The waiting ground on, like slow wheels. Harrigan had put in place the graveyard shift and sent some of his other people home, but by late in the evening they felt as worn as he was, the enclosure was getting to them. They manned the phones, checked the information they received constantly from the public and found that almost all of it was either old or useless. Opposite the Temple in Camperdown, the surveillance teams sat rubbing their eyes as they waited outside a silent, almost dark building. The sheer boredom ate at everyone.
Harrigan told his people to catnap whenever they could and sent them out on breaks to give them some fresh air, to get them to move.
A little after nine, he took a phone call from the surveillance team telling him the preacher had just left the Temple.
‘He’s been picked up by a very nice Jaguar,’ a female voice said,
‘chauffeur driven. Our registration check says it’s owned by a Mrs Yvonne Lindley, north St Ives. Looks like he’s going out to a late dinner. There he goes. He’s heading off to the Harbour Bridge by the looks of it. Going north.’
Half his luck.
‘Keep on him,’ Harrigan said. ‘Don’t let him get away from you.’
‘We’ll do our best.’
‘No,’ Harrigan replied, ‘you won’t lose him, is what you’ll do.’
In an excess of self-protection as much as anything else, he had earlier rung the security firm charged with guarding the Whole Life Health Centre clinics. They had assured him that the clinics were under twenty-four-hour protection. He asked for that in writing and then logged the time and date of his call. He emailed Marvin, copying the message to everyone he needed to if he was going to protect his back, expressing concern that at least one of these clinics just might go up tonight, only to receive in reply a phone call from the Tooth’s personal assistant saying that they had every confidence in present arrangements.
‘Send me that in writing,’ he said to her, knowing that she would not.
Harrigan was snookered, he had no people he could send to fill the gap.
He was reduced to making sure the street patrols had been alerted and having the staff at the clinics warned personally by his own people.
As the time ground on, he took another call from the surveillance team.
‘We’re sitting outside Yvonne Lindley’s pile on the north shore. And a very nice pile it is too. He’s inside,’ the female voice said.
‘Call me if anything happens.’
‘And the rain comes down at last. We’ll be back to you as soon as he’s on the move.’
The storm which had threatened all day had finally broken; the rain began to pour in sheets down his window. It was a relief. He went out into the main office to see who was there and who was out. He saw Grace disappearing into the tea room, presumably in search of coffee; a small group in a corner with Jeffo, Ian sitting nearby. Trev was out in search of fast food. Grace reappeared on her way back to the computer room. Engrossed in whatever it was they were looking at, the small group around Jeffo had not seen him. He had turned to go back to his office when he heard laughter, some quiet, almost whispered comments, louder laughter and then Ian speaking, not quietly.
‘Fuck off, mate. I wouldn’t show that around here if I was you.’
Harrigan turned again in time to see Grace stop nearby, putting a mug of coffee down on a desk.
‘What’s that?’ she said.
Jeffo said something to her, Harrigan could not hear what. He was waving a picture from side to side in front of her, moving his body with it and laughing. She walked up to him. The crowd around him parted a little.
‘Give me that,’ she said.
‘No way, Jose,’ Jeffo replied, passing it out of her reach to someone else.
She hit him hard across the face with an open hand, the sound like a whiplash throughout the open office. He jerked back in shock and touched blood on his mouth. There was a collective gasp and, in the background, muted cheers from a few other watchers. Jeffo stood up slowly, moving around towards her. She stood her ground.
‘Gracie, you back off now,’ Ian said urgently, on his feet as well and circling them. ‘Jeffo, why don’t you sit down and just shut up for once.’
‘You bitch. I bit my lip,’ Jeffo said, moving dangerously close to her.
‘You give me that,’ she said again, not moving, facing him.
Harrigan was between them, outraged.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he said to Grace. ‘You never do that. You never, never hit anyone you work with. Don’t you ever do that again. Not while you work for me.’
Grace stepped back, pushing her hair out of the way, smudging her makeshift make-up. She looked sideways and then back at him and barely nodded. Jeffo had also stepped back, muttering a single word to her as he did so. He was grinning as he took repossession of the photograph but no one else was smiling. Harrigan turned to him just as he was slipping it out of sight into his top drawer.
‘What’s that, mate? Let me have a look,’ Harrigan said.
‘It’s just a joke. Nothing.’
‘If it’s a joke, let’s share it. We can all have a laugh, we need one.
Come on. Let’s see it. Give it here.’
There was silence as Harrigan found himself looking at a picture of a younger Grace on a stage somewhere, holding a microphone and wearing high heels but otherwise naked to the waist and barely clothed at all.
‘That is not me,’ she said angrily. ‘That is airbrushed rubbish. It’s got nothing to do with me. I don’t even look like that.’
Harrigan felt sick to his stomach. He eyeballed Jeffo while he tore the photograph into four pieces and shouted for Dea. The tiny woman appeared at once.
‘Shred it,’ Harrigan said. ‘Flush it down the toilet with the rest of the shit. Got any more of those to go with it, mate?’
‘No, it’s just the one.’
‘Don’t tell me that. You’ve always got something up your sleeve.
Let’s have a look in your desk.’
Harrigan pulled out an envelope containing several more pictures.
He tore those up as well. They stood in silence listening to the shredder mince them to pieces.
‘So where did these come from?’ Harrigan asked, looking at the envelope. ‘Old Roger. Straight out of Marvin’s office, in other words.
Wouldn’t you know it? Nice to know they’ve got nothing better to do with their time down there. Or their money, for that matter. Unlike the rest of us.’
He smiled. The room remained completely quiet.
‘You love this, don’t you, mate,’ he said to Jeffo, still smiling, ‘little jokes like this. You just love them.’
‘It is just a fucking joke, Boss. I’m not the only one that’s got them.
It’s nothing. What does it matter?’
‘Oh, but you love it. Sticking a knife in there, bad-mouthing someone here, playing little games, pinning nice little pictures up on the wall. You’ve always got something for everyone else to laugh at. You get a charge out of it, don’t you? You’re someone everyone here can rely on when they really need to, aren’t you? You know what loyalty means.
You’re here, waiting to stick it to them when they need you most.’
‘It was just a fucking joke. There was nothing to it. Why worry?
Everyone knows — ’
He stopped.
‘Everyone knows what?’ Harrigan asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘No, come on, tell me. Everyone knows something that I don’t. I don’t think Grace knows it either. What is it? You want to say it?’
Jeffo was silent. He looked at Grace, who had moved to sit down at a spare desk. She looked away, meeting no one’s eye.
‘Okay,’ Harrigan said, ‘no one knows anything. Except this. Clear your desk and get out. You can go home now.’
‘You can’t do that.’
‘I can. Get out. Now. While I watch you. And don’t waste your time doing it.’
Harrigan stood by as Jeffo cleared his desk and went towards the exit. At the door, he stopped.
‘Why don’t you piss her off instead of me?’ he called as a parting shot. ‘Wouldn’t be a problem then. But we all know the answer to that one, don’t we?’
‘Get out,’ Harrigan almost shouted, unexpectedly stung to real anger.
Jeffo was gone, into the lift. Harrigan turned to look at everyone else. Grace was watching him but it was impossible know what she was thinking. She looked down at the desk, rubbing her forehead. He did not speak to her, there was nothing he could say publicly. The air jangled with the contrarieties of tension, relief and tiredness, a sense of chafing, human irritation pushing at the edges.
‘Everyone who’s got work to do, do it,’ he said. ‘Everyone who can take a break now, take it. Get some fresh air and something to eat.
Forget about the last twenty minutes. We have to keep our minds on this. Take your pagers with you.’
One or two people did leave after he had spoken, friends of Jeffo, but there was nothing he could do about that. Others went back to work.
‘Boss.’
Louise’s slow and gravelly voice interrupted him. She was standing beside him, breathing whisky.
‘What is it, Lou?’
‘Something you should see. I came out to see you earlier but you were preoccupied.’ She smiled a slow, sardonic, alcoholic smile as she glanced around at the room. ‘Thought I’d better wait. You need to know about this. You might like to get some other people in here as well. Gracie, you need to look at this too. This is a different sort of picture,’ she added very quietly.
They gathered around the monitor. Grace sat in her chair, back a little and staying out of the way. She felt a tap on her shoulder and looked up to see Ian handing her a fresh cup of coffee.
‘Don’t worry about it, Gracie,’ he said quietly, ‘Jeffo’s just a shit.’
She smiled at him out of pure relief.
Harrigan noticed the small communication and briefly wondered about everything and nothing that might exist between the two of them, before turning his attention to the screen.
‘I went looking for the Avenging Angels,’ Louise said a little creakily. ‘I thought, they’ll be there somewhere. If people enjoy sending out photographs like the one they sent out, they’ll be on the web somewhere, showing off. And sure enough, there they were. This site moves around. You’ll see why. It’s amateurish, I’ve got to say, you could do better. There’s no talent here. The Firewall would do a better job, she’s got some imagination. But you’ll see. Here we go.’
The site opened to the tinny sound of a drum beating and the words
‘Avenging Angels: Abortionists made to face God’ appeared on the screen. A set of doors opened and the sound of gunshots rang out in the background. An angel with ammunition belts slung around its hips pointed with a handgun to a poster on a brick wall in an alleyway.
‘Bounty Hunters Wanted,’ the poster said, ‘Generous rewards offered for the destruction of persons performing abortions, those who authorise child-killing, and the buildings that house these Hellholes.
Whether you work for God or the Devil (and let the Devil’s own kill each other, we say) the Avenging Angels are prepared to pay good money for the bringing of these mass murderers and the witches who serve them before the ultimate court, God’s tribunal. Be a hero. Save a child. Guarantee of payment on receipt of positive proof of destruction, death or disabling.’
‘This is serious?’ Harrigan asked.
‘That’s what I asked myself. I thought, someone’s playing a bad joke on me and I didn’t come down in the last shower. No, it’s serious.
Here’s the proof,’ Louise replied.
A gallery of eight pictures titled ‘The Damned’ appeared on the screen while the background noise became one of children crying.
‘Here we go. One more time.’
Louise clicked on a picture of Agnes Liu marked with a red slash.
She was standing in a supermarket car park at a location presumably somewhere in California, with her sunglasses in her hand and a bag over her shoulder. The words ‘Bounty Paid’ appeared underneath.
‘For your information, that bounty isn’t small. Whoever shot the doc got $20,000 US for it. Which is even better in Australian money. And here’s the piccie our friends sent the doc the morning Hurst shot her.’
The image of Dr Laura Di-Cuollo expanded to cover the screen.
The words ‘Bounty Paid’ were also stamped underneath it.
‘There’s a whole file of names and addresses and photographs in there of people who’ve got prices on their heads and where you can find them if you want to.’
‘Is there anyone else we know in there?’ Harrigan asked in his neutral voice.
‘No. These lucky people are all Americans and Canadians. I guess they just picked on the doc because she was in California for that little while. They thought she was fair game.’
‘Where is this site?’
‘Don’t know. I’ve got a trace out on it but I can’t give you a location just yet and they might shut me out any minute.’
‘Who are these people?’ he said.
‘Oh, no, Boss,’ Louise was grinning, ‘they don’t go around telling people who they are. They just put everybody else’s name out there.’
It wasn’t quite what he had meant.
‘Who got $20,000 US for shooting the doc?’ he asked.
‘The preacher,’ Grace replied. ‘Lucy Hurst doesn’t have it.’
‘Neither does he, Gracie.’ Trev, swallowing a mouthful of hamburger, had appeared later than everyone else and stood in the background.
‘We’ve checked Fredericksen’s finances backwards. That money’s not there.’ He moved forward. ‘So is Hurst working for them? With them?’
‘Maybe they’re using her,’ Grace said.
‘Might be she’s using them,’ Louise replied.
‘Hurst hasn’t been back online?’ Harrigan asked Grace.
‘No. Her mobile’s dead, I think. If that’s the only means of connection she’s got, we won’t hear from her again until she can steal another one.’
Harrigan looked at his watch.
‘All right. We pick that information up and we follow it. Meantime, we still wait. We watch the preacher. We take the phone calls. We keep monitoring. As soon as anything moves, we’re onto it.’
The crowd dispersed, Louise leaving the room with them. Grace turned her chair back to her computer screen and buried her hands in her long hair, then looked up to see Harrigan standing at her elbow.
‘Yeah?’ she said.
‘Come and talk to me while I’ve got a little time, Grace,’ he said very quietly. ‘Come and enlighten me on a few matters. You owe me an explanation. More than one.’
Grace looked at the screen.
‘What if she comes back on?’
‘If she does, Louise will be here, she can get you back in. I’m going to my little Greek cafe around the corner for an ouzo and water and to remind myself there’s another world out there. You can join me there if you want to.’
Not long after he’d left the room, Louise returned. She might as well have been listening to them talk.
‘Take a break, Gracie,’ she said, ‘go and get a cigarette. I’ll keep an eye on things for you.’
‘Will you?’
‘Yeah, don’t worry, I’ll call you,’ the older woman replied. ‘Go have a fag. Indulge yourself. Life’s too short. Too short for anything.’
‘Thanks, Lou.’
Grace smiled and left, in desperate need of nicotine. In the women’s toilets, she washed away her smudged make-up, feeling too worn to replace it. The cold water on her face revived her. Returning to the office she saw that several other people had also left to get some fresh air. She slipped out. Those remaining noticed that she was gone, checked that the boss was also out, and drew their own conclusions.
Outside, the lights of the tower office blocks burned spangled gold in the rain, a chequerboard of light and dark. The streets were empty, more as a consequence of the weather than the lateness of the hour.
Debris littered the footpaths but the rain was reduced simply to a storm, the strength of the wind had dropped. Grace parked illegally, working on the belief that no one would be delivering goods or handing out parking tickets on a night like tonight. The cafe was empty. Yellow lights gleamed on dull wood and polished grey linoleum. The man with the silver and black hair tied back in a ponytail stood behind the counter, looking a little more crumpled than he had that morning. He recognised her as she walked in.
‘He’s out the back,’ he said. ‘Do you want anything?’
‘Coffee. Do you have anything to eat?’
‘Yeah, I can get you something. Go and sit down.’
The room smelled the same as it had early that morning. Harrigan sat at the table in his shirtsleeves, drinking an ouzo and water and eating a bowl of some sort of meat stew. His pager and mobile sat on the table where he could see them. He smiled at her.
‘You did come,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know if you would.’
She smiled and put her cigarettes on the table.
‘Light up if you want.’
‘No, I’m not going to do that,’ she said. Coffee and a simple meal arrived on the table in front of her. ‘What’s the food like here?’ she asked after the counterman had left.
‘Basic,’ he replied. ‘It’s just fuel. It’ll keep you going.’
She started to eat just as he finished.
‘Talk to me, Grace,’ he said. ‘Tell me why I threw Jeffo off the team just now.’
‘Are you sorry he’s gone?’
‘That’s not the point. And you know that. You can tell me. Is there anything else out wide that I need to know about right now?’
Grace ate in silence for a few moments.
‘It’s not Marvin,’ she said. ‘It’s Baby Tooth. I was at the Academy with him.’
‘Lucky you,’ Harrigan said with genuine sympathy, forbearing to ask if she’d had the pleasure of knocking back the attentions of Tooth junior, who was noted for going after anything that could wear a skirt.
‘It’s like father, like son with them, isn’t it? It was our last night. We were having a party and he got legless. Me and a friend took him back to his room so he could sleep it off. And guess what? He had these exam papers on his desk. They had “Embargo” all over them, he’d got them from head office. He cheated at every exam and he still didn’t do that well.’
‘Grace, I thought you had a brain. Tell me you didn’t.’
‘I didn’t, it was my friend. He was so mad, he went and dragged the principal out of bed. That was Sweet Freddie, wasn’t it? He didn’t want anything upsetting his retirement. He sent it up the line to head office. Nothing happened. Until graduation, when the Tooth walks up to me smiling from ear to ear and tells me ever so quietly I might as well quit now and not waste my time because if I don’t I’m going to be really sorry. He’s spent the last eight months proving it. I’ve seen that picture stuck up on a lot of walls. And I know it’s still out there.’
‘What happened to your friend?’
‘He already had another job. In London. I didn’t know that. He’s a forensic accountant. He’s making a fortune over there.’
She tried to laugh it off. Come to London with me, Gracie, but I don’t want anything like babies. She could hear him saying it.
Everything between them had died there and then.
Harrigan watched her as she ate in silence for a little while longer and then pushed the plate to the side, the food not quite finished.
He walked out on you, didn’t he? Dropped you right in it and walked away. I’d treat you better than that.
‘That wasn’t too bad,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to be polite.’ He watched her light a cigarette.
‘That’s a nasty story.’
‘It’s just a story.’
‘The Tooth can’t do anything to you while you work for me. But don’t ever do that again, Grace. You never hit anyone. It doesn’t matter how much they provoke you.’
‘Well, I did,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m only human. Maybe I got pushed too far.’
He wanted to say, you can’t be human and do this job; you’re too human, that’s your problem. In the brief silence, his mobile rang. It was his surveillance team.
‘He’s on the move,’ the voice said. ‘It’s bucketing down out here and the visibility is very bad. This is not going to be easy.’
‘You don’t lose him,’ Harrigan said. ‘It doesn’t matter what happens.’
Grace was looking at him expectantly.
‘The preacher’s on the move,’ he told her.
‘We should get back in.’
‘In a moment. You still haven’t been straight with me, Grace.’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Not completely. Don’t tell me you have.’ He had finished his drink and sat leaning his elbows on the table. ‘Marvin’s dangerous but the most he can do is run you out of your job. Don’t think I don’t know what that means. But the people we’re dealing with right now will do a lot more than that. You tell me. Do they know you? Just give me an honest answer. I need to know.’
Grace ground out her cigarette and was faced with a fundamental inability to lie.
‘Yes, they know who I am. I don’t know if they’ve made the connection yet.’
She sat back, feeling cold, her heart beating strongly. She was afraid and her hands were shaking badly. She refused to look at him.
Harrigan leaned his chin on his knuckles.
‘Fredericksen has,’ he said. ‘From the moment he laid eyes on you.
He recognised you again today and he threatened you to me. He knows exactly who you are.’
‘He can only have seen my picture. I don’t know how he could know who I am just from that.’
‘You’ve got a face that’s very easy to remember.’
‘It’s just a face,’ she said. ‘Anyway. They took my picture. One day when I was on my way into the city clinic. They hassled me, I showed them my warrant card and I sent them on their way. I shouldn’t have, should I? They remembered my name. They sent me one of their lovely letters saying they knew where to find me.’
‘They had your address and you didn’t tell me that?’
‘You didn’t need to know.’
He was silent, staring at her. He could not quite believe what he was hearing.
‘When did this happen?’
‘Just before Christmas,’ she said, again not looking at him.
He did the mathematics while Grace lit another cigarette. She was still not looking at him.
‘You could do that, could you?’ he said, very quietly.
As soon as he said it, he wished he hadn’t. Unexpectedly, he had felt the nudge of the prohibitions he had been taught during his boyhood, an unexpected repugnance that she could have had an abortion. He didn’t want to feel that.
She looked at him, drawing on her cigarette. ‘Yes, Paul. I could do that.’
Her tone was icy. There was silence.
‘I don’t need this,’ he said.
‘That’s all that matters, is it?’
‘It does when I’m holding everything together.’
‘This is not your business,’ she said angrily. ‘It won’t stop you wrapping this up.’
‘If something happens to you, who goes to see your family? I do.
These lunatics shoot people they think deserve to die. Do you think I want to knock on your family’s door and have to tell them something like that? You don’t get paid to take risks like this.’
Grace shook her head. ‘Isn’t it my life? Don’t I make that decision?’
‘Not while you work for me.’
‘No? Do you know you don’t give people much space, Paul? You like to organise them too much. You think you know how they ought to feel and what they ought to do. Maybe you don’t.’
Harrigan felt heat rise at the back of his neck.
‘You’re getting very personal there, Grace. Anyone else but you and you’d be gone.’
‘This is personal. Because we are personal, aren’t we? Everything we do is personal. I know we were for about twenty minutes in here this morning. I don’t think I was imagining it. You asked me.’
Harrigan watched her hand smooth the scar on her neck. He had wanted to ask her if she would sleep with him, he had thought she would. He did not know what he wanted to ask of her now. He did not know how to describe her any more.
‘Do we have anything else to say to each other? Do you need to know anything else?’ she said into his silence, taking it to mean that their original twenty minutes was finished. ‘I should get back to work.’
Before he could reply, his mobile rang again.
‘We’re on the Pacific Highway,’ the voice said. ‘I’m sorry but I’ve got to tell you that we’ve lost him.’
‘You haven’t.’
‘We have. He gave us the slip, he had it planned. He got out of the car at an intersection and disappeared down a lane and into someone’s garden, we think. We don’t know where he went after that. We stopped the Jag and we’ve spoken to the driver. The target had asked him to stop and let him out. We’ve got a search on but I think we’ve lost him for the night.’
‘Then keep searching. And tomorrow morning you can come in here and you can explain yourselves to me.’
‘They’ve lost him,’ he said to Grace in disbelief. ‘What do they do for brains? They’re supposed to be the best. Fuck! ’
She was shocked to see how much the exhaustion and strain had changed his face. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, strangely polite, and walked out of the room.
She waited for a few moments then ashed out her cigarette. She collected their joint goods, coats, phones, her shoulder bag, his wallet which he had left on the table. She stopped at the counter on her way out.
‘What do I owe you?’ she said.
The man shook his head. He looked out through the doors at Harrigan who was standing under the shelter of the entrance way, staring at the weather.
‘He works too hard,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she replied. Don’t we all.
‘Thanks,’ she said and left, appearing beside Harrigan in the doorway to hand him his coat. He accepted it without speaking, together with his pager, his phone and his wallet, the sight of which made him raise his eyebrows in some surprise.
Grace felt the warmth of Harrigan’s physicality in the fabric of his jacket, the cotton of his white shirt, with all the closeness of aftershave and ordinary human odour. Crossing the line to connect to the body beneath the fabric had slipped past the bounds of possibility. All the sexual need she still felt for him had led her into grief, not much else, but this was usual. It was better to ask why she might want to put herself into the poisonous situation of having an affair with her boss.
He looked at the empty street, waiting for Lucy Hurst to appear any moment out of the dark. A degree of control had returned to his face.
‘You should have told me all of that sooner than now, Grace,’ he said.
‘None of the things you’ve done tonight have been very professional.’
She did not know how to interpret the disappointment in his voice.
‘I’m just starting out. I’ll toughen up in time, the way I’m supposed to,’ she said, without looking at him. ‘I’ll see you back there.’
She left him standing in the doorway of the cafe and ran through the rain to her car.
‘Yeah. Probably you will. You’ve probably got that in you somewhere,’ he said quietly to himself, watching her go.
Grace breathed in solitude as freedom. No one need know she was letting herself slide badly enough to cry as she drove back to the office, the tears grudgingly squeezing out for her. Out on the streets it was still pouring rain. Lightning strikes split the sky.