by James Phelan
She looked up at him. Her eyes awake, more than Fox’s. There was so much innocence and truth in there, written all over this little face.
“Are you an angel?” she asked.
Fox smiled with his eyes, then his mouth.
“Why, should I be?” he asked.
“It would be nice,” she said. She turned her attention back to the storm and they watched in silence for a couple of minutes, the only sounds those of the rain and thunder and the wind in the trees in the oval below.
“I’d like to be an angel,” she said. “I’d like to fly.”
“Then one day you will,” Fox said. Considered it. Smiled. “I’d like it, too.”
Fox saw, in the reflection of the glass in the window, Jane standing in the open doorway behind him. The dim light spilled out of the hallway and back-lit her outline. She walked over.
“Come back to bed, little miss, or you’ll fall asleep in school today,” she said, scooping her daughter up into her arms.
“Bye,” the child said.
“Bye, angel,” Fox replied. He shook the bear’s paw. Watched them leave the room. He was left there in solace, the thunder moving off, the rain still belting down and whipping into the open window now. Fox felt the water, more wet than cold, spray his skin and run down his legs to pool on the parquetry timber floor.
Jane was back beside him. She sat on the arm of the chair and put a hand on his shoulder.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Fox said. He looked up at her. “I slept for a couple of hours. I’m sorry if I got too drunk last night.”
“I have friends sleep on my couch all the time,” she said. “Gabriella thinks they’re all here for her to talk to when she can’t sleep.”
“Gabriella. That’s a sweet name,” Fox said. He put his hand on Jane’s. There was a familiarity in touching her that went far beyond the few days they’d known each other.
“Sorry—I can’t even remember how I got here,” Fox said. “Last I remember we were at Eight Mile…”
“You don’t remember going to Sing Sing?”
“Oh God, no,” Fox said. “Tell me I didn’t do karaoke.”
“You and Gammaldi sang some INXS song, and said that anyone Australian could join in and that everyone else could fuck off.”
“Shit,” Fox said, his forehead on his hand. “I seriously can’t remember doing that.”
“You were very drunk, yet somehow you almost managed to sing in key,” she said. “We left when the rest kicked on to The Box.”
“Jesus.”
“And in the cab ride here, you said I could help you.”
“Help me what?”
“Help you through whatever you need. You don’t need to do this alone—I can be there for you. I want to help you through whatever you’re going through.”
“I can manage just fine, thanks—”
“Lachlan.” Jane put her hand on his shoulder. Looked steadily at his eyes. “Let me in.”
“Look, I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have come back here.”
“But you did. You don’t have to be alone. If you want help, I can be there for you.”
“Jane,” Fox said, looking into her eyes. “I can’t—”
“You’ve got so much going for you—you’re hot, you’re smart—”
“I can’t do this now,” Fox said. “Who I am now, what I’m doing, all this drinking, the no sleep, being irrational, erratic—this isn’t me.”
“I can see that,” Jane said, “and that’s why I want to help. You don’t deserve to go through this alone.”
“I’m big enough to look after myself.”
Jane got up. Fox watched as she sat on his lap side-saddle. It broke the tension and he let himself relax, resting his head on her.
Fox noticed a much-loved and dog-eared Bible open on the side table next to the sofa where he’d slept.
“You been reading the Bible?”
“A little,” Jane said. “Reading some to Gabriella. My mother used to read it to me.”
“Does it help?”
She leaned her head onto his. Thunder broke the sky close by. No wonder he’d dreamed he was in Iraq again. They watched and listened to the storm.
“Some of the time.”
17
THE FLORIDA KEYS
The Afghan arrived at the door right on time. He travelled light. Just a small backpack over his shoulder and a briefcase in his hand. He greeted his old friend in Pashto, and for a moment it took them back to their younger years.
“Where’s Tahir?” he asked his friend as he entered the house.
“Mr Massoud is in Washington, waiting for us,” he replied. “You and I will drive up there tomorrow, we have a safe house there.”
“What is Tahir still doing up there?” He looked at the three other men who were there. he’d not met them before, but knew of them, knew their families. They all waved—timid, slow movements, as if they were now conserving whatever energy they had left in this life for their travel to the next. He knew two of them were to be martyrs soon, piloting speedboats into the next life. The other was there for support and back-up, his fate less certain, but there were many options for him. Guns were stacked against a wall, the dining table covered in bomb-making material. “Is something holding him up?”
“I am not sure, but as it involves the infidel’s president, he has not been using the telephone,” his friend replied. “Don’t worry, old friend. We are ready to strike on Saturday, when the country will be weakest.”
The Afghan nodded. he’d been a hero in the war against the Soviets; trained many of his countrymen in the fine art of precision mortar fire. He knew exactly what lengths Tahir had had to go to, to get the information for the timing of this Saturday’s attack. The Afghan was, after all, the leader of this cell. His Saudi brother-in-arms in Washington was merely a tool at his disposal, much like these men here before him. Their unifying force was more than mutual hatred for this nation. This was jihad. Funded by friends in unlikely places, friends who shared in their vision of seeing this nation hurt.
He walked through to the kitchen, motioned for his friend to make tea. Opened the briefcase to reveal detailed blueprints of an elaborate and vast structure. Photographs of what seemed to be a steel maze, points highlighted where the two speedboats were to strike. The immense scale of the thing had him wondering if they’d arranged for enough explosives. But it had all been planned, by engineers, back in Saudi Arabia. Men used to such structures, men who knew the weakness and strength of all that steel and concrete and whatever else.
He turned to the men in the lounge room, and studied them as they sat there silently watching the television. The volume was low but it was still an affront to his ears. They watched the show in detached interest, sometimes with expressions tinged with vehemence.
Yes. Finally, they were all ready.
18
SOUTH KENT, CONNECTICUT
It was mid-morning and the earth was damp underfoot as Fox ran. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, mud flicked up the back of his legs as he pushed himself in a final sprint.
Fox ran on a well-worn path that formed a ring just inside the dry-stone wall that bordered Wallace’s five hundred acres of rolling green fields in Litchfield County. Unlike when he ran or rode alone in NYC, he didn’t run with his iPod here. Instead, he freed himself in the quiet that surrounded him.
He checked his watch. Forty minutes, at least ten k’s. He stopped and stretched against the waist-height stone wall. His skin bore the scarred marks of an outdoorsman combined with those of a war veteran. Two quarter-sized scars on his right elbow dimpled an entry and exit point of a gunshot wound. A reminder of peacekeeping duty in East Timor. Some ominous scars bore memories of torture; other, lighter ones spoke of the sports he’d played over the years. One wound was still sore, over his left collarbone, still stiff from the rehab he was just getting through. More
than once he’d wondered why he couldn’t have Indiana Jones’s ability to take the blows, show he felt them in some macho way, then move on, ever able to deliver shotgun-sounding punches.
The distinctive pop-pop-pop of 9 mm pistol fire brought him out of his stretching routine.
He stilled himself and listened closely. There—more shots, echoing up from the low point on the property. Controlled three-round bursts. Someone from the GSR security team? He couldn’t make out the figure at the firing range, and not for the first time thought that maybe he should get his eyes checked. It was the sort of distance he used to be able to see with precise clarity. Now, he noticed that leaves on trees were more a mass of colour rather than individual forms. He knew that each leaf had its own hue, shape, texture, but it was something he hadn’t seen for some time.
Jogging back along the path, Fox lost his footing where it closed on the shallow creek. He went down hard and fast, sliding into the frigid water and collecting a side full of mud along the way. The rain runoff from the storm acted like a rising tide, almost knocking him down as he stood knee-deep. It was coloured with the nutrients from the soil and waste runoff from the livestock on nearby farms. Filtered through the earth but carrying so much with it. His Sox cap moved with the current, spun in an eddy around some smooth rocks and floated away, conforming to the inevitability carried in the force of water.
The gunfire stopped; some birds squawked their return to the lone peppercorn tree across the other side of the creek. Its sad curtain of leaves dipped into the water as flashes of red signalled the birds’ presence. A group of Red Crossbills.
“A crookedness of Crossbills,” Tas Wallace said, giving Fox a start. “Birds have such wonderful collective nouns.”
“That they do,” Fox said, washing the mud off his hands and arms. He clambered over the slippery creek-bed, took the offered hand of Wallace and let his boss help haul him out of the water. Thanks didn’t need to be spoken, and Fox had little doubt his boss, a reformed alcoholic, could smell the alcohol on his breath. “I saw a bald eagle when I was here last, about a month ago.”
“Yeah?” Wallace said. Poured himself a coffee from a thermos, his black retriever, Molly, close by his leg. “Haven’t seen one of them around here for years.”
“Pity. Beautiful creatures.” Fox took an offered cup and waited for coffee to be poured. “Was that you shooting?”
“Me? You kidding?” Wallace said. “Haven’t fired a gun since I shot a fox with Dad’s under-over shotgun. It had been attacking our family’s chickens for weeks. I would have been about fourteen, I suppose. Got up at dawn every day for two weeks to try and catch him in the act. Well, I did, and the image of its head blown away gave me nightmares for months.”
“A fox, hey,” Fox said, with a wry smile.
“Sorry, hope he wasn’t related,” Wallace replied, taking a sip of coffee. The older man’s eyes narrowed. “You’re drinking too much, aren’t you?”
Fox dug his heel into the soft earth underfoot.
“This is a messy business we’re in,” Wallace said. “Lousy hours, hard, stressful work. Particularly the area of responsibility you have.”
“When did you give up?”
“I would have been about your age,” Wallace said. “I was working at the Washington Post then. I think I was the only guy who didn’t get plastered over lunch.”
“And why’d you do it?”
Wallace turned, paused to reflect.
“I was in my late twenties,” he said. “Just broken up with my fiancée, and she didn’t want to know me. I was a workaholic. I was stressed, confused, overwhelmed. Didn’t take long for the self-medication through booze to turn me into an alcoholic. Eventually got to a point where I was about to lose everything, and it took a friend to point out that most of my problems came from the bottle.”
They stood there as the truth washed over them.
“Go clean for a while,” Wallace said. “It’ll hurt, but you won’t regret it. And forget the twelve steps, just do it, mind over matter, and you’ll be that much stronger. It’s a life-changing action. Gives you back control.”
Fox nodded slowly. It sounded like a sensible move but he knew it was harder than that. There were good reasons why he drank. Weren’t there?
“So, you haven’t drunk in fifty years, hey?” Fox jibed.
“I’m not that bloody old,” Wallace said. “About twenty-five years, I guess. Only lapsed the once.”
Fox caught himself before asking When? Wallace had lost his daughter less than a year ago, surely something that would drive you to drink.
“Come on, back to business,” Wallace said, with a slap on the back for Fox. “I’ve come through with some gold for you. You’re gonna owe me.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’m going to London to collect Michael Rollins, he’s agreed to meet you in Nigeria the day after tomorrow,” Wallace said. “He’ll set up some interviews for you with the militants, in and out within twenty-four hours. I’ll be dropping him off personally, if you can meet us on the ground?”
“Will do,” Fox said. He drained half his brew, watching the steam rise and through it the flowing ripples of the creek water.
“You’ll be all right with this? You don’t have to go, we can outsource it,” Wallace said. Not known as an emotional man, he did possess qualities that his staff sometimes took refuge in. Half priest, half father.
“Yeah,” Fox said. He shook his cup dry onto the ground. “It’s just been one hell of a year.”
“The year of the Fox,” Wallace said. He slapped Fox on the back as they got up and headed back to the farmhouse.
“I hope next year will be my year of sleep,” Fox replied.
“I head back to New York in an hour,” Fox said. “Think you can get me back up to speed?”
Fox stood at a roofed timber bench that served as a shooting position. Down the hundred-metre range was a series of targets spaced across his line of vision and set at ten-metre intervals. Sandbagged walls marked the edges and ends of the range.
“I doubt it,” Richard Sefreid, GSR’s head of security, said. “You taking a pistol to Nigeria?”
“There’s only so far I’m willing to rely on body armour,” Fox replied. He sighted the first target and squeezed the trigger twice in quick succession. The Heckler & Koch Mk23 CT pistol was smaller and lighter than the old H&K SOCOM he was used to. He fired again and emptied the clip at the target, the compact .45 remaining steady in his hands. Relatively steady—his hands weren’t what they used to be. He put the pistol down, squeezed his hands tight, released them, then repeated this a dozen or more times. “Damned if I’m going to allow myself to be picked off on the street like so many other journalists around the world.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Sefreid reassured him.
“I’ll be right,” Fox said. He replaced the H&K with an FN Five-seveN. It immediately felt right in his hand. Well weighted, the fit snug in his grip. He looked down the sights at the twenty-metre target. Crack-crack-crack. Three holes in the centre of the silhouette’s head. He looked down the sights, lined up the three-dot sights and let rip with a few double taps. Ten, twenty, thirty metres. All tight groupings, certainly better than the .45 at the thirty-metre mark.
“Nice grouping,” Sefreid commented. “Try further down the range.”
“Less recoil in this one,” Fox said. He brought his left arm up to steady for a two-handed shot, and fired off the remainder of his twenty-round clip. All the rounds had found home, any one of them would at least incapacitate a live target. His left shoulder ached under the stress, and he pushed through the pain by ejecting the spent magazine onto the floor and ramming in a fresh one.
“Kill house?” Sefried asked.
“You know it,” Fox said. He safetied the pistol and they ran over to a big timber barn. Inside was a full-sized pre-fab house, set up to train the security team in close-quarter scenario
s.
“One hostage inside, unknown enemy agents,” Sefreid said as they kitted up. Overalls went on, helmets, clear face masks, vests with neck protection. Special pistols armed, they went in through the front door.
Clearing room by room, Fox took down three plywood targets in as many seconds. Smoke was pouring in through holes in the floor and it was dark; no outside light made it to the hallway, which doglegged through the floor plan.
Fox inched into a room—noticed the target with the yellow mark that signified it as the hostage. Took a step inside, turned to clear—
Hit in the back. Turned around, another shot to his chest. Bright red paint.
Emma Gibbs was there, crouched on the ground behind the door.
“I think that means you’re dead,” she said.
“I thought you only took head shots,” Fox replied as he helped her to her feet.
“Occupational health and safety,” she said, tapping her clear plastic visor.
Sefreid was in the hall, and saw Fox and Gibbs file out of the room.
“Come on,” Fox said, leading the way to where they cleaned and loaded their paint-ball pistols. “Have the targets moved around and let’s do this again.”
19
LAGOS, NIGERIA
The afternoon sun spilled into the gymnasium above the garage. The sound of running shoes on a treadmill at full speed filled the room.
Mendes was running flat out. Dressed just in shorts and gym shoes, sweat pouring off his body. He was never out of shape, and although he didn’t have the body of a long-distance runner he had that of a sprinter. Big, powerful muscles built for speed and brute strength. he’d programmed the treadmill to sprint for two hundred metres, slow to a jog, sprint again. Each time the interval between sprints would lessen, so that by the time he’d run six kilometres he was at the breaking point of exhaustion.
