Flight of the Eagle (30 page)

Michael felt as if he was walking in a valley with his enemies enjoying the advantage of the hills on either side. But at the end of the valley he could see Fiona smiling sadly at him. He sensed that her need to talk about the fate of their son was equal to his own. At least now he could go to her without the threat of blackmail. But the thought of the meeting with the colonel the next day caused Fiona to fade from his vision. Was he walking into a trap set by the utterly ruthless man he had sworn to avenge himself on one day?

‘You leave tomorrow, John,’ Michael said firmly to the big Eurasian sitting opposite him in the dingy office that had been a front for their operations against von Fellmann. Not that the office would have fooled a careful scrutiny by anyone acquainted with the import and export trade. There was no real evidence of the paperwork one would expect with the trade: no ledgers of accounts could be seen on the bare desk or empty shelves; no almanacs of shipping routes. Only a painted sign at the front of the tiny office declaring the proprietor.
John Wong – Importer of Oriental Wares.

John shifted in the swivel chair and hunched forward. ‘You go without backup to Central Station tomorrow you could end up dead if your suspicions about Granville White being behind the meeting are right,’ he growled. ‘You need me, Michael.’

‘Not anymore, old friend,’ Michael said mournfully. ‘You have a wife and family to think about and I was stupid to even recruit you for the job here. I took advantage of your loyalty without thinking through the possible consequences the mission might have had to your safety.’

John's burst of laughter rolled around the tiny office, catching in the spider's web at one corner of the tin ceiling. ‘Old friend, I was getting bored,’ he said when the laughter had abated to a chuckle. ‘I was almost missing the days you and I pushed our luck to the limit. I was growing fat on my missus' excellent noodle cooking and I was starting to question why the hell I had left you to have all the fun somewhere in the Orient. I often thought about raising the subject of rejoining you every time Horace came over for a chat.’

‘It's different this time,’ Michael warned with a sad smile. ‘Here I have come the full circle of my life to confront the enemy who started me on the road to the hell that has been my life. I'm in his territory and he holds all the advantages.’

‘Never much different in the past,’ John grunted. ‘You and I always seemed to be up against the odds. But somehow we survived.’

Michael stared at his friend. Yes. They had seen much together and had always beaten the odds. But this was different. Here, he worked under the shadow of the gallows, should he be identified and betrayed to the police. A warrant for murder did not cease in a man's lifetime. Here, his friend could be compromised by association with a wanted felon. A compromise that could ruin his business and life with his family. ‘You leave tomorrow,’ Michael reiterated stubbornly as he bit down on the unlit Havana cigar he had retrieved from a box on the desk. ‘What happens tomorrow is personal. It's got nothing to do with you.’

‘All right, if you say so you bloody fool,’ his friend answered with a tone of exasperation. ‘I'll go, and leave you with your problems.’

Michael stared suspiciously at his friend as he leaned back in his chair. The damned inscrutableness of his Chinese half had come to the fore, he thought. ‘Will you give me your hand on a promise to go?’ he asked, as he continued to examine the expression of the man opposite and noticed a faint flicker of uncertainty.

But the uncertainty was quickly absorbed in the smile that came slowly as John thrust out his broad hand. ‘On the lives of my family and my illustrious ancestors I promise I will leave,’ he said and Michael took his hand.

‘The lives of your family I believe,’ Michael said with a wry grin. ‘But your illustrious ancestors! I doubt that you have ever burnt incense for them.’

‘I was talking about my Irish ancestors,’ John retorted. ‘And from what I've seen of barbaric Irish custom it seems you drink to them. Not burn incense.’

‘Good idea. I suggest we share a drink for old times' sake and toast illustrious ancestors – Chinese and Irish.’

John nodded. An oath on the lives of his family was indeed a sacred blood oath and maybe he had forgotten to mention
when
he had promised to leave Sydney. At least not until he was sure his friend was not walking into a possible trap.

TWENTY-NINE

T
he meeting with the bankers dragged into the early evening. Lady Enid Macintosh hardly entered into the discussion on the merits of converting two more of the Macintosh ships with refrigeration engineering. Her hated son-in-law had taken most of the lead in the discussion with the grey men who would finance the enterprise.

She sat in the austere, dark panelled board room immersed in her grief and hatred for the smugness of the man who now sat at the head of the long, polished table. Granville had taken the chair as a gesture of his position within the Macintosh companies and Enid did not have the strength to comment on his assumed role as head of the financial empire that was, in reality, slipping from her rigid control.

The three other men who sat along the oak table represented the English financial institutions which backed the Macintosh companies. Granville had convinced them that the money needed to convert the ships for the Australia–England run would bring greater profit to the company with the addition of a meatworks in Queensland. Beef and lamb from the colony could be funnelled into the Macintosh abattoirs and then packaged for shipping direct to England. The revolution brought about by the invention of refrigeration meant Australian meat could be shipped fresh to English tables. No longer would the non-perishable clips of Australian wool be the only major product to be exported from the far-off colony. The finest cuts of Australian meat could grace even the Queen's table.

Cigar smoke curled in heavy blue clouds around the room as the bankers puffed and listened while the excellent port in crystal decanters made the listening even more tolerable. The men finally nodded as one and the plan was approved. Much as she hated and despised her son-in-law, Enid had to admit his plan to link the whole chain of meat production from the hardy Queensland pastures to the elegant tables of England, without a costly middleman, was sound. Theirs would be a monopoly.

‘Thank you, gentlemen.’ Granville smiled broadly as the men filed out of the smoke filled room to go to their exclusive clubs in town or to their families in Sydney's more affluent suburbs. But his fixed smile melted once he was alone with Enid. She had not bothered to thank the men and remained seated at the table. Granville closed the door and turned to speak to her. His aristocratic good looks had faded with time and he now looked in appearance like a middle-aged bank manager or accountant. But his suit was the finest cut in the colony and had been tailored in London's Saville Row.

‘I have been remiss in offering my condolences on your tragic loss, Enid,’ he said with feigned sympathy. ‘A terrible thing to happen to one so young.’

Enid stared listlessly at him. ‘You may be able to convince the men who were here on the merits of the proposal,’ she said in a tired voice, ‘but you will never convince me you have any feeling except for power.’

‘Oh, I have feelings for my daughters.
Your
grand-daughters,’ he retorted. ‘Both will have reached their twenty-first years very soon,’ he added as a veiled threat to Enid's tenuous control of the family fortune. ‘I will probably give them coming-of-age gifts of substantial sums of money so that they may enjoy the fruits of their grandfather's legacy to them.’

‘In return for their shares,’ Enid replied, attempting to keep the rising bitterness from her tone. She did not want her hated son-in-law to see her distress at the statement about his daughters most likely selling their shares to him. He would then have an almost clear two-thirds share of the Macintosh companies. ‘You give nothing away, Granville,’ she said. ‘Not even to your own flesh and blood.’

Granville glared with undisguised hatred at the frail woman who confronted him across the table. For so many years she had dominated the Macintosh family but her iron rule was coming to an end, he consoled himself. He suspected that she had only returned from England because she was paving the way for her beloved grandson, his own wife's bastard, to take a more active hand in the Macintosh companies, should he leave the army as he had promised Enid. If so he would have returned to Sydney. But that was a moot point now that he was missing in action and most likely dead. ‘It was
your
flesh and blood that gave me the opportunity to sit in this chair,’ he sneered as he grasped the back of the chair he had occupied at the head of the table. ‘A chair I doubt that you wished to relinquish in a hurry, dear Aunt Enid.’

‘You have no right to the position, as you well know, Granville,’ she replied as she walked towards the door. ‘Until your daughters come of age we both hold the balance of decision making in the companies. And a lot can happen before then.’

‘Not a threat I hope, Enid,’ he said with mild surprise at his mother-in-law's statement. ‘You don't have many friends left alive.’

‘I will never believe my grandson is dead. Not until I see his body with my own eyes,’ she replied with a steely determination in her statement. ‘And from what I know of my grandson he is too much like his father to be killed that easily.’

At the mention of Michael Duffy's name Granville blanched. One of two recurring nightmares was to wake up and look into the eye of the man who he knew would one day exact his revenge on him should their paths ever cross again.

The other nightmare was losing everything to his mother-in-law. But there was also a third nightmare that visited him in the dark nights. A nightmare with no real substance, just a vague feeling of dread for a place he had never visited: a hill on Glen View Station surrounded by endless plains of brigalow scrub, a primitive place, sacred to a people long since dispersed by Sir Donald almost a quarter of a century earlier.

Enid felt a surge of pleasure at seeing the observable discomfort the name of Michael Duffy caused the despised Granville. Oh, if only she could turn back time. She had made few mistakes in her life but when she had they haunted her down the passage of years. They were mistakes that had commenced as ripples and ended as life destroying tidal waves. Bad decisions had lost Enid the love of her only daughter and turned her into a bitter and vengeful woman. Fiona had long cast her lot with Granville and the sale of her shares to him only proved further the lengths she would go to inflict the maximum damage on her own mother.

When Enid opened the door to the board room she saw Colonel George Godfrey standing in the hallway, an umbrella hooked over one arm. He stood admiring a painting on the wall and Granville, who had followed Enid into the hallway, paused when he saw the former army officer.

‘Good evening, Lady Macintosh, Mister White,’ Godfrey said politely as he turned from the painting. He was not in the corridors of the Macintosh building by accident; he had walked the same corridor many times on his way to the Macintosh offices to pass on information that would be converted to important intelligence. ‘I pray I am not too late to see you.’

THIRTY

S
team and smoke swirled around the people waiting on the platform of the railway station. The chuffing iron monsters that trailed billowing smoke across the plains and mountains to the west of Sydney now trailed their smoky plumes into Sydney's Central Station.

The trains brought elegant ladies, rheumy eyed shearers, eagerly awaited mail, bales of wool and young men in search of work in the bright lights of the ‘big smoke’. The railway lines joined the distant colonial capitals in a way only once dreamed of. Now a traveller could step aboard a train in Melbourne and cross the Murray River to change trains for the trip to Sydney, a feat made possible by the completion of the construction of a bridge spanning the river near the township of Albury.

Outside the cavernous structure of the railway station horse-drawn cabs, carriages, drays and buggies waited for fares, families or friends. Wealthy ladies wearing the awkward but fashionable bustled dresses of the day mingled with their poorer sisters who could not afford to be as uncomfortable and thus wore plainer, less voluminous dresses.

Adventurous or desperate young women from the country stepped off the trains in search of positions as maids and nannies in the homes of the colony's gentry. Young men in moleskins and the single shirt they owned left the station in search of a cheap flop house, and eventually a job working in one of the factories or building sites of the rapidly expanding prosperous city.

From an elegant horse-drawn carriage alighted a dignified older man in frock coat and top hat carrying an umbrella hooked over his arm. He searched the sandstone portal of the railway terminus for the man he had come to meet.

Michael Duffy doubted that he would need the small pistol he carried when Godfrey arrived to pick him up. It was unlikely Granville White would make his appearance in such a public place – or that he would do his dirty work personally. No, it was more likely he would be taken to a lonely place where men would be waiting for him. But Michael had decided to go along with the colonel and maybe he would have a chance to get to Granville. How? He did not yet know.

At least this time he was forewarned and partially prepared, unlike the many years earlier when he had confronted the vicious Rocks' thug, Jack Horton, and his equally dangerous half-brother. Both men had been hired by Granville to do his dirty work and dispose of Michael.

Godfrey approached him through the crowds of passengers and waved with his furled umbrella. Michael moved towards him like a stalking cat. The colonel was aware of the Irishman's tense demeanour as he approached; he moved with the grace of a hunting cat ready to spring and the big man kept his right hand close to his side. He has a gun, Godfrey thought with mild amusement, realising Michael did not trust him.