Headhunters (17 page)

“No,” she said, edging around a little so that Milton could get behind her.

“Because you’re not a fool and you don’t have a death wish. Right?”

“That depends on you,” she said.

He laughed at that. “You have some balls on you,” he said. “You hear that, John? She has some balls on her.” He paused, edging around, Matilda covering him every step of the way. He spoke again. “This is what we’re going to do. You just bought John a little more time. There’s a car over there, up by the van. Where are the keys, Keren?”

“In the ignition.”

“Take John with you. You’ll be fine. The spread on that shotgun is more dangerous to us than the pistols are to you. Malakhi and Keren won’t fire.”

She started to back up the slope.

“Keep the gun on him,” Milton repeated.

“I am.”

“You get in the car and drive away. But it’s just a postponement. John knows I’m going to find him again and kill him, one way or another. You’ve been lucky twice, haven’t you, John? Hiding behind someone’s skirt for the second time.”

“I’ll drive,” Milton said to Matilda, his voice low and imperative. “I’ll go around, get in, wind down the passenger window and open the door for you. You’re going to get in, rest the shotgun through the window and keep it trained back at them. All right?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You get a head start, but where are you going to go? Look where you are, John. There’s one road out of here. You could go east or you could go west. How hard is it going to be to find you again?”

Malakhi and Keren still had their guns on them. Bachman stayed where he was, allowing a distance to open up between him and them.

“You know who he is?” he called out. He was talking to Matilda. “You know who he really is?”

“I know who he is,” she said.

“Don’t let him get in your head,” Milton said.

Bachman pressed on. “John Milton. The British government’s most bloodthirsty assassin. You know how many people he’s killed? I bet he hasn’t told you that. Men and women, maybe children too. I don’t know.”

“Don’t listen to him.”

Bachman’s voice was full of sarcasm. “What is it, John? How many have you killed? A hundred? Two hundred?”

Matilda and Milton kept backtracking; Bachman started to follow them.

“How many, John?”

He didn’t answer. She dared not look behind her, but she heard the sound of a car door opening, then the sound of an engine turning over and an electric window winding down. She heard the click of the door as it was unlatched and the squeak of a hinge as it was opened.

“Get in.”

Matilda backed up until she felt the chassis of the car against her back. She heard Milton put it into gear.

It was the Navara. She ducked down and lowered herself onto the passenger seat.

Milton had the car in gear and floored the pedal.

She heard shots.

Two shots.

The windshield shattered and Matilda shrieked.

They swung around, the rear wheels sending up twin scads of gravel and scree.

More shots. The rear windshield was blown onto them.

Matilda poked the barrel of the shotgun out of the window. The agents were spread out on the slope between the clearing and the water’s edge. They dropped to the ground as she fired. The buckshot spread tossed up scads of dry earth and vegetation and she thought she heard a cry of pain.

She pumped the shotgun, ejecting the spent round and chambering a fresh one.

Milton wrestled the car into a straight line and they barrelled ahead.

They passed the van. Matilda aimed and fired into the engine block. She pumped again, leaning out of the window so that she could jack around and aim at the Isuzu. The Navara bounced through a pothole just as she fired, and the jerk ruined her aim. The spread went low, the edge blowing out the front offside tyre and scoring tracks across the hood.

“You all right?” he called out.

She didn’t answer.

He swung around and looked at her. “Matty? Are you hit?”

She realised that she hadn’t taken the opportunity to check herself over.

She checked now.

“I’m all right.”

Milton swung the wheel, the rear of the vehicle sliding across the gravel until the wheels found purchase and they bolted forward.

“What did you hit?”

“The van isn’t going anywhere.”

“The four-by-four?”

“I think I blew a tyre out.”

“Well done, Matty.”

They roared up the track that led back to the Barrier Highway. There was a single bar gate at the end. Milton told her to hold on and punched the gas. The Navara lurched ahead and then slammed through the gate, ripping it open. Milton spun the wheel again and the car slid out onto the asphalt, heading west.

“We need to move,” Milton said. “They’ll change that wheel and come after us.”

“Where?”

“Broken Hill,” he said.

“And then?”

“I’m going to have to work on that,” he said.

MILTON DROVE the Navara as quickly as he dared. It was a fine balance. He knew that Bachman would be in pursuit, and he couldn’t allow him to catch up. On the other hand, if he drove the car too fast through a pothole and buckled a wheel, he was going to have to stop, and Bachman would reel them in. How long would it take them to change the wheel on the Isuzu? Not long. He pushed the car up to sixty, blooms of grit and dust spraying out and, he knew, visible for miles behind them. Nothing to be done about that. He couldn’t slow down. And Bachman was right. There was no way they would be able to lose them out here.

Matilda was grim-faced next to him, bracing herself against the dash as the car bounced and leapt.

Milton stared ahead, his face locked in concentration. The sun lanced down, blinding shafts that he had to squint into, trusting that the glare wouldn’t blind him when he needed to see.

The engine roared.

Milton squeezed down with his foot.

Eighty-five.

A little more.

Ninety.

“John—” Matilda said.

Milton didn’t reply.

“What are we going to do?”

“We run. If we stay ahead of them, we’ll be fine.”

“They’ll come?”

He nodded. “He won’t give up.”

MILTON REALISED how they were going to escape as the buildings of Broken Hill appeared from out of the heat haze. The road had been joined by the tracks of a railway for the last twenty miles and, as they raced ahead at seventy, they caught up with a train. It was enormous, almost a kilometre from start to finish, and the Nissan was travelling more quickly. They passed carriages with people gazing out of the window at them, a dining car, and, eventually, the squat-shouldered engine. The driver pulled his horn as they raced ahead, the mournful up and down blare echoing away across the vast plains.

“Do you know where the station is?” he asked.

“This side of town. Why?”

“It’s our way out.”

Milton kept up the speed. The track ran five metres from the road at one point and Milton had seen a large plaque on the side of the engine that announced it as the Indian Pacific.

“What do you know about that train?”

“It runs east to west, from Sydney to Perth. It only runs once or twice a week.”

Milton guessed that the train would need to stop for a while to replenish its supplies, but he couldn’t guarantee it, and he didn’t want to spoil their chance of escaping on it by arriving too late.

Matilda had opened the glovebox and was rifling through it. “How are we going to pay for tickets? I don’t have anything on me. No money or cards. You?”

“No,” Milton said. “Nothing.”

They would have to stow away. How practical was that? It was a big train. It would surely be easy enough to get onto the platform and, once they were on the platform, they would be able to find their way aboard. How long would they be able to stay there?

“What stop comes after Broken Hill?”

“Adelaide.”

If they had to get off, they would get off there. Then what?

“Check that,” Matilda said.

“What?”

She was holding up a wallet. She opened it and took out a wad of banknotes.

“Lucky us.”

That was fortunate. But it made him nervous. Luck tended to even itself out, over time. Where were they on the scale now? Ahead or behind?

MILTON FOLLOWED Matilda’s directions to find the station. It was an old Victorian building, with two large wings joined by a single-storey run with a veranda. There was a large parking lot that was mostly empty save for a handful of vehicles parked next to the entrance. He slowed and looked for people. There was a single man leaning with his back to the wall, a cell phone pressed to his ear. No one else.

Milton parked and asked Matilda to wait. He took the wallet and walked across the lot toward the building. The man with the cell phone was lost in his conversation. Milton paused at the door and glanced quickly to the side; the man didn’t react, glowering into space and raising his voice as, presumably, his conversation took an unwelcome turn. If he was with the Mossad, he was good. Very good. Milton didn’t think it was very likely.

He opened the door and stepped into the building. It was air-conditioned, and the cool washed over him. He was hot, sticky and dusty, and the change in temperature was welcome.

He went into the bathroom and looked at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. Bachman had landed a series of blows on his face and the damage was evident: dried blood clotted his nostrils, there was a cut above his right eyebrow and a contusion was forming on his left cheek, darker marks within the purple evidencing Bachman’s knuckles. Milton had boxed in the army, and had been good, and he had received thorough combat training in the SAS and then the Group. But Bachman was on another plane entirely.

Milton was not used to being beaten so comprehensively, and Bachman had done it to him twice now.

But Milton knew that Bachman had one weakness. The two of them had met before, years before their altercation in New Orleans, when Bachman was working for the Mossad and Milton was an operational Group Fifteen asset. The CIA, Mossad and MI6 put together a joint black operation, beyond top secret, to infiltrate the Iranian nuclear weapons industry. There was a factory in the Zagros Mountains responsible for the development of Iran’s Shisha missiles. They assassinated five key scientists in an audacious coup that put the fundamentalist bomb back by five years.

The mission had involved a trek through the mountains and, during the journey, it had been necessary to ford a fast-flowing river. Each member of the team had been carrying a full combat load of weapons and other gear, and crossing the chest-high water had proven to be difficult and dangerous. Milton had gone first, working hard against the flow, concentrating on maintaining a solid footing, and had made it without incident. Bachman had waited and had gone last of all. He made it across, but it was obvious that he was uncomfortable. As they continued the trek on the other side of the river, both of them damp and cold, Bachman had sheepishly admitted that he was a poor swimmer and that he had always been uncomfortable in water.

Milton had tried to exploit that weakness at the lake, but Bachman had been wise to his ruse.

There would be a third confrontation. Bachman wouldn’t give up, and it wouldn’t be safe for Matilda until he was out of commission. Milton would have to take him out, one way or another.

He filled the sink with cold water and stooped to dunk his face. The sudden chill was invigorating, sending tingles across his skin, and he stayed there for a moment and waited for it to bring him all the way back around. He stood again, took a tissue from the dispenser and began cleaning the blood from his face. The water in the sink darkened as his blood dissolved in it. When he was finished, he was left with a swollen eye socket and a litany of bruises, but he looked a little less frightening.

He drained the sink, splashed another handful of cold water on his face and then took the wallet from his pocket. He withdrew the notes and counted them. Three hundred dollars. He slipped it into his pocket. There were three credit cards in the name of Paul Watson. An American Express, a Visa and a MasterCard. He knew that they would all be fake and that, even though he would have been able to draw down significant funds by using them, doing so would be too dangerous: Bachman would be able to trace each transaction, probably in real time, and although it would have been useful to have more money, it wasn’t worth the risk. He put the cards back into the wallet and dropped it into the trash.

Then he went back outside.

There was a woman being served at the ticket window. Milton joined the queue. The woman seemed to know the clerk and the two of them were having a very pleasant conversation about a shared acquaintance and how he was recovering from a recent stroke. Milton tapped his foot, and then cleared his throat. If either of them noticed his impatience, they did not show it.

Milton felt a twist of anxiety.

Bachman was following. Had to be. Milton didn’t know how far behind them he was, but it couldn’t have been more than half an hour. The road was straight, and he hadn’t seen anywhere that he might realistically have hidden during their eastward flight. Given that, he guessed that Bachman would have continued. It wouldn’t be long before he caught up. Ten minutes? Would he check the station, or would he assume that they would carry on and keep driving west? It was impossible to guess, but Milton would feel anxious until they were moving again.

The woman finally shuffled out of the way and Milton stepped up to the window.

“Afternoon, sir. Where to?”

He had been considering their destination. There was one given: they had to get out of Australia. But where would be the best place to do that?

“Next train to Sydney?”

“Direct train leaves in six hours.”

That was too long to wait. Bachman would be in town much sooner than that. And it was the most obvious choice. He tried to put himself in Bachman’s shoes. It was most likely that Sydney had been the staging post for the Mossad agents. If they had others with them, or if there were
sayanim
working with them, that was where they would be stationed. They would be routed to the airport to look for him.