18 March 2005
Trish was shaking. Nick could feel it where their bodies were pressed hard together in the backseat of Adbul Supomo's car. For a moment he considered reaching out to her, taking her hand in his, whispering some reassurance, but Abdul's gaze kept flickering to them in the rearview mirror, and he didn't think Trish would really be able to hear him, at any rate. Her eyes looked strangely distant, as if she had gone somewhere far away in her mind.
"You're doing great," Abdul said.
Trish shuddered, and Nick choked back a miserable little laugh. If this was great, he didn't want to know what terrible looked like.
"It's not ideal-"
A strangled sound left Trish's lips, her eyes snapping forward to stare at the back of Abdul's head incredulously. Not ideal; that was surely the understatement of the century.
"I mean, it's tragic," Abdul corrected himself half-heartedly. "But you're both all right, and the way you handle this will prove to Hartono that he can trust you."
By the way you handle this Abdul meant they weren't going to handle it at all, and Nick knew it. When no police came sniffing round the dockyards, when no news stories about the murder of two young men on the premises of Claybourne shipping came to light, when no one said anything at all, Hartono would know that Trish and Wesley were like him, cold, and calculating, and less interested in human lives than in lining their own pockets.
What had happened was this; in an attempt to catch Hartono out a trap of sorts had been laid for him. Trish and Wesley had agreed to meet Hartono in person for the unloading of his latest shipment. It had been decided that Trish and Wesley would not wear wires, as Hartono was a clever man, and insisted on certain precautions, including cursory pat-downs, prior to any interactions. In an effort to record him accepting the cargo, taking responsibility for it, SIS had carefully wired both the inside of his container and the exteriors of several surrounding containers on the dockyard, mics and cameras providing a perfect view of the scene. The plan was easy; the Claybournes would meet Hartono, take him to the container, let him look around, have him sign some paperwork, and leave him to direct the unloading of his assets. The cameras would do all the hard work, and the following day SIS would bring the full force of their might down upon Muhammad Hartono, and any of his associates they could find.
It was a remarkably simple plan, and Nick had wondered why they hadn't tried it months before. It had seemed to him they could have saved themselves rather a lot of time if only they'd done this sooner. Now, though, he knew better.
What had happened at the dockyard had been anything but simple. Hartono hadn't shown; he'd sent Mr. Prakoso in his stead. That had thrown both Trish and Nick, for they did not know why Hartono hadn't come himself or what to make of this change of plan, but they had gamely gathered up two of their employees - both SIS plants - and led Prakoso to the container. The SIS boys - Davis and Howard - had thrown open the doors of the container while Mr. Prakoso stood next to Trish and Wesley, silent as a grave. Anxiety had nipped along Nick's spine but he did his best to remain calm, to smile, to give no outward sign of his distress. The boys opened the doors, walked away to stand behind Nick, Nick stepped forward, intent on leading Mr. Prakoso into the container, and then suddenly, sharply, with no warning whatsoever, a hail of bullets had rained down around him. Reflexively Nick caught hold of Trish, dragged her down to the ground and sheltered her head against his chest, but there was no need; the shooting stopped as quickly as it had started. The two SIS boys were dead, their blood sprayed across Trish and Nick both, their bodies limp in the dirt. Mr. Prakoso stood to the side, clean and apparently unfazed.
I believe you may have a problem, Mr. Claybourne, he'd said, eerily calm as ever. Nick had looked up at him incredulously, still holding his trembling wife tight to his chest, but he swallowed down the curses he longed to spew. Somewhere above them, perhaps perched atop the same containers SIS had wired the night before, at least two gunmen were hiding, their weapons no doubt still trained on the Claybournes. The shooting had not surprised Prakoso; he'd been expecting it, must have been instrumental in orchestrating it. Nick's very life had hung on his next words, and so he chose them carefully. I believe you may be right, he'd said, rising gingerly to his feet, helping Trish to stand.
I'll leave you to deal with it, Mr. Prakoso had told him, and then he'd walked away, whistling.
So Nick had dealt with it, had rung Abdul, who worked as a sort of fixer for Hartono, and a team of lads in nondescript clothing had come and carried the dead men away. Mindful of the fact that they might still be under surveillance Trish and Wesley hardly spoke to each other, and did not say much at all to Abdul, just watched in silence as the scene was cleared, and then left in Abdul's car.
"Why?" Trish asked raggedly, snapping Nick's attention back to the present. It was a good question; why had those boys been killed? How had it even happened? With SIS watching every inch of the dockyards Nick couldn't fathom how the shooters had been able to slip in - and out again - undetected. Obviously Hartono knew something was up, but he hadn't taken out the Claybournes, had chosen instead to kill their employees. Had he learned that those two men were working for SIS, or was he only sending a message? Would he be waiting for them when they got home?
"Who knows," Abdul said, remarkably nonchalant about the whole thing. "If he suspected you were informing on him, he'd have killed you. He showed you that up front. I think your cover is intact. When he sees that you don't make a fuss about this little hiccup, he may be willing to tell you more. Just keep your heads down."
Trish barked out a laugh, brittle and angry, and Nick just bit his tongue, watching the streets of Sydney slide by outside the window. Christ, this never should have happened. Had they grown too comfortable meeting with Hartono? Were there precautions they'd failed to take, a failure that had cost two men their lives? It had been remarkably risky, in retrospect, agreeing to go to the veritable warren of containers in the dark, with the wrong man, without any backup besides two unarmed men who'd promptly been murdered. It was easy to lose your way in the dockyards, and the containers made easy cover for unsavory characters, as the evening's events had proved. The cameras and mics had been trained on Hartono's container, but as Nick wracked his brain he could not recall surveillance having been put in place further out. They'd been sitting ducks, and now Davis and Howard had paid the price for their laxity in blood.
"Home again," Abdul said as he pulled the car to a stop outside their house.
"Thanks, mate," Nick said. Trish was already out of the car, making a beeline for the front door.
"Give us a call in the morning," Abdul told him. "We may know more in a few hours."
"Right," Nick said, and then he stepped out into the night.
By the time he reached the front door Trish was already inside. Nick kicked his shoes off in the foyer, closed the door, locked it, and sighed. Everything had gone pear shaped; Abdul could insist that their cover was intact all he wanted, but Nick knew better. Clearly Hartono suspected something was afoot, and Nick had no idea how much longer they could keep this charade going. He'd half expected to find someone waiting for them in the house, but Trish had turned on all the lights as she went, and nothing was amiss.
I've got to talk to her, Nick thought glumly. They had to come up with some kind of a plan, had to decide how they were going to handle Hartono, what they were going to do if they found themselves in a jam. More than that, though, he needed to hear her voice, needed to see for himself that she was well, that this ordeal would not break her. He needed to reassure her, longed to hold her, longed to hear her gentle voice, reminding him that the world was not as evil as it seemed, that there was still a piece of goodness worth holding on to. She was, he thought, the only good thing left in his life.
He followed the trail of lights down the corridor to their bedroom, but she was nowhere in sight. The door to the en suite was closed, and he could see light shining out from beneath it; she must have gone straight there, he thought, to strip out of her blood stained clothes and wash away the grime of the night. Perhaps it would have been wiser to give her some space, to allow her a few minutes to pull herself together, but Nick was keyed up, anxious and restless and desperate to talk to her, and so he did not hesitate. He marched across the room and tried the bathroom door, and upon finding it unlocked he walked right in.
Inside he found Trish; she'd closed the lid of the toilet and sat down on top of it, buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking, but if she were weeping no sound of it escaped her. There were no microphones, no cameras, no eyes and ears trained on them in the bathroom, but Nick locked the door behind him and turned the shower on for good measure, hoping that the noise of the water would drown out the sound of their voices. With that done he turned his attention back to Trish, went to her and knelt down on the floor at her feet.
"Hey," he said, resting his hands on her knees. Above him Trish drew in a ragged breath, dropped her hands away from her face to settle atop his own, her eyes miserable and yet full of fire as she looked at him.
"I want to kill him," she breathed, her voice low and rough with rage. That surprised him; Nick had been expecting fear, and grief, but he had not been expecting her anger.
"They didn't deserve this," she hissed. "And he could have...he could have killed you."
"I'm right here, Trish," he reminded her. "If he wanted me dead, I would be."
"It was so close," she whispered miserably. She was right about that; Davis and Howard had been standing a few feet behind Nick and Trish. The fact that neither of them had been injured suddenly struck him as rather remarkable; whoever Hartono had doing his dirty work, they must have been expert marksmen. If a single one of those bullets had traveled a hair's breadth off course, Nick or Trish - or both of them - could have been laid out in the dirt just like their colleagues. That was something he'd need to address with SIS, and he told himself he'd mention it to Abdul when they spoke in the morning. He had more important things to worry about at present.
"We're all right, Trish," he said. The words sounded foolish to his own ears; both their shirts were stained brown with dried blood, and there was dirt and worse in Trish's perfect blonde hair. They were terrified, and lonely, and angry, and right on the very edge of disaster; they were, both of them, the farthest thing in the world from all right.
"I can't do this without you," she whispered to him softly, and then she reached for him, her fingers trailing through his hair around the curve of his ear, something tender and terrible in the gesture. "You've got blood on you," she observed, the pad of her thumb brushing against the shell of his ear as if trying to clean away the mess she'd no doubt found there.
"So do you." There was no need to be so quiet, with the shower covering their voices, but the moment was still, and tense, and Nick did not dare speak above a whisper, lest he shatter them both. Her concern for him spoke to his heart, stirred the yearning he always felt for her into something greater, something fiercer, something he could hardly contain. That she needed him as badly as he needed her, that she had been so moved by his brush with danger that she apparently paid no mind to her own, that she could look at him the way she did now, her grey eyes round and bright and begging for something he so desperately longed to give her, set him on fire with need of her. The warmth of her legs beneath his hands was enticing, but it was not enough; he needed her, all of her, needed her close and soft and in his arms.
She had reached for him, and so he took that as permission, reached for her and brushed her hair back from her face, and she pressed her cheek against his palm, seeking that contact even as he sought to give it to her. One of his hands cradling her face, one hand resting on her thigh, he was so close to her it left him aching, and yet they were not as close he wished to be.
"Your shirt will be ruined," she said.
"Good riddance," Nick said. He hated those bloody shirts with their garish patterns and pearlsnap buttons. He'd give anything to have his own clothes, his own life back, to be able to live freely, to love her, if she'd let him. The shirt was sticking unpleasantly to the skin of his back and the reminder that he carried the blood of those two boys upon his own body made his belly churn with disgust, and he reached for it suddenly, desperate to be ride of it, tugged until enough of the buttons came undone for him to rip the shirt from his back and fling it into the corner of the bathroom where it landed in a heap, a silent accusation of his own foolishness.
Trish's eyes widened slightly as she took in the view of his bare chest, and it was only then that he realized he might have made a terrible mistake, stripping off like that in front of her. All alone, with no one to see, no one to hear, Nick was kneeling half naked at her feet, and maybe she could feel it, too, the undeniable pull of gravity that drew him closer and closer to her. It was Trish who'd pulled them back from the brink before; would she find the strength to put an end to this madness now, before they lost themselves completely? It would have to be her, he knew, for Nick himself was gone already, overwhelmed and drowning in his longing for her, his affection for her, his desperate desire to touch her, and find some piece of his own humanity restored in the gentle brush of her hands against his skin. Once more he rested his hands on her knees, drew in a deep breath, and waited to see what she might do.
