Prohibited Zone (33 page)

‘Where's the girl, West?'

‘Not here.'

‘Obviously. You didn't leave her in the car, either, like I told you to.' He rounded the olive tree and stood in front of me, glaring while he pulled a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, lit one and exhaled smoke in a thin jet. ‘I also told you not to fuck me around. I am not a patient man.'

‘You must have misunderstood what I said, Hindmarsh. I told you I had her. I didn't say I was going to bring her with me, despite what you told me to do. And I didn't say I was going to hand her over, you just assumed that. I'm not.'

He sucked his cigarette and looked around, then looked back at me. ‘Then what the fuck is all this about? Maybe I should just bust your arse.'

I stood up and stretched. ‘I doubt you could. Unless you king hit me again, and I'm not going to give you the chance to do that. Or unless you tie me up again.'

‘What are you talking about?'

He dropped his half-smoked cigarette on the ground and snuffed it with a twist of his shoe. He let his hands hang loose at his side, fists lightly bunched.

‘You kidnapped me, didn't you? And Kara.'

He sneered at me. ‘Bullshit.'

‘Yes you did.' I pulled a copy of the Groskreutz lease from my shirt pocket. ‘I found the place you took us to. It's just off Worden Road, near Mount George in the Hills. Ring a bell?'

‘No.' He was a good liar. No doubt that's a skill they teach at spy school. His sneer stayed where it was, just below his twee moustache.

‘See this paper?' I said, waving it at him. ‘This is a copy of the lease agreement between the owner, a Mr Groskreutz, and the lessee. Guess who that is?'

His expression still betrayed nothing, other than contempt.

‘You don't have to guess, do you?' I said. ‘It's you. Nigel Hindmarsh. It even has your mobile phone number.' I held the paper in front of his face so he could see the number.

He snatched it from me. ‘How did you get this?'

‘Doesn't matter how I got it. But it's enough evidence to put you so far up shit creek you'll have your head up someone's arsehole.'

He folded it and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘It's a copy of a copy, Hindmarsh,' I said. ‘And I bet the real-estate agent will be able to identify you, if it ever comes to that. Unless you're going to kill him to cover up your mess.'

‘It might be easier just to kill
you
,' he said. He made a show of looking around. ‘Plenty of places round here to shove a body. No one would ever know. Or care, for that matter.'

I pulled my phone from my hip pocket and disconnected the microphone lead I had attached to it earlier. I put the phone to my ear.

‘You'd care, wouldn't you, Detective?' I said.

‘Not much, to be honest,' said Tarrant on the other end.

I looked at Hindmarsh, his face purple with fury, and held out the phone.

‘Want to talk to Tarrant?'

‘Why would I want to talk to that wanker?' he spat. He hit out at my proffered hand. I took a couple of steps back.

‘Maybe to make sure he heard the threat you just made against me,' I said. I spoke into the phone again. ‘Did you hear it, Detective?'

There was a loud sigh. ‘Yes, I heard it, West. And recorded it in my notebook. And I also heard him call me a wanker. That's much more serious. Tell him to go fuck himself.'

‘He doesn't like you calling him a wanker,' I said to Hindmarsh.

‘Do I care?'

‘West,' said Tarrant, ‘I need to be there. This ends now.'

‘I'll get back to you on that, mate,' I replied. I folded the phone and put it back in my pocket.

‘So to summarise,' I said to Hindmarsh, ‘you could kill me, but since you've just made a public threat against me, I reckon you'd have a pretty tough time of it for a while.'

He stared at me for a long time, his colour slowly relaxing back to red, then gave a heavy sigh. ‘Of course I was never going to kill you, West,' he said. ‘As much as I'd like to.'

He pulled another cigarette from its packet and lit up, glancing at me as he did so. He was giving himself time to assess the new situation. ‘So what do we do now?'

‘I'm going to sit down,' I said. I sat back on the olive tree. ‘You might as well, too.'

‘Fuck, you want to hold hands?'

‘Just sit down. If you want to save your neck. Here, have an olive branch.' I broke off a small branch and held it out. ‘Maybe we can make a deal.' He grunted with what might be described as an irritated flourish, and sat, ignoring the olive branch. I tossed it away. The large branches of the fallen tree shaded us from the sun, which was strong now that the clouds had dissipated.

‘You've still got something I want,' he said.

‘Which I guarantee you're not going to get. And now it's time for me to make a little threat. If you make a grab for Saira, I will go straight to the media and tell them what you've been up to.' I opened my phone again, quickly aimed it at Hindmarsh and took his photo. ‘That's for the media story,' I said. I looked at the screen. ‘Doesn't flatter you, but a good likeness.'

He stared at me with hard black eyes.

‘I don't understand you, West. You don't seem at all concerned about the security of your country. You don't seem to mind that a bunch of terrorists is wandering around looking for people to blow up.'

‘Is that what drives you? The national interest?'

‘Of course it is.'

‘And you know what's in the national interest?'

‘Of course I do. And I know that a terrorist attack is
not
in the national interest.'

‘And you would go to any extent to protect the national interest?'

‘No, there are boundaries.'

‘Which are?'

He shrugged. ‘We could have made a complete mess of you in that house. We didn't.'

‘But your mate had a good play with Kara's tits. In the national interest, was it?'

He exhaled smoke and we both watched it as the westerly breeze blew it against the wall of the quarry.

‘Look, all we wanted was information. We didn't have much time. We didn't want to hurt her, we just wanted to scare her, make her
think
she was going to get hurt. It didn't work. I called the whole thing off when he started stripping her. That wasn't in the plan.'

‘Who was he, anyway?' I asked.

‘You don't need to know.'

‘He didn't seem to mind hurting me.'

‘Lots of people wouldn't mind hurting you, West.'

He looked like a man who believed in what he was doing, believed in the righteousness of his country. He probably stood to attention when they played the national anthem. Maybe he even knew the words. He was a man who believed that the end justified the means. Perhaps it did. Maybe you have to fight terror with terror. Or maybe if you do you end up with something that is no longer worth fighting for.

‘I bet your boss doesn't have a clue what you're up to,' I said. ‘He won't be happy to find out on the news.'

He shrugged. ‘The press run bullshit stories all the time.'

‘By the way, I have a theory about why you're so fixated on Saira.'

‘Which I would be fascinated to hear,' he said. He was jiggling his knees up and down, one after the other. ‘But would you mind cutting to the fucking chase? I have things to do.'

‘You're interested in Amir Khan because you think he's a terrorist, right?'

‘Get on with it.'

‘You know how fond he is of Saira, and that he probably doesn't care much about anything else in the world. You want Saira as leverage. You either need her to smoke Amir out from wherever he is hiding, or you already have him and you want to use her as a way of getting him to talk. Am I close?'

He didn't respond. His face didn't change or give even the slightest twitch. His legs kept jiggling.

‘I happen to think you already have Amir. I think you picked him up almost as soon as he escaped from Woomera. In fact, I think you knew about the escape and even encouraged it so you could get your hands on Amir without anyone knowing.'

He drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘Is that your bullshit theory?' he said. ‘Why would we want him to escape when we could interview him any time we wanted?'

‘True, you could talk to him whenever you wanted, but you couldn't torture the poor bastard. You had to go black, if that's the right spook expression. You had to get him somewhere where no one knew what you were doing to him. You thought that was the only way you could get him to talk. And you were going to take Saira with you and maybe torture her, too. Only that part of the plan backfired.'

Hindmarsh stood up and crushed his cigarette butt under his shoe. ‘It's all bullshit. Good luck with the media, telling them about a kidnapping you didn't bother to report to the police. I'm out of here.' He turned to go.

‘But I did report it,' I said, also standing up. He stopped and turned back. ‘I told Tarrant and his sidekick Pinchbeck. They saw the bruises. Tarrant already knows you're an arsehole.'

I dug around in the front pocket of my jeans and pulled out Janeway's phone. I held it up.

‘But this is your biggest problem, Hindmarsh. It used to belong to Peter Janeway. You know him, he's a guard at the detention centre. I found your phone number on it. I also noticed that you and he have been calling each other quite a lot lately.'

Hindmarsh showed a reaction at last; his lip lost its sneer.

A jet was heading west over our heads at cruising altitude, leaving behind a trail that rapidly went ragged, a white scar in the sky.

‘I wonder how much you know about what Janeway was up to,' I said. ‘Maybe he was following orders. Your orders. He's been a bad boy. Kidnapping, sexual assault, beatings, all in a day's work for him. You know he's in hospital? Maybe he can do a deal, cough up some information on his ASIO handler in return for a little court leniency.'

‘You're bluffing.'

‘Yeah. That's why you're shitting yourself.'

He walked away a few metres, picked up a rock and threw it at the wall of the quarry. ‘Fuck!'

‘You know you're stuffed, don't you? You're a rogue agent, you're just as dangerous as a terrorist.'

He snorted. ‘Bullshit!' He flung another rock at the quarry wall and swung round to face me. ‘I'm trying to protect the fucking country, even for fuckwits like you who don't deserve it. I'm the good guy.' He said it as if he believed it. ‘You have no idea of the threat we face in this country. There are fuckers out there who want to destroy us, kill thousands of innocent men, women and children. Children! They actually
want
to kill children. You think I'm as dangerous as they are? You're a moron.'

I said, ‘Sure, everyone is scared of terrorists and want people like you hunting them down. But who said you could take the law into your own hands? Who said you could torture people? You start doing that and you start growing your own terrorists. You can't win a war on terror by terrorising people.'

‘And you can't win it by bending over and letting them fuck you up the arse.'

I put the phone back in my pocket. Hindmarsh was glaring at me with his little pellet eyes. He picked up a third rock, a hefty one. He shaped to throw it at the quarry wall but changed his aim at the last minute and flung it at me. I was expecting it and ducked under it. As I did he reached into his jacket, pulled out a gun and pointed it at me, assuming a classic double-handed shooter's stance. He moved with impressive speed.

‘Freeze!' he yelled.

I was still in a half-crouch. I froze for a moment but, with an effort of will, I stood up. ‘I'm getting sick of people pointing guns at me, Hindmarsh,' I said.

‘Give me the fucking phone.'

‘No.'

‘You can't win, West.'

‘Nobody's going to win, Hindmarsh. You don't get that yet, do you? And you can't kill me; we've already been through that, you wanker. You're not thinking clearly.'

He made a snorting noise. ‘I can still shoot you in the leg.'

‘Sure you can, mate, but you'd have every cop in the state out looking for you in a flash. Not even agents of the Commonwealth can go round shooting people – especially ex-footy stars – in the leg.'

‘You said before you weren't a star. Nobody would give a fuck.'

‘I can offer you a way out, Hindmarsh. You might even get to keep your job, although you don't deserve it.'

‘Spit it out.'

‘Put down the gun first.'

He thought for a moment and then pointed his gun at the ground, but he didn't put it away. I reached behind my back and pulled out PJ's pistol. I slipped off the safety catch.

‘Now we both have a gun,' I said. ‘So put the damned thing away.'

He stared at me. Eventually, with a shrug, he shoved the damn thing in his holster.

I kept mine in my hand, pointed to the ground. ‘Here's the deal. Release Amir, wherever he is. Hand him over to the cops. If you do that, neither Kara nor I will spill the beans on what you've been up to and you get Janeway's phone. And PJ's gun, if you want it. '

‘That's your deal? No way.'

‘Fine.' I opened my phone and selected the general phone number for the
Advertiser
, which I had typed into my directory at the Port Willunga house, still watching Hindmarsh out of the corner of my eye. When it was answered I asked to be put through to the paper's chief investigative journalist.

‘The media will call you a rogue agent,' I said while I waited. ‘They will say you fucked up big-time. There will have to be a police investigation; you're not above the law. You're going to prison, Hindmarsh.'

‘Close your fucking phone,' he said. ‘You can have Amir.'