Tropic of Death (9 page)

The pub was busy but not crowded, with a scattering of tourists, kids thumping away at slot machines, and a handful of regulars, by the look of them, leaning on the mahogany counter and putting the world to rights. At a corner table American sailors were drinking bottled beer. It had a relaxed feel and nobody bothered her.

Rita had done as Steinberg suggested, checking his website and finding a photo of a balding middle-aged man who looked like the archetypal scientist - dome-headed with a studious face and dark eyes behind black-rimmed glasses, and a hint of scepticism in his smile. At precisely three o’clock he walked in and looked directly at her. A tall man with shoulders slightly stooped, he was easily recognisable from the website image but, on this occasion, he wore no trace of a smile. In his checked shirt and cream trousers there was almost an air of formality about him, given the surroundings.

After a cautious glance around he approached.

‘Dr Steinberg,’ said Rita.

He sat down, his hostility undisguised. He gave her a look as heavy as a lead cudgel.

‘I don’t appreciate coercion,’ he said in a low voice. ‘The only reason I’m here at all is because you’re Byron’s friend.’

‘Well, thanks for coming.’

‘You gave me little choice. Hardly the way to treat the friend of a friend.’

‘In that case I apologise. I didn’t mean to be officious.’

He dismissed that with a grunt. ‘How is he anyway?’

‘Popular,’ she answered. ‘A bit too popular, sometimes.’

‘Still tweaking the faculty’s nose? Still preaching hi-tech revolution?’

‘His big theme is machine intelligence, if that’s what you mean,’ she replied. ‘But his nose-tweaking will be at Cambridge next semester. He’s landed a post as visiting professor.’

‘Hmm.’ Steinberg nodded sadly, as if revisiting a source of regret. ‘He’s always been smart, young Huxley. One of my brightest students, then he overtook me. He was destined for success.’

Rita studied his expression. ‘And what about you? You don’t seem too happy with where destiny’s brought you.’

‘
Here?
Of course not. But you already know that.’

‘Yet many of your fellow academics would be envious - of a defence research salary, if nothing else.’

‘The money’s generous because it purchases your soul. The discoveries here have nothing to do with enlightening humanity.

Quite the opposite. Working here negates the reason I became a scientist.’

‘Why don’t you leave?’

‘Timing, my dear. Timing. And endurance.’

‘At least you’ve got a pleasant location to endure.’

‘Ha!’ There was no humour in his strangled laugh. ‘You may think you’ve arrived on an idyllic stretch of the Queensland coast, but you haven’t. You’ve entered no-man’s land.’

‘You’re talking about a tropical beach resort.’

‘No. I’m talking about a tropic of death.’

‘I assume you’re speaking metaphorically.’

‘Not at all. Look …’ Steinberg hesitated, then went on. ‘I don’t want any friend of Byron to find themselves in harm’s way.

But if you stay here and conduct your investigation with anything like integrity, that’s exactly what will happen. You’ll be treated as a hostile.’

‘By whom?’

‘The real authorities here.’

‘Dr Steinberg,’ Rita said. ‘I’m having trouble making sense of what you’re trying to tell me.’

‘Think East Berlin in the seventies. Think Stasi.’

‘I find that hard to imagine.’

‘Not for me. Members of my family had to suffer it, and the parallel here is unnerving.’

‘When you say
here
, you mean the base?’

‘A closed institution with a reach far beyond the perimeter fence,’ he answered. ‘
Here
is wherever it wants to be. Unlike the Stasi, our guardians have access to the full range of twenty-first-century technology.’

‘The comparison, I’ve got to say, seems a bit Orwellian.’

‘The comparison is valid and if you stay long enough you’ll see why. There’s a line I keep thinking of: “death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush.”’

‘What’s that from?’ she asked.

‘Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
.’

Rita couldn’t decide if the physicist was giving her a genuine warning, or if being embedded in a military research establishment had made him more than a little paranoid. Either way, she needed evidence.

‘What do you know about the murders?’ she asked.

‘I have no direct knowledge. Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘But you know something.’

‘There’s no doubt the death of Rachel Macarthur served a purpose. Ergo, so did that of the first victim. The purpose was to silence them.’

‘You don’t believe they’re victims of a serial killer?’

‘No. That flies in the face of probability. And logic.’

‘Logic?’

‘Yes, Miss Nederlander.’ Steinberg clasped his hands together in something of a professorial pose. ‘Ever heard of Ockham’s razor?’

‘Isn’t that some medieval concept?’

‘It’s a scientific principle: the simplest explanation to fit the facts is most likely the correct one. A random lunatic on the loose is a superfluous entity and an all too convenient misdirection.’

‘Hmm.’ Rita still needed convincing. ‘Silence them about what?’

‘The environmental threat posed by the base.’ He glanced sideways before continuing. ‘I know for a fact the protest movement was right about radiation pollution. That’s what I mean by a tropic of death.’

‘Electromagnetic radiation?’

‘Precisely.’

‘Byron says you’ve compiled a report.’

‘Then Byron’s been talking out of school. Please don’t mention it to anyone.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘It’s on a disk.’

‘Is that yes or no?’

‘Let me think about it.’ Steinberg looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got to go.’

As he pushed back his chair Rita placed her hand on his.

‘Dr Steinberg. When will you think about it?’

‘You’re very persistent.’ He sighed. ‘I’m going straight home from the dentist. That’s when I’ll consider producing an edited version for you. I’ll call your mobile. Five o’clock on the dot.

Satisfied?’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me. If we’re discovered it will put both our lives in jeopardy.’

Rita drove back to the police station and touched base with Jarrett.

He had nothing new to tell her and she wasn’t about to inform him of her visit to the Steamboat. She left him with a glum look on his face and made her way into the old watch-house, climbing the stairs to her makeshift office. There was little to do other than wait and think, the computer screen in front of her, the archaeology of crime propped around her.

She did a series of online searches, calling up background pieces on the protest movement, the research base, the war on terror, but her mind was distracted by doubts about Steinberg and his conspiracy theory. He was convinced of its truth. That was obvious.

Just as obvious was his bitterness and resentment. Had it warped his judgement? It was very easy for a deeply disgruntled man to blame a hostile force for his plight, much as Jarrett felt that fellow citizens were turning against him. Somehow there seemed to be an overlap, though that wasn’t enough to turn the investigation on its head. She needed more to go on than Jarrett’s anxiety and Ockham’s razor. She needed something tangible. Perhaps Steinberg’s secret report could provide it.

Five o’clock came and went with no call on her mobile.

Steinberg had been definite about when he’d phone her but by ten past five he still hadn’t rung. She gave him another five minutes.

Still nothing, so she called his mobile. It was switched off. That didn’t surprise her. His failure to contact her had an ominous feel. Something must have gone wrong. There was no point in hanging around.

Trying his number again, with the same result, she walked briskly to the police car park where she’d left the Falcon. The weather was changing. A wild wind had blown in a low ceiling of cloud. She got in the car and pulled a local street directory from the glove box. According to the address Byron had supplied, Steinberg lived south of the town at a place called Leith Ferry, which was little more than a dot on the map. She decided to pay him a visit, whether he liked it or not.

14
Rain was sweeping in off the sea as Rita drove south from the estuary along a road skirting defence department property. She passed the research base, a barracks and an artillery range behind tall wire fences studded with warning notices: commonwealth of australia - authorised personnel only
.
On the other side of the road cane fields stretched into the distance, their dense mass of stems threshing around in the wind. After a few kilometres the fields receded inland, giving way to soggy ground and the upper reaches of tidal inlets, while to her left was the fringe of the vast military reserve.

There was no sign of activity, war exercises or otherwise, as she followed the road through an empty landscape. The place had an end-of-the-world feel to it, nothing but muddy creeks and mangrove swamps. Remote sugar sheds lay low on the land.

Solitary trees stood bent and stunted, deformed by the coastal winds. The isolation obviously suited the government. The flatness and inaccessibility made security easy.

Beyond the mangroves was open scrubland and the first sign of habitation, a weatherboard shack set back from the road, but as Rita drove by she noticed the windows were boarded up. She passed overgrown field gates, a disused barn and broken fences bordering what might once have been sheep pasture, and as the road curved around a stand of ironbarks it led to a wooden bridge over a swollen river tributary. As the car’s wheels thumped over the planks, lamp posts and powerlines came into view, then rows of houses, several dozen of them. This was Leith Ferry.

The main street was deserted. Rain fell against an almost eerie quiet as Rita drove past silent houses behind uniform picket fences. The style of the homes, decorated with geometric motifs and leadlight windows, dated them to the 1920s or 30s, yet they were in immaculate condition. There was something anomalous about the scene, an almost regimented neatness, with no shops to be seen, no services of any kind, just accommodation. Even a small stone church had been converted into apartments. A board beside it that once would have held parish notices was printed with a list of directions to military installations. That explained it. What had been a rural community decades ago was now in the hands of the government, leased and maintained as living quarters for staff employed at defence facilities. Leith Ferry, which no longer possessed a farming population, a church or a ferry, was now effectively a civilian barracks.

Rita found the turn-off she needed at the top end of the main street. It led her down a dead-end lane with no other houses around. When she got to Steinberg’s home she pulled over, her senses alert, a hollow feeling in her stomach.

She sat in her car with the engine off and spots of rain whipping against the windscreen. She was parked in a dreary landscape beside a remote weatherboard cottage. The white wooden structure looked forlorn as dusk closed in. It was a lonely, windswept spot - a dispiriting view of fields returning to wilderness, with just a few spindly trees around, while in the distance rose the inhospitable slopes of the ranges. Far away, along a high ridge, the giant white spheres of the US satellite tracking station loomed under the grey cloud cover. Some hint of what Steinberg had said, his suggestion of a presence alien to Australia, was starting to ring true. She didn’t like the mood of the place.

The gate was open and a car was parked in the driveway, but something wasn’t right. Then she noticed not a single light was visible inside the house. Almost instinctively she reached for her bag and took out a pocket torch.

She got out and walked through the rain to the front porch.

She pressed the doorbell but couldn’t hear a sound. The circuit seemed to be dead. She knocked loudly several times. Still no response. Her sense of unease was growing. She leant her weight against the door. Locked solidly. She tried peering through the front windows but they were curtained. She could see nothing. Then she went around the back. The kitchen door was also locked, but a rear window was slightly open. She caught a smell of electrical burning. Now she was certain something was wrong.

Rita slid her hand inside, opened the window wide and hoisted herself over the sill. She found herself standing in a bathroom with patterned tiles. She listened. A heavy stillness filled the house.

Then she walked quietly from the bathroom along a carpeted passageway towards the front of the house. It led into a hall with a sideboard, a mirror, an old-fashioned umbrella stand and open doorways right and left. The tang of electrical burning in the air grew stronger, along with a much nastier smell. It came from the door on the right. Rita stepped quietly through it.

Steinberg was lying on the floor, his body contorted in a motionless convulsion. Rita breathed out slowly and reached for the light switch. She flicked it. Nothing happened. Lights fused.

That explained the smells - both of them. Burnt circuits and burnt flesh. She got out her torch and shone it on the body. It was beside the open door to an inner room - a computer den.

She moved closer and squatted down. The features were those of the man she’d spoken with just a few hours ago but now they bore the warped rictus of a face in shock. The skin on his hand was scorched and blistered. She raised the torch beam till it rested on a security keypad. Its metal buttons were buckled and blackened. So that’s how it had happened. Just as he’d punched in his personal access code the door of his computer den clicked open and a lethal surge of electricity shot through his body.

It looked like a freak accident. None of the wiring was exposed. There were no marks she could see in the torchlight to indicate the keypad had been rigged to electrocute him. But as her hand rested on the polished floor she felt something on her fingertips, a light powdering of fresh sawdust. That made it professional. And it changed the whole complexion of the case she’d been seconded to investigate. Rita had wanted evidence to justify Steinberg’s paranoia about the research base and its military authorities. Now she had more than she needed but at the cost of his life. She hung her head as a pang of remorse shook her.