Bad Seed (43 page)

‘So you have a bit more time on your hands, funerals notwithstanding.'

‘Yep.'

‘Great,' said Spittle. ‘Maybe have a chat with Hassan and Thornton. Divvy up the workload as you see fit. Keep me in the picture, eh?'

Cato asked if that was all. It was. Except.

‘DI Pavlou mentioned she's looking forward to hearing from you before Friday.'

‘Sir?'

‘The vacancy? She seems very keen on you. You've obviously impressed her. You'd be a shoo-in, I reckon.'

Cato frowned. ‘The timing's not real good. Flattered as I am.'

Spittle smiled. ‘Don't worry about the loyalty thing. Apparently she's told Mick Hutchens everything.'

‘Everything?' said Cato. ‘Like what?'

‘Dunno, but he's definitely in the loop on your career plans.'

Cato knew now what had been gnawing at Hutchens at the hospital. Betrayal and treachery. Pavlou had him believing that Cato was about to jump ship. He kept his face as neutral as possible. ‘Did DI Pavlou drop by earlier?'

‘No, she phoned.'

So he'd learned two things. First, Pavlou was playing silly cruel power games with the job vacancies. Why? Who knows. Second, she had phoned that morning with yet another message. Case closed on the Tans. Got it? Perhaps she and ACC Mike had indeed been comparing notes. Driscoll too, maybe.

Deb Hassan and Chris Thornton invited him over the road for a coffee and a catch-up, Thornton's round. It was mid-morning and Gram Parsons wailed from the gloom of The Record Finder next door, an Old Testament dirge about Satan, booze and women. It pretty well reflected the weekend crime tally.

‘I'm doing the domestic stabbing,' said Hassan, licking froth from her upper lip. ‘Chris is doing the boy racers and the drug busts. They're linked. We're sharing the break-ins.'

‘What do you need from me?' Cato could already feel his attention wandering.

‘Clarity of thought and decisive leadership.'

Uh-oh, thought Cato.

‘Just kidding,' said Hassan, catching the look on his face. ‘Take care of the home front, we've got it covered here.'

‘Yeah,' said Thornton. ‘Sorry about your dad.'

‘Thanks.'

Cato's phone buzzed. Driscoll. ‘Where are you?'

Cato told him.

‘Don't move. See you in ten.'

‘Something come up?'

‘Yeah.'

They finished their coffees while Gram Parsons warned them about a fiery hell just around the corner if they didn't change their ways. According to him the whole town was insane and no amount of wealth would protect them from the Lord's burning rain. Another cavalcade of election billboards rolled by with a large evangelical image of the man whose moment cometh. Be careful what you wish for, mused Cato.

Driscoll rocked up soon after and immediately impressed Deb
Hassan. He flashed her one of his smiles and she went all girlish, a revelation to Cato. She and Thornton made their excuses and left, ruefully it seemed on her part. Driscoll got down to business.

He hummed a tune. ‘Born Free'. The black PR company in Shanghai.

‘What about them?'

‘They don't just clean up your CV and your Facebook misdemeanours.'

‘Go on.'

Apparently Born Free occupied a suite of rooms in a twelve-storey block in Shanghai's Pudong district. The rest of the building was made up of all manner of high-tech outfits involved in IT support, research and development, marketing, security, financial planning and analysis. Everyone in the building providing a lucrative and sought-after service and everyone in the building interconnected in some way.

‘How do you mean?'

‘Ownership, boards of directors, joint ventures; you name it.'

Cato still didn't see the point, and said so.

‘That twelve-storey block is just part of a whole complex, a mini-suburb if you like, under the control of a specialist cyber wing of the People's Liberation Army. Unit 61398 it's called. From there they control the Great Firewall of China and what people can and can't see on the internet. They can also do their cyber attacks on enemies and business rivals as well as monitoring the phones, emails, social media accounts, and internet browsing habits of their citizens.'

‘So?'

‘So I think you're being hacked and bugged and stitched up. Not necessarily by that specific unit but certainly by somebody with a similar capability, perhaps a freelancer moonlighting from the day job. I hear the pay's not that flash for most of the drones. Anyway, like I said, Li has powerful friends and some of them might have a personal stake in some of his bigger property deals. His Aussie ventures would be particularly attractive to them; a good way of laundering ill-gotten gains. And these people are able to watch you all the way from Shanghai.'

‘Where did you get this tip-off from?'

‘Some of it is freely available on news websites. Other stuff is from friends and contacts.'

‘Your PLA General friend?'

‘Among others.'

‘What can I do about it?'

Driscoll shifted in his seat. ‘These folks give me the heebie-jeebies. If it was me I'd stay offline and hole up in South America for a few decades.'

Which wasn't entirely practical. But in some ways it was liberating. You were up against people so powerful that your fate was out of your hands. It was like being told you've got terminal cancer and your days are numbered, nothing you can do about it except try and enjoy what little time you had left. Then his father's premonition came back to him. The one about dying in China. In China, from China, because of China: what's a preposition between friends?

‘Did your contacts tell you who precisely I'm pissing off and why?'

‘No. But my bet is on Phoebe Li and her circle. Being a privileged rich kid herself she went to school and uni with all the other such kids – the high cadres' children, HCCs. These are the offspring of high party officials, army generals, and they've become untouchable. There was a road rage incident in Beijing recently. One of the HCCs, a seventeen year old kid, pranged his Porsche into a delivery truck. His fault entirely, according to the witnesses, but that didn't stop him and his mates dragging the truck driver out of his cab and beating him into a coma. They walked away laughing and nobody said a thing.' Driscoll shivered against a gust sweeping up High Street. ‘Phoebe's crowd believe they have an absolute entitlement to wealth and power and they can do what they like without any consequences.'

And these were the same people who were probably behind the threats to him and his family. A daunting prospect. But he could sit and wait for them to come, or he could take the initiative. Cato smiled. ‘We had a saying in Stock Squad, “may as well be hung for a
sheep as a lamb”. So if I wanted to rattle Phoebe's cage, how might I go about it?'

‘I suspect her cage has already been rattled. You want to go further?'

‘Yes.'

They considered their options while Gram Parsons continued his miserable bleating.

Back in the office Cato got to work. Driscoll had returned to the SAS barracks in Swanbourne to do his spook schtick. Maybe Rory's implacable unseen foreign enemy scenario was pure bulldust, a Yellow Peril scare for the twenty-first century with Cato, of all people, buying into it. It was convincing though: land deals, high cadres' children, cyber dragons in their twelve-storey lair in a mysterious Shanghai suburb. You'd almost want to believe it because it was so exotic and dangerous. Maybe the truth was more humdrum, low-rent, and closer to home. Yet Cato had decided to trust Driscoll and it was based on little more than gut instinct. So, if the cyber dragons were hacking him did that mean the whole Western Australian police computer network was compromised or was it just his personal laptop that had been targeted? His approach was not dissimilar to his Chinese Whispers tactic in Hopetoun. He tried not to think about how much trouble that had got him into. He would lay one trail of rumours with his personal laptop and a different trail with his work desktop. That would tell him which, at least, was the compromised machine, or even if it was both. After that things were likely to get trickier.

Cato laid his trail then spent the rest of the day dealing with the bureaucratic detritus of the job, drifting now and then into nostalgic reveries about his father. A failed attempt to get them both interested in footy when he was ten, Jack's excruciating jokes when Cato brought home his first girlfriend at fourteen, his mother playing the piano one evening and Jack bending down to kiss the back of her neck.

Guido Caletti had sent the boys home early, except for Bruno, his nephew. He knew Bruno wouldn't go. The lad watched his boss like a hawk, took his job too seriously. He needed to get a life, get a girlfriend. If the lad had been this diligent at uni he'd be a fucking professor by now, life tenure and all that. A small flock of night owls haunted the café, keeping Bruno from closing up. An alcoholic public servant from one of those ugly communist-style blocks in East Perth, the Department of Nothing Worth a Fuck, who hated his wife and kids so much he didn't want to go home to them. A tipsy couple who couldn't keep their hands off each other and should have been in a motel going at it instead of sipping sambuccas and playing footsie in his café. And the sad, lonely carrot cruncher in the Driza vest and beanie who looked like he'd taken the wrong turn at Wagin. Maybe he was hoping somebody would tell him where the brothel was.

Guido summoned up his Joe Dolce voice and laid on the accent to charm them out of there. ‘Time please, ladies and gentlemen. You got no homes to go to, eh?'

The public servant muttered something worth stabbing him for, scraped back his chair and lurched out the door. The couple gave each other a last lingering tonguey and a wave to Guido and his nephew as they tiptoed off to bed. Bruno was busy washing and wiping the sambucca glasses. The carrot cruncher wasn't there. Obviously out the back in the dunny. Christ, give me strength, Guido said to himself.

‘Leave the rest 'til morning, Bruno. Off you go. I'll shepherd the sad bastard out and close up.'

‘You sure, boss?'

‘Yep. See you tomorrow, son.'

Bruno grabbed his phone, ciggies and sunnies and left. Guido cleared the last of the cups and glasses from the tables and deposited them in the sink. Still no sign of sad sack. He went out back to find him. He edged his way past the boxes of Chinotto stacked in the passage and the mop and bucket outside the gents. He pushed open the door and spoke from the threshold.

‘Sir? You in here? We're closing up now, mate.'

No answer.

He sighed and stepped in towards the closed door of the cubicle. Knuckles raised to do the rap.

A wire went around his neck.

Cato heard about it on the news as he was driving away from the funeral parlour. He'd been tasked by Mandy to double-check last minute arrangements and confirm the choice of music. Mandy favoured Chopin but Cato knew his dad would also like to have slipped in a bit of Dean Martin. According to the radio report, prominent Northbridge identity Guido Caletti had been found dead that morning in his coffee shop. Major Crime were investigating and Organised Crime were also involved given the man's reputation. According to police spokesperson DI Sandra Pavlou, foul play had not been ruled out.