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Jack Cavanagh lay restless in the master bedroom of his huge waterfront mansion, next to the warm sleeping body of his wife, Beverley. While she slumbered soundly, his eyes were wide and staring into black shadows.

Why, Damien? How did I fail you?

Jack was deeply troubled by what his son had done, and he was troubled too by what he had just consented to. There were things that The American would make happen, terrible things that would be done in the pursuit of damage control. And though the true seriousness of Mr Hand’s work was never uttered, the word ‘
murder
’ not actually stated, that knowledge was implicit.

Jack would never pull a trigger, but neither was he innocent. He knew full well that his consent to Mr Hand’s activities would mean death for some human being, or beings, out there. Mr Hand meant to murder those who would topple the hard-earned Cavanagh empire, and Jack would pay him handsomely for it.

Jack’s throat tightened. His eyes grew sore, fighting tears he would not allow.

He felt ashamed.

Jack Cavanagh felt the weight of his own father’s judgment on him. What would he have done in Jack’s place? Would he have given consent to what was about to take place—those unmentioned, terrible things he ‘did not need to know about’?

Why, Damien? Why?

How did I fail you?

Such musings were pointless.

It was done. The wheels were in motion.

While Jack Cavanagh stared at the dark ceiling of his luxurious bedroom, lying next to his wife, his highly paid security consultant was hard at work. No idealistic concerns entered the mind of The American; he was trained for such eventualities, and familiar with making the hard choices necessary to ensure the security of his clients.

Bob had a lot of work to do.

In the interests of his billionaire client, it was of paramount importance that he track down all communications that the girl at the party, Meaghan Wallace, had made in the time leading up to her death; specifically, any SMS and video messages from her mobile phone that might contain evidence of Damien Cavanagh’s involvement in
criminal activities. He had to establish the level of threat and the seriousness of the leak, and he needed to stay under the radar of the Australian authorities and the public as he went about his work.

Having spent over a decade of his career as the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s headquarters in California, The American was well connected and well respected, even now as an independent contractor. He had people he could call on in instances such as these.

George would be an asset in what he had to accomplish, albeit an expensive one.

The American dialled using his personal Iridium satellite phone—the signals from which were non-geostationary and too fast-moving to be effectively tapped—and reached his contact at his home in Maryland around six in the morning.

‘George, it’s Bob calling from Australia. I am sorry to wake you.’

‘Bob? I don’t believe it.’ George gave out a good-natured laugh, his American accent sounding more prominent than Bob had remembered. With the years he had grown used to the Australian twang. ‘Nah, I wasn’t sleeping. At my age you don’t need much sleep. Tell me, how are things down unda?’

‘Very well, George. Very well.’ After some friendly chitchat he got to the task at hand. ‘George, I have another favour to ask…on similar terms…’

George was high in the command at the US National Security Agency. And the NSA, along with Britain’s GCHQ, ran an intelligence program codenamed ‘Echelon’ which was of particular value in solving Bob’s problem for his client. Australia was one of the five countries cooperating in the signals intelligence (SigInt) program. The secretive, decades-old UK–USA alliance bound together signals intelligence agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia with the NSA to scan every single phone call, fax, email and SMS message in Australia—and the world—for the interests of security. Thus the communications of Meaghan Wallace had already been intercepted by the electronic ears at the Geraldton facility in Western Australia and automatically sent on to the US, where the men at the NSA could now retrieve them. Strictly speaking, the system was used for spying on communications in the interests of national security: communications relating to North Korean military plans, Pakistani nuclear development and, since 9/11, terrorist activity. Every single communication in the world went through the sophisticated program called ‘The Dictionary’, which flagged topics of interest based on relevant keywords, names and phone numbers. The giant global spy system had other commercial and political uses, too. When she was in office, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously ordered a tap on two of her Cabinet
members, and also used the Canadian arm of Echelon to bug the mobile phone of Margaret Trudeau, wife of the then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Bob himself had personally ordered the surveillance of certain multinational companies through Echelon’s vast capabilities in the lead-up to one of Jack Cavanagh’s biggest international commercial deals, and it had given them a great edge over the competition.

Bob’s latest request would go against SigInt’s new rules, but it could be done.

For a price.

To see that his client’s multimillion-dollar transportation deal went through smoothly, there was little Bob White would not, or could not, do. Within twenty-four hours he should have traced the call received by Jack Cavanagh, tracked down the potential blackmailer, Warwick O’Connor, and traced all of Meaghan Wallace’s recent communications. By then, Madame Q’s man Mr Hand would be on the ground and ready to move on the list of targets.

Oh God…

Makedde ran as fast as her legs could transport her, muscles aching with the effort. There was no time. She needed to get there FAST, and if she didn’t get there fast enough, he would take another life—her mother’s life. Without Jane all would be lost. How could the world keep turning without her? The sun would stop shining. All life would come to a terrible end, leaving only a desolate world devoid of meaning.
I must get there in time. I have to save her.
With adrenaline pumping loud in her ears, Mak kicked through the door and into the room.

Almost too late. Almost too late. Almost…

‘Stop!’ she called out, trying to raise her weapon. ‘Put it down! Don’t do it!’

There it was.

She saw IT—that dark, malevolent thing lingering like a dense shadow in the room, a shadow made up of tiny fragments of hate, the very embodiment of utter evil. IT was holding her mother down on a bed—
Makedde’s own mother.

IT had a blade in its hand. A scalpel.

Makedde tried to lift her gun to shoot but her father’s police uniform held her arm down, the sleeves too heavy to bear, too tough to lift. The gun turned to pure lead—heavy, so heavy—and it too could not be lifted. Her arm stayed at her side, useless, pointless, the gun too much for her. Helplessly, she watched the blade of the scalpel come down in a swift arc, the faceless demon laughing at her feeble efforts to prevent the death of her mother.

Makedde’s feet were glued in place, the floor sticky with red fluid. She tried to leap forward to stop the blade as it swung down, but it was no use. She could only watch.

‘
Noooo!
’

She was too late. Again.

The scalpel continued its arc, the room turning crimson, everything now deep red—everyone; the shadow was red, her mother was red, and the stench of death was overpowering. The shadow laughed at her, revelling in her horror, revelling in the crimson—crimson everywhere, covering everything, covering her eyes. Beneath the red she saw tall grasses swaying in the wind. She smelled salty sea air. There was death in the air and on the wind. The grasses began to turn and as they did, blade by blade, they turned the red colour of freshly spilled blood.

Mak cried out.

‘Are you okay?’ a voice said.

The shadowy creature was laughing, the sound filling her heart with horrible heaviness. She felt like she was dying…

‘Mak!’

A voice broke through the fragments of her murky thoughts. Someone was drawing her out of that horrible scene, her failed attempt to save her mother, the terrifyingly sadistic torture and abduction, Catherine’s torn body; Mak’s heart filling with darkness; the shadowy demon, faceless and terrible, laughing at her failure; the overwhelming blood and death.

‘Mak—wake up! Wake up! You’re having a nightmare.’

Andy was shaking her gently by the shoulders, and Makedde found that she was already sitting up in bed.

Oh God. I’ve had another bad dream.

‘Mak, are you okay? What was it about, the nightmare?’ he asked.

‘I was dreaming, wasn’t I?’ she said, disoriented, but already knowing it was a dream, and a familiar one.

Makedde was in their dark bedroom. Moonlight crept in through the half-open blinds, casting faint light in odd shapes across the bed covers. As her eyes adjusted she could make out Andy’s face; she reached out to him and stroked it with one hand. Her fingertips felt stubble.

‘You’re here…’

‘What was your nightmare about?’ he asked. He had both hands on her shoulders, gripping her softly.

‘I can’t quite remember,’ she mumbled, searching for the dream that was slipping away on waking.

‘Look at you,’ he said. In the faint light she could see that he was shaking his head.

Mak put her hands to her face and neck and realised that her skin was glistening with sweat. Her pillow felt damp. It had been a very vivid dream; they always were.

‘Are you okay? You seemed pretty scared. Was it that same dream?’

She squinted and rubbed her forehead. ‘Yes. But…it was a little different this time. I should get my dream diary. Where did I put it?’

Mak had suffered nightmares and insomnia on and off for the five years, since her abduction by a sadistic criminal who had tied her to a bed in a cabin out in the woods—before this man who now lay beside her, Detective Andy Flynn, had intervened, saving her life. Her father’s girlfriend, Dr Ann Morgan, had recommended that Mak start a dream diary to record her sleeping habits and the details of her dreams. She had not made an entry for some time. She had, in fact, thought her sleeping was back to normal—but now, in her dreams at least, it felt like some terrible thing had returned to her life. The dark thing that had haunted her was back.

‘You can do that in the morning,’ Andy said of her dream diary. ‘Don’t think about it any more, okay? Come here.’ He pulled her into his arms, and she pressed her face against his soft chest hair.

Mak was glad of his presence, and glad it had just been a dream. She liked the feeling of him against her, and she liked when he was tender like this.

Her death was not your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s.

Jane Vanderwall had died of cancer, not at the hands of some demonic creature Mak failed to save her from. Cancer was a horrible disease that had taken not only her mother, but so many other people as well. She was not alone in having lost a parent. It had been five-and-a-half years since her mother, bald and painfully swollen from chemotherapy, had finally lost her brave battle.

And the world had continued to turn after she was gone. You didn’t think it would.

During the months when her mother was in hospital suffering through a bone marrow transplant, and the prognosis was bad, Makedde had really wondered if her own heart could keep on beating without the woman who had brought her into the world.

But it had.

Jane Vanderwall fell, and the brutal momentum of life just continued.

‘You haven’t had nightmares for a while,’ Andy said bluntly, concern in his voice. He was right:
she hadn’t. It had seemed like it was a good year or two since it had been a major problem for her. For a time she had felt quite freed of the death that had shadowed her life for too long, but now there was this dream, and these feelings again. She hoped it was not a bad omen. Perhaps it had to do with Andy’s leaving.

‘Everything gets so mixed up in my dreams,’ Mak said.

There was her mother on the bed under that horrible blade—rather than Makedde herself, as it had really been. Mak was always wearing her father’s police uniform in her nightmare, and it never fitted her. It stopped her from moving forwards. And, of course, that nightmare always featured Death, and the cutting scalpel of her attacker. The only thing that really made sense upon waking was her feeling of horror and loss. That feeling was real, even if all the elements were mixed up.

She looked at the clock. It was 2 a.m.

Makedde tried to shut off her brain. Thoughts were slippery and unbalanced in half-waking. It was not a good time to try to solve the world’s problems: there was nothing she could do at two in the morning that would make things more clear. Andy would leave, and she would go to Melbourne to visit Loulou and track down Meaghan’s friend Amy. She needed to keep herself busy.

‘I’m going to take a shower,’ Makedde said
abruptly and threw back the sheet on her side of the bed. ‘I feel all…
icky.
’

For fifteen minutes Mak stood under the hot pulsing jets of their cramped en-suite shower, the slippery spiral of thoughts and nightmarish images seeming to fall off her with the water, swirling down the drain at her feet and disappearing—for the moment, at least.

She shut off the tap and took a deep breath. Her naked body felt refreshed and clean. Beads of water trickled down her skin.

Mak walked back into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around her. When she returned, Andy was halfway between sleep and waking. Moonlight and shadow played across the light bedsheets, the summer evening warm and the window open.

‘Andy,’ she whispered, but then decided she didn’t want to use words.

Mak knelt on the edge of the bed and let her towel drop. Slowly, she pushed the sheet back. In the low light she could see Andy’s naked masculine form in its entirety. He lay on his back on the bed, his tall frame stretched from pillow to foot, arms above his head. She ran her warm hands across his naked body, and followed her fingertips with gentle kisses, first on his chest, one nipple and then the other, then down his stomach along the thin line of dark hair that trailed to his groin. Andy lay still while her hands found him, caressed him, urged him to attention.

Before long she had crawled on top of him, straddling his hips and pressing her mouth to his. They kissed passionately, as those who have been starved of sexual love do. Tongues darted in and out. He grabbed the back of her head, his fingers in her wet hair, pulling her closer.

Mak pulled away. ‘I’ll miss this,’ she whispered in his ear, and pushed her hips down on him. It was so good to feel him enter her. They fitted together tightly like puzzle pieces, and began to move in unison. Andy was hard and eager, and his hands were caressing her flesh, moving from one soft place to another, reaching up for her neck, her shoulders, her nipples, her firm breasts, as his pelvis moved and rocked. Her breasts swayed slightly as she leaned over him, her nipples brushing against his chest. She threw her wet hair back, sending a small shower of droplets over them, and he gripped her waist while she rode him, water dripping slowly down her torso.