Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (30 page)

Like Palmer, Bill Dennis was a tall, athletic-looking man, somewhere in his thirties. He was also very well dressed for a detective. The stitching and material of his suit spoke of the care and attention of an expert tailor: no sign of uneven weave or missing threads. There was no way this guy was wearing some glue-seamed piece of shit. As Detective Dennis hunched forward over the table to read from the file, the suit seemed to flow around him rather than bunching and wrinkling. When he moved back, it returned to its smooth and pristine state. It’d been a while since Julianne had bothered with such things, but she’d have wagered that between them, Detectives Dennis and Palmer were strutting about in eight or nine grand’s worth of tailoring. Were it not for the imposing mirror filling that far wall, the impression created would have been of two senior executives at the boardroom table of a wealthy mining company. Downing had been right. Everything about Bagot Road Police Station suggested an almost limitless source of funds.

‘Thank you for those details, Detective,’ said Shah. ‘It helps to have some information.’

‘Sure,’ Dennis replied, favouring both Downing and Shah with a sympathetic smile. ‘It does. And, you know, if there was anything, even the smallest thing, that came to mind about why anybody would want to hurt Mr Ross and you, Mr Shah, that’d be very useful information for us to have.’

The Australian sounded so reasonable, so friendly and eager to help out, that it was a moment before Jules realised that he and Palmer were running a good cop/bad cop routine. She almost blinked in disbelief. One, that they would even try. And two, that she hadn’t spotted it as soon as the amiable Detective Dennis had wandered in sporting such a disarming expression on his handsome face.

Downing returned the smile as though he were a kindly and benevolent uncle.

‘I am sure my client will give the matter due consideration,’ he said. ‘Of course, it defies belief that two men with a common history – friends, indeed – should be targeted in such a fashion in what for them, remember, remains a foreign city, even if they have chosen to make it their new home. I assure you, Detectives, that if Mr Shah is able to make such a connection, you will find out about it. But as you would appreciate, he works in an industry which, while crucial to maintaining the security and even the good governance of the city and the Territory, is nonetheless plagued by any number of unscrupulous operators, many of whom would not hesitate to step well beyond the boundaries of decency and law to achieve an advantage for themselves.’

Jules wrote down on the notepad:
Shah targeted by rivals??
She circled the question three times. She didn’t believe for a second that that was the case, but the Nepali himself had folded his massive arms and nodded once, grunting in approval. When she’d sought him out after arriving in Darwin, Shah’s assumption about the bombing was that rival security operators, most likely one of the big mercenary companies like Sandline, had lost patience with his refusal to accept their buyout offers. But she knew he didn’t think that now. He agreed with her, that the most likely attacker was Henry Cesky. The construction magnate had means, motive and form.

‘Have you received any threats?’ Palmer asked. ‘From business rivals, I mean.’ He seemed highly sceptical.

‘These are not people who are foolish enough to make threats,’ replied Shah, before his legal mouthpiece could answer. ‘They decide. They act.’

Neither of the detectives was comfortable with the idea of a turf war breaking out between rival military companies in their city. For one thing, the police would be completely overmatched in any such scenario. Shah Security was relatively small, but some of the bigger operators, who provided border control and interdiction services, ran to some serious heavy metal in their inventories. Helicopter gunships, light armoured vehicles, even jet fighters operating out of private airfields in Papua New Guinea and on a couple of islands throughout the Indonesian archipelago, where they usually protected giant mining operations. The mercs weren’t allowed to deploy anything like that here. And even if they were, they themselves would’ve been completely outclassed by the huge military presence in and around Darwin.

Nevertheless, the large PMCs still had thousands of personnel stationed throughout the city and the Northern Territory, almost all of them ex-military with combat experience. Their declared role in Australia was to provide ‘aid to the civil power’, a conveniently ambiguous mission statement. These duties encompassed everything from running the giant government farms down on the Ord River – prison farms, really, for hundreds of thousands of refugees from countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines, but not, curiously enough, the US – to anti-piracy patrols and even search-and-destroy missions throughout the remnants of the Indonesian state. The long chain of thousands of Indonesian islands, fanning out north and north-west of Australia, had fallen into anarchy and an impossible confusion of internecine revolt.

Shah’s lawyer lazily tapped at a sheaf of notepaper with an expensive-looking fountain pen. Jules was almost certain it was a Mont Blanc. ‘So perhaps,’ he said, ‘you officers might consider focusing your initial investigative efforts on some of the PMCs that have made it quite clear to my client that they seek a hostile takeover of his operation, should he not be disposed to entertaining thoughts of a more amenable arrangement.’

‘Amenable to Sandline and Blackwater,’ added Shah.

It was difficult to tell whether Palmer was uncomfortable, disgusted or utterly pissed off. Jules put her money on all three.

‘You stated before that you had no idea who might be involved in this,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘And I don’t see how the attack at the marina fits into this bullshit idea that one of the merc operators is responsible. What the fuck would they get out of blowing up an old drunk on a boat?’

She bristled at the insult to her friend but managed to control her reaction with a breathing exercise. Shah was not the only one who could swallow his rage.

‘Nothing,’ the former Gurkha replied with a shrug. ‘This is why I do not speculate for you, Detective. Until the attack on Mr Ross, I had my reasons for believing that my rivals may have made the attempt on my family. I even believed the bombing at my house was bungled as a warning – that shoddy operators were used, and possibly even sacrificed, simply to send a message. You cannot deny there is much manoeuvring and ill-feeling in my industry at the moment. There has been blood, and there will be more. So it is natural for me to suspect a rival, in my own case. For Mr Ross, however, I have no explanation. That is why I do not answer your question, Detective Palmer. I truly have no idea.’

It seemed that everyone in this room was acting out a role of some sort. Jules knew Shah was lying, but not why. While Cesky may have been able to hire men to do his bidding all the way down here, she didn’t imagine he had any real influence in this city. His power base was in Seattle. There may have been a huge American presence in Darwin, because of the local expatriate population and the recent porting of the Combined Fleet, but American power was not what it used to be. She’d only been here a day, but already she could tell that Darwin was one of those cities fêted by history to be a place in which rising empires and falling giants contended for dominance. Cesky might operate here, from a distance, but he was not important to the city or the powers that had gathered here. There would be a good reason, Jules was sure, that Shah and his lawyer hadn’t thrown his name on the table during this interview.

‘Well, I think that probably concludes our business, Detectives,’ Downing announced, calmly returning the lid to his expensive pen. ‘And really, I can’t reiterate it enough, my client has an obvious personal interest in seeing this matter resolved. But this is not the way to go about it. This is merely wasting everybody’s time. We are more than happy to make ourselves available for interview whenever necessary, for good reason. But next time, perhaps, a phone call might suffice. Now, if that’s all?’

Detective Dennis began shaking hands and saying farewells before Palmer could further poison the atmosphere.

‘Mr Downing . . . Mr Shah . . . and Ms . . .?’

‘Julianne,’ she answered with what she hoped was a pleasant, distracting smile. ‘Jules, if you like.’

‘Jules then,’ said Dennis before turning back to the other two. ‘I’m sorry if this is all a bit difficult, gentlemen. But it’s important we chase down every possibility. I’m sure you understand.’

‘Of course,’ gushed Downing. ‘But do feel free to simply call next time.’

Palmer grunted something and excused himself from the room as Mr Shah and his legal team prepared to leave.

‘You’re English,’ said Dennis while Jules was gathering up her notes. ‘Been in town very long?’

‘No.’ She shook her head.

‘Julianne is our newest associate,’ Downing interjected, in something of a rush. ‘She’s very new in town.’

‘Oh, okay then. Maybe I’ll see you around again, Jules?’

Was he trying to pick her up? Jules retreated into character.

‘Well, I’m just filling in on this case. Short-handed at the office, you know.’ She threw her supposed boss a look that cried,
Help me!

‘Short-handed indeed,’ agreed Downing. ‘But I’m afraid it’s back to conveyancing and land titles for you, young lady, when you’ve typed up these notes. This job can’t all be about bloody murder and intrigue now, can it, eh?’

‘We live in hope,’ said Jules.

She set her alarm to wake her after two sleep cycles. Three hours. It wasn’t ideal, going into the first day of an infiltration already fatigued, after a two-day crunch of briefings, presentations, liaising and general immersion in all things Blackstone.

‘Life is pain, princess. Suck it up,’ she groaned after forcing herself out of bed as the clock radio came on.

The room’s previous occupant had tuned the radio to the Armed Forces Heartland Network, on which a newsreader was now ticking off the overnight items. The US Navy was continuing to scale back its anti-piracy patrols along the East Coast. A severe blizzard that had shut down the West Coast was heading inland and expected to be over KC by nightfall – a point that left Caitlin feeling satisfied with her decision to fly out that morning. Local police were still appealing for witnesses to a hit-and-run accident near the River Market. And tickets for three Avril Lavigne concerts at Kemper Arena in February next year had sold out yesterday within an hour of being available online.

Caitlin changed into her clothes for the day: jeans, a red Kansas City Chiefs sweatshirt she’d bought from the gift shop in the hotel lobby, and a leather jacket. There would be time enough to get into uniform as Colonel Katherine Murdoch once she arrived in Fort Hood. She inhaled an oatmeal cookie and an apple for breakfast, brushed her teeth and tossed the toiletries bag into her suitcase. She was done with Kansas City. All of the files and briefing notes she had reviewed were sitting in the room’s safe. She always packed her bags the night before departure, meaning she had nothing to do now besides organising a ride to the airport and confirming the handover of the room to the security detachment. She was just reaching for the phone when it rang.

‘Colonel Murdoch? This is Special Agent Dan Colvin. We met briefly yesterday afternoon, you might recall. There’s something I need to discuss with you, if it’s not too inconvenient.’

Caitlin was still groggy and not ready to face anything more challenging than a cup of shitty hotel coffee. The voice on the other end of the line sounded oddly upbeat and cheerful. It was a little too early in the morning to be dealing with . . . well, with morning people.

She remembered this Colvin guy, though. He was with the FBI’s field office here in KC, handling inter-agency liaison. He’d been one of her first contact points when she arrived as the emissary of Chief of Staff Culver. He had taken her to a couple of agencies and briefings. Built like a runner, with a face chiselled out of hard, unforgiving brown basalt, Special Agent Colvin was the type of man who left an impression.

‘Hang on, would you, Agent?’

Caitlin tossed the phone on the bed without giving him a chance to reply. She went through to the bathroom, splashed water on her face and towelled off, which woke her up some. She took three seconds to force herself into the role of Colonel Katherine Murdoch. It was the mental equivalent of pulling on somebody else’s skin.

‘Sorry,’ she said upon returning to the line, ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night. Is there something I can help you with?’

‘I doubt it, ma’am, but there may be something I can help you with. I have a file note, a request from Mr Culver in fact, to contact you in case of developments in a couple of our investigations. It concerns one of our Mandate settlers, a Mr Miguel Pieraro.’

‘Er, yeah . . . I know of him,’ she replied. ‘I was just reviewing his file last night. What’s up?’

‘I’m afraid Mr Pieraro has been killed. A hit-and-run incident three days ago.’

That woke her up, stunning her into consciousness more effectively than the ice cold water she’d splashed on her face. Caitlin noticed that Colvin didn’t say ‘accident’. She looked at her bags, packed and standing by the door, ready to go. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Agent Colvin,’ she told him, sincere even through the fogginess still clouding her head. She had really felt for the man who had lost everything, save for one daughter. She felt these things more deeply now, having her own child, no matter how hard she tried to shut down her feelings when she was out in the field. ‘That guy deserved a break. But I’m a little pressed for time here, unfortunately. Is there some reason you contacted me, beyond professional courtesy?’

It was a rather discourteous thing to ask, but there had be some reason Colvin had called. And she really was pressed for time.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘The traffic cops called in their colleagues from Homicide pretty quickly on this one. And Homicide called us when they saw that Pieraro’s name was flagged with a link to the federal databases. I figured Mr Culver would want you to know.’

Caitlin could hear the curiosity in back of Colvin’s words. Why would the White House Chief of Staff want a military advisor from his office to know about this sort of stuff? She was glad he didn’t press the matter.

She sat down on the bed, accepting the delay. ‘Homicide?’

‘Yeah,’ said the FBI man. ‘All of the evidence adds up to Pieraro and the woman he was with, a Maive Aronson, being deliberately run down.’

‘I see . . .’ Her mind was racing ahead now. Was this important enough to delay her departure? ‘Agent Colvin, I’m very grateful that you called me, and I apologise if I seemed a little brusque. I was just heading out the door for the airport.’

‘Ah, that’s cool,’ he replied. He seemed to have decided to dispense with inter-agency formalities after all. ‘Look, if you’d like, I could swing by and pick you up. Our office is just a couple of minutes away from the old Harrah’s, and you’d be welcome to go through the evidence they’ve put together so far. If you think you need to brief Mr Culver on it.’

Again, he spoke with a slightly rising inflection as his professional curiousity kicked in.

Caitlin frowned, unsure of which way to jump. Culver had made it clear that he was interested in anything to do with Blackstone’s complicity in the attacks on those homesteaders down in the Mandate. But he’d also stated that anything besides tying Blackstone to Ahmet Ozal was of secondary importance.

‘I suppose it couldn’t hurt,’ she said, opting to cover both bases. ‘Mister Culver is
very
interested in the security situation down in the Mandate. As you’d know. I can’t say if this plays into that in any way, but if he wanted you to reach out to me, I guess I need to take a look at what you have. I’ll be down in the foyer in a minute or two.’

‘Oh, that’s fine. I’m on my way out the door now. See you in five.’

He broke the connection. Caitlin forced herself to make one last check of the room before putting a call into the security detail to let them know she was leaving. Two uniformed Protective Service officers appeared at her door less than a minute later. Their ready-room was just down the hallway. She handed over her pass and confirmed the presence of the files in the safe before she left.

The same two air force men – officers, as it turned out – she’d seen in the gym the previous night were waiting at the elevator when she arrived.

‘Think we’ll get to fly this month?’ one asked the other.

His friend shook his head. ‘Nope. Shot our wad over New York. I reckon that was the last flight of the Buffs for a while.’

Caitlin took the information in without comment as they all stepped into the lift. Probably pilots from Whiteman on a pass. She turned up the frost on her stone face to its most glacial. The ride down to the lobby was excruciating.

‘Dyke,’ one of them muttered as she strode out through the sliding doors.

Almost certainly the guy who had tried to catch her attention over by the treadmills. An egomaniacal man-child. It was a pity she had no compelling reason to engage them in character as Colonel Murdoch. Could’ve been useful practice, tearing this asshole a new one.

She turned into the marble lobby. At least it looked like marble; it could just as likely have been some sort of veneer, she wasn’t sure. The whole place had been completely refitted during reclamation. As she wheeled her luggage over to the counter, Caitlin passed a dark spot scoured onto the otherwise smooth, creamy surface. She wondered if she’d just passed over the final resting places of one of the Disappeared. Screens above the desk ran news feeds, the local weather radar and flight information for Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport. She considered buying a trinket from the gift shop to take home to Monique, before thinking better of it.

Best to cut that shit off now, sister.

She dropped her keycard off at the desk and made her way over to the entrance to wait for Dan Colvin. She wasn’t sure what, if any, meaning she should look for in the killing of the homesteader. There was no obvious connection to her primary interest, namely Baumer, Ozal, and the undeclared salvage contract the latter’s company, Hazm Unternehmen, had obtained down in Texas. And it wasn’t as though settlers didn’t have it tough on the frontier anyway. There were more than enough real pirates and banditos out there.

Just as she was shaking her head at the muddy, opaque nature of it all, she recognised Special Agent Colvin coming towards her through the revolving doors. A black, GSA 2002 Chevy Suburban sat idling outside for them.

‘Colonel Murdoch,’ he said, offering her a smile. Dressed in jeans and an anonymous sports coat, he looked like any other government contractor. Apparently there was not much call for the suit-and-tie look of the Hoover era these days.

‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said.

‘De nada.’ He took her suitcase without preamble and wheeled it out towards the car. ‘Where are you flying off to?’

‘Just the next stop on my never-ending End of the World Tour,’ Caitlin replied.

If Special Agent Colvin was sufficiently alert to have noticed she hadn’t answered him, he was also good-mannered enough to make nothing of it. He took care when hoisting her luggage into the back of the Suburban. Although there was nothing breakable in there, Caitlin appreciated the thought nonetheless. She couldn’t help noticing a number of foreign-language books piled up in a plastic bin in the trunk, among them
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to French
and a similar Spanish title. A third book looked like a text from the now defunct Defense Language Institute.

She indicated the collection with a tilt of her head. ‘How many languages do you speak?’

He didn’t seem the type to puff up his chest and brag about himself. ‘Oh, three if you count Arabic. How about you?’

‘None,’ she lied. ‘I have a hard enough time with English.’

She picked up a manila folder from the passenger seat, Miguel Pieraro’s name handwritten on its cover in thick black ink. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked as they strapped themselves in.

‘Sure, knock yourself out, ma’am.’

He put the Suburban into gear, before navigating his way around the potholes, following a route that took them east towards the Chouteau Trafficway. There was no light to wait for at any of the intersections. He simply stopped long enough to avoid a pair of Hummers leaving the militia substation at the Chouteau Bridge, before proceeding north to the ramp for Highway 210.

Traffic was pretty thin on 210, with a few people on horseback as they turned westbound. On her right the Cerner Campus was a hub of activity, with soldiers running their morning PT and vehicles moving out into the city. Towering over the campus, a short way from the road, was the rechristened North Kansas City Federal Medical Center. An army Black Hawk emblazoned with the Red Cross lifted off from a helipad beyond her line of sight, to travel to points unknown.

As they moved closer to North Kansas City proper, the already-light vehicular traffic began to thin out further. KC didn’t really have a peak hour anymore. Most people seemed to get about by bus, the service for which was regular enough that there were always one or two commuter shuttles in view. The remainder of the traffic consisted of government and military vehicles, and a hefty spread of civilian ones featuring the logo of Cesky Enterprises, the biggest reconstruction contractor in town.

‘Now, what you’ve got there,’ said Colvin, nodding towards the folder in her hands, ‘is basically everything the accident investigators and Homicide guys have so far.’

‘This Aronson woman,’ she asked, turning over a page, ‘what shape is she in?’

‘She’s seen better days, poor woman. She’s in a coma up at the hospital. Doctors can’t say yet whether she’ll come out of it. So she’s not going to be much help.’

Caitlin grunted, already distracted by the details in the file. The accident investigation squad had concluded very quickly that the hit-and-run was no accident. The assailant’s vehicle, a blue Toyota pick-up, had accelerated quickly from a standing start, driven in an almost perfectly straight line, until a few metres out from where it had struck the victims; at that point, it had swerved to line them up with the centre of its bull bars. Pieraro had been struck first, and his body flew into Aronson, protecting her from the worst of the impact. The Toyota had stopped in a controlled fashion a little further down the road, the report went on. There, it picked up a passenger – a large male, judging by the boot prints he’d left preserved in the snow. The investigators had been able to track the vehicle for a short distance because of the same snowfall that had provided them with such a rich haul of evidence at the site of the incident.

Caitlin looked up to collect her thoughts as they passed by an old burnt-out McDonald’s on the right-hand side of the road. The familiar feel of suburban sprawl, with a slight edge of the End Times. She couldn’t help thinking, given his effectiveness when steering his charges to safety amid the road-agent gangs of Texas, that Miguel Pieraro would somehow have sensed a vehicle approaching in this environment.

‘I seem to recall hearing that Thursday was blown out by a blizzard,’ she said eventually.

‘It was, later on,’ explained Colvin. ‘But we got lucky with the weather. There was a light fall on Thursday morning. And then an hour-and-a-half hiatus during which the temperature really fell away, but before the big dump came on. One of the first people onto the scene was a city road worker. He’d cleaned up after a few accidents in the past and knew to preserve the scene at this one. Accident investigators got there inside of ten minutes when he called it in. Sometimes the stars align.’