25. Ten days later. Cairns/Canberra/Seisia. Mid August 2012.

Thursday afternoon. Cairns.

Lucas had plenty of time to think during the long drive back to Cairns. He was dropping a couple of the students back at the airport to catch the late afternoon flight to Brisbane, from where they were heading further south, to either Sydney or Melbourne, he wasn't sure, but he had narrowed those two cities down as being the host for what was fast being confirmed as a multi-pronged attack. He still wasn't sure exactly what the target was – Shinwari and her people were holding their cards close to their chests – but he expected to be able to find that out soon and in the meantime he was still slowly gathering evidence. To deliver to whom, he didn't know at this stage but he would do some digging when he was in town. He studiously avoided acknowledging that deeply-buried name, just as he remorselessly stomped on any hint of that stupid, helpless hope whenever it reared its head but still, as the brilliant turquoise water sparkled into view beyond the sudden green of the coastal rainforest as they crested the last hill before plunging down towards the city, the name and the hope floated upwards again, as delicate as one of the bejewelled butterflies in the rainforest and as dangerously painful as one of the equally delicate, almost invisible irukanji jellyfish which swarmed in warm coastal waters. Harry. He would keep an eye out for Harry again. He had had no luck finding him during his weeks of searching but then he hadn't expected to. Nonetheless, he couldn't shake the idea that they were both meant to be here, in this distant outpost, at this moment in time and if that was the case then there must have been a reason. That reason may well be to prevent what he, Lucas, feared would be one of the biggest terrorist attacks ever carried out in this hemisphere, something that would surpass even the horror of the Bali bombings, even if he didn't know what that attack was going to be.

He would keep an eye out every time he was here and he would continue to gather data, sow errors and deliberately mislead so that, if it was meant to be, he would be ready.

Thursday evening. Canberra

As Lucas was driving into the coastal city, Ilian was leaving her office in Canberra, far to the south, and walking through the cold, blue-gold afternoon light to her car. Meg wouldn't be home when she got there – stuck in her barrister's wig in the High Court, fighting some esoteric white-collar criminal's appeal – so as she set off she debated with herself whether to be lazy and pick up a takeaway or just go home and see what she could rustle up from the fridge. The latter won, on the basis that by the time she hung around waiting for most takeaways to be cooked she could make something healthier for herself at home.

Almost an hour later she was reclining on her leather lounge, glass of wine in hand, gazing out over the view of the darkened city and letting her mind return to the problem that had been teasing it since her flying visit to Cairns: Harry + Ray + Capricorn Downs. How much to tell to whom or whether to tell at all. She hadn't mentioned anything exact to Harry on the day, apart from the information that the cattle station may have been a training centre of some sort, and he hadn't asked; she had been more interested in extracting everything he and his wife had known about Bateman and Elliott. And she still hadn't contacted Ray. Her immediate boss, as well as the DG, had considered her suggestion and couldn't see any issue with it, although neither could understand why he wanted to know. She suspected she could, though, and unknowingly had identified the same reason. Her nose for trouble had been twitching as well while they had been discussing Bateman and she, too, had a feeling it might eventually be useful for the two veterans to know the truth about each other.

As for Capricorn Downs itself, they still weren't much further advanced. Brendan was back on site, with a few extra toys to play with courtesy of a flying visit home by his aunt, but hadn't reported anything much new, although he was in the process of taking photos of every visitor that he could and slipping off at every opportunity to upload them via his new satellite phone to an address on the Cloud given to him by Ruby, where she was picking them up and running them through the facial recognition software. The pair camped in the national park were still having problems getting anything of use from their monitoring efforts and were now convinced that Elliott, the communications expert, had some sort of rolling cloaking program in place on the internet and phone connections so that every time they started getting close it changed, sending them back to square one. Ilian was beginning to think that might actually be an excuse to contact Ray – he was one of the few people they had with enough experience to be able to quickly come up with something to counter the program. Her research efforts into that horrible gut feeling she had experienced also hadn't thrown up anything yet, despite it being the most likely target. She had gone back to the original message from the woman in Brisbane that had alerted them in the first place and it had actually mentioned that Shinwari had said 'the meeting was in less than eighteen months', so that was a fit for what she suspected, but everything else – organisation, venue, personnel – were as clean as a whistle so far leaving Ilian herself with absolutely no concrete reason to move on any of them. She was just going to have to leave the place on a watching brief.

Her somewhat overweight Russian Blue cat chose that moment to jump onto her lap, purring and looking up hopefully out of bright green eyes. She gently stroked his ears and sighed.

"I don't know, Pusskin. Whatever is going on up there is bad but I can't prove it and no-one believes me. There's only one thing I'm certain of." The cat meowed and butted his head against her hand to encourage her to keep patting him as she continued contemplatively, "And that is that, no matter what Harry thinks, John Bateman is going to find him. All reports suggest that Bateman as North looked on him as a surrogate father and the affection was reciprocated. Now he's at his lowest ebb and has just found out that the man he thought was dead is actually alive. He will find him again, and soon." The animal kneaded her lap and gazed adoringly at her as she considered that thought and the chill that went with it. She just had to remind herself that Harry knew how to look after himself, if it came to a fight.

Headlights swept into the driveway and she smiled. Meg was home. Enough brooding on things she couldn't control and time to relax. It was almost Friday now so she would call Ray next week some time just before she rang Harry and in the meantime her crews would keep digging. Something would come up, eventually.

Friday morning. Sydney.

The pair had flown in late the previous evening, after the Englishman had dropped them at the airport in Cairns, and been taken straight to the safe house on the edge of Auburn, probably the city's most Islamic suburb. They had seen nothing of the city's famous landmarks as a result, just street after street of traffic, low-rise shops and small, free-standing, old-fashioned red-brick homes. Now it was the next morning, the drizzle that had greeted their arrival had cleared and, after prayers at the nearby mosque, they were heading for the same destination by different routes.

The first man, an Iranian electrical engineer who was now posing under the identity of an Iraqi Christian refugee, was starting work at the venue on the following Monday, working for the contractors who were maintaining the facility and in charge of setting up the additional security and communications hardware for the upcoming three-day meeting. He would make his way there later in the day and initially approach it from a tourist's perspective, spending the day getting familiar with the entire area from the outside.

The second man, an Indonesian Muslim now posing under the identity of a man who had been living in the city for ten years and working at times as an air conditioning technician, headed in earlier, catching the suburban train to Circular Quay and walking out with the flood of work-day commuters into the bright sunshine between the station and the old wooden ferry piers directly adjacent, to be surprised by the sheer scale and beauty of the view. The waters of the harbour were right there, lapping at the base of the esplanade and scenting the air with salt and sea-life. On the northern shore, opposite the Quay, houses, blocks of flats and historic buildings jostled for space on the steep green hillsides dotted with palms, jacarandas and frangipanis while looking down on the busy traffic of what was still a working harbour with water that appeared, this morning, like crushed sapphires sparkling in the clear, sharp light. Behind him the glittering glass towers of the CBD stretched upwards into the blue while the vista in front of him was framed to the left by more old sandstone buildings behind the international ocean liner terminal, the whole dominated by the great, grey metal arch of the famous bridge with its monumental tonalite pylons while to the right was his destination and, ultimately, the target, it's creamy tiled sails looking like they could set the entire edifice to sea for an extended voyage. The Sydney Opera House on Bennelong Point, internationally famous as a World Heritage listed architectural wonder would, before very much longer, be the focus of a two-day G20 summit focussing on intelligence, security and the shifting global economic and political focus from the western hemisphere to the eastern. Twenty global leaders, including the US, Russian and Chinese Presidents and the Prime Ministers of Britain, France, Canada and Japan, along with senior intelligence figures from each of the member countries, would be closeted for hours at a time in and around the various venues within the building which were being or had been converted into conference and discussion rooms, trying to one-up each other under the guise of solving the world's problems.

Soon, though, it would be famous for another reason. They would strike a blow for Islam so loud it would echo around the world and make the infidels of both the West and the East recognise the truth and submit to the will of Allah. And he would be a vital part of it. Glancing at his watch he realised he would be late if he didn't get moving and so set off to the east, past the back of the ferry piers to the waterfront walkway that would take him to the meeting on the lower level of the Opera House concourse, where he would begin his deception, taking his place as one of the multitude of security guards hired for the event. Today was the induction day when all the new starters would be shown around the facility from top to bottom. At last, he would be able to start escalating the plan. The Englishman who had taught him had been thorough – he was sure he would have no problems with the deception.

Others were already signing in so he joined the queue, false papers at the ready. He was so excited he could barely control himself. But he must. For Allah.

Friday afternoon, Cairns.

He really hadn't expected it to happen again at all, let alone so soon. No matter how much he might have wished it, the realist that whispered constantly in his ear from the back of his mind told him that the odds of him ever seeing Harry again were somewhere to the negative of zero. And yet here they were. Mid-afternoon on a Friday and he was sitting at a pavement table in one of the bars set back from the waterfront, nursing a beer he didn't really want while waiting for the afternoon flight to arrive carrying his next pick-up and over the road, sitting on a bench in the shade of one of the huge fig trees behind the sea-wall and gazing out over the muddy turquoise water, clearly waiting for someone, was Harry. The older man had turned up some time over the past five minutes: Lucas hadn't actually seen him arrive but he hadn't been there when he'd first sat down with his drink and flipped open his tablet and he had been when he'd glanced up from the screen a couple of minutes ago, startling Lucas into almost dropping his drink, but his shock had almost instantly turned into a wild surge of hope. He didn't believe in it but this had to be fate at work. Glad of the obscuring rampant tropical vegetation hanging from the veranda rafters, he sank further down into his seat to watch.

Nothing much happened for a few more minutes until Harry's phone rang and, once he had answered it, he stood up and began to pace as he talked. It was a surprise to the watcher to see how he was dressed – work boots, shorts and a stained cotton drill work shirt – and he couldn't say why but there was something about the way the man was moving which suggested that he was just as surprised by his phone call. Whatever it was, it didn't last long, and he slid the phone back into his shirt pocket, looking up from the footpath distractedly but then his expression changed completely, to a clearly loving smile. Looking the same direction, Lucas finally saw her. Ruth. Swinging with a loose, casual walk along the footpath, in a short, sleeveless emerald green shift, leather sandals, a large straw sun-hat and with a bag full of books slung over her shoulder, she looked cool and relaxed and was wearing an equally loving smile. At least he could lay claim to helping at least one good thing come into the world…

She saw Harry put away his phone as she crossed the road not far from him but didn't think any more of it until he looked towards her, that sixth sense of his letting him know that she was there. The look he turned towards her was a mixture of incredulity, wariness and incipient happiness and made her laugh as she approached.

"What's that expression for?"

"You're not going to believe it," he responded, drawing her into an embrace and a tender, if brief kiss. "That phone call was Graham!"

He was right, she didn't believe it. That difficult, troublesome, confused and lost son whom her husband still loved despite having given up trying to understand years ago, seemed to have benefited from the forced, half a planet wide, separation. He had already begun to change before their departure, quietly sobering up and enrolling at university as a mature aged student. Since they had left and with no father around to rebel against he had turned his energies to his studies and discovered a quiet passion, and talent, for marine biology, finding a form of peace in the ocean and its life-forms and, in the scientific process, a focus for that restless energy which was so much like Harry's. There had been no direct communication between parent and children for the first twelve months of his exile, just in case; since then, Catherine's contact had been regular, if encrypted (courtesy of Malcolm) while Graham's had been intermittent at best. Harry had only risked passing on a phone number to Catherine a few weeks beforehand; she had rung almost immediately, to invite them to surreptitiously meet up with her over Christmas, when she would be in Auckland with Aron's family, but he hadn't expected to hear from his son in a hurry, if at all, yet today had proven him wrong.

Ruth was as stunned as he was but, watching the expressions play across his face, she was guardedly hopeful. Although he said nothing, she knew that the separation from his children was a permanent ache, for all his self-perceived hopelessness as a father, and his delight whenever they got in contact now was a quiet joy for her and she had happily thrown herself into organising their forthcoming holiday over the ditch. But she still hadn't expected Graham to call, and wondered what it augured.

"Well, that's a nice surprise," she responded in her low, musical voice. "What did he have to say?"

Still trying to process the extraordinary call, Harry released her from the embrace only to drape his arm around her shoulders as they turned to walk to the car.

"It seems that he is doing so well in his course that his professors have organised for him to do a field placement at the end of this academic year. In Townsville. At the Australian Institute of Marine Science. He wants to catch up while he's here."

He sounded so surprised and happy that his son would be based only 400km away, for three months, in less than a year that she could only mentally cross her fingers and hope it all went well, for both of them. At least it looked like all the effort he had quietly put in not so many years back keeping Graham's criminal record clean had finally paid off, whether the boy – man, now, she corrected herself – knew about it or not. They continued to chat as they walked, both so surprised by the phone call and its content that they completely failed to notice the eyes watching them from the deep shadows of the bar or when Lucas quietly got up and followed them to their vehicle. He stayed in the shadows as they drove away, his eidetic memory taking snapshots of the Landcruiser and its number plate until it disappeared from view. Once he was back at the cattle station tomorrow he would put his evenings off to good use. It shouldn't take him long to track them down.

Although what he would do then he had no idea.

Friday, 20:30 hours. Seisia, Cape York Peninsula.

It had already been a long, weary trip, first coastal hopping from Merauke in Irian Jaya to Boigu in Papua New Guinea and now spending the last couple of days island hopping from there to Seisia, the tiny town perched on the tip of Cape York. The town itself wasn't quite on that collection of worn, rounded granites which jutted into the Torres Strait, but was a few km south-west, nestled behind a sandy beach in the lee of a small headland. The boat came ashore quietly on the beach to the north of the headland, its petrol outboard engine having been silenced while they were still 500 metres off-shore, the propulsion replaced by a small electric motor instead. There was next to no swell and no wind at all on this night so the final short leg to shore went quickly. The nearest buildings were over 200m away from the landing point and deserted at this hour, their inhabitants elsewhere, in the bar at Bamaga. The passenger, wasting no more time, stepped ashore, movements neat and economical, retrieved her small backpack and disappeared into the night while the boat reversed out and did the same thing. Yorse Hartono materialised from the darkness just inside the tree-line and joined her silently, with only a nod of recognition. It would take them ten minutes to walk to the Seisia Holiday Park where Hartono had booked them into the small cottage for the night before they began the long trip south to Capricorn Downs the following morning. No-one took any notice: she appeared to be just another Papua New Guinean, albeit of part-Chinese heritage, arriving to visit relatives. Even if they had noticed, there was nothing to indicate that the backpack held an hermetically sealed canister with a small amount of white powder containing enough endospores of Bacillus anthracis bacteria to fell an entire city. Which was entirely the plan.