Leopard Dreaming (47 page)

‘Get a sedative,’ Kitching repeated as an order to Bohai.

‘Don’t!’ Maddy tried to scream, but it came out as barely a whisper. She knew the one thing Mira
feared above everything was loss of control, becoming vulnerable. All her worst nightmares always surfaced whenever drugs dissolved her mental barriers.

‘It won’t harm her,’ Kitching argued. ‘It’s only the broth from our little “breath mints”.’

‘One more thing,’ Freddie begged on his knees. ‘Please order your men not to float me. I must stay awake and fully aware until every last one of her friends have all betrayed her.’

Kitching laughed and switched on a tap to douse the last of the flames. ‘She has no friends she could trust in the first place.’ He gave a nod to Bohai to confirm a full dose of the sedative, then headed out to the hall, as if there’d never been a disturbance in the infirmary. Maddy also witnessed the room morph slightly somehow into a medical laboratory — as if burning the manuscript had changed the future in a way that none of them noticed. Except Freddie.

‘Be a good boy now,’ Kitching said as he paused briefly in the doorway. ‘Give Bohai a hand to hold her down for it. We don’t want her to drown, do we?’

Gabby watched the dinghy until Lockman dissolved into the darkness of the mangrove marshes.

More like a swampy delta after the rains, the narrow mouth of Hall’s Bay would remain impassable for the
Liquid Limo
.

Beside Ben, Tarin Sei checked and holstered her side arms.

‘So,’ Gabby said decisively. She leaned nearer to Sei and elbowed her in the ribs like a cat poking the side of a watchful guard dog. ‘How long until we break out the jet skis?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Sei raised her brow, looking genuinely perplexed.

‘Park ranger, remember? I know how to read a map. That chopper landed at the south end of an old World
War Two bunker, but Adam’s rowing for the north end, like he knows another way in.’

‘Good for him if he does. What’s that got to do with the jet skis?’

Darkin joined their huddle, wearing nothing aside from a killer set of abs and nude-coloured boxer shorts with a strategically positioned image of an electric guitar that gave him the appearance of being well endowed. He’d also armed himself with a broad grin and two golden Desert Eagles. ‘So when do we leave?’

‘Are you a clown?’ Tarin looked him up and down and snatched the weapons off him. ‘Don’t shake your junk at me. If you’re not going to play in the mud, go find some more painkillers for my man over there. I’m all out.’

‘Way ahead of you,’ Darkin said. ‘I slipped two little friends in a glass of vodka and orange for him, right before he picked a fight with our boy out there.’

Gabby clasped a hand over her mouth. ‘I dropped two dissolvers in a glass of lemonade for him about twenty minutes ago, right after we set off from Poacher’s Cove. I swiped them from your king-of-all-first-aid-kits when we had it open for Adam, sorry.’

Tarin frowned. ‘I gave him morphine an hour ago.’

All three turned in sync, in time to see Ben with the door to the first aid kit open and his head tipped back, dosing himself from a red bottle of tablets.

‘No!’ They all shouted as one.

Darkin lunged across so fast he beat the two women at snatching the bottle. Empty by the time he got to it.

‘Oh, hey!’ Ben cheered. ‘Is it my birthday?’

‘How many did you take?’ Darkin asked.

‘The rest, like it says.’ He teetered to the left a little as he wavered, attempting to point to the word
two
on the label.

‘Phew!’ Darkin slammed the door on the first aid kit. ‘For a second there, I thought you were dead.’

Tarin snatched the bottle to read for herself. ‘What are they?’

Ben opened his palm as if he expected her to give it back, but instead Gabby snatched it.

‘Bottle says they’re for migraines.’

‘Demon migraines from hell.’ Darkin grabbed the bottle and lobbed it into the nearest rubbish bin. ‘Maybelline called them her rocket ships. Man, oh, man, is he going to space.’

‘Who’s Maybelline?’ asked Gabby.

‘Backing singer. Girlfriend … ex, that is, although she rules the neck of a mean bass guitar. Look, forget it. She’s out of my life at the first chance I get to replace her. In the band, I mean. After hanging with gutsy babes like you pair, I can hardly go back to selfish airheads, can I? A guy could starve on that diet.’

‘Will he be okay?’ Tarin asked as she inspected Ben’s eyes.

‘Should be, but when those babies kick in he won’t feel pain for a year.’ Darkin grabbed his leather trousers and a pair of rubber slippers for walking on coral reefs, and hopped about tugging them on.

‘What are you doing?’ Gabby asked, almost amused.

‘Glad you asked.’ He danced about on one leg until he’d fitted the second rubber shoe like a glove. ‘I say the three of us should take the jet skis, slip ashore and arrange a little distraction. Draw most of the bastards to the front door while our boy sneaks in the back way. Doesn’t matter if our guns are a little shiny then, or the jet skis a bit noisy. Better if they are, yeah? Should even work to our advantage.’

Gabby shared a glance with Tarin, and then blinked at him. ‘Where did that idea come from? I thought all you cared about was music, your shag pile carpet and the bill you keep tallying for the feds.’

‘Hey, that bill was their idea. Bad boys shot up my baby. Dinged off paint chips from bow to stern and the
sherlocks couldn’t catch them. The whole defence force is out hunting them, allegedly, and yet here we are, closer than any of them. So what does that tell you?’

‘That it’s a trap,’ Sei said. ‘So you two get to stay here with Ben and get this beached whale swimming again.’

‘
Bordel de merde
,’ Gabby swore. ‘You’re crazier than Adam. You can’t go ashore alone. After what you’ve lost, you should still be in hospital.’

‘I only need one hand to arrange a diversion. I’ll buy him time to get in and out, with less chance of any wet play.’

‘Wet play?’ Gabby screwed up her face, horrified. ‘Well, that seals it. I’m going ashore to help, whether you like it or not. Nobody shoots at my friends except me, and even then it’s only with paint balls.’

‘Paint balls aren’t bullets, Ms Biche. You’re not trained for this.’

‘Woohoo! Paintball!’ Ben cheered dopily.

‘Maybe not as a soldier,’ Gabby said, trying to ignore him, ‘but I’ve nailed more covert missions against drug and wildlife smugglers in a year than most soldiers do terrorists or enemy soldiers in their whole career. So whatever you are, try thinking of me as the civilian equivalent.’

‘Cat fight!’ Ben cried, rolling into their argument. ‘Who’s got the baby oil?’

‘Back off, Benny. I can defend myself.’ Gabby turned him around and pushed him enough to free-roll him back to the bar. ‘You know I’m right,’ she argued, turning back to Tarin. ‘Besides, you already have a task. Adam left
you
in charge here. That leaves only me to slip ashore quietly.’

‘And me,’ Darkin said. ‘The
Limo
will float herself when the tide comes in.’

‘And me!’ Benny chimed in. ‘Rock and roll!’

Sei shook her head determinedly. ‘You three still need to clear the mud. That means you’re needed at
the helm,’ she said, pointing at Gabby, then glanced sideways at Darkin. ‘
You
need to do everything she says, until it’s safe to restart the engines, and you,’ she said, striding over to Ben. She spun his wheelchair around so fast it seemed to make his head spin. ‘You get to stay right here and keep yourself warm for me.’ She straddled his lap, pushed her breasts in his face and slid her hand down his chest, ensuring she had his attention, even through the haze of medication. ‘Can my big brave bandage boy handle that for me?’

‘I-I-I …’

‘I thought so.’ She kissed him deep enough to taste his breakfast. ‘Be good now, or we’ll be up for an argument when I come home.’

Returning to Gabby, she also tapped up Darkin’s jaw to stop his mouth hanging open.

It didn’t last long. ‘Wow,’ he gasped. ‘If I am bad, can I stay up for an argument too? Then he shook himself like a dog throwing off water. ‘Seriously, ladies. Have you seen half the safety systems aboard? Look, there’s a button for everything. This isn’t my first kiss with a coastline. I only
said
it was because I guessed our boy would order us straight back out to sea if we weren’t stuck here.’

‘He’s right there,’ Gabby conceded. ‘I haven’t known Lockman all that long, but I know he prefers to work alone.’

‘Irrelevant,’ Tarin argued. ‘He ditched the army, so he can’t pull rank to order me around any more.’

‘Neither of you are listening to the music here,’ Darkin persisted calmly. ‘We’ve played the winning tune so far by working as a band, yeah? Only I’m not the lead singer on this album. That’s our boy Lockman, while we sing the chorus.’

Gabby and the rest of the quartet shared glances in unison, until the three on their feet all looked expectantly at the one in his wheelchair.

‘Whoa.’ His eyes glazed over a little more. ‘Am I minding the aeroplane?’

‘And the airwaves.’ Darkin fetched the two-way radio and tossed it into Ben’s lap. At the same time, he retrieved an extra spare radio from the third drawer down at the helm, and synchronised both to match Lockman’s radio on channel sixty. ‘Not that you’ll need it. Between me and the trusty flint on my brand-new survival knife, we’ll be back before it registers that we’ve gone anywhere.’ He waved a hand in front of Ben’s face, but Chiron was already breaching the stratosphere.

‘We have lift-off, ladies.’ Darkin dangled keys to the jet skis and tossed a set to Tarin. ‘Who’s with me?’ He grinned wickedly at Gabby.

‘Oh, no you don’t.’ She snatched the second set of keys from him. ‘If we have to share, I’m driving.’

L
ockman rowed deeper into darkness through the maze of mangroves until he emerged on the far side in a sheltered cove. Tranquil in the rising moonlight. Beyond the beach and a low grassy dune he could see the gentle slope of wildflowers. Replanted in rows, despite a developer’s bulldozer.

Huddled in the middle, like escapees from the surrounding rainforest, stood a grove of Poet Trees; seven methuselan Moreton Bay fig trees, complete with golden Braille poetry on their limbs, and a crown of tree houses in their boughs. Hard to imagine a grove that large had been replanted faster than they’d been bulldozed, and yet there they all stood, replicas of Mira’s childhood home — and a testament to how far General Garland had been prepared to go to secure Mira’s allegiance, after realising that she’d never concede to being used as a lab rat.

Easing up on his oars, Lockman slid the dinghy ashore, and hauled it higher to the tussocks of shoreline grasses, which promised safety above the high tide. Instead, a mangrove root tore open the final seam, putting him in debt to Gabby finally for a brand new dinghy. He stashed the wreckage under a scattering of
fallen palm fronds and the lengthening moon-shadows of a lush pandanus grove.

The low grassy dune shielded his approach to the flowering field, where most of the buds had closed shop for the night. Unlike the mosquitoes. A thick cloud of them swarmed around him.

Scratching up a handful of sand, shell grit and rotting leaves from the roots along the high tide grasses, he rubbed his face and neck, removing the sharpest scents of civilisation and replacing them with the saltier traces from the local environment.

The cloud of bugs thinned almost immediately. Crickets protested on the far side of the dune, but all else seemed quiet for as far as he could see in every direction. He crouched low anyway and made his way over the dune, careful to scan full circle first using his Night Owls in every mode.

The ghostly iridescent green haze of enhanced night-vision stole all the other colours from the field, and as he cycled from infrared to ultraviolet thermal imaging and back again, he could easily imagine what it must be like for Mira to look backwards through the various shades of time using her own electronic lenses.

His gut twisted up in knots to think of her in the hands of Kitching’s men.

Shaking his head clear, he switched to advanced Peeping Tom mode, and used a series of sonar pulses to see through all of the solid objects around the field to anyone who might be hiding behind the trees, dunes or other land formations.

No nasty surprises yet, as far as he could see.

Refocusing on the centre of the field, he scanned the crowning glory: the orchard with the ghostly grove of Poet Trees, where the circle of tree houses perched high in the broad canopies, linked to each other around the circumference by a chain of timber-and-rope bridges.

Through the green haze of enhanced night vision, the golden Braille glowed white in lacy strings. In the rising moonlight, the pattern seemed almost magical, but without Mira, the house itself seemed sterile.

A second series of low frequency pulses in Peeping Tom mode enabled him to scan through the timber slatted walls into each room. One room in each tree, and inside the nearest three he found the ghostly shapes of beds and cupboards, all facing the bay. Readjusting for distance, he focused beyond them into the great boughs on the far side of the circle, and scanned the contents of a small bathroom and kitchen.

Switching back to infrared, he noticed the white glowing lines of water-pipes snaking down the outside of the trunk like metal vines.

Still no movement or brighter heat signatures around the grove, and nothing to indicate that Mira had been brought here against her will, but he didn’t really expect that anyway. Not on this side of the forest or ridge.

He scanned the remaining trees in the grove until he found the artificial trunk which glowed white almost totally from roots to leaves — shaped and painted to appear as if two great trees had grown together to form one, and yet only the smaller of the two could grow or replace any branches or leaves.

Inside the hollow metal trunk of its artificial twin, he found the distinct outline of a platform elevator — incomplete, with loose wires hanging from every corner. Barely large enough for two fully grown men, let alone a full squad of Mira’s abductors, but it would serve him well enough as a back door to the old bunker.

He knew Garland had ceased renovations and withdrawn her engineers as soon as Mira had broken all ties with her, so the bunker should have been sealed up at the other end too. But it didn’t surprise him that
Kitching had apparently seized an opportunity to move in. The colonel had been surviving and thriving under the general’s nose for years, and it seemed the closer he kept to her, the blinder she seemed to him.

Moving again with stealth, Lockman caught sight of three crouching heat signatures ahead at the nearest edge of the clearing, and in reflex he dropped to the ground himself with his weapon drawn, hoping they weren’t equipped with the same level of thermal imagery — wishful thinking, considering Kitching dealt in stolen technology for a living.

With his luck, they probably had laser vision that could melt him.

Crawling out of the forest, the three ghostly shapes kept low, moving slowly and hunched as they reached out with short arms and pulled themselves directly towards him. Refocusing for distance and clarity, he noticed the cooler shades of their long tails in the grass, and breathed a sigh of relief. He’d nearly waged war on three of Pockets’ relatives.

Easing his finger away from the trigger, he moved forward again, unable to shake the unsettling feeling that eyes were watching him — and not only from the wallabies. They startled upright, pricked ears at him, and hopped back into the forest, suggesting that way at least was clear of any unfriendlies.

He didn’t dare to glance up to get bearings from the sky. There was still a chance he hadn’t been pinpointed yet by either Garland or Kitching through NORN, the National Orbital Reconnaissance Network; equipped with facial recognition technology amongst other things. But if Kitching had the balls to move into the old bunkers before Garland had finished renovations, then he must have put eyes in the forest somewhere to guard his back door. It seemed only logical — unless he was worried they could be used against him, the same way he’d been using surveillance against Mira.

Keeping to the shelter of the canopy, he lunged to the trunk of the cold metal tree, opened a panel of false bark, revealing a security panel, and punched in Mira’s real name as the access code:
Mirage_Chambers
.

‘Okay, I’m in,’ Moser said as he made himself comfortable in Delaney’s surveillance van. He used a cheap, pre-paid phone that he’d just purchased from the newsagent to log into NORN through the federal police and emergency services access portal. ‘Normally I’d use my own phone, but if Lockman is right, it’s already compromised.’

He handed the pocket change and sales docket to Symes, and switched from satellite view to x-ray mode for seeing through buildings. Within seconds, NORN homed in on their position, and their small screen lit up with an aerial view of Gabby’s makeshift surveillance van. The metal roof appeared to turn translucent grey, and three bright technicoloured heat signatures appeared, revealing the exact positions of their bodies, albeit blurry and opaque. In contrast, their concealed weapons glowed grey, having absorbed sufficient heat from their bodies to register as a few shades less stark than the usual white for metal.

‘So that’s really us?’ Delaney waved her arm slowly and looked up. Her goldfish red and gold silhouette moved to look up too and waved back to her. ‘How does this help? It’s too distorted to see anything of value, and the screen’s too small to zoom in on enough details.’

‘Let’s see what we get at the penthouse.’ Moser connected the cell phone to the nearest blank monitor on the wall above him, and shifted focus along the street until he’d positioned the circular targeting zone over the tallest building, the top floor of which commanded its own best views of the ocean.

Three heat signatures lit up the screen again, this time in a grey-green bedroom. Their body temperatures
fluctuated wildly, writhing and pulsing brightly on the long sofa — two buxom females, glowing purple and orange, sucking each other’s faces while riding a male, top and tail, in a frenzied kaleidoscope of neon technicolour.

‘Whoa, sorry. Wrong focus.’ Moser tapped the touch-screen again, panning up a few levels. ‘The auto-focus is set to ground level.’

‘Hang on,’ Delaney said, grabbing Moser by the shoulder. ‘Are you saying that was the ground floor apartment?’

Moser paused halfway up the eastern elevator shaft. ‘Yeah, so?’

‘Which corner?’

‘Nearest, west side.’

‘Bloody brilliant! How’s that for fate? Go back!’

‘Keep going,’ Symes countermanded.

‘But Gabby’s boss lives in that apartment. If we’ve found proof that he’s been taking lunch-break liberties, she’ll have something to hold over him. He’ll have to quit ragging on her, assigning her all the pleb jobs and suspending her skipper’s licence every time a fish sneezes.’

‘How could we find proof?’ asked her uncle. ‘Officially, you’re not here, so you can’t use it against him.’ Symes gave the nod for Moser to focus on the search at hand. ‘The deed’s done, so it’s too late anyway.’

‘I disagree. Uncle, that bad boy’s got a wife with a chest that’s flatter than his, so obviously she’s neither of those two I saw. That means Gabby’s not the only one he’s hurting, and if I recognised the curves on those other two, which I think I did, then he’s in bed, literally, with smugglers of drugs and wildlife.’

‘Officially, you’re not here,’ Symes reminded her quietly. ‘If you want to shake him out of his tree now, all you’d need is a strategic nod and a wink. Otherwise,
if you want any dirt on them, you’ll have to start your own fresh investigation.’

‘Like a hunt for good coffee?’ Delaney leapt to her feet. ‘I’ll go knock on his door for a cup of sugar.’

Symes grabbed her by the arm. ‘Our cup’s full, Cassie. Don’t spill it on me.’

Delaney sighed heavily and sank back to watch the screens. ‘Fine, but if you come up empty here, my heels are smoking.’

‘Fair enough.’ Symes patted her hand, while Moser continued panning up through the building until a hive of five heat signatures appeared — all relatively motionless at their stations inside the top floor of the rented penthouse. Too distorted by false colours to permit any chance of facial recognition.

‘Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer my covert cameras.’ Delaney returned her attention to her makeshift panel of mismatched monitors, where three cameras of varying image quality gave her a view of the bedroom and two opposite corners of the main living area.

At the dining table, she saw a dark-haired guy who managed to make jeans and a t-shirt look uncomfortable. He glanced over his shoulder twice while jotting invisible notes on a page; strangely, that page was already full of hand-scrawled notes and coordinates.

‘Hey, Uncle, forget the blond guy. Are you seeing this?’

Symes leaned across her, studying the brief sequence in slow-motion replay while a second monitor continued recording the live feed.

‘That’s a digital pen,’ Symes said, watching it a third time. ‘At the last lecture I gave in Sydney, recruits were using them to jot notes and diagrams. Anything they wrote automatically stored or transmitted as a text file or image. There’s a normal ink mode too, obviously, so
the original can be kept as a hard copy, but that guy is using it with the nib retracted.’

‘And on paper that’s already used so it’s harder to see what he’s really up to,’ Moser said as he leaned in for a better look too. ‘I’m no geek, but if I need to take notes from a laptop, I just cut and paste from one file to another.’

‘He
can’t
be the mole.’ Delaney frowned at her monitor. ‘I’m never that lucky. I’m usually stuck in this truck for hours, day after day, and even then I’ll rarely spot anything tangible that can be used as evidence. What we need is that pen. Or a better view of his screen so we can at least see what kind of intel has snared his interest.’

‘Check there.’ Moser pointed to the large flat-screen TV in the background, which hung on the wall like a huge painting, reflecting the suspect’s image. ‘Maybe the girls in the lab can work on that and get us a clearer magnification.’

‘Or I could knock and ask the general for a cup of sugar?’ Delaney grinned, but Symes shook his head.

‘We can’t play our hand too soon, Cassie. His pen may have a memory that can be wiped at the press of a button.’

Delaney licked her finger and traced the movements of his pen on the dusty monitor. On screen, his writing appeared to be neat and tidy, but the angle of his notepad on the table made his lettering too tight to recognise, so her only result in trying to copy it with her thicker fingertip was a clean spot on the monitor.

‘What we need here is our own stationery.’ She checked the pockets of her jeans and the shirt that she wore over her white singlet and bikini, but found them all empty, as expected. ‘Anyone got a pen and some thin paper for tracing? If one of you can slide the paper while I copy the movements of his pen, we might just
get something useful, especially if we can transfer the recorded feed down there to my biggest screen.’

Symes grinned and patted his hip pocket. ‘It’s a good thing Lockman coughed up a refund. Must be my turn to visit the newsagent.’

Ben floated through the foggy stars, only mildly aware of the broad grin on his face.

He couldn’t feel any pain. Or any part of his body.

Dimly, across the far side of the universe, he heard a bumping noise, and as the sound brought him progressively back to earth, his synapses fired enough for him to realise where he really was, and that the sound was coming from a nearby cabin.

Soon followed by scratches and a thud.

He rolled his wheelchair around to investigate and saw Mira’s joey hopping towards him.