ELEVEN
Ralph Abernathy takes closer to forty-five to find the café. He wasn't kidding when he said his press picture was several years old. The last few turns around the sun haven't been kind to him. He stands near the entrance of the café, fussing with his cell phone while trying to be surreptitious in his examination of the room. I'm the only one paying him any sort of attention, and after a few minutes of pretending to be coy, he shoves his phone into his pocket and marches up to the counter.
Mid-forties. Divorced or never married. Certainly single. Obsessive about all the wrong things. Good shoes, though. The man knows the importance of decent footwear. His coat is an old leather bombardier jacket, nicely distressed and worn in. It's a little snug across the back, and I doubt he can zip it up anymore, but it's clearly the one aspect of his old life—his wistfully remembered twenties—that he can't quite let go of.
He sits down heavily across from me—a complicated espresso drink in a wide ceramic cup, a half-eaten cookie in his hand. He needs a haircut more than he needs a shave; more than both, he looks like he could use a break from the relentless of his life.
I wonder if this is what I'll look like in a few months, or if it'll happen more quickly.
“Fishing,” he says by way of greeting. “Shall I call you Fisherman?” He's given this some thought on the drive over.
“David is fine.”
He takes a big bite of the cookie. “You don't look like a David,” he says, trying to hide his disappointment that I'm not keen on his code name.
I don't have the heart to tell him about the statue in Florence that I modeled for once upon a time.
“You wrote the stories about the Cetacean Liberty,” I say, getting to the point. “I read all the press. You were the one who kept asking questions.”
He nods, sitting up in his chair—pleased that I know his work. “It never made sense, and then, yeah, I did some digging and found about the tragedy in Japan, with Kyodo Kujira.” He shoved the rest of the cookie in his mouth and leaned forward. “I paid a translator for some port reports. Out of my own pocket. I knew Kyodo had put a fleet in the water. In June. They'd been out for nearly a month when the accident on the Liberty happened.”
“A long time when you're not actually catching whales,” I say.
“Exactly.” His head bobs up and down again. “The reports are gone now. Kyodo's fleet is now listed as having been moved from Ishinomaki to Shimonoseki, which is bullshit. They've never had boats in Shimonoseki.”
“New management,” I suggest.
He chokes on a laugh, and covers it up by taking a drink from his beverage. “That's not funny,” he protests when he has recovered. He glances around. “Do you know who these Secutores guys are?”
“They're independent contractors,” I say, using the phrase that is de rigueur in this decade for mercenaries. “I suppose they can work in Japan as readily as they can here in Adelaide, yes?”
“Jesus,” he swears, putting his hands on the table and stiffening his fingers to gesture at me to keep my voice down.
I lean forward. “Why do they have two guys sitting in the second floor waiting area of the P wing at the hospital?” I ask.
“They're still there?” When I nod, he shakes his head. “Why? There's no one there any more.”
“Who isn't there?”
“The people from the Liberty.”
“How many?”
“I don't know. I could never find out. That's where they went, though. I talked to a couple of the pilots who airlifted people out of the rafts. Some of them in pretty bad shape. Burns and exposure. Somewhere around twenty is my guess.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Prime Earth's lawyers showed up.” He tries to rattle off the firm's name but gets it wrong. He nods when I correct him. “Yeah, bunch of tight-assed corporate hacks from the US. Flown in. Didn't give a shit that they had no clue about Australian law. Buried the hospital in a ton of paperwork, and threatened litigation on everyone—down to the f*cking interns who were emptying bedpans. A couple of days later, these other guys show up—Secutores—and everyone's a*shole puckers even more.”
“Why does Prime Earth send in independent security consultants if they've already gotten everyone running scared with lawyers?”
“Oh, these guys aren't with Prime Earth.” He shakes his head. “No, no. Prime Earth takes off as soon as these guys arrive. They're still dumping paperwork on the hospital, but it's all hands-off now. Secutores is in charge.”
“And then?”
“A week ago, I manage to get one of the nurses to talk to me. She won't tell me anything useful, but she tells me the ward has gotten really quiet. Like ‘no one there' sort of quiet.”
“They released them?”
“How? And where did they go?”
“They moved them, then.”
“Again: How? And where?”
“I don't know, Ralph. That's why I'm asking you.”
He fidgets in his chair, one of his legs bouncing up and down. Arguing with himself. “Ah, f*ck,” he whispers, shaking his head. “Look—” he starts.
I pick up my mug and take a swallow of tea. “I'm almost done with my tea,” I say. “When I finish, I'm leaving.” He needs a push.
“Okay, okay,” he says. “There's this guy. I don't know what happened, but somehow he got lost in the shuffle when everyone was being brought in. He says he just got up and walked out of the ER. Came back the next day with some story about an accident in his garage.” He shakes his head. “I don't know how he got away with it, but they didn't make the connection. Old dude. Veteran of some kind. Vietnam, I think.”
I know who he's referring to, but I let him continue. Gus had been one of the engineers on the boat, a retired Navy enlisted man. As a young man, he had been a Riverine in Vietnam, running the engines on one of the converted monitors that harried the Viet Cong in the Mekong Delta. His boat had been overrun one night, and he and three other Navy men disappeared into the jungle for five years as POWs. A lot of the crew thought Gus was the craggiest bad-ass that had ever lived, and he certainly leaned into the part, but I knew from the tremor in his hands and the way he pressed himself against the bulkhead, eyes downcast, the few times I had passed him in the ship that his bad-ass days were far behind him.
“I was looking for anything, any sort of lead that I could use to convince my editor this story was worth following up. That there was more going on than some bullshit US company getting all squirrelly about getting sued. I got in and found this guy. Talked to him one night. He was going to be my source to blow the whole thing wide open…”
“They figure it out and disappear him too?”
Ralph shakes his head. “He died. In his sleep, I guess. His room was just empty one morning.”
Death. It comes quickly to some. I suppress a shudder. “What was he going to tell you?” I ask. “He give you any hint?”
“You read my last story,” Ralph snorts. “What do you think?”
I had, and knowing about Gus's death, I understood the underlying bitterness that ran through the story. No reporter likes losing a source, especially when the story they know is there suddenly slips away from them. However, I know how to reel him back in.
“I was there too,” I tell him. “On the Cetacean Liberty.”
“Bullshit,” he says, but his disbelief doesn't reach his eyes.
“That man's name was Gus,” I tell him, and I go on to describe the scars on Gus's hands and the tattoo he had on his right shoulder. Ralph eats it up, that hardened nugget of hope that he hadn't been able to let go of suddenly softening in his hands, threatening to become malleable again. Something that he could shape into that story he dreamed about.
“Holy shit,” he whispers when I finish.
“Now,” I say, putting my hands on the table. “let's talk about those two guys at the hospital right now. How many more of them are there? What's their routine?”
“Why? What are you going to do?”
“I'm going to ask them some questions.”
“I… I don't think that's a very good idea,” he blanches.
“Why, Ralph? Don't you want some answers? I know I do.”
I can tell he is not a fan of the direct approach, and I concede there's some prudence there. He's not entirely sure why they are there at all if everyone has been moved somewhere else. I suspect it is because they're waiting for someone like me to show up. And I did, which means I have a short window of time before word gets back to wherever the Secutores command center is. The two guys I saw tonight didn't recognize me, but they had noticed me. Judging from the lack of any excitement around the hospital during the time I'd been in the café, I don't think they've called in their suspicions, which meant it will go in their nightly report. A line item to establish a baseline pattern. If they spot me again, Secutores will upgrade me to active threat status.
I have to either not be seen again or be long gone by the time they find out that I'm still around. I can't take them in the hospital itself, even the parking garage is going to be tricky, but taking them after they leave the hospital opens me up to an entirely different set of risks though. Pros and cons. Every mission has them. The deciding factor, as always, comes down to which “things have gone to shit” scenario is the most recoverable. When things go awry—and they will—where do I have the best chance of survival.
And Ralph too. Short of banging him over the head and dumping him in the trunk of his car, I'm not going to be able to get rid of him. That's the cost sometimes of hooking a source. They can be hard to get rid of.
Visiting hours are going to be over in an hour or so, and I doubt the Secutores men are going to remain in the waiting area after that. Their job is to keep watch for strays like me who might come wandering in; they're not protecting any assets at the hospital. Not anymore. They're just watchers. Once there's nothing to watch, they'll call it and head back to wherever they spend the night.
“Ralph, here's the deal,” I lay it out for him. “You can wait for me, and either I'll come back in a while or there will be a sudden surge in police activity around the hospital, which will be your one and only clue that I'm not coming back.”
“Maybe I should come with you…” he tries.
See? Hooked. Can't shake him off the line. I try to push him off a bit with a simple question. “Do you want to be a material witness?”
He sits there, looking like he is actually thinking about my question.
“Mull it over from your car,” I tell him as I stand up.
“That… yes, that makes better sense,” he says.
I leave Ralph and the café, and walk back to the hospital to scout the route the mercenaries will probably take. There's a new parking structure and it's got a floor plan for maximizing parking, which leaves little in the way of places to hide and blind spots, but there are enough.
The pair exit P wing shortly after nine o'clock, heading for the parking garage. They're walking assuredly. Not excited. Not bored. They've got something on their minds, and they're looking forward to reporting in. In the last few hours, they've decided I'm worth making some noise about to their superiors.
All the more reason to act now.
I slip around the exterior of the garage and enter by one of the pedestrian access points near the back. There's a man sitting in a silver Mercedes along the back wall of the ground floor, his car pointing the opposite direction of every other vehicle. He's reading a newspaper, his window cracked slightly, and he glances up as I walk by. There's something about him that seems familiar, but I can't place it, and the setup looks like a bored town car driver waiting for his ride to finish whatever they're doing in the hospital. The guy doesn't seem interested in me, and I push him out of my mind as I stroll toward the low railing that separates the floors of the garage.
General parking starts the floor above. I check to make sure no one is watching and leap up through the narrow gap between the floors. Cars are packed along every up and down ramp—these half-floors are separated by a combination of steel wire and heavy concrete blocks. There's just enough room between them for a body to slip through. It's the sort of architectural layout that parkour aficionados love.
The mercenaries take the elevator, and I move up quickly enough to stay ahead of their ride. When the elevator opens on the third floor, I'm already there, crouched behind a hulking SUV.
The two cross to a dark sedan parked close to the half-wall, and in that moment of time when all four doors are unlocked and they're getting in, I dash over and slip into the back seat on the passenger side.
The driver has buckled his seat belt and is reaching for the ignition when I crack him in the side of the neck with my fist. The passenger goes for a weapon in the glove box. He gets it out, and I let him thumb off the safety before I take it from him and break his nose with the butt. The driver is still reeling from my punch, but he quiets down when he feels the barrel of the pistol press against his head. It's a familiar looking model. SIG Sauer P226 with a short magazine. In the car, the .40 S&W round will do quite well. I don't need a lot of bullets.
“Hello, gentlemen,” I say. “I think it's time we had a chat.” The smell of Passenger's blood is making me tense, making the thirst knot my stomach, and I bleed off a lot of that tension in my voice.
They both go still, waiting for me to make the next move. It's always nice to do business with professionals.
“Hands on your heads,” I tell them, “interlace your fingers.” Driver seems to be the one who is going to test me, and so I thumb back the hammer on the gun. It's a double action pistol, and pulling back the hammer lets them know I mean business.
Passenger starts breathing out of his mouth, and tiny strands of blood fly from his lips.
“You don't want to do this,” Driver says.
“Do what? I just want to ask a couple of questions. This doesn't have to get complicated.”
I sit back, taking the pressure off Driver's head. This way I can keep the gun on both of them. Driver looks at me in the rearview mirror, and if I had a silencer on this pistol, I'd put a bullet through the mirror, but I settle for making sure he can see the pistol.
“Who's paying for your services?” I ask.
“F*ck and You,” Driver says.
“They pay well?”
The question isn't what he was expecting and he blinks heavily at me. Passenger starts to turn his head, and I kick the back of his seat to let him know that I don't think that is a good idea.
“Where are the people from the boat?” I ask. I tap the barrel of the pistol against Driver's shoulder. “And F*ck and You's house isn't the right answer.”
“You're not going to shoot us,” Driver sneers.
“No?” I lower the pistol and press it against the back of his seat. The trigger action is good and clean, and I fire the gun twice. The leather seat is a decent noise-suppressor, and Driver jerks and coughs very dramatically, spitting blood on the dash and windshield. With a rattling groan that I know well, he slumps forward against the inside of his door.
The barrel of the gun is hot and I press it against the back of Passenger's neck, shushing him because he's starting to make a bit of a high-pitched whining noise.
“Where are they?” I ask when he calms down enough to hear me.
“E… Eden Park,” he stutters.
“See? Not very complicated at all.” I hit him hard enough to put him out, and toss the gun into the driver's side footwell. I get out and walk away.
It would have been easy to kill the other one too, but that turns the car into a crime scene that Adelaide Police are going to be all over. With Passenger still alive, he's going to call it in to Secutores. They're going to scramble to do clean up, and I did Driver discretely enough that they'll probably get away with it. The job will tap their resources though, leaving less guys to be waiting for me at Eden Park.
That's the first thing Passenger will do when he wakes up. Let his command know what he told me. If he lied, it means nothing; if he told me the truth—and I suspect he did—I've got a very small window of opportunity.
Ralph is startled when I appear next to his Volvo. I tap on the glass and he unlocks the passenger side. “Eden Park,” I say as I climb in. “Drive and talk. We don't have a lot of time.”