by HMC
Jade tiptoed through a living room, a beautiful, oversized fireplace lighting her way. The wrought-iron grate reached her full height and the flames spat and cracked at her as she walked by.
A great, fat tabby purred at her from the one and only chair in front of the fire. He turned over so his feet and belly were up, tempting passers-by to give him a tummy rub on his long, soft, grey and white splotched fur. Jade couldn’t help herself and went in for a gentle tickle. The grateful cat nudged her with his head and let out a soft grunt of appreciation.
This house felt far too safe to be her place of death. She followed the sound of laughter.
The kitchen looked like it’d been remodelled in the seventies. Swirling yellow wallpaper reached down from the roof to meet dark wooden cupboards, encircling the perimeter of the kitchen. A large bistro style counter with orange bar stools dominated the centre of the room, and there was a gargantuan copper range hood affixed over a sprawling cook top.
Sitting on one of the two stools at the counter was her brother, Angus. He seemed to be no worse for wear than an arm in a sling.
Next to him sat a beautiful oriental woman with creamy skin and a sparkle in her eyes. Her jet-black hair was worn loosely in a ponytail and her beauty was effortless and undeniable – even in a matching navy-blue tracksuit.
She wasn’t as sweet as she looked, though. She’d yanked Jade from the car earlier and held her with a vice-like grip. They’d driven her and Angus to this place in the bushland. When Jade refused to comply, they’d put her in the room, told her to calm down and locked the doors on her. Angus was still out when she’d left him.
They must’ve unlocked it after she’d finally given up and slept.
‘So, you’re finally awake, sleepy head.’ Her brother was completely at ease. Angus had always been such an excellent judge of character and Jade trusted his instincts through and through. Even if she didn’t, there wasn’t much of a choice right now.
‘This is Ayrah.’
The woman nodded, smiled and took a sip of beer from a stubby. ‘I’m sorry about before. You’re one strong lady.’
Jade nodded.
‘And this is Oskar.’
A rough shabby-looking man walked in and Jade recognised him instantly. She was so taken aback she couldn’t speak, every fibre of her being tingled.
‘I know you. You drive the ambulance at Maine.’
Before Jade could grab the nearest weapon, Angus spoke. ‘He doesn’t really. He’s undercover. They all are.’
Oskar was closely followed by a taller man, who was around the same age as Jade. Face exhausted, the second man put out his hand for Jade to shake and all she could do was look at it, and then back up at him. She folded her arms in protest. He’d been the other one who’d chased them up the mountain. Angus hadn’t introduced him, which meant he’d forgotten his name.
His eyes were Andaman Sea blue and his brown hair was greying at the temples. He wasn’t conventionally attractive, but it was the intensity to which he looked at her that made her heart flutter. Was she going to fall in love with everyone she met now that she was a divorcee?
‘I’m Grady.’ He put his hand down and looked pained. ‘Please, sit down.’
The others took their places around the counter and made themselves comfortable.
Jade’s cheeks burned. There was a fire in her guts as she stared at these three outsiders sitting so nonchalantly before her. Jade’s words were venomous. ‘What makes you think I’m going to trust you people? If you are to be trusted, give me my goddamned gun!’
Grady shuffled and both Oskar and Ayrah burst out laughing.
‘She’s right,’ said Oskar, ‘give the woman back her gun before she loses it.’
Grady frowned, reached into a kitchen drawer and pulled out her handgun. He placed it onto the orange laminate countertop.
‘Calm down, Jade, they’re on our side.’ Angus looked a little embarrassed by his sister.
‘No, I won’t calm down. I’ve been burned, stabbed with needles, locked up in an asylum, and chased up a mountain. Who are you people!’
They all looked at each other, unfazed.
Ayrah even looked benevolent.
‘Sit down, Jade, and let us explain.’ This time Grady, the very serious looking one, spoke with resolution.
‘Okay, I’m listening.’
Ayrah stood up and withdrew a six-pack of beer from the humming refrigerator. She prepared to open them with a bottle opener attached to a full set of keys, but Grady interrupted her.
‘Is that a good idea? Is this really a good time to be drinking so much?’
‘Relax man, one more beer each.’ Oskar nodded with approval and as she passed the beverages around, Ayrah gave Grady a small jab.
‘We’ve been on edge for over six months now, and you’ve turned into a dried up old maid. Have a beer and chill out.’
Grady’s face remained stern. He really looked like a train wreck but Jade had supposed that was normal for him. Jade swigged the cold, fizzy liquid and it soothed the nervous feeling in her stomach; she could get very drunk right about now. She really wanted to – but it would have to wait until this whole thing was over and if they were alive at the end of it.
Angus swigged his beer and turned to her. ‘Ever heard of ABCI?’
‘Yes I have. The Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence.’
‘Well, Ayrah here is an intelligence analyst.’ She nodded. ‘Grady an investigator and Oskar does technical surveillance.’
‘We’ve been collating data on Maine’s special research project for six months, now,’ Oskar said.
Jade had no idea there was a crime authority involved. She didn’t know whether to feel relieved or annoyed with these people who hadn’t come to save her and her patients. She still wasn’t certain they could be trusted.
‘Jade your friends are okay,’ Ayrah said. ‘We’ve been listening in.’
They’re okay. A weight lifted off Jade’s shoulders. ‘If you’d said that the moment we met, things might have gone a little differently.’
‘Really? You seemed pretty dead-set on us being the bad guys.’
‘So, you know what’s going on then?’ Jade changed the subject.
‘More or less,’ said Grady.
‘So why can’t you just go in and get them?’
‘It’s not that simple. When a crime syndicate is a large as these guys, we need hard evidence.’
‘Well, now you have me. I’m a witness. What more do you need now?’ Jade was frustrated.
‘She’s right,’ said Ayrah. ‘We need to take her in and get a statement, then straight into witness protection.’
Jade knew it would be coming. But there was still no talk of getting her people out. ‘When you get my patients, they’ll all be witnesses, too.’ They seemed to be ignoring her.
Grady spoke next. ‘We found a Dr. Harry Hanson. We finally convinced him to make a statement, too. Apparently Green opened up to Harry when he was working at Rowan’s – to his detriment. When Green found out Harry was against his philosophies he had him fired and sent goons after him. The poor man was out of his mind with paranoia when we sent Owen to get him. Thought we were trying to kill him. Sounds a lot like this morning actually.’ Grady snorted with laughter and no one joined him. ‘You know … when we were following you?’
Jade gave him a sympathetic smile.
Angus piped up. ‘Who’s Owen?’
‘Jade would know him as Damon Speirlsman,’ Ayrah replied.
For a second, this shocked her. But then Jade realised how much sense it made. ‘My patient?’ She totally understood. No wonder Anne couldn’t find any background information on him; he didn’t exist.
Ayrah continued. ‘When Harry told us that George Barter and Freddy Parks were two patients who were treated at Maine, Owen
decided he had to go into Rowan’s Home to protect them.’
Damon. No wonder he disarmed that gunman. It also explained two weapons at the scene.
‘Owen was worried that Green had put them both in the same spot for a reason.’ Ayrah shook her head in frustration. ‘I’m worried about Owen now.’
‘My surveillance hasn’t picked him up lately,’ said Oskar.
‘I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but if you don’t go in and get him out now, you’ll lose him. They poison you every way they can in that hellhole. You may already be too late. Especially if Green is onto his game.’
Everyone was silent, waiting for her to tell her story, now; and tell it she would. They had to understand … really understand what they’d be up against in Maine.
As they sat together, she told them her tale from start to finish, much like she had with Angus, but with a few extra bits tacked on the end and, most important, her lengthy conversation with Dr. Karl Phillips. It didn’t matter now whether or not she could trust these people, it mattered only that there was a chance she could. They needed to know what would happen to their undercover agent if something wasn’t done.
‘I knew that this was big,’ said Ayrah. ‘But what they’re actually doing down there – it’s worse than I expected. Now we know why they work so hard to cover their tracks. Why it’s so important to go after those who know.’ Ayrah sipped her beer.
‘We honestly thought Dr. Karl Phillips was out of the picture,’ Grady said. ‘We were told not to worry about him. No one ever thought they’d go after Samantha Phillips. We take full responsibility for that mistake.’
Jade took that moment as her cue and pulled out the letter from Karl to Sam. She found several documents inside. They all gathered around to look over her shoulder.
‘What is it?’ Angus nudged in to see.
‘It’s what Karl gave me.’
‘Looks like a list of names, a map of Maine, notes ... we’ll need to blow this up a few sizes.’ Grady turned to Jade. ‘Do you think Karl would be ready to make a statement, also?’
She’d just finished reading his letter to Sam. ‘He’s kind of written one right here.’ She passed it over to him.
‘Jade, can I enlarge these and fax some copies?’ Grady spoke with urgency – as if sharing this information was a life and death matter. She supposed it was.
‘Sure.’ She was happy for him to do so. Jade would do everything she could to help them get all the evidence they needed.
‘Thanks.’ Grady took the letter and the documents then returned with them copied and enlarged for them all to have a closer look. Jade put the originals back into her jeans pocket.
‘I’ll be needing those,’ said Grady.
‘Can you copy that letter for me one more time then?’
He frowned.
‘It’s for Sam.’ He nodded and left the room.
TRACKING DEVICES
It was calculated cruelty and he saw it all. The way it worked was beyond his wildest imaginings and Agent Owen Taylor had everything he needed, apart from a way out.
They didn’t even bother to call him Damon anymore.
They knew exactly who he was.
Owen had been there long enough now to see what they were up against. The patients were herded in, and one by one, depreciated to nothing. He’d become one of them. Inside his head he documented it: names, dates, staff members – anything he could. But would it all be for nothing? What if he died here with a head full of answers and no one to share them with?
He lay in a room that could’ve been a room in any hospital, anywhere. It just happened to be Maine’s underground Medical Research Facility and he couldn’t think of a more terrifying place to be. It was easy to imagine a quick death – to say goodbye and to end it. But to imagine losing your mind … your self … at the hands of others, to have no way to stop it, to wonder how long it would take before it was entirely gone – that was a horror to end all horrors.
What made Owen sick was that it was all a corporation con; a bid to be on the leading edge. To be at the forefront of medical science – to discover, to learn and grow – while at the same time maiming, disfiguring and destroying. And they were succeeding. They’d been doing so for a very long time.
Dr. Clancy Green was a modern day Mengele. ‘The Angel of Death,’ Dr. Josef Mengele and his team of SS doctors were best known for their Nazi human experiments on inmates – implementing medical torture to see what their victims were capable of, including small children. It was all in the name of developing combat strategies for the German militia.
The SS stood for Schutzstaffel, or ‘protective squadron.’ And like them, Green and his army of well-trained, brainwashed servants scooted about like they were all normal. They acted as if they were doing everyday research, in a normal facility, with a mission statement and vision to boot. They acted as if they were working for humanity rather than against it.
They were respected on the outside, too. They figured out the causes and correlations of mental disorders. They spat out studies that were renowned in universities – appraised and celebrated by distinguished colleagues everywhere.
Maine was so much more than he’d anticipated.
Not only were they producing high quality research data in one area, these bastards were branching out. Why stick to mental health alone, when the country had become the playthings of the pharmaceutical industry? Companies whose promise to fix or alleviate symptoms made them billions each year. When a drug that lessened one symptom would bring on another, there were other prescriptions to fill for that. And Green was now talking about dealing in all sorts of other arenas: organs, muscles, skin, hair – and who was to say that it hadn’t already begun? He told Owen all of this, as if he’d never have the chance to pass it on.
It all funnelled back to the original brainchild of the Society: if that which is destroyed evidences a negative reaction, then that reaction must be a direct result of the destruction.
And why use rats when you could use humans?
Owen was in deep shit.
It was his job to get the information to someone who could do something with it. But he was stuck. He was useless. The dream of escape seemed unattainable.
They could kill him at any moment. His initial gut feelings had been right; he had drawn a doozey of a case as his first undercover assignment.
Evening crept up and the trackers stopped for supper. The little café they chose was decked out with paintings of green tree frogs and images of rainforests, so badly done that the price tags that matched them were painful. Sabatino thought he could probably do better himself and that some people were laughably oblivious, but he also felt sad for them. He had a tender spot for no-hopers, try-hards, anyone who went for something and failed at it. It was the only place in his heart that hadn’t turned to stone. He especially mourned the plight of junkies, and almost cried once when he found one who had overdosed on a couch.
Sabatino’s job that night had been to kill a mother. She was searching for the daughter she’d put in an orphanage, ten years prior. The mother was sniffing around a ‘project.’ The Society didn’t like it.
There was a good reason that she hadn’t found her daughter, and never would. She was an ex-junkie and by the time Sabatino had got to her, she’d taken care of that herself – needle hanging out of her arm and vomit all over. Poor bitch had a relapse. She’d just wanted her kid back.
‘Siddown, Sab,’ Frankie said as he picked up a menu. A selection of American ketchup and mustard were the standard condiments on the café’s table and he pushed them aside. Sabatino made himself comfortable in the cosy booth, next to his teacher.
Shanghai sat across from them and silently slid an address scrawled on a piece of paper over to Frankie, who read it and snorted.
‘This is a suburban address in Fairholmes.’
&
nbsp; Shanghai nodded and spoke in a thick Chinese accent that Sabatino had to listen very carefully to understand.
‘Yes,’ whispered Shanghai, ‘they came back down the mountain.’
Frankie smiled widely. Sabatino hated it when he did that – it looked so blackly evil, with his mouth full of crooked yellowing teeth. But he never dare mention it, for fear of losing his tongue.
‘How many agents?’ Frankie asked.
Shanghai put up three fingers.
‘Good. One on one, then.’
Shanghai continued, ‘the house is an old dairy farm. It sits on ten acres. It’s big.’ Shanghai used the mustard to draw the layout on the table. ‘Here is a front porch, hall, two bedrooms on either side. The lounge is here and kitchen is at the back … bathroom, laundry and three other bedrooms. No neighbours for two kilometres.’
Frankie folded his hands together in thought. He took the salt and pepper shakers, as well as a bottle of ketchup. He used them as representations of themselves, around the mustard creation in the centre of the table. ‘We hit in five hours. Sabatino and Shanghai, you’ll take the back three rooms and I’ll take the front two. The best option is to take them out while they’re sleeping. As we know from experience, agents tend to be light sleepers so don’t forget, quiet as a water snake. They may leave one awake to keep watch. If this is the case, he will probably be on the front porch – so leave that one to me.
‘The objective is to get Dr. Jade Thatcher out alive. She’s the one our employer wants. She’s evidence – evidence that needs to be covered up. You have her photo. Study her face, because if you accidentally kill her, I’ll kill you both. This mission is to kill all three agents and the brother. Next, a word of warning. There are two females on the premises. The one we want will probably be in a room, protected by the others. Do not, whatever you do, grab the Japanese woman. She’s an agent, whom I have seen in action before. Grab her by accident, and you’ll be dead before your body hits the ground.’
Sabatino nodded. ‘Whoever finds her first will bring Jade Thatcher out to the van and we’ll be on our merry way.’ They ate their meal in silence and tipped the waitress handsomely, who, despite her sudden windfall, frowned at them for pouring mustard all over her table.
