WHERE THEY FALL, page 28
A rising sense of urgency washed over Casey McArthur. Many of these text messages were twelve hours old, some more than a day. He felt his face flush. A tingling sensation travelled the length of his arms. He recalled multiple occasions over the last few years where Holland’s whereabouts had been difficult to pin point. Holland’s proposed corruption didn’t come as a complete and unjustifiable shock. He had had doubts of his own about Holland’s motives.
McArthur pulled his laptop from his briefcase and sat on a metallic and uncomfortable bench beside the carousel. He opened his Outlook and clicked the most recent unopened email. By the time he had scanned over a handful of documents, McArthur knew something sinister was afoot. Prime Technologies? Alpha Numerix? Holland’s meetings interstate and overseas seemed a little too convenient. They paid him to attend a convention on behalf of the Department, yet the correspondence in this folder placed him at a meeting with whoever the hell AC was. The correspondence saved in the folders Blake sent was a huge, flapping, red flag. McArthur had seen corruption in the force before. He knew that exploitation climbed both ways on the organisational ladder. He needed to be cautious about how he approached this. Holland needed to be brought in for questioning, but he couldn’t go public just yet. He needed to know more.
McArthur tried to call Rachael Blake. Her phone went straight to voicemail. Second, he tried Cameron Cole. The phone didn’t ring. After a few seconds of anxious silence, McArthur heard the crackled recording of Cole’s voicemail. This solidified McArthur’s fears. Never in Cole’s time on the Major Crimes squad was his phone off. His work ethic was prodigious. He would answer his phone at two am if it rang.
The carousel groaned to life. Commuters shuffled towards the black conveyor belt, waiting impatiently for their luggage. McArthur took photos of the emails and PDFs sent through from Rachael Blake and he did the only thing he felt safe to do. He called the Victorian Police Commissioner.
FIFTY
Lachlan stood alone in the empty corridor.
Adrenalin spewed through his veins as he tried to process what he had done. He placed the whisky bottle on the dull grey tiles and ripped off his lab coat as if it carried with it a type of contagious illness. The coat embodied the wrongdoings of Project Alpha. It sickened him. He flung it against the wall and watched it pile up in a ruffled mess on the floor.
He scooped up the empty bottle and ran off towards the mess hall. The garage lay on the other side of it. Beyond that was the elevator, leading him to God knows where. He didn’t have a plan. He didn’t know what he was doing. Hell, even if he got outside the facility, he didn’t know where he would go. Or how? Desperation clawed at his wild thoughts. Survival seemed so close, yet clouded by so many barriers. He knew that if he were to survive, he would need to do what he had done to Alana to others. A feeling radiated from his stomach. Like he was riding in an elevator and someone snapped the cable.
He reached the small landing separating Area A from the mess hall. On other days, black-clad soldiers had manned the door. Lachlan stood alone in the corridor, assuming the lock-down included the guards. He stepped into the empty mess hall and noticed the black shattered remains of something on the floor. A phone, perhaps. His eyes gravitated across the room and locked onto the double doors leading to the garage.
Hope rose above the violent pits of fear. As he took his first step, guilt overshadowed hope. He thought about the innocent women taken from the desert. He thought about their unfortunate fate. One of those poor women had been violated for the project’s progression. They had sent the other off to die.
Lachlan made a choice. He could have run across the empty mess hall and tried his luck in the garage. He could have fled to the surface and hoped to find his way to familiar territory. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He thought of those poor women. What if one of them was his daughter Allie? What would he go through to save her?
He turned around and took off at a brisk jog along the deserted corridor towards C5. He had been a coward his whole life. Now he needed to do what was right.
He reached the main laboratory without incident. As he turned the corner into the octagon-shaped control room, he almost bowled Stephen and Lawrence over. They stood beside the central control panel. Concern plagued them both. Something was amiss.
“Jesus, Lachlan,” Stephen said, his thick South African accent skewing Lachlan’s name. “What are you doing in here? The lab is in lockdown.”
Lachlan wiped sweat from his forehead and looked around the room. The glass cells were empty. They had moved the subjects.
“Where are the subjects?” he asked, ignoring Stephen’s question.
“We have moved them to holding cells. We’re transporting them tomorrow.”
“Transporting them where? What’s going on?”
“That’s not your concern, Lachlan.”
“And what about the tourists sent to C5?”
“What about them?”
“Are they being transported?”
Lawrence stepped toward Lachlan Harvey, noticing the bottle in his hand and the layer of shiny sweat covering his face. A tiny splatter of Alana’s blood had stained the front on Lachlan’s white sweater.
“How did you get out of your room, Lachlan? Why do you have Alana’s whisky?”
The potent tone of suspicion soured Lawrence’s questions. A delayed reply only further solidified Lawrence’s distrust.
Lachlan reacted with a pace that even took him off guard. He swung the bottle in an underarm uppercut motion and hit Lawrence in the jaw. Lawrence let out an unusual sigh as life left his lungs as he slumped sideways onto the tiles.
A gasp escaped Stephen’s lips. His overweight body shape didn’t allow for any quick movements. He looked from Lawrence on the floor to Lachlan’s frenzied eyes. Before he could raise his flabby arms in defence, Lachlan brought the bottle down on Stephen’s forehead. He grimaced but didn’t falter, his hard skull taking the brunt of the blow. Neither of them being fighters, Stephen utilised his weight and charged at Lachlan Harvey in a falling motion, attempting to smother him and bring him to the tiled floor beside the unconscious Lawrence.
Lachlan tried to lunge out of the way, but Stephen’s enormous mass made it impossible. The South African grabbed onto any part of Lachlan he could and dragged them both to the floor. Stephen had never thrown a punch in his life, but he tried, the force of it being nothing more than an irritation for Lachlan. He tried again and his weak wrist buckled from the force of the blow.
Pinned underneath Stephen’s weight, Lachlan squirmed. He tried to wriggle free, but Stephen held him firm, locking his vice-like grip around Lachlan’s upper arms. Both men writhed across the floor. Both men grunted and groaned.
As Lachlan veered closer to helplessness, he thought again of his wife and daughter. He owed it to them. He would do what he had to do for them. If his survival served any purpose, it was to get home to family and adjust his priorities. He would never again put his obsessive interest in biology over family time.
An animalistic fight-or-flight mechanism kicked in, taking over his over-analytical processing. He reached up towards Stephen’s sweaty face and gripped it, locking his index finger in the side of Stephen’s mouth. He tugged as hard as his desperate muscles allowed. Stephen squealed and tried to free himself from the vice-like grip. Lachlan tugged harder, clenching his finger on Stephen’s face. The warm flow of blood followed the sound of Stephen’s skin tearing. Lachlan Harvey yanked with everything in him, opening up Stephen’s cheek with a gruesome gash.
Stephen howled as he rolled over, freeing Lachlan enough for him to leap off the floor and reach for the first thing he could grab—a wall-mounted eighteen-inch monitor screen. He slammed the back of the monitor down on the South African’s head. Once. Twice. Lachlan roared with a primal surge of rage, unfamiliar to the passive man. Stephen’s neck crumpled sideways from the third blow and he stopped moving, lying lifeless beside his partner.
Lachlan stood up and vomited on the grey tiles.
He sucked in mouthfuls of much-needed air and looked around with rising panic. He knew they monitored the lab; the cameras mounted to the white ceilings clearly visible. Acting on impulse, he opened the closest cell and dragged Lawrence inside. Then he tried to move Stephen. He pushed him. He pulled him. Lachlan even tried rolling him over. After five minutes of backbreaking struggle, Lachlan had both scientists inside one of the glass cells designed for the subjects. He forced the door closed and engaged the lock.
An unusual sensation swept over him. He felt wrong inflicting pain on others, but strangely, he had never felt more alive. As he dashed through the small corridor towards C5, he realised the feeling that coursed through him was courage. His courage intensified with each step he took.
He turned towards the access door to C5, and that rising courage dissipated in one fleeting exhalation. He paused. Two guards stood at the door with pistols in their holsters.
“Oh, shit!”
FIFTY-ONE
Victor should have checked in by now.
The Prime Technologies security analysts attempted calling his phone. Twice. Their attempts went unanswered. Alana wasn’t answering her satellite phone, either. The procedure, which they followed diligently, dictated that Alana had to be available for a briefing via satellite phone twice daily. Since the Project’s inception, Alana had answered the phone twice a day, every day. She had never missed a beat. Now, on the same day Victor had gone dark, Alana had missed two of those calls.
Could it be a coincidence? The security analysts had their doubts.
Prime Technologies had rules. They prided themselves on inconspicuousness as much as they did on robust procedural control. One of those rules included never making contact with their counterparts in Australian law enforcement. But these were desperate times. Alexandra Chung had already missed her daily check in. Now her phone was off. Next in line was none other than Inspector Jasper Holland.
From their discreet office space in Wan Chai, Hong Kong, the security team at Prime Technologies initiated their plan. They called Jasper Holland on his emergency contact number. A number provided to him by Prime Technologies. A keep-on-at-all-times phone he needed to carry everywhere. The team got nothing. The phone was off.
Three failed contacts meant critical failure. Critical failure meant it was time to contact the board. Chen, a lowly but loyal security analyst on the seventeenth floor, activated the alarm. Within seconds, the phone beside his computer monitor rang. It had never rung before. Chen picked up the receiver with a shaky hand. The voice on the other end sounded scratchy, a filter used to disguise the caller’s voice, making them sound almost robotic. Prime Technologies didn’t take chances. They would not let voice recognition software impeach any of their senior leaders.
“Code yellow communication status,” Chen said with nervousness.
“Are you certain? Once we start this, we cannot change it.”
“Yes, sir. We cannot contact Project Alpha or its team. It’s been hours. Four missed touch points and no response from our senior partner in law enforcement.”
“Stay by the phone,” the scratchy voice said, and the phone call ended.
Richard Leung slammed the phone down with violent force. He adjusted the reading glasses on the tip of his nose and turned to two men sitting at the hardwood conference table beside him. They sat in Prime Technologies head office in Shanghai. Years earlier, they had relocated all operations to Hong Kong as a means of security. As far as the Chinese Communist Party’s manufacturing watchdogs were concerned, Prime Technologies was a medium-sized business with a focus on telecommunications and IT. The clandestine focus on synthetic biology Richard Leung had started almost a decade earlier he now covered under the guise of the shell corporation, and all operations took place offshore. They started in the Philippines before moving Project Alpha to the Australian desert. Since the lab began its operations in the arid plains of South Australia three years earlier, things had progressed without any problems. Leung and his business partners studied the current issues on a large projector screen before them. Chung appeared to be missing. Two Victorian detectives were snooping far too close for comfort. The security team placed them in South Australia. The evidence alluded to the fact that the detectives had Alexandra Chung in custody. With the help of their people in the federal police, they sent Holland and Victor up there to sort out the problems. Now they were unreachable. The lab had gone dark.
Leung and his two business partners all nodded in agreement. The setback would be crippling. It would undo years of successful operations. But having the lab found by authorities and searched would be even more crippling. Despite their stringent processes, there would be evidence on site, evidence that would point towards Alpha Numerix. People didn’t need to dig too deep to see that Alpha Numerix would point to Prime.
They nodded in agreement.
Leung picked up the receiver, turned on the voice filter, and waited. Chen picked up after just one ring.
“Extract the data,” came Leung’s robot-like voice. “Download all available information from their servers. Once the download is complete, start the failsafe.”
“The failsafe, sir?”
“Yes. We will send through the codes. They won’t find anything out there but a pile of rubble under ten metres of desert sand.”
“Yes, sir.”
The line disconnected. Chen turned to his colleague with an ashen face.
The explosives that had sat dormant in the walls of the facility for three years would finally serve their purpose.
FIFTY-TWO
Cameron Cole had thought it was the end.
Before the black Hilux came rattling over the corrugated road, Cole had squeezed Rachael Blake’s hand and said goodbye. Now that fate had a different plan, Cole couldn’t shake that unnerving sense of finality, of acceptance of the end. He was ashamed that he had given up. The fight had left him. The end had almost staked its claim. As he walked across the gravel towards Joel Watson and Jake Gibbs, he vowed he would never give up without a fight again. He owed it to Jenny. He owed it to Blake.
They made introductions. Ryan stepped out of the Hilux and joined them. Watson introduced himself to the two Major Crimes detectives. He introduced his men, Talbert and Drysdale, who used heavy-duty zip ties to restrain Holland, Jonesy, and Victor.
They spoke of the journey that brought them to the desert. Then Cole and Blake listened to Jake’s harrowing story. It helped connect the dots. The van on the highway. The bodies in the back. Chung trying so desperately to gain access to the Lyndhurst store.
Holland continued to make threats from where he sat in the sand, his wrists tied behind his back. They fell on deaf ears. Cole and Joel Watson turned their backs to the Inspector. Their plan had changed now. Cole thought he was getting a fully equipped team from the AFP for support. The idea of storming the castle, at least for Cole, had eroded, worn down and weathered like the sandstone blocks that surrounded them.
“I don’t care,” Jake replied to Cole’s concerns about lack of firepower. “If Annie is there, then I’m going. I’m taking this Hilux and I’m going in there, with or without you guys.”
“Let’s just think for a second,” Blake said, resting against the side of the vehicle.
“We have,” added Joel Watson. “They’re expecting their own guys to return in this truck, right?” We’re gonna drive straight in there and take them by surprise. That’s strategy 101, if you ask me. Look how well it just worked with these clowns.”
“And what are we going to do with these clowns?” Cole asked, pointing to the three captives on the sand. “We can’t leave them tied up in the desert. They might be the enemy, but we’re not monsters.”
Despite the betrayal, Cole couldn’t abandon them. He always tried to walk the line of decency and morality, even when the walls caved in around that line.
“Fine,” Watson sighed. “Throw them in the tray. None of them are dying. The Asian guy’s wound is superficial. Your federal cop needs a hospital. But that can wait.”
“If he dies in our custody, then—”
“Then what?” Watson raised his voice. “He was about to execute you, Cameron Cole. He was about to put a bullet in your skull and leave you out here to rot.”
“It’s not the point. We just need to monitor his vitals, is all I’m saying.”
“Well, let’s stop messing around,” Jake said. “Let’s throw these bastards in the back and go find this place.”
Jake navigated from the passenger seat as Joel Watson drove.
Cole, Blake, Ryan, Talbert and Drysdale squeezed into the back seat while Holland, Victor and Jonesy lay helpless in the tray. They had left Alex Chung and the stationary helicopter on the gravel pad. Neither would go anywhere.
Jake recognised the cattle grid and the inconspicuous track heading north. Watson turned north at the roads fork at Jake’s request. Memories flooded Jake’s weary mind. Memories of taking the same track just two days before. Larry clutching a beer. Annabelle twirling her hair on her fingertip, obsessing over that damn map. Nausea rose from his empty stomach. If only they hadn’t cut that corner. If only they didn’t have that map. Anxiety crippled him. Was it too late? Would he ever see Annabelle again?
“They’ll be okay,” he said aloud, but to no one. “They would have left them for dead out here if they didn’t want them alive.”
Cole leaned over the headrest and placed his hand on Jake’s shoulder. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. The power of human connection lifted Jake from his anxiety, even if only a fraction. Cole knew what it was like to lose his life partner, his soul mate. He didn’t wish those feelings of trauma and loss on anyone. He had only known Jake Gibbs for less than an hour. It didn’t matter. He could relate more than anyone else crammed into that truck.
