After the Flood, page 23
He’d been lying over his left arm and it had very little feeling. He tried to haul himself using the kitchen chair but he hadn’t the strength. He oriented himself, discerned the outline of the front door. He part crawled, part slithered towards it. After each couple of advances he was forced to stop to regain his breath. He was so thirsty. Now he was at the foot of the door. He reached up and turned the doorknob. Locked.
He wanted to shut his eyes and sleep. Pain shunted through his body like carnival bumper-cars. The back door, would it be locked? Probably. But he remembered something from his conversation with the realtor when he hired the place. She’d said, ‘You might want to get a new clip on the bedroom window. It doesn’t really work.’
He’d forgotten all about that until now. He hadn’t remembered to tell Thomas. He began to haul himself towards the bedroom.
‘I must have leaked a lot of blood,’ he thought. He supposed that the exertion would make it spill faster, tearing open any clotting. It had to be done. His left arm was still useless so he would stretch out his right arm and then pull while pushing with his feet. An image came to him of one of the statues in Gabrielly’s mother’s house, Jesus with his palms pointing out and blood flowing from them. He did not think of himself as Jesus but he did whisper to Gabrielly: ‘Help me.’
And somehow, he made it to the foot of the worn bed with the sagging mattress in the stale-air room. He was feeling light-headed but he dared not stop. He seized the bedpost closest to the wall and hauled himself up. The curtain was rough and stiff and smelled like it had been stored in an attic. He stuck his head under and reached for the clasp on the sliding aluminium window. Broken it might be but it still had some grip. He squeezed and it gave. He slid open the window and felt moving air. Flywire. Damn. He didn’t have the energy to return for a knife. He pushed his head into the flywire but he was too weak to break it. He hauled his whole body onto the bed and pushed. This time his weight was enough.
It wrapped around his face like a veil and he pitched forward, out of the open window, his stomach across the sill, his knees and legs still on the bed inside. He put his hands down and his fingers touched the gravel side of the house. He thrust forward and felt himself tumbling.
The slight breeze with an ocean tang revived him momentarily and he made a few metres crawling quite quickly to the front of the house but then the effort told and he felt faint and dizzy, only worse than before. He took a long moment to get his breath and pushed again. Then again.
He could barely lift his head now and there was a dull humming in his ears. He thought he heard Gabrielly’s voice above the hum and he rolled on his back and looked up and she was looking down on him, the light in her eyes a zillion stars. Sometimes he and Gabrielly would sit out in front of her little house and look up at these same stars. How many million people had they seen die in their lifetime he wondered? He had been a lucky man to have found Gabrielly and Ingrid. But Ingrid was in danger. Because of him. He rolled back onto his stomach and dragged himself forward. The humming was really loud now and everything was even blacker. He tried with all his might to go forward but he was immobile. He did not think there was enough liquid in his body to cry but he did. He thought he lifted his chin but he couldn’t be sure. Dark swirled, the buzz in his ears grew louder and a last jolt of panic shot through him.
He was about to die. His last conscious thought was that this was his last conscious thought.
26
The hire boat could do eighty k per hour but there was no need to open it up and attract undue attention. Thomas pointed it generally west, angling to the south towards the island. The night was a low fever but as the boat surged through the dark it produced a palliative breeze. Paul had assured him that at night they would be able to bring the boat in close to shore without being challenged. If they were challenged, they would have to anchor further out and swim in. His biggest worry was the explosives getting wet but Seydoux had assured him the bomb was waterproofed, the explosive in plastic rammed into a PVC tube, closed at both ends apart from the line to the booster. There were places you could take the boat right up onto the beach but it being night and Thomas never having been here before, he would play safe, get within fifty metres of the shore, and swim the rest of the way.
It had not been his original choice to despatch Paul but he had to admit that it actually worked out well for them. Paul was the weak link, and while he had believed Paul was to be trusted and would never have given them up, it had turned out quite clearly that he had been wrong. Still, Paul had suffered and, unlike Seydoux, was more cowardly than treacherous. Even had there been time, Thomas would not have crucified him. His pulse was gone when they cleared out. By the time the police eventually linked them, they would be well out of the area.
It had been foolish of Paul to lose his burning demand for retribution because he had met some woman. Most women will betray you. He stared through the plexiglass at Annika sitting cross-legged on the foredeck. She was different, one in a million.
An image of his mother began to pry open a box of memories. He tried to push her out but she defiantly kept her toe in there. He shook his head to clear her. It wasn’t long now and he’d be able to burn the hurtful memories on a giant pyre. The lights of the island showed as small white globs on the horizon.
Soon.
Of all the dumb things I’ve done, thought Clement, this is possibly the dumbest. Aloft in this dark sky, a metallic reverberation travelling up his backside and through his body the only thing to connect him to the real world, while his thoughts galloped unfettered. They had travelled over a vast continent of memories and emotions, from Phoebe and fatherhood to his unfortunate experimentation with being a sex-machine. They had trawled through the ashes of the case, the false leads, his own shortcomings. The whole two-and-a-half hours he’d been in the air, they were being funnelled to the same end point: Was this a wild-goose chase? Would Risely crucify him if it turned out to be so, and probably more likely, would somebody crucify Risely if he didn’t?
The word ‘crucify’ pinched him.
That was where this case had started after all. He couldn’t see Earle in the seat behind without twisting and he wondered if he might be similarly troubled on Clement’s behalf. Clement being the senior man had taken the seat next to Cindy, their pilot, and, being the senior man, he would also be the one where the buck stopped. Yes, he could have called Risely, woken him and laid his cards on the table.
‘Listen, I have this hunch about what Berryman and Styles might be up to.’
The trouble was his cards were all twos and threes. Risely would have said, ‘Well what do you have exactly?’
And he would have tried to talk up his case. Somebody had booked a private boat-hire with Seydoux. This, through his own fault, had until this evening been overlooked. It seemed inconsequential. Until you started to ask yourself, well who did book that boat? And why would they have gone through with it?
At which point Risely would, quite correctly, have asked what he’d been able to find out from the people who hired the boat. This is where it got sticky. Mark Coleman was currently incommunicado somewhere at sea. There was no reception on his phone at the moment and until he radioed in no means of immediately contacting him. And time might be of the essence.
Clement would explain how he had tried the Deep Adventures after-hours number and got the office manager, Safavi, who knew hardly anything about the hire because it wasn’t an official hire. But she did know that the hire had gone ahead. Coleman had headed into the marina early this morning with twin outboards and a trailer for Seydoux’s client. But that was all she knew, no names, no numbers and no gender. The client’s driver’s licence and a copy of the deposit would likely be with Coleman on his phone. He would have snapped those but had probably not yet had time to upload because he went almost straight out on the charter. The contract might be somewhere at work but it could take time to dig up. Time Clement felt they might not have. He had asked Safavi to please get into work and try to find that contract and send an electronic copy to him as soon as possible.
Nothing yet. And he knew what Risely would say, would be obliged to point out, that it may simply be a normal hire.
Of course, it might not be Berryman and Styles. But to ignore that possibility was to Clement negligent, for the boat might be less about escape and more about completing a plan of action. He would have said to Risely exactly what he’d said to himself.
‘Think about it. Maybe the target isn’t on land. Maybe that’s why Seydoux was so appealing, because what they wanted to blow up had to be approached by sea. What if they wanted to make an almighty political statement? What target would serve that purpose best?’
And there he had come up with one obvious answer: a gas train. If that was the target, you would strike at night and from the water. He felt a tap on his arm and saw Cindy pointing to a yellow-white halo in the darkness below. The island.
He motored in slowly now as quietly as possible. They had approached from the opposite end of the island to the long jetty where ships berthed and filled up with their LNG cargo. Paul had told them there were no tankers scheduled for this evening and that would mean less activity in general. It was also only a thin moon so they were close to invisible as the bright mushrooms of light where the main plant was located did not reach this far. It was a little after midnight now and close to high tide. While it meant they had to swim a short distance to shore, it was preferable to arriving at low tide when they would be stranded further away. The slow bass chug of machinery reached out from the island and brushed his ears but he heard no voices or rushing vehicles. They would be able to walk unhindered towards the plant’s outer fence, cut through that and advance to the gates of the inner fence for which, thanks to Paul, they had passes that would enable them to stroll in through the gate. Then it was a matter of planting the bomb, setting the timer and retracing their steps. If all went smoothly, he would also set the booster to detonate but if there were any problems, he would keep that in reserve. He cut the engine and dropped a light anchor. Then he fetched the small plastic raft from the cabin where it was already inflated. His eyes met Annika’s and he was taken by surprise when she swept into his chest and raised her mouth for a kiss. He detested such dramatic gestures but he went along with it.
The shore was no more than about thirty metres from them and though extremely venomous jellyfish could be found in these waters from November on, he considered the risk low given the short time they would be in the water. Even had the water not been so warm as it was, he would have avoided using a wetsuit because the sooner they were in land gear, the better. He had debated whether to leave Annika with the boat, the original plan, with Seydoux and him going ashore. In the end he thought it was better that she joined him. They stripped down to their bather bottoms, both of them electing to go bare-chested. After carefully loading the backpacks containing the explosives into the raft, they added plastic bags with ‘work’ clothes, boots, tools and torches. Then they slipped on fins. He sat on the edge of the boat and dropped in first, like a teabag in the tepid water, he thought to himself. She carefully handed down the little raft with the backpacks, the bombs inside. The water was calm with very little movement. She followed his lead and they began quickly kicking towards the rocky shore. They were there in no time. He felt his fins dragging over rocks and went horizontal, pushing the raft ahead. Using the fins as protection he clambered the last couple of rocky metres to land. Annika followed. They slipped off their fins and opened the plastic bags, dried themselves with a small towel then pulled on dark blue drill pants and orange safety jackets with silver flashing. After putting on socks and boots, they clipped their passes to their hips. He made a neat pile of the fins and bags and slipped on the first backpack. It wasn’t heavy at all. He helped Annika with hers.
‘Like going for a hike,’ she whispered and it was the first either of them had spoken for minutes. From the plastic bag he retrieved wire-cutters, a torch and a lethal-looking knife which he slipped into a scabbard on his belt, hidden by the large jacket. Seydoux had warned him against trying to acquire guns.
‘If we need guns, we haven’t done it right,’ he said. ‘And the police are always onto that sort of thing. Where are you going to get a secret gun from? Bikies? You can’t trust them. And the police could be monitoring them. All you need is a diver’s knife, just in case something unexpected crops up.’
They made ground easily, heading two o’clock in direction. It was about one hundred metres of low rock, tufty scrub and sand before the outer fence. The only cover came from a few giant termite mounds. Thanks to the narrow moon they were in darkness for more than half of this journey, however as they drew closer to the perimeter fence, talons of strong artificial light stretched towards them. According to Paul, this outside fence was not alarmed or electrified although there were intermittent cameras, not in this little quadrant though. As he reached for his wire-cutters, he remembered what the Frenchman had said.
‘Get the best make you can. It’s a lot harder to cut through wire than you think, especially if it is fairly new. This stuff you see on TV where they snip away like with paper is bullshit. Make sure you practise.’
And he had taken the Frenchman at his word and practised regularly, strengthening the muscles in his hand. Of course, they could have taken the risk and gone in through the gate using their passes but if anybody saw them, two workers coming in from outside the perimeter fence might arouse unwanted curiosity.
‘What’s up?’ ‘Is there a problem?’ He could imagine the conversations and then he would need convincing answers.
No, this was better. As he started cutting the first strands of thick wire, he heard a droning hum above the bedrock noise of the plant. It took him a moment to place it but then he realised what it was, the engines of a light plane. From the sound of it, it was drawing closer.
Because they had left with such haste, there had not been time to forewarn the island of their take-off, and they had been well into their flight before pilot Cindy had been able to raise the island’s command centre to prepare them for the landing. She assured Clement and Earle she could manage regardless.
‘There is so much light from the plant I might as well be flying into Perth,’ she laughed. ‘But best to make sure there’s no grader sitting on the strip when we land.’
Clement had her alert the island command centre that two detectives were on their way in and Clement identified himself and explained that while they should not be alarmed, the security staff should be well and truly on the alert if they weren’t already. It was just as well that Clement did this, for the notification they should have received already had fallen between the cracks. Perhaps whoever had been told to alert mining companies about the bomb threats had taken that literally and neglected other resource companies. Regardless, it was the first they’d heard of it.
The small plane dove through the black curtain towards the artificial light, descending into the giant metal maw: all around them were ladders, tubes, pipes, cylinders, fences, platforms. They touched down on the strip, bounced for a few hops and then coasted to a halt.
The strip between the fences was around seventy metres wide, mainly low scrub with a rim of gravel bordering the outer fence through which they had just crossed. They were in full light now and heading like they belonged towards the gate that Paul had assured them would take them to the inner sanctum. Thomas was feeling confident. Surely had the security people suspected anything they would have been patrolling the waters. But when he was only about twenty metres from the gate, he heard shouting. On the plant side of the fence, men sprinted from a donga and headed to a brace of four-wheel drives parked out front. As they powered up, a golf cart containing two men came speeding along on the strip between the two fences where Thomas and Annika were currently trapped. It was about thirty metres back, gaining quickly. These men did not wear the bright jackets that matched their own and those on a few other workers in the inner area that Thomas could see. Those in the cart and the ones who had sprinted from the donga wore navy-blue overalls: security. Annika swung towards him, her eyes wide with panic. His own heart was thumping. He swung the backpack off his shoulder and slid open the zip. His fingers could flick the detonator timer on from there. The golf cart was hugging the narrow gravel strip near the outer fence, the passenger shining a torch at the wire. It had already passed the point where he and Annika had entered. From the looks of it, it might not have spied the damage. He didn’t think they’d been seen yet. His brain was spinning. Stand? Run? Detonate? The light plane – had that brought news? Had Paul been found? They stood stock-still as the cart passed them. Then it swung around and came back towards them. He debated, the knife or the bomb? There were two of them, they would overpower him if it was just the knife. The fingers of his right hand were inside the bag now, touching the timer.
The cart’s lights hit them in the face. They had come so close. Defeat tasted bitter at the back of his throat.
‘We’ve got a report of a potential security threat,’ said the broad Australian voice from behind the light. ‘You haven’t seen anything?’
He was shaking his head before he’d thought about it. ‘Nah. What sort of threat?’
He saw the man’s eyes flick over their security passes, satisfied.
‘Not sure. Disgruntled greenies, I think. Keep a lookout.’
Then the cart looped back and continued in the direction it had been heading. But now he could see the four-wheel drive was leaving the inner compound via a boom gate.
So, somehow or other they had discovered something was up.
It had to be Paul. Somebody must have found his body in the house.
‘What do we do?’ Annika pressed into him.
