Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (54 page)

The girl.

Caitlin found herself struck dumb and paralysed by the shock of recognition.

She knew this girl. Knew of her anyway.

The Mexican refugee. From the murdered settler family. In the madness of death and violence, Caitlin couldn’t remember the name of the girl’s father. The man who’d been run down in Kansas City. But she thought she recalled the daughter’s name.

‘Sophie. Sophie, don’t shoot!’

The teenager turned the muzzle of the gun on her, and Caitlin recognised the fugue state of close-quarter battle in her eyes. She was gone, lost in the killing.

‘Sophie. I came for your father,’ Caitlin shouted. ‘For . . . for Manuel.’

The gun stopped tracking in her direction. The girl looked confused and then upset.

‘Miguel,’ she said in a small voice. ‘My father was Miguel Pieraro. He was a good man. And this . . . this . . . Blackstone killed him.’

The hard lines and planes of the teenager’s face collapsed. It was like watching a burning tower go down. She was a pyre of vengeance and lone justice, and then it all fell in on itself, and Sofia Pieraro was a little girl in a room full of dead men and shredded bodies.

She gasped and dropped to the floor.

Jed grunted as his face struck the wet tiles of the bathroom. His arm was on fire, burning as though held in a furnace. A great crushing weight bore down on his chest as he gagged and struggled to draw air into his lungs. With his good hand, he raked at the breast bone, as though he might be able to tear through and wrench out his own heart. Fling it from his body before it betrayed him completely.

It was killing him, just when he needed to be at his strongest.

Another pile-driver slammed into his chest and he moaned as bubbles of spit foamed on his blue lips. The phone was close. He could see it, as though through a long tunnel. But in his rational mind, as clouded as it was by a descending premonition of doom, he knew, he absolutely knew, that it was within reach. If he could just get to it. Dial emergency. But he couldn’t move. Giant rubber clown hands had seized the base of his spine and started to squeeze. The grotesque sensation felt like a python running up his back, accelerating as it raced for the base of his neck. He felt the spasms close up his throat as though he were being strangled. Jed worked his jaws, as if to protest, but no sound came out, save for a gurgling moan.

Even in this extremity, his reptilian cunning did not desert him. For as dark wings folded over Jed Culver, he wondered, should he survive, whether having suffered a massive heart attack might count in his favour, win him a few sympathy points, when Kipper was deciding just how high to hang him.

*

Caitlin held up her cuffed hands where Sofia Pieraro could see them. She advanced, slowly, cautiously, even though every nerve in her body compelled her to turn and chase after Baumer.

‘It’s okay, honey. He’s gone. They’re all gone. You did well. You just need to put the gun away. Or give it to me. There’s another man here we need to get. Somebody working with Blackstone.’

The carnage and destruction were hellish. The girl had unloaded the better part of two clips into her targets at close range. The fresh, barnyard stench of slaughter, so familiar to Caitlin, was still so dense and surprising it caused her to gag. Blood, chunks of flesh, bone shards and viscera were all mixed in promiscuously and sprayed around the room as if thrown from buckets.

‘You’re done here. You have to come with me, now,’ said the Echelon agent, injecting as much authority into her voice as she dared. This girl could flip either way, dropping into catatonia, or turning the last of her ammunition on Caitlin and then herself.

She limped past the corpse of Jackson Blackstone. His dressing gown had come open, spilling the contents of his stomach over his pyjamas.

‘Can you give me the gun, Sofia?’ Caitlin asked softly. She listened for the howls of approaching sirens. It wouldn’t be long. Holding up both hands, still cuffed, out to the Mexican girl, she said, ‘I can get us out of here, Sofia. But we need to go, now.’

The teenager seemed to reach a decision. She snatched the AK-47 close to herself.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘This is mine. I keep the gun.’

‘Fair enough, then. But we have to get going. Follow me.’

‘Okay,’ the Pieraro girl said, seeming not to care what happened now as long as she had the gun. Before she moved towards Caitlin, however, the young woman took something from her pocket – three polaroids, it looked like – and dropped them on Blackstone’s corpse.

Caitlin didn’t bother to limp over and find out what sort of calling card she’d left. This chick was fucking crazy.

She did almost stop to pick up the handgun that Blackstone had used to wound her, until she remembered him firing without result at Pieraro. Emptying the magazine. She checked to see if the girl was wounded, but she appeared to have escaped without a scratch. Caitlin wasn’t surprised. It had been a long time since the Governor had seen combat, and he was firing wildly.

‘Why don’t we just go this way?’

Pieraro had stopped following her, and had turned back towards the French doors, and the darkness outside.

‘There is another man here,’ replied Caitlin. ‘We have to get him. He was a road agent,’ she added, improvising from her sketchy recall of the Pieraro file. The mere mention of the words ‘road agent’ galvanised a response from the teenager. Her face hardened and she strode up beside Caitlin, taking her by the arm and supporting her as the American hobbled along trying to keep up.

‘Be careful,’ Caitlin warned as Sofia led the way out of the library, into a hallway in the centre of the house. It was well lit, making good targets of both of them.

A blood trail led towards the front door, which stood open.

‘Oh no. You. Fucking. Don’t,’ growled Caitlin. She set her course for the exit and accelerated as best she could. Every step drove white-hot spikes of pain through her leg, arcing up her spine and into her head. To her surprise, Sofia ran ahead of her and loosed a short burst of fire out of the open doorway just before she ran though.

Nice moves, kid
, thought the veteran field operator.

‘You! Stop now!’ cried the Mexican girl.

Another short, rattling bark from the AK-47 lit up the night outside as Caitlin hurried after the younger woman. She feared that after running from light into dark her night vision would be ruined, but she needn’t have worried. Sofia Pieraro stood on the front deck, levelling the assault rifle at Bilal Baumer, who had both hands in the air and was staring at her as if pursued by an apparition from the seventh level of hell. Porch lights bathed him in a soft, yellow glow. He looked slow, disoriented. Possibly concussed. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and that side of his face looked grossly misshapen. When he saw Caitlin emerge from the house, he started to move again, only stopping when the gun roared and plowed up the earth around his feet.

Caitlin pushed past the civilian and charged at Baumer, advancing on him in great, lopsided strides. He smiled.

She caught a glimpse of porch light on the blade that appeared in his right hand.

‘I will shoot him,’ cried Sofia.

‘No! Don’t!’

Caitlin put herself between them deliberately. Turning slightly side-on to Baumer, she faced him with her injured leg to the fore, placing most of her weight on the rear foot. Her hands came up in a guard position, using the chain-link of her handcuffs to ward off the knife, which came flashing in at her as Baumer cried out, ‘
Allahu Akbar!
’

She was ready for his feint, and did not commit her block until he had switched the arc of his attack at the last moment, turning a backhanded slash into an overhead stab, aimed at the base of her neck. She pivoted on her good leg, keeping the turning circle as small as possible, parrying the stroke, and whipping her elbow back into his broken cheekbone.

Crack
!

He cried out in shock and pain. Caitlin reversed the flow of her defensive sweep, channelling her
ki
through her forearms and into a looping shield that landed concussive hammer fists on his face, shredding his lips and breaking his nose.

Holding her body close to his, jamming his knife between them so that he had no chance to use it, she raked the handcuffs down the length of his arm until she had proper control of the weapon hand. After keeping most of her weight off the injured leg until the last possible moment, she gritted her teeth and stepped through, absorbing the pain as she dragged his hand across the front of her body and down towards his hip. Reversing the direction of her attack as she brought the captive limb up, Caitlin fed Baumer’s arm into a figure-four entanglement. A downward sword-slashing move broke his arm in three places.

As he screamed, she pistoned up on her good leg, groaned as she transitioned briefly to the other, then leapt high, pulling him backward with the handcuffs as she swept them over his head and around his throat. Pivoting again on her good leg, she dropped into a half-hip throw, taking him over fast and hard. His spine snapped a fraction of a second before she twisted, screamed with her own pain one last time, and shattered the vertebrae in his neck. Caitlin came down on top of his limp, twitching body.

She was crying. Crying with pain, and rage, and relief, and horror, when the young woman appeared by their entwined bodies.

‘I know you,’ Caitlin said, expecting to die. ‘I knew of your father. A good man. I know what they did to your family.’

She waved a hand weakly back in the direction of Blackstone and his men. It was all she had.

Sofia Pieraro was shaking. She tried to smile, but her face was twitching and rubbery and the effect was perverse.

Caitlin awkwardly disentangled herself from Baumer’s body. ‘If you want to help me, you can give me a hand up,’ she said. ‘We still need to get out of here.’

She could hear sirens coming closer. Boots pounding up a gravel path.

‘Miss Kate. Miss Kate. Are you in there?’

A familiar voice. A Polish accent.

‘It is Milosz. Of GROM.’

‘Come with me,’ said Caitlin. ‘Come quickly, if you want to live.’

‘The big bastard? The Rhino? He’s about ten, maybe fifteen minutes up the track that way,’ said the park ranger.

‘You know him?’ asked Jules.

He grinned. ‘Everyone knows the Rhino. Up that way,’ he pointed along the track that crawled uphill, skirting the edge of the Noosa National Park.

It was crowded with tourists and locals. The latter were easy to pick in their bare feet and board shorts, most of them carrying short boards around the headland to a surf break that was far enough off the tourist trail to discourage daytrippers. The tourists were just as easy to spot. Pink-skinned English backpackers, Chinese tour groups, small pods of fair-haired Swedes and Germans. And Americans, of course. There was no missing them; the loudest, most colourful diaspora in the world.

Those who’d washed up here on the Sunshine Coast tended to be the wealthier, luckier ones. There was nothing like the big American ghettos of western Sydney or New Town anywhere near this strip of Queensland coastal heaven. Shah had even told her that the odious St John siblings, Phoebe and Jason, had bought themselves a family compound up in the nearby Glasshouse Mountains. She hadn’t seen those wankers since they’d left the
Aussie Rules
in Sydney and very much hoped that wouldn’t change while she was in town to visit the Rhino.

The park ranger had already gone back to pointing out a koala high in a gum tree to twenty or thirty squealing primary school children, so she didn’t bother thanking him for the directions. Jules craned her head back but couldn’t make out the animal within the clutter of the subtropical rainforest canopy. She didn’t think koalas lived in rainforests, even the dry subtropical kind, but there were plenty of gum trees salted in among the screw pine and raintree and bracken fern.

She took a swig from a water bottle and resumed the trek up the headland. ‘Not a bad day for it,’ she said to herself.

The coastline curved away in a series of scalloped bays, most of them home to easily surfed point breaks. Those closer to the seaside village of Noosa were crowded with holiday-makers. The further up the trail she climbed, through thick forests of beach lily and passion vine, the more challenging the surf conditions down below seemed to become, thinning out the crowds. Julianne was glad of the shade from the forest, even though the humidity beneath the canopy seemed much worse than it had back on the beach. After five minutes of climbing, her tee-shirt was stained with dark sweat patches, and she had finished most of her bottle of water.

Joggers ran past her in both directions, drenched with perspiration. Neither the heat nor the climb seemed to bother the surfers, at least those heading out for a ride. They ran nearly as quickly as the joggers.

Jules was in no rush. As far as she knew there was only one track in and out, so she wouldn’t miss him. She did her best to enjoy the walk. An easterly breeze pushed tentatively into the fringes of the forest, dappling the path with sunlight as the foliage hissed and swayed. Breaks in the vegetation afforded a view to the north, where the coast curved gently around to form what seemed to be a massive open bay. The main tourist beach was crowded with thousands of bathers playing in the gentle surf break. A couple of yachts and some smaller cabin cruisers, one of them hers, rode at anchor further out.

She found him standing on a sunny platform watching the surf crashing into the base of the rocky headland hundreds of feet below. There was no mistaking Rhino A. Ross. Even after a couple of months of enforced rest, and wrapped in bandages, he looked like a powerful if wounded pachyderm. Leaned up against a safety rail entwined with orchids and guinea flowers, his chin resting on his hands, he presented a lonesome, melancholy aspect.

‘Hello, Rhino,’ she said.

He stood and turned and the woebegone air that had hung around him was banished by smile and a roar.

‘Miss Jules!’

He wore an eye patch – always would now – and you could tell that half of one bandaged hand was missing, but it didn’t stop him wrapping her in a fierce hug and clapping her on the back with strength enough to wind her.

‘How are you, Rhino? I called in at Shah’s villa looking for you, but the guy at the front desk said you’d gone for your morning walk.’

‘Same time every morning,’ he said. ‘The best way to get your health back is just to get out of bed every morning and chase it. Although I’m not as fleet on the hoof as I used to be.’

One of his knees was still wrapped in a compression dressing.

‘And was that your fine vessel I saw at anchor in the bay this morning, Miss Jules?’

‘No, it’s Shah’s. I’m taking it down to Sydney for him. As a favour, you know.’

The Rhino smiled. During the last month or two, the favours had been a one-way street. The old Gurkha had looked after both of them very well.

‘Come sit yourself down in the shade, Miss Julianne,’ he offered. ‘Be a shame to ruin that peaches-and-cream complexion of yours.’

The Rhino retrieved a dark wooden walking stick from where he’d leaned it up against the fence, waving her off when she tried to lend him a hand.

‘Prefer to haul my own fat ass around, if you don’t mind, Miss Jules. No offence. Bad habit for a Rhino to get into, letting others do the heavy lifting for him.’

‘Of course,’ she replied, taking a seat on a bench shaded by a small stand of mock olive trees, wrapped in a dark creeper heavy with electric orange flowers.

The water below them was an opalescent green, fading to a deep blue further out. She wondered how many hours a day he spent up here gazing off towards the horizon. America was out there somewhere beyond the edge of the world, what was left of it anyway.

He lowered himself carefully onto the perch. Jules winced involuntarily, imagining the discomfort of his burns and all that fresh scar tissue.

‘Did you see the news this morning?’ she asked. ‘Henry made the news. The real news, I mean, not just the blogs.’

‘Don’t have much time for the news these days,’ he said. ‘Just the weather and the fishing reports, and I can get those by sticking my head out the window or hobbling down to the coffee shop.’

She took a piece of folded newsprint from the pocket of her shorts. It was damp and frayed, but still legible. Both of his hands were bandaged, and one of them was missing three fingers. Jules unfolded the clipping and held it out for him to read.

‘
Presidential confidant Cesky to face consecutive life terms
,’ he quoted from the headline. A smile formed at the edge of his mouth, but died there. ‘That’s good news, I suppose,’ he said. ‘If they convict him. If I had my way, though, he’d a-been thrown to the sharks. Worthless motherfucker.’

He read the rest of the report while she held the piece of paper as steadily as she could in the breeze. She was done with crying. She’d emptied herself of tears back in Darwin.

‘Still no sign of his daughter, then? Little Sofia,’ he said quietly after finishing the story.

Julianne didn’t reply. Miguel’s daughter had disappeared soon after his murder. The police and the FBI had listed her as a missing person, but she doubted they were doing much to find her. America was full of missing people.

‘Do you think Cesky got her?’ Jules asked.

‘I hope not,’ the Rhino said. ‘For Miguel’s sake, I would hope not. That poor family, they were good people. They deserved none of it.’

‘This life,’ sighed Jules. ‘Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.’

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Surfers, joggers and bush walkers passed by them in both directions.

‘Good of Shah to let you have his place down here,’ she said after a while, for want of anything better to fill the space between them.

‘Another good man,’ said the Rhino.

‘You think you’ll go back to Darwin when you’re better? Shah says there’s a job for you anytime you want.’

The Rhino leaned forward and rested his chin on the handle of his walking stick. ‘Yeah, I know. Piloting an armed cruiser for him off Bougainville. The big copper mine up there has had some problems with pirates and gun-runners. It wouldn’t be a million miles away from the work I used to do for the Coast Guard.’

She closed her eyes and let the sun play over her face. ‘You wouldn’t be working for yourself though, would you, Rhino?’ she asked, reading his mind. ‘Wasn’t that always the plan?’

‘That’s the thing about plans, Miss Jules. They almost never survive contact with the enemy.’ He plucked a flower and sniffed it before tossing the bright orange bloom into the undergrowth behind them. ‘And what about you?’ he asked. ‘I don’t see you working as a delivery girl in the long term.’

She opened her eyes again and smiled. ‘No, neither do I. I had thought I might try my luck back in the States, you know, after they got hold of me to testify against Cesky. Bloody video link put paid to that idea, didn’t it.’

The Rhino nodded. He’d given his initial deposition from a hospital bed in Darwin. Like her, he’d been raped by Cesky’s lawyers.

‘Come on,’ he grunted, pushing himself up off the bench, ‘walk back with me. We’ll have an early lunch.’

They started back down the trail. Jules was forced to fall in behind him every time they passed somebody heading up towards the headland.

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘What now for Lady Julianne Balwyn? Back to the ancestral estate, perhaps? I hear the new feudalism is all the rage in old England. Or is it the cruel sea for you again, m’lady? High adventure? Fortune and glory?’

She laughed. Not loudly and not for long, but she did laugh.

‘No, Rhino,’ she said. ‘An early lunch is what now for Lady Julianne. And maybe a nap in the afternoon.’