Color of Blood(59)

He went back to the entrance and took up a position at his original vantage outside the building, since people were now exiting in solid numbers.

The temperature outside had climbed into the high fifties, and the sun began to poke through the cloud cover. He could see snow-capped mountains in the distance, and his attention began to wander. Sometimes he would notice an extraordinarily attractive woman and would allow himself the pleasure of following her with his gaze for longer than was necessary for the task at hand.

At 3:20 p.m. the headache returned and centered itself directly behind his forehead.

“Crap,” he muttered. Dennis stood up and stretched, balancing the notebook on top of the short brick wall. He raised his arms above his head and absently lowered his outstretched arms, windmill fashion.

He accidentally brushed an older woman who was walking past.

“Sorry,” Dennis said, grabbing the notebook. He was tempted to go back to his hotel, hit the bar, and then go to bed. He took one more cursory glance at the entrance.

He saw two well-dressed Japanese men exit. They held one of the doors for two gorgeous young women that Dennis took for Scandinavian models; both were striking blondes at least six feet tall.

Directly behind the women, a young man walked out, squinting a little in the glare.

Dennis was stunned—the man could be Garder. He was about the correct height and had close-cropped, dark hair. Dennis glanced at the photos quickly and then back at the man walking toward him.

Christ, he thought, it could be Garder, and he’s walking right toward me.

***

There was a sensation of being rigid, as if she had been cemented in place. She regained her bearings and gagged at the taste of the sweet, medicinal vapors in her throat.

Judy tried to raise her right hand to rub her sore neck, but her hand would not move. She tried to open her eyes, but something covered them, and worse, she realized her mouth was tightly bound over with something. She appeared to be lying flat on a hard surface and was restrained, with only her nostrils open. She took big gulps of air through her nose, creating a snorting sound. Something had been inserted into her ears so that she could barely hear herself breathe.

“Hey,” she heard someone say, but the words were distorted and sounded as if they were coming from a cartoon voice.

“She’s coming to,” someone else said. The words sounded high-pitched and silly. Judy briefly wondered if she’d had a stroke or some other neurological injury, but then she slowly assembled the few facts at her disposal: she had been grabbed at her front door and then drugged. She was bound to a table of some sort, blindfolded, and had manipulated sounds piped into her ears by an electronic device that distorted voices.

This was a good sign; they wouldn’t be going through the trouble to change their voices if they didn’t plan to release her. So she waited, trying to calm her heart exploding in her small ribcage.

She heard what sounded like laughter, and then felt a hand on the inside of her right thigh as it slid up between her legs. Judy twisted violently and heard a voice bark, “Stop it! Told you none of that.”

This directive was followed by more laughter, and she estimated it came from perhaps two other people.

Then a cartoony voice came through loud and clear: “G’day, Officer White. How are you doing?”

Judy did not respond.

“Can you hear me? Nod if you hear me.”

Judy nodded.

“Good,” the voice said. “You may have guessed that we’ve altered our voices with this nifty gadget. Kind of like an iPod for criminals, eh?”

More cartoon laughter.

“You know why you’re here, don’t you?”

Judy shook her head and sent out a muffled “No” through her taped mouth.

“Come on, Officer White, you know what’s going on.”

“No!”

“Then we’ll make things so bloody crystal clear to you that even you—a copper—will appreciate the genius of this effort. We started by sending your lovely dad a message. I believe you could call that Phase One.

Judy heard more cartoon laughter.

“We have a very lucrative business here that is being bollocksed up. There are some very wealthy people involved in this import-export business, and they are extremely upset. Two of their shipments—one export at the airport and one import in Fremantle—were recently confiscated, and it made them very, very angry. So you’re probably wondering what that has to do with you then, yes?”

Judy held perfectly still.

What in God’s name are they doing? she thought. Don’t they know I had little to do with that bust? She felt a stab of fear through her chest and again tried to slow her breathing.

“I believe that your AFP team has several informants they’ve planted in our organization. We thought we fixed that leaky faucet, so to speak, by shooting a very large hole in a very small man recently. We thought that would scare the other spies you have inside our organization. But then we recently lost a very large inbound shipment of merchandise, didn’t we?”

Judy was so terrified that she felt nauseated. She had indeed heard rumors of informers on the government payroll feeding tidbits of intelligence back to headquarters, but they were not her informers. Surely they know I have nothing to do with any of the informers, she thought.

“One of our benefactors is a bloody bright fellow,” the voice continued. “He’s convinced me that if your team has informers inside our organization, that it’s only fair that we have more informers inside your organization.”