Assassin (18 page)

The woman wore blood-red stiletto shoes in a shiny patent leather, the heels as sharp as needles. She was just his type — petite and curvy, with ample breasts disguised beneath a cowl-neck minidress and little dimples above her tanned knees. She had kinky hair in a mousy brown, and large, sad eyes that seemed to search for him through the slow, late-night crowd. He’d spotted her through the large window, even before she set foot in the White Cockatoo. He’d known she would come to him.

The ones in stilettos were asking for it.

And the ones in the red stilettos?

They were desperate for it.

The woman looked around with an air of uncertainty, standing between the small circular tables and attracting a couple of looks. He watched her reflection in the mirror behind the bar, locked on to her signal, her vulnerability, her presence. He felt stronger with her proximity, felt like the predator he longed to be, the predator he was fast becoming after Victoria. He’d claimed one prize and he would claim
another to prove to himself that he could, to prove to himself that he was as powerful as those he admired, to prove it to the world. He kept his cap tilted down, trying not to beam with the joy of seeing the lovely, lonely, perfect woman, drawn to him as if by some dark magic. Taking careful sips of Victoria Bitter, he watched her every move in the reflection between the bottles.

The woman neared him, crossing the room. She arrived just next to him and leaned forwards, flicking her hair to one side and sliding a small leather handbag onto the bar, one brown, lightly freckled forearm only inches from his wrist. His pulse jumped.

‘Um … bartender?’ she said in a voice that was timid and immediately washed away by music coming through the speakers nearby.

But
he
heard her. He heard
everything
she was saying. She had an Australian accent, but she wasn’t local. He would already have noticed her if she was.

‘Um, can I have a Heineken, please?’ the woman said, trying again, seemingly unaware that she was being closely watched by the very man who could give her what she needed. It was her subconscious that had brought her there. Her subconscious. It was like that with all of them. It had been like that with Victoria, who’d shown herself to him again and again until he finally took her, just as she’d silently begged him to, with her high shoes and her coyly averted eyes and her brazen body. Displayed.

He shut his eyes and inhaled. He smelled cigarettes on her. He smelled her sex.

The music changed, and he took another sip of his beer and placed it back on the bar. The bartender was filling a mug for
the woman now. A large mug. It would be easy to drop a pill into it. Just a single white pill and by the end of that drink he would have her and she would get what she was asking for. He reached into his pocket.

‘Hey!’

Someone was between them now, interfering. He drew a sharp breath and stayed hunched over his drink, watching in the reflection as everything around him shifted. It was a blonde woman. She was fat and sweaty, and she tapped his woman’s shoulder with a manicured hand and slid in next to her, standing with her back to him; he seethed quietly, his view obliterated.

He kept his head down, breathing quickly. In his pants pocket, he unclenched his hand, let go of the little pill.

‘Hey, what took you so long?’ the woman in the red shoes said and embraced the blonde interloper as he sat frozen on his stool, looking at his beer and fighting violent thoughts.

‘One more, please. Bartender?’ the woman in the red shoes ordered, before she and her disgusting friend began an animated discussion about a band he had not heard of and would never see. He groaned — a primal sound so animal and low that no one would hear it. He removed his leather wallet, his mouth tight with anger. He found some bills, put his crumpled money on the bar and vacated his favourite stool to slide away into the night shadows. He would find her, he felt certain. He would find her.

Another night.

The man was slim and white and unremarkable, and he was walking around slowly under the harsh, colourless fluorescent lights of a convenience store; the place was lit up like a TV set
in the darkness of Surry Hills. An actor in the most boring play ever conceived, he walked from aisle to aisle, listlessly, wearing camouflage pants, sneakers and a T-shirt, his every non-action artificially lit. His face was slack and he held something red in his hand. Occasionally, he scratched himself.

Senior Constable Perkins loitered outside, watching.

The man in the overlit convenience store browsed a magazine rack near the register. He picked up the
Daily Telegraph
. Put it down. He picked up the
Tribune
, flicked through a few pages. Put it down. He picked up a
ZOO
magazine, considered the heavily endowed creature on the front — her red string bikini, her platinum hair — and put it down. Finally, he turned left and walked with agonising slowness to a humming fridge full of overpriced water and soft drinks and milk. He opened it. Pulled out a carton. Closed the door again. He shuffled towards the counter. Paused. Picked a can of soup off a shelf. Turned it over in his hands. Put it back.

Christ.

Perkins rubbed his neck.

The man abandoned the can of soup and brought his carton of milk to the counter. He fished around in his pocket. He pointed at something on the rack below the counter, spoke in a voice too low for Perkins to make out.

The man behind the counter was a young Sikh. He wore a white turban and a look of intense boredom. ‘It says right on it,’ he protested in loud, accented English and threw up his palms.

The man picked up a packet of gum and dropped it on the counter next to the milk. The Sikh rang it up on the till and the man took a while to count out his change, one coin at a time.

Perkins moved across the street, away from the store. He stopped outside a busy Japanese restaurant and watched the man exit the shop and cross the street at the zebra crossing, toting his white plastic bag. He’d bought a carton of milk and a packet of gum. Perkins would note it all down — the time, the place, the purchases.

He pulled out his phone. Dialled. ‘Headed your way,’ Perkins said. He leaned a shoulder against the side of the grubby building and flicked a spent cigarette on the ground, crushed it with his heel.

‘He’s still alone?’ the sergeant asked down the line.

‘Alone,’ Perkins confirmed, watching the man’s back as he walked, the swinging plastic bag shifting back and forth.

If the sergeant was disappointed, he didn’t let on. ‘Hold your post,’ was all he said and hung up. Perkins pocketed his phone and pulled out his Benson & Hedges. He lit another cigarette and took a long, slow drag. Next to him, a man opened the door for an attractive woman, the chatter of the restaurant spilling onto the street. The woman stepped onto the street right next to him, laughing at something her companion had said. She threw an arm around his neck and leaned in for a kiss, the back of her jacket riding up to reveal a line of flesh across her hips.

Senior Constable Perkins squinted at their embrace, took another drag and looked away.

He was part of a six-person surveillance team watching the every move of one John Allan Dayle, a person of interest in a recent homicide. Perkins had been on a number of major operations and though this was his first day on this particular gig, thus far, he was not impressed. Firstly, the guy looked pretty damn ordinary. He did not look like a serial killer.
Secondly, his house was in a very difficult location for surveillance from a vehicle because an unfamiliar car would stand out on Davoren Lane like dog’s balls on a bird. They didn’t have a pole camera installed, weren’t sure when they’d get one, and until STIB, the Special Technical Investigations Branch, got a plant inside — which could take weeks knowing their backlog and all the bullshit with the warrants — it would mean a hell of a lot of standing around for Perkins and the rest of the team. Perkins didn’t like it. The team leader, his sergeant, had hoped a neighbour would assist by letting the team set up in a room of their house, but so far they’d been knocked back. Fucking Surry Hills.

But the third and most important reason Perkins did not like this new job was simple. It was because of the feds. It was the feds who had decided on this guy, Dayle, he’d heard. A couple of federal agents from Canberra had been called in to consult on the case. ‘Profilers’. They had fingered this Dayle guy, recommended this surveillance be done.

Perkins knew a thing or two about profiling.

He’d read the latest research debunking so-called ‘behavioural science’ as nonsense.
Science. Fuck me.
He’d seen Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in
The New Yorker
and he didn’t have much time for profiler voodoo bullshit. These people weren’t cops. They hadn’t done a day of police work in their lives. They didn’t know shit, as far as he was concerned.

Perkins finished his cigarette and flicked it on the ground.

Fucking profilers.

The Edmund Barton building consumed a full Barton city block, framed by flat tracts of asphalt car park on two sides, hemmed in by evenly spaced government regulation trees. The building’s early 1970s Seidler architecture was imposing and strange. A bunker for an alien race.

Makedde drifted past in her stolen Holden, taking in the familiar architecture of the Australian Federal Police Canberra headquarters. The bunker-like shell had vehicular access points barred by large, cylindrical posts which slid silently into the ground for all those with clearance to pass, tunnelling down into hidden subterranean parking chambers. The grid of roads surrounding the building was dotted with red AFP cars. Metal detectors were visible through the glass of the main entrance. Surveillance cameras were mounted everywhere. The open courtyard was incongruous: though it had been designed for public access, the outdoor area had been fairly unwelcoming since the AFP moved in. It possessed all the sense of freedom of a prison exercise yard, despite the presence of a small eating area with blue café umbrellas, currently closed. Makedde
had sipped coffee there on occasion, under the gaze of the six storeys of interior windows, when she and Andy had first moved to Canberra together. He’d wanted to show her off. At first.

Mak knew she was being filmed, but she cared very little. She doubted anyone would recognise her or bother to check the tape and so notice the plates of a stolen car. She was a dead girl from Canada. A nonentity. The feds had better things to do. Like nail Jack Cavanagh and his corrupt colleagues. She’d come here on emotional instinct. It was well after dark, but she half expected to see his red Honda sitting outside. He’d pulled a lot of night shifts towards the end of their relationship. She doubted that had changed. But no, his car could not be seen.

Andy.

Soon Mak was parked, suburbs away, walking through the pleasant Canberra night air on quiet sneakers. She approached the familiar house, feeling almost playful. It was a three-bedroom dwelling, and she knew the layout intimately — the exits, the floor plan and what she would likely find inside. She recognised the car out the front and as she walked past it she dipped in one smooth movement, attaching the magnetic tracking device to its underside.

Andy Flynn woke with a start. He tensed and sat up. Something had woken him. A noise? As his eyes adjusted, he saw a dark figure standing in his bedroom.

Shit. Where is my sidearm?

Andy leaped out from beneath the sheets and rolled to the floor beside his bed, crouching out of view and out of firing range of the intruder. There was a baseball bat under the bed somewhere …

Where the FUCK did I put my sidearm?

‘Andy.’ The voice was familiar.

The intruder stepped forwards, revealing herself to be a tall woman with a face crowned by darkness.
That face.
He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

He reached up and turned on the bedside lamp. A small, dim pool of light illuminated the room.

It
is
her.

Mak was standing near the foot of his bed — a bed they’d bought together. She was dressed in head-to-toe black, and she was wearing a hood. No, it was a wig, a dark wig. She looked quite changed, but it was unmistakeably her. As the reality set in, he found he could say nothing for almost a minute. A swell of emotion rose in his throat. He was relieved, overjoyed, confused, angry. He and Mak had tried living together here, a kind of last-ditch effort to make it work after five years of on-and-off dating. She’d moved her life to Canberra in a gesture of commitment after he landed the job of setting up the national profiling unit. But of course the new setting hadn’t fixed their old problems. He’d screwed it up. Of course. When had he not screwed it up? He’d had walls up. He’d had issues. He’d had steam to blow off. This
was
her, wasn’t it? This wasn’t a dream? A nightmare? But if he wasn’t dreaming this, then what the hell was Makedde Vanderwall doing here, in his bedroom in the middle of the night, unannounced, months after leaving him?

‘You won’t be needing my baseball bat,’ she said calmly.

It was already in his hands. A reflex. He put the bat down on the carpet at his feet and stood up to his full height. He’d been sleeping naked, he now remembered, and in the low light he thought he detected a slight grin on the face of his intruder. The lamp would have him backlit, right at crotch level. Andy
took a step towards her and she threw something at him. A pair of his jeans. He held them up in front of himself with one hand. ‘I guess we aren’t on those kinds of terms any more,’ he said and laughed, surprising himself. The grin remained on the woman’s face for a moment, and then faded.

He pulled his jeans on slowly and did up the buttons. This was perhaps the first time Mak had helped him get dressed. ‘It’s good to see you.’ An understatement. ‘I thought …’ He trailed off, unwilling to describe his greatest fear aloud.

I thought you were dead.

He’d lost count of how many messages he’d left for her. ‘Why didn’t you call me back?’ he asked. ‘Why didn’t you leave me some kind of sign? Anything?’

‘Because I’m dead.’ She spoke slowly. The grin was nowhere to be found.

What?

She seemed vastly different from his memory of her, yet this
was
Mak. There was no broad, dazzling smile. No rush of warmth or even anger. She looked uncharacteristically pale beneath the dark hair. He didn’t like the changes he saw. Nevertheless, she was still devastatingly beautiful to him. His body was already responding, despite himself. Hers was a face that had filled his thoughts and desires for years and that was not something you could just switch off. Especially now, when he was so thoroughly unprepared for her presence.

‘You won’t be needing this.’ She placed his Glock gently on the end of the bed. ‘I didn’t want you waking up and blowing my head off.’

My sidearm.

He felt his cheeks grow hot. Thank God it was only her and not some real intruder. Was he losing his touch so badly that
Mak of all people could come into the house and take his gun without waking him?

‘You kept your key.’

She laughed, but the sound had no mirth. ‘I don’t even have Loulou’s keys.’ The friend she’d stayed with in Sydney when she’d left him. ‘I don’t have anything any more.’

‘Why?’ he finally asked. ‘What happened over there?’

She walked around the bed and sat on the edge. Her shoulders slumped and he noticed she had something slung over her middle: a slim black case. ‘I am sorry to arrive like this, but I had to talk to you in person,’ she said.

‘You couldn’t have warned me? Let me know you are all right?’ He frowned and sat next to her in the bedroom that had once been theirs.

‘No,’ she replied flatly.

They sat together for a moment, not quite touching.

‘You’re the only person I trust — as it turns out,’ she confessed softly, sounding a little surprised at that truth.

The long fingers of her left hand strayed to his, and he instinctively placed his hand over hers. It felt cool under his fingertips as he traced her knuckles, feeling her smooth skin, the familiarity of a hand he’d held so many times, a hand he’d once wanted to put a ring on. Though she was fully dressed, he was clothed only in his jeans, and with her unexpected proximity and the intimacy of the moment, he felt an urge to kiss her and pull her down onto the bed with him.

He shook his head. ‘Jesus, Mak, what is this? Where have you been? Paris this whole time? What happened?’

‘The Cavanaghs happened.’

‘Tell me.’

For a stretch of time he sat beside her, stunned into silence, holding her hand and listening. He listened to how she’d found Adam Hart in Paris, and sent him back to his worried mother in Australia, seeing him off at the airport. She’d planned to holiday in Paris for a while — that part pained him somewhat because seeing Paris was something he’d always wanted to do with her, but he did not interrupt. And then she told him what had happened with Luther Hand, the man who abducted her. She spoke so steadily, so evenly, it shocked him. It was as if she had practised talking about these horrible things, like she’d read them in a book and it had not really happened to her at all. But when she got to the part about the fire, she shuddered and her words stopped abruptly.

Andy held her hand speechlessly as she stared off towards the dark window. He wondered what she was seeing.

He knew not to push for more information. It was best to address the present for now. ‘You have to tell your father you are alive. This is killing him. He’s called me every week since you went missing,’ he urged her.

‘
Dad.
’ Tears sprang from her eyes, but she stood up and wiped them away quickly. ‘I know. Trust me, I know. It’s awful. But I can’t contact him. You know how connected he is. The moment he stops agitating to find me they’ll know I’m alive. They’ll know that he knows, and that will put him in danger.’

It was serious then. More serious even than Andy had thought.

‘I can’t tell him yet. Not until more time passes,’ she continued, her throat sounding tight.

He waited for more.

‘Andy, there’s a price on my head. Half a million Euros. God knows how many freelancers are after me for a chance at that kind of cash.’

‘Are you sure? That’s a lot of money.’

She shot him a sobering look.

‘I didn’t mean to say you could be wrong, but —’

‘I know it’s a lot of money, Andy. Jesus, you think I don’t know that? That’s the problem. I know the price because I lived in Luther Hand’s apartment for weeks. I watched his communications. They tried contacting him and when he didn’t, I don’t know, didn’t give the special signal or whatever, they knew he’d failed. They put out another hit and this time it’s not one killer I have to look out for — it’s many. You don’t know what I’ve been through in the past few days …’

She trailed off, then started again. ‘I know I got in too deep. You tried telling me that. You warned me I was getting …
obsessed
with the Cavanaghs.’ When Mak got a taste of injustice she just couldn’t let it go. ‘You know the investigation you warned me about? The one I wasn’t to get in the way of? Tell me what’s happening. The media has been all but silent about the Cavanaghs recently.’

‘There is pressure on,’ he said.

‘
Pressure?
’

‘Jack Cavanagh is a heavy hitter,’ he explained uncomfortably.

‘I’ve noticed that.’

‘There was an investigation launched by the AFP, with talk for a while about a possible link between Cavanagh’s organisation and an international crime ring operating from Queensland, but … it’s gone quiet,’ he regretted to add. That
was all Andy had to offer: possible links that seemed to have gone nowhere. Depressing news, yet Mak’s eyes had lit up.

‘Queensland?’ she said. ‘I have something for you.’ She slid the strap from her shoulder and opened the case. It was a small laptop. ‘This belonged to the man the Cavanaghs sent to kill me. Luther Hand is what he called himself — or one of the names, anyway. I believe there may be evidence here to link him back to the Cavanaghs.’

‘What kind of evidence? Where is Luther now?’

‘Dead.’ Her voice was toneless.

He waited for her to explain, but she didn’t.

‘This has to be enough to help prosecutors get a trial over the line,’ she said in a hopeful voice, gesturing to the computer. ‘This man, Hand, was a trained killer and highly paid.
Very
highly paid. Who else but Jack Cavanagh would pay so much to prevent me from returning to Australia alive?’

Andy frowned. Some very hard proof would be needed to take down Jack Cavanagh.

‘He kept notes on his work,’ Mak continued, ‘and though I haven’t been able to make sense of all of it, a forensic computer expert could. There are numbered sequences and initials that I think identify individuals he worked with, and could identify traceable payments, accounts, that sort of thing. And there are references to me and to the Cavanaghs. I had to give this to you, Andy. I couldn’t trust a courier with it.’

Her blue-green eyes seemed to plead with him. She appeared hopeful that the risks she’d taken to reach him would prove to be worthwhile.

‘Be very careful, Andy,’ she warned. ‘If they know you have this, you could become a target. Be careful whom you trust with this.’

Perhaps Jack Cavanagh had bought some influence in the NSW police force and local government. But could his tentacles really reach as far as Canberra? As far as the AFP? Just how careful would Andy have to be?

‘I’m glad you brought this to me. I’m glad you knew you could trust me, Mak.’ He reached out to her and she let him put his hand on hers again. ‘Now you need to be in witness protection. We can look after you.’

She pulled her hand away. ‘Like hell you can. I’d be a sitting duck.’

‘Whatever this computer has on it will be far more valuable with you as a witness,’ he reasoned. ‘You have to explain what happened and how you obtained it.’

Mak gave him a joyless grin. ‘Really? And say what, that I killed this guy and took his laptop?’

‘Yes. Tell the truth. Tell them what you told me. Tell them what you’ve been through.’

‘And you really think I’d make it to trial? How long would that be? A year? Longer? There’s no way they’ll let me live that long.’

‘We can protect you. It’s a good system, Mak. It’s totally separate from us, from the state cops, too. No one would know where you were.’

‘You wouldn’t know where I was. Sure. But someone would. And all it takes is that someone wanting something — cash, a promotion, a morsel of power. Jack Cavanagh can give it to them. That’s the way it is, Andy.’

‘There are good cops out there, Mak.’

‘Don’t patronise me, Andy. I know most cops are honest — my own father was one — but it only takes one who isn’t to get me killed.’

He took her shoulders in his hands and was shocked by the way they felt: they were hard with unfamiliar muscle. ‘Don’t give up on us, Mak. We are close to getting him.’