Leopard Dreaming (53 page)

‘Who’s this?’ Gabby asked.

‘Good question.’ Darkin tapped the driver’s window, but got no response from the catatonic woman inside. ‘So far, all we can guess is Kitching locked her down here, promising she’d be safe if he switched off all the lights, but he also locked the door from the outside and
she’s spent the last of the fuel trying to smash her way out again. She’s also busted the lights and car battery.’

‘A good thing she
did
run dry,’ Tarin said. ‘Or she would have gassed herself.’

‘And us.’ Darkin kept a wary eye on the woman. ‘They didn’t seem to care about the fumes when they dumped us in here. I suspect the truck and all that gear is meant to torment us.’

‘Seems a bit of a stretch,’ Gabby argued. ‘None of the criminals I know are that creative. More often just negligent.’ She rummaged through a small bag of clothes, looking for the woman’s driver’s licence or anything else with her identity. Instead she found a rainbow-coloured skirt and white blouse that she’d helped Mira Chambers to buy during her first shopping trip away from Serenity.

‘Hey, I know this vehicle! Different plates and more damage since I last saw it, but no mistaking. It’s Mira’s Hilux. The one Adam won for her in the fishing competition last month.’

She sifted through the camping gear thoroughly, knowing that Lockman always packed more than enough to cope with any situation; disappointed to find everything smashed, bent or strewn all over the place. ‘Somebody’s really put them through a war zone. Lights, radio, camping gear; it’s all ruined now.’

‘Nice assortment of fishing knives.’ Darkin directed her attention to the tackle kit. ‘The fire starter has a nice zap to it, and the electric guitar is as strong as a club, so we’ll stand a chance of defending ourselves if they ever come back this way.’

‘Electric guitar?’ Gabby winced at the sound of him strumming a few notes. ‘Are you a magnet now too? Whose is it?’

‘Still sleepy?’ he teased. ‘It’s shaped like a machine gun and I found it amongst the tents. So work it out, sweet cheeks.’

She did, surprised to guess it must be Lockman’s. ‘That’s one more thing I didn’t know about him.’

‘Get it off me!’ screamed the brunette inside the cab. She rocked harder, back and forward, as if stuck in a loop, trying to convince herself. ‘Snake, snake, snake. Last place they’ll look for you, last place they’ll look!’

‘I’ve seen that behaviour before,’ Gabby said. ‘When a wild animal gets trapped. Don’t touch her or she could snap.’

‘Oh, she bites,’ Darkin agreed. ‘Literally. She was guarding a dying torch when we found her, and nearly tore off Tarin’s other hand when she reached in to help. It took both of us to snatch it off her, but turns out the fungi are brighter anyway.’

‘We’re on our own,’ Tarin said, still working methodically on finding an exit. She reached out as far as she could over the roof of the truck and jumped down to start exploring for weaknesses along the adjacent wall. ‘That’s the good news. Bad news; I’m pretty sure it’s a cold room. If they ever switch it on, we’ll be in real trouble.’

‘Pretty big cold room,’ Darkin argued. ‘I’ve played in concert halls smaller.’

‘Pretty big military base,’ Tarin replied bluntly. ‘Old, but this whole bunker used to be a depot for munitions, equipment and medical supplies during the Second World War. Barracks big enough for a thousand troops so the kitchen and food stores could hardly get by with a normal pantry. They did everything big back then.’

‘They also drove that Hilux in here,’ Gabby said, thinking aloud, ‘which means there has to be another exit which never made it into local legend. That also makes this more likely a warehouse. So what makes you think it’s a cold room?’

‘These walls are all made of a non-magnetic alloy, same as the floor and ceiling, and there’s a lot of small vents, but they’re all up high. Cold air falls, heat rises,
better temperature flow to keep it relatively even. Switched off now, obviously, but still most likely a cold room.’

‘Where’s the door?’ Gabby asked, and Darkin pointed behind her.

‘It’s sealed too,’ Tarin said. ‘And as thick as the walls. You can check the indents yourself, if you like. Our crazy snake lady rammed the shape of the bullbar into every panel.’

‘Wow, brilliant,’ Gabby cried, meaning it. She bounded for the door. ‘Grab a knife, and give me a hand here, rock star. Let’s see if those muscles are good for anything aside from tickling a guitar.’

‘If she couldn’t punch through it with a truck …?’ he asked.

‘Fine, I’ll do it myself.’ Gabby found the door and felt around the side of it familiarising herself with the shape and all the hinges, then crouched to the lowest left corner, where she opened the army knife.

‘Leveraging it up to pop off the hinges,’ Darkin said, peering over her shoulder. ‘We already tried that with a couple of tent-poles that were packed for camping. We couldn’t get under it.’

‘I’m not leveraging,’ she said, getting to work on the metal. ‘I’m picking.’

‘Those hinges are screwed and pop riveted inside the panels,’ he argued, ‘so we couldn’t get at them that way either. We tried.’

‘Then maybe you should have tried waking me sooner. I know a trick.’ She leaned aside to let him see how she was digging at it. ‘Smugglers use a lot of cold packs for getting wildlife though customs. I’ve seen parrots in thermos flasks, wombats in eskies, and a few other things too horrible to mention. Usually the poor creatures are all sedated with the aim of making their air last long enough, but it nearly never does — and those who wake before they asphyxiate all have some
degree of success in scratching their way out, provided they manage to hook the metallic joins between alloys and make it into the insulation.’

Tarin grabbed the torch and fishing kit, bolted across to them and offered Darkin his choice of fishing knives. Within minutes, working together, they picked through to the metal panel on the far side of the door, and when Darkin repeated the trick and found fresh air on the other side through the small hole, he grabbed Gabby by both ears, pulled her against him and smacked a long genuine kiss on her.

Tarin laughed and hugged the pair of them, bouncing up and down on her knees, but Gabby shoved him away, stunned and blushing.

‘Back to work,’ she scolded him. ‘We’re not free yet, rock star.’

H
earing movement in a room ahead to his right, Lockman stopped again and took cover behind another stack of crates. For a derelict bunker it surprised him how much of the original gear had been left behind, and how much hadn’t been cleared out yet by the general’s engineers before she’d called a financial halt on the renovations.

Using his Night Owls, he switched to Peeping Tom mode to peer deeper into the facility — and found a room where the walls reflected his signal back at him like light off a mirror, making it appear like a solid white block of metal.

He switched off his Owls immediately, guessing the shielding in that room might conceal someone else with signal detection equipment. The bigger field units could see through almost anything, or at least a lot more than his small mobile unit. They also pulled a lot more power and could see through their own jamming frequencies.

If anyone detected him, though, they made no move to reveal it. He crept right up to the door and looked in to find two Asian men with their backs to him — one Chinaman and one Japanese cooperatively monitoring
a panel of satellite views over several small tropical islands.

Lockman blew them a kiss.

They spun, reaching for their sidearms, but he already had the drop on them. They froze with their hands midair, and obeyed when he signalled them to get down and lie flat on the floor, quietly.

Sliding a pair of cable ties out of his vest, from his fist-thick bundle, he fastened their middle fingers and thumbs tightly together behind their backs to ensure they couldn’t escape by any of the methods he knew. Far more restrictive than handcuffs. He also tied their boots together using their own laces, hogtied them same as the last pair and gagged them with strips that he tore from their own sleeves. Closing the door this time gave him privacy to check their surveillance screens.

He glanced to the humming generator, worried about fumes building up, but saw the exhaust vented up through a pipe that disappeared into the ceiling. He also noticed it seemed big enough to generate power for the whole facility — at least enough to run the coolant system for a mobile nuclear unit akin to those on a submarine. About the size of a family dining table, it looked almost as safe, but he knew better. It could generate enough power to light up a small city.

Returning his attention to the panel of wall monitors he found only two that showed internal views of the bunker; both empty hallways. Nine watched over islands where the only signs of civilisation seemed to be small fishing villages connected by walking tracks, while the top screen watched over the ruins of an old colonial church and metal doors to the bunker.

He saw a squad of four men wearing black fatigues who emerged from the doors and moved off into the forest, taking cover.

Lockman grinned, knowing they’d never find him that way. To his left, he also noticed a field
communications unit; more advanced than he’d ever seen before. However, the most important controls for
on, off, range
and
frequencies
seemed similar enough to the model he’d learned to use at boot camp. So he could use it.

He took careful note of the three frequencies they were using, then switched one over to marine channel sixty-nine, being the one used by the Australian navy which also guaranteed him a prompt relay to General Garland. Engaging transmission, he sent only one encrypted code:
Scarlet Pernel.

Mira’s alias.

The one Garland had arranged for her, and the one Mira would never personally use, not even if her life depended on it.

Alarm bells rang from every laptop around General Garland. Surveillance officers threw up their hands from their keyboards in accordance with standard instructions to freeze upon receipt of that signal, and Garland tossed her plastic cup of coffee at the sink as she rushed to Lasso’s shoulder.

‘Where is he?’ she asked, leaning over to peer at the screen.

Lasso casually pocketed the pen he’d been using as the new window popped up and blinked automatically. ‘Has to be a malfunction, ma’am. That signal is nowhere near the main theatre of operations. Otherwise it’s a marine channel being used from a location on shore, which is liable for prosecution. If not a malfunction, somebody’s headed for jail, or at least court.’

‘Rubbish.’ She snatched his laptop away and slid it to a spare seat at the table. ‘If that code came to me, it’s smack bang where we need to be.’ She tapped at the F1 button three times fruitlessly. ‘What’s wrong with this thing? It’s not responding.’

‘Oh, personal settings, sorry, ma’am. For security purposes, the keyboard is set to my preferences. May I?’

She slid it back to him.

‘Which reply code did you wish to transmit?’

‘
Pimpernel.
Then I want you to mobilise the alphas through deltas and send them his way.’

Lasso tapped the code into the keyboard. She saw him press tab to enter, but instead of sending the signal, the window closed, leaving a blank spreadsheet open.

‘What happened, Airman?’

‘Not sure, ma’am. Hacker must have compromised the system. Give me a second. I’ll see if I can tweak a work-around.’

‘Get me another laptop!’

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ came the replies from around the room.

Garland jogged the circle to see for herself.

Her whole communications network had crashed, including headsets and her military mobile phone.

Lockman waited for a reply for longer than the prescribed three minute time frame. No code, and no confirmation, meant his signal must have been compromised. He needed to move, and move fast, away from the source of transmission. Only problem; sending that code from anywhere inside the facility was enough to alert Kitching to his presence. And there were only two exits.

Unless he could make one.

He glanced up to the exhaust vent for the generator. Too narrow for a wombat, let alone a human, but he didn’t need much to change that; just a suitable projectile with sufficient power behind it. Having climbed down a shaft in the first place, and knowing the terrain above, he could guess how much light sandy soil and rock was above him, and how much
power build-up he’d need to blast through it, using the generator itself as the projectile. He only needed to fashion a shaped charge under it to ensure it blew up instead of out. More importantly, he needed to find Mira Chambers and Maddy Sanchez first.

Garland watched Lasso as he flicked through screens at an impressive pace. His fingers tapped so fast, she lost her place each time she glanced sideways at the rest of her team; who waited for orders with faces as blank as their screens. They only blinked now and then, like cursors.

‘Get back to it!’ Lasso ordered. ‘Find a back door.’

‘At least we know he’s on the mainland, Airman.’ Garland had glimpsed the small map only briefly, but well enough to recognise the general shape of the coast adjacent to her position on Stradbroke. Lockman had to be somewhere between Jacob’s Well and Deception Bay, a coastal distance of roughly a hundred kilometres. Unfortunately it also spanned the state’s capital, Brisbane.

‘Where do we send the teams?’ Lasso asked. ‘City or suburbs?’ He glanced at the rest of his team. ‘I can get them started on hunting down signal echoes, just as soon as I’m done hacking the hacker.’

He opened a new window, with a prompt to enter his security code.

‘Kitching’s hard to predict,’ Garland conceded. ‘If Lockman’s chased him to ground as suggested by his call for cavalry, there’s no predicting if it’s somewhere remote or heavily populated. With over two million people in Brisbane alone, the odds are stacked heavily towards the latter. Mobilise the alphas anyway,’ she ordered. ‘Point them ashore and we’ll refine the destination en route.’

‘I’ve lost contact with them too.’ Lasso entered his code and shifted his hand to attempt contact with
Patterson and Pobody again — when the front door burst open.

‘Hold it!’ shouted Senior Detective Symes. He rushed in with his Glock pointed at Garland while Moser and Delaney burst in behind him, threatening the others not to make any moves either.

‘
You
hold it!’ Garland countered. ‘This is a defence training initiative, Detectives. You’d better be lost, or I’ll have your heads for the local crab pots.’

Symes stood his ground. ‘Please lean aside, General. I believe Airman Lasso was about to betray you.’

‘
Again
,’ Delaney added with emphasis. She rushed forward and snatched the electronic pen out of Lasso’s pocket. ‘With this. He’s been sending coded messages every time you turn your back on him.’ Withdrawing a clear sheet of laminating plastic from her pocket, she unrolled it to reveal a tracing of Lasso’s distinctively neat handwriting. ‘The only people I know with neat writing are all psychos.’

‘Then you mustn’t get out much,’ Lasso argued.

However, the white table top made the evidence stand out as effectively as black marking-ink on white paper:
Target located aboard yacht. Co-ords to follow. Reacquire and deliver as per previous instructions.

Garland glowered at Lasso. ‘You’re the mole? For how long?’

He folded his arms, making it clear he had nothing more to say.

‘We couldn’t see his screen clearly enough to figure out all his personalised control keys,’ Delaney explained, ‘but we recognised this much.’ She tapped the F7 button for screen brightness three times — the same way she’d seen him doing it to scroll back a few windows — until she came across a satellite image of the
Liquid Limo,
run aground in a shallow channel between mangrove islands outside of Hall’s Bay.

Symes winked at Garland, staying alert to any movement from the others. ‘At first we thought he was talking about re-acquiring Mira Chambers, but they already had her by this stage. Check the time stamp.’

Delaney adjusted the replay of the satellite, taken from low to the horizon, until she saw an air-sea rescue chopper appear on screen with a team of men in black fatigues and emblems to match the general’s own alpha team — except Garland didn’t recognise any of their faces.

‘They’re not my people.’ She saw them capture Bennet Chiron, disguise him in matching fatigues, and fly away with him. ‘Why didn’t any of you see this?’ She spun to glare at the rest of them but got no reply from any of them.

‘Earlier today,’ Delaney said, tapping the timeline at the base of the screen, ‘your airman sent me on a merry runaround, pretending to be from dispatch at police HQ. He also ordered two of your MPs from your spec ops division to hijack the
Liquid Limo
after Benny Chiron was aboard. I believe you called them your alphas? Lockman told me their names were Patterson and Pobody, but I also took no chances. A pair by the names of Brette and Finnigan are also on ice, just in case.’

‘On what charges?’ Lasso asked.

‘Conspiracy to trap and sell protected wildlife. It’s only after surveillance we realised this was a military operation. So we’re here to hand over. In summary, this man Lasso has been controlling everything you see. Everything they see too, in loops he’s had running.’ She pointed over her shoulder at the rest of Garland’s team. ‘Might as well be paintings of eunuchs for all the real work they’ve been doing.’

Delaney used another control key, switching screens to reveal what was really happening in and around the hotel room where Garland’s other teams
still awaited signs of an ambush or enemy approach from land or sea.

‘Know what that means?’ asked Symes. ‘It means he’s not only your mole, General. As far as your theatre of operations is concerned, he’s the Mr Big Director who’s been conducting the whole stage and orchestra.’

‘That’s only speculation,’ Garland argued. ‘I need evidence before laying any charges.’

Delaney dealt out another four sheets of tracings. The first revealed a sizeable fee paid to the local air-sea rescue team for a joint ‘training exercise’. The next two had contact details for some of Kitching’s weapons buyers in China and the Middle East, while the last revealed the frequency for one of the tracking devices assigned to Lockman and Mira Chambers.

‘Punch line,’ Moser said. ‘He’s not only your mole. He’s your Mr Mystery.’

Mira staggered down the hall, refusing to be led by the hand again.

She still needed to touch the wall regularly for balance, but willed herself to keep moving to help metabolise the sedative enough to regain more of her strength and ability to think straight. She could already feel the pain beginning to rise behind her eyes from the hue which permitted her to filter and process normal light and see in real time, but she also wanted to endure it as long as possible — hoping to achieve a balance between mind and body at some point soon, so she could figure out how to escape with both Ben and Matron Sanchez. The others too, if she could believe anything Kitching or Freddie had told her about them being captured.

Two more young Asian men turned into the hall ahead of her, and hailed the colonel, who called out to them by name as Ryuu and Fuyu. As they approached, Mira recognised them from the list of Kitching’s sons
and grandsons. She stared at them for a long moment, and still couldn’t tell them apart. Identical twins, apparently. The first she’d ever seen, despite twins being quite common amongst Fragile X carriers, since it was usually only the single births that malformed or grew into society’s ‘misfits’.

Carriers of the beastly gene, nonetheless. Yet Mira sensed no personal or hormonal attraction to either of them. Certainly not in the way Freddie had warned that she would.

A huge relief. It gave her hope that her attraction to Lockman was based on other qualities she admired about him. At least, that’s what she chose to believe.

As the two came into better focus, they nodded politely to her, and she to them in reflex — but only until she stopped herself. She wondered if they knew of her relationship to them yet, as uncles or cousins two or three times removed. Either way, they looked worried. They clicked their radios and spoke as if attempting to contact a third party, who responded only with static.