Jill Jackson - 04 - Watch the World Burn (25 page)

‘Two minutes,’ said Jill. ‘I can’t believe they won’t move. Oh, get out of the way!’ Even with a siren right up their arse, some motorists just didn’t get it. ‘There’s a fire up there, Gabe! It’s got to be Caine.’

‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ said Gabriel. ‘It can’t be him. There’s no way Caine would start a fire tonight and not cause complete mayhem. A pissy little fire? You heard the radio – they’ve got the fire contained, no casualties. It’s out already. It’s not Caine. He’d have to have someone in a coffin to risk coming out to play tonight.’

‘Well, we’re almost there now. Let’s check it out.’

Gabriel suddenly shot forward in his seat.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he said.

‘What?’

Gabriel had his radio out. ‘It’s not about the fire, Jill. Please, just do whatever you have to do to get us there!’

Well, she couldn’t really blame herself. Every single decision she’d made tonight had been a mistake. Giving in to Hamish, the red dress, these frigging shoes. Erin Hart scowled at the stilettos dangling in her left hand and held on to the filthy stair rail with her right. Still, having a bomb go off in your dining room would probably whack your common sense out of shape a bit, she figured.

She kept moving, trying to watch where she stepped. Just what she was stepping on in her bare feet, she shuddered to imagine. She knew that stairwells, even stairwells in five-star hotels, also doubled as spittoons, romantic rendezvous locations and piss troughs. Erin would bet her feet were a biohazard right now.

At least Hamish had walked down with her – the last of the restaurant guests, the wooden-spooner, the absolute loser. She’d seen the smile the gorgeous waiter had flicked over his shoulder at them when they’d first started out. Hamish could have caught him up in a heartbeat; he’d have had his phone number by now.

‘Last flight, Mrs Hart,’ said Hamish. ‘We’re nearly there.’

‘Hamish,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘If you don’t start calling me Erin right now, I am going to perform upon you an emergency tracheotomy, using the heel of this shoe.’

Hamish grinned. ‘But Mrs Hart sounds so important, like I work for a member of parliament.’

Erin lifted a shoe in the air.

‘All right, all right,
Erin,’
he said. ‘We’re here!’

Hamish pushed open the heavy fire door and leaned against it, holding it open for her.

Erin stepped barefoot into the street, the world exploded, and then there was nothing.

Hurdling across the bonnet of a slow-moving taxi, Troy Berrigan watched Caine register his movement, then pivot towards him. Caine met his eyes and smiled.

Just fifteen metres from him now, and clear of moving cars, Troy ratcheted up the pace. Ten strides would do it.

Nine.

Caine held something dark and round in his hand. He raised it to his mouth.

Ohgodohgodohgod.
He threw it.

Elizabeth Street exploded. The car alarms barely preceded the screaming, and each competed for decibels. Troy pulled himself into a sitting position on the street and tried to get to his feet. Everything bled – or it seemed that way through the veil of blood in his eyes. He used a parked car for cover and got himself into a crouch.

He reached up to where the blood began, touching gingerly. He felt a thrill of horror when his fingertips contacted goo. Panicked, he pressed harder and felt the resistance of his scalp. He breathed out and let his hand pad around. A lot of blood, but at least his fingers didn’t slip inside his skull. He’d once attended a suicide where the vic had blown off the top of his head, but the prick hadn’t realised he was dead. He’d stayed conscious until they were three minutes away from the hospital, when the fact had caught up with him.

A fucking grenade. Where’s Caine?

When Troy spotted him again, the rush in his ears silenced the screams and the sirens. Just his blood surging and the sound of his breathing accompanied him as he crouched his way along the row of parked cars. Troy could see that Caine held another bomb, and this time, from the cover of a white people-mover, it looked as though he was positioning himself for better aim.

As Troy sprang from his squat near the wheel well of the white van, Caine put both hands on the grenade and hooked his finger through the pin.

‘At the scene of a bombing on Elizabeth Street, opposite Hyde Park, David Jones end. Multiple casualties. Suspect was sighted involved in a struggle with civilian. Suspect is no longer in sight. Special Agent Delahunt is in situ.’ Jill crouched next to the car, watching him run while she called it in. She felt naked without her firearm. ‘Suspect’s name is David Caine, current AFP terror target. He’s in possession of light military weapons and looks to have detonated a fragment grenade.’

The sirens closed in from everywhere. Jill heard the dispatcher calmly requesting further details. She clipped the radio to her waistband and moved. They had what they needed for now.

Fucked if she was going to sit there while Caine still had his liberty.

She sprinted across the road, ignoring the two bodies twenty metres away and her urge to assist the hysterical group beyond them. She spotted Gabriel cautiously making his way around the white van, behind which, a minute earlier, they’d witnessed Caine being crash-tackled by Troy Berrigan.

She reached the van just as Gabe disappeared beyond it. She followed.

Everything had become super-slow, as it always did. Frame by frame. Mid-spring, Troy had watched Caine’s hands come apart. Troy connected, body-charging Caine to the ground. He brought himself to his knees, rammed one of them into Caine’s spine.

Now he could see the grenade. Caine’s throwing arm was outstretched, flat against the pavement. Troy reached down, restraining Caine’s left hand with his own, and then, with his mangled right hand, he reached forward and grabbed the fist holding the grenade.

Caine coughed once beneath him. They lay together quietly for a bit, breathing in synch.

‘I’ve released the pin, Troy,’ said Caine.

Troy squeezed his thumb and forefinger tighter around Caine’s fist. Although his good hand easily restrained Caine’s left, his right had no real power anymore. He could feel his grip weakening. He let himself moan quietly with the exertion.

Right then a pair of black combat boots filled his vision. Oh God, there’s another one. I’m sorry Lucy, Chris. He angled his face upward.

Delahunt, above him.

‘He’s pulled the pin,’ said Troy.

‘I heard,’ said Delahunt.

‘I can’t hold it,’ said Troy.

‘I can see,’ said Delahunt, squatting beside them. Delahunt wrapped his hand around both of their own. Troy’s arm began to shake.

‘Hi, David,’ said Delahunt, pressing the barrel of his Glock into Caine’s temple.

Another pair of boots appeared in Troy’s line of sight.

‘Jackson, just there,’ said Delahunt. ‘To your left. Would you retrieve that pin?’

Troy felt Delahunt shift his weight just a little.

‘Thank you,’ said Delahunt. ‘Now, Jill, you need to just thread the pin back in through the top of the safety lever.’

Jackson kneeled in front of them.

‘Caine’s finger’s blocking it,’ she said.

‘David, you’re going to have to move your index finger,’ said Delahunt. ‘Just your index finger, or I’m going to put this bullet right here through your head. After I’ve done that, we’ll still have four seconds to get the pin in, and Jackson here will accomplish that while your brain is still smoking.’

Troy felt a slight shift beneath his fingers. He watched Jackson slide the pin into the grenade. He shuddered and unclawed his hand. Jackson retrieved the grenade.

Delahunt wrenched Caine’s hands behind his back and Troy rolled off, sat up, then rubbed at his missing fingers. While Delahunt cuffed Caine and searched his pockets, he watched Jackson take a step closer. She stopped at Caine’s face.

‘Are there any more surprises for us out here?’ she yelled down at Caine.

Nothing.

Troy winced as Jackson pulled back and kicked Caine full in the face. He only faintly heard Caine’s moan. The lights now accompanied the sirens, and he could feel a chopper thumping in.

‘Stop,’ said Delahunt. ‘We’ve got company, Jill. Can you give me the radio? We have to get this whole area closed off and searched. Right now.’

For the first time in two weeks, Jill slept right through the night. She woke at eight, pulled a T-shirt and shorts over her bikini and jogged across the road to the beach. She kept to the dry sand; with no resistance under her feet, the shifting ground sucked at her ankles, sapping her momentum. She ran harder, wrenching her feet free with each step. Her thighs were already burning by the time she got to the surf club. When she reached the tidal pools at the end of the beach, every breath shredded and her lungs sucked for air. She turned at the rocks and, with her feet finding better purchase on the wetter sand, ramped up the pace, sprinting to maintain the effort until she reached the shifting sand again.

Two laps later, she could not run anymore, but she imagined Scotty, beside her, laughing down at her while she busted a gut to try to beat him, just once. Her face wet, Jill pushed through it. Every waking moment of every day brought the realisation of one more thing she’d never do with him again. When she dropped, in the middle of her fourth lap, she stayed there, her head between her knees, trying not to vomit.

After a swim, Jill headed back to her unit, then showered and washed her hair. She’d been so exhausted last night that she’d fallen into bed in the same singlet she’d been wearing for thirty hours.

She decided right now that she would burn it. She grabbed an apple for breakfast and rang Gabriel.

‘You had breakfast?’ he asked by way of hello.

‘Yep,’ she said, crunching.

‘Want some more?’ he asked.

‘Yep,’ she said.

Jill arranged to meet Gabriel at the coffee shop underneath the AFP offices. She ordered raisin toast and was served a piece of bread the size of a textbook. Gabriel bought a yoghurt. They took their food to an outside table, steering clear of the smokers.

‘You’re not hungry,’ said Jill.

‘Something’s not right,’ he said.

She waited.

‘We got nothing from the first round of interrogation,’ he said. ‘I knew we wouldn’t. Caine won’t talk. Not for a long time, anyway. So we put him in a safe cell around two, to make sure he doesn’t off himself.’

‘You could have at least overlooked his belt,’ she said.

He gave her a look.

‘Joking,’ she said. ‘Keep going.’

‘Anyway, I’m watching his non-verbals as we’re going at him. He’s a calm motherfucker. But I got some stress signals when I went in on the anomalies, the actions that just don’t make sense to me.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, this guy ... You’ve gotta understand that this squirrel has been out there committing murder undetected for at least a decade. No priors for anything. This is an extremely contained, obsessive individual. He’s acutely paranoid, but not psychotic. He’s at once profoundly disturbed and completely, coldly sane.’

Jill shook her head, pushed most of the toast away. ‘Why do you think he does it?’

‘Oh, he’ll have some obsessive dogma about the government trying to control people’s lives, some manifesto to bring them down or at least disrupt them as much as he can. And this latest spree is obviously all connected with the cameras. He doesn’t want more surveillance. Of course, CCTV cameras are the ultimate symbol of Big Brother, but at a practical level, he wants to continue going about his work undetected. The more cameras there are around, the less likely that he can do that.’

‘Well, he’s not going to be doing any more work in this country,’ Jill said. ‘Except maybe in the kitchens at supermax, if he’s lucky. That double-fatal last night is enough to see him never released, but now there’ll be plenty of time to tie him to everything else.’

Gabriel stirred his yoghurt. He hadn’t eaten any.

‘So, the cameras,’ Jill said. ‘That explains last night, the bombing at Erin Hart’s house, and maybe the stabbing of the drug rep and pushing Sheila McIntyre in front of a train.’

‘Oh, I think we’ll find he did the last two,’ said Gabriel. ‘He tried, but he just couldn’t keep the superiority out of his eyes last night when I took him through the Ninja Turtle stabbing. I told him that with the stabbing, he was trying to tell us that he’s the invisible man and he’ll kill when he wants to – cameras or no cameras.’

‘And he looked proud of himself when you said that?’

‘Oh, he fucken loved that I got it. He’s so proud of himself. But when I mentioned the bombing at the politician’s house, I got the stress signals. He was not happy.’

‘You don’t think he did that, then? But everything puts him there. And Hart is the head of this CCTV committee.’

‘I know. I told him that I thought it was sloppy work – he didn’t even get a kill and he risked Hart not attending his big show at Incendie the next night. You should have seen him when I said that! He had to move, Jill, he started shifting in the chair, and I got a full cluster of deception and blocking signals.’

‘Maybe he’s just mad at himself,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’ She thought for a moment. ‘It’s not like he’s totally single-minded. I mean, hating surveillance cameras doesn’t explain why he killed his mother.’

‘These fuckers always have a mummy thing. And everyone’s dispensable to them. But killing his mother
was
connected to the cameras, don’t you see? He needed to know where the evac point at Incendie was. He knew about the retirement party for Norris. Of course, he knew that Norris had been the driving force behind the cameras for years, so he wanted to send him off with a real bang. Him and as many of his cronies as he could manage.’

Jill was silent a moment. Finally, she said, ‘You think he killed his mother to shape his
tactical
plan?’

‘She would have copped it eventually, anyway. Doing it there was just convenient.’

‘That just leaves Scotty,’ she said quietly, her eyes on the table.

Gabriel sighed. ‘Well, yes, Scotty. That and the acid attack on those kids.’

‘Really, Gabe, that acid attack could have been anyone.’

‘And yet the chemical used is in his shed. And Erin Hart receives an email about it. It’s all tied up together somehow, but it doesn’t seem his usual style.’

‘What’s bugging you about it? Why doesn’t it fit?’

Gabriel suddenly scraped back his chair, snapped his head up. His eyes bored into hers. ‘I’ll tell you why, Jill. The acid attack on the kids, the firebomb into Erin Hart’s home – they’re adolescent acts. Ill-conceived, impulsive. The very opposite of David Caine.’

Jill took a deep breath. ‘Oh my God. An adolescent. An adolescent who had access to the shed.’

Gabriel grinned, the smile was bitter, his eyes dead.

‘Mona,’ Jill said.

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ said Troy Berrigan, after Jill had identified herself when the call connected. ‘I was just trying to find the card Delahunt gave me last night. I need to talk to you.’

‘Shut up a minute, Troy,’ said Jill. ‘Do you know where Caine’s kid is?’ She jogged down the steep stairs to the street, a hand on the railing. Gabriel was waiting by an AFP vehicle.

‘So, you know already?’ said Troy.

‘Know what?’

‘About the gun.’

‘Fuck,’ said Jill. ‘What gun?’

‘My little brother’s locked up,’ said Troy. ‘Discharging a firearm. He wouldn’t tell anyone where he got it, until today.’

‘Mona?’ asked Jill.

‘Mona,’ said Troy.

Jill opened the passenger door, stepped in. ‘Where is she?’ she said into the phone. ‘Do you know?’

‘She was here last night,’ said Troy. ‘Lucy told me that some social workers showed up at school and wanted to put her in a shelter or some shit. Lucy made them call me. It was before all last night’s bullshit happened, and I convinced them she could stay here. She slept in my sister’s room. I didn’t know what the hell I could say to her about her father this morning, so I just stayed in bed when I heard them get up. I figured DoCS would know how to break it to her when she got to school this morning. She’s only sixteen.’

‘She’s gone to school?’ asked Jill. ‘Which school?’

‘Randwick Girls High,’ he said.

‘Randwick Girls,’ said Jill to Gabriel.

He rocketed the car from the curb.

Troy spoke again. ‘If that’s not why you called me, what do you want her for? Are you going to tell her about her father?’

‘Something like that,’ said Jill.

‘Well, I just want her away from my sister,’ said Troy. ‘There’s something not right about that whole fucking family.’