by Alan Carter
‘What’s the prognosis?’ said Cato, maintaining some levity in his voice. He didn’t want to drag the poor bugger down with tales of bereavement.
‘Should be out of here tomorrow. There’ll be a bit of to-ing and fro-ing at the outpatients while they check the blood thing and make sure there’s no clotting.’ Hutchens seemed to be avoiding eye contact. ‘I had been hoping to be back at work by today, but …’ he trailed off.
‘You okay?’
‘Just told you, didn’t I?’
‘Anything else worrying you?’
‘Nah, mate. Nothing.’ He smiled up at Cato, sadness in his eyes. ‘When’s your old man’s funeral? I’d like to try and make it.’
‘Wednesday. Ten. Fremantle. But look after yourself first. Okay?’
‘No worries.’
They parted. Cato was rattled by the exchange. Something was bubbling under the surface, a deeper malaise. Had Hutchens finally had enough? He’d been through enormous stress and trauma of late. Maybe DI Pavlou was right, maybe his boss was finally on his way out. The deadline for the Major Crime job was Friday. He dismissed the thought. If she and ACC Michael were swapping notes then odds on he was already cactus.
He dropped by DI Spittle’s office and told him he’d like Wednesday off for the funeral.
‘Sure. Whatever you need.’
Spittle updated Cato on the weekend’s tally of stabbings, assaults, break-ins, drug busts and car thefts.
‘Nothing special, then,’ said Cato.
‘You up to resuming a bit of the load, now the Hutchens stalker thing is sorted?’
‘Yep.’
‘And DI Pavlou tells me the Tan case is definitely closed as far as she’s concerned.’ Spittle met his eye. ‘That right?’
‘I understand that’s her position on the matter, yes boss.’
‘So you have a bit more time on your hands, funerals notwithstanding.’
‘Yep.’
‘Great,’ said Spittle. ‘Maybe have a chat with Hassan and Thornton. Divvy up the workload as you see fit. Keep me in the picture, eh?’
Cato asked if that was all. It was. Except.
‘DI Pavlou mentioned she’s looking forward to hearing from you before Friday.’
‘Sir?’
‘The vacancy? She seems very keen on you. You’ve obviously impressed her. You’d be a shoo-in, I reckon.’
Cato frowned. ‘The timing’s not real good. Flattered as I am.’
Spittle smiled. ‘Don’t worry about the loyalty thing. Apparently she’s told Mick Hutchens everything.’
‘Everything?’ said Cato. ‘Like what?’
‘Dunno, but he’s definitely in the loop on your career plans.’
Cato knew now what had been gnawing at Hutchens at the hospital. Betrayal and treachery. Pavlou had him believing that Cato was about to jump ship. He kept his face as neutral as possible. ‘Did DI Pavlou drop by earlier?’
‘No, she phoned.’
So he’d learned two things. First, Pavlou was playing silly cruel power games with the job vacancies. Why? Who knows. Second, she had phoned that morning with yet another message. Case closed on the Tans. Got it? Perhaps she and ACC Mike had indeed been comparing notes. Driscoll too, maybe.
Deb Hassan and Chris Thornton invited him over the road for a coffee and a catch-up, Thornton’s round. It was mid-morning and Gram Parsons wailed from the gloom of The Record Finder next door, an Old Testament dirge about Satan, booze and women. It pretty well reflected the weekend crime tally.
‘I’m doing the domestic stabbing,’ said Hassan, licking froth from her upper lip. ‘Chris is doing the boy racers and the drug busts. They’re linked. We’re sharing the break-ins.’
‘What do you need from me?’ Cato could already feel his attention wandering.
‘Clarity of thought and decisive leadership.’
Uh-oh, thought Cato.
‘Just kidding,’ said Hassan, catching the look on his face. ‘Take care of the home front, we’ve got it covered here.’
‘Yeah,’ said Thornton. ‘Sorry about your dad.’
‘Thanks.’
Cato’s phone buzzed. Driscoll. ‘Where are you?’
Cato told him.
‘Don’t move. See you in ten.’
‘Something come up?’
‘Yeah.’
They finished their coffees while Gram Parsons warned them about a fiery hell just around the corner if they didn’t change their ways. According to him the whole town was insane and no amount of wealth would protect them from the Lord’s burning rain. Another cavalcade of election billboards rolled by with a large evangelical image of the man whose moment cometh. Be careful what you wish for, mused Cato.
Driscoll rocked up soon after and immediately impressed Deb Hassan. He flashed her one of his smiles and she went all girlish, a revelation to Cato. She and Thornton made their excuses and left, ruefully it seemed on her part. Driscoll got down to business.
He hummed a tune. ‘Born Free’. The black PR company in Shanghai.
‘What about them?’
‘They don’t just clean up your CV and your Facebook misdemeanours.’
‘Go on.’
Apparently Born Free occupied a suite of rooms in a twelve-storey block in Shanghai’s Pudong district. The rest of the building was made up of all manner of high-tech outfits involved in IT support, research and development, marketing, security, financial planning and analysis. Everyone in the building providing a lucrative and sought-after service and everyone in the building interconnected in some way.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Ownership, boards of directors, joint ventures; you name it.’
Cato still didn’t see the point, and said so.
‘That twelve-storey block is just part of a whole complex, a mini-suburb if you like, under the control of a specialist cyber wing of the People’s Liberation Army. Unit 61398 it’s called. From there they control the Great Firewall of China and what people can and can’t see on the internet. They can also do their cyber attacks on enemies and business rivals as well as monitoring the phones, emails, social media accounts, and internet browsing habits of their citizens.’
‘So?’
‘So I think you’re being hacked and bugged and stitched up. Not necessarily by that specific unit but certainly by somebody with a similar capability, perhaps a freelancer moonlighting from the day job. I hear the pay’s not that flash for most of the drones. Anyway, like I said, Li has powerful friends and some of them might have a personal stake in some of his bigger property deals. His Aussie ventures would be particularly attractive to them; a good way of laundering ill-gotten gains. And these people are able to watch you all the way from Shanghai.’
‘Where did you get this tip-off from?’
‘Some of it is freely available on news websites. Other stuff is from friends and contacts.’
‘Your PLA General friend?’
‘Among others.’
‘What can I do about it?’
Driscoll shifted in his seat. ‘These folks give me the heebie-jeebies. If it was me I’d stay offline and hole up in South America for a few decades.’
Which wasn’t entirely practical. But in some ways it was liberating. You were up against people so powerful that your fate was out of your hands. It was like being told you’ve got terminal cancer and your days are numbered, nothing you can do about it except try and enjoy what little time you had left. Then his father’s premonition came back to him. The one about dying in China. In China, from China, because of China: what’s a preposition between friends?
‘Did your contacts tell you who precisely I’m pissing off and why?’
‘No. But my bet is on Phoebe Li and her circle. Being a privileged rich kid herself she went to school and uni with all the other such kids – the high cadres’ children, HCCs. These are the offspring of high party officials, army generals, and they’ve become untouchable. There was a road rage incident in Beijing recently.
One of the HCCs, a seventeen year old kid, pranged his Porsche into a delivery truck. His fault entirely, according to the witnesses, but that didn’t stop him and his mates dragging the truck driver out of his cab and beating him into a coma. They walked away laughing and nobody said a thing.’ Driscoll shivered against a gust sweeping up High Street. ‘Phoebe’s crowd believe they have an absolute entitlement to wealth and power and they can do what they like without any consequences.’
And these were the same people who were probably behind the threats to him and his family. A daunting prospect. But he could sit and wait for them to come, or he could take the initiative. Cato smiled. ‘We had a saying in Stock Squad, “may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb”. So if I wanted to rattle Phoebe’s cage, how might I go about it?’
‘I suspect her cage has already been rattled. You want to go further?’
‘Yes.’
They considered their options while Gram Parsons continued his miserable bleating.
Back in the office Cato got to work. Driscoll had returned to the SAS barracks in Swanbourne to do his spook schtick. Maybe Rory’s implacable unseen foreign enemy scenario was pure bulldust, a Yellow Peril scare for the twenty-first century with Cato, of all people, buying into it. It was convincing though: land deals, high cadres’ children, cyber dragons in their twelve-storey lair in a mysterious Shanghai suburb. You’d almost want to believe it because it was so exotic and dangerous. Maybe the truth was more humdrum, low-rent, and closer to home. Yet Cato had decided to trust Driscoll and it was based on little more than gut instinct. So, if the cyber dragons were hacking him did that mean the whole Western Australian police computer network was compromised or was it just his personal laptop that had been targeted? His approach was not dissimilar to his Chinese Whispers tactic in Hopetoun. He tried not to think about how much trouble that had got him into. He would lay one trail of rumours with his personal laptop and a different trail with his work desktop. That would tell him which, at least, was the compromised machine, or even if it was both. After that things were likely to get trickier.
Cato laid his trail then spent the rest of the day dealing with the bureaucratic detritus of the job, drifting now and then into nostalgic reveries about his father. A failed attempt to get them both interested in footy when he was ten, Jack’s excruciating jokes when Cato brought home his first girlfriend at fourteen, his mother playing the piano one evening and Jack bending down to kiss the back of her neck.
Guido Caletti had sent the boys home early, except for Bruno, his nephew. He knew Bruno wouldn’t go. The lad watched his boss like a hawk, took his job too seriously. He needed to get a life, get a girlfriend. If the lad had been this diligent at uni he’d be a fucking professor by now, life tenure and all that. A small flock of night owls haunted the café, keeping Bruno from closing up. An alcoholic public servant from one of those ugly communist-style blocks in East Perth, the Department of Nothing Worth a Fuck, who hated his wife and kids so much he didn’t want to go home to them. A tipsy couple who couldn’t keep their hands off each other and should have been in a motel going at it instead of sipping sambuccas and playing footsie in his café. And the sad, lonely carrot cruncher in the Driza vest and beanie who looked like he’d taken the wrong turn at Wagin. Maybe he was hoping somebody would tell him where the brothel was.
Guido summoned up his Joe Dolce voice and laid on the accent to charm them out of there. ‘Time please, ladies and gentlemen. You got no homes to go to, eh?’
The public servant muttered something worth stabbing him for, scraped back his chair and lurched out the door. The couple gave each other a last lingering tonguey and a wave to Guido and his nephew as they tiptoed off to bed. Bruno was busy washing and wiping the sambucca glasses. The carrot cruncher wasn’t there. Obviously out the back in the dunny. Christ, give me strength, Guido said to himself.
‘Leave the rest ’til morning, Bruno. Off you go. I’ll shepherd the sad bastard out and close up.’
‘You sure, boss?’
‘Yep. See you tomorrow, son.’
Bruno grabbed his phone, ciggies and sunnies and left. Guido cleared the last of the cups and glasses from the tables and deposited them in the sink. Still no sign of sad sack. He went out back to find him. He edged his way past the boxes of Chinotto stacked in the passage and the mop and bucket outside the gents. He pushed open the door and spoke from the threshold.
‘Sir? You in here? We’re closing up now, mate.’
No answer.
He sighed and stepped in towards the closed door of the cubicle. Knuckles raised to do the rap.
A wire went around his neck.
32
Tuesday, September 3rd.
Cato heard about it on the news as he was driving away from the funeral parlour. He’d been tasked by Mandy to double-check last minute arrangements and confirm the choice of music. Mandy favoured Chopin but Cato knew his dad would also like to have slipped in a bit of Dean Martin. According to the radio report, prominent Northbridge identity Guido Caletti had been found dead that morning in his coffee shop. Major Crime were investigating and Organised Crime were also involved given the man’s reputation. According to police spokesperson DI Sandra Pavlou, foul play had not been ruled out.
The call from Driscoll came just after the weather. ‘Garrotted.’ That probably would point towards foul play then. ‘Did we do that?’
‘We’ meaning Cato. He didn’t want to dwell on the notion of lightning striking twice. Chinese Whispers really was the deadliest game he’d come across, except maybe Russian Roulette. ‘He wouldn’t have been without pre-existing enemies,’ Cato said.
‘No,’ conceded Driscoll. ‘But it’s a bit of a coincidence, eh?’
‘It is,’ Cato agreed. He felt sick.
Late yesterday, on his personal laptop, Cato had done a few google searches of Phoebe Li and put together a Word document of thoughts and queries which he’d emailed to himself marking it ‘Personal – Safety’. The document had speculated on Guido’s tip-off about Phoebe and Yu Guangming and possible involvement in the tangled Shanghai land deal. Was she in with Yu and looking to secretly profit from her father’s vastly over-priced buyout of Cambridge Gardens? In the Word document he’d included a note to himself to follow up with Guido on a few more details. So was Cato now next in line?
Meanwhile on his office desktop computer he’d sent a query to Chris Thornton asking him to look into Des O’Neill and, in particular, the story of the Lake Grace farmer who’d killed himself and his wife in a murder-suicide. It seemed plausible. Of course Cato would be interested in angles where blood had been spilt. But he had his answer now. His personal laptop was the one that was hacked and Guido Caletti had paid the price.
‘Omelettes and eggs, mate,’ said Driscoll. ‘Don’t fret on it. He’s bound to have done bad things in his life to have earned his reputation. It’s karma.’
‘Thanks,’ said Cato. ‘I feel better. So, what now?’
‘You know those big plastic neck braces they use when you’ve got whiplash? Maybe you should invest?’
They agreed not to talk any further on the phone now. Odds on, the hacking capacity extended to that too so they’d have to keep it brief and vague from here on in. They’d meet at the end of the day, after Driscoll had finished his training course. He was due to fly out on an early morning red-eye the next day. He couldn’t say where.
Cato ended the call and parked near the Roundhouse for the walk back down High Street to the office. He looked up at Lara Sumich’s apartment, the For Sale sign in the window. The world moves on. What did any of this prove? Yes, his personal laptop was probably in the grip of the cyber dragons and their evil mistress must be Phoebe Li but unless they could entice Phoebe over here none of this was worthwhile. Even then she’d probably pull a few strings and skip the country. He recalled a quote, often cited by his father, when he was encouraging Cato in his school studies, particularly the dreaded Maths. It was by the cellist, Pablo Casals, to th
e effect of ‘the situation is hopeless, we must now take the next step’.
First things first, maybe that plastic neck brace.
Hutchens was having his drip changed when Marjorie phoned him. David Mundine didn’t get bail as they’d feared but he’d walked free anyway. The private contractor providing prisoner escort duties managed to lose him in transit between Hakea and the magistrate’s court on the fourth floor of the Murray Street justice complex. The relaxed and diffident young driver, a recent recruit on a starting wage of just over seventeen dollars an hour after tax, was pretty confident they had him when they entered the court building. But then it all got a bit crowded and busy, and confusing. Sorry.
‘Fuck,’ said Hutchens.
Marjorie agreed.
It wasn’t the first time this mob had mislaid their charges and it probably wouldn’t be the last. This was the same company earmarked to provide security at the reopened refugee detention facilities in the resurrected Pacific Solution gulag. At this rate the little munchkins would be scurrying all over Nauru like rabbits in a carrot patch. That at least offered some chink of light to those blighted souls who would come across the seas, our boundless plains to share. But it had put a real damper on Mick Hutchens’ day.
‘Enough is enough.’ He turned to the nurse changing his drip. ‘Can you get that tube out of the back of my hand? I need to be away.’
‘Not without a doctor’s say-so.’
‘Get the doctor, get the paperwork. Now please.’
He wasn’t being rude, just assertive.
It took a bit more wrangling and humming and hah-ing but an hour later Marjorie picked him up in the Kia and they were gone.
He dragged a clean T-shirt over his bruised head while she drove. ‘How’s Bill?’
‘He’ll make it. The bullet missed most of the important bits and they’ll give him a colostomy bag to replace the rest. He’s always been a fit old thing. Strong as an ox.’
‘That’s great, angel. You got Melanie sorted?’
