The Unknown Terrorist (22 page)

“There’s a long way to go with the homicide investigation.” A short silence followed. “You know how it is.” Richard Cody waited. The air con sounded like the gentlest rain. “Completely off the record …” said Siv Harmsen finally. “Look, we share an understanding, don’t we, Richard?”

“Completely,” echoed Richard Cody.

“Well,” said Siv Harmsen, “they’re taking seriously the idea that it might have been another terrorist.”

“That doesn’t make sense, though,” said Richard Cody. “Why would a terrorist kill a terrorist?”

“Well, it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?” said Siv Harmsen. “He’d become too public, too well known, and therefore a liability. These people are ruthless, even with their own. What’s that phrase I heard you use this morning on tv?—‘the unknown terrorist’. It’s them, the unknown ones, that can get away with the bombings. They’re the ones to fear.”

Rather than presenting a problem, the death of Tariq al-Hakim solved one of Richard Cody’s key dilemmas. Jerry Mendes had gone cold on the Bonnie and Clyde title. As no one had yet come up with anything better, the special had only been promoted generally as “a chilling exposé about home-grown terrorism here in Australia”. Jerry Mendes would, he knew, now agree to the special being focused on Gina Davies. And Richard Cody felt he had a new and perhaps vital element in his story. For what does a Black Widow do but slay her partner?

Richard Cody thanked his ASIO contact for having personally phoned, and was about to hang up, but Siv Harmsen
was oddly talkative for such a late call.

“All this garbage about truth being suppressed with these new terrorism laws,” Siv Harmsen went on, “you know
we
want the public to know certain things. And that’s not me saying that, Richard. That’s people much higher up than me.”

“I’m glad,” said Richard Cody. “We all need to pull together at times like this.”

“Dead right,” said Siv Harmsen. “You get it, you see, Richard. But a lot of people don’t. And we need them to. My bosses like your boss, Richard,” he added. “My bosses want us to help Mr Frith and you all we can.”

As his wife grumbled at the disturbance so late at night, Richard Cody lay back on his pillow, feeling vaguely triumphant. Now his special had just about everything. He could even see the title that had come to him after Siv Harmsen’s call. It would dramatically top and tail the ad breaks, backed by a deep voice announcing his comeback:

“
THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST
returns after this break.”

It was enough. It had to be. How he wished he could hold his son. Nobody knows what moves anybody.

TUESDAY

61

WILDER WAS STILL DREAMING
when she was lifted off the bed by the explosion. The sensation of once more flying, something she had not known in her dreams for a very long time, was so intense and pleasurable that the noise of the explosion, of her bedroom door slamming open, of men racing into her room, of men yelling, was for a fraction of a second absorbed into her dream before she was taken into their nightmare.

Not until other sensations took hold—her body starting to smart from the shoes and books she had landed on—did she slowly come to the awareness that somebody was yelling but the sounds seemed to be reaching her from far away. She knew not a next thing, but many things all happening together: her still-dark bedroom, her still-asleep mind, filling
with ever more men clad in black, wearing military helmets and goggles and brandishing assault rifles, crashing through her home, and at that moment she felt their fear and their hair-trigger aggression as a complete letting go.

“Christ, she’s pissing herself,” she heard one man say.

Later that day she would tell the Doll,

“I was so scared, just so fucking scared. I thought they were the terrorists come to kidnap me, that’s what I thought. They didn’t look like soldiers. They didn’t look like armed police or security guys. They looked like … like, unbelievable, really, Gina, I couldn’t believe them, they were out of
Star Wars
, aliens, they were all in black, but their suits had special pockets and bumps and gadgets and what with their helmets and goggles they looked kind of like amphibious monsters, like killer toads crawled out of the sewers to kill us all, that’s what I felt. I mean, they were so weird. They looked like death, Gina, like what happens when you die, and I just thought, I’m going to die.”

And then the Doll could hear her crying some more, before gathering herself and going on.

“What I remember isn’t the noise or even them, but the smell, that smell of animals terrified and excited all at once, just like kids get sometimes. And I was so fucking frightened I couldn’t move, not even when they were ordering me to get up. I thought they were going to kill me, and it was some trick. They were pulling my home apart—drawers, cupboards, wardrobes, Max is screaming—looking for I don’t know what.

“At first I couldn’t understand what they wanted, then I realised they were police, that they had some sort of warrant,
but even then it wasn’t clear. Maybe it was drugs or maybe a mistake, and then I realised it was you, Gina, and only you, it was all about you. I was so shit scared, I wet myself again, there on the floor, and this man in black and goggles holding a rifle to my head, not moving, I told him, I said, ‘If it’s Gina, you don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s beautiful. This is just mad. You don’t know her.’

“And they just said: ‘Have you ever thought maybe it’s you who doesn’t know Gina? Have you ever thought she might be trained to never tell or breathe a word to you?’”

The Doll said nothing, only moved the phone away from her ear a little. There were many sounds all around, Wilder’s voice now just one. How many sounds equal the end of something and the beginning of doubt? There were cars, drills, sirens, building and road works, signalling that under-tow of terrible movement that no one can understand nor predict, but which everyone must obey. The Doll could feel her feet losing their grip beneath her, could feel other forces sweeping up her body and taking it away.

“Gina?” said Wilder. “Gina, are you still there?”

62

A little over an hour after Wilder mistook the invasion of her home for the freedom of flying, Nick Loukakis, who in consequence of rowing with his wife was sleeping on an air mattress on their living room floor, gave up on the idea of sleep. His thoughts turned to his marriage and it suddenly struck him that they could no longer go on living together and that he must leave her. It seemed not simply important,
but overwhelmingly necessary, that they talk. He got up and went upstairs to their bedroom in order to speak to his wife. But she was asleep, on her side, with a slight snoring burr to her breath.

Still there was the hopeless momentum of his need to change, to no longer live the way they lived, and though all this remained important and necessary in his mind, looking at her now he had no idea what he might say.

“Are you awake?” he began softly, hoping to wake her gently; hoping even more strongly the opposite, that she would not hear him and sleep on. She slept on.

He sat back up on the side of the bed, and, having nothing better to do, continued sitting there. He thought of a documentary he had seen about a great inland sea in Russia, the life-giving forces of which had always been taken for granted, until in a few short years it shrivelled up and disappeared. And somehow their love seemed to him like that inland sea that had simply vanished, that sea that seemed inexhaustible and immortal, and after a time he again leant over and once more whispered to her, because he wanted to tell her about that sea, and once more she didn’t answer.

And so he sat on the bed until the dark night changed into a grey dawn, and he was no longer sure what it was that was so important and necessary, only that whatever it was, it was urgent. Through the course of the night the story about the vanishing sea had also transformed in his mind, until now it was only a tale that really meant very little. But still he hoped that together they might find some words for all the torment he now carried within him and, he suspected, she now also bore inside her.

But the dawn passed and the day came and when they saw each other in the kitchen an hour later, coffee cups in hand, it was as strangers who have no words other than the dullest and most obvious for each other. For, Nick Loukakis dimly realised, there were no words for any of it, neither the finding of love, nor its disappearance.

63

The Doll was still dreaming when the Panasonic television came on. A woman said:

“This is your in-house wake-up call. And don’t forget, this week our continental breakfast is on special.”

And then she vanished and the tv flicked onto Six’s breakfast program,
New Day Dawning
.

“Well,” a newsreader was saying, “the lap dancing terrorist story just keeps on growing.”

The television cut to another angle, the newsreader turned to face it, and the Doll began searching for the remote control. She didn’t want to hear any more. If she heard nothing, it might be possible to find a way through all this. But to listen was to become part of the madness. She would not watch, she told herself, she would not listen.

But the remote control was not next to her bed, and the new world in which she was no longer the Doll but someone and something else altogether continued rolling in, inescapable, tormenting, as undeniable and all-encompassing as the heat she could feel already building outside the sealed window’s glass.

“In new developments, terrorist suspect Tariq al-Hakim has been found dead in inner Sydney. Police are treating his
death as homicide. Meanwhile, fellow terrorist suspect Gina Davies, known as the Black Widow, remains at large. Police have issued the following image of Gina Davies, believing she may have altered her appearance.”

An image flashed up of someone who looked like Gina with a blonde bob. It was a good likeness in the way an ID photo can be a good likeness but, in essence, unrecognisable. That, the Doll guessed, was something, but it didn’t feel comforting.

“Meanwhile, in a police raid in the inner city suburb of Redfern early this morning,” continued the newsreader, “a woman was taken into custody to assist police with their enquiries relating to terrorism rings in Australia. The woman has subsequently been released.”

The Doll knew it must have been Wilder they had picked up, but she didn’t want to know. She knew that Wilder would never now be able to get her money out of her flat and to her, but she didn’t want to know that either. The Doll was up out of bed, looking for the remote control on the small writing table with its broken lamp. ‘It could be someone else,’ she told herself as her search grew more frantic, ‘some real terrorist, some crazy fucking Leb like the one in the burkah. Or an Abo, they’re always picking up Abos.’ And then she felt bad, because maybe they no more deserved being hassled and harassed than Wilder, and maybe they were every bit as innocent, but who cared about Abos other than people like Wilder who didn’t matter anyway?

The remote control wasn’t on the writing table. She should ring Wilder, thought the Doll, then cursed herself for her stupidity. How could she ring her? What if they were listening in? The Doll’s search became more determined.

“Attorney-General Andrew Kingdon has rejected criticism of the raid as an abuse of new anti-terrorism powers,” the newsreader went on.

The remote wasn’t in either of the two tub chairs, nor under the bed with the dust balls and a popped Viagra card.

“In a prepared statement, the attorney-general described the issues the nation was addressing as being of the utmost seriousness. He went on to say that the government did not have the time or resources to be playing games.”

Then the Doll saw the remote, on top of the television, lost in the shadow of the television cabinet. It had many different coloured buttons, and in her panic she could remember the meaning of none of them. There were just coloured buttons, like little lollies.

Why listen to what wasn’t true? If she saw and heard no more, perhaps her life of only a few days ago might return, her griefs and sadnesses might stay hers alone, and she would once more be able to pursue her hopes and her dreams.

The Doll hit several buttons, the television made a squelching noise as it turned off, and the newsreader disappeared.

The Doll went to her hotel room door and opened it, to escape if only for a moment, to breathe, to not feel trapped. A tunnel-like corridor, brown and not overly pleasant to smell, pocked with identical doors, came into view. The Doll felt something with her toes, and looking down saw a newspaper. The headlines read:

TERRORIST DEAD
ASIO RAIDS REDFERN TERROR HQ

But it wasn’t that which caught her attention. It was the date. It was 6 March.

64

The Doll left the Retro Hotel in a rush. She headed down Pitt Street at a brisk pace toward the city centre. The sun had gone, and the sky had dulled off to the colour of a filthy pavement. Yet the lack of sun brought no relief. The cloud was a brown, prickling rug that seemed only to make the humidity and the heat even more unbearable. The smog spread a gritty fug over the windless city and left a burning taste in the Doll’s mouth.

Everything was still, as if waiting.

She felt wretched with tiredness; her body at sixes and sevens with itself; one moment too hot, at another too cold; somehow slimy within and itchy and dry on the outside. Her head ached, and she felt a slight queasiness that was also a giddiness. As she walked the streets, her senses seemed at once dulled and overly sensitive, so that she was slow at registering that a traffic light had changed, yet nervously jerked her head around when behind her a mobile phone rang.

After a few blocks the Doll escaped the heat into the welcome chilled bowels of air conditioned shops.

A voice said: “Today only. On special.”

A voice said: “Get to the red light now.”