Zero Hour

bloodstained pages. They used tweezers and wore gloves. One of them seemed to be taking photos of the contents under a UV light. In the far corner, a second woman tapped away on a laptop.

“Nothing on that,” she said, answering some question that had been asked before Kurt and Hayley entered. “Next line, please.”

The group froze at Kurt and Hayley’s arrival.

A stocky man with rolled-up sleeves and a buzz cut stood at the head of the table. “Clear the room,” he grunted.

This was the boss, Kurt guessed. He looked none too happy.

The others began to move, putting down whatever they were working on and filing out one by one. The last one to leave pulled the door shut.

“Are you okay?” the burly man asked Hayley.

“No, I’m not okay,” she said. “People are getting killed right in front of me now. You said nothing like this would happen.”

“I thought this would be the last time,” the man said.

Kurt had guessed right. Some kind of rendezvous was in the works, but the way Hayley was acting, she didn’t sound like an operative.

“Don’t mean to be rude,” Kurt said, “but would someone clue the dumb foreigner in as to just what’s going on here?”

The boss man turned toward Kurt. “You’ve walked yourself into a dangerous situation, Mr. Austin.”

“You’d be surprised how often that happens.”

“Actually,” the man said, “in your case, I wouldn’t be. I’ve read your file. Trouble seems to find you. And when it doesn’t, you go looking for it.”

“My file?” Kurt asked. “Why would you have a file on me?”

“Because I’m Cecil Bradshaw, deputy chief of counterterrorism for the ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. And you are a wayward member of the National Underwater and Marine Agency as well as a former specialist with the CIA.”

“I agree with everything but the wayward part,” Kurt said. “I’m here on vacation.”

Bradshaw looked like he didn’t believe that. “Really? And your vacation just happened to land you in the middle of the most sensitive operation we’ve conducted in years.”

Kurt could imagine how it looked, especially considering his background. “Bad timing,” he insisted. “I’m not a spy or anything. I’m a nautical engineer and head of NUMA’s Special Projects Branch, which generally involves research and development, though we do get into our share of scrapes. As for the CIA, I did salvage work mostly. Refloating sunken ships. Retrieving important parts from inside them, or blowing them up to keep others from doing the same. And even that was a long time ago.”

“So it says in your file,” Bradshaw replied.

“Look,” Kurt said, “I’m just here for the conference. And, once it’s over, I plan on surfing, diving, and knocking back a few Fosters. But I don’t stand around and watch people burn to death or let them get shot, if I can help it. That’s how I got involved.”

Bradshaw seemed to be weighing this, perhaps acknowledging Kurt’s actions in his mind. His tone softened a bit, but his face remained gruff.

“Okay, Austin, I’m going to cut you a little slack,” he said. “I’m also going to assume you’re not dumb enough to open your mouth about what you’ve seen here. But if you’re not sure you can stay quiet, I can find a nice ovenlike jail out beyond the Black Stump where you can sit and think about it to your heart’s content.”

Kurt wasn’t sure where exactly the Black Stump was, but it sounded far away. Like a trip to Siberia only hotter.

“I remember the drill,” he said. “You want me to sign something? See a hypnotist to forget this ever happened? That’s fine too. Just show me the way out, and I can head to the beach like I intended. But you might want to check your own ranks for a leak because someone knew this little meeting of yours was going down.”

Hayley and Bradshaw exchanged a glance. Something unspoken passed between them.

Bradshaw turned back to Kurt. “Not likely,” he said with a smug look on his face, then changed subjects. “But since you’re here, maybe you’d care to offer your professional opinion.”

“On what?”

“Start with the dead man’s last word: Tartarus. Does that mean anything to you?”

Kurt looked at the setup once again. They were prepared to digest a lot of information. At least three analysts were on-site, plus Bradshaw. Whatever they were hoping for, it came in short. Way short.

“Only what I told Hayley,” he said.

“We’re dealing with a threat to Australian national security,” Bradshaw insisted. “Maybe even to other countries. We have four dead contacts, two before this event. One of them led us to a shipload of exotic mining equipment. You said Tartarus was underground.”

“That’s right,” Kurt said. “In Greek mythology.”

He glanced at the desk where the laptop was. “As you’ve no doubt discovered, it’s a mythological prison for the gods. But unless you know something I don’t, it’s not real. Whatever that guy was trying to tell you, I doubt he meant it literally. Tartarus is probably a code word or a cipher for something. Maybe related to the papers he gave you.”

Bradshaw took a second to digest this and then waved Kurt over to the conference table. “You claim to be an engineer. These look like schematics to me. You see anything here that might ring a bell?”

Kurt studied the cryptic papers. There was so much blood on them, the writing was obscured and smeared in places. What he could see looked like gibberish. He saw complex equations populated by symbols he didn’t recognize. The second page was definitely part of a schematic, but it seemed to describe a circular-shaped dome.

“Afraid not,” Kurt said. Despite his earlier guess, he couldn’t imagine a single word unlocking the clutter he was looking at.

“What about the boat?” Bradshaw asked. “Did you see anything in it before it burned? A backpack? A suitcase? A computer?”

“Is that what they were bringing you?”

“Just answer the question.”

“No,” Kurt said, “I didn’t see anything like that.”

“What about the driver?”

Kurt’s mind drifted back to the scene on the promenade. “He asked me to leave him and help this guy. He called him Panos.”

“That’s it?”

“We didn’t exactly have a long conversation.”

Hayley looked away sadly, and Bradshaw sighed with disappointment. “Well, you’ve been a tremendous help,” he said sarcastically.

“He did save my life,” Hayley pointed out.

“That he did,” Bradshaw agreed, speaking with a note of humility in his voice for the first time. He stepped toward the door. “Sorry to be so nasty, Mr. Austin, but it’s been a damned awful day. Enjoy your vacation.”

“Hold on a second,” Kurt said.

His mind was drifting back to the incident. He couldn’t recall any luggage in the boat or anything else out of the ordinary except that he remembered Panos wincing in pain when he was dragged from the boat. He recalled the odd way the man’s fingers had curled up and how he struggled to walk. There was something strange about his hunched-over appearance as he lumbered away from the boat. Something familiar too. Kurt had seen that gait before.

“That guy was your informant?”

Hayley went to speak, and Bradshaw stopped her.

“Come on,” Kurt snapped, “either you want my help or you don’t.”

“The dead men were couriers,” Bradshaw said reluctantly. “Bringing us something.”

“Do you know where they came from?”