Redback

by Lindy Cameron

  Man, what time was it at home? And how spooky, what with me about to meet Ilia, and with Cassie in the john doing whatever with Evan.

  Knowing he wouldn’t be able to talk straight, he decided to call Cassandra’s husband back later. Besides, his own slice of paradise was waiting in the very next carriage.

  It never occurred to him, not even for a second, that Ilia de Chevalier would not be on the train. It had been her idea after all - to meet like spies on the Orient Express.

  Justin Baileu West was overcome by the immense physical and emotional pleasure of his own personal revelation. He felt no guilt. None. Not in what he’d been doing, how he’d been feeling, or in how he now planned to live his life. It would be guilt free, shame free - ha! shameless - with no irrational fear of eternal damnation. This was his spiritual epiphany; just as coming with Ilia had been the only truly religious experience he’d ever had.

  Stepping back to allow someone out of the lounge car, Justin zigged when he probably should have zagged to get through the door before it closed. Most of him made it inside, but the door slammed onto his left wrist. He yelped in pain and dropped his phone in the walkway behind him.

  He noticed several people in the lounge car look up when he swore; one person made a move to help him, everyone else ignored him.

  Ilia was nowhere in sight yet.

  Had Justin known she was not even on that train to Paris he might have wanted to die right there on the spot; but she had, in fact, already taken care of that. And her betrayal was absolute.

  Five seconds after the microwave chip, entwined in the silver under the lapis lazuli on his wrist, connected with the receiver on the detonator beneath the lounge car, nine kilos of C4 ripped the carriage from the rest of the train. The explosion ripped Justin West apart and, in half a breath, killed everyone he had just laid eyes on.

  Seven of the 15 carriages behind derailed in a screaming screeching tangle of metal, wood and flesh, as they ploughed into the debris of the lounge car. The remaining carriages concertinaed into the twisted wreckage they had formed. The engine and six front cars were flung from the tracks, as if from a ground-level catapult; their momentum wrenched back for a brief second before release.

  Chapter Eighteen

  10 Downing St, London

  6.45 pm

  Eric Hargreaves, Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister, moved quickly towards the Pillared Room. He’d already organised a television to be brought in; but was going ahead to break the news that all hell - more hell - had broken loose. It was such an awful end to an otherwise fruitful day.

  The talks between the Syrian and Israeli Ambassadors, the PM and the US President had come to an excellent conclusion and now the sound of laughter and the clinking of ice in glass, or glass against glass was rolling up the hall towards him. Forty-three guests had joined the official party for celebratory drinks; only 12 dignitaries would remain for dinner. It really was too bad he had to spoil such good cheer.

  Hargreaves entered through the open doorway of Number 10’s main reception area. In a flash, as was his forté, he placed all the guests. The PM, Tom Buchanan, was on the far side of the Pillared Room, in the immediate company of President Brock, his Deputy Secretary of State Adam Lyall, the Syrian and Israeli ambassadors, and the Australian High Commissioner.

  Mrs Buchanan and Mrs Brock were holding forth with the American Ambassador and five ambassadorial spouses.

  Edward Drake, ex-head of MI5 now Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was chatting with the boffins from Telamon. Richard Thorpe, head of MI6, was deep in conversation with three Commonwealth trade delegates.

  In between were a variety of lower ranked officials. Only one of the President’s secret service members was in the room, the others were in the foyer, or having supper.

  Drake and the two Telamon directors moved across to join the Prime Minister’s group a moment before the Chief of Staff got all the way across the room. Hargreaves waited politely while Drake finished his introductions.

  ‘…introduce you to Darius Rashid and Michael Dawson from Telamon, the California communications institute consulting with us on the new sat-nav program.’

  ‘Excuse me, Prime Minister,’ Hargreaves said.

  ‘Oh hello, Eric. Do you need me?’ Tom Buchanan responded to the slightest tilt of his secretary’s head, excused himself for a moment and took a few steps away with him.

  ‘There has been a terrible train crash sir,’ Hargreaves began slowly and quietly, until he realised the PM had stiffened in horror. He reassured him, quickly, ‘In Europe, sir; but a very bad one apparently. It’s somewhere in Luxembourg close to the French border, near Belgium.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh my Lord,’ Buchanan said, genuinely concerned but relieved he could rein in the shock that latched to his assumption it was a local tragedy and therefore about to need his attention.

  ‘Early reports do suggest it was a bomb, I’m afraid. There are many, many dead.’

  ‘Oh bloody hell.’

  ‘Indeed, Prime Minister. I have taken the liberty of organising a television set to be wheeled in here - the news is out anyway. And when you are ready, I will arrange the telephone calls to your counterparts in, ah, well Luxembourg and France to begin with.’

  ‘Thank you, Eric. In the meantime, if you could let their ambassadors know that we will provide any assistance they may need.’ The Prime Minister returned to his group.

  ‘What’s up there, Tom? You look like you’ve seen a terrorist,’ Garner Brock drawled, grinning at his own humour.

  God help me! Adam Lyall strongly resisted the urge to gag his Commander in Chief.

  ‘I may as well have, Garner,’ Buchanan said. ‘There’s been a train accident of some kind near the French border. It looks like it may have been a deliberate attack.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said the Syrian Ambassador, Abdu-l-Qadir.

  ‘Goddamn terrorists!’ Brock swore. ‘What the hell do good folks have to do for just a month of peace, let alone a peaceful world?’

  Odd question from the mouth of Roger Ramjet. Lyall nodded in polite agreement with his President.

  ‘My Chief of Staff is having a tele brought in, oh here it comes,’ Buchanan said. ‘I gather it’s not long happened, but is all over the news already, of course.’

  Other guests, curious as to why a huge television was being pushed into this room, moved out of the way as two men wheeled it over to the wall with the power and aerial connections. The same men then deftly rearranged some of the green upholstered chairs to allow seated views of the screen.

  ‘Excuse me ladies and gentlemen,’ Buchanan announced. ‘I am so sorry to interrupt the evening’s celebration but it seems there’s been an attack on a European train, I believe near the Luxembourg border. The television is for immediate information. Of course, if any of you need to contact your embassy or anyone else, please speak to my staff. They are at your disposal.’

  The plasma screen came to life, ready-tuned to the live horror still unfolding on the other side of the English Channel. The air was virtually sucked from the room as more than 40 people gasped in collective shock at the BBC images of the tangle of wreckage, small fires in the dark, the eerie flashing blue and orange of countless emergency vehicles, circling helicopter spotlights, bedraggled and damaged people being tended or helped away, rows and rows - already - of draped unmoving bodies.

  Someone broke the stunned silence with, ‘Oh those poor people,’ and then all began speculating. The BBC studio presenter was saying that, ‘while no group had yet claimed responsibility for the incident, authorities at the scene said it was obvious the wreck had been caused by a large explosive device’.

  ‘It’s beyond me why any civilised human being would want to make a claim on such destruction and misery.’ It was the American First Lady. Elaine Brock had come to stand by her husband but had her arm looped supportively through that of Marjorie Wilde, US Ambassador to Britain. They were joined a moment later by the head of the SIS, R
ichard Thorpe.

  ‘This is a terrible state of affairs,’ Buchanan pronounced, turning to his Security and Intel chiefs. ‘Teddy, Richard - you two and I will have to get together in a moment to review this.’

  ‘Of course Prime Minister,’ Drake said, as he and Thorpe nodded.

  Nearly everyone in the room looked shocked or appalled, and in some cases downright distressed. Adam Lyall felt unmoved. No one present had yet claimed friend or family as a possible passenger on the doomed train, nor shouted in horrified recognition at someone on the screen; but so many in the room were, nonetheless, visibly upset.

  Lyall instead wondered if, as his ex-wives maintained, there really was something wrong with him and whether an expert in such things might have an opinion. The images on the screen had no adverse affect on him at all and despite his role in this being clear, he remained indifferent. Was he perhaps inured to the blood and the carnage and the loss; was that his problem, his tragedy? Or was he simply one sick bastard?

  He did consider the possibility that after the debacle in the Pacific he was probably just really pissed; especially after having to listen to the Australian Ambassador, or Commissioner or whatever she was, go on and on about the successful rescue of the Laui hostages - like she’d been personally responsible. Lyall tuned back into the conversation.

  ‘Please all of you go, do what needs to be done,’ the Prime Minister was saying to his guests. ‘Dinner will now be at 8 pm for those who can or wish to stay. We still need to eat, my friends.’

  ‘Life goes on and terribly on,’ noted Darius Rashid.

  ‘Yes it does, doesn’t it,’ agreed the First Lady.

  Excellent; dinner. Adam Lyall felt suddenly hungry, and was pleased the Brits got their priorities right.

  Oh, maybe that’s it. I’ve just got some stiff-upper lip in my genes, or a fine British ramrod up my arse.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Dallas, Texas

  Tuesday 12.40 pm

  Kyle ‘Kero’ McTeal was only one ballpark away from the cranky old truck Jesse-Jay had stolen from mad Burt Wiggins back in Carthage, when the call kicked in and the bomb went off.

  The lethal combination of 43 bags of ammonium nitrate fertiliser soaked in nitromethane and jammed into the truck against barrels of diesel fuel, 30 balloons of blasting gel and a couple of remote-activated detonators, lifted two floors and the roof off the butt-ugly Jackson Street carparking building.

  Motor vehicles in hundreds of pieces, chunks of concrete and metal pipes, even a bunch of signs, blew sky-high and then fell back down in a thunderous series of earth-quaking shocks. It was as if the Lord Almighty had chucked a godly fit and emptied heaven onto downtown Dallas.

  Kero always reckoned he was a lucky, unlucky bastard. He watched, mouth agape, as the windows of buildings all around the corner of Jackson and Griffin shattered into a million pieces, then he bent down to pick up a bottle he could collect a dime on. That’s when the shock wave hit him and blew the soda bottle clean out of his hands, taking his fingers with it. He collapsed in a dead faint and a second later was buried beneath a shower of shit and debris.

  Two miles outside of town, on Route 35, Jesse-Jay Bagget and Micah O’Brien witnessed the rise of dust and rubble, heard the explosion a moment later, and then watched the carpark fall back to earth.

  ‘Well ain’t that a pretty sight.’

  ‘It most surely is, Micah. But wasn’t it, like, five minutes early.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Micah shrugged.

  ‘Not as long as it puts the frighteners on those that count.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly. Start her up, Jesse-Jay; we got an appointment for the main event.’

  Finally, the real deal. Jesse-Jay put the Lincoln in drive and pulled out onto the highway.

  Micah offered him a smoke, one he’d first lit for himself. Jesse-Jay wouldn’t have never shared spit with that useless Kero, but he didn’t mind doing so with Micah O’Brien. He relaxed at the wheel for the drive south to Killeen, where the other five regulars of the Carthage Thunder Militia, Eastern Unit of the Texas Star Brigade, were waiting for them.

  US State Department’s Operations Center,

  Washington

  Tuesday 1.50 pm

  US Defence Secretary, Nathanial van Louden, stood staring at a wall map of Western Europe before sticking a coloured pin between the names Bettembourg and Dudelange, which was as close as he could get to the site of the European train crash near the French border. The TVs in the bank of screens behind him - tuned to CNN, Fox NEWS, Sky, the BBC and Al Jazeera - were beaming in sound and ghastly images of the wreckage from the attack 45 minutes before at the hands of some pissed group of terrorist/anarchist/communist/insurgent/neo-Nazi/ separatist whackos.

  Trust the French not to know what’s going on in their own backyard, he thought. It’s not like it’s even a very big backyard.

  A Texan by birth and disposition van Louden naturally compared everything in the world to his home state, and right now he was figuring that the whole country of France was not quite the size of the state of Texas. He wondered how such a pipsqueak nation could have a completely different language - well, dang, and a completely different history - to that of Germany next door, and England across the way. As for Luxembourg, where the train had blown up, that could be popped into south-west Texas somewhere between Houston and the Mexican border and nobody’d know it was there.

  Van Louden’s thoughts were hijacked as the main door was thumped open by his own Chief of Staff Harry Corbin who’d driven him to the Center just 20 minutes before and then disappeared to make a hundred phone calls. Various State Department secretaries, executives and bureau advisors looked up from their strategic huddles, papers and chitchat.

  ‘Looks like we have an update, gentlemen,’ Secretary of State Aiden Bonney said.

  ‘Worse than that,’ Corbin said, picking up the remote to raise the volume on the Fox News screen which was now showing a different news item to the all others. One by one the coverage on the rest of the channels, including Al Jazeera, switched to the same daylight view of a bomb-damaged street.

  ‘Christ Almighty, it must be a full moon over there. Are they blowing up buildings now?’ Bonney exclaimed, removing his reading glasses to get a better look. ‘Oh - my - God.’

  ‘It’s not over there; it’s here - ten minutes ago,’ Corbin was explaining. He put his hand on his boss’s forearm. ‘Downtown Dallas, Nate. Some fuckers have blown a multistorey carpark to kingdom come, and half of it landed on the Earl Cabell Federal Building.’

  Van Louden felt physically assaulted by the notion that anyone would attack his state, his territory, any part of his own goddamn backyard. Everyone else in the room stood staring in horror, assailed by an awful creeping sense of déjà vu.

  ‘Find out who did this,’ van Louden said. ‘Get the army, the FBI, those pansies from Homeland Security, the friggin Girl Scouts down there. I want the arseholes responsible for this outrage dragged here to the capital, so I can stick their heads on pikes in the White House Rose Garden.’

  ‘Assuming Osama’s bomber-boys have got any heads or arses left,’ said Bonney’s executive assistant Peter Shaw.

  Van Louden’s attention snapped from the TV screens to the Secretary of State and his clutch of advisors. ‘What? You think this is al-Qaeda?’

  ‘I think we’ve got to start with that assumption, Nate,’ Bonney agreed.

  ‘Oh crap,’ van Louden swore.

  ‘Get Adam on the phone in London would you, Peter,’ Bonney said. ‘He’ll have to tell the President.’

  ‘While you’re at it, suggest they all get their butts stateside, asap,’ van Louden declared, to unanimous agreement.

  10 Downing St, London

  7 pm

  Adam Lyall watched his boss, the leader of the free world, observing him like a scientist who never expects to see a change in the micro-organism stagnating in his Petri dish. Lyall knew that Garner Brock actually thought he was doi
ng his personal best for the tragedy in Europe by continuing to socialise with the remaining ambassadors and other guests, thereby filling the space created by Prime Minister Buchanan’s temporary absence from his own room.

  The cell phone in Lyall’s pocket vibrated again. It was the fourth time this evening and again he chose to ignore it. Damn thing was like an alarm clock bringing him back to the here and now, by alerting him to the wider world.

  Lyall had taken a breather on an old chair next to a matching gilt couch on which were two minor officials from the US and Australian embassies. The two women had bonded tediously over the train disaster, but were now staring, shocked and blissfully silent, at the Persian carpet. Time to move. He got up before more bad news started the fools next to him blabbering again.

  Garner and his First Lady were still talking to the Australian High Commissioner, the PM’s wife and Rashid and Dawson. But as the SIS spy boss, Dick Thorpe, had just re-entered that equation, things looked like they might get interesting so Lyall decided to rejoin them.

  ‘Mr Lyall, excuse me sir.’ It was the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s telephone call for you in the Cabinet Room. It’s Washington.’

  About time, Lyall thought. ‘Lead on,’ he gestured, and followed Hargreaves from the room.

  President Brock watched his Deputy Secretary of State wander nonchalantly out of the room and then forced his attention back to the two young - well youngish - American entrepreneurs who were attempting to explain the latest breakthroughs in satellite technology. Apparently Telamon was their big-deal institute in California and had already earned them a fortune in civilian and Defense Department contracts back home. They were now working with a British group to improve coverage for military navigation systems and civilian cell phone networking. Brock was lost in the morass of acronyms and jargon; and just wished they’d work on their own communication skills by speaking plain ordinary American.

  The President was impressed with the attractive Aussie High Commissioner’s obvious grasp of their techno-babble, however. But then Telamon were apparently already dealing with Jennifer Leland’s government Down Under. Brock noted that Rashid, the Californian geek of Middle-Eastern extraction was quite the charmer - he’d snaffled Jane Buchanan and Jennifer’s attention straight off. But Dawson was coming across like a surfer who’d washed up on dry land. Garner Brock knew that feeling well.