Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (16 page)

‘Well, you’ll just have to make up for any shortfall on his account, won’t you?’

In her ‘go’ bag, Julianne had fifteen hundred dollars in local currency, two changes of clothes, a first-aid kit, and three plastic cards, two of them credit cards, one an international driver’s license, establishing her identity as ‘Julia Black’, a British woman, a resident of Florida, when the Wave removed all human life from that part of the North American continent. ‘Julia’ had been spared being turned into apocalyptic blood pudding by virtue of being on holiday in Spain with her husband. (In fact, Julia Black’s earthly remains were almost certainly staining the couch, carpet, toilet, or whatever, of her Miami home.) The sudden disappearance of more than three hundred million Americans like Mrs Black was a boon to the likes of Lady Julianne Balwyn. That is, to those individuals who, through misadventure and a certain moral flexibility, often found themselves in need of a spare identity and disinclined to let good manners prevent them from stealing one from the mysteriously departed. It wasn’t like the Disappeared were using them anymore, and of course the great majority of people lived their lives as unknowns anyway, dying in that same useful state.

Jules swung the small backpack over her shoulder as she stepped up into the Greyhound, departing the bus terminal at the city end of Oxford Street for Brisbane, a thousand miles to the north. She wished she had a gun in the bag. She wished she had more money. She really wished she wasn’t climbing on board a fucking Greyhound and riding the pooch for the next twenty-four hours in the company of fifty or so lumpen proles smelling of fast food and existential failure. But she couldn’t afford a plane ticket all the way to Darwin and at any rate security at the airports and train stations was much tougher than on the bus routes. A series of Jemaah Islamiyah suicide bombings a couple of years back had seen to that. She didn’t imagine the local wallopers would break a sweat investigating the death of a small-time crim, but she was developing a healthy paranoia about Cesky’s ability to hunt her down.

She checked her ticket – seat 20A – and was relieved to find herself sitting next to a young woman who smiled nervously at her approach, before putting her head back inside a fantasy novel the size of a house brick. Jules nodded brusquely, establishing the precedent of not talking to anyone. She stowed her bag in the luggage rack over the seat in front of her where she could keep an eye on it, and tried not to regret the six months rent she had paid in advance on her bed-sit in The Rocks. The rental market was so tight, with the city full of refugees, that if she hadn’t been able to stump up the cash she’d have had no chance of securing her digs. That deposit siphoned off a good deal of her liquid funds. And now she’d had to abandon the place, to get out of the city where she’d been tracked, and run north to the only people she could trust in this country, or possibly the whole bloody world.

‘Come on honey, it’ll be a great adventure.’

‘No it won’t. This sucks. This whole country sucks. I just want to go home.’

American voices. There was no escaping them. Maybe a third of the passengers travelling north were displaced Americans. The unlucky ones, those who arrived without capital or connections. They were probably heading north for the fruit-picking season, although they would probably be a month too late to score the best jobs. That’s why they were on this bus, like Julianne. Because they were losers.

The father and daughter, the angry princess who just wanted to go home, wrestled their heavy backpacks past her on their way to the rear of the bus. The bags looked way too heavy for carry-on luggage, leading Jules to suspect they probably contained most of the worldly goods of this woebegone pair. She’d seen it so often in the last couple of years, people moving around with everything they owned strapped to their backs. There was nothing unusual about that, of course. People had been living like that for thousands of years. But not white, middle-class Americans.

And she was in no position to look down on them. Not fleeing the city with her little go bag and her fake ID.

The big metal doors of the Greyhound’s luggage compartment slammed closed outside as the last of the passengers shuffled in and claimed their seats. She sent a silent prayer of thanks up to the God she didn’t believe in that the morbidly obese man with the apocalyptic body odour who got on last was not her seat buddy. Stealing a quick glance at the Tolkien fan next to her she smiled. The young woman had obviously had exactly the same thought at just that moment. They shared a conspiratorial smile.

Jules wished she had thought to pack a novel in her getaway bag, but entertainment hadn’t seemed like a high priority when she put it together. She was just going to have to sleep through most of the trip. Luckily they were driving through the night.

‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen, my name is Tim Blair and I’ll be your coach captain for the run up to Lismore.’

Oh God. Shoot me now
, thought Jules,
a fucking coach captain. Where do they find these dropkicks?

Blair started in on his pre-departure spiel, explaining the ‘features’ of their state-of-the-art vehicle. Julianne stared out of the window and tried to ignore him. A baby started crying somewhere a few seats behind her. The emo zombie across the aisle turned his MP3 player up to an eardrum-shredding volume.

‘. . . and we’ll be stopping for dinner just after midnight in the town of Hexham,’ said coach captain Blair, ‘which in the opinion of this professional long-haul transport systems operator does the finest chicken’n’chips in the southern hemisphere.’

For the first time since she had slotted the Romanian, Lady Julianne Balwyn wondered whether she might be better off staying in Sydney and taking her chances with whatever contract killer Henry Cesky sent after her next.

*

Too keyed up to sleep properly – not that it was really an option on a bus anyway – she spent the first four-hour leg of the trip, a frustrating, drawn-out, stop-and-start crawl through the gridlock of the CBD and the semi-permanent traffic jam of the northern suburbs, throwing a little pity party for herself. Julianne knew she had much to be grateful for. Unlike Pete and Fifi, she was at least drawing breath. She hadn’t taken a bullet during a pirate raid, and she’d dodged any number of bullets since. In spite of Cesky’s best efforts to get at her. And in the larger scheme of things, of course, she knew she should be grateful that they hadn’t pushed their yacht a little harder back in ’03, to make the rendezvous with the
Pong Su
, a North Korean freighter carrying four million dollars worth of perfectly counterfeited US currency that they would take in exchange for the one million worth of genuine greenbacks, somewhat soiled by their connection to a series of drug transactions, stashed away in the hold of the MV
Diamantina
.

If Pete had been a more diligent smuggler they’d have been about ten nautical miles inside the Wave when it swept over the
Pong Su
. Thankfully, Pete was a doofus. A great mate, to be sure, and she missed him terribly, but a doofus.

A thin blanket served to ward off the chill of the air conditioning as they pulled onto the freeway and accelerated away from Sydney. Unable to do more than nap fitfully, Julianne found herself replaying the last few years, wondering which particular ill-chosen life path had put her on this shitty bus in the middle of the night at the arse end of the civilised world. As always, she came back to her father. She had loved her old man, rogue that he was, and the old devil had done his best to provide for her in his own way, salting some of his ill-gotten gains through a series of bank accounts tucked away in remote jurisdictions with famously lax attitudes towards regulatory oversight. But it hadn’t been enough. Not nearly enough. Julianne wondered whether she might’ve been happier living an alternate life, with a normal father, who hadn’t raised her to live well outside the norms that most decent people accepted as the price you paid for civilisation.

On the other hand, she was, arguably, better prepared to have survived the last couple of years. She flicked a glance up at her backpack, and shifted position in her seat to take her weight off the wallet in her back pocket, where Julia Black’s driver’s license, credit cards, and refugee papers sat. Would she have thought to lay in such preparations had a scoundrel not raised her? Would she even be alive today? Probably not, she thought, as the bus rolled through a striking series of canyons, cut deep into the thick layer of sandstone that lay under the Sydney Basin. Powerful up-lighting illuminated the soaring rock walls, throwing them into beautiful relief.

‘Do you have anyone waiting for you, up north?’

‘What?’

The Tolkien fan had taken her by surprise, laying down her book and asking a question. Julianne had no desire to get into conversation with anyone, and kept herself closed off.

‘You look a little bit lost is all,’ said the girl. ‘Like you have nothing to look forward to. Are you going up to Queensland to work, or to meet someone?’

‘Oh,’ said Julianne, searching for an answer. As much as she wanted to just keep to herself, she had always been taught that good manners cost nothing, and could often serve as useful camouflage for one’s true nature. ‘I have a friend who’s sick,’ she said. ‘I’m going up to visit him. To help out a bit.’

‘That’s nice,’ said the girl. ‘You seem like a nice person. I hope it works out for you.’ And with that she went back to Middle Earth.

*

The girl left the bus in Coffs Harbour, a pleasant enough seaside town where they stopped for breakfast the next morning. Julianne’s luck ran out at that point, when the seat next to her was taken by an unwashed young man whose body mass was fifty per cent composed of stainless steel piercings. He played loud, terrible music through his disgracefully cheap headphones and farted with joyous abandon all the way to Brisbane.

She couldn’t really afford a good hotel room, but Julia Black could, so Jules booked a night at the Sheraton as soon as she arrived in the northern capital. She had no intention of staying for long. She felt the urgency of her need to get to Darwin as a physical discomfort. Soaking in her bath at the hotel, washing away the unpleasantness of the road trip with a bottle of champagne from the minibar, Julianne called down to the concierge desk.

‘I need to get in contact with someone in Darwin,’ she said. ‘A Mr Narayan Shah. He runs a security consultancy up there, but I’m afraid I’m not quite sure of the name of his company. I wonder if you might be a dear and see if you could track it down for me. That’s Narayan Shah. He’s a former Gurkha, if that helps . . . okay. Thank you.’

The phone next to her bed rang ten minutes later while she was tying up the thick, white bathrobe and contemplating a room service binge. If she was going to burn Julia Black’s ID and credit rating she might as well torch it in high style.

‘Ms Black, it is Arthur at the front desk, I have Mr Shah on the line for you.’

She heard a click and a beep and then Shah’s voice was in her ear.

‘Ms Black? This is Narayan Shah. How can I help you?’

‘You can stop calling me Ms Black for a start. It’s Jules, Shah. From the
Aussie Rules
. How are you?’

He was, it seemed, surprised and delighted to hear from her.

‘Miss Julianne, this is a pleasure. I had heard you were back in Australia and was hoping you would call.’

She smiled at the rough, familiar tone of the old sergeant’s voice.

‘Hello, Shah,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely to talk to you. And yes, I’m sorry I haven’t been in contact, but, you know, trying to keep a low profile and all.’

She sat down on the bed and snugged the dressing gown closer around her.

‘I understand,’ said Shah. ‘The authorities, they did not make it easy for you with Mr Norman’s boat, and some of your passengers.’

He meant the Pieraro family. Her wealthy American refugees had walked down the gangplank and into the warm embrace of the locals. Not so much the penniless Mexican family.

‘Is there something I can do for you, Miss Julianne?’ Shah asked. ‘I still regard myself as being in your debt.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly. It’s me who owes you. We would not have made it without you and your men. And I’m afraid I have to call on your grace and favour again. I’m in a spot of bother, Shah, and it might be something that affects you, eventually. And maybe the Rhino too. Did he make it up to Darwin? I know he was headed there and wondered if you might have been in contact.’

There was a slight pause before the former Gurkha answered.

‘The Rhino, yes, he is up here. I have seen him once or twice. But he is a proud man, Miss Julianne, and he keeps his problems to himself. I would very much like to help him, and you if you are in need. But I cannot say that Mr Ross will want our help.’

Julianne gazed for a moment out of the hotel window. Julia Black had booked a room on the executive level, for the added security, rather than for the extra luxury. The elevation afforded her sweeping views across the city and out towards the coast.

‘Well, he’s going to need our help,’ she said. ‘And I’m going to need yours, Shah. Someone’s trying to kill me.’

‘Fascinating,’ said the soldier turned businessman. ‘Somebody is trying to kill me as well.’

There was silence between them for two heartbeats.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Shah. I fear I may have dragged you into something awful.’

His laughter was unexpected but reassuring.

‘Miss Julianne, nobody drags me anywhere. Except my wife down to the shops during the sales. I apologise that I cannot stay long on the phone to discuss this with you now. I really do have some pressing matters to attend to here. But I wonder how quickly you might get to Darwin.’

‘Not quickly at all, unfortunately,’ she admitted. ‘My resources aren’t what they were.’

She hated having to talk with Shah like this, as if he were a mark. It spoke well of the man that he recognised what she was doing but did not hold it against her.