Zero Hour

Bradshaw shook his head. “If we knew that, there would be no need for this lovely conversation.”

“I suggest you start looking underwater,” Kurt said, “because that man was suffering from DCS.”

“DCS?”

“Decompression sickness,” Kurt said. “Bubbles of nitrogen in the joints. It causes horrendous pain and a hunched-over appearance — if the patient can even walk, that is. You get it from deep, prolonged diving, then surfacing too quickly. Normal treatment is one hundred percent oxygen and time in a hyperbaric chamber to force the gas back into suspension. But wherever this guy came from, I’m guessing he didn’t have the time to go back down. Kind of hard to do when you’re running for your life.”

Bradshaw all but snickered. “He’d just been in a crash, playing stuntman without a seat belt or a helmet. More likely, he was injured in the wreck.”

“He wasn’t limping,” Kurt noted, “he wasn’t favoring one side. He was bent over like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame and unable to straighten up. Those are the most typical effects of a disease commonly called the bends.”

Bradshaw seemed to be considering Kurt’s guess. He sucked at his teeth and then shook his head. “Not a bad thought,” he said, “but here’s why you’re wrong.”

He pointed to a brownish red smear on the bloodstained papers. It was oddly iridescent under the light.

“He was covered in this,” Bradshaw said, “every pore, every fiber of his clothes. So was the last courier we found dead.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a type of soil, called a palaeosol,” Bradshaw explained. “Common in the outback. Not found underwater. If it tracks with the other guy, it’ll contain a mix of heavy metals and various toxins, including traces of manganese and arsenic. Which tells us these guys are operating in the desert somewhere. Not from a submarine.”

“He could have been in a lake and gotten dirty afterward,” Kurt pointed out.

“Have you ever been to the outback?” Bradshaw asked. “The lakes out there are mostly transient. Even during the rainy season — which it is not right now, by the way — they’re shallow and wide. Like your Great Salt Lake.”

Kurt was stumped. “Don’t know what to tell you,” he said, “but I’d stake my reputation on it. That man came up from a depth where he was exposed to great pressure.”

“Thanks for your opinion,” Bradshaw replied. “We’ll be sure to check into it.”

He waved a hand toward the exit.

“So this is what it means to be shown the door,” Kurt said.

Hayley looked as if she’d have preferred to leave with him. Kurt felt differently about her now. A damsel in distress. He wondered once again what her deal with Bradshaw might be.

“Good-bye,” she whispered sadly. “Thank you.”

Kurt hoped it wasn’t quite final. He guessed that suggesting as much would annoy Bradshaw. A win-win situation.

“Until we meet again,” he said. And then he stepped out through the door and left her and Bradshaw behind.

FIVE

Two hours after the incident, Kurt found himself back in his suite at the Intercontinental Hotel. He’d taken a shower, sent a long e-mail to NUMA headquarters, and finished a tumbler of scotch before climbing into bed.

Forty minutes later, he was still wide awake, staring at the ceiling and listening to the hum of the air conditioner. The events played on an endless loop in his mind. As they did, the questions chased one another in circles.

What was the ASIO dealing with? Why would a man covered in desert dust also be suffering from decompression sickness? And what part was Hayley Anderson playing in all of it? She seemed to be there by her own choice, but she didn’t seem happy about it.

Despite a little voice that told him to leave it alone, Kurt found he couldn’t let it go.

He glanced over at the nightstand. He’d covered the bright face of the alarm clock with a towel to keep the light out of his eyes, but his Doxa watch was resting beside it. He scooped it up, checked the luminous hands, and realized it was almost two o’clock in the morning.

He threw the covers off, climbed out of bed, and walked over to the desk. If he couldn’t find sleep, maybe he could find some answers.

He opened his laptop and took a drink of water while it booted up. A quick Internet search regarding the ASIO brought up numerous articles. He didn’t expect to find a list of secret operations, but he thought there might be something indicating what they were dealing with. Maybe something obscure enough that he could put two and two together.

With no luck there, he thought about Hayley.

“Who are you, Ms. Anderson?” he muttered. “And what are you mixed up in?”

He ran a Google search on her, and a wealth of links appeared.

To Kurt’s surprise, Hayley was a scholar: a theoretical physicist tenured at the University of Sydney. She’d authored a number of papers with incomprehensible titles. There was a more easily read article about her turning down an invite to Oxford. He found another where she was trying to explain something about gravity and why Einstein was wrong in his understanding of it.

Kurt poured himself a glass of scotch. He found himself more baffled than before. What on earth was a young woman who could prove Einstein wrong doing in the middle of a terrorist investigation?

Finding no answer to that question, or any public link between her and the ASIO, he turned his attention to the dead informant.

Kurt was certain the man had been suffering from decompression sickness. The question was: how did he get it?

DCS had once been called caisson disease, because it was originally noticed in construction workers who were toiling away in the pressurized caissons used to build the foundations of great bridges. But it was most commonly seen in scuba divers.

The dead man Panos had arrived in a boat, racing across Sydney Harbour. That also suggested he might have been diving. But he wore grimy street clothes, not a wet suit, and he smelled like days of perspiration, not the fresh salt of the sea. That, along with the mining connection and the ASIO’s belief that some terrorist group was operating in the outback, weighed against Kurt’s theory.

He found a register of lakes in Australia and painstakingly scanned through them. Just as Bradshaw insisted, most of them appeared to be shallow or even transient, drying up completely in the summertime.

“Not the kind of places one gets the bends,” Kurt said.

He put the list down and began scanning a satellite image of Australia. Moving westward from Sydney and out over more arid territory, it was easy to see how quickly the terrain became barren. Occasionally, he came across a swath of green.

Much like the American Southwest and the Egyptian Nile, wherever a stream or river flowed, vegetation grew up around it. Even if it didn’t flow year-round, there was often underground water to be had. But that water was locked away in permeable sands and aquifers, not hidden lakes that one could swim in. And even if he could find a lake, that didn’t explain the toxins on the man’s skin.

About ready to shut down, Kurt used the touch pad to scan a few more sections of the map. He stopped when a strangely colored spot caught his eye. He tapped the ZOOM IN command a couple of times and waited.

The map blurred and refocused, with the iridescent spot taking up a quarter of the screen.

He was staring at a lake. A lake of brilliant rainbow hues, brighter than anything in nature had a right to be.