Deep Water

by Whitcroft, Isla;

  ‘I get the room ready, then serve the men food,’ Marissa said.

  Cate looked at her in horror. There were only a few minutes left before the men started arriving for the meeting. The bugs had to be in position by then to give her any chance of finding out what the Cotians were doing in the Friday Islands.

  Cate could have kicked herself. She had left it all too late. Then she heard the faint sound of music filtering through from the rehearsal room nearby.

  ‘Do you know Lucas Black?’ she asked Marissa. ‘Lucas Black, Black Noir.’ Cate mimed a guitar playing, then sang a few bars of ‘Trapped’, Lucas’s latest single.

  Marissa’s eyes lit up. ‘Lucas Black,’ she repeated in her Russian accent. ‘Yah, I like very, very much. He is cool, really cool.’

  ‘He has asked for help with his rehersal. He needs your help.’

  Cate grabbed her by the hand and half dragged her to the rehearsal room and up to the stage where Lucas was still playing the guitar. This time he saw Cate approaching and stopped playing in mid chord.

  ‘Hi, Cate,’ he said, coolly, as if he had been expecting her. ‘Come to watch the rehearsal?’

  ‘Lucas,’ Cate sounded panicky even to herself. ‘Lucas, this is Marissa. Marissa, this is Lucas Black.’

  ‘Hi, Marissa,’ said Lucas, smiling down at her and strumming on his guitar.

  ‘Hi,’ croaked Marissa, gazing at him with total disbelief.

  Cate went up to him, looked imploringly, and whispered, ‘Lucas, please can you do me a huge huge favour and keep Marissa here until I come to get her? Tell her you need her help. You’re so important she’ll do anything for you. I know it’s a big ask, but it won’t be for long.’

  He grinned. ‘Cate, I don’t know why you’re in such a state. I could actually do with someone to adjust the amplifiers. The sound system is playing up something shocking.’

  He put out his hand to the awestruck maid and helped her onto the stage. ‘Fancy checking out my new song?’ he said as Cate mouthed a silent thank you to him.

  ‘Take your time,’ Cate said to Marissa. ‘I’m really happy to cover for you.’

  Out in the corridor she paused and rested against the wall for a few seconds to catch her breath. She looked down at her watch. Five minutes to the meeting. Just enough time to nip back and place the bugs. She didn’t care where any more. Then she heard a noise and through the glass corridor doors she could see the men assembling. The meeting was about to begin.

  Without thinking, Cate ran back into the conference room and headed for the laundry cupboard. By the time the first man was walking through the conference room door, Cate was standing by the table, hair tied back, smoothing down the apron of her maid’s uniform, and trying to stop her hands from shaking.

  CHAPTER 13

  The five men sat around the table, the low level lighting adding shadows to their already sinister faces. The oldest men, greying hair slicked back from their leathery foreheads, sat at either end of the table, one security guard behind each of them. The bodyguards had been first into the room, checking under the table, pulling back the TV screen, even tugging at the door of the laundry room which Cate had just had time to lock behind her. That done, one produced a bug sweeper which he ran over every surface in the room – including Cate’s uniform.

  Cate thanked her lucky stars that she hadn’t managed to plant the bugs or activate the ones on her. She was trying hard not to make eye contact when a guard jabbed her painfully in the shoulder. ‘Where is your name tag?’

  Cate looked down at her chest and feigned surprise. ‘I must have left it back in kitchen – I came here in a hurry. I’m sorry. My name is Marissa,’ Cate replied, mimicking the Russian girl’s accent.

  He grunted and looked at her, his eyes hard and calculating. ‘You speak Spanish?’ he asked.

  Cate took a deep breath and shook her head. ‘I am from Russia,’ she said. ‘I speak little English.’

  He seemed satisfied with that. For ten minutes, the men ate and drank as if they had not seen food for a week. The room became hotter, stickier, the smells of the food mingling with the sickly sweet aftershave worn by the men.

  Cate stood quietly to one side, removing plates as they were emptied, filling up the glasses with water or wine.

  Then one of the older men began to talk and, as soon as he did, the other four put down their glasses and listened intently.

  ‘Friends,’ he said in Spanish, raising his glass to the table. ‘This is a great day for us all. Today we leaders of Cotian industry are exporting our expertise to another country for the very first time. As you know, we have identified the product that will ensure our success. Now all we have to do is work out which of us takes on what role and rewards from our endeavour.’

  Cate hoped that her face didn’t betray her understanding and fear. Her eyes moved around the table and she knew she had seen each face before on the screen in another hot and claustrophobic room back on Diamond Island in Sydney Harbour. They were all there: Carlos Ibanez, Fernando Gutierrez, Miguel Lopez. Despite the exaggerated courtesy and respect they were showing one another, she knew these men hated and feared each other.

  ‘These men are ruthless,’ Marcus had said, ‘and most of all they hate informers. They would kill their own mothers if they got the slightest inclination that they were acting against them.’ And now she was stuck in a room with them. Spying on them. Her mouth suddenly dry, she swallowed hard and put her hands behind her back to stop herself from biting her nails.

  The clock on the wall opposite her told her that it was quarter past eight. Just how much longer could Lucas keep Marissa away? A man with a scar – Gutierrez – was talking now, and fiddling with the projector. First up on screen was a map of the Friday Islands and the mainland, and then, Cate realised she was looking at a topographical picture of Snapper Bay. The men were talking quickly now; it was harder to understand them. They were also using a lot of slang that Cate was struggling to translate. She could pick up that they were talking about computers, discussing the sales of iPads and mobile phones and mining for . . . What? The word sounded like ‘Indians’. Then there were several mentions of ‘Indianbe’.

  There was another picture of Snapper Bay, this time taken from the sea, and then, to her horror, shots of the eco-warriers. Noah, Mitsu, even Michel. All of them were there. Her heart froze, expecting to see herself, to be caught out, but the pictures must have been taken before she arrived. They moved on to more shots of the beach.

  ‘How is the sapo?’ the young man with the curly hair suddenly asked. ‘Is he encouraged to work faster now?’ He laughed, his mean face lighting up, and the two bodyguards sniggered like schoolboys from their shadows.

  Sapo . . . Toad? thought Cate wildly. How is the toad? Frustration was taking over. She had risked so much to be here and yet she was learning nothing.

  And then she remembered. A long ago insult from a Mexican kid with whom she and Arthur had shared a tutor during her dad’s stint in Warsaw. She had been maybe ten or eleven and he thought she had sneaked on him to the teacher. ‘Sapo, sapo,’ he had shouted at her when lessons had finished. ‘Spy. Traitor.’ Cate felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach. So it was true. An informer was working for the Cotians. At Snapper Bay.

  ‘The encouragement worked perfectly,’ said Gutierrez. ‘As it always does.’ He put his hands together as if in prayer. ‘The sapo is doing our work and people are already starting to leave.’

  He gyrated his hands from left to right, and began to sing the theme tune from Jaws. ‘Now we’ll see just how much those kids love their precious turtles.’

  The whole room erupted into laughter. Cate thought about Josie’s terrified face as the sharks had surrounded her kayak and she was seized with an overwhelming urge to push their vicious faces into the dirty plates.

  The phone on the side table rang, an irritating beep that silenced the whole room.

  ‘Answer it.’ The guard nodded curtly at Cate. Cate’s mo
uth went dry. It must be the hotel kitchen or maybe reception checking to see if everything was OK. They would hear her voice and know she wasn’t Marissa. She walked towards the phone slowly, praying that it would stop ringing before she reached it. ‘Answer it,’ said the guard again, his tone more menacing.

  She swallowed hard, picked up the receiver and spoke quietly. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Marissa here.’

  ‘Cate, it’s Lucas.’ Cate felt her knees almost buckle in relief at the sound of his voice. ‘Marissa’s on her way back.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Cate, her voice expressionless as she replaced the receiver. She looked up and caught the security guard’s eye. ‘I have to go to the kitchen,’ she said. ‘Someone else will come to serve you.’

  He nodded and opened the door.

  Out in the corridor, Cate turned and leant against the wall, her head bowed. Despite her relief at being out of that fetid room, she felt as if she was about to be sick. Further down the corridor, a door opened and Marissa came out, waving and blowing kisses into the room. But when she saw Cate, her smile vanished and she turned white.

  ‘They have been there long?’ She pointed a shaking finger at the conference room. ‘They didn’t notice?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Cate, pointing to herself. ‘I pretended to be you. I helped a friend waitress once. How was Lucas?’

  The girl blushed. ‘He was amazing. It was the best day of my life. Thank you. But now I must go in and do my job. Please, you tell no one?’

  ‘No one,’ said Cate firmly, feeling slightly guilty that the girl was so grateful. She bent forward and removed Marissa’s name tag and at the same time pushed another twenty dollars into her pocket. ‘I said I was Marissa. You need another name.’

  ‘I’ll be Claudia,’ she said, beaming. ‘The name of the other maid on duty here tonight.’

  ‘Sounds great,’ said Cate kindly. ‘See you around, Claudia.’

  Cate walked slowly up the corridor. She reached the rehearsal room and paused. She knew she should go in and say something to Lucas, but she was too tired to come up with a bright idea to excuse her weird behaviour. She would face him later.

  ‘Nice outfit, Cate,’ said Lucas sardonically. He was standing in the doorway holding his guitar case and looking at her with an unfathomable expression in his dark eyes. ‘I think its time you and I had a talk.’

  CHAPTER 14

  Cate sat on her balcony watching as the last of the sun’s rays were obliterated by the gathering darkness. Beside her, the swimming pool was lit up with a rainbow of underwater lights, their colours reminding her, as if she needed it, of the events at Snapper Bay. She was just about to text Louisa when she spotted the old text from Arthur – the one he had sent her containing the news report on the attempt to buy out Snapper Bay. Of course, how could she have forgotten?

  It was too early to call her brother. A text would have to do. Cn u find out just who ws bhind bid to buy lease on Snapper Bay? ASAP. Xxx

  Half an hour later her phone rang. ‘How’re you doing?’ Michel said sheepishly. ‘I really needed to hear your voice.’ He paused. ‘Things are a bit tense here, Cate,’ he continued, all trace of his usual humour gone from his voice. ‘When you get back from Purbeck, I want us to take off, just you and me. I just want you to myself for while. I feel like since you got here, well, you’ve been in another place, if that makes sense. I want us to be close again, like we were in Antibes last summer . . . Cate, I have to ask you . . . Is everything OK? With us, I mean?’

  The concern in his voice made Cate want to cry. Especially since she knew that, in part, he was right: her mind had been elsewhere, focused on the IMIA and its demands. It wasn’t fair, she thought furiously. They asked too much of her and it was rebounding on poor Michel.

  ‘Michel,’ she said, her voice firm, her emotions now fully under control. ‘Everything is OK with us. More than OK, I promise. I’ll be back at Snapper Bay in a couple of days’ time and then I can’t wait for us to go off together. It sounds like the best idea ever.’

  As Michel hung up, Cate heard the thud of a helicopter flying overhead. Nine-thirty. They may be disastrous for her personal life, but Marcus and Henri were always punctual to a fault.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ Henri asked as he and Marcus strode into the room minutes later. He was glaring at Lucas Black who was sitting impassively in an armchair in Cate’s bedroom.

  ‘It’s Lucas, Lucas Black,’ said Cate nervously. ‘The pop star.’

  She knew the importance that Henri, Marcus and indeed the entire IMIA placed on silence and she hated that Henri may be thinking she was loose-tongued. Or, worse still, that she had become so starstruck that she had confided in Lucas just to get his attention.

  ‘I didn’t ask who he was,’ Henri was speaking quietly now, always a bad sign. ‘I asked what he was doing here.’

  Cate took a deep breath. ‘He helped me,’ she said simply, deciding that honesty was the best policy. ‘I needed a miracle and you guys weren’t around. Lucas came through but he wanted to know what was going on. Somehow I couldn’t manage to fob him off.’

  ‘I worked for British counter-intelligence in Afghanistan,’ Lucas said, his voice sounding almost robotic, and his face expressionless. Suddenly he looked like a stranger and Cate shuddered inwardly. ‘My brief was to infiltrate the Mujahideen and get information that would allow us to pre-empt suicide attacks. Both in that country and in ours.’ He paused and his eyes dropped. ‘I wasn’t always successful. I lost someone I loved very much and I left the army to build a new life.’

  Cate’s heart lurched. She remembered his first hit single and felt tears of pity for Lucas pricking at the back of her eyes. No one spoke.

  ‘I can smell a covert operation a mile away,’ Lucas finally continued. ‘So I was never going to buy Cate’s excuses, no matter how good they were.’ He sounded more like the cocky, confident Lucas that Cate knew now. He looked from Marcus to Henri. ‘Don’t worry. I can keep a secret. But in return, I have to know what is going on here on Purbeck Island. I have me and mine to think about, to protect if necessary. And that includes Cate.’

  Marcus and Henri gazed at each other, their expressions unreadable. Then Marcus turned his palms up in a gesture of defeat. ‘OK by me, Henri,’ he said, ‘but you’re the boss.’

  Henri looked at Lucas and then seemed to make up his mind. He turned back to Cate. ‘Well, Cate,’ he said, as if Lucas had never spoken. ‘What have you got for us?’

  ‘Some evidence,’ said Cate, heaving a sigh of relief and handing him the tiny memory card she had retrieved from the pen camera. ‘I took some shots of the divers I saw last night at Snapper Bay. It may have picked up their faces – it may not.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Henri shortly. ‘Anything else you can tell us about what is going on?’

  Cate shrugged. ‘Not really,’ she said honestly. ‘The Cotians are definitely staking out Snapper Bay. I could be mistaken, but they talked about a sapo amongst the eco-warriors.’ She looked at the two agents, wondering if they knew what it meant.

  ‘An informer,’ said Marcus flatly. He slapped his hands together in frustration. ‘Here we are, thinking we were smart putting in Cate as an undercover agent. These guys were ahead of us, maybe have been for some time. But why go to all that trouble? What is it that they want from Snapper Bay?’

  There was silence.

  ‘Come on, Cate.’ Henri was sounding testy as he always did when things didn’t go his way immediately. ‘You must have picked up something. These guys are making hundreds of thousands of dollars every week out of their illegal activities back home. It’s got to be something pretty phenomenal to bring them all the way here.’

  Marcus shifted uncomfortably on the bed where he had taken up residence. ‘Cool it, Henri,’ he said. ‘Cate’s doing her best. She’s just a kid.’

  Cate walked over to the window and stared out at the swimming pool. Dinner over, the band were back in their favourite spot, swigging f
rom bottles of beer, horsing around, pretending to push each other into the pool. There was no sign of Nancy.

  She sighed and turned back to the men. ‘They talked a lot about a word that sounded like “Indians” she said. ‘Mining Indians, and making huge amounts of money from it.’ She thought back to the conference room, her mind running back through the snippets of sentences she had heard from around the table. ‘I think one of the men said something about paying,’ she said slowly. ‘Making the rest of the world pay huge amounts, that’s what he said.’

  There was silence and then Marcus got up from the bed. ‘Look, Cate, that’s brilliant. You’ve done really well. Getting into that conference room was pure genius. I’m sure you understand that, well, for now we still haven’t a lot to go on. We can’t just arrest people from a perfectly legitimate Latin American country because we don’t like the look of them. We need more.’

  ‘Well, you can count me out,’ said Cate firmly. She had been waiting for this. ‘I’m staying on for the concert tomorrow and then I’m going back to Snapper Bay.’

  ‘Good, that’s great, Cate,’ said Marcus. ‘I think that’s just where you need to be, to get to the bottom of this. We have to find out which one of the eco-warriors is working for the Cotians and then we might have a chance of finding out why.’

  ‘No.’ Lucas spoke again, this time his tone flat and menacing. ‘Cate’s done enough now. It’s someone else’s turn to risk their lives. You, for example.’

  Henri and Marcus turned as one to stare at him, shock written on their faces. Cate wished she had a camera. It wasn’t often that Marcus let down his cool.

  ‘When she told me what she was doing, I thought she was a complete fantasist,’ he said quietly. Lucas raised his hand in apology. ‘Sorry, Cate, but I did. But not any more. Can we get this straight? You have a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl working for you as a spy, you send her in, alone, to spy on some of the most dangerous men in the world and then, when she’s risked life and limb already, you ask her to keep spying?’ He shook his head. ‘And people say rock stars are immoral.’