If Prosper was surprised, he didn’t show it. Nor did he fly into a rage. On the contrary, he dropped Cadel’s wrist and picked up the lifejacket.
Cadel didn’t know what to think. He stared in confusion, wet and breathless and freezing cold. The gun was now just a useless lump of metal, weighing him down. He wondered, fleetingly, if he and Prosper should each take an oar. What if they rowed together, sitting elbow to elbow? Would there be any advantage in that?
‘Maybe this time it’ll be different,’ was all Prosper had to say. ‘Maybe this time, I’ll drag you down with me.’
But then a wave broke like thunder nearby. White froth cascaded over them. The boat reared like a startled horse, nearly pulling Cadel’s arm out of its socket as he clung to the oarlock.
Prosper didn’t have a choice; if he hadn’t grabbed the gunwale, he would have been hurled backwards. Therefore, rather than relinquishing the lifejacket, he let go of his oar – which was promptly snatched away by a surge of water.
‘If I were you,’ he loudly suggested, ‘I’d hit me with that gun and take this lifejacket!’ He was wearing a strange, lopsided grin, and there was a wild look in his eye. ‘It seems like the obvious solution, don’t you think?’
‘Wh-what?’ Cadel’s own teeth were chattering, now. His shoulder was killing him. The whole world seemed to be moving in slow motion, spinning off course. Or was it the boat? The boat was spinning too – and a dark, heavy, towering threat loomed somewhere off in the middle distance. But he couldn’t focus on that. He didn’t have the energy. He was still trying to work out what to do with the gun.
‘Didn’t I teach you anything?’ Prosper thrust his face into Cadel’s, bawling out advice over the boom and hiss of breaking waves. ‘When it comes to survival, it’s every man for himself! Forget the common good! Forget the bleeding-heart crap that all those coppers and social workers have been feeding you! I know you, Cadel – you’re a pragmatist! You think with your head! You should hit me with the gun and take the lifejacket!’ He laughed again – the craziest, most despairing laugh that Cadel had ever heard. ‘If you do that, dear boy, I’ll die happy!’
The words were snatched away by a howling wind. Then a huge jolt yanked Cadel from his seat. He felt the impact through his entire body. His head snapped back. The breath was knocked out of him. Turning somersaults, he saw the dinghy’s crumpled bow soar up to block out the sky – and knew instantly what had happened.
They had hit submerged rock.
Suddenly he was buried in water. The gun was gone. His lungs were bursting. He thrashed and kicked and dislodged one shoe. Something nudged him, but bobbed away when he tried to grab it. He surfaced, gasping, and caught a glimpse of the boat. It had flipped over. He couldn’t reach its exposed keel, though he tried to swim in that direction. The swell, however, was dragging him away, round and round, pushing and tugging. There was no sign of Prosper. A broken oar flashed past. Seaspray lashed and stung.
Then a huge wave lifted Cadel like a cork, before submerging him again. Dumped in a trough, he was propelled down, down, down by massive forces, as tonnes of water piled up on his head. He said to himself, I can’t drown. Not now. This is impossible.
An overwhelming sense of disbelief snuffed out his panic. He wasn’t thinking about Saul, or Fiona, or his friends. He was thinking about the boat, and how he might reach it. Kicking off his other shoe, he struck out for the greenish light overhead, away from the darkness beneath him. Swim. Swim. Swim. The word beat a tattoo inside his skull. His whole life had been narrowed down to that one, simple procedure. Swim.
All at once he was gulping down air. The relief was so great, it was almost excruciating. But his arms felt so weak. His chest felt so sore. He couldn’t see the boat – in fact, he could hardly see anything, because his eyes were full of salt water. And a terrible realisation was creeping up on him. He asked himself: Is this how it’s going to end? Am I going to die off the coast of California?
The third time he went down, he wasn’t pushed; he was pulled. A rip dragged him under, twirling him like laundry in a washing machine. And when he struggled towards the surface, it seemed to recede. The pale, submarine light grew fainter and fainter. The blackness crept up on him, on every side, like the walls of a tunnel. He was suffocating – his chest was burning – he had to breathe!
What happened next was a jumble of vague impressions: darkness, then a blank period, then a solid presence and a loud noise. A sensation of acute urgency was followed by one of immense relief. But never once did Cadel break through into consciousness. His mind was adrift, detached from everything firm, proven and understood; he let his own identity slip away. The world dissolved. There was nothing left. He was floating … floating …
… and coughing. He was coughing. Hack-hack-hack. Slowly, he reconnected with his arms and legs. They were pinned down. He couldn’t move.
Hack-hack-hack. He struggled for air.
‘He’s breathing!’ someone shouted. And someone else said, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’
Cadel opened his eyes. A face was hovering over him, against a backdrop of dark cloud. The face was long and brown and damp, with very white teeth. Cadel didn’t recognise it.
‘Are you okay? Can you hear me?’ the lips enunciated.
Cadel didn’t reply. He retched, then tried to roll over. Immediately, the weight on his chest and arms lifted.
He heard someone say, ‘It’s a miracle.’
By this time, the edges of his vision were clearing. He could see things – and make sense of them, too. He was lying on sand. He was wet. He was alive.
It was raining.
As he threw up, something was placed across his shoulders. A jacket? It nearly blew off again, before an eager pair of hands tucked it around him like a shawl. More people were talking, high above his head. He couldn’t look at them. He couldn’t move. He had to lie there in his own vomit, because the effort involved in bringing up a bellyful of seawater had exhausted him.
Gradually the murmur of voices became clearer. They all seemed to be male voices, with American accents. He heard ‘phone’ and ‘shock’ and ‘ambulance’. Then he started to cough again.
‘Jesus! Cadel! Oh, my God …’
Kale. The word sprang into his mind, followed by a flurry of other words: Prosper and boat and lifejacket. Meanwhile, someone had squatted beside him.
He craned his neck to look up at the hunched figure.
‘Kale?’ he croaked.
‘Are you sore? Can you move? Is anything broken?’ It was Kale, all right. He raised his voice sharply before Cadel could ask about Prosper. ‘Where’s the ambulance? Did someone call an ambulance?’
‘I did.’
‘They’re on their way.’
‘I’ve done a first-aid course …’
‘Should we shift him? Before they get here?’
‘He needs to be kept warm …’
This babble of responses was reassuring. There had to be six or seven people standing around in the rain – and it occurred to Cadel that some of them might be policemen.
Kale certainly was. His jacket was flapping open in the wind, exposing the gun tucked into his shoulder holster.
Prosper doesn’t stand a chance, thought Cadel, slumping with relief.
‘Prosper,’ he rasped, and Kale leaned down to listen.
‘What’s that?’ asked Kale. He laid a hand on Cadel’s sodden curls. ‘Can you sit up? If you can sit up, we’ll carry you. We’ll get you up the stairs.’
Up the stairs? Briefly distracted, Cadel raised his chin again, peering through the forest of legs that surrounded him. Across an expanse of sand and rocks he saw a crumbling orange cliffface with a flight of steps hanging off it.
Though he didn’t recognise these steps, the tightly packed mansions perched above them rang a bell.
‘We won’t take you back to that goddamn house,’ Kale assured him, at which point Cadel realised that ‘the goddamn house’ – Rex Austin’s house – must b
e quite close. It had to be close, or Kale wouldn’t have turned up so quickly.
Unless it hadn’t been quick? Cadel didn’t know. He couldn’t tell how long he’d been lying on the beach like a stranded whale. Minutes? Hours?
‘Where’s Prosper?’ he muttered. And this time Kale heard.
‘Prosper?’
‘He was on the boat with me …’ As Cadel strained to peer back over his shoulder, Kale started firing orders at the men clustered around them both. Clearly, many of these people were also FBI agents; Cadel registered the fact in some remote corner of his brain, though he didn’t really listen to what was being said. It was happening too far above him, and he didn’t feel well enough to concentrate.
He did notice, however, that the churning, thundering surf had to cover a lot of ground before it was able to lick at his toes. And he thought, Did I get all the way up here by myself?
There were no drag marks that he could detect – but then again, there were no marks of any description. No footprints, no tyre tracks, no nothing. The sea would have washed everything away.
‘Cadel. Cadel.’ Kale squeezed his arm. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Of course I can hear you,’ said Cadel, feeling vaguely annoyed. ‘I don’t have water in my ears.’
‘You told me you were with Prosper. In a boat. Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happened? Did he throw you overboard?’
‘No.’ A fit of coughing intervened before Cadel could finally gasp out, ‘The boat capsized.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I took the gun, but I dropped it. Prosper got the lifejacket.’ As he tried to organise his scattered memories, Cadel made a feeble attempt to sit up. His head swam with the effort. He was starting to shake. ‘There was hardly any petrol in the engine,’ he continued. ‘Rex must have turned it on, to make a noise. He’s under a green thing, now.’
‘Take it easy,’ Kale begged. ‘Don’t force it. You can tell me later.’
But Cadel couldn’t seem to stop talking. The words kept spurting out of him, like the seawater he’d swallowed. ‘We hit a rock,’ he continued. ‘The boat was upside down. There’s a house inside the other house – that’s where Prosper was hiding. Wilfreda was there too, but she’s gone to Mexico, I think.’
‘Shh. It’s okay. Can you hear that siren? That’s the ambulance.’
‘Prosper’s a good swimmer. He told me so.’ Cadel was flagging. His eyelids drooped. His muscles wouldn’t hold him up any more. ‘You’d better be careful,’ he murmured, sinking back down onto the sand, ‘because Prosper took the lifejacket. If I made it, then he made it. He wasn’t scared. He wouldn’t have drowned.’
‘Down here!’ Kale shouted. ‘Over here!’
A radio crackled nearby.
‘He’ll be heading for Mexico, too,’ Cadel added, before his tongue decided, of its own volition, to stop working. His lips wouldn’t move. His eyes wouldn’t focus.
He felt so tired …
THIRTY-SIX
They were waiting at Sydney Airport: Fiona and Saul, Sonja, Judith, Gazo … even Hamish. When Cadel emerged from Customs and Immigration, he spotted them at once.
What with Sonja’s wheelchair, Saul’s bandaged head, and Judith’s neon-pink glasses, they were very hard to miss.
‘Christ,’ muttered Kale, transfixed by Hamish’s leather jacket. It was so heavy with studs and chains and rivets that it must have weighed as much as Hamish did. ‘What is this, a three-ring circus?’
Cadel didn’t respond. The sight of all those eager faces had rendered him mute; he could hardly manage the stiff little smile with which he greeted the flurry of waving triggered by his sudden appearance. Next thing he knew, he was engulfed in a knot of people, as Fiona threw her arms around him and Gazo relieved him of his green bag.
Saul and Kale shook hands, awkwardly. It wasn’t an easy manoeuvre, because Saul’s right shoulder and arm were imprisoned in a complex arrangement of bandages. But the two men did their best, without dislodging anything. Then Saul thanked Kale, and Kale apologised to Saul.
Meanwhile, Cadel was being bombarded by questions.
‘Are you feeling okay? How was the flight?’ said Fiona. ‘Did you manage to get any sleep?’
‘D-did you hear about Dot and Com?’ said Hamish. ‘They were picked up in Melbourne. Boy, are they in trouble!’
‘Do you want to go straight to my house? Or is there some kind of police business you need to get through first?’ Judith asked Cadel, in a voice that was just a fraction too loud. And Fiona hastened to elaborate.
‘We’re all living at Judith’s – you and me and Saul,’ she explained. ‘Just for the time being.’
Sonja remained silent. But her brown eyes strained towards Cadel, and her taut, quivering neck told him how keyed up she was. He would have liked to say something nice to her. He would have liked to compliment her on her tartan skirt and matching hairband. He even opened his mouth. The words, however, wouldn’t come.
And he couldn’t give her a kiss. Not in public, surrounded by people like Kale and Hamish.
‘We’re blocking the exit,’ Saul suddenly observed. Though he looked terrible, with bruising and grazes all around his right eye, he seemed to be coping pretty well with the heaving bustle and reverberating noise of the arrivals hall. ‘Let’s get out of here. Who’s going with Judith? Sonja, of course …’
‘Do you want to go with Sonja, sweetie?’ Fiona turned to Cadel, who nodded. Saul threw him a quick, speculative glance, but didn’t speak.
Judith boomed, ‘I’ve got room for two more – the rest of you will have to pile into Gazo’s car.’
It was decided that Judith would take Sonja, Cadel, Fiona and Saul, while Kale and Hamish would ride with Gazo. Both cars would be driven to Judith’s Maroubra mansion, where a bed would then be found for Kale.
‘It’s a bit crowded at my place,’ Judith confessed, as they all trooped off to the airport’s multi-level car park, ‘and I don’t have much furniture, but I’m sure we can work something out.’
‘Is it properly secured?’ Kale wanted to know. Though bleary-eyed and unshaven after the long flight, he was still on full alert. ‘Are we talking about a fully operational alarm system?’
‘It’s safe enough now,’ Saul replied. ‘There was a problem, but that’s been solved.’ Laying a tentative hand on Cadel’s shoulder, he quietly added, ‘Sid and Steve have been terrific. They’ve cleaned out Judith’s whole network for us.’
‘And they’ve been pulling a whole b-buncha stuff off Dot’s computer,’ Hamish chimed in, ‘because she didn’t get a chance to wipe her files. So what with that, and Raimo Zapp’s data, and whatever they can get out of Niobe, I reckon Vee won’t stand a chance.’ He sidled up to Cadel, as the whole group stopped in front of an elevator. ‘You heard they found Niobe, didn’t you? She was hiding out in San Diego. And it looks like Vee might b-be holed up in New Zealand somewhere, so –’
‘That’s not for public discussion!’ Saul interposed sharply. And Kale clicked his tongue.
‘You got a big mouth, kid,’ he informed Hamish, before addressing Saul once again. ‘I figure Cadel should use the stairs. Just in case. Like the kid said, we’ve still got a certain hacker perp at large.’
‘Right,’ Saul agreed. There followed a general discussion about who should go in the lift (with Sonja) and who should use the stairs, but Cadel didn’t take part in this debate. He was still dazed and reeling, though whether from jetlag, fatigue or emotional shellshock he wasn’t sure. Physically, he had fully recovered from his near-death experience in the Pacific Ocean. After a very short spell in hospital, he had been released into Kale Platz’s custody, with a prescription for anti-diarrhoea medication and a pamphlet about post-traumatic stress. He had then spent most of the subsequent two days – before his flight back to Australia – eating and sleeping and watching the ninety-seven cable TV channels to which the FBI agent subscribed. No demands had been placed on Ca
del. Everyone had tiptoed around him. And on the trip home, he had flown business class, courtesy of Judith Bashford.
So it wasn’t as if he had suffered any kind of injuries, or periods of deprivation. And he was pleased to see everyone – of course he was. Extremely pleased. Why, then, couldn’t he scatter smiles and hugs like confetti? Why did the car park staircase feel like a mountain when he started to climb it? Why did he dread the prospect of a long drive in a crowded car, even though the people who would be sharing it with him were his nearest and dearest?
Perhaps it was sheer cowardice. Perhaps he was scared that someone would raise the subject of Prosper English, long before they reached Maroubra. It was inevitable. It was even understandable. Yet the thought of it made Cadel feel sick.
‘Do you want to sit in the front, sweetie?’ Fiona inquired. ‘You’re not looking very well.’
Cadel shook his head. Then he found his voice, at long last.
‘I want to sit next to Sonja,’ he mumbled.
‘Okay.’ Fiona sounded faintly relieved – perhaps because Cadel had decided to talk. She turned to her husband. ‘Why don’t you sit in the front?’ she suggested. ‘It’ll be easier for you.’
Saul concurred. He was quite pale, by this time, and had to lower himself gingerly into the seat beside Judith’s, taking care not to bump his bandaged head or jolt his broken collar bone. It took even longer to get Sonja properly settled; shifting her about had always been a complicated job, and the cast on her leg made it more difficult than usual.
Finally, however, the car was fully loaded. The last door slammed. The last seatbelt was fastened. As Judith pulled out into the sluggish traffic, Saul twisted around to peer at Cadel.
‘We can talk in here,’ the detective announced. ‘It’s not exposed, like that car park.’ A brief silence ensued; when Cadel didn’t ask any questions, Saul went on. ‘I don’t know how much Kale’s told you, but things have been moving very fast, at this end. Hamish was right: Dot and Com are both under arrest, and we’re closing in on Vee. So you don’t have to worry any more. Okay? There’s no need to worry.’