was two hundred meters above sea level, and as he descended the steep path to the beach he knew the yacht was fifty kiloms away, approaching fast. Ten minutes later he stepped onto the white sand of the beach, warm in the morning’s sun. He couldn’t see the yacht now, as it had dropped below his horizon, and he walked out to where the surf rolled in to the shore. Shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun to the east, he faced south and waited for it to reappear.
The wind tore at his white cotton outers. The surf was high, perhaps two meter swells, and a few surfers were out testing their skills on the waves. The yacht’s high mast and distinctive sail came into view and within minutes it had rounded up into the wind on his mooring. The mooring was three hundred meters off the beach. He saw the crew of two climbing into the dinghy slung underneath the wings and releasing into the sea. It turned and pointed its lifted nose to the right of him and he waved. The crew waved back and the inflatable dinghy paused its run to catch a wave and then came in fast, powering through the surf. The roar of the throttle reached him through the wind.
He walked down into the surf to catch the dinghy’s nose and the crew of two jumped out into the surf. The three of them pulled the dinghy until it was out of the reach of the sea and then laid it down in the sand. Panting with the effort, Gabriel looked across at Martine Shorne and said, “I missed you too.” He turned to Maloo and stepped to him, giving him a bear hug and lifting him off the ground. He said, “Great job, brother. Thanks for getting her out.”
“Ah, no worries, mate. It was a piece of cake.”
With his left arm around Maloo, he held his right arm out and Marty came under it. Hugging her close he kissed her temple and said, “Come on. Let’s go up to the house. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
Showered and with a white towel wrapped around her head and a gold sarong wrapped around her body, Marty walked into the large living room. Gabriel, who was sitting on a large white cloth sofa, rose to greet her. The walls were decorated with a bark paintings and other aboriginal art. A huge yirdaki hung on the wall nearest Gabriel. It made Marty think of her conversation with Billy.
Folded out on low wooden table in front of the sofa was Gabriel’s Devstick. Next to that stood a bottle of wine and two glasses. He gestured at it with his hand.
“Will you join me in a glass?”
“It’s a bit early, isn’t it?”
“Well, my internal clock is a little out of whack. I’ve been working nights and sleeping days. So for me this is around about when I normally have a dinner and then head off to sleep.”
An uneasy silence settled. The brief but wild romance that they shared when they had met was now a memory trying to find a foothold in the present. It had been a little over three months since their two days of bliss in Tahiti, and Marty wondered if he still felt the same.
Gabriel smiled a little and walked across the room holding out both hands palm upwards. She took his hands and he pulled her close into him as she wrapped her arms around his back. Gabriel, a head taller than her, placed his hand on her neck and pulled her head into his neck.
He whispered, “I’ve missed you every day since we parted. I know this is difficult being here with me like this, but there’s no pressure. If your feelings towards me have changed, I will understand.”
She turned her head, and reaching up with her hands, pulled his head down to kiss him. She finally broke the long kiss and leaned back to look at him. “I feel the same. I didn’t want to leave you in Tahiti, and if I’d been there on my own accord, I wouldn’t have. But I was there because Flederson sent me to meet you and I had to report back.”
“I know. We each have our duty. Speaking of which, come and have a look at this and tell me what you think.”
“Sure, and I’ll have a glass of that wine too. I’ve been awake since midnight. That yacht of yours is something else. We topped a hundred kilos per hour coming into the Bass Strait with that southerly behind us. It kept us busy but that water ballast system, which Maloo told me you put in, works great.”
“Yes she’s a beauty — but nothing compared to you.”
“Compliments and wine in the morning — are you trying to get me drunk?” she said playfully, taking his hand and being led over to the sofa. Gabriel looked at the time on the Devstick. 10:14am. He turned the folded-out Devstick toward her and gestured at the letter on the screen.
“In one minute this is going to be all over the planet.” Her blue eyes flicked back and forth as she read Gabriel’s letter. Finished reading, she reached over for the glass of wine that Gabriel had poured for her. Her eyes flicked to the bottle.
“I shared a bottle of this with a very interesting man in Darwin recently,” she said and gestured with her hand at the bark paintings and the yirdaki on the walls around the room. “You wouldn’t happen to know him by any chance?”
“Billy. Yes, he told me about your visit. I’m sorry we couldn’t get you there earlier. I wasn’t and I am not playing you. OK? I agreed with Flederson, before I met you, that I would provide you with the reason to do your own investigation. And that I wouldn’t interfere with the collection of evidence. That was the trade off. He wanted me to come in and testify. I didn’t think I’d survive that. I was sure Sir Thomas would see me dead a long time before I got to any kind of a court. About a month before I let myself get arrested in Bangkok, Flederson contacted me and told me that you weren’t making any progress. I got the sense that he was getting impatient, so I acted. I didn’t know that Sir Thomas would react so swiftly in shutting you down. I thought you’d have time to follow the evidence and build a case but he moved too fast.”
“How is Flederson? Do you know?”
“Well, the news reports say he’s undergoing regen and still in a coma. From what I can gather he’s under twenty-four hour guard in UNPOL ICU. You can bet that the guard is made up of Sir Thomas’s people and that Flederson, if he comes out of his coma, will be in serious danger. What I haven’t been able to figure out is how Sir Thomas found out about Flederson and you.”
“He might not have found out. Cochran was passed over for the Director’s role by the Board of Governors. It was probably her.”
“But she was injured in the explosion. Two or three days in regen, and apparently only narrowly missed losing an eye.”
“Her wounds were minor. She timed it perfectly, I think, and I know she’s crazy enough to do it. Think about it. What better defense can there be than being present and wounded when the bomb went off. No one will believe that she’s insanely clever enough to walk into a bomb. She kills five people, cripples Flederson, gets rid of me — who she hates — and gets the top job in UNPOL. There was only one time when she could do that without having to go after them individually, and that was at that dinner.”
She tilted the wine glass at the letter on the screen. “What are you hoping to achieve?”
“I’m hoping it’ll get Jonah in. He’s our best and perhaps only chance at stopping this.” Gabriel sat cross- legged facing her with his arm along the back of the sofa, a wine glass in his hand and the other hand resting on his ankle. “To expose Tag now is too big a risk. We don’t have any solid evidence. We don’t even know how the toxin will be hidden, and it has to be hidden, doesn’t it?”
“We talked about it. Flederson and I, I mean. Flederson believed your story about your mother’s murder and you being a witness. But then you sent the message about the Tag being poisoned and that you thought it was going to be used to kill sixty-five percent or more of the population. You started us on the trail of Sir Thomas for killing your step-mother and father but to then claim that Tag was his plot to, well, take over the world, was a stretch for us both. You’ve got to understand that Flederson is a thorough, calm, logical policeman. He doesn’t make leaps of faith, that’s why initially I was surprised at his request. When he asked me to go undercover and find out what I could of Sir Thomas’s operation, I thought it was part of an internal audit. But then when he explained your story to me, I was surprised because I had never seen him make that kind of decision, purely based on trust, before. But after I met you in Papeete, I understood. But he wasn’t convinced of the Tag being a device to commit mass genocide.”
Gabriel looked grim at her words. “And you? What do think?”
“At first I leaned more towards his way of thinking but then, after your escape, the bombings started and I believed you. It fit. It made sense. Flederson still wasn’t convinced but he had swung sharply away from being certain and urged me to get down to Darwin and begin the investigation as fast as possible. I had to wait a reasonable time to make it look like we discovered the evidence about you through process, and I was about to file
