WHERE THEY FALL, page 27
Victor approached with his weapon in hand. Cole forced himself to be strong. Blake didn’t care about pride. She cried broken tears. Snot hung from her nose. Victor stopped and turned his head. A vague sound broke the desert silence—a distant whine.
Jonesy and Holland looked west along Mount Hopeless Road. A cloud of dust hovered above the track, caused by a vehicle travelling at speed.
“Shit! Talk about timing,” Holland groaned, still clutching his aching gut. “Stay with them,” he ordered Victor. “If they move, put a bullet in them.”
Jonesy got into a concealed position behind the helicopter as the vehicle approached. The hum intensified, the rumble of a diesel engine purred across the plains. Victor turned to steal a quick glance at the vehicle. He studied the black Hilux with tinted windows as it approached.
“That’s one of ours,” he called out to Jonesy. “That’s Sebastian returning to the lab. We were tracking them earlier.”
Jonesy lowered his weapon at the news. Holland relaxed his posture. Cole tried to grip Blake’s hand, noticing the fistful of gravel and sand. He held her at the waist instead. She was defiant to the end. Cole loved that about her.
The driver of the Hilux manoeuvred cautiously around the stationary helicopter and came to a stop beside the black van. Victor peered inside, unable to make out the features of those within because of the heavy tint. He waved. No one exited the Hilux.
A strange silence swallowed the desert as the driver turned the ignition off. No one moved. Holland stood beside the chopper with Jonesy. They both held their weapons loosely at their sides. Victor stood behind Cole and Blake clutching his Glock nine-millimetre pistol, clearly about to execute the two people kneeling in the dirt. Chung’s lifeless body lay sprawled on the gravel, the flies already crawling across her bloodied face.
The sound of the passenger door opening seemed amplified by the silence. It creaked as the door handle disengaged. Victor did a double take. Holland blinked. Jonesy’s jaw dropped when Joel Watson, dressed in Australian Defence Force army fatigues, leaped out of the vehicle with a rifle drawn.
FORTY-SEVEN
Alana had heard nothing in hours.
Victor’s last words played repeatedly through her worried mind. I’ll see you soon.
Disappointed in her own weakness, fear now consumed her. She knew the model. She understood the rules better than anyone. Was Victor coming to get rid of her, too? Had she now extinguished her value?
Sweat formed on her brow. Her hands—usually as controlled as a heart surgeon’s—shook with nervousness. She headed to her quarters to pour a glass of single malt whisky. She unscrewed the lid with a sweaty palm and poured almost to the brim of the tumbler, taking it back in a few large gulps.
Alana never showed emotion. Bordering sociopathic, Prime Technologies had hired her for her ability to execute decisions without letting emotions cloud her judgement. So why did she feel bad for Lachlan Harvey? Why did she want him to live?
She finished her glass and stared at herself in the mirror. Dishevelled, wired, corrupted. Her hair usually had a wild style, untameable and free, but as she stared at herself, she looked beyond wild. She looked rattled. Coils of hair hung in all directions, dangling over her face, giving her an unruly appearance.
Guilt plagued her conscience, something that rarely, if ever, bothered her. Two dozen subjects remained downstairs, locked in their rooms, unsure of their future, unaware of their past. Two women kidnapped at gunpoint and stripped naked, lay in cells in C5, ready to undergo trials of some of the most sinister pharmaceuticals known to man. Prime had been trialling nerve agents comparable to the extremely toxic VX chemical compound. Alana understood the effects of such poisons. She had helped manufacture them. She knew the pain it caused the victims as their bodies struggled through an agonising few minutes of muscular paralysis before succumbing to death from asphyxiation as their own diaphragm muscles lost function.
Stephen scheduled the two tourists to receive a dose of the nerve agent in just two hours. In line with the ever-presented need to collect data, one was to have it injected, the other to have it rubbed on their skin.
Alana poured another glass of whisky, took it back in one swig, and grimaced. For the first time, as she stared at the dishevelled mess in the mirror, someone she didn’t recognise stared back at her. She narrowed her eyes and threw the crystal tumbler at the mirror, shattering both the mirror and the glass into hundreds of hazardous shards. She grabbed the bottle from the table in one fell swoop and left her quarters.
Lachlan sat on the edge of his bed. He hadn’t moved in hours. His emotions had peaked and troughed. Now they plateaued in a hazy mask of disillusion. Alana and the team had left him out of the loop, as they would to any prisoner, but he knew something was amiss. They hadn’t locked him in his room for this long, ever, even on first arrival.
His door swung open with such speed that it caused him to flinch. He leaped from the bed, a reactionary instinct to movement at the door. He stopped. Alana stood at the doorway, clutching a half-full bottle of whisky. Her hair was a mess. Her mascara and eyeliner, usually presented with an artist’s perfection, had left streaks down her face. A stain covered the front of her white jacket, the top two buttons carelessly undone.
Without waiting for anything from Harvey, she entered his room, jamming the door ajar with a small stool beside the storage cupboard.
“Care for a whisky?”
She didn’t wait for Lachlan to reply. She unscrewed the lid, took a swing from the bottle and then handed the bottle to the still-stationary synthetic biologist. Lachlan took the bottle and put it to his lips. His face contorted as he swallowed, the Scottish single-malt burning his throat.
“They’ve ordered us to get rid of you,” Alana said, nonchalantly and free of emotion.
“What?”
“According to Prime, you’re a liability?” She took the bottle from his hand and took another swig. Lachlan could hear the slur in her words. Her body language was unlike anything he had seen from her to date.
“What happened to three months? What happened to fixing the processes?”
“We’re all just pawns,” Alana slurred, handing the bottle back to Harvey. “We’re all just pawns in this sadistic game.”
Lachlan looked at the contents of the whisky bottle. He took a step back as lines of worry crowded his clammy forehead.
“Oh, don’t be a fool, Lachlan,” Alana said, sensing his concern. “If we were to execute you, it wouldn’t be by poisoning you with The Macallan. That would be a waste of good whisky.”
“So what now?”
“I don’t know. We’d been making genuine progress. We met all the demands of those bureaucratic corporate cunts and now they want to throw in the towel.”
“I mean, what now for me?”
Alana stared at Harvey. Her drunken eyes spoke a thousand different messages. Somewhere in those narrowed jade-green eyes, Lachlan sensed guilt. He sensed hatred, desire, and danger.
“Right now, we’re sharing a drink.”
“And then?”
“You wouldn’t believe who funds this project,” Alana said, ignoring Lachlan’s question. “They have Aussie politicians in their pockets. They have senior members of every Police jurisdiction in the country, including the Australian Federal Police.”
Lachlan Harvey swigged from the bottle again and said nothing.
“Now, because of a few hiccups, they want to execute you. They want to execute the subjects. They want to burn the bodies of those stupid bitches downstairs. Hell… they’ll probably execute me, too.”
“This is insane!”
“Have you looked around, Lachlan? Which part of this is not insane? You said it yourself. We have played God. We have made humans from chemical composition. If the powers that be can make life so flippantly, what makes you think that they’ll struggle to take it?”
The words sunk in. Neither of them spoke. Alana’s stare trailed off somewhere in the corner. Lachlan watched the lead scientist. Her body language said it all. This was the end. Thoughts of Sharon and Allie sitting at home mourning for him raced through his numbed mind. Lachlan Harvey wasn’t a quitter. Lachlan Harvey was a survivor. He was also the most passive man one could ever meet. Anger and violence were foreign to him. He had spent his whole life being the voice of reason, the antihero to machismo and virility. But… desperate times can bring the animal out in a man.
He repositioned the bottle in his hand and swung. Alana didn’t even have time to look up. As Lachlan lunged forward, he brought the bottle down on Alana’s crown, expecting it to shatter as it made contact. It didn’t. The bottle made a solid thump sound as it split open Alana’s head. Her knees gave way like a three-legged chair as she fell to the tiled floor. Her eyes rolled back as the fleeting grip she had on consciousness left her. Blood stained her thick head of hair. She lay lifeless on the floor as Lachlan digested what he had just done.
He didn’t wait. He searched the pockets of Alana’s jacket for keys or a key card. He found a small, black fob on a thin lanyard and leaped over Alana’s body. He didn’t check to see if she was still alive. It didn’t matter. With no handle on the inside of the door, his room was a prison. Lachlan kicked the small stool out of the way and stepped into the hall, pulling the door closed behind him and trapping the unconscious, or dead, Alana inside.
Still gripping the bottle of single malt, Lachlan took off towards the vehicle compound.
FORTY-EIGHT
Jonesy had to do a double take.
He reacted too slowly, surprise working against him. Victor and Holland were equally as useless, frozen in slack-jawed confusion. Three men stepped out of the Hilux with weapons at the ready before Jonesy and Victor had time to reposition theirs. Jonesy turned to take aim. Holland dived into the sand like the coward he was.
Despite the unusual scene Joel Watson and his team faced, they assessed it with seasoned efficiency and made a call based on the information they processed. The two on their knees, defenceless in the sand, were the good guys. He knew it from their eyes. Desperate. Authentic. The others… well, they appeared to be seconds away from executing the good guys in the middle of the desert. It didn't take a genius to join the dots. Something was terribly wrong.
Joel Watson fired a precise single shot from his rifle and caught the man in the navy suit in the shoulder. The force from the high calibre bullet lifted Victor from the ground and threw him across the gravel. He rolled to a stop and dropped his pistol. Jonesy fired at the well-positioned soldiers, taking chunks out of the side of the Hilux with Jake and Ryan still holed up inside.
Bullets flew in both directions, their sound travelling across the desert scape with cinematic surround sound oddity. Jonesy screamed as a bullet from Joel Watson’s rifle hit him in the lower leg. He winced, watching the blood stain his stonewashed jeans. Before he could react, another bullet hit him in the foot, ripping through his black leather boot and exiting the other side, taking several toes with it.
“Drop your weapon,” Watson called from beside the Hilux.
Jonesy gripped his bleeding calf with one hand but still held his rifle firm.
“Wait!”
The voice rose above the sound of gunshots, high-pitched and laced with fear. Holland knelt on the sand with his badge raised in a shaking hand. “Wait,” he again demanded. “I’m an Inspector with the Victoria Police Department’s Major Crimes division. We’re on the same side.”
Painful silence. Joel Watson and his men rested their fingers against their triggers but ceased firing. Jonesy slipped into unconsciousness, blood loss and shock claiming him. Victor lay in the dirt, clutching his shoulder, his face contorted into a grimace.
“We’re not on the same side,” Watson replied. “As a man sworn to serve our fine country and defend it from enemies both outside our borders and within, you would never find me in the desert about to execute civilians.”
“Can someone get to him?” Cole interrupted, pointing to Jonesy’s lifeless body beside the chopper. “He’s losing a shitload of blood!”
Despite the heart-breaking deceit from his friend, Cole would always be Cole. His friend had burnt a bridge, but it didn’t mean he deserved to die.
“No one move,” Watson demanded.
Holland knelt in the dirt. Victor squirmed in agony. Watson and his two loyal soldiers shuffled forward, closing in on the scene before them. Blake stood. Watson studied her with interest. Scabbing covered much of her face. Dark rings hung under her blood-shot eyes. A cast covered her right arm, held to her chest in a white sling.
“We’re not civilians,” she said with her functioning hand raised in a gesture of defence. “We are detectives with the Victoria Police Department. Our superior here has gone to lengths to silence us.”
“She’s lying,” Holland screeched.
“Look, while we argue about this,” Cole interjected, “I’m going to take ten steps and see if Jonesy is still alive. If so, we need to stop that bleeding!”
Watson looked at his men. He signalled for one of them to join Cole and then nodded. Together, they surveyed Jonesy for vital signs of life. His breathing was shallow, his skin cold and clammy.
“Jonesy’s alive,” Cole bellowed across the desert wind. “We need something to compress the wounds.”
“Jonesy?” asked Talbert, Watson’s second in command. “So you know the guy?”
“Yes, we called him here. He’s from the AFP. He’s supposed to help us raid a facility just north of here. A facility where we believe a Victorian biologist is being held captive. Clearly there are more people invested in the cover-up of the facility than in doing what’s right.”
Holland’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Detective Cameron Cole. “Shut your mouth, Cam. You’re digging yourself a grave.”
“The only one that has dug themselves a grave is you, Jasper. Was it worth it? Was the money worth the lies?”
Holland turned away, unable to keep eye contact with his detective.
Talbert pulled two roller bandages from a field kit mounted to his belt. He wrapped the wound on Jonesy’s shin while Cole kept the pressure on. The rear door of the Hilux opened. Cole watched a man step out. He looked dishevelled and dirty. He looked driven, yet somehow, in contrast, completely defeated. The eyes of a broken soul bored into Coles. Cole sensed it—anguish, fear, honesty and loss.
“Do you know where this facility is?” The man asked.
Cole nodded. “We believe so.” He pointed to Chung’s body in the sand. “She gave us the coordinates.”
“They’ve taken my girlfriend. They kidnapped her from the desert track. You need to take us there.”
Blake walked towards Joel Watson, who still had his rifle raised. “Hey,” she said. “We’re not the enemy. Holland is. And that guy leaking all over his expensive suit is, too. You’re going to need time to digest the gravity of this situation. There are layers. Then, when you accept that we’re on the same side, I say we go get this man’s girlfriend back.”
FORTY-NINE
The wind howled across the tarmac, bringing with it horizontal rain.
Superintendent Casey McArthur stepped off the carpeted walkway and into the domestic terminal of Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport. He’d been in Perth with his sick sister for a week. She had declined rapidly, shortly after receiving results of a biopsy. He had never been close to his sister, living on the other side of the continent, but blood is blood. He remained with her for a week as life left her weakening body. Despite his apparent lack of compassion, he knew that staying with her had been the right thing to do.
McArthur remained entirely off the grid. He had devoted his time to his sister. He had been there with her, undistracted during her last hours. Only three years his senior, watching his sister pass at sixty-three years old made McArthur realise just how mortal we all were. Now, after a week away, he returned and turned his phone on. A barrage of text messages and voice mails pinged through.
He threw on a double-breasted overcoat as he made his way to baggage claim downstairs. The flight hadn’t even been at half capacity. The small number of commuters’ rushed towards the carousel in hypnotic-like urgency, only to get there and wait. McArthur ran his fingers through his thinning grey hair and tongued his moustache, a habit he had developed years earlier when he first started growing facial hair.
As he waited for the luggage carousel to groan to life and deliver him his Italian leather suitcase, he scrolled through his inbox. He noticed an exorbitant amount of messages from DC Rachael Blake.
URGENT.
McArthur scrolled from text to text.
CHECK YOUR EMAILS.
Another one from later that day:
CORRUPTION UNCOVERED. CHECK YOUR EMAILS!
McArthur’s eyebrow lifted.
HOLLAND IS DIRTY. WE NEED HELP!
Blake hadn’t told Cameron Cole that as they travelled west across the country from Melbourne that she sent through the files from Holland’s computer to Superintendent McArthur and First Class Commander Jones. It’s not that she hadn’t trusted Cole’s lifelong friend at the AFP, she just trusted McArthur more. Despite her distaste towards her superior, he was a cop to the core. He served for the right reasons. Victorian policing had been in his blood for generations. His great, great something had served during Melbourne’s establishment as a port settlement in the 1840s. Since then, every generation of McArthur had done their time in the Victoria Police Force. Blake didn’t doubt his honesty. She convinced herself he, of all people, had to do things by the book. She hoped she was right.
