Authors: Caroline Carver
A mobile started ringing somewhere, and when nobody answered it she realized it was hers. Lunging for her backpack, she yanked
the thing out.
“How’s tricks?”
Her heart gave a leap, and she hurriedly turned away from Riggs, ducking her head and pressing the receiver hard against her
ear.
“Er . . . I’m at the police station, actually. In Cairns.”
“You going to be long?”
“No idea. Apparently the chief wants to ask me some questions.”
Pause.
“What about?”
“Oh, something that happened earlier today.”
“Must’ve been mighty big to catch the chief’s eye. He’s an important bloke, all up. You okay?”
She was surprised by the anxiety in his tone, and even more surprised by her reaction. A rush of tenderness for his concern,
which she immediately put down to feeling vulnerable at the day’s events.
“Fine.”
Another pause.
“Listen up. I think I know where your mother is.”
She bolted upright in her chair.
“What?”
“Get yourself back up to Nulgarra quick smart, okay?”
“Yes, yes, but where is she, are you saying she’s—”
“I’m going to do a recon tonight. Check the place out. If I can, I’ll grab her. Okay with you?”
“God, absolutely, definitely, but be careful, won’t you, please?”
“Cautious as a leopard, cunning as a snake.”
Before she could give him a message for her mother, he hung up.
Trembling with excitement, she pushed her phone back into her backpack. Lee had found her mother! She and Mum could be flying
out tomorrow, away from all this mayhem, away from the Chens!
“Good news?” Riggs asked.
“Oh, a friend’s just had a baby.” She smiled brilliantly at him.
His expression had turned peculiarly withdrawn.
“It’s a little girl,” she added firmly for good measure.
“My boy was a preemie. Nearly died.” He opened a drawer and took out a photograph and showed it to her. A smiling, remarkably
handsome woman in blue was holding a strapping toddler in her arms. “Looks just like me, eh? Bit podgy, but handsome as hell.”
He was beaming from ear to ear.
Startled by this sudden change from bullying cop to proud parent, she was about to say, “How lovely,” or something along those
lines, when he snatched the photo and shoved it back inside the drawer.
“Heard from our friend Lee lately?” he asked.
Her skin tightened but she kept her face bland.
“Why are you so interested in Lee?” she responded. “I mean, I know he’s a people smuggler, but you all seem so hell-bent on
finding him, I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t something else.”
“Danny boy hasn’t told you?”
“Well, no, not really.”
He flicked another look at her breasts. “Guess I can understand that.”
She resisted the urge to grind her teeth and said again, “Why do you want Lee?”
“To tear his head off and stick it on a pole, that’s why. If it wasn’t for Lee, Sergeant Tatts would still be alive. Sodding
Lee.”
Heart thumping, she said, “He killed a cop?”
“Too bloody right. Greedy bastard, Lee. Do anything for a buck. He was brought up like a Chinese, you know, by some ancient
old hag. Believe me, you can’t trust him further than you can throw your average Chinaman.”
He checked that the drawer with the photograph of his family was shut, as though protecting them against what he was about
to say, before leaning forward in his chair.
“Years ago, the powers-that-be thought it was a brilliant idea to take this thug off the streets and make him a copper because
he had a white father, some bigwig swanky lawyer in Hong Kong, and because he spoke fluent Cantonese and Mandarin. They regretted
it big-time when he tipped the Red Bamboo Gang off about Tatts.”
Georgia felt as though she’d been punched in the stomach. “Lee’s a
policeman
?”
“
Was
a fucking policeman. A fucking joke, the whole thing. He’d been transferred from Hong Kong to work with our feds to plug
the illegal immigrants and was working for the other side the whole fucking time. No wonder we never caught any bloody boats
with him tipping the RBG off.”
Her voice was faint as she said, “You said he killed a cop.”
“Yeah. Not personally, but there’s not a whole lot of difference. He may as well have pulled the trigger himself. Tatts had
been working undercover on the biggest drug deal we’d seen in the past decade, pretending to be the broker between the RBG
and a buyer. It was all set up. Tatts had the money. Jason Chen and his father the drugs. We were going to nail the two top
honchos of the RBG, and then fucking Lee dobbed Tatts in.”
Sucking on his small milk teeth briefly, he continued. “Tatts vanished four hours before the rendezvous. Jason Chen wanted
to make a statement to us cops, to make sure none of us would go undercover against them again. So he chopped off all the
sergeant’s fingers and toes with pruning shears, you know, like for gardening? Then he dumped Tatts on a garbage dump just
out of town . . . to bleed to death.”
Appalled, Georgia sat there and stared at him.
“You know the worst thing?”
Numbly, she shook her head.
“Tatts was Lee’s fucking partner.”
He slammed his palm down onto the table, making everyone in the room pause and look up.
“What do you think of Lee Denham?” he roared into the room.
“Arsehole!” someone yelled, followed by, “Shoot the fucker!” and “Waste of fucking space!”
“He’s not a popular man,” added Riggs, looking gratified. “If we see Lee, we’ll nail him to the wall and—”
“Riggs, put a sock in it,” a man said wearily behind her. “You’re like a stuck record.”
The room fell quiet. Riggs’s expression turned formal as he looked over Georgia’s shoulder. “Chief.”
“Miz Parish, sorry about that. If you’d like to join me.”
Stunned, Georgia had to make an extreme effort to appear in control of her limbs as she got to her feet.
Lee was an ex-cop.
That explained the slightly military aura, his knowing who Riggs and his sidekick were when they’d questioned her about the
intruder at Mrs. Scutchings’s house. And he knew Daniel. Sweet Jesus. He was a cop who had betrayed a fellow policeman to
suffer a terrible death. His
partner.
“I’m Chief Inspector Harris.”
She turned around to discover a tall man with a close-cut white beard. Very distinguished, almost patriarchal, with pink cheeks
and a gentle smile. Aware that her palm was cold and sweaty, she surreptitiously wiped it on her trousers before shaking,
but as she glanced up she saw he’d caught her doing it. The smile turned sympathetic.
“Not everything feels comfortable in police stations,” he said kindly. “I’ve just a few questions, then I’ll let you be on
your way.” A nod at Riggs, who nodded back, and then he ushered her into a room next door.
“My office. We might be able to hear ourselves think in here, not like next door. They seem to be under the mistaken impression
that if they shout, things get done faster.”
The chief’s office had the same high ceiling but was tiny in comparison to the enormous squad room. Three walls were taken
up with folders, books, and journals, and his desk was a clutter of paper. He sat behind the desk, Georgia took the battered
armchair in front.
“I heard them slagging Lee off,” he remarked casually, but she could see the tension at the corners of his mouth. “I should
be used to it, but some days . . . I liked Lee a lot, and although he betrayed me and my men . . .” He ran a hand over his
beard and glanced away. “We were all very . . . ah, close to Sergeant Tatts.”
Lifting a pen from his desk, he rolled it between his fingers like a cigar. Sudden vision of Lee smoking. Lee who had told
her he knew where her mother was. Her own personal hawk. A hawk every cop wanted to see shot from the skies with an Exocet
missile.
“You want to tell me what happened in Brisbane?”
“Um . . .” She didn’t know where to start, or rather, how to start lying. She had to in order to protect Jon and Lee, and
keep her mother safe.
“My Brisbane colleagues were seriously unimpressed with your sudden exit from their city. Hence calling us to pick you up
once they knew you were on a plane to Cairns.” He gave her a wry smile. “You gave them a run for their money, I gather, but
thankfully nobody got hurt, which is what counts.”
She couldn’t work out how the cops knew it was her at Quantum Research, nor the chain of events that had led the Chens to
Jon. She frantically backtracked over the past twenty-four hours, trying to think who knew where she was going. As far as
she could recall, only India knew about Brisbane, and then her brain jumped a little further back. Paul Zhong. Paul had told
her about the lab in Brisbane. And who knew about Paul Zhong? Sergeant Daniel Carter, that’s who. Who was also a cop.
We have friends in the police.
Spider.
Dear God, who had Daniel told about her seeing Paul Zhong?
“I was going to go back and talk to them,” she offered weakly.
He gave a dry chuckle. “Sure you were.”
“It’s just that I was visiting a friend, you see. And then suddenly the fire alarm went off . . . and shots were fired. I
didn’t know what on earth was going on, I just wanted to get the hell out, to be honest.”
“And your friend is Wang Mingjun. Jon Ming.”
She dithered briefly, then admitted, “Yes.”
“Where is he now?” He arched a pair of thick white eyebrows, pen poised above a yellow legal pad as though to take down Jon’s
address. “Well?”
“Why do you want him?”
“Several reasons. One, to fill in the gaps. We know he’s considered a valuable commodity by the Red Bamboo Gang. We’d like
to talk to him. See who he knows, maybe get a new trail into the RBG.”
“You
know
about . . . what they’re researching?”
“Oh yes.”
Jon being questioned by the police wasn’t an option. For all she knew, he’d end up in a detention center like Paul Zhong and
his family, an illegal immigrant with no rights, so she said, “He dropped me off at the airport, then left. I don’t know where
he’s gone.”
The chief put down his pen, frowning. “His bike was found outside departures. He flew to Sydney, we’ve got that far, but we
don’t know where he’s headed.”
I won’t tell you, she thought. I won’t, not until Jon’s met with the AMA and is a citizen of Australia, so help me God.
He sent her a look of compassion. “I understand you must feel a strong bond with Jon Ming, having been with his sister in
the air crash, but we really need to find him. For his own good. We want to protect him. From what we can gather, the RBG
want to haul him back to China. It’s my guess he doesn’t particularly want to return there. And we don’t want him to either.
He’s extremely valuable to us. As I’m sure you can appreciate.”
In the distance she heard a horn beep and the distinctive chatter of a parrot.
“We want to help Jon. He’s in danger. After the morning’s events, surely you can see that?”
She could, and she honestly wanted to help Jon too, but the thought of Spider . . .
They sit in their webs and pull the strings they want.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know where he is now.” Which was true. He could be in a taxi, in a restaurant, in the AMA’s offices, caught
in a traffic jam on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Long pause while the chief spun his pen on his legal yellow pad.
“If we had Jon Ming, then we would have the RBG. We could set something up. Catch them unawares.”
And use Jon as a hostage, like the Chens had her mother? she thought. You must be joking. He’d get doughnut withdrawal. He
may be a fat bastard who reeks of nicotine, but at least he’s a fat bastard who rides a motorcycle like a demon, even with
a sack of potatoes on the back. Besides, Cookie needs him. Poor darling’s in the pound.
Another lengthy pause. The chief dropped his pen, leaned back in his chair, and steepled his fingers on his beard. He looked
at her hard.
“Sergeant Carter tells me he thinks you might be in touch with Lee.”
The skin tightened all over her body at the realization that Daniel could obviously see through her like a pane of glass.
What else had she given away? She hadn’t thought she was
that
transparent.
“And I think he could be right. However, I’m also thinking things are a lot more complicated than you’re letting on . . .
But we’re here to help
you.
And we can’t do that unless you help us. Do you understand?”
“Yes. And . . . thank you.”
“Do you know where Lee is?”
“No.” Not exactly, anyway. Just that he’s in Nulgarra somewhere and about to rescue my mother.
“Rumor has it he’ll be sailing soon. On his yacht,
Songtao.
” He shot her a look she couldn’t quite read. Half curious, half wary. “Do you know how the boat got her name?”
She shook her head, wondering where this was leading.
“
Songtao
means ‘waves of pines,’ the sound the wind makes when it blows through a pine forest. Apparently there was such a forest
where his grandmother used to take him when he was a child. In China, roots are incredibly important, so he named his boat
Songtao,
in memory of his grandmother, the person he grew up with.”
“How on earth,” she said faintly, “did you find that out?”
“Guangxi,”
he said, fiddling some more with his pen. “It’s a debt of favors the Chinese use. Put it this way, Riggs was owed a favor.
Got put in touch with a boat captain in Fuling who told him the story. We know a lot about Lee.”
She wasn’t sure why he’d repeated it to her, but thought he might be trying to gain her trust by showing her some police work
and the trouble they were taking to get to Lee.
“If you hear from Lee,” he said, “tell him I’d like to chat, would you?”
Get in line, she thought, but said, “Sure.”
“And what about Jason Chen and his father? Seen them lately?”
“Who?” she said, injecting her tone with doubt.