Redback (44 page)

'Oh no sir, that's not right. I don't work that way.'

'Even you, my honourable assassin friend, may make an exception on this occasion. The file is
on its way.'

Houston, Texas
Tuesday 11 am

The Lieutenant-Governor of Texas stood to take his leave of Abigail West with a
gallant old-fashioned bow. 'Dear lady, I thank you again for your hospitality.'

'Oh George, you're such a charmer. Sometimes I think you have ulterior motives.'

'Me, Abigail?' Gantry smiled his charmer smile.

'Yes, I do believe you might be sweet on me. Or perhaps it's my batty sister who takes your
fancy.'

'It is you, it is you, sweet Abigail. But do bid farewell to Edwina for me. I thought she would
have returned from the rose garden by now.'

Abigail shook her head. 'She may well have set off to fetch you a tea-rose, George, but if she
remembers to come back at all, she'll probably be bringing a shoe.'

'She's not that forgetful, surely.'

'She has her moments. Ah, speak of the fairy here she comes. And what did I say? She goes off for
a rose and comes back with a boy.'

George Gantry looked horrified for a moment but collected himself into a guffaw, fortunately
before Abigail noticed his lapse. Batty Edwina West had indeed returned with a boy, and that boy
happened to be Jesse-Jay Baggett. And while it mattered not if the Lieutenant-Governor was seen out
and about with a citizen on the public streets of Houston, an identifiable connection with the lad
was probably not sensible. Bluffing, however, had won Gantry many a game of high-stakes poker
so…

'Jesse lad,' he said, 'I thought you were catching up on the club paperwork in the Humvee.'

Jesse-Jay, his eyes wide as if he'd been caught by an old lady he'd not seen coming, said, 'I was
sir. But then I was abducted,' he raised an eyebrow at Edwina, 'by this lady who insisted I come
have some tea.'

'Oh Edie,' Abigail chided.

'I couldn't leave the poor boy sitting in that tank, Abigail. And you, George, you should know
better than to exclude anyone from our hospitality. I mean, you wouldn't have left the President
sitting in your tank the other day, now would you?'

Gantry shrugged. 'Now that would have been tempting indeed.'

'I wish you had,' Abigail said. 'Now at least do the courtesy of introducing the boy before you
leave, George.'

'Of course. Mrs Abigail West, Miss Edwina van Louden, this here is a young constituent of mine,
Jesse -Jarvis. He ah, is a member of the Texas Star Brigade, a kind of boys' club of which I'm the
sponsor.'

'Oh how nice,' Edie said. 'Are there more like you then, Jesse?'

Jesse-Jay shrugged. 'There used to be more of us.'

Nuevo Laredo, Mexico
Tuesday 11 am

Scott was staring up at the upholstered roof of Laura's car while she drove the
streets of Nuevo Laredo, a picturesque town south of the Rio Grande; or the Rio Bravo, as the locals
on this side of the Rio called it. He wished he was still sleeping. Right now he felt sapped of
energy and for a second wondered if he was unconscious, or dead, until with a supreme effort he
managed to open his mouth. 'Aargh.'

'Oh very eloquent Scott,' Laura noted, then went on with her travelogue. 'This here town has a
12-hectare commercial area designated for legalised prostitution; called Boy's Town. It's basically
a walled nocturnal playground of cantinas, restaurants, brothels, 'cribs' for freelance hookers, and
transvestite bars.'

'That's nice, Laura. Are we going there now then?'

'No Scott, we're going to the police station.'

'That would've been my next guess.' Scott had slept most of the drive to the border and then
woken up long enough to crash again in their motel - most pleasantly in the arms of Laura Serrano.
Since then he'd been awake and asleep and awake all morning, while Ms CIA drove around looking for
the American couple who had 'dropped the dime' on the software pirates. It transpired the elusive
couple were 21st century hippies, or 20th century left-overs and, if they were even still in Nuevo
Laredo, there were many places they'd been known to hang out. At least that was according to each of
the people Laura had spoken to so far. Each had simply passed her on to the next joint. Sometimes
literally.

'You smell like marijuana,' Scott said.

'You should've smelt the place I just spent an hour in. On my own, while you slept in the car.
Some research assistant you turned out to be.'

'Hey, when the CIA puts me on their payroll I'll be happy to sit around with dope heads and
exchange 'wows'. Why are we going to the police station?'

'Because I think something might have happened to our tipsters,' Laura said, as she parked the
car and swung her legs out the door. 'I'd like you to come with me this time.'

'Okay,' Scott said, joining her on the footpath. 'But how come you want me to come in here, but
didn't care about the dope den?'

'Let me see?' Laura smiled at him. 'Pot heads versus Mexican police, where would a girl feel
safest.'

'We don't need no shtinking badges,' Scott said.

'Exactly. Come on.'

It took Laura precisely 67 minutes to get it out of the local police chief that Jake Collins, one
of her lost hippies, was under police protection. The man and his partner, expat Australian Celia
Bridle, had been the victims of a shooting the day before. She had not survived the incident in the
very early hours of Monday morning; he was in a stable condition in the Nuevo Laredo Hospital. The
Chief then helpfully provided a Deputy to accompany Laura and Scott to the hospital, so they
wouldn't have to spend another hour getting past the guard to see Señor Collins.

Jake Collins, as it turned out, was in the process of trying to check out of the hospital against
the advice of the doctor and the wishes of the Deputy on duty.

Scott watched as Laura secured the scene by offering to buy everyone coffee at the café
next door. Five minutes later the cops were happily sitting up at the counter, and Laura and Scott
were seated in a booth with a grief-stricken survivor.

'
Now
you guys turn up,' said the man who looked like a tie-dyed General Custer. 'We
contacted you over a week ago. We told you some serious shit. We waited for you to contact us back.
And then the evil little ferret turns up, tells us he's been sent to 'get us' for informing on some
brigade, or something - to the F-B-I
and
the C-I-freakin-A - and then he shoots us. The guy
just shoots us.' Collins pointed to his chest. 'The only reason I'm not dead - dead too - is because
I was wearing a shitload of weed, packed in a thick leather case, under my shirt.'

'Do you want us to arrange to get you out of here and back to the States, Mr Collins?' Laura
asked.

'What do you mean 'arrange', sweetheart? And don't call me mister; my name's Jake. I go back and
forth over one of those bridges every week. I'm an American, no one ever asks questions. Hell, no
one asks the Mexicans I take with me anything neither.'

'Can I ask you something, Jake?' Scott said.

'Be my guest,' he said, as the waitress delivered their coffees.

'I may be wrong, but I'm guessing your business is a supply and demand one. So I'm wondering why
you would approach the CIA about anything, let alone software pirating.'

'The FBI. We rang the FBI not the CIA,' Jake said. 'And why? Because Celia said it wasn't right
that Americans were obviously buying guns and shit in order to harm other Americans. Now, it took an
Australian to make me see the truth in that. Also, to be honest, I wanted to put a certain lying
sonofabitch out of business.'

'Guns?' Laura repeated.

'Yes,' Jake nodded, adding a fourth spoon of sugar to his cup. 'We had dinner, about six months
ago, with a now very ex-associate, Wendell Burke,' Jake spat the name. 'He is a pirate of music and
games and movies. At this meal, there was also an Arabian called, Assad bin Something; and these two
rattlesnakes, Jesse and Mike, from Texas. They were talking paranoid bullshit about how the
government is selling America to the Russians or the Jews or the Martians. I kinda tuned out.

'But they'd come to see my now ex-friend about this game that he'd got special for them, which
had instructions for blowing things up. Again, you know, I wasn't really listening. I thought that's
what you did with all them games; you know, blow shit up.

'But then they - the Texans - and the Saudi dude also got to talking real guns and explosives, as
in the purchase of. That's when Celia and I chose to be elsewhere. We don't, didn't, like guns as
such - and now I reckon that was a premonition.'

'Did you see this game they were talking about?' Scott asked.

'I've got a copy. Wendell gave it to us, along with some movies and shit, about a week after that
meeting.'

Laura sipped her coffee. 'Where's Wendell now?'

Jake shrugged. 'Cheating the hell out of folks in Stateside Laredo.'

'Have you seen any of the other men since?' Laura asked.

Jake Collins gave her a look. He pointed at his chest again, and repeated the look. 'The wiry
little ferret named Jesse shot me and killed my Celia. If you find him, I'll go anywhere to testify
against him; but I do not actually want to leave Mexico unless I have to.'

'You really only contacted us because you had a beef with this Wendell Burke, right?' Laura
said.

Jake rolled his eyes. 'Yeah. But Celia was right, even if it got her killed; and it did get her
killed, which means she
was
right. Do you think maybe they were the dudes that blew up
Dallas?'

'That is a definite possibility, Jake.'

'Then she was doubly right and so I'll do whatever you need.'

'Okay, I have some surveillance photos taken at Fort Hood the day of the attack there, which I'd
really like you to look at; see if you can ID this Jesse or Mike.'

'Sure,' Jake nodded. 'Oh hey, the other guy came back in between.'

'Who, Mike?' Laura queried.

'Yes. I was having lunch with Wendell, about a week before he became deserving of my revenge, so
that'd be three weeks ago, when Texas Mike came by to pick up something Wendell was holding for him.
He had another guy with him that time. Can't remember his name but,' Collins shut his eyes, 'he was
driving a truck with the name Mc, McSomething; McTeal, that's it. It was on the door. No idea if it
was his.'

Laura was smiling as she shook her head.

'Yeah, I know,' Jake said. 'Surprising that a hippy dope-head would even remember what day it is
let alone details like that. But it's a gift, my memory. The only one I've got.'

HF Learjet 45, en-route Sydney
Wednesday 7 am

Jana woke with a jerk as the Helix Foundation's bizjet was dumped into an air
pocket and neglected to climb out of it again. She swallowed hard, lifted the window slide and
squinted down at land and water, water and land.

'You had a nice little snore going there,' Gideon commented. She was sitting across the aisle,
such as it was, in a matching leather recliner. The cabin of the Bombardier Learjet had ten such
seats: two opposite the galley, and four in two club-squares. Eight of the seats were occupied by
Ruth Jardine, three of her Redbacks (four counting Jana, which they were already doing), two SAS
troopers and an America CIA agent. The flight crew, or rather the lone pilot, was still sitting just
where Jana thought he should.

She raised an eyebrow at Gideon. 'Did you know you laugh in your sleep?'

'It's the only time I'm amused by anything,' Gideon said. 'Where are we?'

'Somewhere over southern Malaysia. You slept through the pit stop in Bangkok.'

'Uh-huh. And we've only got one pilot, right? Are you sure he's still awake? What happens if he
passes out from exhaustion? I know, don't tell me, one of you Redbacks will take over. As long as
you don't expect me to have to land with only garbled instructions from the bell tower.'

Bell tower?
Gideon's frown was getting deeper the more Jana babbled. 'Jana, time out,' she
said. 'You won't have to land this thing, ever, okay. Coop or I will do it. We are the
co-pilots.'

'Of course you are.' Jana eyed Gideon suspiciously. 'Is there anything you don't do, Bryn?'

'Cook. I do not cook.'

Jana's attention was hijacked by a commotion at the front of the jet, four metres away. Triko and
his unbelievably ocker brother Jason, aka Mudge, were apparently doing the universal brother thing
and arguing over a toy.

'Jason, you may well have liberated this from the terrorists.'

'No, that was me,' the American, Dwayne Kennedy interjected, 'Mudge just carried it.'

'Whatever! The point is
Mudge
wouldn't know the first thing about plugging it in.'

'That's enough, children. Be nice, or Ruth will send you outside to play,' Ruth said.

'How did Jason get to be so much more of a yobbo, than Triko?' Jana asked Gideon. 'They were both
born here.'

'Beats me, but it's scary isn't it. I'm going to scrounge some coffee, want one?'

'Yes please.' Jana watched Bryn squeeze forward to the galley and noted, that although she'd
removed the long over-shirt and vest, she was still wearing the rest of her undercover outfit of
comfy boots and baggy men's pants.

Jana scowled. The moment they'd got within cooee of Rawalpindi, on the return journey, she had
ripped off the
burqua
that Bryn had deemed the most appropriate disguise for 'a short blonde
chick trying to go unnoticed in an Islamic country'.

Admittedly the head-to-toe garment had been of a lovely blue material, but she now knew it had
been completely unnecessary. In fact, as Taxila was a good couple of hours east of the now virtually
locked-down Peshawar, they all could've traipsed around like regular tourists in jeans and
jackets.