Redback (47 page)

'No problems at all, Nick,' Zahkri said. He smiled at the man with the red hair and then pointed
at his leg. 'But what happened to you?'

'Slight altercation with an ex-colleague and my gun.'

Zahkri narrowed his eyes. 'But you are okay? This won't affect anything, I hope.'

'No of course it won't,' Kelman said. 'The boys are on their way and I'm flying out
tomorrow.'

'Excellent. Then Samir and I will just wait here for the news and make plans for the
procession.'

Dallas, Texas
Wednesday 9 am

Laura Serrano flashed her Homeland Security ID at the duty nurse, asked to see the
list of patients, then gave the thumbs up to Scott when she found the name she was looking for. The
death toll from the Dallas car park bombing stood at 94, after many of the seriously wounded had
later succumbed to their injuries. Nearly a week after the attack, 52 of the other 114 injured
remained in one or other of the many Dallas hospitals.

Arlington Memorial had eight still on their critical list and another 17 in relatively stable
conditions. The man Scott and Laura were here to see lay somewhere between the two.

The FBI computer performing the search for keywords had, overnight, come up with one of the three
names that the hippy from Nuevo Laredo had given them. In fact all the information provided by Jake
Collins had proved useful.

Jake had gone through 265 photos, lifted from the Fort Hood surveillance footage of all civilians
who had entered the base on the day of the attack. He identified the man he called 'Texas Mike' as
the deceased conspirator, Micah O'Brien; and had also pointed out the other man he'd first met in
O'Brien's company. It wasn't a very clear image of 'Jesse' but Collins swore he was the same man
who'd returned to Nuevo Laredo overnight on Sunday, to try to kill him and his girlfriend.

Nerd No. 27's search program found a match to the third name, 'McTeal', that Jake had recalled
was written on the truck when Micah 'Mike' O'Brien visited Mexico a second time. A Kyle McTeal,
citizen and truck owner of Carthage, East Texas, had been a victim of the Dallas bomb.

Laura and Scott entered a four-bed ward occupied by only one patient, who was trying to operate
the TV remote with bandaged hands and his chin.

'Kyle?'

Kyle 'Kero' McTeal looked up expecting to see yet another nurse wanting to stick something sharp
in him or make him sit on a bed pan, ready or not.

'Hi, my name is Laura Serrano. I'm from Homeland Security. This is my assistant Scott.'

'Homeland Security? Is that good or bad?'

'Um…good?' Laura said.

'Okay. Could you turn the sound up for me? I seem to have lost half my fingers.'

'Can we ask you some questions first?' When he didn't seem to object, Laura continued. 'Why were
you here in Dallas the day of the bomb, Kyle?'

'Taking cattle to market.' He looked at Laura with suspicion. 'Why do you want to know?'

'Well, Kyle, you live in Carthage, but here you are. How did you get to Dallas?'

'In a truck.' Kyle looked left and right. 'With cattle.'

'Was it your truck?' Scott asked.

'Um, no.'

'And where is it, this truck?'

Kero had really, really hoped that Jesse-Jay would've come to take him home by now. He was afraid
something like this might happen. That people would want to ask him stuff that he wouldn't know how
to explain. Kero had left heaps of messages on the phone machine at home, but had finally figured
that Jesse-Jay must be hiding out.

'Kyle? The truck, where is it?' Laura said.

'Well you know, I kinda forgot. Might be amenesia.'

'Oh no, have you got
amenesia
?' Laura repeated his mispronunciation and made it sound like
a terrible disease. 'I'm so sorry Kyle. That's a really dangerous thing to get when, um, you've also
lost a lot of blood.' She pointed at his hands.

Kero frowned. Maybe that hadn't been such a good thing to claim. Scott wandered to the other side
of his bed. 'Maybe you parked the truck in the car park on Jackson. What do you think?'

Kero narrowed his eyes wondering if it was okay to say yes to that, seeing as how the truck and
the car park weren't there any more. 'Might have,' he said, nodding as if he wasn't quite sure.

Laura decided it was time to bring out the big guns of confusion. 'Well, Kyle, I don't quite know
how to tell you this, but you know your friends Micah and Jesse…' She let the words hang for a
moment hoping they'd form their own suggestion in Kyle McTeal's not very bright mind.

For a moment there was nothing - that Laura or Scott could see.

Kero's mind, however, was forming a barn-wrecking twister.
She knows about Jesse-Jay. How?
He's been caught. No. Oh. He's been killed. Maybe he was too close to the bomb when it went off
early like it did. Fuck. It got me, maybe it got him. And Micah. Not Micah. Oh man, not Jesse-Jay.
And the Colonel will be well pissed. Shit!

Nothing at all. Scott and Laura glanced at each other, wondering if Kyle had gone to sleep with
his eyes open.

'Are they okay?' he suddenly asked.

'Not really.' Laura made a face that said it was a hard thing she had to tell him.

'I can take bad news,' Kero said.

'Micah is dead, Kyle,' Scott said. 'He was killed at Fort Hood, the day you lost your
fingers.'

'I don't understand. Fort Hood? Where's that?'

'A couple of hours from Dallas,' Laura said. 'We think he went there with Jesse.'

Kero shook his head. 'No that's not right. Jesse-Jay was to meet me afterwards at the
Texas
T-Bone
. In Dallas.'

'Meet you after what?'

'After the bomb.'

'So you knew about the bomb then,' Scott said, playing question ping-pong with Laura.

Kero refused to look at him.
Was that a trick question?
He held up his hands, or what was
left of them. 'What do you think?'

'So you were going to meet Jesse-Jay but the bomb went off? Where were you?'

Kero shrugged. 'Just standing on a corner.'

Laura looked at him sadly. 'So Jesse-Jay didn't come back from Fort Hood either. And I gather he
hasn't been in to see you.'

Kero was not going to answer that one. 'How did Micah get killed at this other place?'

Scott sat on the end of the bed. 'He was shot, Kyle. In the back of the head.'

'Probably by someone who knew him,' Laura said.

Kero started to fidget. Hard to do when he couldn't pick at things because his hands were all
bound. Then he remembered he didn't have fingers to pick with anymore. He wasn't nervous of the
Security Homelanders neither; no, he was edgy because Jesse-Jay once boasted to him that he'd killed
a man. Like that. A bullet straight to the back of the head. 'Mafia hitman style' he'd said.

'You okay Kyle?' Scott asked.

'You think I had something to do with the bomb?'

May as well jump all the way in, Laura thought. 'Yes Kyle, I'm afraid we do. And we think you
realise now that Jesse-Jay has kind of left you holding all the blame.'

Scott cleared his throat and gave her a look that asked:
which left field did that spring
from
.

'Do you want to tell us about Jesse?' Scott asked.

'Jesse-Jay,' Kero said. 'Jesse-Jay Bagget, my stepbrother. Son of my late Aunt Hannah from
Arkansas.'

Scott closed his eyes. Even in
Deliverance
territory that one would take some working
out.

'Your stepbrother is also your cousin?' Laura always was quick.

Kero frowned. 'No. He was just my step. Didn't even know I had an Aunt Hannah until recent. Fact,
first time I laid eyes on Jesse-Jay was about seven or eight months ago when he turned up at my door
with a card from Aunt Hannah asking me to give him a bed for a couple of nights. We took to each
other, he had nowhere else to go, so he stayed.'

Scott sighed heavily. 'And the Thunder Militia?'

'Jesse-Jay got me in. Put in a good word with the Colonel.'

'The Colonel?' Laura smiled and looked puzzled.

'Yeah you know,' he shrugged, 'the Colonel of the Militia.'

Dubb Airport, New South Wales
Thursday 1 am

Bashir Kali alighted from the Bergen Mining Group's corporate jet with five
legitimate Bergen employees, a dentist, a guilty-looking man in dire need of medication, and two
English backpackers who, like him, were hitching a ride from Sarawak in Malaysia.

This last leg of Kali's journey to Australia was his third plane connection after the jeep, truck
and bus he'd taken in quick succession after leaving Peshawar on Monday.

He had most reluctantly left a badly-beaten Majid in Chandigarh, in the care of loyal members of
Groh Sitaarah sworn to Atarsa Kára. His friend was devastated not to be able to perform their
second Trust together but such was the will of Allah. Kali had promised to do better than his best
to make Majid proud.

The night air here in the Southern Hemisphere was cold and the wind, as he crossed the tarmac,
bit into his skin. His first task in the morning would be to get some warm clothes.

A man approached from the shadows near the small airport building, waited until the other
passengers had entered, and then called Kali by name.

It was the Emissary's good friend from Indonesia, Mr Dumadi Arjuna. Kali smiled at the man with
whom he'd carried out the successful Khartoum and New Delhi jobs; and together they walked away from
the terminal building and climbed into a very nice car.

'You had no trouble getting here?' Arjuna asked.

'None at all. Everything went as it should. I am amazed I could just get on and off so many
aeroplanes without trouble or too many questions. Especially this last flight.'

Arjuna laughed. 'It is easy, because for some peculiar reason the Australians think we come in
rickety boats pretending to seek asylum.'

'But why would we risk detention or deportation?' Kali asked.

'Or death on the open sea,' Arjuna laughed. 'It is a mystery, my friend. A mystery.' He turned
the music up and began to dance in his seat as he drove.

Dallas, Texas
Wednesday 11 am

When Scott and Laura returned to the Dallas Field Office they found a tall,
strange, dark-haired woman poking through their stuff. Not that it was their own stuff exactly but
they had put it into the logical piles through which the woman was now rifling.

They stood together outside the office that the SAC had set aside for them and realised, in the
same moment, that they both felt put out by the same stupid thing. They broke out laughing.

'We need counselling,' Scott said.

'We need a divorce, or whatever you do when you're - us.' Laura pushed open the door to introduce
herself to the interloper.

The woman smiled. 'Ah, the CIA, the journalist. I am EAD Brenda Janeway of the NSB.'

'Is that contagious?' Scott asked, shaking her offered hand.

Laura whacked his arm and then followed suit with the hand shaking. 'Ms Janeway, from the FBI, is
heading the whole Dallas investigation.'

'Good,' Scott said. When both women looked at him oddly, he added, 'Well, isn't it?'

'I hear the two of you have made more headway in 24 hours than the whole Field Office has in a
week.'

Laura laughed. 'To be fair, everyone else here had to sift through absolutely everything that's
come in which, as you know, has been a mountain of information. We on the other hand had a couple of
clues which we ran down to…'

'Make more headway than anyone else in seven days,' Janeway said, and waved for them both sit.
'I'd like you to fill me in on all your revelations but first I want to ask you about this.' She
held up the printout headed 'Nerd 27 List'.

'Nerd 27 is the computer geek guy I recruited to collate everything we needed; oh.' Laura
realised the Director didn't care about him, so she explained the reason for list instead.

Janeway pointed to a word: 'And this is?'

'
Atlantes
,' Laura said. 'It's the name of the book, or instruction manual, embedded in the
fake
Global WarTek
game we recovered in Carthage. The game is littered with quotes from
it.'

Janeway sighed. 'Are these quotes, or any part of the content, similar to those in the game you
brought to us, Scott?'

'Almost identical, except in the language that is used. And I don't just mean that yours is in
English, and mine is in Arabic, French and English. But the way it's presented, or phrased, is
designed to speak directly to its target audience: the Carthage one to disaffected, white, mostly
Christian, guns-R-us, government-hating nuts; the Cairo one to disaffected, multi-ethnic, mostly
Muslim, missiles-R-us, democracy-hating nuts.

'And thanks to the insight into the provenance of both
Atlantes
and the
Rashmana
,
since talking to the Australians, we've…'

Janeway held up her hand. 'What Australians?'

'I did warn them about that,' said Special Agent-in-Charge Hayden. He apologised to Laura for
startling her again.

'Tell me about the Australians,' Janeway said.

'Before you go there,' the SAC said, 'I have some bad news I'm afraid. It seems that witness you
just spoke to at Arlington General passed away before the agents dispatched to take his statement
could get there.'

Laura and Scott stared at Special Agent Hayden, then at each other, then back at him.

'Passed away?' Laura said in disbelief.

'You mean Kyle?' Scott said.

'Passed away,' Laura repeated. 'What do you mean passed away?'

The SAC shrugged. 'I don't understand what it is you don't understand.'

'You are talking about Kyle McTeal?' Scott said.

'Yes, Mr Dreher. Kyle McTeal, the possible witness.'

'No, sir. Kyle McTeal - the Dallas bomber,' Laura said. 'And a man who, just an hour ago, was
hale, hearty and demanding a second breakfast. Missing a few fingers he was, yes; but no more near
death than you or I.'