‘The army used to own all this land,’ he said, waving his fork back in the direction of the long, low-lying headland along which she had just walked.
It was not yet nine o’clock, but already the heat was stifling. Jules was frosted with drying sweat as she fanned herself with the menu and leaned back to allow chilled air to spill over her from the air-conditioning vent directly above their table. Bi-fold doors retracted to open the Sirocco up to a vista that stretched from the million- dollar yachts anchored in Cullen Bay around to the open waters outside Darwin Harbour. The water translated from the striking, almost opalescent green of the shallows close in-shore, to a deep cerulean blue a few hundred metres out.
‘I spent a lot of time here at the end of the ‘90s,’ he added. ‘At the barracks down at the start of Allen Avenue.’
‘The old brick buildings I walked through, the shops.’
He grinned as he carved up a thick rasher of bacon. ‘Yeah, the frock shops and wine bars and little trinket places. Pretty, weren’t they?’
They were indeed very pretty, and looked hideously expensive with it. Not that the Sirocco was a greasy spoon, with its dark, bentwood chairs, fresh white linen and a minimalist fit-out that suggested an architect had been paid a lot of money to do nothing. However, the patrons and trophy wives sunning themselves and enjoying breakfast out on the terrace, while looking well fed and content, didn’t seem to be in the same league as the new money she’d seen flaunting itself down on Allen Avenue. Even so, many of them were probably the well-insulated, well-off types who never let the cares of the world affect them.
‘This whole headland used to be mostly open ground,’ said Pappas, his big, rugby player’s frame expanding as two arms stretched out to provide some idea of the size of the area being discussed. ‘It was the barracks, some pretty dreary housing, and a lot of brown grass keeping the dust down.’
That didn’t describe the neighbourhood she had just walked through. It looked to have been extruded, fully formed, within the last twenty-four hours, from the wet dreams of a property developer with an Ayn Rand fetish. Condo complexes, pucka low-rise residential villages, stand-alone mansions of steel and glass, implying astronomical power bills to keep them cool, satellite dishes, in-ground pools and long tidy avenues shaded by old- growth trees. The sort of trees you could transplant, but only at massive expense.
‘Seems a short time for such a complete makeover, though, right?’ asked Jules. ‘New money, I suppose?’
‘Like you would not believe. Hundreds of billions of dollars poured in here, looking for a safe haven. It was like a tsunami, a blast wave. It swept everything away. There’s an army base about thirty clicks outside the city, replaced the barracks here. There are two infantry divisions out there, one armoured regiment, and a Marine Expeditionary Unit that the Yanks kicked in to give the Combined Fleet an amphibious assault capability.
‘Just like the Old Bill’s nick yesterday,’ Jules ventured, nodding slowly. ‘All on account with the FPDA.’
‘Too right. Except we call ‘em brown-shirts here,’ he added with a grin. ‘And all just so they could get the military out of the city and the developers onto the headland. That’s how much money they have, and that’s how much power it brings.’
He began forking his bacon onto a piece of toast, which he dunked in the yoke of a fried egg. ‘Still,’ he said with a shrug, ‘I suppose it makes sense. If anybody ever decided to lob a couple of cruise missiles at that base, at least our cafes and resort-style executive residences would be spared.’
She had the distinct impression that Nick Pappas did not approve. She scooped up the last of her yoghurt and muesli, and washed it down with a sip of English breakfast tea. They were alone in their darkened corner of the Sirocco. The whole terrace was well shaded and comparatively cool, despite lying beyond the chilled air curtain protecting the interior of the cafe. Most of the other customers preferred to take their leisure out there, and Pappas seemed to know the proprietor well enough that he and his guest enjoyed an exclusion zone around their table. He had taken a seat in the corner, affording him both a clear tactical overview of the room and an exit through the door to the kitchen, just a few feet away.
‘So what now?’ Jules asked.
‘A couple of things. For you, unfortunately, a nervous few days, or hours, or who knows, maybe even minutes, while we wait for these pricks to have another go at you.’
‘Hmm. I can’t honestly say that the sit-around-and-wait-to-get-slotted plan is filling me with confidence, Nick.’
Pappas finished his breakfast and began patting down his pockets as though looking for something, before stopping, frustrated. ‘Bugger,’ he muttered. ‘I keep forgetting I’m supposed to be giving up the smokes … No, look Julianne, it doesn’t really appeal to me either, so I think we need to get on the front foot. Shah’s given me a pretty good backgrounder on this bloke Cesky, and your past with him. But what would really help is sitting down with you now and working our way through everything you know. Not just about him, which I’m assuming isn’t much more than I already know. But also about everybody you had on that yacht who you reckon he might have it in for. If this bloke is working through a revenge fantasy, it’d help me to know who he’s likely to hit, and where I might find them. Or what’s left of them.’
Jules adjusted her chair so that she wasn’t looking directly into the fierce glint of the sun coming off the water. ‘Do you have a pen and paper?’ she asked.
He produced a notepad and a small digital recorder and over half an hour she told him everything she could remember about the week they had spent in Acapulco at the end of March ‘03.
Cesky hadn’t even figured that much in her calculations at the time. He’d wanted to get his wife and four daughters to Seattle, she recalled. Some crap about big business opportunities there, with that shimmering death- haze on its doorstep. Proved himself to be an instant pain in the arse - well, a bigger one than most of the passengers she eventually took on, which was saying something - and Miguel Pieraro had done her a solid favour by beating him down when he did. She knew Cesky was hanging around the Fairmont on the day when Shah came in to evacuate the paying passengers, and Miguel’s extended family. She smiled fondly at that -
Being honest about it, Jules could see why Cesky would imagine he owed them some payback. Any normal person would feel the same, especially if they’d been abandoned in a dangerous shithole teetering on the edge of collapse. But normal people wouldn’t take it any further than that.
And normal people, she had to admit, probably wouldn’t have got themselves and their families out of Acapulco. They’d have died there. Cesky had shown himself to have the balls to cope with being kicked off her boat, and to leverage himself and his family onto another one. A pity it sunk and one of his kids drowned. Perhaps if that hadn’t happened, she wouldn’t be sitting here talking to Pappas. Perhaps he could’ve just let it go and been content to have escaped.
‘So the other passengers you took on,’ Nick asked when she’d finished, ‘these rich reffos and wet-backs - what about them? Who were they, and where are they now?’
Julianne shook her head. ‘Not all of them made it across. We lost a few when we ran into the
Pappas, who was scribbling away even though his recorder was picking this all up, gave a little shake of the head. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘If they’re kicking around somewhere, I’ll find them. Especially if Cesky has already had a go. You said that before this mate of yours, the Mexican bloke, gave him a bit of a touch-up, Cesky had also had a fight with some internet porn guy?’
She laughed loudly enough to attract the attention of a couple of diners sitting outside.
‘Oh God, Larry Zood! I still have to take a shower when I think about him! It’s like having somebody’s unwashed underpants inside your head …’
A smile flickered at the corner of the former commando’s mouth as he kept taking notes.
