Authors: Robert Muchamore
‘My dad has to sign this stuff. You just take it out to the residence, knock on the door of his room and wait by his bed while he deals with it.’
Lauren nodded enthusiastically. She realised that the walk to the residence and back would probably make her late for dinner, but she’d heard tons of stories about Joel Regan’s mega-opulent residence and there was no way she was going to turn down a chance to meet him.
Rat, who appeared to have intimate knowledge of every underground tunnel and room inside the Ark, drew the quickest path from the office to the residence on the back of a compliments slip. The journey involved taking a spiral staircase two floors below ground level and then heading several hundred metres along a cramped passageway that had condensation on the ceiling and patches of mildew on the walls.
This ended at a heavy doorway, which budged after a few worrying seconds during which Lauren thought she wasn’t strong enough and might have to walk all the way back. The door took her into the luxurious ambience of the residence.
There was none of the woodchip wallpaper, growling air vents and acres of magnolia paint that dominated the rest of the Ark. The broad corridor was lined with white marble and the air was scented with vanilla. At one edge, there was a twenty-centimetre gutter into which water trickled and fresh white flowers bobbed around in floating glass pots.
Lauren saw that Rat had drawn a left-facing arrow, followed by a long curve, on his set of directions. The curve was an upwards ramp. One side was fronted with floor-to-ceiling glass and overlooked an outdoor spa. The other was hung with large paintings. Lauren was no art buff, but even she realised that anything three metres wide with Picasso’s distinctive signature in the bottom corner must have cost millions.
‘Can I help you, young lady?’
Lauren looked up to see an Asian man dressed in a three-piece suit, leaning over a chrome railing.
‘I’m from the office,’ Lauren explained, feeling underdressed in her scruffy rugby shirt and oversized shorts.
‘Ahh,’ the man said. ‘Where is Rathbone?’
Lauren answered as she turned on to a flight of stairs and began stepping up on some extraordinarily deep carpet. ‘He got held up doing some filing, so they sent me.’
The butler walked in front of Lauren. His white gloved hands were joined behind his back, except when he leaned forward theatrically to allow her through one of the solid maple doors.
Several turns and five doors took the pair into a darkened room. The curtains at two giant windows were closed. There was a bed in a gloomy corner, containing a breathless man, who sat up dressed in silk pyjamas.
‘Your correspondence, sir,’ the butler said grandly. Then he looked at Lauren. ‘I’ll wait outside and lead you back.’
As Lauren stepped up to Joel Regan, she caught a whiff of disinfectant and noticed that the old man had an oxygen tube running out of his nose.
‘You must be Lauren,’ Regan wheezed.
Lauren was surprised that Regan knew who she was, and must have looked it.
‘I may be frail, but I still keep up with the gossip – Come closer.’
As Lauren stepped forwards, Joel wrapped his silk-covered arm around her back and pulled her into a hug. She hated this, because his face was covered in bristles and his pyjamas smelled vaguely of sick.
‘You’re a beautiful angel,’ Joel said, as he let Lauren go. ‘I sense great power in you and a dazzling future.’
‘It’s so
amazing
to meet you,’ Lauren said, gushing like she knew a Survivor should.
But all she could think about was the smell and the miserable, wasted lives of thousands of Survivors around the world.
‘Specs and pen,’ Regan said, pointing his finger towards a bedside chest.
Once Lauren had fetched them, Regan pushed the glasses up his nose and began slowly pulling the letters and cheques out of their slots. He signed his name with a trembling hand and shooed Lauren away when she leaned in to steady the signature book.
A side door opened without a knock and Susie Regan stormed to the bedside. She snatched the signed letters and began inspecting them. Lauren hadn’t met Susie before, but recognised her from photographs.
‘Are you reading these, Joel, or just signing whatever she puts in front of you?’ Susie asked aggressively. ‘Have you seen this one?’
Joel downed his pen and looked wearily at his young wife. ‘Sweetheart, Eleanor knows what she’s doing.’
‘Does she,’ Susie said. ‘This one is a power of attorney for our shares in Nippon Vending Industries. Shouldn’t I at least fax it to Brisbane and get our people to check it out?’
Joel shook his head. ‘Our people? Don’t you mean
your
people?’
‘The Spider is trying to cut me out,’ Susie said, clacking the heel of her leather boot against the wooden floor. ‘You might be dying, husband, but I’ve still got a lot of living to do and that bitch daughter of yours wants me on the first flight out when you croak. Is that what I deserve? Do you want to see me spending the rest of my life in squalor? I want joint control over the companies. How many times do I have to say it?’
Joel swiped his hand in front of his face. ‘You’ll be provided for, petal. Eleanor is my daughter.’
‘Pity she’s not the one over here at four in the morning, calling out your doctor and swabbing chunder off your face.’
Joel pointed at Lauren. ‘Can we not do this when the girl is here? You’re embarrassing her.’
‘
Don
’t try weaselling out of it that way.’
‘I’m sick of this,’ Joel shouted, his voice carrying surprising power for such a frail-looking man. ‘I need rest to get my strength back, not this constant earache from you.’
With this, Joel picked up the leather binder and flung it at his bedside cabinet. The letters fluttered out in all directions and the binder hit a vase of flowers. Lauren jumped back as it hit the ground near her feet. She expected the vase to shatter, but it bounced off the floor and the water inside began pouring out.
After standing the vase up, Lauren instinctively grabbed a handful of disposable towels off the cabinet and crouched down to mop up the water before it spread.
‘What are you doing?’ Susie shouted, turning her spite on Lauren. ‘Did I ask you to do that? Get out of here, you foul brat.’
Lauren straightened up abruptly, shocked by the tongue lashing.
‘What about the letters?’ she asked edgily.
‘Tell the office that Susie Regan will show them to her husband when he’s well enough to deal with them.’
Lauren nodded, before turning and hurrying for the exit.
As she reached for the doorknob, Susie came charging across the floor and grabbed Lauren by the neck, clawing her with painted nails.
‘You speak to Rat,’ she spat. ‘You tell him that if he wants favours from me, then it better be him that comes with the letters from now on. And when he does, he brings them to
me
.’
‘OK,’ Lauren nodded, as she felt her pulse hammer inside the tightly wrung skin around her neck.
‘And,’ Susie added, sinking her nails in deeper, ‘you keep your mouth shut, madam. If you spread around what you just saw here, I
will
find out about it. I’ll call up the school and have them paddle you so hard that you don’t walk for a month. Understood?’
Lauren nodded as Susie let go and shoved her towards the door.
Dana used the radio in her trainer to brief Michael on her flight details before getting into the cab to Brisbane airport. He said he’d arrange for an ASIS team to cover them when they arrived in Darwin. The agents would then tail her to wherever she ended up and keep watch from a position close by.
Eve always acted confident around the mall: efficient nods, tight-lipped smiles and a purposeful walk. But the sudden absence of routine turned her into a wreck. She’d lived in the commune since she was eight years old and her head was so full of devils, angels and other Survivor gibberish that the real world spooked her.
Eve fretted over safe keeping of the hundred-dollar note she’d been given as spending money for their journey. She kept asking Dana questions: what kind of food would they find in the airport, whether aeroplanes had toilets on them, if the take-off would make her sick. In the crowded check-in area at the terminal, she gawped in all directions and insisted on linking her arm through Dana’s so that they didn’t get separated.
The way the Survivors messed people up made Dana mad. If you got caught giving a little kid a bag of drugs you’d go to prison, but cults messed kids up just as badly, and nobody seemed to care.
Still, getting bugged by Eve wasn’t enough to quell Dana’s excitement at finally getting her big breakthrough. She had no idea what this trip north was about, but the high level of secrecy meant it had to be dodgy.
The 737 took four hours from Brisbane on the east coast to Darwin, capital of Australia’s sparsely populated Northern Territory. It was close to midnight when they landed.
As the girls headed into the Darwin International arrivals lounge, carrying small backpacks containing a few personal items and a change of clothes, a man held up a sheet of cardboard with their surnames on. He was powerfully built, very tall, with blond hair tied back in a bunch.
Dana knew the face from somewhere, but it took a few seconds to place him in a surveillance photograph: it was the dude Bruce Norris had beaten up in a Hong Kong hotel room three months earlier.
‘Welcome to Darwin,’ the man said, as he reached out to shake Eve’s hand. ‘The name’s Barry, Barry Cox.’
*
Next morning, Dana woke in a comfortable double bed. The shower was running in the bathroom next door and someone was moving in the hallway. She stepped on to a wooden floor that creaked under her bare feet and headed up to the window to check out the neighbourhood. They were half an hour’s drive from the city and it had been pitch black when they’d arrived the night before.
She ripped back a curtain and peered through a dusty sheet of mosquito netting towards the next house along. The shabby home was thirty metres away, after a stretch of baked earth scattered with rusted-up junk. The bright yellow van on the neighbours’ drive had a picture of a satellite dish on the side with
RAY’S ANTENNAS
painted underneath.
Dana reckoned she’d like to live somewhere like this: a slightly run-down house miles from anywhere, where you could do whatever you liked without anyone hassling you. Go into town once a week for groceries, a good-looking boyfriend who pumped weights in the garage, kept himself to himself and read a lot of books. Two or three dogs,
definitely
no kids …
The door clicked. It was Eve, dressed already and looking at her watch. ‘It’s service time back at the mall, Dana. I think we’d gain strength against the devils if we prayed together.’
Dana was cheesed off at Eve for shattering her little fantasy. The girls sat on the edge of the bed and hugged. Eve read a couple of paragraphs from
The Survivors’ Manual
, then they both closed their eyes and repeated the ten-sentence chant.
‘Good morning Lord. We are your angels. Here to serve you. Make us strong. Please protect us. Our souls are honest. Our thoughts are pure. We are leaders. We will take humanity. Through the darkness.’
A woman called Nina stood in the open doorway when the girls opened their eyes. They’d met this middle-aged woman briefly before going to bed the night before. She had a long red face and you could tell she was a hardcore Survivor from the mass of beads on her leather necklace.
‘Angels,’ the woman sighed dramatically. ‘Coming in here and seeing two beautiful young girls praying like that … I think that was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.’
Dana was tempted to throw up at the syrup, but she copied Eve and broke into an enthusiastic smile. Nina rushed into the room and gave the girls a big hug accompanied by an
ahhh
sound.
‘God protect us,’ Nina said, and the girls repeated the words before saying a round of
Amens
.
‘Now Dana, get yourself dressed and both of you come through to the kitchen. Barry and I will explain our task over breakfast.’
*
James sat facing Rat, with bowls of frosted cereal and beakers of orange juice on the table between them. The two boys had wet hair from the shower and were still puffed from morning exercises.
Rat’s expression suddenly wilted. ‘Oh crap.’
‘What?’ James asked, but a glance over his shoulder answered the question before Rat got the chance. Georgie was steaming their way.
‘Why do you do it, James?’ Georgie asked.
‘Do what?’ James asked defensively.
‘I’m talking about your friendship with Rathbone. It does you no credit. It will lead to trouble and when it does, I’ll be on you like a Rottweiler.’
There was nothing James could say without upsetting either Georgie or Rat, so he diplomatically crammed a spoonful of cereal into his mouth and crunched.