‘No, it’s not. Not this time.’
He looked at her silently. The tension in the room made her sit rigidly in her chair. She hated it here where there was no place to hide. Things said in this room could be as intimate as those said between her and Paul but without the warmth or the connection. Clive knew almost as much about her as Paul did. The biographies of all his officers were secured on his hard drive, variables that might affect someone’s work.
‘You’re not the woman I was expecting to meet when you came back from maternity leave,’ he said finally. ‘From everything I’ve heard about you, I’d say you lost a skin or two in that time. Your personal life has taken a lot of hours recently, which I’ve accommodated at our inconvenience. In this profession, your work comes first. But I’m still going to keep you on this operation.’
‘What made you decide that?’ she asked, managing to keep her anger out of her voice.
‘Let’s assume Kidd is corrupt and being blackmailed. His security clearance means he knows you’re an agent with Orion. If the person who has him on a string also knows you’re from Orion, they might come looking for you. Let’s find out.’
‘Wouldn’t it be more likely they’d give me as wide a berth as possible?’
‘Think of that escape. A desperate act. Wouldn’t they want to try and find out exactly what we know?’
‘I’m the bait, you mean. For what? I still have no information on what this operation’s really about or who or what the target is.’
‘When you need to know, you’ll be told. I don’t think that time has come yet. But I can tell you this is a very significant operation. Being involved in this way would be quite a feather in your cap.’ He tossed this cliche at her as if it were a hook.
‘How much danger would that scenario put me in?’ she asked.
‘You’d have full backup. My judgement is you’re still professional enough to deal with it.’
‘Is this a direction from you?’ she asked. ‘And if it is, is there any agreement to support it? Normally when this kind of arrangement is made, there’s a written agreement and a set of directions on how to proceed.’
‘That’s a refusal.’
‘No, it’s a request for clear, written directions.’
‘Then we’ll see what happens first. In the meantime, you stay assigned to this operation under my direction.’
Again, he opened his folder. This time, he spread out a series of photographs. Jirawan in the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. Photographs Grace had taken herself.
‘There’s something else I think we should discuss,’ Grace said, keeping her irritation under control. ‘Given this woman is Jirawan Sanders, what about her husband? Is he missing? Or is he dead?’
Clive looked up from the photographs. ‘He’s dead. Peter Sanders. He was an Australian who ran an import- export business in Bangkok, which is where he met this woman. That’s the last piece of information I’m going to give you right now.’
‘She has a child somewhere. If both parents are dead, shouldn’t we find out where this child is, or at least ask someone to locate him or her?’
‘Whatever’s happened to that child, it’s not our responsibility.’
Finally Clive gathered up the pictures and put them away. ‘The man who did this-’
‘Man?’ she interrupted.
‘Apart from the evidence of sexual assault, do you think a woman would have the physical strength to do this?’
‘A woman could watch. She could administer a beating.’
‘Yes, she could. But whoever did this likes to kill. That’s my opinion. Report to me tomorrow about tonight’s raid. One other thing. Have you heard the news in the last hour?’
‘No. I haven’t had time.’
‘You should go and listen to it.’
‘Why?’
‘Chris Newell was snatched as he left court today in a very bloody affair. Two people are dead and several badly wounded. We both know about Newell’s connection to you. If he turns up on your radar, I need to know.’
‘I’m going to make a personal call. Excuse me,’ Grace said, and left the room immediately.
At Orion, personal calls were only tolerated under very unusual circumstances and had to be made on your own phone. Walking at speed down the hallway to her office, Grace rang Harrigan with a shaking hand. She was desperate to talk to him, but nothing would have made her call in front of Clive.
The phone was answered almost at once. ‘Harrigan.’
She breathed relief. ‘It’s me. Are you all right? What’s happened?’
‘I’m okay, babe. I don’t have a scratch on me, which is more than you can say for some of the people here. It’s bad. Two men shot dead. It happened in front of me.’
‘You’re okay?’
‘I’m handling it. It’s like being back on the job again.’
‘Someone did that for Newell? Why?’
‘Don’t ask me. He’s not worth anything like this. I can’t talk to you now-I’ve got people who want me this end. What time will you be home tonight?’
‘Late. There’s an op going on. I don’t know when I’ll get back.’
‘We’ll talk about it then. You take care.’
‘Where’s Ellie?’
‘She’s fine. She’s at Kidz Corner. I’ll pick her up the same time I always do. She won’t know anything’s happened. Okay? I’ll see you.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Take care, babe.’
‘You too.’
Babe. A name he had given her this last year or so. At first, it had seemed so unlike him it had startled her. One of those small pieces of intimacy between them she could still be surprised by.
She thought about Clive’s comment on her personal life. She wasn’t the only one who had changed. Since Clive had arrived, Orion had changed as well. To an agency already obsessed with secrecy, he’d brought new levels of paranoia. People worked in compartments; no one was allowed to know what the next person was doing. It had reached a level where operatives didn’t share even the most trivial pieces of information. People muttered that this was Clive’s way of making sure there was no one to challenge him. Grace agreed with this opinion; it was the oldest tactic in the world. But aside from that was his attitude to her. He was always trying to get under her skin, to play games with her feelings. She wondered if she was imagining it, but there seemed to be a touch of obsession in his treatment of her, as if he couldn’t leave her alone.
Even today, he’d sat on the news about Newell throughout their meeting, a meeting he had deliberately drawn out. Perhaps it was his way of getting rid of her; he had driven out other operatives since he’d arrived. Whatever his ultimate aim, he’d succeeded in putting the question in her mind. Did she want to do this kind of work any longer?
At the heart of Grace’s life there were cracks, events that marked the time before and after happiness. She had grown up in New Guinea where her father had been a defence attache at the Australian High Commission. Her life had been spent happily between boarding school in Brisbane and time with her family, including her brother, Nicky, to whom she was still very close. Her childhood lived in her memory as time spent in a magical place. In her mind she could still see the landscapes she had grown up in, all of which had an intense beauty. But when she was fourteen, her mother had died in a little less than twenty-four hours from a rare form of cerebral malaria. Grace had once believed that nothing in her life could match that heartbreak, not even if her father or her brother died. She knew now that losing either Paul or Ellie would be as bad.
Her father had ceased to be Brigadier Kep Riordan with the High Commission in Port Moresby and had come back to Australia to raise his two children as best he could, on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where he’d been born. There Grace ran wild, falling in with a group of older kids who stole cars and took them for joy rides. She remembered one night shouting at the driver to go faster and faster, so much so that she’d spooked him. She’d
