Tropic of Death (17 page)

His torturer towered over him, Freddy’s mobile phone in his hand.

‘I’m adding my number to your contacts,’ he told him. ‘My name’s Kurt. Do you think you’ll remember that?’

Freddy nodded several times, unable to speak.

‘And you’ll call me as soon as you know anything about the whereabouts of Stonefish. Right? Because if you don’t, you know what you’ll lose.’

Freddy nodded again vigorously.

‘Good,’ Kurt said, and led the others from the house.

After the front door banged shut behind them, Freddy lay still until he could gather enough strength to limp gingerly, still bent double, to the stockpile of medications stashed at the back of his fridge. He needed another hit and he needed it fast.

25
Long after the International Risk Assessment Committee had adjourned for the night, its clandestine business concluded, another sequence of covert activity began within the confines of the base.

Data was being accessed, scanned, evaluated and concealed within the system, thanks to a randomised neuronetic pathway that was effectively a ghost login.

The identity of the ghost remained a secret, known only to the user. No official presence on the base could be allowed to find out, including the committee, senior management, or staff deployed on levels six and seven. Of necessity, there could be no witnesses.

The activity of the ghost circumvented all obvious protocols.

Outside the subterranean labyrinth, the grounds were silent and secure. The gates were locked, bolted and chained. An elite force of military police manned security points around the concrete superstructure and armed personnel patrolled the perimeter fence.

Razor wire, concrete barriers and pillars dripping with CCTV

cameras added to the fortress-like effect, designed to avert any frontal attack. Inside the complex, toiling through night shifts, a few dozen staff worked at their tasks under the watchful eyes of the guards. The base’s military authorities were convinced that all the appropriate measures were in place to guarantee that no breach of security would go undetected.

The ghost continued scanning, focusing now on a single event contained within the immense digital archive of the system. The relevant data displayed surveillance images from an incident that had occurred some two weeks ago in an alleyway by the docks. The footage showed Rachel Macarthur walking down the cobbled slope.

Then a dark figure emerged from a doorway, approached from behind and put a hand over her mouth. The ghost observed, in slow-mo now, the raised arm of the attacker, the nail gun clenched in the hand, the mechanism being fired, the projectile piercing the skull and Rachel slumping to the ground. With the image frozen, and tracking around one hundred and eighty degrees, the ghost zoomed in on the killer, enhancing the light. The image became clear, the face unmistakable.

The record of homicidal violence could be viewed dispassionately.

It changed nothing. Even though it preserved the actuality of murder it was beyond the reach of police, courts and the entire criminal justice system. As evidence it wasn’t simply inadmissible, it was nonexistent. Surveillance data processed by the Tracker technology didn’t exist because, officially, the system didn’t exist. Its secrecy was guaranteed by national security directives of governments committed to fighting the war on terror. That meant the data identifying the nail-gunner was protected from any exposure whatsoever - judicial, media, political, or even military. The ghost knew it existed, but the ghost wasn’t telling anyone.

The ghost was Audrey Zillman.

As system controller, with a complete overview of the project, Audrey had identified a problem. It wasn’t scientific, it wasn’t even technical. It was human. So far, Audrey couldn’t decide what to do with the information, never mind formulate some sort of response. In effect, it was outside her province.

The problem was behavioural. A very limited number of people could access the Tracker. Restricted use of the technology was ensured by a mandatory level-seven security clearance. The protocol was dictated by the sensitivity of the project and the need to protect it from disclosure, even to high-ranking staff at the base. But what it couldn’t safeguard against was abuse of the privilege. It was immediately clear to Audrey that some high-echelon officials were accessing or tampering with surveillance data in private, personal or unauthorised ways. Although she had no obligation to issue an alert over such breaches, she was logging and secretly filing them. Part of her dilemma was procedural. The administrators and managers who would need to be alerted were the same individuals who were bending the rules.

The problem intensified after the first murder.

Audrey worked on the principles of scientific method. Her approach to everything was logical and analytical. Morality was not her strong point. Objectivity was. The killing itself could be viewed as excessive, and yet it was based on rational assumptions.

The victim, ‘the man in the mud’, had represented a danger that needed to be eliminated. The person was disposed of and the immediate threat was removed - QED.

With the second nail-gun murder, the problem escalated further.

A pattern was emerging and it posed the perennial question: did the end justify the means? At what point, Audrey began to query, did the process become irrational? Not yet, seemed to be the answer. Logically, of course, there was a patent contradiction because the solution was barbaric. However, Audrey observed, such a tactic had enjoyed a long tradition in human affairs, spanning the entire evolution of the species, and would doubtless persist for centuries to come. Therefore intervention served no purpose. Constrained by security restrictions, her position in the base structure, moral ambiguities and the momentum of history, Audrey was compelled to do nothing. She would simply continue to keep watch.

26
After zapping the pain with morphine and dropping a double dose of sleepers, Freddy passed out for the night, enduring vivid dreams about freewheeling circles of data and electric women and giants wielding shears. He woke in the morning to a throbbing ache in his groin and a fuzzy brain. That meant more painkillers and an upper for breakfast. He washed them down with bottled water. He couldn’t face food.

He sat at his breakfast bar, looking out at islands in a storm-tossed sea. The shipping passage was ribbed with breakers and the sky was full of low clouds and rain. The day was dismal.

So were the rooms around him, plastered with souvenirs of a dead relationship - ban-the-bomb emblems, rainforest panoramas and dolphin decorations, lots of them. Rachel had been big on the dolphin theme. But there was a lack of personal photos, the result of hectic lives. The only shot of Rachel and Freddy together was a memento from their holiday on Hamilton Island, a colour photo mounted on cardboard with Freddy nursing a koala. He gazed at Rachel’s beaming face regretfully, lost in a morass of self-reproach, until the upper kicked in and his mind clicked sharply back to the present and the predicament he found himself in.

His unwelcome visitors of the night before weren’t the type to go away. They hadn’t told him who they were but they didn’t have to. He’d encountered their sort before, back when he’d been interrogated about the Edge of Chaos virus - anonymous men in suits, with an official authenticity to their threats and a brisk brutality in their methods. But the man who really scared him was the American, Kurt. He was a practised killer, Freddy had no doubt, because he’d met more of the same among Billy’s circle of acquaintances. It was the way they checked you out, the coldness in their eyes, and that hair-trigger vibe that could switch their mood from calm to violent in a second. But Kurt was even worse.

If he had government agencies behind him, as Freddy suspected, he could kill with impunity.

It was time for Freddy to follow Stonefish’s lead and lie low. But where? The police knew about the various places he used as crash pads, including the flat above the cyber cafe, so they were out, and his warehouse loft was no longer safe since the confrontation with Audrey. His standby option made sense. He’d live out of the back of his Land Rover for the time being, moving between suitably obscure locations. In the meantime, there was only one obvious course of action - he needed to get Billy Bowers onside.

For a start, Billy had to be told about the men in suits and their pursuit of Stonefish. With any luck, Billy could provide Freddy with some real protection.

Then he could get to work on figuring out how to reach Stonefish without anyone finding out.

Still moving gingerly, Freddy walked to his van, got in and, after a careful look around, drove out of the crescent and down the hill into the town, checking constantly that he wasn’t being tailed. When he got to the docks, he turned into the cobbled alley and followed it down to the bottom, parking in a fork of the dead-end T-junction beside the Rough Diamond Club.

When he went inside the bouncer blocked his way to the stairs.

‘Billy ain’t here.’

‘When’ll he be back?’ asked Freddy.

‘Maybe sooner, maybe later,’ shrugged the bouncer.

‘Great.’

‘Why don’t you wait in the bar? You look like you need a drink.’

‘I need more than that,’ growled Freddy. ‘But I might as well start with a vodka.’

27
The wind was still gusting but there was a break in the rain as Rita walked down the alley. The area was ripe for redevelopment, with most of the shopfronts and buildings boarded up. Apart from the club, the only other businesses still operating were an all-day breakfast cafe and a fishing shop called the Rod ‘n’ Reel. She checked out the dead-end laneways right and left; on one side was a fenced-off demolition site, on the other was a narrow footpath sloping down to a stretch of quayside lined with bollards.

This part of the docks was deserted. The sea frothed and thumped against empty berths, hurling spray into the air. The wharf, on a spur from the basin of the harbour, was disused and in need of repair. A tangle of seaweed rode the foam, meshed with litter and driftwood. The nearest vessel was a freighter tied up at the coal terminal several hundred metres away. The only other presence was a row of towering wind turbines embedded in a concrete breakwater. The machines stood like white metal giants fanning the sky, their blades wheeling busily high overhead. Rita wiped a film of damp from her face as she took in the padlocked cargo sheds and loading cranes that backed onto the club. The mood of the day didn’t help but the place felt uninviting - the sort of bleak backwater where death came unobserved.

She returned to the alley and walked up the slope to the spot where Rachel’s body had been found. A bouquet of dead flowers hung forlornly in the doorway where the killer probably stood while waiting for his victim. Rita lifted a folder of crime-scene photos from her shoulder bag and, after studying them, bent down to peer at the alleyway surface. There, cut in the cobbles, three grooves were visible. They told her that the attacker was focused and efficient, requiring just three accurate blows to remove the head and hands. He was also tall and physically strong - he had to be to restrain Rachel while raising a cumbersome nail gun to the back of her head and firing downwards almost vertically. And he was familiar with the location. It was the perfect place for an ambush, with poor lighting, narrow access and limited parking space at the bottom of the alley. Rachel had told the taxi driver of an arranged meeting at the club. It meant she’d been lured to her death in a public place, where the crime was carried out with speed and discipline, rather than in a psychotic frenzy.

Rita was becoming more convinced that only one scenario remained consistent with the facts. The murder was professional.

The nail gun was an oddity, yet that too could be explained. It was an unwieldy choice for a hitman, unless it had been opportunistic in the first killing and diversionary in the second. If so, it had certainly diverted the police. The same applied to dismembering the body. It provided detectives with an obvious crime signature, but to Rita’s profiling mind the signature was a fake. She refused to read into it the signs of pathological fantasy. All she could see were the hallmarks of calculation and misdirection.

She stood up, put the photos away and sighed. A moral dilemma confronted her with increasing clarity, together with a more practical problem: how to work the case. Simply compiling a profile of the killer was fraught with hazard. It would be safe enough to describe him as
tall, powerfully built, intelligent, calculating, socially competent, ruthless and highly disciplined.
But could she add:
a skilful and accomplished killer or hired assassin, with a gangland, military or elite police background
? Of course not. It would turn the investigation on its head, bringing the wrath of Inspector Bryce, Captain Maddox and others in authority down upon her.

The only honest way forward was blocked. It was unacceptable and unresolvable at the same time.

Rita didn’t know what to do.

Damn it, she thought, and wandered towards the club. The place might be worth checking out, or it might not. If nothing else, she could do with a drink. As she walked under the neon sign at the entrance, the door slid open for her, a bouncer holding it ajar and greeting her with a suggestive smile.

‘New ladies always welcome,’ he said.

‘Thanks,’ she said dubiously.

As the door closed behind her, Rita found herself entering the sort of twilight haunt she was used to dealing with as a sex crimes detective: a furtive pick-up joint open for business around the clock. These places were all the same. Whatever nocturnal appeal they possessed, during the day everything looked stale and tacky.

A few male drinkers were propped on stools at the counter, a barmaid chatting idly to one of them, the others transfixed by a rugby match on TV. In the middle of the bar two youths were playing pool - teenagers with shaved heads and tattooed arms -

the clack of the balls sounding against the whirr and jangle of poker machines in an adjoining room. In a side booth a pair of women with hard faces and low-cut tops bent towards each other, talking behind their hands as they looked Rita up and down. Two booths along a young man drank alone. At a corner table sat an old woman cradling a bottle of stout and coughing between puffs on a cigarette, her wrinkled face expressionless, her eyes gazing into the middle distance.