Sensitive New Age Spy (13 page)

This really upped the stakes. I knew they wanted me off the case, but now it looked like somebody wanted me dead.

There was a sudden piercing shriek from Chloe. Diego looked up and gasped. ‘What the hell is that?’

I swung round in my chair. Jesus, first the rental car, now this. What immediately came to mind was the closing lines from
Apocalypse Now
– The horror, the horror…’

Chloe had pushed her chair back from the reception desk and was frantically trying to fend off the small brown dog that was enthusiastically humping her leg.

‘Leave the girl alone, Fritzy. Heel, damn you. Ah, Murdoch, just the man I need to see.’

Fritzy was a miniature dachshund and as usual he was connected by a leash to the Honourable Gwenda Felton. Gudrun referred to this combination as the rat on the rope, leaving it open as to which end of the rope the rat was on. Apparently there was a Mr Honourable Gwenda Felton out there somewhere but no one had ever seen him. At parliamentary functions, tree plantings, building dedications, and the ritual breaking of recalcitrant public servants on the rack, it was always just Gwenda and Fritzy.

She marched through the office towards me, a swirling kaleidoscope of brightly coloured fabric, crimson lipstick,
blue eyeshadow, too much rouge, and hair bleached and teased to breaking point. Diego was left choking in a wash of perfume and hairspray. As an Officer of the Order of Australia, Gwenda Felton was entitled to have AO after her name, which was entirely appropriate because if this woman were a movie she’d have to be rated Adults Only – way too scary for anyone under sixteen. And she made a lot of people over sixteen pretty nervous as well. She could suck all the oxygen out of a room in just one breath, and proceeded to give us a demonstration.

‘I think you should have an armed security guard outside that door 24/7 and perhaps we could make the glass bulletproof and I don’t think it would kill either you or that boy to wear a suit and tie or get a haircut.’

She handed me Fritzy’s leash. I looked down into the dog’s beady little eyes and I knew two things. One was that Fritzy was pure evil and the second was that Dougal could have him for breakfast. I gave the leash to Diego, who was looking very confused at this talk of armed guards, bulletproof glass, and people wearing suits and ties.

‘Why don’t you and Chloe take Ms Felton’s doggie for a bit of a stroll, mate,’ I said. ‘She and I need to have a chat.’

I locked the front door after they left and smiled at my new boss. ‘First things first,’ I said. ‘This is the office of WorldPix, a commercial photo agency, not D.E.D. So your showing up here doesn’t do much for maintaining our cover. And having a marked car and an armed guard from the
Australian Protective Service out front would be a great way of advertising that something else besides photography is going on here. Secondly, Diego and Chloe work for WorldPix, and like most of the people here, they’ve got no idea what D.E.D. is and I’d like to keep it that way. Thirdly, wearing a suit and tie
could
very well kill me. If I’m under cover as a photographer then I need to be damn sure I look like one.’

‘Rupert said you were difficult, Murdoch, but I’ve handled difficult people before.’

This was true. Gwenda Felton had left a long trail of shattered underlings in her wake. Her motto was ‘my way or the highway’, and out on that particular highway Gwenda Felton was a B-Double with very dicky brakes.

‘As to my showing up here, Murdoch,’ she went on, ‘I’m not a complete idiot.’

That was the kind of admission you rarely got from politicians these days. But having the fate of the nation in the hands of almost complete idiots wasn’t much consolation.

‘The official reason for my visit is that I need to update my PR photographs. So coming here allows me to kill two birds with one stone. We can talk about the new rules for D.E.D. operatives while you take my picture.’

What the hell did she need PR shots for? Did she think she was going to get a profile in
Spy Weekly
?

While I set up the lights in the studio, Gwenda Felton laid down the law. There would be a lot more in the way of paperwork and a lot less in the way of operatives acting on
initiative. My investigation of the business on the
Altoona
was now closed, shut down,
finito
, put to bed, never to be mentioned again.

‘And just so we’re clear, Murdoch, I’m contemplating setting up a branch office of WorldPix somewhere in the far north of Finland, and people who mess with me could find themselves up to their ears in snow and caribou.’

I think she meant reindeer, but I got the point.

‘Perhaps we should also think about changing the name of D.E.D.,’ she continued. ‘It makes for a rather depressing acronym, don’t you think?’

The Directorate for Extra-Territorial Defence had been the cover name for a military-support section for coastwatchers on enemy-occupied islands in the Pacific in World War II. The officer in charge had covertly and unofficially turned it into a visual-surveillance operation, with his eye on setting up a secure government job for himself after the war. The plan had worked and D.E.D. was now one of the oldest security operations going. We had a long and proud, if totally secret and deniable, history, and now this bureaucratic blow-in wanted to change the name on her first day on the job. How typical was that?

Through the camera lens, Gwenda Felton was a riot of colour and movement. Her outfit made Carter Lonergan’s Hawaiian shirt collection look sedate. I suggested we postpone the shoot and get a wardrobe stylist and makeup artist in and she asked if I’d ever eaten caribou meat, so I let it go
and figured I’d get Chloe to work her magic in PhotoShop. The girl would be up for a major pay rise if she could pull this one off.

Thank God for auto-focus cameras. I turned the music up, closed my eyes and tried to think about Saturday lunch at Buon Ricordo, the Italian place run by my friend Armando. The image I actually conjured up was Cristobel Priday naked in my bathtub, but that was okay too.

When Gwenda and Fritzy had gone I made a few phone calls. The first was to a computer boffin mate, the second was to Byron Oxenbould’s agent, and the third was to Carter Lonergan.

Carter and I had been talking about getting together for lunch since he took up his post. He was wary of my invitation at first, so I mentioned that Julie would be joining us and he was suddenly able to rearrange his busy schedule and make himself available around noon the next day.

I was now well and truly out of the loop on the non-missing, non-existent nukes. I knew Carter would be right the middle of the action, and if my plan worked I should be able get some useful information.

I headed into the city down Hickson Road. I figured a walk along the harbourfront and through the Rocks might clear my head and get the image of Gwenda Felton smiling
like a rouged piranha out of my brain. The other image I was trying to lose was the rented Toyota bulging outwards from the explosive charge that someone hoped I’d be sitting on. I must admit that made me a bit jumpy.

Up towards the casino I picked up a tail: a young bloke in lycra on a Bianchi Cross Veloce with a courier satchel over his shoulder. He was probably one of Gwenda’s minions, making sure I was obeying her directive to drop the case, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I ditched him by detouring through the casino, ducking out the staff entrance and grabbing a passing taxi. It was all a bit too easy, so I figured he must have been one of Gwenda’s boys.

At Circular Quay a kilted busker with bagpipes was competing with an Aboriginal bloke on a didgeridoo. It was hard to say who was winning, but it definitely wasn’t the ferry passengers. There were a number of large trucks parked outside one of the burger chains on Pitt Street, and the presence of movie lights, muscular blokes in T-shirts and tool belts, and hyperactive young production assistants rushing about with clipboards and walkie-talkies indicated the presence of a film crew.

Byron Oxenbould, or Boxer to his friends, was sitting on a folding chair with his feet up on a trolley full of audio recorders, microphones, boom poles and headphones. He was reading an electronics magazine and looking bored. When my shadow fell across his magazine he glanced up.

‘What a fucking debacle this is,’ he said. ‘It’s a one-day
shoot and I reckon we’ll be here till bloody Christmas. Plus every time we do a take I’ve got to get an assistant director to slip Mr Didgeridoo and Bonnie Prince Charlie over there ten bucks each to pack it in for five minutes so we can hear what the actors are saying. Noisy buggers are making more out of this job than I am.’

One of the top motion-picture sound recordists in the country, Boxer did the odd TV commercial between feature films, and occasionally some clandestine sound stealing for D.E.D. He was very good at his job and he hated working with people who weren’t good at theirs. Boxer was a handsome bastard in his own disshevelled way, and a couple of very famous actresses insisted he was the only man they’d let tape those tiny radio mikes inside their cleavage. As Boxer liked to say, ‘It’s a dirty job but someone has to do it.’

The director started screaming at a young PA with a bum bag that looked like it held everything including the kitchen sink.

Boxer shook his head. ‘That bloke couldn’t direct traffic on an escalator.’

‘But you’re getting all the fast food you can eat, right?’

He gave a sardonic laugh. ‘Eighteen hours out of my life and forty thousand feet of film for thirty seconds on air extolling the delights of the triple-cheese, double-crumbed, ham-steak, barbecued-bacon chilli burger with pineapple – and would you like extra fat with that, sir?’

Boxer tilted his head towards the street, where the film
crew vehicles were parked between rows of orange witches hats. ‘You could stuff one of those damned burgers into a grease gun and do a decent lube job on half those trucks out there. If I had higher ethical standards and a lower mortgage I’d tell ’em to stick it.’

He tossed the magazine onto his chair and looked at me. ‘And speaking of dubious ethical standards, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?’

‘I’ve just been photographing Gwenda Felton,’ I said, ‘so I needed some fresh air.’

Boxer shivered. ‘I reckon you’d need more than fresh air after something like that, mate. Maybe an eyeball transplant.’

‘Your agent said you were off for the rest of the week. I might have a job for you, if you’re interested.’

Boxer glanced over to where the bulk of the film crew were now milling around the director, who looked like he might be about to have a stroke.

‘Let’s go grab a coffee. It’s gonna be at least an hour before this dill works out that he’s never going to be able to make his little burger epic look like the opening shot from
Goodfellas
.’

We found a café with tables upstairs where I could keep an eye on the street. The waitresses were a couple of young and beautiful Scandinavian backpackers and they fell on our table like the Mongol hordes when they spotted Boxer. In Sydney, good-looking gets good service, and we had cappuccinos and
a couple of apple Danish in front of us in no time flat.

When the waitresses finally left us alone I ran a couple of questions past Boxer. He nibbled at his pastry and thought about his answer for a good five minutes, eventually nodded and said yes, it was probably possible. I explained who the target was and he said no, it was totally impossible, adding that I must be out of my tiny mind.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘if you don’t think you can do it, I understand. I’ll find somebody else.’

‘Gee, Alby, reverse psychology? That’ll work on me every time.’

‘Sorry. I can’t explain why I need this done, but you know I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important.’

He looked at me for a minute. ‘Yeah, okay, I’m in. But you owe me big time.’

I called for the bill, which arrived at the speed of light. ‘I’ll get this,’ I said.

‘You got that right, pal.’

The waitress brought back the change and handed Boxer one of the café’s business cards, which had two phone numbers written on the back. It looked like Mr Good-looking would be getting more than just great table service.

I left Boxer at the film shoot and walked back to the Quay, trying to decide between taking a bus or train to Bondi. Cabs were out – I’d heard enough rant-back radio on the
ride over from the casino. I opted for the train to Bondi Junction and a bus down the hill.

Julie’s board was outside the front door and she was still in her wetsuit, towelling her hair dry. Julie in skintight, glistening black neoprene was quite a sight.

‘How’s the surf?’

‘Great. That northerly’s perfect for the south swell. Just magic.’

I tossed the rental car keys onto the dining-room table.

‘That was meant for you, wasn’t it?’ Julie said. ‘What’s going on?’

Whoever planted the bomb probably hadn’t noticed the flat in the dark. A puncture, one beer too many, and freezing my nuts off on the back of Gudrun’s Indian had saved me from getting them blown off in a rented Toyota. ‘I guess someone really does want me off this case.’

‘Half a kilo of C4 triggered by a mercury switch would definitely achieve that,’ Julie said. ‘And then some. But apart from that, how was Canberra?’

I gave her the good news about my demotion and the bad news about our new boss and she took it rather well. Her resignation letter was a masterpiece of tact and brevity. There were only two problems that I could see.

‘First of all, I’ve no idea what a funking bitch is,’ I said, ‘and secondly, who’s going to watch my back if you leave?’

She took the letter from me, tore it up and threw it in the bin.

‘Got that out of your system?’

‘Yep.’

‘Good. Now, I ran into Cristobel Priday with Artemesia Gaarg in Canberra this morning. Any idea what the connection there is?’

‘I know Cristobel is part of Artemesia’s save-the-whale crusade.’

‘Yeah, I know, but I sprung them holding hands over toast and Vegemite. Are you sure there’s nothing more to it than whales?’