Genius Squad (2 page)

‘Oh dear,’ she said.

‘He probably didn’t even
wear
his pyjamas,’ Mace remarked cheerily, demonstrating once again – in Cadel’s opinion – that he wasn’t as thick as everyone assumed.

‘Those pyjamas were clean last night,’ Cadel pointed out, trying to stay calm. ‘Hazel, you gave them to me, remember? Do they smell as if I’ve worn them?’

Hazel took the pyjamas. She put them to her small, round nose. Cadel knew that when it came to laundry, Hazel had the nose of a bloodhound. After bringing up four children and twelve foster children, she was thoroughly trained in the art of distinguishing dirty garments from clean ones.

A single sniff was all it took. She turned to Mace, looking disappointed.

‘Now Thomas,’ she said, ‘have you been lying to me?’

Mace shook his head.

‘Because you know what I’ve said about this, Thomas. Sometimes we feel angry and frustrated, and do things we’re ashamed of. Then we lie about them afterwards, to protect ourselves. But most of the time, there’s no need to lie. Because it’s the lie that people find hard to forgive, not the offence . . .’

Cadel took a deep breath, willing himself to be patient. Hazel, he knew, was a really, really nice person. He admired her selflessness. He was grateful to her for cooking his meals, washing his clothes, and letting him use her computer.

But she was also driving him mad. Sometimes he could understand why Janan threw such terrible tantrums. Cadel was often tempted to throw one himself, after sitting through yet another gentle, stumbling lecture on why it was important not to kick a football at somebody’s face. He had to make allowances; he realised that. No doubt Hazel was used to dealing with kids who
didn’t
grasp how wrong it was to throw large, heavy objects at people. Or spit in their food. Or piss in their beds.

All the same, he found it hard not to lose his temper. Because Mace, he knew, needed no reminding about the proper way to behave. That dumb act was all a front.

‘Okay, okay,’ Mace finally conceded. It seemed that he, too, could only stand so much of Hazel’s well-meaning counsel. ‘I did it. I was joking. Can’t you take a joke?’

‘But it’s not a very nice joke, is it, Thomas? Cadel doesn’t see it that way. Would you like it if he went to the toilet on
your
bed?’

Mace shrugged. He was still smiling a big, goofy smile.

‘My brother used to
crap
on my pillow,’ he said. ‘Everyone used to laugh.’

‘I know.’ Hazel was very earnest. Very sympathetic. ‘It must have hurt when your brothers laughed at you. Still, that’s no reason to make other people feel bad, is it?’

Hazel proceeded to explain why she was going to ask Mace to strip and remake Cadel’s bed. But Cadel didn’t want Mace in his room again. Enough was enough.

‘It’s all right,’ he interjected. ‘I’ll do it myself. Or Mace will miss the bus.’ (And if Mace missed the bus, there was every chance that he wouldn’t end up going to school at all.) ‘I don’t mind,’ said Cadel. ‘Really. There’s not much else for me to do, anyway.’

Everyone stared at him in utter disbelief. So he pursed his lips and opened his big, blue eyes very wide – and it worked, as usual. Nobody looking at his angelic face would ever have suspected that he was planning to dump the soiled sheets on top of Mace’s prized football boots.

‘Well, that’s nice of you, dear,’ said Hazel, somewhat at a loss. ‘I hope you’re going to apologise to Cadel, Thomas?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Mace replied, with an obvious lack of enthusiasm. He opened his mouth. He took a deep breath. Then suddenly he yelled something about hearing the bus, and bolted into the garden.

Every footfall shook the house. His schoolbag knocked a calendar from the wall. The screen door slammed behind him with an almighty
crash
.

Cadel peered through the kitchen window at his retreating form as it moved across a large patch of mangy grass towards the front gate. Beyond this gate lay a wide, almost treeless street lined with fibro and weatherboard houses. Cadel could see a pair of sneakers, their laces tied together, dangling from a suspended power line. He could see a small plastic bag skipping along the footpath in a fitful breeze. He could see a sparrow pecking at something edible in the gutter.

But the school bus was nowhere in sight.

‘I’ll make him apologise properly when he gets home,’ Hazel promised, before hustling Janan into her car. For about twenty blessed minutes, while Janan was being delivered to school, Cadel had the house to himself. But then Hazel returned home, and settled in front of her computer (she had a part-time data entry job), and Cadel, once again, found himself with nothing to do.

Nobody seemed to want him any more.

None of the universities wanted him. Even though he had completed high school more than a year before, at the age of thirteen – even though he had scored perfect marks in all his exams, and knew almost everything there was to know about computers – Fiona could not find a single faculty anywhere that would admit him. This was because he had no official status in Australia. He was an illegal alien. No one knew exactly when he had arrived, or exactly where he had come from. It was thought that he had been smuggled into the country at the age of two. It was also thought that he might have been born in the USA. Australia, therefore, didn’t want him. But the US didn’t want him either. Since no record of his birth existed, there was no proof that he could legitimately claim US citizenship.

Most importantly, no one could be sure who his father or mother were. The woman who may have been his mother had been murdered, in the States, when he was still an infant; officially, the crime had never been solved. And the man who had once claimed to be his father (off the record) now refused to admit it in public.

Even his own
father
didn’t want him.

Cadel was therefore living in a kind of limbo, with nothing whatsoever to do. He didn’t even have access to his own computer. At one point he had owned two computers, but both had been confiscated by the police as evidence. They were part of an ongoing investigation into the activities of Prosper English (alias Thaddeus Roth), who may or may not have been Cadel’s father. Prosper was in gaol now, awaiting trial on charges ranging from fraud to murder. His network of employees had disintegrated. His assets were frozen. His various properties were being treated as crime scenes.

It was all a huge mess, and Cadel was sitting right in the middle of it. Nobody knew what to do with him. He had no money. No family. No country of origin. He didn’t even appear to have a name. Originally, he had been called Cadel Piggott. Then his surname had been changed to Darkkon, when Dr Phineas Darkkon – the criminal mastermind and genetic engineer – had suddenly appeared in his life, claiming to be his father. But Phineas was dead now, killed by cancer, and very probably hadn’t been his father after all. Prosper English, Darkkon’s former second-in-command, was a far more likely candidate. Only Prosper wouldn’t admit to anything.

So what was Cadel supposed to call himself? Cadel English? Cadel X?

Fiona called him Cadel Piggott, because Piggott had been the assumed name of his adoptive parents. Not that they had
really
been Piggotts. And their adoption of Cadel had never been officially recognised. They’d never even been married. Dr Darkkon had simply employed them to raise Cadel as a screwed-up little weirdo.

Cadel didn’t know where they were now. Nor did he know what had happened to the house in which he’d lived between the ages of two and fourteen. His whole former life had been torn up and thrown away, like so much scrap paper.

All he had left was one friend. Sonja Pirovic. She was the only person who had never lied to him. So Cadel decided to go and visit her, on the day he first met Saul Greeniaus.

He hoped that visiting Sonja might cheer him up.

TWO

Unfortunately, Sonja lived a long, long way from the Donkins’ house.

To reach her, Cadel had to spend an hour and a half on public transport. He had to catch a bus, then a train, and then another train. That was why he sometimes booked taxis. And why, as a consequence, he was always broke – despite the fact that he received a small allowance from the government.

It was all quite maddening, because the police could easily have given him a lift. On the morning of the urine incident, Cadel wandered into Versailles Street at about half-past nine and saw that two plain-clothes policemen were sitting in an unmarked car, as usual, some distance from the Donkins’ driveway. One of the policemen looked familiar. The other did not. Cadel wasn’t sure exactly which agency they belonged to – whether they worked for the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Security and Intelligence Office, or even the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. All he knew was that the Donkins’ house was constantly being watched, and that whenever he left it, he would always be followed.

At first this had pleased him. He had felt safer knowing that Prosper English couldn’t get at him without alerting the authorities. Once or twice he had even asked his bodyguards for a lift. Their response, however, had been disappointing. He had been told that the officers assigned to tail him were not his personal chauffeurs. They were there to do a job. Cadel’s job was to pretend that they didn’t exist, and go about his normal business without acknowledging that they were dogging his footsteps.

‘But I’m catching a bus,’ Cadel had protested, during his first conversation with the surveillance team.

‘Then one of us will catch it with you,’ was the reply.

‘But wouldn’t it be easier just to drive me to Sonja’s house?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s not in the job description.’

And that was that. No matter whose shift it happened to be, not one of Cadel’s watchdogs would help him. Instead, as he trudged along the street to the bus stop, they would drive past him, park up the road a little, and wait until he had left them behind before driving on again. Even when it was raining, they refused to pick him up.

Cadel resented this attitude so much that he had begun to toy with various notions that he should never have entertained: notions of shaking them off, just to annoy them. He could have done it quite easily. He had dodged pursuers before, on numerous occasions; Prosper English had always tried to keep him closely monitored. But behaviour like that belonged to his past life – a life of subterfuge, manipulation and despair. It was not a life that he remembered fondly. He was
ashamed
of the person he had been, back then. Through the agency of the Piggotts, Prosper English had raised him as a scheming, friendless, emotionally stunted freak. Cadel had left that freak behind, and did not intend to welcome him back by indulging in the sort of nasty intrigues that had once kept him fully occupied.

Still, it was annoying. More than annoying. It was, in fact,
unfair
that on such a damp, miserable, overcast morning, the men in the unmarked car wouldn’t give him a lift to the station, at least.

Was it any wonder that Cadel should have been in such a foul mood?

Nothing about his surroundings cheered him up, either. The Donkins lived in a flat, dreary suburb on Sydney’s western outskirts. There weren’t many trees or parks or Internet cafes in the area. People either lived in mean little houses on rambling, untidy blocks of land, or in brand-new mansions squeezed so tightly between boundary fences that they barely had any gardens at all. The local library was hard for Cadel to reach. The local walks – along culverts or across sunbaked football fields – were deeply depressing. The buses always arrived late at the nearest bus stop, and sometimes didn’t arrive at all. The bus stop itself was in a bleak and windswept location; Cadel could foresee that it would be a very cold place to stand on winter mornings.

Fortunately, however, winter was still a few months off. So at least Cadel didn’t have to wait in the freezing cold for twenty minutes while the two policemen sat watching him from their warm car. Still, he was glad when the bus arrived. Not only did it mean that he could sit down, at long last; it also meant that one of his bodyguards was forced to abandon half a cup of takeaway coffee. Cadel was feeling so resentful that it pleased him to see someone deprived of a hot drink.

The coffee-deprived policeman followed Cadel onto the bus, and took care to sit some distance away. He was short and stocky, with close-cropped hair and a glum expression. Perhaps he was glum because he didn’t like playing nursemaid. Or perhaps he disapproved of the trip itself. Cadel was well aware that the police would have preferred that he didn’t visit Sonja. Such visits, he realised, were a bit risky. Prosper English knew about Sonja. He knew how much Sonja meant to Cadel. Though Cadel’s whereabouts were currently a well-kept secret, it was much harder to hide Sonja. There weren’t many places where a girl with her special needs could safely live.

If Prosper’s agents wanted to trace Cadel, they only had to find Sonja first.

So, Cadel had been advised that he ought to consider rationing his visits to Sonja’s house. Such trips required two surveillance teams instead of one, and left him very exposed to a possible assault. Cadel had been reminded that he was chief witness for the prosecution – that Prosper might want to stop him from testifying. Prosper, after all, was a ruthless and intelligent man. Did Cadel really want to risk putting himself in harm’s way?

‘Prosper won’t try to kill me,’ Cadel had responded. ‘I know he won’t. He tried before, and he couldn’t. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it.’ Seeing the sceptical looks that had greeted this statement, Cadel had tried even harder to explain. ‘You don’t understand,’ he’d said. ‘I’m scared of Prosper, but not like that. He doesn’t want to kill me. He wants me to be on his side, that’s all.’

The police disagreed, however. So when Cadel finally reached Sonja’s house, he found two unmarked police cars stationed nearby: one around the back of the house, another near the front.

After months of being followed, he could spot them quite easily. To begin with, they were sparkling clean. All were recent model sedans. Each was normally occupied by two passengers, both of whom sat in the front. And when Cadel waved at them, or poked out his tongue, or did anything else designed specifically to irritate the people inside, he received no response at all.