She put aside her surprise, however, and any natural disquiet. Birendra was supervising them, after all, and these men had gathered around her in a protective shield at the behest of Narayan Shah. At any rate, her concern was marginal. After years of shipboard life, she had a high tolerance for people messing around in her personal space. Sometimes it was necessary. No point in being precious.
Jules swung her feet out of bed and padded over to the windows to edge the curtain open a few inches, just enough to brighten the room so she could move around without tripping. While she was mixing and matching outfits from the pieces scattered around, she noticed a couple of significant accessories. A mobile phone and a handgun. The phone was a Nokia, one of the new models with a large colour screen and internet access. Sitting next to it on the dressing table was a SIG Sauer pistol, with three spare clips of ammunition. The shotgun that Granger had given her was gone. Fair enough, she thought. Darwin was a frontier town, entirely feral in parts, but she doubted the local wallopers would stand for her walking around with a sawn-off elephant gun.
In the bathroom also, she found evidence of unusual thoughtfulness on the part of Shah’s men. Or perhaps the beautiful Ashmi had been in their ears. The cheap no-name toiletries supplied by the motel had been replaced by body gel, shampoo and conditioner from Crabtree & Evelyn. Jules nearly swooned.
She towelled off her damp hair after a long shower, turning her mind to the practicalities of having burnt her fall-back ID, the increasingly compromised Julia Black. She had just over a thousand dollars in cash, which wouldn’t last long in Darwin. On the other hand, she had three credit cards in the name of Ms Black. Three cards she could no longer use, because they’d automatically give away her location to any interested parties. Shah would undoubtedly support her, but she’d need to be able to look after herself.
The answer, at least a temporary one, slipped under the door as she was getting dressed. A large white envelope, with her name inked on the front. Jules finished buttoning up the sky-blue linen shirt she’d thrown on over a pair of khaki shorts, before retrieving the envelope.
Inside she found two thousand dollars Australian in ‘pineapples’ - the bright yellow, plastic fifty quid notes they used down here. There was also a note from Nick Pappas and a printout of a Microsoft Where 2 map downloaded from the web. The map showed her the route to a waterfront cafe where she should meet Pappas in half an hour.
She fitted a holster for the pistol to the thick, soft brown leather belt Shah had supplied. The gun sat comfortably in the small of her back, covered by the long tail of the shirt. She found the placement awkward, having carried her weapons openly for the last few years. But then, for the last few years, she had mostly been travelling well beyond the edge of the civilised world.
She finished lacing up a pair of sturdy comfortable walking boots, divided the cash into three lots, adding some to the thousand dollars in her wallet and securing the rest in two pockets she could zip closed. Her complexion had tanned to a deep caramel over the years of shipboard exposure, but she took the time to apply a layer of moisturiser with a high UV rating anyway. In her opinion, Australian women had old rhino hide for skin, and Julianne did not intend to emulate them for want of five minutes’ basic skin care.
That thought led naturally to worrying about the Rhino, and wondering how she might be able to contact him. Those two rozzers up at Bagot Road obviously hadn’t come through with anything for Piers Downing. Reminding herself to ask Pappas, Jules left the room.
Her bodyguards were nowhere to be seen outside. The note from the former SAS man told her they would be around, but she couldn’t see them at all.
*
She joined Pappas at his table, tucked into a back corner of a dining room that enjoyed views over the ocean. The Sirocco Cafe, according to the Australian, was a real-world example of how the power structure of this city had been wrenched free of its moorings by the Wave. Change had come quickly. And it had run deep.
‘The army used to own all this land,’ he said, waving his fork back in the direction of the long, low-lying headland along which she had just walked.
It was not yet nine o’clock, but already the heat was stifling. Jules was frosted with drying sweat as she fanned herself with the menu and leaned back to allow chilled air to spill over her from the air-conditioning vent directly above their table. Bi-fold doors retracted to open the Sirocco up to a vista that stretched from the million-dollar yachts anchored in Cullen Bay around to the open waters outside Darwin Harbour. The water translated from the striking, almost opalescent green of the shallows close in-shore, to a deep cerulean blue a few hundred metres out.
‘I spent a lot of time here at the end of the ‘90s,’ he added. ‘At the barracks down at the start of Allen Avenue.’
‘The old brick buildings I walked through, the shops.’
He grinned as he carved up a thick rasher of bacon. ‘Yeah, the frock shops and wine bars and little trinket places. Pretty, weren’t they?’
They were indeed very pretty, and looked hideously expensive with it. Not that the Sirocco was a greasy spoon, with its dark, bentwood chairs, fresh white linen and a minimalist fit-out that suggested an architect had been paid a lot of money to do nothing. However, the patrons and trophy wives sunning themselves and enjoying breakfast out on the terrace, while looking well fed and content, didn’t seem to be in the same league as the new money she’d seen flaunting itself down on Allen Avenue. Even so, many of them were probably the well-insulated, well-off types who never let the cares of the world affect them.
‘This whole headland used to be mostly open ground,’ said Pappas, his big, rugby player’s frame expanding as two arms stretched out to provide some idea of the size of the area being discussed. ‘It was the barracks, some pretty dreary housing, and a lot of brown grass keeping the dust down.’
That didn’t describe the neighbourhood she had just walked through. It looked to have been extruded, fully formed, within the last twenty-four hours, from the wet dreams of a property developer with an Ayn Rand fetish. Condo complexes, pucka low-rise residential villages, stand-alone mansions of steel and glass, implying astronomical power bills to keep them cool, satellite dishes, in-ground pools and long tidy avenues shaded by old-growth trees. The sort of trees you could transplant, but only at massive expense.
‘Seems a short time for such a complete makeover, though, right?’ asked Jules. ‘New money, I suppose?’
‘Like you would not believe. Hundreds of billions of dollars poured in here, looking for a safe haven. It was like a tsunami, a blast wave. It swept everything away. There’s an army base about thirty clicks outside the city, replaced the barracks here. There are two infantry divisions out there, one armoured regiment, and a Marine Expeditionary Unit that the Yanks kicked in to give the Combined Fleet an amphibious assault capability. And, of course, because they couldn’t afford to run an MEU themselves anymore, the Pacific Alliance now picks up the tab. Anyway, all of the infrastructure, all of the materiel, every bloody cubic metre of concrete, every nail, everything - it was all paid for by the development authority.’
‘Just like the Old Bill’s nick yesterday,’ Jules ventured, nodding slowly. ‘All on account with the FPDA.’
‘Too right. Except we call ‘em brown-shirts here,’ he added with a grin. ‘And all just so they could get the military out of the city and the developers onto the headland. That’s how much money they have, and that’s how much power it brings.’