The Ebola Conspiracy

by Mark Furness

  “What are you going to do?” said Steele.

  “Take it back.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry.” I binned the coffee. “The coppers will laugh at me, won’t they?”

  “Nice photo, but you pulled the fucking thing down. If I was a copper, I’d put you in the nutcase file under Kamikaze Carp: oddball claims Jap fish attacked his door.”

  “I want to know what happened in Henry’s cell. Can you put me on to one of your prison sources?”

  “I’ll twist some fins and get back to you.”

  I phoned Jack in Shanghai. It took a while to clarify with him that it wasn’t our dog I found gutted and hanging off the front door. He reminded me it was 4.30am where he was.

  “You want to back off?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Watch your back,” he said, “and keep your head screwed on. Don’t let East provoke you into doing anything stupid.”

  I phoned Claire. It was just after 8am. She was at The Citizen’s office at Circular Quay, overlooking the main ferry wharf in the city. She liked to walk to work early and watch the sun rising over the harbour and ferry docks we can see from our tower on the northern edge of the CBD.

  Claire hadn’t attended the East trial, nor had she been in Sydney to read the publicity or hear the rabid speculation before it. She was fresh eyes and ears on an old landscape.

  “How’d you go running your eyes over the court transcripts?” I said.

  “That takeover bid by the Double Happiness Trading Company that Henry made one of his inside share trades on. Remember it?”

  “Vaguely. Tiny, wasn’t it? Barely worth his trouble.”

  “What did you tell me when I started here? Stand back, close my eyes, open them, look for the odd man out.”

  “And?”

  “Double Happiness was the only trade he did that involved a totally foreign company.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Find out who’s behind them. I’ll be in the office a bit later. Doctor’s appointment.”

  As I walked to my car, I tried to make sense of the dead fish. Charles East’s speciality was terrorising people with his lawyers and his PR people. He attacked people’s money and their reputations, and he did so in public to maximise the impact. Nothing physical, no direct violence, so apart from Henry, did he have unusual problems? Or new advisers? Mr Greyhound’s spittle-mouthed antics outside the courthouse were a twist on East’s psychological tactics.

  Hugo would be okay on the far side of the world with his nana, I told myself, but maybe I should move Fish next door long-term - and persuade Alice to move to her boyfriend’s house for a while.

  My head ached with possibilities, so I put my mind to work on the tangible lunacy of the freeway traffic and drove into the city. I couldn’t find a car space near our house, or anywhere else on the nearby streets, so I rolled into an underground carpark a couple of blocks from home. I parked and walked towards the stairwell that led up to the street. The route took me past bay B9. It was empty, so I couldn’t miss a stain on the concrete floor that looked like an old oil spill. Nor could I stop the flooding recall of an image of my father sitting on his arse, with his back leaning against the front wheel of my parked Defender in that bay, his head hanging sideways and his brain matter splattered against my driver’s side door, his right hand holding the gun. That’s when I found the letter in his pocket about wanting to put a snake in my bed, metaphorically speaking, along with instructions about where to find the twin Browning 9mm he’d left for me and buried in my garden at home beside the frangipani tree.

  I walked quickly up the stairs and out to the street. My phoned pinged. A text from Steele: Got someone. Where RU?

  I replied: About to hit The Pig.

  VIII

  THE PICKLED PIG’S owner locked his horse-sized black eyes on me. Mick O’Hara was grinning inside his permanent five o’clock shadow, hands on his narrow hips, dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, button-down pockets sporting mother-of-pearl buttons. He wore grey woollen britches held up by braces and ankle-high riding boots in matte black. A grey homburg cocked at a slight angle topped him off.

  “Looks like you need a drink,” he observed.

  “And coffee,” I said, studying him back. “Let me guess. Gold miner, not cattle hand.”

  “Correct,” he replied.

  I like that subtlety about Mick, who’s a regular theme dresser and does great German lederhosen on Mondays. He headed to his glistening coffee machine, gave it a couple of pats and milked its hissing pipes. I looked around the Pig’s dozen worn booths. The old leather suitcases stacked on high shelves around the walls reminded me of a steam-era railway carriage. The occupants were just me and three lean young women in matching orange spray-on tans with bleached teeth sucking juice from straws in jam-jar glasses.

  I opened my iPad and browsed the newspapers online. Mick plonked a latte on the table, a shot glass of bourbon by its side. I sipped the coffee and pondered the shot. Steele walked in.

  He had a red welt on the bridge of his nose. I said nothing. He may have stumbled, or told a bad joke to another reveller somewhere last night. But I knew things were getting crazier between him and his wife, and she wasn’t the shy type.

  “It’ll cost you,” Steele said.

  “For what?”

  “I can hook you up with a prison psych nurse who’s looking after Henry East, but he wants $500 for the privilege.”

  “When?”

  “This afternoon. You take the cash with you. I’ll text you time and place.”

  “What do I get for five huge?”

  “My man’s at the kid’s bedside most nights.”

  “You coming with me?”

  “Sorry: got other work. Someone’s wonderful son has just hurled his girlfriend off the 25th floor. Apparently he didn’t like the way she did the dishes.”

  Steele took a few steps to leave and turned. He picked up my bourbon and threw the contents down his throat. “You want us to take the dog?”

  “I think he’ll be okay next door for now.”

  “Alice?”

  “I have a plan.”

  Steele winked and walked.

  Mick plonked another shot of bourbon, a cup of iced water, and a plate of thick, hand-cut raisin toast, butter on the side, on my table. He insists that I eat breakfast. I applied a smear of butter.

  “You’ll die with a fine heart one day,” he said before looking at my iPad and shaking his head. “You know, Gar, the human mind creates some sad things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Take that fancy electric mat you have there.”

  “They’re called tablets.”

  “Magic mats to me. You can fly on ‘em all over the world without leavin’ home and peep into people’s windows twenty-four-seven. It’s just that you miss the bloody point.”

  “What point’s that?”

  Mick shook his head again, slowly: “Human contact. Smellin’, touchin’, tastin’. You’re married to that fuckin’ thing.”

  “It works for us.” The truth was I got his point. I stood up and headed for the toilet.

  When I pushed the door open, one of the young women with the orange-stained skin was standing over the bowl, panties mid-thigh, using one hand to hold her dress up. A stream of urine was arcing into the toilet. She turned sideways and smiled.

  “Sorry,” I said. She was holding a substantial penis with a silver ring through its hole. I closed the door and walked back to my table.

  A few minutes later, Mick came over. He pulled a business card from behind my ear like he used to pull magic coins from behind my kids’ ears, and out of their noses.

  “The girls over there asked me to give this to you. If you need some R and R,” he said with a mighty grin. The card read: Seahorse Club. Saddle up for the most exciting rides in town.

  He couldn’t know I’d found one of Charlotte’s old dresses in Hugo’s wardrobe last week when I wa
s looking for a travel case. Hugo had black eyeliner pencils and jacaranda-coloured lipstick in a drawer. And a magazine article about a male super model who walked the world’s most famous catwalks in women’s clothes.

  I drained my coffee, walked home, had a nap to make up for last night, showered and headed to The Citizen’s office wearing a suit and tie to tell the world, and myself, that I was a serious man.

  In the taxi, I checked my wallet for the paper packet of cocaine I was saving for Ron. I put the Seahorse Club card in beside it.

  IX

  MY PHONE pinged in the taxi as we closed in on The Citizen’s office building clustered with other towers along the harbour-front stretch of the central business district, or CBD as the occupiers called it to save a bit of breath and sound hip. A text from Steele read: “Fly Half Hotel, East Sydney. 4pm. He will be wearing a Sydney Swans cap.” I had over an hour to burn.

  Our news bureau was perched about halfway up a sixty storey, white-marble-entranced monument called Gunnaroo Tower. It was smack bang in the middle of a postcard cliché, flanked by the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. If strutting was an Olympic sport, the occupants of Gunnaroo would win medals every time they crossed the lobby.

  The tower wasn’t my choice of local HQ. Most of the new-media HQs were located in cheaper low-rise on the other side of the CBD in the inner urban grime around Central Railway Station and Surry Hills. But a German pension fund owned Gunnaroo and Jack Darling assured me we had got a good leasing deal through Ailsa Dusseldorf, a half-owner of The Citizen. The family of the Frankfurt-born industrial heiress made its fortune crafting engine cogs for luxury cars, before the Chinese and Indians worked out how to copy them at lower cost. She had partnered with a Californian named Zac Werner eighteen months ago to fund our start-up global media operation. Zac made his pile by creating computer security software.

  Online-only media, like The Citizen, was cheap on technical infrastructure – there was no paper, no printing presses and no costly physical distribution. Journalists didn’t cost much either, not these days, but managing them was like herding monkeys and consumers didn’t want to pay for news, not much anyway. Advertising was thin too, so The Citizen ran at a loss. Some of our competitors called it a vanity project for the owners. I didn’t give a shit about that – ninety-nine percent of media workers are mirror gazers, the bigger, the better. I was gambling that the tax benefits to our founders, enabled by global money shuffling by smart accountants - legitimate, of course - would keep Dusseldorf and Werner pouring money into the hopper for a while yet. My mortgage repayments depended on it, Alice was in art school, and Hugo in high school. Moreover, job offers were thin on the ground for a man with my reputation.

  Claire was sitting at her desk, one of four butted together in our mostly open-plan space, talking on the phone. There was one desk for another reporter we were yet to hire. The other two were for our subscription-come-advertising-sales person, and the office administrator who worked two days a week. Neither of them were in. As the bureau chief, I got a glass-walled private office with a harbour view through a window the size of a modest wardrobe.

  I glanced at a TV screen fixed to a wall in the main room. It was turned to a twenty-four-hour news channel where half a dozen journalists and politicians were spread along a desk in a studio, clucking at each other like over-coiffed roosters and lip-sticked hens.

  Claire brushed the liquorice strands of her Cleopatra haircut away from a milk-coloured cheek. I glimpsed a purple mark on her throat next to her white shirt collar. She always wore long sleeves and trousers and I’d begun to wonder why.

  “Tell me about Double Happiness,” I said.

  “It’s a Shanghai stock exchange listed company that made a takeover bid for an Australian mining company named Austar Gold. Henry made about $25,000 by buying Austar shares before the bid was announced and selling them afterwards when the price almost doubled.”

  “And?”

  “Double Happiness is 30 per cent owned by a group of Hong Kong investors, but none of them own more than 5 per cent. Another 20 per cent is owned by a Chinese steel mill boss from Guangdong Province. The biggest shareholder is a London-based firm named Cavalcade Investment Group with 38 per cent. Rats and mice own the rest out of Singapore and South-East Asia.”

  “So,” I said, “pursuing the odd-man-out idea, why would one Western investor be sitting among all those Chinese?”

  Claire tapped her keyboard. I pulled a chair next to hers and we looked at her screen.

  The Cavalcade Investment Group is a privately owned, UK-based asset management and financial services company. We work with individuals and financial institutions to invest internationally in growth industries including banking, telecommunications, property development and travel.

  Cavalcade is headquartered in London, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai.

  “Let me see that logo,” I said.

  Claire zoomed in. The Cavalcade logo on the company’s home page was the shape of a heraldic shield.

  “Very Game of Thrones,” she concluded. “House of Lannister, don’t you think?”

  I had to agree. “Memory test,” I said. “Mine.”

  Claire followed me into my office. I sat at my desk and opened the photos file on my laptop. I clicked on a picture of Henry East swinging a polo mallet atop a pony. Hooray Henry was wearing a black peaked cap, cream jodhpurs, and a short-sleeved black shirt with the collar turned up. I magnified the left breast of Henry’s shirt, focussing on the place where the sponsors put their mark, and there sat the Cavalcade shield logo, slightly distorted in the folds of the cloth, but there nonetheless. The photo caption said Henry was playing at the Ascot Park Polo Club in Surrey outside London.

  “Find out who Cavalcade’s key people are,” I said, “and any other links between them and the Easts.”

  “Henry East,” said Claire. “Do you think maybe someone was trying to extort money from him?”

  “Why extortion?”

  “He knew how to play the financial markets, didn’t he? Maybe someone in the prison wanted him to do the same for them - to make him their puppet - and so he cut himself to get away.”

  “That’s possible. Maybe they wanted to terrorise some cash out his father too. But let’s just probe Cavalcade for now. I have a meeting with a man in a hat.”

  “An interesting hat?”

  “I hope so.”

  Claire’s mobile phone rang as I passed her desk on the way to the main door. Her husband’s name was on the screen. She stroked her throat and let it ring out.

  X

  THE MAN in the hat was late.

  So I perched on a stool at the front bar of the rundown Fly Half Hotel. Happy Hour ran from 4-6pm and building workers in fluoro vests rubbed shoulders with office workers. I recognised the solo types in suits who drift around the CBD hoping that if they change pubs every drink or two and keep their neckties done up, their dependency will stay secret.

  “What are you having, love?” said the barmaid, whose appearance was worthy of a long look. She was in her late twenties, I guessed, and handsome with a red crew-cut. She had cat-like, green eyes and what appeared to be black-painted champagne corks stuffed in her drooping ear lobes. That was the least interesting part of her. Her nipples stood proud from her chest, which looked more hard muscle than soft breast, over which she was wearing a tight white singlet with the words ‘wife beater’ stencilled on it in black.

  I ordered a Happy Hour beer which tasted like cooking oil and soda water. I was thinking about how you get what you pay for when the Swans cap arrived on the head of a large man. He wore a red-and-white-checked shirt tucked into blue jeans with a crease ironed down the middle of each leg. I figured he lived with his mum, or he had done so for too long. He had white running shoes on his feet: new ones. I waved and he came over. His face was so freshly shaven there was soap and whiskers stuck to the rims of his ears. This ma
n was dressed for business.

  “Gar Hart,” I said, extending my hand. His hand was big enough to hold a man’s head comfortably, which I concluded was an asset for a psych nurse in a prison hospital.

  “Bruce Tyson,” he said. “Tom says you’re okay - most days.”

  I let him have that one without a fight. He dug his fingers into a bowl of free Happy Hour crisps that was sitting on the bar and ordered a craft beer not on the Happy Hour menu. The barmaid winked at him as she pulled the beer, flexing biceps that were magnificent, being tattooed with red and blue veins that made it look like her skin had been stripped away for anatomy study.

  “Drink here often?” I said to Tyson.

  “My local.”

  That was good information. I knew where to find him if he worked out. I pointed at a table next to a wall and we sat down.

  “Mind if I take notes?” I pulled a pad and pen from my jacket pocket.

  “Tom said you’d pay.”

  I gave Tyson the envelope with the cash. He didn’t count it. He stood up and stuffed the envelope into the back of his jeans. That was weird because he had two perfectly good back pockets, though this was a rough part of the city at night, and I guessed it would be late by the time he headed home, or somewhere else. If I was a mugger, I wouldn’t look inside Tyson’s bum crack either.

  “So you are looking after Henry East at Silverwater?” I said.

  “He’s a fucking mess. Not much looking after I can do.”

  “Badly cut?”

  “His head. Inside his head.”

  “Tom says Henry might have been attacked, not self-inflicted. Is that true?”

  “That’s what I’m hearing. But the prison plods are going for the suicide line.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know. Suits someone up top.”

  “What does Henry say?”