‘You wearing a wire?’
‘Just curious.’
‘You think this is a TV show? You think I should tell you everything, and then somehow you’ll knock the knife out of my hand, and we’ll struggle, and you’ll take me prisoner?’
‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘Pretty much.’
‘The others thought so too. They were all hard men. Just like you. Didn’t help them. Won’t help you.’
‘They weren’t expecting you. I was. I led you right here. We’re in a loading bay. There’s no one around.’
‘I have a knife.’
‘And I have a rule. Pull a knife on me, I break your arm. It’s a childhood thing. Kind of stayed with me. Actually I have another rule first. I forgot to mention. Something my mother always made me say. I have to give you the chance to walk away. In this case you could carry a message for me. To your boss. No dishonour in that.’
‘What’s the message?’
‘Tell him they both cried like babies.’
The guy came straight at me, with the blade out in front. I don’t like knives. Never have. Never will. But over the years I have learned how to deal with them. Which is sometimes to ignore them. To delete them from the scene. Not a knife coming at you, but a fist. You want to get hit by a fist? Of course you don’t, so you stay calm, and you twist away, a routine evasive real-world manoeuvre, a move you have made a million times before, so you dodge the knife easily, without either thinking about it or getting all worked up about it.
And then you stay with the fistfight illusion by continuing to ignore the knife entirely, and by using your falling-away momentum to whip a hooking right into the guy’s face.
At which point he gave up the knife involuntarily. First his sunglasses exploded, and his heels came up in the air like he had run into a clothes line, and the knife clattered to the concrete, and he went down flat on his back, with a sound that was mostly a dusty thump, flesh and bone, but also a wet crack, behind his head, which didn’t bode well. He lay still. He kept on breathing. His eyes stayed open. But he wasn’t seeing anything. He wasn’t reacting to anything. Even when I broke his arm.
He had nothing in his pockets except a car key marked Holden, which was presumably the brown sedan, and a cell phone, which had a log showing incoming and outgoing calls between six different people. Clearly the guy liked to chat.
I put the key and the phone in my pocket and I walked away. I looped around to where the crowds were, and I sat on a wall, and I checked the phone in greater detail. Five out of the six callers were clearly friends. They would call him, or he would call them, and they would chat, sometimes up to twenty minutes. Back and forth, mutual, probably typical.
The sixth caller was different. He was incoming only. Not back and forth, and not mutual. And he was brief. Sometimes not more than forty-five seconds. He called every two or three days. He was the boss, I thought. Calling to issue instructions.
The phone said the boss’s name was Dragan.
I looked up and saw Pete Peterson getting out of a car about thirty yards away.
Peterson looked the same as he had in New York. Blue suit, boyish hair, the aches and pains and the battered hands of a one-time ballplayer. Cricket, most likely, I thought. A big deal in Australia. He looked tired. Maybe not good at sleeping sitting up.
I stood up and he walked over. He pointed at a café table outside a gift shop. We sat down face to face.
He said, ‘Tell me why you’re here.’
‘Flights are cheap now,’ I said. ‘It’s a great vacation.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘I was a company commander once. A long time ago. I did my share of paperwork. Those Xeroxes you showed me looked familiar. I recognized the technology. State-of-the-art photocopying at the time, but a couple generations out of date now.’
‘Our lab says the paper is about twenty-five years old.’
I nodded.
‘And it was stored for most of that time,’ I said. ‘The photocopies were sealed in the envelope and stacked with a bunch of other crap. You can tell by the way the metal butterfly closure has made a mark on the paper. All four sheets, deep and crisp and clear. Heavy pressure. That envelope was at the bottom of some random pile for nearly a quarter of a century. Long enough for the glue to perish on the flap. Let’s call it twenty-two years, for the sake of argument. Then three years ago someone found it. Maybe in an attic. Maybe by accident. A long-lost treasure. Right away they mailed it to the address here in Sydney. Then all kinds of mayhem broke out.’
‘Tell me the who and the how and the why.’
‘Someone wants vengeance,’ I said. ‘A quarter century ago something bad happened to them. Not here in Australia. Somewhere else. They had to flee. They moved here. All along they believed an old rumour, that back in the day someone had found out who the four men were, who had done the bad thing to them. But it was only a rumour. They had no actual information. Not until the photographs finally arrived.’
Peterson said, ‘Who are they?’
‘We’ll get to that,’ I said. ‘First we got to look at how they did it. Which you won’t like. Four unlabelled photographs don’t mean much. They must have run them through government software. Way before you did. They turned a list of faces into a list of names. Either they had an inside man, or someone took a bribe, or they hacked your systems.’
Peterson said nothing.
‘It gets worse,’ I said. ‘Four names don’t mean much either. Not unless you know when one of them happens to be headed for Australia. So you can be ready for him. Which means another inside man. Or more bribes. Or more hacking. Either your visa system, or the airline manifests, or the immigration desks themselves. Or all three, in a neat little sequence. They were plenty ready for me, for instance. That’s for damn sure. Some guy got to me less than twenty minutes after I stepped out of the baggage hall. Was it the same with the first three?’
‘Broadly,’ Peterson said. ‘Not twenty minutes. But within hours.’
‘Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. All international airports. The visa, the plane ticket, the arrival. Like one, two, three, go. They timed it perfectly.’
‘What guy got to you?’
I pointed.
‘Loading dock,’ I said. ‘Not talking. He hurt his head. But I got his phone. He works for a guy named Dragan.’
‘Who are they? And who are you, really? You said you didn’t know the other three.’
‘I don’t.’
‘But you said the four of you did a bad thing.’
‘Separately.’
‘What bad thing?’
‘It was only bad from their point of view. I was happy enough about it.’
‘What was it?’
‘I’m only guessing about the other three. But I’m sure I’m right. Unexplained men from shadowy military units. British and American. I asked myself, what was I doing a quarter century ago, that could have gotten me on a hit list? What could the other guys have been doing? The only possible answer was Kosovo. Before your time. Serbia and Croatia and all that stuff. The former Yugoslavia. All kinds of strife and civil war and atrocities. I was deployed there, briefly. Mostly during the clean-up.’
‘Doing what?’
I didn’t answer. I was neither proud of it nor not proud of it. It was a mission. One of many. But I remembered it pretty well.
Afterwards they gave me a medal. The Balkans, some police work, a search for two local men with wartime secrets to keep, both soon identified, and located, and visited, and shot in the head. All part of the peace process. No big deal.
I said, ‘It’s classified. Why they told you I was directing traffic.’
‘Assassination?’
‘You’re pretty smart, for a cricket player.’