They’d gone to bed to make love and instead they’d fought. He followed the curve of her narrow waist to the point of her hip, tracing the folds of her silk nightgown. Her body was long and lean, and as close to perfection as he could have imagined. Absently, he stroked her back, making circles, soothing her and himself with the motion. He was trying to control his own anger, concentrating on the touch rather than on the barrier between them.
At first Annabelle’s body was rigid, muscles tensed. But then she began to relax. And so did Tom. He unconsciously followed the swell of her breasts under the silk, tracing circles that ended at the point of her nipples. He was suddenly aware that they were hard, and that so was he. Annabelle’s breathing had also changed, subtly but fundamentally. She shifted position to bring his skin into contact with hers. He continued to stroke her softly, running the backs of his fingers around her belly. She cooed softly and reached behind, holding his erection in her cool hand. Annabelle parted her legs. Tom gently touched her between her thighs and her body shuddered subtly, as if charged by a mild electric shock. Annabelle guided him inside. He felt her warmth encircle and invade him, the ultimate softness.
They lay there for a time, each feeling the other’s presence within. And then he started to move, slowly. Her breathing quickened. The pleasure rose unbearably, both aware of the other but at the same time lost in a white-out of ecstasy. They came together noisily, Annabelle letting go of her voice, Tom holding on to his breath and then exhaling as the tension between them reached a climax. The stress melted away with the dissolving strength in their muscles. They lay quietly together, remaining coupled for as long as possible.
‘When do you go?’ she finally asked in the darkness.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Where will you go?’
‘Annabelle…’
‘I know, I know. You can’t tell me…’
Annabelle woke from a fitful sleep in the grey light of early dawn. The space beside her was empty. Somehow she had known that it would be before she opened her eyes, the reassurance of his breathing no longer in the room. Tom was gone, replaced by an emptiness so total it made her cry.
Australian Defence Force HQ, Russell Offices, Canberra, Australia
Like many Australians, Wilkes felt uncomfortable in the nation’s capital. It wasn’t a real city, more of a concept town from an architect’s portfolio, the streets too smoothly surfaced, the lawns too neatly manicured, the buildings too monumental, the shirts too stuffed, the cats too fat, and so on. It was a city built to house public servants and politicians, about as remote from the real world they were supposed to be administering as it was possible to get.
The commercial flight arrived bang on 1000 hours, the 737 touching down on a rain-swept runway. Wilkes was surprised to be met by a white government car, the sort reserved for the obese felines high on the totem pole. He looked out the window but only saw Annabelle’s face. Nothing had been resolved between them. Wilkes momentarily regretted slipping the ring on her finger. No, Annabelle is The One, he told himself. The details of their lovemaking flooded into his mind. Yeah, we’ll sort it out. The conviction that things would improve allowed Tom to mentally leave Annabelle at home, just as he had done physically before dawn, and concentrate on the day ahead. His mobile phone had gone off while he was in a taxi on the way to meet Annabelle at the television station the previous evening. The voice on the phone summoned him to Canberra. He’d had a feeling the call would come when he heard the news of the embassy bombing.
Australian representatives at USCENTCOM, the US military’s eye on the Middle East, had managed to convince the US Joint Chiefs of Staff that Australia should be deputised to patrol South East Asia, the argument being that Australia was a stable democracy with close proximity to potential trouble spots and, most importantly, national interests in common with the US. Since Afghanistan and Iraq, the SAS had become the sharp end of this new American appreciation of Australia.
The big Ford glided past the barricaded square dedicated to Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey, one of the great Australian leaders of the first two world wars. Wilkes looked out the window and allowed his eyes to drift up the single column on top of which perched an eagle. The Ford bucked slightly as its front wheels took on the driveway entrance to the Australian Defence Force HQ, the Australian strategic command centre. Wilkes knew the building well. It was unprepossessing, built in the sixties from the materials popular at the time, and was sorely in need of a makeover. Scrap that, thought Tom as he looked up at the featureless concrete and glass block. What it needed was a wrecking ball.
The vehicle drove up to the temporary, sandbagged boom gate, a row of steel spikes set in the road twenty metres beyond it. Two troopers in full battledress, Kevlar helmets, body armour and Steyr assault carbines approached the car carefully from the rear three-quarter position, one soldier covering the other with his weapon raised and, Tom speculated, off safety. He lowered his window and produced his identity card for inspection. The hit on the US Embassy had obviously made everyone jumpy. The soldier relaxed when he saw who and what Tom Wilkes was. He let his rifle hang beside his arm by its strap, and called in the warrant officer’s numbers through a portable police-style microphone clipped to one shoulder. The boom rose. He was expected. The Ford rolled forward over the road spikes and headed for the front entrance.
Things had certainly changed, thought Wilkes. Within a couple of months of Bali, when the intelligence services gained some true inkling of the malice towards America and its allies in the region, all major government buildings had come under the control and protection of the military. Now, after Jakarta, caution would again be an around-the-clock reality until everyone got bored with it. Terrorists would just have to wait a little until things relaxed before driving a truck bomb into the foyer and giving the bell on the front desk a ping. This protection duty added to the enormous pressure on the ADF’s resources. There simply weren’t enough soldiers to go round, which was why the task had recently fallen to the Army Reserve, the part-time soldiers. Wilkes wondered what the two men on the front gate did when they weren’t wearing combat fatigues. Ad execs? Estate agents? Hairdressers? Enough of that, he reminded himself, we need these guys.
Ten minutes later, Wilkes found himself outside the designated office. A familiar face appeared around the corner. ‘Thanks for coming down so quickly, Tom,’ said Graeme Griffin, shaking his hand. ‘Flight okay?’
‘Fine, thank you, sir,’ said Wilkes.
‘Good. Come on in.’ The Director-General of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service was tall and lean. The handshake felt like holding five steel bolts. Long before ASIS, Griffin had been an academic, an associate professor in the political science faculty at Melbourne University. Rumour had it he’d also had a military background, something in black ops, but no one knew too much more than that. But these days, just about everyone claimed some kind of Special Forces background and Wilkes would have been far more impressed if he’d been something unusual, say, a palaeoanthropologist. Aside from that, the man was shrouded in mystery, appropriate for Australia’s top spy.