Headhunters (41 page)

He turned away from the window and looked down at the papers on his desk. The report had been filed three days earlier, and it was voluminous. He had requested that its authors attend him this evening so that he could ask a few additional questions. Blum had found through long experience that sometimes the answers were more accurate when the interrogation was face to face.

His ADC returned, paused at the door, and showed the two agents inside. Malakhi and Keren Rabin looked a little nervous, as well they might. Blum’s reputation for irascibility went before him, and they must have known that the equivocation in their report would annoy him.

“Sit.”

There were two chairs in front of his desk. Keren Rabin took the chair on the left, her husband the one on the right. They sat quietly, waiting for him to speak. The two of them had kept Bachman under surveillance, as he had ordered. Blum knew that he and Milton would meet again to resolve their differences and he wanted to be absolutely sure that his intelligence regarding the aftermath was certain.

“Thank you for your report,” he said. “Very thorough, although the lack of a firm conclusion is disturbing. I’ll get straight to the point. There was no sign of them? Of either of them?”

“No, sir,” Keren said. “None.”

“The local police?”

“They were not informed. We didn’t think it would be wise.”

“No,” Blum said.

“I waited for an hour,” Keren said, “while Malakhi removed Shavit’s body.”

“That, at least, is taken care of?”

“Yes, sir,” Malakhi said. “We buried him.”

He turned back to Keren. “And you saw nothing?”

“Nothing. If they survived the fall, they didn’t come out at the property. There was a natural breakwater. They would have had to swim around that and around the bay.”

“It was dark, though?”

“Yes, sir, but the property was well lit.”

“The sea?”

“Moderate visibility.”

“So it’s possible they might have been able to swim clear?”

“Possible? Yes, sir. But likely? With respect, sir, I would say not.”

“Be clear, agent. You think they’re dead?”

Keren held his gaze. “Yes, sir. That would be my conclusion.”

He reached for his glasses and perched them on his nose so that he could read the annotations he had made to the summary.

“Matilda Douglas?”

“She has returned to Australia. She flew in to Melbourne, took a train to Broken Hill and was picked up from the station by her brother. They went back to the sheep station.”

Blum had wondered whether he could afford to let the girl go. She knew everything, after all. In the end, he had decided that it was a risk he could afford to take. It would have brought unnecessary attention to have abducted her for a second time. And there was little incentive for her to cause trouble.

“And Ziggy Penn?”

“I’m afraid we still don’t know.”

“You have no idea?”

“No, sir. We couldn’t leave the property to pursue them. It would have been a risk until it was cleaned.”

“I know that.”

“We know that he didn’t fly out of the country. We checked airline manifests. No hits.”

“Hospitals? He was shot, yes?”

“No sign, sir.”

“Make a suggestion, agent.”

“It would just be speculation, sir. He knows how to drop off the grid. I’m sure that’s what Milton told him to do. He can get money. It might be difficult to find him again.”

Blum stood and dismissed them both. He turned to face the window, watching them depart in the reflection in the darkened glass. They were good agents, and they had done almost everything that he had asked of them. The loose ends, though, were displeasing. He didn’t like uncertainty.

He gazed out over the rooftops again. Rain streamed down the glass. A peal of thunder detonated overhead, rattling the window in its frame. He put his hands behind his back and clasped them together. Both Milton and Bachman were trained to disappear. Bachman had engineered his own death before and had stayed out of sight for ten years. Milton had the same talents.

The Rabins were sure that both men were dead.

Was that good enough for him?

ZIGGY PENN had entered the state of Zen calm he always enjoyed when he did his best hacking. His fingers flashed across the keyboard, code spewing forth almost as if his hands and brain were disconnected. The Starbucks shop was as cookie-cutter as all the other branches he had ever been in. It could have been Seattle or Chicago or London, such was the bland sameness of the décor and the coffee and even the other customers arrayed around the nearby tables.

As it happened, Ziggy was in Gangnam, an upmarket suburb of Seoul. The coffee shop was a short walk from the apartment that he had just visited. It was available for lease, was furnished to a high standard and, most important of all, came with a blazingly fast one-gigabyte-per-second Internet connection. It was also correspondingly expensive with a deposit equivalent to six months’ rent required before it would be removed from the market. Ziggy needed an injection of funds to make the payment, so he had taken a quick detour.

It was an easy hack. A local restaurant that he had visited the day before was lax with its data security, and he infiltrated their servers and copied the credit card details he needed. He would sell those details online. The purchaser would make five or even six figures if he or she was careful; Ziggy would settle for ten thousand bucks.

He paused for a moment and cracked his knuckles.

Ziggy’s leg was still sore, but it was healing well. Matilda had taken him to a hospital in Brgat, where his injury had been treated. There had been no point in trying to disguise what had happened to him. The doctor had identified it as a gunshot wound immediately and had made it clear that the police would have to be called in order that he might be interviewed. Ziggy had not put up any resistance to the suggestion, but, as soon as the man had left him alone to rest for the night, Matilda had smuggled him out of the ward in a wheelchair and then driven him away.

They had travelled north to Zadar and then crossed to Ancona by ferry. From there they had driven north through Italy into Switzerland and on to Bern, where they went their separate ways. Matilda had said that she was going to return to Australia. Ziggy decided upon Korea. He knew what Milton would have advised him to do, and had completed the last leg of his journey in as low-tech a way as possible. He had no cell phone, and he limited his time online to when he could be sure that his activity could not be tracked. He had avoided airports, travelling instead by bus and train to Vladivostok. The trip took nine days and included stops and changes in Basel, Hannover, Berlin, Frankfurt, Brest, Moscow and, eventually, Vladivostok. From there, he took the
Eastern Dream
ferry to Donghae.

Milton had been uppermost in his thoughts during his long journey. Both he and Matilda had debated whether they should stay in Dubrovnik in the event that he hadn’t died, but, eventually, they had agreed that it was pointless. Milton was dead. He had to be. Matilda had watched him and Bachman topple over the edge and disappear into the sea below. They knew Milton was resourceful and tough, but there had been no sign of him or Bachman. Even if Milton had survived the fall, the current was hungry and strong and it seemed impossible that he could have beaten it.

Staying in the city would have been dangerous, too. Ziggy had given the Rabins enough doubt that they had allowed them to leave, but there was no way of knowing how their orders might evolve now that both Milton and Bachman were dead. Victor Blum might call Ziggy’s bluff. They needed to get away, put as many miles between them and the Rabins as possible.

Ziggy wondered about Matilda. She wasn’t going to hide, and he knew there was no point in trying to persuade her that she should. She was going home and damn the consequences. She would be easy to find. Ziggy admired her courage, but thought she was foolish. He would make himself much more difficult to find.

Milton had bought both of them the opportunity to slip into obscurity. Ziggy knew that, and he was going to take advantage of it even if Matilda was not.

So far, Seoul had been everything that he had hoped it would be. It was friendly, the economy was booming, and the weather was pleasant. It was teeming with people, with more than enough ex-pats that another Westerner could be absorbed into the morass without attracting attention. The apartment he had found was luxurious. The women were attractive and his early forays had suggested that the Internet dating scene was vibrant and, even better, it was ripe for a little optimisation. He thought that he would fit in very well here.

He finished inputting his code, pressed return, and stared at the screen. The data would start to flow within the next few minutes and then he would use it to start to build his new life. He would be sensible, stay out of sight, hack only when he had to—and even then, he would take no chances.

He knew he could be happy here.

THE MOTORCADE had driven out from the collection of huts and other ramshackle buildings that comprised the homestead at Boolanga. It was an hour past dawn, and the sun was already starting to bake the sand and rock beneath the wheels of Matilda Douglas’s Jeep. She remembered how hot the day had been yesterday. It had persisted deep into the night, pulsing out of the ground as they ate their fry-up of mutton, finished with bottles of beer that had been chilling in an ice bucket.

Matilda had been back on the station for a month. It was coming to the end of the season, and the sheep needed to be mustered so that the rams could be separated from the ewes and the male lambs neutered. They had received a report overnight that five sheep had broken free of the vast 10,000-acre paddock, and that dingoes had been seen in the area. The business was not so flush with cash that they could write off those sheep, so they had determined to go out and find them.

There were four of them that morning: Mervyn and Eric were on motorbikes, and Harry was overhead in the small Cessna that they used to direct operations. He was circling above the paddock, having located the runaways and radioed their location down to the other members of the posse. Mervyn and Eric had gone ahead to round them up. Matilda could still see the long plumes of red dust that were kicked up by the wheels of their bikes. She would find a suitable spot and then take the temporary pens from the trailer and erect them so that the animals could be herded back into captivity. Once they had been penned, they would be driven into the back of the trailer and Matilda would return them to the rest of the flock.

The radio crackled into life. “They’re running to the south,” said Harry.

“Roger that,” Eric radioed back. “I can see the bastards. We’ll loop around and drive them east.”

Matilda picked up the radio and spoke into it. “Do it sooner rather than later. It’s going to be as hot as Hell today.”

Matilda’s Jeep was towing a trailer behind it, and the towball rattled noisily in the coupling head as the vehicle bounced across the uneven dirt track. She found a suitable spot and braked to a halt. The landscape stretched on for miles, almost identical whichever way you looked. The sky above was a cold blue, unspoiled by cloud. There were clumps of angry-looking bushes, trees that had been beaten down by the sun, and knots of yellowed, parched grass. There had been a big storm the day before yesterday, and the deluge had painted more green on the landscape than would have been usual for this time of the year. The dusty earth drank the water up, and the ochre had seemed deeper than usual as the first stabs of light had lanced out from the horizon earlier.

Matilda muscled the pens out of the back of the trailer and set them up. They were arranged in a wide V, with the open trailer at the point where the two arms of the V met.

Doves watched from the branches of a nearby tree. A kangaroo regarded her with what she took to be pity as it idled by. It took her twenty minutes to erect the fences and, when she was done, she was damp with sweat. She took a bottle of water from the Jeep and was about to sit down in the shadow of the trailer when she saw a smudge of dust rising to the west. She had forgotten her binoculars in the rush to get going this morning and she cursed herself for it now. It was a vehicle, still too distant to identify, but if she had to guess, she would have said that it was another motorbike.

She leaned into the Jeep and picked up the radio to call her brother, but decided against it. He was out of position, so he wouldn’t easily be able to overfly what she was looking at for a second opinion. And he would panic, thinking about what had happened to her, and send Mervyn or Eric, or both of them, back to help. The whole morning’s work would be ruined. The sheep would be gone.

No. She’d handle this herself.

Because Bachman was dead.

She had seen him die.

And if the Mossad wanted her, would they really send one agent on a motorbike?

She clipped the radio back onto the dash, reached across for her shotgun and then stood next to the Jeep to wait for whomever was approaching.

Distance was deceptive in the outback, and it was another five minutes before the new arrival was close enough for her to confirm that he or she was, indeed, riding a motorbike. She wished, again, that she had her binoculars, and, instead, occupied herself by breaking the shotgun and thumbing in two shells. She clicked it shut again and then held it across her body, the index finger of her right hand resting over the trigger guard.

Another five minutes passed and now she saw that the rider was a man. He flicked the bike around a depression and then leapt over a termite mound.

Two minutes after that and Matilda recognised him.

She flicked the safety on the shotgun, propped it against the side of the Jeep, and walked out, leaving the blessing of the shade and meeting him halfway.

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