‘Oh, man,’ Anna said, eyes closed, head back, ‘it’s like I’ve been cold and someone has wrapped a warm blanket around me, but all on the inside. Do yourself a favour…’
Carrie didn’t want to, but at the same time she did. The internal battle being fought was between her conservative upbringing and a little girl’s fear of needles, and her desire to ‘fit in’ with Simon. He had cornered her and attacked her weakest link — her desire to be accepted, loved. That, and Carrie wanted sex with him, badly. ‘Okay,’ she said, turning her head away and holding out an arm. ‘Do it to me, baby, uh-huh, uh-huh.’
‘You can bet on that,’ he said.
Carrie felt the pressure of the tourniquet and the swab, followed by the lightest pinprick. And then the drug followed, flowing through her system, sweeping away her cares and inhibitions like debris on a flood tide. She opened her eyes after what seemed only a minute. Anna and Simon were naked. Anna was now lying back on the kitchen bench, legs up in the air as Simon fucked her. Carrie mentally shrugged and let her dress fall from her shoulders. My turn, sugar… The photos on Simon’s bedroom wall swam into her mind and she realised that the women were all like her and Anna — salt and pepper — and that the women were photographed in pairs. This was Simon’s thing, sex with two women at the same time, the ménage à trois. Ordinarily, a realisation such as this would have propelled her indignantly to the front door. But that part of her brain had been banished to a faraway land. Carrie looked at Anna and Simon and decided they were the two most beautiful people in the world, and that she wanted them both inside her. She moved behind Simon, and hugged him and held his cock as he thrust into her best friend. He turned and kissed her.
The flood continued to rise within Carrie until it arrived in her throat and began to swell. Her temperature soared, a white-hot burning within, melting her core. A certain sensation told her Simon was now fucking her from behind, but she couldn’t feel anything. Carrie looked down on Anna and saw that she hadn’t moved off the kitchen bench. Anna’s stomach heaved and the vomit, mostly champagne, erupted from her lips. Carrie staggered, unable to keep her legs under her, collapsing to the floor.
Simon knew something was seriously wrong. The courier had warned him about the stuff’s purity. But they all lied about their gear, didn’t they, to increase the anticipation and the price? Anna’s eyes were open, blank and staring, and the puking had stopped. Oh shit, oh shit. Simon hesitated for a few minutes, trying to think of an alternative to ringing the emergency number on the phone, thinking of the police, his career, about everything, in fact, except about the two naked women dying from an overdose in his designer kitchen.
Australian Federal Police HQ, Canberra, Australia
Federal Agent Jenny Tadzic knew something majorly wrong was going on. The reports from the various state police forces up and down the east coast were deeply concerning. There was a large batch of killer heroin on the streets and people were dropping like flies — schoolteachers, solicitors, executives. It was times like this that Tadzic could see just how pervasive heroin was. It had infiltrated all levels of society, from the top down and the bottom up. She rifled through the folders, picked one at random and skimmed it. Two women dead in a photographer’s studio. The women were well off, pretty, everything going for them. Why? Why get hooked into mainlining smack? Doctors, builders, journalists were dying from hotshots alongside the homeless and other long-time users. And Tadzic had absolutely nothing with which to counter the menace. Her department — the whole organisation — was out-gunned and outmanoeuvred. Eventually the supply would dry up and the deaths would stop, but in the meantime the drug was cutting a swath through the community as effectively as a new virus. She closed the reports and sat back in her chair, overwhelmed by a feeling of utter helplessness.
And then there was the whole Angie thing. The girl had seemingly disappeared off the planet, as had her boyfriend. The DEA still hadn’t found their man either. The world was a shitful place.
Flores, Indonesia
The Sword of Allah waited at the end of the runway. Hendra had calculated that the runway itself was too short for the drone, when fully loaded with its payload and fuel, to gain enough ground speed for takeoff unless the breeze was fresh and exactly onshore. That, Hendra had warned, would be a rare occurrence indeed, due to a number of factors he’d learned since becoming a meteorological expert. But Hendra also promised those factors were a minor setback.
Duat took him at his word. Had the man not developed an electronic brain for the drone that made it fly as if an invisible pilot was at the controls? That in itself was miraculous. Duat cast his eye over the aircraft as Hendra and his young assistant wheeled it from the hangar. The Sword of Allah was considerably larger than any of the aircraft Hendra had been testing to date. And it was certainly in far better shape now than when it had arrived in a box crate from Latakia, Syria. It had been delivered in pieces, the whole roughly cut up with a saw. Looking at it now, that was difficult to believe. What had Hendra said? He’d used carbon fibre and Kevlar obtained from shipwrights in Denpasar to rebuild the wing’s mainspar and fuselage. He said he’d avoided using aircraft technology so as to keep the questions to a minimum.
Duat ran his fingertips lightly over a wing. He could barely feel the join. ‘Hendra, you are a wizard,’ he said. ‘Babu Islam owes you a great debt.’
‘Thank you, Emir.’
‘May Allah reward you amply.’
Hendra smiled. For the moment, appreciation from Duat was reward enough.
A catapult had been rigged up using a spare outboard motor and it had yet to be tested on the drone itself. A sleigh on skids had been used to determine the loads it was capable of dragging and that had certainly been promising. But a test with the Sword of Allah itself? That had had to be postponed a number of times due to monsoonal activity, but a break in the weather saw the morning dawn with a grey slate sky that turned blue as the orange ball of the sun climbed out of the sea.
The test Hendra was conducting, he’d explained, would not provide all the answers because the Sword of Allah would not be weighed down with its payload or full fuel tanks. If it took off fully loaded, Hendra calculated that it would not then have enough runway on which to land before ploughing into the rocks at the far end. The test was merely to investigate the effectiveness of the catapult, and the drone’s stability as it accelerated down the runway.
Duat had listened to all this and his appreciation transformed into impatience. The suicide squads were trained, Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim had prepared the canisters for insertion in the drone and all, except for the drone itself, was ready. How much more time would Hendra need? And there was a worrisome development within the encampment. A sickness was spreading. Duat himself was having trouble keeping food down. Rahim was no longer capable of work, and his assistant had taken to bed. Indeed, Rahim had become a slave to the white powder and it was doubtful that he would live beyond another two weeks, a race underway between the drug and the cancers that had spread throughout his body, each vying to end his life. But most disturbing of all was the growing certainty that it was only a matter of time before the authorities discovered the location of the encampment.
It had been a couple of weeks since the news media in Australia and the US had announced that the CIA had hunted down the man suspected of being the principal planner behind the US Embassy bombing, Kadar Al-Jahani. Duat thanked Allah that Kadar had been killed rather than taken prisoner and interrogated. But then Duat had seen his own face on news broadcasts linking him with Kadar and the embassy bombing. Duat had laughed at the likeness, making light of his notoriety for the benefit of the men but, privately, he was more than a little concerned. Time was running out. The question was, did they have weeks, days or hours? He’d checked the bank accounts via the Internet. If the infidels were close, they would be frozen. To Duat’s relief, he still had access to them, although there appeared to be considerably less money in them than he’d thought. The money from the heroin sales was being deposited. Perhaps their banker in Sydney was getting greedy. If so, he would have to be killed and a replacement found.