The drone came to my ears seconds before I saw the source. I was looking north but the aircraft came out of the west, just a dirtspeck against the dirty grey beginning of the day. It came down without hesitation, bumped and lurched on the sheep-paddock strip, slowed, slewed around, taxied to within five metres of where I stood beside the vehicle and turned side-on.
The door opened and Cam appeared, black poloneck sweater, leather jacket.
‘G’day. Wiped that motor?’
I nodded, picked up the sports bag with the money.
He looked around, impassively studied the falling-down shed, the rutted road, the bleak and wet landscape. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘seen the attractions of Tassie now. We might go home, have breakfast.’
Inside the Cessna, the pilot was fiddling with something on the instrument panel. His peaked cap was facing backwards. Crapdusters Australia, it said across the front.
‘Can’t find Triple J,’ he said. ‘Got to have that station.’
I groaned.
On the way back, high over the cruel grey strait, Cam said to the pilot, ‘That strip, that’s an abalone strip, right?’
The crapduster looked at Cam, frowned, pushed back his cap, scratched his number one haircut. ‘Y’know,’ he said, ‘go so many places, I forget.’
Cam nodded. He seemed pleased with the answer.
I drowsed. I wanted to go home, to take off my clothes, have a shower, go to bed and sleep. A deep, dreamless sleep.
The landing was silky. So silky that I did not register my return to earth.
In the Brock Holden, running the freeway, I said to Cam, ‘Four people dead. Nothing to do with me.’
‘Before you got there?’
‘No. While I was there.’
He looked at me. ‘While?’
It was too early in the day, whatever day it was, to tell the story. ‘I misjudged this bloke,’ I said. ‘I think his friends might want to have a word with me.’
Cam punched a button on the console. Muddy Waters from every direction, drowning in the Waters.
I woke up in a big bed, white sheets, white blanket, white room, clean-smelling sheets, light of day from huge uncurtained windows.
What day? Where?
I sat up, alarmed, swept the bed linen away, naked, heart pumping. Then I remembered. I went to the window and looked out on a wide arc of the city. Below me lay Albert Park lake and beyond that Middle Park and the bay. Off to the right, I could see the Westgate Bridge and Williamstown.
Time? I found my watch beside the bed. Just after noon. I’d only slept for five hours.
Only? How many hours did I have?
I wandered around the apartment. Little had registered earlier in the day. It was the penthouse, minimally furnished, no pictures, huge windows taking in the whole city, polished boards underfoot, a kitchen like a high-style operating theatre, a gym and a sauna and a Japanese bath and two showers in the football team-sized bathroom.
‘Belongs to a bloke I know, never there,’ Cam had said. How did he know people who owned places like this?
On the coffee table in the sitting room, I found two new shirts, new underpants, my jacket and pants in a drycleaner’s bag, a mobile phone, a ring with three keys, and a plastic card with a magnetic strip and a barcode. A note from Cam said:
Food on the ground floor. The mobile’s clean. Car in bay 12 in basement 1. The card gets you through the doors.
In a shower, water boring into me from all directions, I tried to work out what to do. No Gary to look for now. No videotape of the Bangkok interrogation.
Gary was TransQuik. And Dave was TransQuik, TransQuik inside the government. Possibly a late recruit to the TransQuik cause, recruited after Gary’s disappearance, perhaps even later. I’d been looking for Gary on behalf of TransQuik, a late recruit myself.
What had Gary told Dean Canetti in Bangkok? Something explosive. Dean said:
…wait till you see this, you’ll cream your jeans, it’ll hang Mr S.
Mr Smartarse. Steven Levesque.
Dried, dressed, I got out my notebook, looked for Chrissy Donato-Connors-Sargent. She was home.
‘Chrissy, you said something about someone telling Alan there was funny money in TransQuik…’