Leopard Dreaming (5 page)

‘You want to help?’ she asked, already hating herself. ‘Tell me how many men Kitching has working for him.’

‘I never saw that much of his business. Before I met you and was reassigned to your security team, I reported directly to General Garland.’

She pushed her glasses higher up her nose. ‘You must have some idea. How many crew does it take to run a submarine? Or a fleet of cargo ships, each with their own surveillance teams? Surely, he must have at least one spare crew he could assign to wrecking my day.’

‘You assigned tactics to me.’ He pinned her shoulder to the wall, making her squirm again with real irritation. ‘So … You. Wait. Here,’ he insisted with greater patience than she’d ever had with him. ‘Five minutes. That’s all I need to scope the cove again and be sure it’s still safe.’

Backed against the wall or not, Mira dug in her heels. ‘Five minutes is five years in captivity. Nobody knows that better than me.’
Maddy doesn’t deserve it,
she added with her hands. ‘But if you need reminding of your own time as Kitching’s guest with hot and cold running electricity and water, you run along and play peekaboo with the little ships, and I’ll count it off for you. One little second … two little seconds … shall I screech like an alarm when I reach three hundred?’
That’s probably all the time they’ll need to start their next session with her
.

Lockman moaned, but conceded silently by taking Mira by the hand. ‘This close,’ he warned, keeping her shielded between him and the wall. ‘You stay this close to me the whole time, and if I say
duck
, you hit the ground so hard your diamond eyes shatter. Feel me?’

‘Like Braille, Lieutenant.’ And she lengthened her stride to match his.

B
en Chiron leaned back in his wheelchair, making it creak. His hip and chest ached from sitting up all night, but it sure beat lying flat on his back for another twenty-four hours straight.

He stared past his grim reflection in the narrow bedroom window to the blood-red sunrise across the bay. A kookaburra landed on the power lines and laughed at him.

Another bleak day of sunshine mocking him too. Another glum day without Mira.

His nurse had removed all the clocks from the house. She’d even cut power briefly to the oven and microwave while he’d been asleep, which switched them off long enough to leave their time displays blinking incessantly with zeros.

She needn’t have bothered. He could start counting the hours again as soon as the first ferry headed across to Stradbroke Island. As a permanent resident over there, he knew the timetable by heart. Downhill from him at the wharf, a small crowd of bleary-eyed walk-ons began to gather for the 5 a.m. run.

At high tide, the view would appear cheerier, but for now the bay had retreated leaving only a single
deep channel, flanked on both sides by mudflats and mangroves.

He missed the sound of the surf from his own bedroom window. He missed the family of seagulls that often fought over prawns and sand crabs on the beach beside his patio. And he missed the more important things, like walking, showering by himself, and dropping his own fly to take a leak. Most of all he missed Mira. It tore him up, worrying where in the world she could be out there. He couldn’t understand why she hadn’t come to visit him. Strange that Maddy Sanchez hadn’t popped in or dropped him a line at least once either. It had been a full week since his ordeal at the hands of Colonel Kitching’s associates. And two miserable days since he’d been discharged from hospital with his mother, who’d also been beaten to within a few heartbeats of her life by Kitching’s associates.

Mira didn’t get along very well with his mother, so maybe that had been enough to keep her away. But she hadn’t called either. She hadn’t responded to any of his messages, which he’d sent every morning through his mother’s private nurse. His nurse too, for the moment. An old family friend, so he knew he could trust the message to get through.

Each note attempted to explain how much he longed to see her, to reassure her that he still cared about her, and most of all, that he wanted to keep working with her to ensure that, some day, she’d eventually regain her full independence. And he loved her. That was something he’d regretted not telling her weeks ago when he’d first kissed her on the patio of his beach house. His captors may have broken his ankles, fingers and ribs, but they’d never broken him enough to turn him against her. No amount of pain had been enough to make him betray her — or the secret of how she did what she did — even though they’d broken him to the extent that he
couldn’t think of returning home yet without breaking into a cold sweat. More than half his injuries had been inflicted there, in his own living room.

In a moment of weakness, he’d recoiled from Mira’s touch when she’d found him aboard their cargo ship. His only excuse: he’d been so ashamed at his own failure to keep her safe, he hadn’t been strong enough to let her read his expression with her warm fingers, as she usually did.

Still unable to use his hands, which were bandaged up like grotesque cotton wool clubs, he was only just learning to roll his own wheelchair with his elbows, and the tragic irony of the situation wasn’t lost on him. Mira had been restrained in a wheelchair on the first day he’d worked with her at Serenity.

Distantly, he heard a static-riddled voice that could only come from a radio in a neighbouring apartment. Old Reggie Goldman’s, most likely. He’d been frugal with his hearing aid batteries ever since Ben’s mother had bought him out and started renting back to him for nearly nothing to help pay for his wife’s funeral and his own ongoing medical expenses. Bad news as always from the announcer; fuel prices, interest rates and squabbling between neighbouring countries — until local news and one name caught his attention.

… Matron Madonna Sanchez, missing at sea under suspicious circumstances. Search teams are relocating further north this morning …

Ben’s blood ran cold, knowing exactly where Mira would be. At sea, at the last known coordinates. She still clung to her adolescent perceptions of justice. Black and white, right and wrong, which made her all the more vulnerable to recapture.

He filled his lungs with as much air as his punished ribs would permit, trying to charge himself with the strength he needed to get moving. He had to find her. Had to get to her before anyone else did. And he had
to talk some sense into that pretty little head of hers. Guardian or not, he’d make her listen to him, and he’d make sure she stayed safe this time, no matter what. He’d already lost one little sister from his life, even if she had only been an adopted cousin. He’d die before losing another.

First place to start looking was his own beach house — just as soon as he could settle his stomach. She had the keys to it, and enough sense to get out of the weather for the night. And no bad memories about it, unlike him.

He waited until Nurse Willow Springs came and went with his morning painkillers. As an old friend of his mother, she treated him far too much like the little boy she used to babysit almost three decades ago, and she’d never let him leave the house until he could walk out.

Hearing her leave down the hall to the rollicking washing machine, he used his forearms to roll nearer to the bedside phone. His elbow knocked the receiver off its hook easily enough, and a pen in his mouth served as a finger to dial his house. Stooping with his ear to the handset, and grimacing against the pain around his ribs, he heard the long repetitious jingling of an unanswered ring tone.

Over two hundred calls to her in five days, all unanswered.

Fear boiled up as rage and he spat the pen at the wall. He smashed the phone and handset onto the floor with the side of his arm, and shouted obscenities at the ceiling. An accident he’d call it later when Springs barked at him, but for now he despaired only for Mira.

Please don’t be out on the water … with
him.

The last time Ben had seen Mira she’d been hoisted aboard a cargo ship with that snaky Lieutenant who’d been assigned by Kitching’s superior officer to be Mira’s bodyguard. Come to rescue him too, allegedly.

More than likely he’d only come to extract the female corporal who’d also been captured during the ambush. Six bodyguards in the security squad and all failed in their mission of keeping Mira safe from the military criminal Colonel Kitching. Untouchable. So all Ben’s pent-up rage and frustration for vengeance had only one point of focus. Not the female corporal, who’d been tortured alongside him, nor any of the other corporals or sergeants who’d been assigned to spy on Mira to keep her safe, allegedly. And certainly not Mira, even though Ben’s captors had tried to convince him that she’d abandoned him. Ben had only one face in mind when he pictured the culprit who’d let him fall into enemy hands. The same guy responsible for hanging Mira out as bait, time and again. The cowardly squad leader who’d been entrusted with their security from the very beginning.

Lieutenant.

Adam.

Lockman.

He was going to pay for his incompetence, just as soon as Ben could find him and tolerate the pain of closing his hand into a fist.

Mira stood at the edge of the shallow wharf, looking out across the mouth of the estuary into the broad calm waters of Moreton Bay. She heard a vessel puttering in quietly from the fog, while a small ghostly motorboat slid out silently into the channel in the opposite direction. Seemed like yesterday’s silent movie playing out of sync with today’s soundtrack.

She smelled bacon cooking and heard a pan clank aboard a nearby sloop where the local radio announcer provided proof that Lockman’s jamming device had limitations in covering this side of the alley. The male voice seemed clear without static as he reported on civil protests in Vietnam and Korea, and a switch in
stations served up no better news for the mariner’s breakfast. A new voice described a third world war scenario escalating out of territorial disputes over islands between Japan, Russia and China.

‘Anything yet?’ Lockman asked.

‘I wish … but if a sub was out there this time yesterday, it was doing what subs do best.’

‘What about Kitching? You said he went this way?’

‘He did, but I’ve lost him.’ She pronounced each word clearly, ensuring every syllable rippled cleanly back through time to Freddie. Assuming he’d been there.

She wondered how far away he could hear from her — in distance, not just in time. If he could use listening devices to hear future echoes from far away, just as she used Lockman’s binoculars in normal ‘day mode’ to magnify the slow light over yesterday’s bay, then it would make defeating him all the more impossible.

As if any shade of impossible could be easier.

Raising Lockman’s Night Owls up to her hues again, she tried to estimate distances between the islands. Not in nautical miles or kilometres, but in minutes, if puttering by dinghy, boat or jet ski.

Panning to her right and refocusing much further down the coast, she noticed a large, low isle smothered in mangrove forests and tethered to the mainland by two bridges, one of them derelict. A century-old tram bridge. A small crescent beach curled out from that end like a broken finger too, both pointing to the skeletal shells of a new housing development. Government land; sold off in the name of progress.

Swollen up at the nearest end of the isle, a forested hill concealed something far more sinister. Historically speaking, at least. She caught glimpses of the tropical palms amongst the darker roofs and lights of the old penal colony.

‘Is that really Serenity?’ she asked. ‘It seems so surreal.’ She didn’t bother to point or lower her voice.
Facts were facts and made no difference if Freddie fore-heard them or not.

‘Mist makes everything eerie. Don’t let it get to you.’

‘I meant to be seeing it from this side of the fence. There seem to be so many places to beach a small boat in those mangroves, I can’t see any reason for Kitching to dock here and go down for her by car. First he’d need to arrange a car from here to there and back again.’

‘Plenty to heist from the yacht owner’s section. That Gallardo would be worth a spin just for the hell of it, and Kitching could have it back before anyone noticed it missing.’

‘I can check that next, I suppose.’ She kicked herself for not thinking of it sooner, while she’d been standing right beside the driver’s window. ‘It’s just so time-consuming.’

And fiddly. And painful. And dizzying.

Wrapping one arm around a slim metal light pole for balance, she kept adjusting her hue controls, searching up and down the estuary and back through minutes and hours, searching for the precise moment that Kitching appeared out this end of the alley.

‘I’m so close. He has to be here. It’s these touchy slide controls. Infinite focus is supposed to make it easier, not a pain in the neck.’

‘All complaints in triplicate. I’m sure General Garland would love to hear from you.’

Mira laughed. ‘Yeah, I’ll bet.’ Secretly though, she planned on it. Let Kitching have his little army and navy for now, and Freddie too, if the colonel could get any sense out of the old man. Mira had satellites armed with facial recognition software on the look-out for her, all commanded by a shadow general for the Prime Minister who’d classified her whole body as a national secret. So all Mira had to do was show herself in trouble at the right moment, and she’d have all the
combined forces for national defence on her tail. Not just a bigger army and navy, but also air force, police, fire, ambulance and even Greenpeace if the General so desired.

‘You want me to acquire a boat yet?’ Lockman asked. ‘I’ve got the last known coordinates of the matron’s phone, roughly half a nautical mile offshore. I could take you out to see exactly what went down out there.’

‘Don’t say “went down” like that, please.’

‘You know what I mean.’

A mosquito buzzed past her ear, and she swatted it away. Her left eye still stung from the last kamikaze, but now her fingers responded like thumbs, and as she returned them to the tiny filter controls on her hues — far more sensitive than her first military prototypes — she bumped them too far.

Purple fog turned red.

Time swept back over the millennia. The coastline retreated out from beneath her; un-eroding and climbing back atop the distant mountain range. Ocean flooded in beneath her, along with the fins and frothy turbulence of three mega-toothed sharks eating another.

Great jaws leapt out at her from the water, and she screamed, falling backwards.

Maddy stumbled down the narrow metal corridor, ushered roughly by the captain of the sub himself. Cruellest of the ragtag crew, Commander Kurst also distinguished himself by barking orders at her in a Russian accent.

It seemed too surreal how life could throw her so far from Serenity and onto a rogue submarine. More than once she’d heard the distant sounds of young children playing. Or a baby crying. Yet the pain and humiliation were real enough. Kurst hadn’t only confiscated her
phone and watch; he’d taken her orthotic shoes, which compensated for the four-inch difference in length between her right leg and her left. Without them, she couldn’t walk without teetering, even when the deck wasn’t moving. Humiliation had to be his goal, and if she hadn’t grown so accustomed to such taunting throughout high school, it might have bothered her as much as he’d hoped. However, he’d also drenched her with a bucket of water; his version of affording her a shower, and re-bound her weaker left arm so tightly behind her back she’d lost circulation again. Every joint and muscle had inflamed with arthritis anyway.

He spun open the wheel to the next bulkhead door and shoved her through ahead of him. Her brow struck the deck as she fell, but she gathered herself up, dripping blood, yet preferring to find her own feet rather than need his help. He hefted her up by the elbow anyway, making her wince yet again as the nylon cords bit even tighter into her wrists.