Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (31 page)

‘Not for Pieraro.’

‘No,’ said Colvin quietly. ‘I suppose not.’

‘Any sign of the vehicle?’

‘Yeah, you’ll find something about three-quarters of the way through.’ He waved a hand, indicating the file again. ‘Doused with gasoline and burnt down to its axles, about thirty miles outside of town.’

‘Oh, that’s not suspicious.’

‘Nope. Happens all the time.’

She fell silent again, hurrying to absorb all the information before they reached her destination. She was hoping for something about the identity of the driver and the man – they were all assuming it was a man – who had got into the vehicle further down the road. The Chevrolet passed under I-35 as Highway 210 transformed itself into a four-lane thoroughfare. Not too far down the highway, she could make out a nine-storey, red-brick building. It dominated the local landscape. The perfect place for a sniper, if you had good intel ahead of time . . .
A spotter maybe?

‘How’s cell phone coverage in KC, Colvin?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Like, for normal folk.’

He shook his close-cropped, rather boxy head as the tall brick building swept by. ‘If you don’t have access to the federal network, you’re pretty much fucked. Capacity is very limited. But having said that, demand is low. Most people do hard, physical work, from sun-up to sundown, usually on the government dollar. Sitting on their butt all day, surfing around on the net, or calling a friend to meet up for coffee at Starbucks, just isn’t that common anymore. Why d’you ask?’

Caitlin held up a couple of crime-scene photographs. ‘Somebody’s probably thought of this already,’ she offered up-front, ‘but the second man looks like a spotter to me. You know – like a second pair of eyes for a sniper. Or a forward air controller.’

‘I do,’ said Colvin, glancing over. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘The angles. If I had time, I’d drive over there and take a look for myself, but from these photographs it seems to me like the guy on the street had a good angle to watch Pieraro and Aronson as they approached. The driver of the vehicle didn’t. But the tyre marks, the almost perfect timing, even the way he veered just a little bit at the end to line them up with his hood ornament – it all looks like somebody was
guiding
him in. Like a FAC will talk close air support in on top of a target. You pull the cell phone records for that area at that time, and you’ll probably get the call. Especially if you check for sat phones. Might’ve been made on a burner, of course. Did they find any melted cell phone components inside the burnt-out wreck?’

The FBI man shook his head uncertainly. ‘I’m not sure. I have to confess, I’m not fully up to speed on this one. I just picked this up because it was flagged as being of interest to Jed Culver’s office. But if there’s no note there about cell phones, I’m sure I could get the local guys to look into it. Or I could probably pull the logs myself, if you want. Is there some way I can contact you when you leave KC?’

She could see Colvin was intrigued. She had to admire the guy. He was an investigator; it must’ve been driving him bat-shit. Particularly why she’d been interested in the homesteader
before
he was killed. You had your mysteries, wrapped in your enigmas, dropped into a bottomless black hole, and he wasn’t allowed to even strike a match and chuck it in there. She could imagine the bumper crop of rumours that would spring up after she’d left. Probably all swirling around the possibility of an armed Federal intervention down in the Mandate.

‘Thank you, Agent Colvin,’ she said as graciously as she could manage on three hours’ sleep. ‘I’m in transit for the next few days but I’ll have Mr Culver’s office get in contact with you. They can handle anything you turn up about those phone logs. I really do appreciate your help on this.’

‘I’m a people person.’ He gave a shrug, accompanying the movement with a goofy grin. ‘I live to help out.’

She closed the file and reached around to drop it on the back seat. There wasn’t much else in there for her. But what she’d seen was worthy of note. Caitlin turned to gaze out the window once more, looking for some perspective.

Northtown was a faithful copy of Norman Rockwell’s small-town America. The road had compressed down to two lanes here, with angled parking spots on both sides, most of which were empty of any vehicles. Wrought-iron benches that no one had time to sit in anymore poked through the snow every block or so. One shopfront featured a marquee advertising the latest Bond film, with the new guy.

Clusters of early morning commuters trudged down the sidewalks towards a bus station in front of an old drugstore, with their hard-hats and safety vests in hand. Probably on their way to scoop up the Disappeared. Bundled up against the cold as they were, Caitlin noticed that most of them were white, with a sprinkling of African-Americans and Hispanics thrown in. No sign of the many Indians she knew to be resident here. KC was dividing itself into camps, or ghettos.

After they’d turned onto Burlington, Colvin accelerated southbound. ‘Got more twists and turns than a pretzel factory out here,’ he said. ‘At least you don’t have to go out to the international airport. In this weather, we’d be looking at an hour-long drive.’

Caitlin nodded, still lost in her thoughts. A pair of F-16s with wing tanks howled into the air on the other side of the railway tracks, en route to patrol the southern approaches to Kansas City.

She was certain that Pieraro’s death had no connection to Ozal and through him to Baumer, so in that sense she had no dog in this fight. But she’d agreed to take on the job in Texas because there was at least a prima facie case linking Ozal – however indirectly – to Blackstone. And for Caitlin, that was motivation enough to maintain a watching brief on the matter of Miguel Pieraro. It was a loose thread, worth pulling.

After the long series of twisting streets and hairpin bends through a part of Northtown that Colvin called Harlem, they arrived at Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport. Such as it was. The main terminal building dated back to the 1930s and resembled a cross between a Quonset hut and a postmodern eco-home. A trio of C-130s sat on the flight line near the brown-brick building of the former TWA headquarters. Someone had told her on the ride into Harrah’s that Howard Hughes’s ghost haunted the place. As far as Caitlin was concerned, this whole country was haunted. The sooner she got on the plane and got this done, the better.

The flight was a regular military shuttle, but there were no other passengers. Still, she didn’t like to keep people waiting. When Colvin pulled into the drop-off zone, the Echelon agent turned down his offer to wait with her, but did so in as polite and friendly a manner as possible.

‘I’ll chase those phone logs up for you,’ he said over his shoulder, while extracting her suitcase from its place beside his container full of books.

‘If you could, that would be great,’ she replied. ‘Mr Pieraro had a daughter. She will want to see somebody punished for this.’

Colonel Katherine Murdoch waved goodbye, and walked into the departure lounge.

Julianne changed motel rooms after the interview at the police station, a precaution, and an easy one. She was travelling light. She arrived outside Shah’s house in The Palms as the sun was dropping low over a wide bay, in which a few dozen sailboats and larger yachts lay at anchor. The burnt orange light of sunset had already coloured the green waters to a sparkling copper sheet.

Looking up from the street at the modern pole-and-beam home, Jules couldn’t help thinking that a spectacular view awaited her on the open-plan area that defined the upper storey, where a few people were already enjoying drinks and chatting in small groups. She’d been expecting a quiet family dinner, with perhaps Birendra or even Downing in attendance. But it seemed that a cocktail party was underway.

She guessed that the interior of the house opened up onto a vast, shaded platform enjoying clear views across an undeveloped strip of coastal scrub. From down here at street level, however, she couldn’t tell where the inside became the outside. But there was no mistaking the scar left behind on the footpath by the attempted bombing. A patch of grass, roughly six or seven feet across, had been charred down to burnt red earth on the verge in front of the post box. Or what had been the post box. The blast had torn huge chunks out of the sandstone plinth that served as a mailbox.

The killing heat of the afternoon no longer hammered down out of a hot, grey sky. But stepping out of her air-conditioned taxi onto the dark scab of scorched earth where Shah’s would-be assailants had fumbled their package and destroyed themselves, Jules still felt the crush of hot, moist tropical air. Her light silk shirt, the one she had borrowed from Ashmi, was sticking to her back by the time she’d walked up the driveway to the front door. Shrapnel from the explosion, stone chips and small pieces of metal, still pitted the dark wooden double doors. She was reaching for an antique iron knocker when the door opened and Shah greeted her, smiling effusively.

‘Come in, come in, Miss Julianne. The others are already here, having a drink upstairs. It is not a very large gathering, just some friends, people we can trust. And there’s somebody I want you to meet. He may be able to help.’

Unsettled for a moment – she hadn’t expected to have to socialise – Jules apologised for not bringing anything with her. ‘Oh Shah, if you’d said something, I would’ve picked up some wine.’

The host dismissed her concerns. ‘Pah! I shall not have you placing me further in your debt, Miss Julianne, when I already owe you so much,’ he said. ‘Come through, please. As I recall from our time on the golfer’s boat, you were always fond of bubble drink, and I have some very good French champagnes in my cellar downstairs. I always wanted a cellar, and now I have one. Let me send one of the girls down to fetch you something. Do I remember correctly, Pol Roger was your favourite? . . . Ah, here is my wife, Pasang. Please, say hello.’

She had been about to say that only French bubbles could be called champagne, and that yes, she shared a love of Pol Roger with Winston Churchill. But before she could throw the switch to small talk, a diminutive Nepalese woman, exquisitely dressed in European clothes – French, too, if Jules’s eye for fashion did not mislead her – appeared at Shah’s elbow bearing champagne flutes.

‘Miss Julianne Balwyn,’ she said with the tone of someone reading from a script. ‘Please excuse my English. Unlike husband, I am not longed with speaking it. But I practise and learn every day so that once I may thank you for taking him home to me and our daughters. And for the . . . the honouring of arrangements you make. You always in a special place for our family’s heart.’

Pasang passed her a drink and performed a small bow. Jules found herself strangely touched, which wasn’t like her at all. Shah had already thanked her for sticking to their original deal, as difficult as that had been after the
Aussie Rules
was impounded. She’d known that he and the other Gurkhas still had a long and dangerous, perhaps even impossible, trek in front of them to make it home to Nepal. After everything that had happened, making sure they got paid as agreed just seemed the decent thing to do.

So no, not at all like her.

‘Thank you,’ she replied, faltering briefly over the woman’s name, ‘. . . Pasang.’

‘Thank you, thank you. You are the Deliverer, Miss Julianne.’ The Nepali’s pretty, jewel-like eyes sparkled with delight.

Shah gave his wife a peck on the cheek before taking Jules gently by the elbow and steering her into a large reception room, with Pasang following closely behind. Dark slate tiles had soaked up the chill from a silent, invisible air-conditioning system. After the uncomfortable humidity of the street, it was blissful to walk into a space that seemed to breathe a gentle, almost wintry gift of frost onto her exposed, sunburnt skin. She sipped from her champagne, struggling with the urge to throw down the whole glass in one go.

The antechamber was quite beautiful. A few pieces of modern art hung on the white walls, offsetting a couple of artefacts that had obviously travelled all the way from their home village in Nepal. Julianne had to admire the restrained taste. She would never have thought it of someone like Shah, a rough-handed soldier, and a former non-com, not even an officer.

But with that unworthy thought came immediate embarrassment. Who was she to be judging others on their aesthetics? She had spent the last five or six years mostly unwashed and dressed in stinking rags. First as a smuggler with Pete and Fifi, then as a pirate, a glorified looter in New York, and of late as a fugitive, scurrying from one bolthole to the next. Shah was a fine man. Someone who had taken whatever talents he had been gifted and done his best with them to secure a good life for his family and, from what Jules could see at the compound, for anyone who worked for him.

‘This is a lovely home, Pasang,’ she said quietly. ‘Shah . . . um, Narayan tells me you built it yourself.’

Pasang took Jules by the arm and patted her like a child.

‘No, no. We did not build this. We paid the men to build it. You are hungry? I have made food.’

‘That would be lovely,’ Jules answered.

A brief, whispered conversation followed between the former Gurkha and his wife as the three of them passed out of the greeting hall and into what looked like an open lounge or family room. They proceeded up a brushed-glass staircase, which took them through another entrance guarded by heavy mahogany doors and into the small crowd that had gathered out on the . . . gallery? The balcony? It was hard to say. White cotton drapery hung from the ceiling, swaying in a warm breeze and seeming to define a point at which the room flowed outside.

‘I must see to the guests,’ said Pasang. ‘And to something to eat for you.’

With that, she disappeared into the crowd, halting briefly to say hello to some of the people she passed.

Jules saw Birendra, and thought she recognised one of the men he was talking to. It looked like Thapa, who had also been with them on the massive super-yacht. Birendra waved when he saw her and the other man turned around. It was indeed Thapa. Shah had brought another of her old crew-mates with him to Darwin. It gave Jules pause. She had lost so many friends over the last few years. Fifi had had quite a crush on Thapa.

‘Over here is the man I wish you to meet, Miss Julianne,’ said Shah.

He guided her towards the buffet table. There, she spotted Piers Downing, picking at a pile of sticky blackened chicken wings and talking to a thickset, middle-aged man with iron-grey hair and the build of a rugby prop whose championship days were behind him, but not too far behind.

‘Ah, my junior has arrived,’ quipped Downing.

The lawyer was looking much less buttoned down than before, having discarded his suit for a pair of cream-coloured moleskin pants and a white cotton shirt that was more poolside bar than Old Bailey. More guests arrived as Shah introduced her to Downing’s companion.

‘Miss Julianne, this is Mr Pappas.’

‘Nick Pappas,’ the man added, as he held out his hand.

Jules returned his strong grip. Years of boat work, and more recently of hauling herself and bags of loot and weapons through some of the worst places in the world, had given her a stronger grip than many men. Nick Pappas, however, was possessed of giant bear paws, one of which could probably enfold both of her hands and crush them to bone splinters. She could feel a lot of restrained power idling at low throttle within his massive frame, but Pappas appeared to be one of those big men who had spent his life learning to be gentle.

‘Nick knows about our complications, ‘ said Shah. ‘In the past he has helped me out with similar problems. Business problems, not personal. But similar.’

Julianne thought she understood what he meant. She wondered about the people standing around out here, talking amiably, laughing and drinking Shah’s excellent wine and grazing on the food his wife and maybe his daughters had prepared. Were they all somehow connected to his business?

‘So how do you two know each other, if that’s not a little awkward?’ she asked.

Both men grinned. ‘Timor,’ they answered in unison, before Shah deferred to the Australian.

‘I was in the army, in those days,’ Pappas began.

‘SAS,’ prompted Shah.

Pappas gave him a look that said he was quite capable of doing his own bragging to the pretty girl, thank you very much. He continued. ‘We ran into each other outside a militia shithole called Los Palos. Gurkhas had long-range patrols encircling the place, as did we. The Indonesian battalion based there was raised locally. Timorese traitors. Not a good look for them once the Indons pulled out. Or for the pro-Jakarta gangs that were always hanging around like scabby dogs. We had the devil’s own job stopping them from killing every peasant within twenty miles. Still . . .’ – he dropped one meaty hand on the shoulder of his old comrade – ‘we did good. I looked up my little mate here as soon as I knew he was in Darwin. He tried to offer me a job, the cheeky bugger!’

The two ex-soldiers shared some private joke at that.

‘So you’re a security contractor, too, Nick?’ Jules asked.

‘No, not really. I do risk management now. A lot of assessment for the mining companies, the big migration agents, some work for the government along with some risk mitigation. Removing the sources of risk,’ he added, pausing to let her understand the import of the euphemism. ‘From what I hear, you could do with some help.’

Guests continued to arrive through the heavy wooden doors. A pleasant draft of chilled air wafted over her every time a newcomer entered the Shah family’s huge entertainment space. Jules estimated that maybe twenty-five or thirty people were here now, half of them locals, judging by their accents, most of the others neighbourhood people or possibly business contacts. Shah had told her that the majority of his neighbours were Chinese and Javanese exiles, and she’d already spotted more than a few of them in attendance. The Javanese made her uneasy. She had never been back to Indonesia after a crooked general had run them off a few months before the Wave.

‘It’s quite noisy up here,’ said Downing, who had been hovering at the edge of the conversation without saying anything. ‘Perhaps you could show us this wine cellar you’re so proud of, old boy? I’d be very interested to see it. I’ve had some diabolical difficulties convincing the local yokels that serving pinot noir at room temperature doesn’t mean serving it up like a goblet of hot blood.’

‘But of course,’ replied Shah. ‘You must come also, Nick. Perhaps we can teach you to drink something more than beer, now that you are a sophisticated businessman who no longer sleeps in his boots.’

‘Doubt it,’ he scoffed. ‘But do your worst.’

As instructed by their host, Jules abandoned her champagne flute there at the buffet table, which was so heavily laden with food, she had trouble finding a spot for the glass. She was hungry, starving actually, and grabbed a couple of small fishcakes before their small group made to leave. They tasted beautiful, still warm and springy, and spiced in a way she’d never come across before. Jules didn’t imagine that fishcakes featured heavily in the national cuisine of mountainous Nepal, but perhaps Pasang Shah had picked up the recipe while they’d been stationed in somewhere like Singapore.

Their home was decorated throughout with objets d’art, photographs and mementoes from all over the world. Shah seemed to have travelled even more extensively than her, although the Englishwoman was sure that if she asked, she’d find that every piece told the story of a posting with the Royal Gurkha Regiment. Even the construction of the house looked like it had been undertaken as an exercise in storing memories within architecture. They passed an internal garden she recognised as a common feature of many Arabic dwellings, while the formal dining space reminded her of tribal long rooms she had seen in Borneo. Nothing so gauche as crossed spears or shields hung from the walls here. It appeared to Julianne that the Shahs had spent a lot of time discussing the significant moments of their shared life with a very expensive architect. A life that had been spent in the service of a regiment that had dispatched them from one end of the world to the other.

Julianne had grown up around money, or in her family’s case, the memory and the carefully contrived appearance of money, and she recognised the real thing when she rubbed up against it. Shah had done very well for himself. She was happy for him.

The wine cellar was indeed a cellar, rather than merely a temperature- and atmosphere-controlled room crammed into a downstairs or underground living area as an afterthought. The four of them – Jules, the two old army pals and Shah’s lawyer, the displaced pantomime Englishman – proceeded in single file down a narrow staircase that doglegged back on itself before reaching a heavy steel door. This Shah opened by tapping a code into a wall-mounted keypad.

‘You must have some exceptionally good wine stored down here, my friend,’ Downing said.

‘I do,’ replied Shah. ‘To be truthful, I do not care for it myself. But then, I am the only man in the house, and I’m sure Miss Julianne will tell you that the ladies do enjoy a nice glass of wine.’