his taxes, didn’t spend more than he declared, didn’t appear to have any offshore money stashes. Not a target, not an interesting person. Then one day, this is late in the life of Black Tide, the glue on Jellicoe reports him talking to Gary. Now Jellicoe was a matter of serious interest to Black Tide. His agency, WorldWind Travel, it wasn’t owned by the cousins. But people, young, they turn up at a cousins’ agency, other places, then they turn up at WorldWind. And the reverse. Sometimes five, six a day. Some sort of cut-out going on. We knew, don’t touch any of the kids. Touch a customer, everything goes on hold. In Sydney, we had a good thing going until this prick of ours, he has a little word with a customer in the belief that an elegant short-circuit is available.’
I wasn’t following well.
‘Lost that, two million manhours, personfuckinghours. Anyway, that’s one side of Jellicoe. The other, lots of tourists pop in. He’s a half-ticket man. We checked his car in a parking garage one night, two hundred and ten grand in the boot, tens, twenties, fifties. There’s two more like Jellicoe we know of in Melbourne. One in St Kilda, one in Fitzroy.’
‘What about Gary?’
‘Like I said, Gary came up late in the day. What do you know about Gary?’
I was taken off-guard. ‘He’s TransQuik. He’s Levesque.’
Pause. ‘That’s right. We didn’t know whose money the cousins were washing until we made Gary with Jellicoe. Then we knew. Then all Gary’s flying around, Hong Kong, Manila, Bangkok, Europe, the States, all his talking to people in places you can’t get any kind of audio, suddenly that all made sense.’
‘Not to me,’ I said.
‘We could have taken the cousins out. Easy. We had more than enough. But where does that get us? Basically, the cousins are like a bank. They move money around for a fee. Whose money are they moving? That’s the question.’
‘What’s the answer?’
‘We were getting there. Gary’s the key. He’s the link. The current passes through him. So it had to be Gary. And that’s where we touched the TransQuik nerve.’
‘What happened?’
‘They shut Black Tide down. Orders from above. Over. Finished. All the files taken, computers swept, cleaned. Nothing left. It was like someone died. Like your mother shot your dog. Eleven months of nothing but Black Tide. It wrecked three bloody marriages because people never went home. The boss looked at the wall for the whole day, drinking coffee. Then he went up in the lift, into the big man’s office, there’s two other people in there. The big man says to our boss, just pull your head in, this is Cabinet-level stuff and you’re a fucking Detective Inspector. The boss grabs him by the tie, pulls him out of the chair, punches his lights out. Jaw broken, teeth on the one side, they’re sticking out his cheek. Hadn’t been pulled off, he’d have killed the bastard.’
‘That was a way of saying goodbye, was it?’ I said in spite of myself.
He made a sound, not a laugh, not a cough. ‘Bought a lawn-mowing round up in Queensland. Mackay. Taking the mower off the trailer one day, a bloke in a Falcon stops, blows his head off with a shotgun. Unsolved.’
He looked at his watch. ‘Got to make some arrangements,’ he said. He loosened his safety belt and went up the aisle to the cockpit, blocked the whole entrance with his frame.
I put my head back, closed my eyes, not thinking of sleep, not considering sleep possible, fell asleep.
I woke up in the last seconds of the descent. Touchdown was two small bumps, a minor whining noise, a consciousness of the safety belt. Out the door, stairs folding out, stiff-legged into an icy Tasmanian night, polar wind blowing, feeling old.
A man was waiting for us, standing next to a Toyota four-wheel-drive on the tarmac. A fortyish man in a suit, thin, tired-looking in the grey artificial glare of the floodlights, wind rearranging his sparse hair. Dave talked to him, hands in pockets, half-a-dozen sentences exchanged, both expressionless, pat on the arm. The man walked away, towards the terminal building, wind lifting the flap of his jacket, toying with his hair.
I thought, planes at your disposal, vehicles. Dave had influence in the right places.
41
Parked at the top of the hill, last-quarter moon and high scudding cloud, we could see the chook farm Gary loved. Painter’s little chook farm, place of memory, girl of memory.
Not so little. Not a farm either. A battery operation: huge barn that would house the living egg machines, another barn about a third the size, a small building, probably the office. About two hundred metres from the chicken barn, up a track, a small house sat on a level patch of hillside.
We had driven past it, gone a long way, beyond earshot, waited, come back, driven beyond hearing again, turned, crept back, barely twenty kilometres an hour.
‘A SWAT team is the way you’d do this,’ said Dave, ducking his head to light a cigarette, left and down below the dashboard.
He came up, cigarette shielded in his palms like a sixties schoolboy. ‘Intelligent SWAT team. But since that’s a contradiction in terms, you’d end up with a dead Gary. You always do. They might as well write you a guarantee the bloke’d be dead.’
He was matter-of-fact. We could have been studying the pictures on the illuminated menu in a McDonald’s drive-through for all the excitement he was showing.
I returned to the point where I’d fallen asleep. ‘What was the reason given for shutting Black Tide down?’
Dave looked at me, blinked, as if he’d forgotten all about the subject. ‘Oh. Jeopardising success of a major national operation in progress. Endangering lives of undercover operatives. Bullshit. Major national operation no-one knows anything about. The ghost ship of criminal operations. The phantom. All bullshit.’
‘That’s some nerve you touched.’
‘Very powerful reflex action.’ He sighed. ‘Right from the top. Cabinet-level reflex.’
‘Levesque?’
‘Gary’ll tell us that. That’s why we went after Gary.’
Another sigh. ‘Anyhow, the shut-down, that’s why we knew it was Gary, our interest in him. And we really knew bugger all about him.’
‘But you didn’t give up. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘That’s right,’ Dave said. ‘We just waited. When the chance came, we fired up Black Tide again, a different kind of Black Tide this time, not official, but not without friends. And we went for Gary. The first time, we were playing it by the book, we’d probably never have got to him. This time, dog and goanna rules. Rolled the prick, rolled and boned him. In Thailand, loaded him with half a kilo of smack, he’s looking down the barrel at twenty years, thirty bodies in a four-man cell, rats crawling up his arse. Canetti did the job, did a great job. He’s got the lingo, spent time in Thailand, knows the locals. Then he had two illuminating hours with Gary, a scared Gary, videoing his memoirs. Couldn’t take more time. Gary was just there on a stopover. But Canetti got plenty to start with. The rest, that’s a few days’ work, going over the details. But first we wanted Gary back in the country, everything as usual, no suspicions aroused that we’d rolled him.’
‘What did Gary tell Canetti in Bangkok?’
Dave ducked his head below the dashboard, took a deep drag, came up, expelled smoke. ‘That’s the fucking problem. We don’t know. Canetti rang from Bangkok, he’s highly excited, he says, wait till you see this, you’ll cream your jeans, it’ll hang Mr S. That’s all he said.’
‘Mr S?’
‘Levesque. Mr Smartarse.’
‘How did Gary get back here?’
‘Everything had to be normal. Gary flew on to Melbourne, direct. He was coming from Europe. Because Canetti’s got his testimony on video, Gary’s with us now. Doesn’t behave, he’s on “Australia’s Funniest Home Videos”. And he can’t go to his bosses, say: “Sorry, I told people about you cause I didn’t want to go to jail in Bangkok for twenty years.’’ They’d kill him on the spot.’
I was starting to understand.
‘There was a risk,’ said Dave. ‘What if he gets straight off the plane, onto another one, he’s gone, out of the
