The Real Thing (14 page)

Three thousand miles away, Fizzer, Tupai and Dennis met a delightful young lady named Kate Fogarty in an Italian bakehouse across the street from a huge, glass-fronted office block which housed Corker Cola Aust. Pty Ltd.

The aroma of fresh bread and cappuccino coffee wound around them as she sat down at the small, wrought iron, marble-topped table by the window, smoothing her long straight hair behind an ear with a casual and well-practised gesture. Outside, the sun had just risen past the side of the Corker Cola building and the early morning rays were washing the table in a rich honey glow. It was a peaceful tranquil morning, with no hint of the dangers that lay ahead.

Kate, she explained, had been Harry Truman’s personal assistant at Coca-Cola Amatil in New Zealand, and they had got on well, but she had wanted to move upwards, not to remain a PA for the rest of her life, and he had encouraged her to complete a Marketing/Communications degree part-time. Now she was a rising executive in Coca-Cola Amatil in Australia.

She had plenty of good things to say about her former boss, and Fizzer felt Harry was right to trust her.

‘I bought the three cellphones,’ she said. ‘They’re connected and working; I’ve tested them. The hired car you asked for is parked on the street outside, it’s a silver Commodore, you can’t miss it.’ She held out the cellphones and car keys.

‘And here’s the cash you asked for.’ She handed over a plain white envelope.

Fizzer took it and glanced briefly inside. ‘Crikey,’ he said. ‘There must be a couple of thousand dollars in here. I only asked for five hundred, in case we needed to pay for taxis, or accommodation or anything.’

Kate shrugged. ‘That’s what he sent.’ She looked curiously at the two boys. ‘He seems to think very highly of you both.’

Fizzer smiled to cover a small feeling of embarrassment. It seemed that quite a few people were putting a lot of stock in him and Tupai. He hoped they were going to be able to live up to it.

Kate rose from the small table. ‘I’ve got to get to work. Harry doesn’t want me to be late today; he said it was essential that I do nothing out of the ordinary. But he wouldn’t tell me why.’

She waited for a moment and, when no explanation was forthcoming, said, ‘But I expect I’ll find out all about it in due course.’

After she was gone, Fizzer rose and said, ‘Time for Daniel to enter the lions’ den.’

Tupai nodded and pushed his chair back. Dennis said, ‘I’ll go and find the car.’

They quickly discovered that the huge street frontage and the great Corker Cola sign on the building was just a façade. It was a real office block all right, and it was full of offices, but very few of them belonged to Corker Cola. There were lawyers, accountants, a large firm of civil engineers, a lifestyle investment company and an insurance broker to name a few. Corker Cola, it seemed, paid for just half of the fifth floor, plus the naming rights to the building, which made the company seem to be much larger than it really was.

Whoever designed the atrium had gone in for potted plants in a big way. It was part entrance way and part jungle, with ferns, trees and shrubs arranged in clumps, even a small stream ran underneath plastic floor panels.

Fizzer was nervous, although he tried hard not to show it. They were walking into a nest of vipers for all he knew, but
someone
had to do
something
, and there really wasn’t anybody else.

A brass panel by the lift gave the names of all the firms and their floors and there were a lot of them, so it took a couple of moments to search through and find Corker Cola. Satisfied, they returned to the entrance way and took seats on a long vinyl sofa in fashionable shades of dark blue and burgundy. A rack of magazines stretched along the side of the sofa, and Fizzer picked up a copy of
Time
.

‘What now?’ Tupai asked, idly leafing through a
National Geographic
. It had an article on the lost-and-found-again Incan city of Macchu Picha, perched high on a mountain top in Peru, and he showed the photo to Fizzer.

‘Wait.’

‘What for?’

‘I’m not sure. But anyone who is going into or out of Corker Cola has to pass through this entrance. So we wait. And watch. And listen.’

Tupai shook his head. ‘We can’t just sit here and hope that a clue is going to fall over us. We have to do something.’

Fizzer turned his head slowly to look at his friend. ‘You could be right. But let’s give this a try first. I have a strange feeling that we are right where we need to be.’

Tupai raised an eyebrow for a moment, before nodding and sinking back into his
National Geographic
.

People came, people went. Tall people, short people, thin people, fat people, young people, old people, and a range of ethnic varieties that you would never have seen in one place in New Zealand. Sydney was a great melting pot.

The morning passed. So did two more copies of
National Geographic
, a
Sports Illustrated
, a
Newsweek
, and even an
Australian Women’s Weekly
, which promised an interesting exposé on the British Royal Family, but turned out to be just a rehash of several stories that had been on the news a few months ago.

Eventually, by rooting around through the piles of old magazines, Tupai found a fairly recent issue of
Pro-Boxing
and that kept him happy through till lunchtime, when Dennis brought over a couple of rolls from the Italian bakery.

Fizzer didn’t turn a page. He’d opened it to an article on the US President and that was the page it stayed at the entire time they were there. Fizzer focussed. He made himself aware of the room, every tiny facet of it.

He breathed deeply and recited some meditation phrases under his breath until his breathing slowed and his heart rate began to drop. Then he started to ‘pick up’ the room. First the walls and the polished marble tiles, the rotating glass door. Then the furniture, every piece, its position, its fabric and construction. The plants, the way the leaves moved in the light breeze when the main door turned, the twisting of the trunks. The position of every leaf on every branch on every plant. The arrangement of the bark that covered the base of their pots.

Once he had picked up the room he was able to discard it, aware of it, but only in the background, like the sound of his own breathing, or his heartbeat. By becoming aware of the room he was able to eliminate it.

Then he started concentrating on sound and movement. Their view was towards the lifts and the centre of the room. No-one could exit without being seen by him.

He concentrated.
He focussed his perception
. He concentrated on the low hum of the air-conditioning until he became fully aware of it and was able to send it to the background and eliminate it from his consciousness. He saw all the people coming and going, he heard them, heard the low conversations about mundane topics, the day-to-day trivia of people on their way to and from work and business meetings.

He could hear the breathing of people as they entered, hear the sound of their watches ticking, the rustle of their clothing. He observed the angle of their heads, the way they held their hands, the young lady, barely pregnant, nervously twisting her wedding ring, the smooth young entrepreneur in the suit that belonged to somebody else, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together as if he had just picked his nose.

He felt the disturbed air of their passage and discerned the mixture of sweat, shaving lotions and perfumes, cheap and expensive, which wafted past.

He listened to snatches of conversation, waiting for a key word that would let him latch on to one of the conspirators. ‘… told you she was a little poison piglet who …’, ‘… and he emailed it to his supervisor, not realising that she was her aunt …’, ‘… OK then, I’ll meet you at the …’

He didn’t eat the roll that Dennis brought, and he ‘picked up’ the sounds of Tupai eating his, so that he could eliminate them from the universe that surrounded him in the spacious well-foliaged atrium.

Borkin’s target went down to the basement car park immediately after the special board meeting. The meeting had gone well, she thought.

The parcel containing her recipe had arrived but, after being switched by her target at the entrance to the building, the recipe shown to the board was a fake all right, but not her fake!

The board had made copies of the recipe, before sending Senior Technician Ramirez away with instructions to brew a batch as quickly as possible for sampling. Before the meeting Borkin had wondered how close it would be. It wouldn’t be the real recipe, but it had to seem real.

She saw her target walk past her office at 5:50 p.m., close enough to the end of the day to seem as if he were simply going home. But she knew he wasn’t. She desperately hoped he hadn’t yet twigged the trap she was building.

She radioed quickly to the FBI team and confirmed the description of the car. They would pick him up the moment he left the car park and keep him in sight, informing her of all his stops. And they wouldn’t get noticed. The FBI was very, very good at this kind of work.

Her cellphone rang, and she plucked it out of her handbag tiredly. It had better be important, she thought.

It was. Fraser and Tupai had not arrived back in New Zealand. The flight had arrived, but they hadn’t been on it. There seemed no obvious explanation for it. That caused a chill that started in the extremities of her fingers and spread like iced water through the channels of her body.

Anastasia Borkin expressed her distress by using a phrase she had picked up from the New Zealanders.

‘Bloody hell!’ she said loudly.

Her radio crackled and the FBI had their first report. The target had driven straight to a nearby mall, and used a pay phone in the entrance. He had made a quick call and was now waiting by the phone. She thanked them and put the radio down on her desk.

A pay phone. She mentally played through the possible moves in this chess game. The target must have contacted the kidnappers, and was waiting for them to call him back. The FBI couldn’t afford to pick him up at this stage. Not if they wanted him to lead them to the kidnappers. He would just deny everything. Better to play the waiting game.

The FBI would be able to track down the number he had called, and also the number that called back, although it would probably be another pay phone.

Still they’d be able to narrow it down to the state and hopefully even the city, which would give them a good start. She hoped it wasn’t overseas, because that would make it twice as difficult for the FBI, as they would have to involve local law enforcement authorities in the country concerned.

Even as she was worrying about such a possibility, a call came through from the FBI team. The first call had been to a cellphone number, somewhere in Australia.

‘Bloody hell!’

He finally picked them up just after two o’clock. The first thing he noticed was the perfume, it had a scent that screamed ostentatious wealth, but that, in itself, was no reason to suspect anything. Nor were the clothes, overtly elegant, fashion for people with more money than style. The giveaway was the accents, a nasally New Jersey accent and a laid-back West Coast sound, trained to neutral-American. Two American accents in the foyer of the Corker Cola building: it might mean nothing, but alarm bells were going off in Fizzer’s head.

‘I don’t care,’ he heard a scrap of conversation as they exited the lift. Other people were passing, talking, and he had to really focus to isolate the Americans. The man was speaking. ‘I’ll camp on their doorstep if I have to. I want my money.’

Fizzer silently nudged Tupai. Tupai asked no questions, but casually rose after the pair had passed, and placed his boxing magazine back on the rack.

The woman was talking now. ‘They’re just waiting until all the loose ends are tidied up. You should be more worried about the call from Atlanta. Something must be up. Why else would … ?’ The rest of the conversation was lost as they passed out through the rotating door.

Fizzer remained seated until they had turned a corner outside the building, then got up, speed-dialling Dennis as he did so.

‘Guy with a cream-coloured jacket, woman in red trousers. We’ll follow them on foot, try and keep close.’

They had disappeared into the crowds that were thronging the inner city streets by the time they emerged, and Tupai wanted to race ahead and catch them. Fizzer caught his arm.

‘I’ve got them,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose.

Tupai sniffed the air and looked at him uncertainly. ‘Are you sure?

‘I’m sure.’ That Fifth Avenue perfume was unmistakeable.

Wherever they were going, they were walking there, and they seemed nervous, stopping a lot and looking behind them, pretending to admire things in shop windows while watching the reflections in the glass.

It was basic spy stuff out of a thousand cheap novels and old movies, and it would have been laughable if it weren’t for the seriousness of the situation.

Whatever they thought they were looking for, it wasn’t two teenagers in t-shirts and jeans, and, anyway, they would scarcely have got a glimpse of the pair, as most of the time Fizzer kept right out of sight of them, hidden in the bustling crowd, the congested pavements. He followed them by smell, and it was easy with the strong, distinctive perfume.

Dennis stayed close, circling the block occasionally when forced to by traffic patterns, other times pulling to the side of the road behind them and waiting for a few moments.

It was a warm sunny day and the air was still. That helped the trailing as well, as a breeze could push the scent into wrong directions and lead them up blind alleys, while rain would have brought all sorts of other smells up from the pavements, gutters and drains making it so much harder to stay on track.

When they weren’t stopping and doing their comical ‘spy stuff’, the man and the woman walked swiftly, as if they had quite a distance to cover and not much time. They eventually pulled to a halt in Chinatown, at a long bank of pay phones on the edge of a crowded, bustling, noisy food hall. If you wanted privacy it was the perfect place, as the surrounding hubbub enveloped you like a blanket, smothering you away from any possible eavesdropping.