Underground (6 page)

But questions still rattled around my mind. Three dead bodies, just like that. ‘So, what, did you have these guys under surveillance or something?’

‘These are security matters, sir. I can’t discuss them.’

‘But . . . look, they told me things. I think they were planning to kill me, so they didn’t care what I knew. They’re called the Great Southern Jihad.’

‘You’ll be fully debriefed, sir.’

‘No, listen, they said they were the ones who nuked Canberra.’

He gave me a somewhat pitying look, then cleared his throat politely. ‘I expect a lot of people say the same thing.’

‘What?’

‘Take it from me, sir. When it comes to terrorist groups and what they claim . . . well, every man and his dog nuked Canberra.’

‘Hey, seriously, they told me how they did it.’

His expression was setting firmly now. ‘Sir, this is really none of your concern.’

‘Not my—? They
kidnapped
me!’

‘Yes, but we’ve resolved that situation.’

I stared at him.

‘Ah,’ he said, looking along the road.

A long, black car was approaching slowly. Time was, you saw very few black cars in Australia. Now they seem to be everywhere. With darkly tinted windows. Just like this one. It pulled up beside us, and Agent Spencer rose to greet it. A rear window rolled down, and looking out was an older man’s face, expressionless behind sunglasses as mirrored as the windows.

‘Status?’ he inquired.

‘Green, sir,’ Agent Spencer replied.

‘Excellent.’ The sunglasses turned towards me briefly. ‘And the package?’

‘Undamaged.’

‘Even better.’

The man in the car was American, his accent southern and lilting, almost slurred. He was dressed immaculately in a black suit, his countenance lean and lined, with a wave of grey hair.
But the left side of his face did not seem to move. A stroke victim, perhaps. And one of our bosom allies, I assumed, from the CIA—or from some other such secret service.

‘I’ll inform the interested parties,’ he told Agent Spencer. ‘And the status of the target participants?’

‘Three terminally degraded, sir. And one in detention.’

The man frowned, a distorted twist of half his lips. ‘Oh?’

‘It’s the woman, actually.’

I glanced towards the postal van, and was alarmed to see a white face, bloodied and furious, staring out at us from the rear window.

‘I understand,’ the man in the car said, and he was looking at the face too. His infirmity made him sound drunk in some genteel fashion. ‘Well, you have your orders.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’d like to borrow some of your men, if I may. We should sterilise the house.’

‘Yes, sir. We’re nearly done here.’

‘Four should be enough.’

‘I’ll have them follow you.’

‘Well done, agent.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

The window rolled up, and the car pulled away. Agent Spencer turned to his men and barked a string of orders. Four of them climbed into a car, and drove off in pursuit. That left only six, and the whole area was looking different now. The smells of gas and gunpowder were gone, as were the bodies. Only the bloodstains remained, darkening slowly towards black.

‘So who was that?’ I asked Agent Spencer.

‘Look, sir, you can ask all these questions when we get you home to base.’

‘And where’s that?’

‘Classified, sir.’

‘You can’t even tell me where I’m going?’

But he seemed to have lost interest in me completely. He walked over to the postal van and opened the rear doors, looked in. ‘Get her out,’ he told his men.

Two of them reached in and dragged the woman forth. They’d already removed her burqa, and it turned out that underneath she was simply wearing black jeans and a red T-shirt. And the boots, after all, only went up to her knees.

Still, she came out like a wildcat, kicking and cursing, a whirl of long limbs and tangled white hair. I don’t think she was an actual albino, she was just one of the palest people I had ever seen. Eventually the agents got her upright between them, and she stood there, glaring at us. And Christ, she really wasn’t much more than a girl. A tall, wild girl, with a livid bruise on her forehead and blood on her hands and arms.

‘Fucking cunts,’ she breathed to us all.

Agent Spencer was unperturbed. ‘Was she armed?’ he asked his men.

‘Two handguns, loaded,’ one replied, ‘and a knife.’

‘There might be more. Strip her.’

Another struggle followed, and it took four of them to do it. I looked away. I know that she had planned to kill me, but still, I didn’t need to see this.

‘There’s nothing else,’ I heard one of the agents say.

‘Cavities too,’ Agent Spencer ordered.

Screams ensued, female, then the sounds of blows, and laughter from the men.

Then, ‘She’s clean, sir.’

‘Okay.’ His voice became formal. ‘Your name is Nancy Campbell?’

‘Fuck you!’ she yelled back.

And despite everything I thought—Nancy Campbell? Her name was Nancy? I’d been kidnapped by a terrorist named Nancy? You had to be
kidding
.

‘Also known as Aisha Fatima Islam?’

Well, that was more like it . . .

‘You have no fucking right!’ she raged.

Agent Spencer paid no attention. ‘Nancy Campbell, you are charged with consorting with a known terrorist organisation, and of conspiring to, and committing, criminal acts against the people and government of Australia. How do you plead?’

‘Not guilty, shithead!’

‘You have been found guilty as charged. Under the authority of State of Emergency Decree 44, I am empowered to impose sentence and implement same. The sentence is death by execution, to be carried out forthwith.’

I spun around.

Nancy Campbell (and I was still struggling to believe that was really her name) hung naked and exhausted between the two agents. Her nose was bleeding, and her white body looked defenceless amongst all those uniformed men.

I said, ‘You’re gonna kill her?’

Agent Spencer was as collected as ever. ‘It’s the law.’

‘But right here, right now?’

‘She’s a killer herself.’

‘But surely you’ve got to interview her. Interrogate her. Find out what she knows, and who she works with. I told you, these guys did Canberra!’

‘We already know all we need to about her. And her group.’

One agent was tying her hands while two of his colleagues held her. The other three men had formed a line and were checking their weapons.

I couldn’t believe it. ‘But you can’t just gun her down!’

‘Shut up, Mr James.’

‘You think you can just do this? I’ll tell my brother about it, believe me. And not only him—I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen.’

It was like lightning. Agent Spencer’s arm shot out from his side, and suddenly the barrel of a pistol was hard against my temple. ‘I’ll tell you one last time, sir. Shut up.’

‘You wouldn’t dare.’

‘Mr James, let me explain. As far as anyone in the outside world knows, you’re already dead. I can make that a reality, very quickly. Now, your brother has indicated that he would prefer you alive. But he only said
prefer
. Because, frankly, you’re more of a problem than anyone needs right now. And the main condition of your continued survival is that you forget everything that has happened to you in the past few days. That you forget everything you have seen here. And that you never mention a word of it to anyone else. All of this will be made abundantly clear to you during your debriefing, and trust me, you will not be released until you have fully agreed. But for the moment . . . shut . . . the fuck . . . up.’

I gaped. And said nothing.

Agent Spencer lowered his gun. ‘Right,’ he said to his team, ‘step clear of her.’

The men holding the woman shoved her to her knees and moved away to either side. She knelt there on the road, pathetic, hands behind her back, nose still bleeding. But she was taking her impending death better than I had.

‘Pray to Allah, girl, if you want,’ Agent Spencer said.

She spat out blood. ‘I hope your dicks rot off.’

‘Squad, take aim.’

I looked away again.

Shots spluttered out, even though no one had said ‘fire’. Then there was screaming, male this time, and more shots. Something exploded and I was thrown to the ground. Looking up, I caught a glimpse of figures leaping down from the top of the cutting. Federal agents were falling, bloodied and agonised, and smoke was billowing into the air.

Fuck, I thought, in a kind of weary amazement, three times in as many days.

Here I go again.

I really wasn’t born for such excitement.

Me, a child of the placid 1950s.

Mind you, in my youth, we did have the cold war. And looking back, that really
was
a war. Two monolithic powers, evenly matched, slugging it out for control of the whole world . . . or at least the mutual destruction of it. It was a different scenario from today, believe me. The Russians were something to truly fear, an enemy who actually had the capability to win. Who would have thought that, sixty years later, the evil empire would be long forgotten, but we’d all end up twice as terrified of nothing more than a few thousand stateless terrorists? Or that, in the name of eradicating them, we’d be fighting a dozen different shitty little wars across the globe? Stalin would have been thrilled to cause half as much alarm, and he had a fully equipped army five million strong behind him.

I’m sure that my parents, securely enclosed in the great swathe of white middle-class Australia, and fighting the good fight against the red peril, had no idea what oddities the future held. We had the house in suburbia, we had the picket fence, we even had Mum waiting on the couch with a cocktail for Dad to come home from work. We were proof that democracy worked, and we knew that, once the Russians finally admitted defeat, all would be right with the world.

What on earth did Islam mean to any of us?

This was Melbourne. We lived in Camberwell. Leafy streets, green lawns, and a ‘dry’ zone. Not even a pub in sight to disturb the peace, let alone a mosque. (In fact, last time I visited the suburb nothing much had changed, the odd AFP checkpoint notwithstanding. When Camberwell gets rowdy, well, that really will be the end of western civilisation as we know it.)

My father? He was a public servant, Department of Mines and Energy, upper middle grade. My mother didn’t work, and Bernard and I were the only children. The good life was all ours, so much so that looking back it seems like a fairytale now. Actually, a rather boring fairytale, for very little of my earliest years seems to stand out in my memory. Playing in the backyard, watching TV, walking to primary school, holidays at the beach. Bernard was always there too, of course. Did we get along then? I don’t recall hating him. But not really liking him either. He was my brother, he was just around all the time.

But as we grew older, to about age nine or ten, two things became clear. Bernard was more timid than I was—quieter, less adventurous, less daring. But on the other hand, he was far more stubborn than me. Say there was a gang of us kids throwing rocks at the windows of an empty factory over Collingwood way. I’d be in there amongst it, and when the windows were all broken I’d be the first to suggest we creep inside and see whatever secrets there were to see. But Bernard, if he was tagging along, would frown at the rock-throwing,
and refuse point-blank to break and enter. Even when the rest of us mocked him and called him a girl and chanted other horrible things at him, he still refused. Shaking his head all the while and growing red in the face—but red with angry defiance, not embarrassment. He never ran away, or burst into tears, or backed down.

And it’s not that he was simply law-abiding. He wasn’t at all. He could be downright sneaky when it came to disobeying our parents. Stealing biscuits, or avoiding chores around the house, or cheating off my homework. But if the law-breaking was public and dangerous, then he wasn’t interested. It was a matter of risk assessment, of investment versus return, of calculating the odds. In every other way he would grab whatever he could, legal or not—as long as he was certain of not getting caught. The other kids were completely baffled by him, but they caught on, eventually, to that stubbornness in him, and eventually gave way before it. He was never as popular as I was, but he was tolerated and respected in a grudging kind of way. A super-cautious little prick, everyone agreed, but certainly clever.

Me, I changed my mind about everything twenty times a day. And while I’d charge off on any caper that was going, well, as soon as it went wrong I’d hightail it out of there just as fast. And I had no problem whatever in backing down if the other kid was bigger and meaner than me, or worse, if it was the school principal. I’d throw in fulsome apologies too, as lengthy and inventive as they were insincere. Christ, it was only for a laugh, so what did it matter?

You can tell which one of us was destined to be PM, can’t you?

Our education was private. We weren’t at the best schools in town, but they were far from the worst. Church of England—sport, God, buggery and the Queen. Well, okay, no buggery, not in my case at least, and nor, as far as I know, in Bernard’s. To be fair, not so much of God or the Queen either. And while
neither of us were geniuses, we got by all right, academically. Me, I think, on native intelligence, breezing along without really trying, and Bernard more by rote learning and by an innate grasp of how to work the system. He was one of those kids who always pinned the teachers down on exactly what part of a lesson would be in exams and what wouldn’t. One of those kids who always had a good excuse as to why he should get an extra two days to finish an essay. One of those kids who always demanded his test papers be reassessed, and who would fight over every half mark. A ready-made lawyer, one teacher called him. An annoying little twerp, said another, while wearily changing a C into a B minus.

No, by the time we were teenagers, I really didn’t like my brother very much.

And we were going our separate ways already. I’d discovered girls, for instance. Not to mention all sorts of useful, entertaining things to do with erections. The underside of my mattress became the repository for a growing collection of racy paperback novels and stolen issues of the quaint, softly pornographic magazines of the day. Thankfully, Bernard and I had our own bedrooms by this stage, so what sort of stash he had I don’t know. Perhaps he didn’t have one at all because there was nothing under his mattress. On the other hand, he would never have hidden it somewhere so obvious. Indeed, as I’ve already mentioned, he did that kind of thing in the garden shed.