Flight Path: A Wright & Tran Novel (28 page)

Saturday 28
th
November.

Kara and Tie
n
were in the back of a second Toyota Kijang. This one, black and newer than Dan and Eugene’s, was parked behind the brothers’ light-golden model. Both cars were two kilometres from the laneway that led down to where the ‘find-my-phone’ app said Eugene’s iPhone was located. Sammi was in the passenger seat and Chaz was behind the wheel. Dinger and Toby were in with the O’Neills.

Tien tested the comms and boosted the amplifier that sat on the third row of seats behind her, “All callsigns, I have it as 03:40”

A series of clicks acknowledged her.

The Gulfstream had touched down at 23:05, slightly later than estimated due to strong headwinds, but the team had arrived completely refreshed. During the flight, the on-board attendants had laid their seats down into fully horizontal beds, dimmed the cabin and nurtured them like they were children in a nursery. After a solid eight hours, they’d been wakened, fed, and allowed to indulge themselves with the in-flight entertainment systems. Sammi had summed up the whole experience most simply by saying it had ruined normal air travel for her, forever.

They’d phoned Dan and Eugene on landing, rendezvoused with them at the hotel Dan had booked them into and spent the last few hours getting ready for what was coming. Toby had inconspicuously distributed the necessary equipment between the two cars so that when they had walked out of the hotel lobby they looked like eight friends, dressed for a night out in the clubs of Kuta.

Now, dressed head to toe in black, equipped with night vision goggles and radio mics, they all climbed out of the cars and made their way silently along the edge of the road. A sky filled with heavily laden storm clouds had effectively switched off the earlier brightness of the moon and although those same clouds also threatened a massive downpour, they had, as yet, held off.

When Chaz reached the point that Dan and Eugene had stopped at previously, he led the team through the first line of tightly packed bushes and trees. Much more detailed and up-to-date imagery, downloaded by Tien in the hotel room, had shown that what, on the older Google maps, had looked like twenty metres deep, almost impenetrable semi-jungle was in fact a narrow line of vegetation. On the other side it opened into lightly covered scrub. It also revealed that Dan and Eugene would have walked into a series of flooded Paddy fields had they gone in a straight line. Chaz, the imagery committed to memory, and his night vision goggles painting the landscape green, moved silently across the open terrain. He scouted around the Paddy fields and manoeuvred around a series of low walls, remnants of some long ago dwelling.

He stopped and crouched when he came to the next outcrop of dense vegetation. The other seven spread out in a line to his left.

“All set?” he asked.

Kara, from her position on the end of the line, made her way up to Chaz, patting each person on the shoulder and getting a thumbs-up in return.

Crouching next to him she said, “Okay. Let’s get this done.”

All eight rose together and went through the tree line. The tightly packed leaves and close-knitted branches were a slight cause for concern noise-wise, but there was nothing to be done for it. Breaking through they crouched again and took in the view ahead. Perfectly manicured gardens, dotted with strange little temples that, from the imagery, Chaz and Sammi had assessed were likely to be light fixtures, now lay in complete darkness. As did a large, mostly rectangular, pool. The four surrounding villas also showed no lights. It was as they had expected it would be at this time of the morning.

Kara clicked her mic and all eight set off again. She and Eugene skirted the side of the pool and approached the rear door of the second villa. Chaz and Toby moved to the one on her left, the biggest of the four. Sammi, with Dinger, approached the one on Kara’s right and Tien, accompanied by Toby moved to the villa farthest to the right.

Kara tried the door handle and as she had mostly expected, found it locked. She bent and removed a set of skeleton keys from her pocket and laid out the black felt roll on her thigh. Selecting a small angular pick with a series of notched bumps, she pushed her goggles to the top of her head. The new binocular-goggles were a huge improvement on the old monocular ones she and Tien had mostly used in the past, but for close work they still made depth perception hard and hindered her judgement as to how close the pick was to the lock. The pitch blackness she now had to deal with wasn’t as much of a concern. Kara knew that picking locks was mostly done by feel and instinct. She also knew that frustration at not getting it first time was not a help. She breathed out and started again. After another minute she heard the satisfactory soft click as the tumblers aligned.

Eugene followed her into a cool, marble-floored hallway and they both stood still. They remained like that for a good three minutes. Not to adjust their sight, as the building’s interior was as pitch black as outside, but to grow accustomed to the sounds and the feel of the house. Kara, her goggles back in place, sensed the place was occupied. She didn’t know by how many or by who, but she knew there was at least one person somewhere in the darkness.

She moved down the hallway, slowly sweeping her vision left and right. Directly ahead of her was the main, front door. To her right she passed a closed door, then one that was ajar. Looking in she saw a bathroom. Further along from it was another closed door. Opposite the bathroom was an open entrance to a lounge room. She looked in and confirmed the spacious room was empty. With hand signals she told Eugene she was going to check the closed door to her left first, then the one to her right. Fully aware that these were likely to be occupied bedrooms, she moved excruciatingly slowly.

The handle was a lever action and she took half a minute to depress it fully. Another half a minute went by before she put any pressure on the door in an attempt to move it inwards. It took a further three minutes for her to ease it open sufficiently to look inside. She withdrew her head back out of the room and clicked her radio three times. She didn’t expect, nor did she need, any confirmatory clicks. Eugene, less than two feet from her, but who had also heard the clicks in his earpiece turned and took up a blocking position between her and the closed door further down the corridor.

Kara moved into the bedroom and as slowly as she had opened it, she eased the door closed. She walked silently across the tiled floor and moved into position to do the most dangerous part of her night so far. Bending low, she reached her hand out, tentatively, knowing that her depth perception was likely to be off and therefore she could well miss her target. A final steadying breath and she plunged her hand down onto Jacob’s mouth. She did miss and hit the bottom of his nose before flopping her palm over his lips.

Leaning in close and pressing down as much as she could to stop him reacting and rearing up, she whispered in a voice so quiet it didn’t activate her mic system, “Jacob, It’s Kara. Be quiet. Tap my hand when you’re ready.”

Kara was impressed when the tap came almost instantly. It wasn’t a usual thing to be assaulted in your bed at night and most people she’d done this to had struggled and fought for at least a few seconds. It was rare for someone’s brain to process the facts so quickly, while in that strange state between asleep and awake.

She took her hand away and when Jacob had pushed himself up in the bed, she leant in sideways to have her mouth as close to his ear as possible, without hitting him in the head with her goggles.

“You doing okay?” She asked.

“Just about. We need to take these people down,” he whispered into her ear.

“Is Derek Swift here?”

“No. Just me and the boss man of the Balinese end of the operation. A Brit called Tommo. Huge guy, must be at least thirty stone. Plus three security. Only met one so far, but meant to be three on site.”

“Well, get up and get ready, we’re extracting you now.”

“No Kara. No way. They’ll go to ground if I disappear.”

“But Swift’s not here so what’s the point in dragging it out?”

“Tommo says I’ll get to meet the rest of what he called ‘the lads’ soon enough. If Swift is in Bali then he’s bound to be invited.”

“And if he’s not?”

“Then we still get to sweep up a whole host of bastards.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“I don’t have one. I wasn’t expecting you to drop in on me.”

Kara, her cheek next to his, felt him grin.

“But I might have an idea, now you’re here. It’s going to be tough. They have judges and lawyers sewn up and when they don’t do that, they have intimidation. I’m not sure, but there’s a chance none of them would go down for what they’ve been doing. But we’ve got to try.”

“So what’s the idea?” Kara asked.

“I wrote down, on Eugene’s phone, what I know so far. If you take it and talk to the authorities, then it might be enough for them to act on. I’ll stay here so they won’t be suspicious. I assume you’ll put an overwatch on me?”

“Of course.”

“Then when the rest turn up, whether Swift is with them or not, I’ll signal you and you can have the cops come charging in.”

“You’re sure?” Kara asked.

“Absolutely. Now take the phone.”

He slipped out of bed and raised the mattress. Kara retrieved the phone then waited until he’d climbed back into bed. She leant in close again, “You be careful Jacob. Tien will be upset if you’re not.”

“Tell her I’m doing fine, will you?”

“Course I will.” She went to get up, but stopped. “Jacob?”

“Yeah?”

“Is this a case of dark hearts?”

“Toby told you about them then?”

“Yeah. So is it?”

“Never more so.”

She made her way to the door and just as slowly as she had eased into the room, she eased back out into the hallway. Eugene was standing in exactly the position she had left him. Kara wasn’t surprised. Dan and Eugene were the most disciplined security team she had ever known, but her admiration and respect for the Harrop brothers was growing daily.

By the time she and Eugene had made their way back to the edge of the lawns and the thick undergrowth of the tree line the rest were already there.

“Where’s Jacob? You signalled you’d found him, where is he?” Tien asked.

“We did, but he’s not coming out. He wants us to try something but now’s not the time or place to discuss it. We need to get the fuck out of here and let Chaz and Sammi find us decent surveillance positions before dawn. Then we’ll figure out a shift system.”

No one, not even Tien, who Kara knew would be tearing herself apart at leaving him on his own, put up an objection. They all accepted that the decision had been made and it was time to sort out how to manage it, not moan about it.

ɸ

By ten in the morning, Dan and Eugene had been in their covert hide for four hours. Chaz and Sammi had used the available imagery to pick a position which was a compromise between the need for complete invisibility and the need to be close enough to provide security to Jacob. The result was situated within a dense stretch of what could have passed for a piece of rainforest someone had forgotten to chop down. It gave clear sightlines across a thirty metre gap to the swimming pool and three of the four villa’s lounges and was approached from the rear by crossing a section of dense scrub that itself was accessed from a small roadway that ran up the side of a deep ravine. Toby was in one of the Toyotas parked two hundred metres back along that road.

Dinger was in a similar, if much smaller covert hide position, on the other side of the complex. He was only ten metres from the top of the driveway and the entrance to the biggest of the four villas.

By half past ten, Sammi, Chaz, Tien and Kara, back at the hotel, had taken a break from discussing Jacob’s notes and what could be done with them. They weren’t the least bit hopeful there was enough to secure a conviction.

Tien put the in-room kettle on and began to make cups of tea.

Chaz opened up his laptop intending to search for the exact meaning of ‘circumstantial’.

“What’s that?” Sammi asked, looking at the image on his screen.

“It’s just the local prison,” he said going to shut the window down.

“Oh let’s have a look,” Sammi said, sliding onto the seat next to him and almost pushing him off.

“Geez Sammi, you’re so delicate,” he said and got an elbow in the side for his trouble.

“Why are you looking at this anyway?” She asked.

“Dan and Eugene asked me to. They’d driven past a place last night, didn’t know what it was so Dan had tried to figure it out from his iPad Google map, but with no success.”

Sammi chuckled.

“Yeah I know,” Chaz said, “how could you not know it’s a prison.”

Kara wandered over, intrigued by his last comment. “I don’t get what you mean.”

“Well of course you do not, my little non-imagery, dark-side intelligence sad-ling. You are not gifted in the mysterious ways of enlightenment.”