The Shadow Game (27 page)

Then he tunnelled deeper, sifting through Webster's shared drives until he reached the prize: the desktop. Harris knew any gold would be stored on its hard drive.

Within seconds he was in and began downloading every document. A thin white line moved left to right across the top of his screen, marking off the precious seconds to completion as the files marched from Webster's world into the cyber hacker's clutches.

Harris took no chances. Everything was saved to his desktop, a thumb drive and to a secure virtual vault that he'd created years earlier. The system was bombproof.

All he needed was another five minutes.

‘System breach. Shut down your computer.'

Charles Dancer's voice barked in Jack Webster's ear, jolting the defence chief from his perusal of an intelligence brief.

‘Shut it down. Now!'

‘Hang on.'

Webster strode to his desk with his phone in his left hand and tapped the keyboard with his right. His PC demanded his username and password before unfolding to the usual bland landscape of icons.

‘I can't see anything wrong.'

‘Doesn't matter. You've been compromised. Every second raises the threat.'

Webster moved the mouse, but the cursor didn't budge. He tapped the keyboard again.

‘The screen's locked,' he told Dancer.

‘Pull the plug. Quickly!'

The defence chief put down his phone and wrenched the screen to the right, scrambling to find the power cord. A tangle of cables disappeared down a hole at the back of his desk.

He tore the screen from its mooring and lifted it above his head before bringing it crashing down on the black box of the central processing unit. Metal twisted and glass showered across his desk.

The office of the most powerful military man in the land filled with smoke.

The connection was broken.

There were many possible reasons, but Harris feared he'd been seen. He immediately shut down his system and yanked the power board from the wall.

Only then did the codebreaker feel the stress of the past hour. He was drenched in sweat and his head was pounding.

Think. This man is deadly and he commands an army.

Harris had to assume that someone would come after the data. Or him. Or both. He was confident he'd left no fingerprints, but couldn't risk going online again.

The stolen documents had been backed up on a thumb drive and also sent to a secure cloud server. But his adversary was ruthless and skilled. No matter what happened, the data had to survive.

Harry Dunkley was right: they had not started this fight and they would only find peace when the warlord was defeated.

There is a way. An old pathway, but reliable. Hiding in plain sight.

Harris put the thumb drive in his pocket and stood up, stretching his back, trying to relieve the stress. A quick walk to the shops would be therapeutic, then back to work, sifting through files offline.

He'd call Dunkley if he found anything useful, but he knew from bitter experience that you had to pan a mountain of dirt to find an ounce of gold.

He stepped from his dark townhouse into a dazzling day.

Harry Dunkley's phone shook. There was a note on the Cryptocat secure messaging system. Trevor Harris had scoffed when Dunkley told him Martin Toohey used Confide.

Need to talk. My place.

Harris's message was promising, but Dunkley was in Canberra's deep south on an errand for Martin Toohey.

He punched in a reply: Give me an hour.

It was an easy drive from Canberra's south and Dunkley followed an ACTION bus as he cruised the last few kilometres to Yarralumla, a smudge of smoke drifting to his west.

He veered off Adelaide Avenue towards Hopetoun Circuit, the bleached white walls of the Saudi Arabian embassy looming
into view. He slowed as he approached a pair of speed bumps at the local school, then turned into Harris's street and a scene of pandemonium.

A pair of police cars, their lights flashing, cordoned off the street, one at either end of a hundred-metre strip. Three fire engines were parked in a ragged row, their tentacles in a tangle as they ran from nearby hydrants. An ambulance sat quietly in a driveway.

The townhouse was gutted, smoke stains vivid around windows cracked by heat. The roof had partially collapsed and its charred wooden rafters looked like broken black fingers clawing at the sky.

‘But he was a friend of mine . . .' Harry Dunkley's face was creased with grief.

He'd watched the ambulance doors close on a black body bag.

A police sergeant was sympathetic, but firm.

‘Sir, we don't discuss investigations, particularly when a deceased person is involved.'

A small crowd had gathered in the quiet street, their voices lowered in respect for the dead. Dunkley scanned the faces, but they were all unfamiliar.

The sergeant was still talking.

‘So how did you know Mr Harris?'

‘We worked on a few projects together,' Dunkley said as he walked away.

The emergency services had managed to protect the surrounding townhouses and were mopping up. A fireman who had been watching Dunkley's conversation with the sergeant wandered over.

‘Was he a mate of yours?'

‘Yes.' Dunkley nodded as he wiped his face with his hands.

‘Sorry mate,' he said. ‘We did our best.'

‘What happened?'

‘Well, it's hard to say . . . there'll be an investigation. But . . . and I don't mean any offence . . . the place was filled with old newspapers and other rubbish. It was a fire trap. That's how accidents like this happen.'

Dunkley looked at the blackened townhouse.

‘This was no accident.'

Frank W Vinson felt the cool, salty breeze wash over him from an opening in the ship's hull. He was exercising alone in the hangar-deck gym of the USS
George Washington
, just twelve feet above the waterline.

It had taken the rear admiral some time to gain confidence on the Woodway Curve treadmill, but he could now sustain a cracking pace. He was in the groove and this was his meditation. A punishing fitness regime had been the commander's salvation following the humiliating retreat of his carrier strike group in the Taiwan Strait.

Congress and the press had demanded a scapegoat. He'd been hauled before the House Committee on Armed Services and all but labelled a coward.

Despite being cleared of misconduct, Vinson was damaged goods and his health had deteriorated.

‘Get fit,' a naval doctor had urged him. ‘You need to do something that you can control. The fitter you are, the better you'll be able to cope with the pressure.'

So Vinson had promised himself two things: he'd get in the best shape of his life, and he'd never retreat again.

He'd resisted offers of a quiet desk job in DC. This sailor would not fade away.

Besides, atonement might lie over the horizon that he was running to catch. His orders were to sail to the Philippines.

His eyes were haunted, stone-grey blank instead of blue.

Martin Toohey sat down beside Harry Dunkley, who sat hunched over a cafe table, pondering a half-eaten slice of cake and the death of Trevor Harris.

Toohey motioned to the waitress. ‘Short black, thanks. Harry?'

‘Nah, I'm right.'

They sat in silence until the espresso arrived, then Dunkley leaned closer to Toohey.

‘We are in fucking danger.'

The former prime minister nodded. He was the ringleader of this circus and was again experiencing the heavy burden of leadership.

‘What do you know, Harry? What did the police tell you?'

‘Nothing,' Dunkley responded, his voice quivering. ‘I got a message from Trevor, telling me to come to his home. That's it.
In the space of an hour his house burned to the ground and he was dead.'

‘But the police say there were no suspicious circumstances.'

‘They also said Kimberley was the victim of a gay bashing. What the fuck do you reckon?'

Dunkley ticked off a list.

‘Celia, my former girlfriend, is frightened off. I'm threatened with a gun. You are punted from office. Benny Hadid is in an asylum.'

Toohey searched Dunkley's face as he contemplated his response. He could see how vulnerable he'd become and worried that he might return to the easy embrace of alcohol and despair.

‘Say what you suspect is true, that Webster had Harris murdered. So, do we run?' Toohey asked.

Dunkley stabbed the table with his fingers.

‘We can't win. This fucking madman commands an army and he is ruthless. He's beat us to every turn and his henchmen found Trevor before he'd had a chance to tell us what he'd discovered.'

Toohey shrugged.

‘You might be right. Maybe we can't win. You run back to Sydney and leave all this behind. But could you live with yourself? You could hide from Webster but you couldn't hide from your conscience.'

Toohey searched for a reaction, for a sign that his words were having an effect. There was nothing but the hopeless stare he'd confronted when he'd found his unlikely friend in a prison cell.