Hindsight (25 page)

‘A personal interest?’

‘Nothing you need to worry about. My gut is telling me things that my head is arguing can’t be possible — and my heart is only snagged in the middle, needing to know one way or the other.’

‘You keep your heart to yourself,’ Ben warned, in a menacing tone that Mira had never heard before. ‘Your hands and every other appendage too. She’s a virgin in the world, pal, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone hurt her. Especially a soldier.’

‘Hey, you’ll get no trouble from me. If it comes, it’ll be from out there — or just as likely from her. Seems to me you’ve got your hands full.’

‘She’s coming along just fine, I’ll have you know.’

Lockman chuckled. ‘You make her sound like you’re rebuilding your car. Mate, she’s perfect as she is, and if you can’t see that, you’re blind or crazy.’

‘She can’t live independently as she is. She needs to pass muster for a review panel.’

‘That’s not the same thing. That’s just upskilling. From what I’ve seen, you’ve been tinkering a whole lot deeper. Listen, I grew up in a house full of headstrong women. You can’t change them, and why would you want to? You either love them as they are, or get out of their way.’

‘I’ll try to remember that, soldier. But so far, the trouble is all out there — and the worst so far was wearing army green.’

‘One bad apple,’ Lockman replied. ‘Kitching is history. You’re hunting counterfeiters now, right? And money launderers and gun-runners and maybe the agent who can link them? Is that all?’

‘Isn’t that enough? With luck, they’re close relatives or the same thing. She doesn’t need any
more
enemies.’

‘Which raises a question,’ Lockman said. ‘I suspect you’ll only tell me to take a hike again, but I’ll never know if I never ask.’

‘Sorry, pal. The most you’re allowed to know about her is what you’ve already seen yourself. Her eyesight … it comes and goes.’

‘And yet General Garland is betting as heavily as all this on her secret talents?’

‘Oh, ye of little faith.’ Ben chuckled. ‘You don’t think a blind girl has a chance of solving international crime better than all the cops and defence forces combined?’

‘Yeah, right,’ Lockman said, making the coals hiss with his coffee dregs. ‘What was I thinking?’

Garland returned with the first rays of the sun, the rotors of her Blackhawks obscenely noisy for such a pristine time of the day.

Mira cooled her toes in the shallow waves of the bay until all three had flown overhead. Briefly, she spared a thought for Ben’s mum, who’d be returning home from work soon to discover him missing. Another war of words ahead, she supposed, which made her wonder what Lockman might have to say about the art of fighting a war on two battlefronts. Still, she preferred the idea of arguing with Mel than with General Garland. Just the thought of it was enough to make her feel tired all over, and as the mechanical hummingbirds stirred up their whirlwinds to land, Mira trudged up the slim beach to the camp site, using a broken branch to help guide her feet over any sand that might have shifted in the last twenty-four hours.

She knew well enough where the marquee was, so she quickened her pace, not wishing to prolong any moment with Garland unnecessarily.

Behind her, she heard two sets of boots resuming their positions in the squeaky sand as a pair of soldiers closed up the gap they’d made for her in their beach-line perimeter. Having moved aside for her without so much as a word in the first place, their respectfully quiet manoeuvres would have made her feel like royalty — if she didn’t already perceive them as another prime threat to her freedom. At least now she had a hand on the leash to the team that would be closest to her.

Lockman was no doubt watching her from the breakfast fire, where he’d cooked juicy thick bacon and poached eggs for her and taken a turn in dropper-feeding the joey. Instead of using the eyedropper from his med-kit, though, he’d made a small hole in the finger of a surgical glove, which proved to be more efficient and wallaby-friendly.

She heard the joey suckling keenly as she passed on her way to the command tent, stealing another slip of bacon along the way but feeling a pang of jealousy that the wallaby clearly preferred his feeding contraption to hers.

Lockman’s truck door groaned open and closed, suggesting he’d interrupted the feed and returned the joey to hang from the neck of the passenger seat before jogging after her. However, Ben had the head start and beat him to her side just as the rotors of the landed choppers began to wind down. Within minutes, General Garland was assembling her dozen ‘best-of-the-best’ for inspection — the nearest two of whom smelled like whales humping.

‘Would you like to sit,’ Garland asked, ‘and interview them individually?’

Mira frowned, wishing she’d been the first to suggest it, so she nodded curtly and asked Garland to hand a list of their names to Ben.

Taking her place on the ghostly branch of the olive tree with Lockman on one side, Ben on the other and Garland keeping her peace with the line of men outside, it didn’t take long before she felt as if she was only choosing her own betrayers.

‘I’d suggest shortlisting those who are multi-talented,’ Lockman said. ‘For example, there’s a handful of specialist snipers here — guys like Lance Corporal Finnigan who’s also a top medic, and Sergeant Brette who’s top of his field with interrogation techniques.’

‘I’d prefer if she stayed as far from snipers as she can get,’ Ben said. ‘It doesn’t leave us much choice, but there are three other names here I recognise.’ He read them aloud for Mira. The first was a female corporal who’d been assigned as a bodyguard for the docs — but she was supposed to be dead, killed in a shoot-out while defending Mira from Colonel Kitching the first time — and the other two had been turncoats, also assigned to provide security for Kitching’s Research and Development department, but they’d left him and joined General Garland.

‘What do you think Garland’s trying to pull?’ Ben whispered to Mira. ‘We can’t trust any of them.’

Mira sighed, feeling the same way. ‘I want to mess with the two MPs first. Call them in together and let’s get this over with.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us your ranks the first day?’ Ben asked the moment Sergeant Jo Pobody and Staff Sergeant Emmett Patterson were formally introduced to them. ‘No lies or we’ll know.’

‘General Garland advised us that Miss Chambers had sensitivity to all things military,’ Pobody explained. ‘It was suggested that names without ranks would be less confronting and more likely to entice cooperation.’

‘What about the interstate plates on your wheels?’ Lockman asked. ‘What was that about?’

‘Greppia has eyes everywhere,’ Patterson replied. ‘He knows the local detectives are onto him, so an MP team from interstate was deemed less threatening — more likely to be out of the loop on him.’

‘More suspicious if you ask me,’ Ben said, but Lockman interrupted him.

‘Not to anyone who knows how small the pool of CSIs can be. Many of our best crime scene investigators are reservists seconded from police.’

‘From any city or state,’ Patterson added, then he launched into a lengthy apology for their urgency and heavy-handedness at Greppia’s convenience store, advising that he and Pobody had been under strict orders not to touch either of them unless Greppia made his move on her. ‘It’s him we want. But you got too close before our other teams had a line on his biggest contacts.’

‘Bait,’ Lockman said, sounding disgusted. ‘You used us as bait, until the big fish looked set to bite?’

‘Hardly. She was happier in ignorance,’ Pobody said, ‘which also kept surveillance hassles to a minimum.’

‘Why so rough, though?’ Ben asked.

‘Minimum force,’ Patterson said. ‘With respect, Miss Chambers, it was you and your friend who put up the fight. It’s not as if you were behaving like a normal blind woman. We hadn’t been briefed by then about your sight, the way it comes and goes, but you did hail from Serenity, where half the residents are crazy and the rest are criminally insane.’

‘Handicapped!’ Mira argued. ‘They only have physical or intellectual handicaps, so any criminal tendencies are symptoms. There’s not one among them who’s a crook intentionally!’ Then she bit her tongue, realising that she’d just defended the place she’d tried so hard to escape.

‘If you say so,’ Patterson replied, sounding only slightly antagonistic. ‘Either way, we couldn’t risk you disappearing with Greppia willingly or by accident.’

‘Willingly?’ She nearly choked on the idea.

‘Long-distance eavesdroppers have limitations,’ Patterson said. ‘We didn’t know the full story. Our task was primarily surveillance, but you managed to make that difficult, spending half your time on the beach or in public, and even when we did get a good lead, you either said nothing or spoke in a code that we haven’t yet been able to crack — and who talks in code, unless there’s a reason to hide something?’

Mira shrugged, wondering what code he meant, since she hadn’t used any form of Braille on Straddie as far as she could recall — but she dared not ask him about it, in case he only meant the discussions about her visions, which probably did sound cryptic to an outsider. If they’d overheard any of her conversation with Ben at the newsagency, then they probably even thought she was crazy.

‘Were you on our tails the whole time?’ Ben asked, as if he’d been thinking the same thing. ‘At Point Lookout, for instance, when I took Mira shopping?’

‘We’d take turns at periods of low risk,’ Pobody said, ‘and I needed to eat. Watching a woman shop is about as exciting as watching a tank rust, so I kept a bead on her from a café across the street.’

‘When did you spot me?’ Lockman asked. ‘Or my rig, kitted up for fishing?’

Pobody laughed. ‘Seen hundreds like that coming in over the last week. Lucky bastards. The weather’s perfect.’

‘First bead we had on you,’ Patterson said, ‘was your Glock up my nose. We didn’t know you were a lieutenant, sir, so any disrespect was unintended.’

‘Forget it,’ Lockman replied. ‘I wasn’t a lieutenant then.’

‘If you didn’t spot him sneaking up on you,’ Mira said, ‘what makes you think you’re good enough to work with him?’

‘You’re still alive,’ Pobody replied, ‘which is the opposite of what you would have been.’

Mira frowned, but the next seven interviews were no more reassuring; three other men and two women who revealed so little about themselves aside from their service records that she could barely sketch images of them in her head beyond their boots and uniform. So it soon came down to the last three, each of whom Mira had been dreading because of her previous experiences with them.

‘Maybe we should scrap this whole idea and go home,’ Ben suggested. ‘I don’t need to clear my name this badly by tracking Greppia. And we can still warn Gabby to keep her head down.’

Mira shivered at the thought of surveillance resuming from a distance, without any control or knowledge over whose eyes held the watch on her. ‘You don’t really think the general will let us walk away?’

‘Wishful thinking. Garland must be up to something if she expects us to tolerate breathing the same air as these people, let alone cooperate as a team.’

‘She’s bending over backwards,’ Lockman said. ‘It’s unheard of. The people you’ve met so far are all from the top of the skills ladder.’

‘That doesn’t say much,’ Ben said. ‘Besides, you’re biased.’

‘Bias aside, is it possible that you’re holding on to a preconception or perhaps a misunderstanding of something that happened?’

‘Misunderstanding, my arse!’ Ben argued. ‘Two of them hunted us for the colonel before switching sides to the general, and the third is supposed to be dead! I don’t care how nice or skilled they are, we won’t be playing games with them again!’

‘I am curious,’ Mira said, ‘to hear what excuses they could possibly invent.’

‘Mira?’ Ben asked, surprised. ‘You know how forgiving I can be, but seriously, under
these
circumstances? You can’t risk your life again with any of them.’

‘Your life too,’ she reminded him. ‘We got an apology from the first two — sincere or not, it would be interesting to hear what they all have to say.’ Sickened by the whole process, though, she called for the next two contenders to be brought in together.