NINE
Everything but the forward prow of the Cetacean Liberty is wrapped up tight in white plastic wrap, and it lolls in the water like a burn victim soaking in a saline bath. A harbor patrol car is parked on the dock nearby, and only one of its two occupants is awake. The other has his seat levered halfway back, his cap pulled down low on his face to block out the half-dozen mercury vapor lights permanently trained on the shrink-wrapped boat. The light reflects harshly off the white wrap, and there isn't a shadow anywhere within thirty yards of the Cetacean Liberty.
Either Prime Earth or the South Australian government has turned the boat into a floating art installation—a minimalist tabula rasa that waits for meaning to be imprinted upon its slick nakedness. What do we see when we look upon this abstract symbol? This bleached blot, waiting for its Rorschach stain.
I don't loiter, but I do make a second pass, walking in the opposite direction. The guy in the car doesn't even look up from his phone. The other one continues to sleep.
Reefie's is a noisy pub three blocks away, and after I enter and gauge my choices, I head for the bar and find an open spot next to a guy drinking alone. A half-dozen plasma screen TVs are competing for the patrons' attention with three different football games (two of the three are broadcasting Australian games), a pair of soccer games, and a US basketball game. Lakers versus someone else—no one seems to care, including the network that is broadcasting the game.
The bartender, a well-groomed man with precision-razored stubble, flips a coaster on the bar in front of me and I order a beer. “A lager. Whatever you've got on tap that isn't the tourist beer.” He squints at me for a second, trying to gauge if I'm trying to be a smart-ass, and when I put a bill on the bar, he stops wondering.
“Not a fan of the local?” The man sitting next to me stinks of fish, and his blond hair has been permanently stiffened by sea and sky.
“It's like that American coffee company,” I reply. “You can get it anywhere, but that doesn't make it good.”
He chuckles and raises his pint glass in my direction. I clink my glass off his, notice how empty his is compared to mine, and catch the bartender's eye. “Thanks, mate,” he says when another full pint is deposited in front of him. “So, journalist or investigator?” he asks.
“Excuse me?”
“If you're looking to chat me up, you're bad at picking out men who might be your type.”
“Was I trying to pick you up?” I ask.
My answer confuses him for a second, though it isn't hard to confuse him in his state. “I ain't got much else to offer,” he says, “and I don't believe in random charity.”
“And the world is a poorer place for it,” I say.
“Which are you?” He squints at me. “Angling for a payout or writing a story?”
“Journalist,” I say, figuring that's the answer he's looking for.
He nods and sticks out a hand. “I'm Ted.”
“Silas.” His hand is calloused, rough from the nets and a fishing knife. “You want to tell me something about that boat out there?”
He grins. We both know which boat I'm referring to. “Aye,” he says, “I can tell you a story or two.” He takes a long pull from his glass, moistening his tongue and making me wait a few seconds. Ted is a garrulous local, pre-greased by the media, and a bit of a drunk; he knows the routine and is happy to play along. I'm a good listener, and I have a pocket full of money taken from the caretaker's wallet.
We're going to be good friends.
Ted takes me back about two and a half weeks when stories began circulating among the fishing boats out of Adelaide that something had happened out on the water. A few days later the Cetacean Liberty was found, adrift, in the Great Australian Bight. She had suffered a fire, and all of her life boats were gone. The Royal Australian Navy flooded the Bight with ships and found a few drifting life boats. What survivors were in them were suffering from burns in addition to exposure and dehydration.
Ted doesn't know how many survived, but it doesn't sound like many.
The Cetacean Liberty was towed back to Adelaide and wrapped up tight. Prime Earth's management—back in San Diego and quick to point out that they are miles and miles from any sort of altercation in the Southern Ocean—stuffed their fingers in their ears and pretended nothing had happened other than an unfortunate galley fire.
Ted tries to milk me for a few drinks, but once I establish that he knows nothing about the whaling fleet, it's clear he isn't quite the fount of knowledge that he thinks he is, which makes sense, given the lack of ongoing speculation I hadn't seen in the local papers. The media did their routine of scrounging for scraps, looking for some morsel that they can worry long enough to show an upward trend in their readership metrics at their next quarterly shareholder meeting. But without some immediate scandal to keep their audiences' attention, their corporate overlords will simply can the stories. The story is lacking a champion, someone like Meredith Vanderhaven, to keep it alive. It dies with a whimper, a final update buried on the back page of the local news section, and the conspiracy community wanders off, looking for something with a bit more meat on it.
No one cares.
Much like this crowd's attitude toward the Lakers' game.
The world is a big place. It's easy to get lost.
I go to ground at a cheap hotel, spending half of what remains from the money I took from the caretaker's wallet. I had gotten to Adelaide too late to visit Callis's bank, and after spending most of a day and part of the previous night in wait mode, I had gone down to the docks. I had to do something; the night was too precious a time to waste.
Wasting time. It's an odd thing to worry about. To be concerned that I might not have enough.
I get a room on the north-facing side of the hotel, put out the Do Not Disturb sign, and hang the comforter over the curtain rod for the windows. I am restless, but I force myself to lie down. Hurry up and wait: all soldiers know how to do it. Sleep when you can. Eat when you can. Keep your weapons ready. The violence will come later.
After a thirst-inducing nightmare of knocking over a blood bank, I get up, shower, and try to find some enthusiasm for going out. Adelaide's smog index isn't as high as many cities in the United States, but it is high enough that I can't be in the sun too long—my skin will have even worse reactions than it did during my idle days on the life boat. I find a coffee shop with computer rentals in the back, where I can spend a few hours. On the Internet and as far away as possible from the sun-warmed air that lies over Adelaide like a heavy blanket.
After a cursory search for mention of my fellow Arcadians, I scan the original stories written about the Cetacean Liberty accident. There is mention of another boat, but no names are given, and certainly no mention of the harpoon boat I wrecked or the one that Nigel attacked.
A search on Kyodo Kujira turns up a number of recent stories. The company's senior management is all dead, lost in a freak fire that ripped through a private facility outside of Ehime, where they were all gathered for a corporate retreat. The timing is awfully coincidental too: three days after Nigel and I went after the harpoon boats. Other than stating the barest of facts, Japanese investigators aren't speculating about the cause of the blaze. A need for further investigation, they say. The blaze was too hot, they explain in a press conference, we can't be sure what really happened.
I go back to the local news, noting the names of the writers who covered the incident for the major news outlets in Adelaide. I even find the name of the hospital where the survivors were airlifted. I find it curious there are no eyewitness reports of what happened. Eventually, I find a single, illuminating sentence tucked on the back page of one of the last stories written. All attempts to interview the survivors were referred to Prime Earth's lawyers—a firm with a long, comma-filled name. It isn't hard to guess the firm's basic response to anyone asking.
Captain Morse's name does come up, and it's only because it is common knowledge that he was the captain of the ship. I learn his first name is Thaddeus. There is no crew or passenger roster, and we're as much guilty of that lack of data as anyone else on the boat. Our own need for anonymity working against me.
I do a web search for Meredith Vanderhaven and find nothing but her byline on articles that are four months old. No hits on what she might have been doing in Australia. No hits on what story she is working on.
Which isn't surprising either. After Beering, she knew to keep her stories under wraps until they were ready for publication. Less time for her targets to prepare. Less time for people to shred documents, disappear sources, and hide the dump sites.
When the sun starts to get lost behind the taller buildings, I get a cab and go visit Callis's bank. It's more centrally located than I want to be in the city, but there's enough of a brisk wind that everyone on the street is more interested in getting to their destinations than eyeballing a haggard tourist like myself. The cab drops me off in front of a worn four-story building that is the lone holdout for modernization on the corner of King Williams Street and Waymouth Street. I keep my back turned to the high-rise going up across the wide boulevard of King Williams; the windows are in, and they're reflecting the sunlight directly across the street.
The bank's windows, on the other hand, are heavily tinted and the climate is tightly controlled at a reasonable temperature. The décor goes for ostentatious in its effort at replicating someone's vision of an aristocratic drawing room from a century ago. The ubiquitous security guard near the entrance straightens slightly when I enter. He's wearing a dark blue wool suit and an expensive silk tie.
It's that sort of bank.
I ignore the security guard who is eyeing me because I'm dressed down for bank's normal clientele, and I adopt the sort of laconic swagger that suggests more money than fashion sense as I head for the client services desks in the back. The ones with the comfortable leather chairs next to them. I throw myself down into one of the chairs, kick my legs out, and stare at the finely attired young man behind the desk.
The nameplate on the desk reads Rupert Gillam, and his sandy brown hair is cut very precisely across the back of his head, a scant millimeter above the finely tailored line of his collar. His suit is perfectly muted for a conservative banker, and his tie is a shade of purple somewhere between aubergine and plum.
“How may I help you?” he asks, setting aside whatever he had been pretending to be working on as I had approached.
“I need some money,” I say with just enough bluntness that he hesitates for a second, his eyes flicking across my attire and general scruffy condition. I smile, and it is my pristine dentition that convinces him that I'm not some homeless person who has come in to rob the bank.
“Certainly, Mister…”
I tell him the family name Callis and I had been using during our jaunt through late-nineteenth-century London. “Call me Silas though,” I say.
He pulls out a keyboard tray and clacks on the keys. “Do you know your account number?” he asks.
I stare at him and he fidgets for a moment, his eyes flickering back and forth from me to his computer screen. “Oh,” he says as he spots something on his monitor. “Oh,” he says again as he starts to read. “Yes,” he continues, licking his lips nervously, and I imagine he's gotten to the part where the account history goes back a hundred plus years. “Certainly, sir,” he finishes. “There's… ah… there's a password.”
“Of course there is,” I say, briefly wondering what it could be. Genevieve,” I settle on. Callis hadn't warned me, which meant it had to be something obvious to both of us. The name of the banker's daughter who Callis had a thing for, for instance.
Rupert nods. “Well,” he says, placing his hands on his desk. He smiles. His dental work isn't as good as mine, though it looks to have cost his family a great deal. “What can I do for you today?”
Finally, some good news. “I'll need some cash. About this much.” I hold two fingers several centimeters apart. “And a debit card of some kind. Something I can use to get more. Oh, and the name of the place where you get your suits.”
TEN
Where Rupert gets his suits turns out to be a place a few blocks away. The stack of cash is easy enough—that only requires a looping scrawl that passes for a signature—but the card will take an hour or two and so I spend it being fitted for a suit I'll never pick up. I buy other clothes too, an outfit that makes me indistinguishable from any other fashion-aware man in Adelaide. Afterward, I stop at a juice shop on the way back to the bank. A mega dose of chia and wheatgrass powder. Processing kills a lot of the green but in large enough quantities, it'll help keep the thirst at bay.
I'm heading to the hospital next, and I can't afford to lose control there. Regardless of what it smells like, most of the blood in the building is going to be compromised. My immune system is already under enough stress.
The Royal Adelaide Hospital is located in North Adelaide, on the south side of the River Torrens, and I cross the gently flowing water on a pedestrian foot bridge near the zoo. I'm tempted by the plethora of aromas wafting out of the Botanical Gardens and I promise myself that I'll scale the fence and admire the sleeping flowers later. The hospital is a brightly lit contrast to the dark embrace of the Botanical Gardens, and I find my way into P wing where the burn wards are located.
The scent of the chemicals makes my skin crawl. Western medicine relies on its science too much. If it comes out of a laboratory and cost more than a billion dollars to create, then it must do something. And these products do, but it's not what these patients need. They need to know their skin will heal, that they'll be able to wear clothing without having to worry about how the synthetic fabric is going to irritate their flesh. They need to know their families won't look away when they enter the room; that someone will look past their melted skin and see the person inside. The creams and salves with the trademark names won't do any of those things. The pharmaceuticals will only make the pain go away. For a little while. But it's okay; there's a solution for the pain that persists after the creams have done their work. It has a trademarked name too, and the insurance companies will cover most of it. Maybe in a few years, the patient can talk about weaning themselves off the drugs. Maybe.
There's a handful of people in the lobby, draped across the uncomfortable furniture. They don't know how to keep a vigil for their loved ones, and the fluorescent lights have sucked all the hope out of their jaundiced faces. The staff move efficiently—some of them make eye contact, but most don't. The only reason they look up is to check the hands on the large clock over the nurses' station.
Patient rooms are on the first two floors, and no one shows any interest in me on the ground floor. As soon as the elevator doors open on the second, I lean forward and press the button for four, trying to appear annoyed that the elevator has decided to slow my ascent down.
There are two men in the waiting area, right in front of the elevator. They look like they bought their suits off the same rack, and they both glance up as the elevator doors open. They're good, but they stare a little too long.
I get off on four, and discover there is no place for me to go but back down. There is no waiting area; instead, there's a nursing station right in front of the door, and the single nurse sitting at it has already spotted me. “Can I help you?” she asks.
“Hi,” I say, spontaneously deciding to be the sort of guy who asks for directions. “I'm trying to find a client of mine,” I say. “His name is Morse. I'm with—” I rattle off the long name of Prime Earth's legal team, adding an extra partner for good measure. “They told me he's on the third floor. ‘Get off the elevator and turn right. You can't miss them.' That's what they said.”
“This is the fourth floor,” she says.
“It is?” I glance around, as if I don't quite understand how I managed to arrive where I'm at. “So confusing—kind of like casinos in the US. They want you to come in, but they don't want you to leave.”
The nurse's nametag reads Kelly, and her long brown hair has been clipped back into a loose bun. It hasn't started to escape her efforts at restraining it, which suggests she hasn't been on shift too long. “There are no patient rooms up here,” she says.
I try for charming, recollecting that Callis had always been the ladies' man between the two of us. I've done my fair share of playing the rake over the centuries, but I've fallen out of practice since World War II. “I was just down on the ground floor,” I say, leaning on the counter, “and my client—Morse—wasn't there.”
“He wouldn't be on the third either,” she says. “He's probably on the second floor.” She slides her chair over in front of the computer monitor. “Morse,” she says, tapping the keys. “What was the first name?”
“Thaddeus,” I reply reflexively, recalling the news article I read earlier.
Her eyebrows pull together slightly as she reads the results of her database search. “Who did you say you were with again?” she asks.
I repeat the law firm's name, reducing it to just the first two partners' names. Like someone who says it over and over again would. They probably even reduce it to a three-letter acronym, but that might be selling the lie a bit hard.
She looks at me again, and I can tell she's actually looking at me this time instead of the cursory boredom elicited from staff by the sight of the lost and aimless. “I'm sorry,” she says. “You've been given some wrong information somewhere. There aren't any patients by that name in the ward.”
“Well, goddamn it,” I say. “Those sons of bitches!”
She pushes her chair back from the desk, startled by my invective. “Excuse me?”
“Listen,” I say, leaning forward. “Can you do me a favor?” When she doesn't immediately flee, I take that as a yes. “Look, I'm not really with that firm. I'm an independent. I do personal injury. You know, fighting the insurance companies—those bastards who turn everything into a shit show of red tape, you know?” She nods slightly. “Here's the thing. I got a call from Sally Morse—Thaddeus's wife, back in San Diego, California. She told me her husband—Thaddeus, though everyone calls him Capt'n actually—was going to get screwed by these other guys. She asked me to come down and straighten things out for Thaddeus—for Captain Morse. I get here, and these two dickheads downstairs try to tell me that Captain Morse isn't here—that none of them are here—and I can't believe it. Where the hell did they go? And why the hell doesn't his wife know?”
She's trying to follow all of this, and I can tell from her expression that she's following the important part—that Morse isn't here anymore. “Which guys?” she asks.
“Downstairs,” I reiterate. “Look, call down and see if they're still there. I just saw them not five minutes ago. They got off on the second floor as I was coming up.”
Somewhat automatically, she reaches for the phone. I pretend to fume, but I'm keeping an eye on her fingers as they move across the keypad. She dials an extension and it's picked up almost immediately on the other end. “Hi,” she says. “It's Kelly up on four. Listen, can you do me a favor?” Her eyes flick up at me and I smile. “Are there two guys just… I don't know…” Her back stiffens slightly. “In the waiting area?” she says. “Are they—?” She looks at me.
“Dickheads,” I say. “One and two. You can't tell them apart.”
A tiny smile catches the edge of her mouth, and she relaxes slightly. “Yeah,” she says, listening. “Yeah, that sounds like them.” She looks up at me again, the smile still there. “Secutores,” she says, repeating what she has just been told.
It's been a long time since I've heard that word, but I smack the counter as if it is confirmation of what I had been telling her.
“Okay. Thanks, Shelli.” She hangs up the phone. “I don't know what's going on, Mr.…”
“Mickelli,” I say, falling back on an alias I haven't used in decades. “David Mickelli.” From Florence, of course. The thing with creating aliases that stick over time is to make them easy to remember.
“Mr. Mickelli,” she repeats. “I can't reveal anything about patient data, and I don't want to get involved in whatever is going on with the insurance companies and any law firm that might be representing patients. It's probably best if you just called—”
“No,” I say, nodding. “I get it. I'll totally forget I was up here, okay?” I take a step back from the counter, far enough that I can't see her name tag any more. “What was your name? See? I've forgotten already.” I keep backing up until I reach the elevator, and I reach over and push the button. “I'll call Sally. I guess I'll have to call those bastards at the firm too, even though they're just going to give me the runaround. And these guys—Hippocampus, Hoplomachus—”
“Secutores,” she corrects me.
I wave a hand. “Secutores,” I say. “They're just being dickheads, right? There's no reason for that.” The elevator arrives, and I stomp into it theatrically. “I'm not going to cause a scene,” I tell her. “I'm just going to talk to them. Tell them I don't appreciate them f*cking with me like that. There's no reason at all for it.” I press the button for the second floor.
“Good luck,” she offers as the door starts to close. I smile and nod.
My smile disappears as soon as the doors close. I press the ground floor button too, and then position myself against the back of the elevator. It trundles down two floors and then opens. I stare at the pair in the lobby, assessing them.
They stare back, and none of us blink until the elevator doors close.
The secutores were Roman gladiators, back in the day. They fought in the Grecian style—sword or spear and shield. I knew the techniques as readily as I knew how to breathe.
Those two aren't lawyers.
One of the things I had Rupert at the bank procure for me was a pay-as-you-go phone. It's as cheap and disposable as they get, but it has a working phone number. I leave the hospital and find a judiciously situated internet café within line of sight of the P wing. I do a quick search for Secutores with a couple other key words and am not surprised at what I find. I do a bit of reading, which only serves to amuse me.
They have no idea who the secutores really were. Still, the name serves its purpose.
I open another tab and click through the website of The Independent until I find an email address for the journalist—Ralph Abernathy—who wrote the articles about the Cetacean Liberty. I have to sign up for a free webmail service and that takes longer than I'd like, but I finally get a screen where I can send an email. I title it “Secutores,” and keep the note brief. “Why does the Royal Adelaide Hospital not have any patients from the Cetacean Liberty? And why are there men from Secutores Security hanging around the burn ward if there are no patients?”
I sign it with my new cell phone number, hit send, and wander over to the counter and order a cup of herb tea.
Fifteen minutes later my phone rings. “It's the wrong time of year to be fishing,” says a male voice when I answer.
“Same could be said for whaling,” I reply.
He's quiet for a minute. “There's no story here,” he says.
“No? Then why did you call me?” I ask.
“I'm recording this call,” he says. “I'll be sending a copy to my editor immediately after we're done.”
“Okay,” I say.
He's a little put off when I don't offer anything else, and after another long silence, he clears his throat. “So, ah, why did you send me that email?”
“Where are they?” I ask.
“Who?”
“The survivors.”
“What survivors?”
I hang up the phone. This game is silly, and I don't really have time for it, but I don't have any other leads.
I have never been very good at investigative work; I have always had a different role in field work. It's always been that way, even before I became an Arcadian. I was the one who read the signs in the wind and the waves, who listened to bird song, and who saw the patterns in viscera. After lying with Mother, she showed me I no longer needed those skills; she wanted me for other reasons. I was happy to oblige her and my new family. I became tooth and claw—a sword for Arcadia. Being polite and knowing how to ask questions were not part of my requisite skill set.
Mere, though, is good at this sort of thing. During the time I had been watching her, I'd seen her play a version of this with a number of contacts. Her trick was always to play hard to get, to suggest she knew more than she did, and to get them to come to her.
As I wait for Ralph to get with the game, I recall the first time we had seen Mere on the Cetacean Liberty. The rest of the team had played her game so readily.
My phone rings again. “Give me something,” he says.
“Kyodo Kujira,” I reply. “Your turn.”
“Not yet,” Ralph says. “What's your connection?”
“One of Kyodo Kujira's vessels was a harpoon boat with a name that translates to Cherry Blossom.”
“Was,” he says, picking up on my verb tense.
“I know what happened to it.”
He breathes heavily into the phone, and I hear the distant sound of his fingers hitting keys on a laptop. “Okay,” he says after a minute. “Not on the phone, though.”
“Of course not,” I reply. I glance over at the café's counter and read him the name that runs across the top of the reader board behind the counter. “I look like any other hipster in here, but older. And I'm drinking tea.”
“Very Colonial of you.”
“Old habits,” I reply. “I know what you look like. The paper very conveniently posts a picture next to your articles.”
“It's… that picture was taken a few years ago.”
“I'll extrapolate.”
“I'll… uh, I'll be there in a half-hour.”
That's a lot of tea to drink, I think as we end the call.
Patience. Time enough.
I kind of hope one of the Secutores guys shows up while I'm waiting. That would be more fun than sitting here.