clowns were going to just leave you in here. ‘Escape? Oh dear, hadn’t thought of that.’ The Indonesian army’s best. Has the Indonesian army ever won a war? Come to think of it, has Indonesia ever done anything?”
I looked at him. He was wearing a tan suit with a red shirt and a striped black and red tie. He had presumably come straight from his office. “So you’re the boss of these people. Not much of a surprise, really, when I think about it.”
“No, not the boss. Just another of the hired help.” He beckoned with his head to the bed. “Better sit down, you two. Pedro here might get nervous if you walk around too much. Might even shoot you. Or me. Or himself, with any luck.”
We sat back on the mattress. The gunman moved to the window and stood gazing at us.
“You’re Briony, aren’t you?” Tom said to her.
“You couldn’t afford me. You don’t need to know.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” said Tom, quite unperturbed. “The Indonesians speak very highly of your abilities. It seems you’ve done more for Australian-Indonesian relations than the entire Canberra parliament.”
Then he turned his attention to me. “I don’t know why the heck you had to get involved. You’ve made a real mess of things, thanks to all your nosing around. You’ll be proud to know we’ve had to make a lot of changes because of you. And we could have done without your friend and my colleague Grant. He really helped stir things up as well.”
“Did you strangle him yourself? No, you wouldn’t have the guts.”
“Or the strength,” added Briony.
He didn’t rise to the bait, just pursing his lips in a thin smile. Nevertheless, my previous encounter with Tom had taught me that once wound up he did not hold back from talking about himself. I tried again. “What’s a respectable stockbroker like you doing mixed up with Indonesian thugs?”
“I’ve never met a respectable stockbroker yet,” he replied. But then he added: “Preparing for retirement. That’s what I’m doing.”
“Retirement?” Matt’s words about Tom’s Indonesian retirement plan came to mind. “You’re the boss of Grant’s old company. What do you want to retire for?”
“The Prophetic Edge!” He spat out the words with a harshness that startled me. “Do you know how much I’ve lost since I joined that place?” He looked around, as if searching for some kind of visual aid that would emphasize his plight.
“You’re the boss. You’ve got to be on a boss’s salary.”
“That’s a joke.” But he wasn’t laughing. “I’m a trader. We all are. Yeah sure, we sell some software, and it helps pay for a couple of pimply-faced Bill Gates-type nerds who design it for us. And I’m boss of that. But I’m a trader like everyone else there. Like Grant was. That’s how I make my money. The problem is that soon after I joined, the market tanked. I lost a bundle. Lost my wife as well. She ran off with her horse-riding coach. Come to think of it, that wasn’t a loss at all.”
“When I visited your office it looked really busy.”
Tom leaned against the wall, as if settling in for a long explanation. “Because just about everyone else was making money. Had been for a while. Except Grant. He lost a bundle too. Why do you think he was smuggling in Indonesians?” The look of bitterness on his face was enormous.
“You’ve got a house in Toorak. Sell that for a couple of million.”
“My wife got it in the settlement. She’s living there now. Her and Seattle Slew.”
“So how does getting into bed with Indonesian terrorists help you retire?”
“Because the clowns are paying big bucks, that’s how. They need me.”
I probed further. “But what’s the connection between the Prophetic Edge and the
Indonesians?”
“When Grant was running Prophetic Edge he used it to service a lot of Indonesian clients. Dubious types. People with money they wanted to launder. People who needed various kinds of official documents. I took over the company and inherited the client list. Then they came to me with an offer that was pretty much impossible to resist. They needed local knowledge. I supply it.”
“Local knowledge for what?”
“That’s for you to find out. And not much chance of that any longer. But you know the Albert Park lake?”
“Yes.”
“I understand it’s about to get a twin.” He laughed.
“But why?”
“Why. Revenge of course. That’s what they tell me. For Australia sending soldiers to East Timor. A lot of Indonesians think Timor should remain part of Indonesia. I hear talk that the big oil companies aren’t too happy either about the country going independent. They’d invested a bundle in developing a cozy relationship with the Indonesian bosses. Maybe they’re behind this as well. Who cares? I’ve got my two mill.”
“Two million dollars?”
“Absolutely. My aim was always two million pounds. That was enough. Would have made that much if the market hadn’t tanked and the wife hadn’t scarpered. But they’d only pay Australian dollars. Plus a false passport.”
There was just one question left. I thought about an innocent young man, a happy surfer, a twenty-first century flower child, brutally murdered with a wrench.
“Tom,” I said. “What about Matt?”
Tom’s eyes bulged and his face seemed to be turning red. “Even that little creep was making more than me,” he thundered. Then he looked at me hard. “Someone else wants to meet you.” He stormed out.
This time there was no thick glass to separate us. Alberto entered and walked straight towards me.