Caitlin nodded. ‘You would also know, sir, there’s nothing unusual about that. Presidents don’t know everything. It’s often better that they don’t.’
Judging by his stern facial expression, Tusk wasn’t much impressed with that line of argument. ‘You can serve me up that horseshit on the finest bone china, Ms Monroe,’ he shot back, ‘but I’m still not going to eat it.’
‘And yet you agreed to allow the mission to go ahead with the support of your office, General.’
‘No,’ he corrected her, ‘with my support. My personal support. That’s not the same thing. Mr Culver, Deputy Director Larrison, yourself, you’re all running a black operation with no plausible deniability, in complete contravention of a law that prohibits Echelon operations on US soil. My office cannot support that. That’s why I’m the only person here who’s been fully briefed. But you need to understand, as I have given Deputy Director Larrison and Mr Culver to understand, that if this goes wrong, I will not be covering up for you.’
They had slowed almost to a crawl as Musso picked his way through a section of road where the tarmac had been partially washed away.
‘If this goes wrong,’ said Caitlin, ‘I doubt congressional inquiries and criminal charges will be the worst of it. Getting out alive will be the first challenge. And as for the prohibition on operating within the boundaries of CONUS, that applies to start-up and stand-alone missions. But I didn’t start working on Baumer when I got off that plane just now. I’ve been on his case since well before the Disappearance. He may be dead, and his network may no longer constitute a clear and present danger. But the investigation of that network and how it effected its operation in New York - which killed a couple of thousand American personnel, you may recall - is ongoing. That’s why I’m here, sir. I have no doubts about the legality of this mission or the justness of this cause.’
Musso smiled slowly as they cleared the ruined stretch of road. ‘From what I know of you, Agent Monroe, you very rarely have doubts about anything.’
‘Then you don’t know me at all,’ she said quietly, but not unkindly. ‘So, why? Why did you agree to this? If you had your doubts, and you obviously do, why not just take them up the command chain? All the way if needs be.’
They’d reached a major intersection with I-35. Musso took the northern entrance and accelerated as soon as he’d left the difficult conditions of the market road behind them. The highway had obviously been properly cleared and was well maintained. The weather wasn’t much improved, though.
‘I still have my doubts,’ he replied. ‘But probably not of the sort you’d imagine. Frankly, I find the idea of anybody cosying up with the likes of Ozal or Baumer to be anathema. Let’s just get that out in the open. If Blackstone thought to gain some advantage by creating a tactical difficulty for us in New York - and by “us” I mean the United States of America - then he should swing by his neck for the crime of treason. Even if treason was not his intent. Even if he had some other agenda of which we are not aware. I agreed to support your mission here because I believe we need to ventilate this whole septic mess. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If you can break open the seal and let some light in on this, it’ll burn him alive. And it needs to.’
For the first time since turning off the main road from the airfield, Caitlin could see traffic. Mostly heavy haulers, and not very many of them, but it was still reassuring to find they weren’t the only people rattling around on the vast plains of Texas.
‘And your doubts?’ she prompted.
‘My doubts are about the consequences. What happens when you find out exactly what the arrangement with Ozal was? If there was indeed an arrangement. What happens then?’
‘That’s up to Culver and Larrison,’ she said without inflection.
If it was up to her, if Caitlin Monroe found out that Blackstone was in any way responsible, even indirectly, for freeing Bilal Baumer, her first inclination would be to put a bullet in his brain. But she had reasons for sticking to the play book now. Two of them hiding out in Aviemore, Scotland.
‘There is another reason why I agreed,’ said Musso as they came up on a truck stop that was open for business.
‘Don’t leave a lady guessing, sir.’
‘I was in NORTHCOM when everything turned to shit back in 2003,’ he began.
‘You weren’t just in NORTHCOM,’ she corrected him, ‘you were NORTHCOM.’
‘Very flattering, Agent Monroe.’ He laughed a little bitterly. ‘But I gave up smoking a long time ago, so I’ll thank you not to blow any up my ass.’
‘Okay.’
‘I was Johnny on the spot at Gitmo,’ Musso said, as if that explained everything. He cocked an eyebrow at her as they passed the truckers’ diner. ‘This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered you, Agent Monroe. That’s why you’re here now. When everything was turning to shit-flavoured custard in Gitmo, and France, and Britain, and pretty much everywhere, the surviving Joint Chiefs, of which I was an acting member, received word from an asset in France about the real reason behind the intifada there, and the roll-up of Echelon’s network. It was an impressive job of work, from a lone operator, to survive that piece of villainy and turn out the bad guys. It might even have changed the outcome of that attempted coup. You were that operator, I believe.’
Caitlin remained silent for just a second too long. ‘You can believe what you want, General Musso,’ she replied. ‘It’s a free country. For now.’
He smiled. ‘And you’re discreet. I like that in a secret agent.’
33
NORTH DARWIN, NORTHERN TERRITORY
She left Shah’s soiree just before midnight, in a taxi driven by one of his men. Julianne didn’t ask why Shah owned a taxi licence. She didn’t need to. The driver was an Australian who introduced himself as Granger. She wondered how realistic it was, having such a fit- and competent-looking white man driving a cab in a city like Darwin, where all the worst jobs were now performed by refugees. Then again, did it matter? The cab was the cover, not the driver, and truth be known, she felt much better riding next to him. Better still because of the pistol she could see bulging under his lightweight cotton jacket and the sawn-off shotgun he’d handed her when they got under way.
‘Boss man says you’re staying in a motel over by Doctors Gully,’ he said. ‘Must be pretty noisy, hey, with all the construction down at the new wharves?’
Jules had been exhausted when she’d arrived here in Darwin. Now she found herself wrung out from the shock and high emotions of that lunchtime down at the marina, worn down by the intrigues of the afternoon and evening. Whenever she thought of the Rhino, her stomach churned with an acid mix of worry and guilt; and when she found herself not having thought about him in a while, the guilt came rushing back with twice as much force. She didn’t much feel like talking, but she’d been brought up to value good manners. For her father, they had been an excellent disguise.
‘I’m so bloody tired, I suspect nothing would wake me once I got to sleep tonight,’ she said. ‘Assuming I can sleep at all, of course, given all the current hullabaloo.’
‘You’ll be right, Ms Balwyn,’ Shah’s man assured her. ‘I’ll make sure you get back safely. And we’ve got a couple of other blokes watching out for you. Put your head down, get some rack time. Nobody’s gonna be sneaking into your room tonight. Not unless they want to have a very nasty accident.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. Her eyes were watering, but that was from exhaustion.
She tried to take in as much of the city as she could while they drove south. If she was going to be here for a while, she would need to understand it. The Palms, the shake’n’bake, up-scale emigre ghetto where Shah had built his house, was easy enough to come to grips with. It was no different from any other expensive, gated community. She hadn’t been back to the UK in years, but she understood there were hundreds of them over there now, with plenty in Europe also. Almost as though the rich were returning to a feudal arrangement, whereby they walled themselves off from the d
angerous masses and hired men like Granger to patrol the walls. Even Shah and Pappas were just glorified gatekeepers; captains of the gate, perhaps, but little more.
Julianne yawned. She had run away, hooked up with Pete and Fifi, to get out from behind the walls of expectation and inherited duty that had fallen to her, as the daughter of a landed family. Now it seemed as if the walls had expanded to enclose the whole world, and they were topped with razor wire, policed by the murderous hirelings of some low-rent bully - someone from the fucking building trade, of all things! A man with ideas above his station and more money and clout than was seemly, even in a world as mad as this one had become of late.
The driver took her along the highway, back in towards the city. A hot, pulsing dome of light marked the location of New Town, where neon lights and jumbotrons kept the darkness at bay. There was no missing it. Some Chinese tycoon had covered two whole city blocks with an immense and gaudy spectacle, in the form of a towering casino, constructed to mirror the look of the Athenian Parthenon. Laser packs and spotlights swept ceaselessly over the black marble facade - although Jules was certain that on closer inspection it would turn out not to be marble, but polished concrete painted to a high gloss noir. Great dark columns held aloft a massive portico, while volcanic geysers of fire snaked and roared up their length from gas vents built into the base of each plinth. The traffic stream thickened up and slowed considerably outside this awesome grotesquerie. Granger cursed under his breath as he muscled the car through the worst of the congestion.
‘Sorry, Miss,’ he said, ‘but as bad as this looks, it’s heaps worse round the back, on the waterfront. Once the sun goes down, it’s a fuckin’ bloodhouse out there. That place where your mate got in a bit of strife today, the old marina, they throw up these massive bloody iron barricades of an evening. Lock themselves down behind them. Be an unusual morning when the sun didn’t come up on half-a-dozen or so corpses around the edge of Newie. So, sorry, but we’re better going through here.’
‘It’s okay,’ replied Jules. ‘I need to get my bearings anyway. So this place goes back what, four or five blocks to the inner harbour?’
Granger leaned on his horn, mounted the median strip and forced a passage past a couple of maxi taxis spilling drunken sailors directly onto the tarmac of the highway.
‘Fuckwits,’ he muttered. ‘Yeah, five blocks along the southern edge. Maybe eight or nine along the waterfront down by the marina, and three of four out of the arse end of Hong Kong Charlie’s here. The whole thing’s a fucking mess. Shaped like a heart. A blackened, hateful heart.’ He grinned, pleased with his literary allusions.
‘Probably best you don’t head in there,’ the Australian continued, as they bounced down off the median strip. ‘There’s three main roads run through the place, but soon as you get off them, you’re fucked. The Authority laid them down when the whole place was nothing more than a bit of waste ground with a few surveyor’s pegs on it. Pretty much everything else in there, every cross-street, every alley, every little fucking cut-through - and there’s dozens of them, maybe hundreds - they all just sorta sprang up along the natural lie of the land, between bits of ground grabbed up by whoever built on it. Sometimes a place will burn down, or maybe it gets burnt down, you know, and the next morning there’s a new cross-street. Probably with a handful of food carts, hookers and pickpockets already claiming it as their turf. Until someone bigger comes along, kicks them off, and runs up something like a fried chicken joint where you can get a bit of crystal meth and a dodgy tattoo with your bucket of spicy wings.’
A fight broke out on the footpath just beside her window, a brawling knot of civilians by the look of them. Maybe construction workers, Jules thought, judging by the high-visibility vests a couple of them wore, and the muddy steel-capped boots they were using to kick the shit out of a small Asian man they’d surrounded. Before she could see how that turned out - poorly, she would have guessed - Granger found a gap in the traffic and accelerated away.
She had no trouble picking out the new developments that climbed skywards over the quaint-looking older quarters of the city. The three blocks ahead of them, on the driver’s side of the car, had been buried under the footing of a gargantuan resort hotel. The Mirvac Mirage, forty-one storeys topping out in a private helipad facility, with its own control tower, which could land four big commercial choppers at the same time. Jules leaned forward and craned her head upwards, peering up into the night. She thought she could see the pulse of landing lights on the roof, but it was hard to tell in the dazzling artificial daylight down here at street level.
In spite of the late hour, hundreds of people streamed in and out of the foyer of the Mirage. Unlike the mob scene just a few blocks away in front of the Grecian-themed casino, the crowds here were all dressed in business attire, resort wear or, in a couple of cases, black tie and formal gowns. Limousines and town cars idled bumper to bumper, the drivers undoubtedly running the air-conditioning against the sweltering evening. It appeared that taxis weren’t allowed in the forecourt of the hotel, but there was a rank full of them on the opposite side of the road.
The police presence was much heavier now, although it didn’t seem to be needed. She had seen none of the Northern Territory’s brown-shirted cops anywhere near where the construction workers had been kicking the life out of that little Chinese man. Here though, she counted four horse-mounted patrols clip-clopping through the large well-behaved crowds.
‘Have a look at these dickheads, would you,’ said Granger. He pointed down a street on the less developed side of the road.
At first Jules wasn’t quite sure what he was pointing at, but then she picked them out of the gloom, maybe a hundred metres or so back. Two armoured cars painted in black and grey urban camouflage, surrounded by a dozen troopers in similarly patterned uniforms.
‘Sandline,’ he explained before she could ask. ‘What they call their “Public Safety Response Team”. Fuckin’ beat-down artists mostly. Truncheons, tasers, capsicum spray, rubber bullets, and real ones too, in case somebody who really knows what they’re doing decides to have a go.’
He was driving quickly enough that she’d only caught a glimpse of them. ‘They didn’t seem to be doing much,’ she ventured.
Granger took a right-hand turn two blocks beyond the Mirvac Mirage Hotel. Jules found herself disoriented by how quickly the streetscape changed. They were now back on a quiet suburban lane, tree-lined, with family homes buttoned up, and only porch lights and occasionally little solar-powered garden lights burning in the night. There was no foot traffic, and the street was lined with cars, each one obviously parked outside its owner’s home at the end of the working day.
Her driver returned to the topic of the Sandline security squad they’d passed. ‘Not much for them to do since they kicked out the black fellas, and after them, some of the refugee gangs that fetched up here back in the early days after the Wave. Proper reffos, I mean - boat people. Indonesians mostly, but lots of Malays too. Jesus Christ, there were some willing fuckin’ stoushes in those days, mate. That’s how those Sandline bastards got a look in. Cops couldn’t handle it, so the FPDA contracted in their own security. It worked so fucking well, they outsourced everything they could in the end. As long as they don’t crack the wrong head open, the private forces pretty much have a free hand.’
They’d driven on another block and Jules could see the lights of the harbour through the trees. In fact, it looked as though one of the giant warships of the Combined Fleet, sporting a South Korean flag, had parked itself at the bottom of the street. Of course, that was merely an illusion. It’d probably dropped anchor half a mile out.
‘Forgive my impertinence,’ she said with a smile. ‘But aren’t you working for a private security force?’
‘Yeah, but we’re more of an old-fashioned outfit. We don’t do much work in Darwin, or even the Territory. This is just a base for us. Most of our business is up in New Guinea, securing the mines and keeping loggers out of the f
orests along the border. Old-school stuff. Not this crypto-fascist bullshit.’ He waved his hand back in the direction they’d come. ‘Anyway, here we go. Just give me a second …’
Granger pulled a small hand-held radio from a pocket inside his jacket.
‘I’m in the golf buggy,’ he said. ‘On approach. Can I play through?’
A heavily distorted voice replied through a rush of static: ’You are clear. Come on through.’
‘What on earth?’ Jules asked, bewildered by Granger’s out-going message.
‘A little in-joke,’ he admitted. ‘Reference to your stealing Greg Norman’s yacht.’
She shook her head as he accelerated smoothly towards the lit-up sign of the Banyan View Lodge, the motel she’d checked into after arriving in Darwin the previous night. It had begun life as a low-budget travellers’ rest, but there weren’t many low-budget travellers in Darwin these days. Most of the guests seemed to be miners transiting to and from the ore fields hundreds of miles south or deep out in the western deserts. She’d seen a shuttle bus running a large group of them out to the airport when she’d arrived.
As planned, two men were waiting for them in the car park. Neither was wielding an obvious weapon like the cut-down shotgun Granger had handed her, but she imagined that, like him, they were probably carrying concealed side arms. It made her feel a lot better. Her mood improved even more when she recognised one of them as Birendra.
‘Miss Julianne,’ said the young Gurkha. ‘I am sorry I did not get to talk with you at Mr Shah’s party. I had to leave early to supervise your arrangements here. We have swapped your room again, and myself and the other men will be keeping watch overnight. Mr Cooley has equipped you, I see?’
She found herself at a loss for a moment until she realised he was talking about Granger, the cab driver. And the shotgun he’d given her.
‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘All good.’
Birendra handed her a set of room keys and walked her over to a stairwell. She waved goodbye and thanks to Granger, even though, apparently, he would be hanging around. ‘No worries,’ he called back.
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