Tropic of Death Read online

  ‘My personality?’

  ‘Yes. He came up with a list that ticked the right boxes - lack of fear, fast reflexes, lateral thinking. On top of that your social instincts are sharp. You distrust authority and can operate below the radar.’

  ‘That’s because I did some impromptu work for him.’

  ‘There’s another quality he mentioned which explains why you’re on a collision course with Whitley Sands. According to Proctor, you’re motivated by a driven quest for justice. The seeds were sown in your childhood.’

  ‘He might be right,’ Rita acknowledged, ‘or he might be spouting Freudian psychobabble.’

  ‘I’ve read your personnel file. More than once you’ve put justice before compliance with the rules.’

  ‘And that’s a flaw?’

  ‘Only if it becomes irrational.’

  Was that a warning? Rita couldn’t tell, so she asked, ‘Are you talking reason as conformity?’

  ‘No. But sometimes it’s rational to appear to conform.’ Luker flicked ash dismissively. ‘Anyway, it’s rare for Proctor to pay such a tribute to anyone. Perhaps that goes some way to explaining why I’m talking to you now.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Luker grunted and sipped from his plastic cup.

  Rita wasn’t prepared to trust him. His friendly approach was welcome and his attempt to distance himself from the internal workings of the base was plausible, yet he was clearly implicated in its covert activities. That meant he probably had direct access to whatever lay behind three murders. One way or another, he was in on it, so she had no intention of sharing her confidences, her insights or the information she’d put together. As for Proctor, her professional respect for him was tempered with the knowledge that he belonged to a sophisticated old boys’ network, and while his intellect and objectivity set him above many of his colleagues, his emotional detachment could at times be insensitive, even unscrupulous. The same could apply to Luker.

  However, despite her misgivings, she was warming to him, and the prospect of entering some kind of mutual agreement would have advantages. Not the least would be a measure of protection from the excesses of the base security force. That threat was pushing her into unorthodox tactics and alliances. On the same day as instigating a secret deal with a criminal hacker she was on the verge of making a private pact with a federal spook. It seemed ironic, if not foolish, but she refused to surrender whatever it was that could be interpreted as a ‘driven quest for justice’. If she did, she might as well quit now. It would be like surrendering her soul.

  ‘So. What are your instincts telling you?’ asked Luker. ‘Can we agree on some unofficial contact?’

  ‘Only if it’s two-way,’ answered Rita. ‘But before I agree to anything, I need some disclosure from you, Mr Luker.’

  He put down his half-empty cup cautiously. ‘What sort of disclosure?’

  ‘Tell me about yourself. Not the agency work - I mean your personal background. My guess is it’s not military.’

  ‘Good God, no.’ Luker laughed with something like relief.

  ‘That’s another reason I’m the odd man out. But hazard a guess.

  What profession do you think I’m grounded in? I’d be interested to hear.’

  ‘I don’t know enough about you.’

  ‘Think of me as an interview subject. Someone who’s walked in off the street.’

  ‘You make it sound like a party piece.’

  ‘I don’t mean to. Humour me.’

  Rita realised what he was doing. By bouncing the request back at her he was setting her a test. It also showed how adept he was at manoeuvring a conversation. A dialogue with Luker was like a game of psychological chess and for now she had no choice but to play.

  ‘Okay, if you insist.’ She shifted in her seat for a more studied look at him. ‘The characteristics you display point in a certain direction.’

  ‘Which characteristics?’

  ‘Outgoing, observant, with a habit of extracting information in a subtle, disarming way.’

  He sucked on his cigarette a little more pensively. ‘You see me as manipulative.’

  ‘With a light-handed touch,’ she demurred. ‘So, if I was making a post-interview assessment, I’d describe the subject as articulate, accomplished and intelligent. He also possesses a supreme degree of social competence and a track record in achieving objectives through persuasion rather than aggression.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to profile me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought you did. And, no offence, but the profile fits a group I’ve dealt with before - men with polished communication skills and a low threshold of boredom. One trait makes them good at their job, the other propels them into binges of self-indulgence leading to hangovers and broken relationships. I’m talking about men in the media. If I had to guess, that’s where I’d place you.’

  Luker bent forward and stubbed out his cigarette.

  ‘You’re good,’ he said. ‘Very good. And you’re right, of course.

  By profession, I’m a journalist.’

  ‘Print, broadcast?’

  ‘Newspapers, with a few stints in radio.’

  Rita relaxed, satisfied it was her turn to go on the offensive.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I cut my teeth in Melbourne before making a name for myself in Sydney.’ Luker gave a weary smile. ‘Then it was over to Europe as a foreign correspondent. London, Paris. Serious reportage.

  Serious drinking.’

  ‘Am I allowed to ask where you were recruited?’

  ‘Spain. I said yes in a weak moment after a heavy weekend touring the bars of Seville. So your bullet-point analysis was accurate.’ Luker gave her another appraising look. ‘My cover functioned successfully in a series of newspaper bureaux.

  Throughout the nineties I combined journalism and the spy game. I’ve got to admit it was a dual role I largely enjoyed. I look back on it with nostalgia since my promotion to a senior post in Canberra. That was at the turn of the millennium, and you’d be right in thinking it cramped my style. Rubbing shoulders with strait-laced public servants and uptight military bores is a bit like Sartre’s vision of hell.’

  That made Rita laugh. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Not anymore. Cairo finished that off.’

  Luker was interrupted by his mobile bleeping. He read the text and said, ‘Damn. I’ve got to go.’ He stood up, brushing flakes of ash from his sleeve. ‘I assume we’ve got an agreement to meet privately.’

  ‘Where, when?’

  ‘The where is easy enough. We’re in the same hotel. The Whitsunday is my home away from home, each time I get bounced back up here by Canberra. The when is notional. At some time of mutual convenience. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘In the meantime, Van Hassel, I’ll see you back in the Situation Room.’

  He beamed at her in a way that had more than one meaning, then walked out, straightening his tie.

  Rita sat back and blew out a sigh. Her chat with Luker had taken her into alien territory. Perhaps it was the no-man’s land that Steinberg had warned her about. But one thing she was sure of. Wherever she was heading, she was leaving routine police work a long way behind.

  29

  Rita finished her coffee and walked to the lifts, the security guards following her with their eyes. Their attention was unnerving. It was also revealing. She now had little doubt that her presence in the building was a ploy by those in charge. Her participation in the review was irrelevant to the process and the so-called ‘overlap’ with her investigation was merely an excuse to reel her in. The base command wanted to observe her closely, find out what she knew, maybe catch her out. The words of Maddox and Luker seemed to back that up. Both suspected she’d uncovered part of the truth. And the truth was dangerous. She tried not to think of the consequences.

  As she waited for an elevator, she realised she was being drawn into a web of deception. Some of it was her own doing but that was her way of coping with the
layers of subterfuge attached to Whitley Sands. She looked across the circular interior and saw the building itself as emblematic. The glass-tiered atrium resembled a mirror maze with multifaceted reflections distorting the angles.

  Perspectives were curved. Things were not as they seemed. The structure conveyed a looking-glass reality. The parallel seemed apt. Like Alice, Rita was having trouble spotting what was false and what wasn’t.

  The doors slid open on an empty lift. A man in a white lab coat went in ahead of her. She recognised him from the smoking room, the technician who’d been pacing up and down. He was standing with his back to her, blocking her way so she couldn’t reach the lift buttons.

  ‘Level one,’ she told him.

  He pressed a button.

  The doors closed and the elevator dropped rapidly through several levels.

  ‘Did you deliberately ignore me?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, turning to face her. ‘I’m taking you down to level five.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ said Rita as the lift stopped and the doors opened.

  ‘I’m helping your investigation,’ he replied, his manner abrupt, his expression tightly composed. He was English, in his early thirties, with pale blue eyes and a taut, boyish face. ‘You should come with me.’

  ‘I’m not stepping out of this lift.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘For a start, I don’t have clearance for this level.’

  ‘No one will report you.’

  ‘Why should I even consider it?’

  ‘You won’t be doing your job if you don’t.’ His body was lodged against the door, holding it open. ‘I’m talking about your duty as a police officer, Detective Sergeant Van Hassel.’

  ‘So who are you?’

  ‘My name’s Paul.’

  ‘Paul who?’

  ‘Paul Giles. Project coordinator.’

  His name was vaguely familiar but she couldn’t recall why.

  ‘You work on the Panopticon Project?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s the one. Will you come with me?’

  ‘Sorry, Paul. You still haven’t given me a reason to run the risk of being detained by your security squad.’

  ‘I’m the one they’d arrest. I’m already a target.’

  ‘So why hijack me and make it worse?’

  ‘They know who killed Rachel Macarthur.’

  The words jolted her.

  Rita hesitated, but only for a moment. If he was offering to prove a direct link between murder and the base he’d got her attention. It was evidence she couldn’t ignore.

  She stepped out of the lift.

  ‘Show me,’ she said.

  Paul led the way along a subterranean corridor past sealed metal doors, Rita’s heels tapping the linoleum. The sound echoed down the passageway stretching into the distance. A couple of scruffy males with the distracted intensity of computer nerds emerged from a doorway and walked past without paying Rita any attention. They were too busy arguing over whether Zen was a form of nonlinear feedback. Rita took it as another looking-glass moment.

  CCTV cameras and alarms were fixed to the walls, along with warning signs outlined in black and yellow diagonals: Authorised Personnel Only. Overhead, a concrete ceiling was strung with a mass of exposed cables and piping. The decor was battleship grey, apparently the uniform colour of the underground facility, adding to its functional and vaguely depressing aspect. She could feel the weight of it bearing down on her.

  ‘How deep underground are we?’ she asked.

  ‘Nearly fifty metres,’ Paul answered.

  ‘What’s on this level?’

  ‘The engineering section - technical support, R&D labs. And, more importantly, my personal work space.’

  ‘What’s below us?’

  ‘Level six has acres of computer hardware and the master control room.’

  ‘And level seven?’

  ‘Our biggest secret. It’s what all the fuss is about. The project hub and control system.’

  ‘Do you have access?’

  ‘No. But I’ve been down there once as the technical director’s assistant. It’s all very space age. Very Star Wars.’

  He led her through a side door and across a communal office space that was unoccupied and untidy. Reams of printout were draped over desks, stacks of magazines spilled from metal cabinets onto the floor and a random collection of pin-ups were stuck to the wall, dominated by a poster-sized print of The Scream. As they reached a large studio door with a red light glowing above it, Rita could hear the thumping bass of heavy metal coming from the other side.

  ‘We have to go via the smart room,’ said Paul. ‘Don’t let it freak you out.’

  As he rolled open the door the full blast of the music swept over them. Rita recognised the track - Guns N’ Roses with the decibels cranked. Paul didn’t try to talk above the sound; it would have been pointless. He just jerked his thumb in the direction they were heading and she followed.

  It was a strange place, a high-ceilinged cavity with tiers of computers, cables trailing across the floor and exposed metal beams overhead. Half a dozen young men and women sat face-to-face across a bank of terminals, swivelling and rocking to the music.

  Rita could see why Maddox was instinctively suspicious of the research staff. Socially these civilians - with their spiky black hair and sloppy clothes, not to mention their undisciplined thinking

  - were the opposite of his security force.

  She smiled to herself as she followed Paul through the centre of the smart room. The area was hemmed in by wall-sized screens.

  Projected onto these were images of virtual creatures, all slightly grotesque, moving around cartoon-like interiors. As the two of them moved through it, a virtual Paul walked across the screens, accompanied by a virtual Rita, chased by a virtual dinosaur snapping at her heels. She found it disconcerting; another aspect of warped reality.

  They left by a rear exit, which muffled the music as it closed behind them and led to a further labyrinth of grey corridors.

  Paul stopped beside a steel door with the number 538 printed on it.

  ‘My place of abode,’ he said.

  Paul swiped a security pad with his pass, opened the door and took Rita down a connecting passage. The claustrophobic dimensions and grey metal fittings were suggestive of below decks on a warship. At the end was another doorway. They went through it into a narrow sound-proofed room, lit only by task lamps and images displayed on a wall of computer screens. A heavy steel door closed them in with a cushioned hiss.

  ‘What is this?’ asked Rita.

  ‘The project coordinator’s control room,’ he answered, dropping into a swivel chair in front of keyboards. ‘My primary work station.’

  ‘And why have you brought me here?’

  ‘To show you classified material and break federal laws. Take a seat, Van Hassel.’

  Despite a constrained intensity about him, there was a cavalier element in his approach. He was displaying the characteristics of a highly strung man who’d finally thrown caution to the wind.

  Not that he was showing signs of being reckless. It was more as if he’d made a calculated decision to break the rules and there was no looking back. If that was the case Rita could expect to learn something that would take her a step closer to the truth.

  She pulled over a chair, dumped her shoulder bag on the floor and sat down. While the bank of screens and digital decks dominated the room, the rear wall was lined with more mundane items - a rack of clipboards, a unit filled with disks, a fire extinguisher and a coat stand on which a denim jacket hung.

  There was also a desk with an open laptop. Beside it was a tech toy in the shape of breasts and a desk calendar with a sepia print of King’s College Chapel. Everything was neat, not a thing out of place. Even a couple of loose pens were aligned precisely with a notepad. It was all beginning to fit with Rita’s initial impression of Paul’s personality as fastidious to the point of compulsive. It was the
sort of personality that made her wary.

  ‘Let’s pick a location in the town,’ he said. ‘Any you fancy?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to show you the system in action. How about the high street? Let’s see what’s going on there.’ He clicked a mouse and a wide-angle view of traffic and pedestrians in motion filled a high-resolution computer screen. ‘Ah, some of our American cousins. Let’s take a closer look.’

  The view homed in on half a dozen US sailors. As they ambled along the pavement, chatting and joking, the view on the screen tracked along with them. To adjust it, Paul tapped a keyboard.

  The Americans stopped outside a bar, lingering a moment before pushing open the door and disappearing inside. Rita recognised the exterior as the Steamboat.

  ‘Let’s follow them in,’ said Paul. ‘Incidentally, there are no physical bugs in the place.’

  Rita watched as the exterior image of the pub dissolved to be replaced by an interior scene, with the sailors pulling out chairs and sitting around a table as they ordered drinks, their dialogue loud and clear. The picture too was sharp, as if it was being fed from a live TV camera mounted inside the bar. But she realised it couldn’t be, not if Paul was being straight about it. Assuming he was, this system seemed to defy logic. It also went beyond any technology currently in use. To see and hear inside rooms at random was a radical advance in surveillance. This allowed total accessibility. No wonder Steinberg had seen Rita’s Orwellian analogy as accurate.

  ‘By the way,’ said Paul, ‘these are computer-generated images.’

  ‘Do you want to explain that to me?’

  ‘That’s why you’re here.’ He swivelled around to face her.

  ‘I’m on the team testing an experimental surveillance system for deployment in the so-called war on terror. It means from my copper-lined control room here I can observe and eavesdrop on anyone within a two-hundred-and-forty-degree sector, up to a distance of ten k from the base.’

  She was watching him carefully. ‘I assume it’s an integrated system.’

  ‘Correct, combining input from all sources of electronic data -

  mobiles, landlines, cables, emails, CCTV, satellite coverage - the lot. Plus something else: an EM Net.’