State of Fear

by Tim Ayliffe

  ‘Okay.’ Bailey readied himself for another argument. ‘Here’s the caveat. We’re going to need to share information. If you find out anything, I want to know.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’

  ‘I won’t get in your way. I’m looking for a happy ending here. He’s just a kid.’

  ‘Just a kid? Just a kid shot dead a police accountant in Parramatta. Stabbed a cop in Melbourne. I’ve lost count of the number of kids fighting in Syria right now. Let’s not underplay this thing before we even know what it is we’re looking at, okay?’

  ‘All I’m asking for is some intel coming back. He’s fifteen. From what I can gather, this has caught his family by surprise.’

  ‘Always does.’ Dexter drained the rest of her coffee, placing her mug in the sink. ‘I’ll do what I can, Bailey. But if I find something that leads me to think that an attack might be imminent, all bets are off.’

  Bailey didn’t bother arguing with her on that point because she was right. If Tariq had succumbed to the ideology and believed that God wanted him to be a killer, there might be no pulling him back from the brink. So he shared what Omar had told him and Gerald less than an hour ago.

  But he didn’t tell her everything.

  He didn’t tell her that he had a phone number in his pocket that might belong to Mustafa al-Baghdadi. That the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist might be calling the shots on this from wherever he was hiding in Iraq. Or Syria. That information was for later, after Bailey had a better handle on exactly what the hell was going on. Time to find out if he really was a player in all this, and why.

  ‘What’re you going to do now?’ Dexter said.

  Bailey grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl. ‘I’m off to visit a guy I know.’

  ‘Helpful. Very helpful,’ Dexter said. ‘And Bailey?’

  ‘Yep?’ He was already moving towards the door.

  ‘Don’t go getting any stupid ideas.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Bailey opened the door, turning back around. ‘You know what they say about that.’

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as stupid ideas, only stupid people.’

  He closed the door before she had a chance to respond.

  CHAPTER 7

  Coffee.

  If Bailey couldn’t go home to recharge his batteries with the sounds of the Rolling Stones spinning on his turntable, then he needed something to perk him up.

  These days, that meant coffee.

  The Italian café near the Town Hall on Norton Street would fix him. With coffee thicker than double-whip cream, it packed a punch. The café was just up the hill from Dexter’s house and the walk would be good for him. Help clear his head.

  One of the perks with laying off the booze was that Bailey had dropped a few kilograms and his fitness was coming back. The fitness he’d lost way back in the 1980s after he’d quit the gym, packing away his boxing gloves and rugby boots, so that he could chase stories in the seedier suburbs of Sydney. When his obsession with journalism began. It was also about the same time that Bailey had first met Sharon Dexter. He was The Journal’s young gun crime reporter who had been breaking stories about corrupt cops running drugs and prostitutes in Kings Cross, and she was the young police constable tipping him off.

  It had been a difficult time to be a woman in uniform, especially someone who looked like Dexter. The few other women in the service had warned her that sexual harassment was just part of the job. Dexter had never accepted it, telling Bailey during one of their secret meetings how she’d broken the finger of a detective for pinching her on the backside.

  They were just friends, back then. Kindred spirits with the same drive for justice. They only became romantically involved when Bailey returned to Australia after his first stint in the Middle East. His marriage had long broken down, and after more than a decade as a war reporter, he had too. Dexter had helped him get back on his feet.

  Bailey had a bad habit of putting his job before everything and everyone. So when America’s war machine started purring after the September 11 attacks, he headed back to the Middle East. This time he almost didn’t make it home.

  More than a dozen years later and Dexter and Bailey were back together again. This time she was the one obsessed with the job, determined to prove that she’d earned her place at the leadership table because she was the best candidate for the job, not because she was filling some quota. The daughter of a Balmain publican, Dexter was driven by the same bold integrity that had drawn Bailey to her decades earlier. She was tough. She was stubborn. She had a big heart inside. Bailey wouldn’t change a thing about her.

  Bailey turned onto Norton Street and the café was just up ahead. He looked down at the old G-Shock watch on his wrist: 8.54 am.

  The watch had been a gift from his father, given to him before he boarded his first flight to Beirut as a 25-year-old.

  ‘You’ll need something that can take a few knocks,’ Jack Bailey had said.

  That was more than a quarter century ago and Jack was dead. A heart attack at the age of seventy-one. Bailey’s mother, Ros, hadn’t lasted much longer. His parents had outlived Bailey’s younger brother, Mike, who had died in a car accident after finishing high school. The brothers had been tight. Losing Mike was something that Bailey would never get over. Not that he’d wanted to. The pain helped him to remember.

  The watch had been through a lot. The highs, the lows and the blows. But it was still ticking.

  ‘Ciao, Bailey!’

  Marco reached his hand through the café’s takeaway window and Bailey shook it.

  ‘You good, mate?’

  ‘Always!’

  Marco knew that Bailey wasn’t going to sit down with all the young mums and prams inside. The barista pumped the coffee grounds into his portafilter, latching it to the machine, and waited for the thick brown liquid to spill into a takeaway cup on the steel tray below.

  ‘You know, Bailey, the Azzurri are going to beat your boys in October.’

  Marco was the only Italian that Bailey knew who liked rugby and Marco loved giving it to him about the Wallabies, who’d been struggling to win a game lately.

  ‘Italians can’t play rugby, Marco. You know that. Ball’s the wrong shape and you don’t get points for diving.’

  Marco laughed, holding out Bailey’s double espresso through the window. ‘Your coffee just went up.’

  Bailey took his double espresso and headed back down Norton Street to the park. He found a bench away from the playground, sat down, and withdrew the crumpled slip of paper from his pocket, opening it so that he could read the numbers scribbled in ink. It had been almost two days since it had been handed to him on the banks of the Thames. Bailey’s window to call Mustafa al-Baghdadi was closing.

  He didn’t want to make the call. He didn’t want to listen to the jihadist’s justification for murder. He was thinking about Douglas McKenzie, the US marine beheaded by one of Mustafa’s men. Bailey had watched it happen. He was there, in the room, tied to a chair.

  For Mustafa, Bailey wasn’t the enemy back then. He was the messenger. The man who would tell his story, explain to the world that he was merely a warrior fighting the evils of the western world. The protector of the future. Mustafa’s posh accent and eloquent speech set him apart from the other extremists. The even tone of his voice was frightening. It was the thing Bailey remembered more clearly than anything. The voice he heard in his sleep.

  Bailey took a swig of his coffee, wishing it was something stronger. He stared up at the sky, catching an Airbus A380 flying overhead. A loud humming noise followed, louder than usual because of the clouds. Every few minutes, another plane vibrated through the air on its way to Mascot. So loud that parents watching their kids at the playground paused their conversations and looked up. The planes were part of everyday life around here under the flight path, where it still cost two million bucks for a house. It was madness.

  9.12 am.

  It was the middle of the nigh
t in Iraq and Syria. Bailey had spent so many years traversing the Middle East that he was good at calculating time zones in his head.

  Placing the paper cup on the bench beside him, he used his free hand to dig his phone from his pocket. Unlocking it, he held down the zero key until it turned into a plus sign, and dialled the number.

  After five long beeps there was a clicking sound followed by more beeps, like he was being put on hold, or redirected. Then more clicks before, finally, someone answered. Bailey knew they were there because of the heavy breathing down the line.

  ‘John Bailey here.’

  He didn’t know what else to say.

  The words were met with more breathing. Sighing in, and out.

  He waited.

  ‘It’s been a long time, John Bailey.’

  The unmistakable voice sent a chill through Bailey’s spine, making him shudder.

  ‘I listened to your speech,’ Mustafa said. ‘The one you gave in London.’

  Bailey wondered how the hell that was possible. No recordings were permitted at Chatham House. Off the record; Chatham House rules. It was where the bloody rule came from.

  He decided not to go there. ‘And?’

  ‘You have your views, I have mine.’

  ‘You didn’t like it, then?’

  Mustafa took a while to respond. ‘You think you know me, but you don’t.’

  Hearing Mustafa’s voice made him feel sick. Bailey had been on the phone for less than thirty seconds and, already, he wanted to hang up.

  ‘Never said I did. Then, or now. I can only go off what you told me, what I saw,’ Bailey said. ‘Anyway, you wanted me to call you. Why?’

  ‘What did you think of the brave martyr’s statement at St James’s Square?’

  ‘The brainwashed kid? Your work? Another wasted life.’

  ‘You were always so quick to judge, John Bailey.’

  ‘My nature.’

  ‘There are plenty more like him, you know. Good soldiers are not hard to find.’

  ‘Is that why we’re talking?’

  Another plane was flying overhead, smaller than the A380, but just as loud.

  ‘I think you know why.’

  ‘No, really, I don’t. Enlighten me.’ Bailey wasn’t about to tell Mustafa that he knew about Tariq. He didn’t want to say anything that might expedite the plan.

  ‘Working for the CIA,’ Mustafa said, his voice more like a growl. ‘Your betrayal has brought us back together.’

  ‘I don’t work for the CIA. I’m a journalist.’

  ‘What you saw in London was nothing. In a few days, you’ll know.’

  ‘Killing more innocent people?’

  ‘We’ll talk again, soon.’

  ‘Betrayal? What the hell are you talking about, Mustafa?’

  ‘I know what you did.’

  Click.

  He was gone.

  I know what you did.

  What the hell was he talking about? What betrayal?

  Bailey’s hand was shaking.

  He folded the piece of paper, catching a glimpse of his three missing fingernails, the skin red and wrinkled. Mustafa’s men had done that to him. The nails had never grown back.

  CHAPTER 8

  Talkback radio hosts only ever discussed three things in Sydney: terrorism, house prices and how much people were paying for their power bills. Usually, in that order.

  The topic of the day today was the soaring prices of electricity and gas.

  ‘You tell me, dear listeners, why our politicians think it’s okay for Australians to pay more for our own gas than the Japanese?’

  Bailey hated opinionated journalism and he’d made no secret of his special dislike for Keith Roberts, whose yapping voice was raging from the speakers in the taxi.

  ‘The energy minister is here with me in the studio. Her name is Jennifer Owens. She’s completely incompetent, I tell you. I’ll say it again, she’s completely incompetent! It’s the only way to describe a member of a government that makes its own citizens pay more for gas than the spot price overseas –’

  ‘Keith, if you’ll let me get a word in here.’

  ‘No, Jennifer. I won’t. Why would I? It’s your incompetence that’s sending this nation to ruin. What do you say to the poor old dear who won’t put her heater on this winter because she can’t afford it? There’s a question I’ll let you answer. Jennifer? Jennifer?’

  After more than two decades on the radio, Roberts was king of the airwaves. He loved the power of his opinions and often boasted that he’d brought down prime ministers and premiers. The sad thing was that he was right.

  ‘I’d say we’re doing the best we can, Keith. And, and –’

  ‘And what, Jennifer? What? You’ve got no idea. You’re all at sea like our last prime minister. Your old boss. Lost at sea, no idea.’

  ‘Steady on there, Keith.’

  It had taken the taxi almost an hour to make it across the city in the busy morning traffic, not helped by the streets that had been shut down because of the mysterious light rail project that seemed to be more about cutting down historic trees than laying tracks. They were only a few streets away from Bailey’s home in Paddington but he couldn’t take Roberts’ incessant yapping any longer.

  ‘Mate, mind giving the radio a rest?’

  The driver shook his head. ‘This is good stuff, important! Keith Roberts speaks for all of us. Not just you rich people in Paddington.’

  This bloke had earned the chip on his shoulder. The wealth divide was growing by the month in Sydney and taxi drivers were the new working poor, especially after Uber had been given a free pass to take half of their business.

  ‘Okay, mate.’ Bailey would put up with Roberts, but he wasn’t going to cop being bundled in with all the eastern suburbs yuppies. ‘Do I look like some rich prick to you?’

  The taxi driver turned around, sizing up Bailey’s worn jeans, flannelette shirt and five o’clock shadow. ‘Guess not. But you get my point.’

  ‘I get it.’

  Bailey wound down his window to get some air. He had bigger things on his mind than worrying about Keith Roberts. Like why the world’s most wanted terrorist was accusing him of betrayal, and why a fifteen-year-old kid from a good family was about to ruin his life and possibly many others.

  He needed to find Tariq and, at this precise moment, he had no idea how. Bailey needed help from someone who knew how to find people who didn’t want to be found. It just so happened that that someone had been sleeping in his spare room for the past three months.

  ‘Ronnie!’

  Bailey called out as soon as he opened the front door.

  ‘Ronnie! Are you here, mate?’

  Bailey checked the bedroom, the kitchen and the lounge. There was no sign of him.

  He opened the fridge and had a sniff of a plastic takeaway box half-filled with pad thai. It smelled good, fresh. He put the box in the microwave and had one more scour of the house. The only things missing were the fishing rods from the courtyard.

  Bailey grabbed his car keys, a fork and the steaming box of noodles and headed out the door. He knew exactly where Ronnie Johnson would be.

  ‘Hello stranger.’

  He didn’t get far. There was a woman standing on his front porch when he opened the door. She almost wore the pad thai.

  ‘Hi Annie. Sorry, now’s not a great time.’

  Annie Brooks. His AA sponsor. She lived around the corner and had a habit of dropping by, unannounced.

  ‘Read your story in the paper.’ She flashed him a concerned smile, knowing it’d get him. ‘Made me worried about you.’

  ‘I’m good, Annie. No slip-ups.’

  The steam from the pad thai was burning his fingers. He stepped around her, resting the takeaway container in a pot plant. The dead fern wouldn’t mind.

  ‘Sorry, too bloody hot.’ With his hands free, he gave her a hug. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m good. Could do with a coffee, though. Got time for a quick
one?’

  ‘This about me, or you?’

  Their conversations were always a two-way street. It was the way things rolled for people battling the booze. Bailey didn’t want to let her down.

  ‘You.’

  She was just checking in. Her usual trick. A casual pop-in for a chat. Talking with Annie wasn’t like a session with a shrink. She had her own head full of demons and she understood Bailey’s world better than most.

  They also had a history together.

  The first time Bailey had met Annie Brooks wasn’t in the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at the church hall around the corner from his house. It was in Beirut. Annie had been a television reporter back in the day when commercial networks cared about international news. Lebanon was a tiny country; all the foreign correspondents knew each other. They shared information. Travelled together. Drank together. And from time to time, they even slept together. Aid workers liked to call it ‘emergency sex’. It was basically the same thing for correspondents. Sex on the fly. A moment of intimacy. Something that connected them to an ordinary life.

  Annie had only lasted a year in Beirut before she was called back to Sydney to present the six o’clock nightly news. She held the job for almost fifteen years, became a household name, until some all-too-clever TV executive decided that she wasn’t ‘fuckable’ enough anymore and replaced her with a younger version of herself. Commercial television was like that. Brutal. And sexist.

  Unlike Bailey, it wasn’t the job that drove Annie to the bottle. She’d always been a drinker. Bailey had seen it firsthand in Beirut. He used to marvel at how she could put away the best part of a bottle of vodka and get up for an early flight the next morning, raring to go. He found out later that she used to start the day with bloody Marys at breakfast.

  Bailey liked his conversations with Annie because, in their own way, they’d both been knocked down onto the canvas and made it back to their feet. They had lived experiences. Wolves to keep outside the door.