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
‘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 dangerous 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
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
