[0850 HOURS LOCAL TIME]
[OUTSKIRTS OF CANBERRA]
The first firefighting rotorcraft that the Angels saw flew right overhead as they approached the outer suburbs of Canberra. A monsoon bucket swung underneath, trailing a thin line of water that glinted through the haze of smoke in the unnatural and sinister twilight. The rotorcraft was followed by three others.
“We made it,” Wall said, almost disbelievingly.
But well behind schedule, Price thought. They had just ten minutes to get to the rendezvous point at the Congress building.
The Tsar lay on the floor in the rear of the cab. His eyes were open. Barnard sat with him, giving him measured sips of water.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Cut yourself shaving,” Barnard said.
“Nice to have you back with us,” Price said, looking around from the front seat.
“Damn,” The Tsar said weakly. “I was having a really nice dream.” His voice was scratchy and hoarse.
“What about?” Barnard asked, gently stroking his forehead. It was an uncharacteristic gesture for her.
“I don’t remember,” he said. “But I think you were in it.”
“Was she naked?” Wall asked, earning himself a weak fist bump from The Tsar but a flying wad of blood-soaked dressings from Barnard.
Strange, ghostly light poured into the cab through the side windows, colouring The Tsar’s face to a dusky red. His eyes were fixed on the sun, a bloodshot orb patterned like the moon, watching them from low on the horizon.
“Whenever I see the sun,” he said, “I’m reminded that I live on a humongous spinning ball of rock hurtling around a giant ball of fire.”
“What’s your point?” Barnard asked.
“How insignificant we are in the scheme of things,” The Tsar said.
“That’s bull. It’s all relative,” Barnard said.
“What’s relative?” Price asked.
“The scheme of things,” Barnard said. “You may think you’re insignificant in terms of the solar system, but to some ants’ nest you just stood on, you’re pretty freaking major. You’re a force of nature, an act of God. It’s all relative.”
The Tsar tried to laugh, but managed only a single hiccupping sound. His eyes closed again and he was silent. His breathing was shallow and quick, like that of a small child.
“Tsar?” Barnard asked. “Tsar?”
There was no response.
“When we get to the city we should go to the hospital like Wall suggested,” Barnard said. “Leave The Tsar there. He’s lost too much blood. At least in a hospital he’d have a fighting chance.”
“Not going to happen,” Price said. “Brogan was right. The Puke disguise won’t fool a doctor, and once they realise there’s one fox loose in the farmyard, they’ll pull out all stops to find the rest of us.”
“If they haven’t already,” Wall said.
“So The Tsar is expendable, is that what you’re saying?” Barnard asked, rounding suddenly on Price.
“We all are,” Price said.
Barnard glared at her for a moment, then lowered her eyes and nodded. “We’re going to be late,” she said. “We’ll miss the rendezvous.”
“We’ll make it if we hurry,” Price said. “And if there are no more hold-ups.”
“Good luck with that,” Brogan said weakly.
“Oh, great,” Wall said. “She’s awake.”
Kozi had said Azoh was young, but she hadn’t said how young. And Kozi had also neglected to tell him one other fact. Azoh was a girl.
Her entrance to the council chamber was a grand affair. Surrounded by her personal guard, the Azaykin, she entered in a procession, led by her most senior advisors. She wore bright blue robes, flowing like the sea amid the contrasting desert sand colour of the Azaykin. Her advisors wore a deeper brown.
They made their way slowly through the room, arriving at the ceremonial chair. The leader of the High Council, Field Marshall Leozii, formally offered her his hand, which she accepted. He then helped her to the chair.
Azoh’s eyes were soft. Her face was covered with ornate jewellery attached by piercings through her eyebrows, ears and nose. Elaborate tattoos covered her cheeks and forehead.
If Chisnall had to guess, he would have put her at no more than seventeen or eighteen years old, although he suspected she was older than she looked.
The salt shaker rattled a little on the tray with the other condiments he was carrying. Chisnall had been selected to present Azoh with a tray of appetisers, another formal part of the ceremony.
There was no doubt in Chisnall’s mind that the Peacemakers had played a hand in that. It could be no coincidence that he had been chosen for this tremendous honour.
But Azoh was a girl.
Had Kozi deliberately withheld that information from him, worried that it might affect his decision? Or had she simply not deemed it relevant, or important enough to tell him?
After all, why should it matter? Killing Azoh would stop the war. It didn’t matter what gender, age or hair colour Azoh had, this was not about her. She was a pawn. A piece to be played in an interplanetary game of chess. No, more than a pawn, a queen who had to be taken.
And yet for some reason it did matter.
Azoh sat and, as she did, her gaze swept around the room. It took in everyone, one by one, only for a second, but when her eyes met his, Chisnall felt that she was indeed seeing inside his brain, into his soul, as if she knew his every secret. Her eyes seemed to probe his, only for a millisecond, then were gone.
No wonder Bzadians thought Azoh could read their minds, Chisnall thought. He was human, and supposedly safe from her prying mind, but even so, he felt like he had just been through an MRI scanner.
He approached, exactly as he had been instructed, pausing and bowing his head as he neared.
Then she spoke. Her voice was soft and young, a pure sound, like cool spring water bubbling up through rocks, like the first quiet murmurs of a spring shower.
“Do what you must do,” Azoh said. Unbelievably, she was talking to him.
He almost went through with it. Almost. But her words seemed stuck in his brain, circling around and around like a line from a song you cannot get out of your head.
Do what you must do.
He placed the tray of condiments on the table by her side and, keeping his gaze averted – anything to avoid those probing eyes – he backed away, the salt shaker now palmed and secreted in a pocket of his uniform.
“Chef, stop,” a voice commanded next to him.
Chisnall froze, although every instinct told him to run. He looked around to see Field Marshall Leozii standing next to him.
“Where is the salt?” Leozii asked, gesturing at the tray.
The silence seemed overwhelming and to go on for hours, although in reality it was only a few seconds.
“It … has been overlooked,” Chisnall said. “I will return to the kitchen and get some.”
“No need, there is some here,” Leozii said. He took a shaker from his own table. He placed it on Azoh’s food table with a disparaging look at Chisnall. If nothing else, Chisnall thought, his career as a chef was over.
But that could be the least of his problems. He was dismissed with a subtle hand signal from one of Azoh’s advisors. He turned to find Goezlin staring at him, and began the long walk down through the council benches, away from Azoh’s chair. He forced himself to walk slowly but his mind and heart were racing. Had Goezlin identified him?
He increased his pace. He had reached the hall of heroes when he saw Goezlin, flanked by two PGZ agents, emerge from the meeting room behind him.
Chisnall turned a corner and increased the length of his stride, quickening his pace even more without appearing to hurry. A curve in the corridor hid the PGZ agents from sight and only then did he start to run. But there was little point. He had nowhere to go.
“Well, this just keeps getting better,” Brogan said.
They had found a vantage point on top of an unfinished high-rise building, a luxury hotel according to the dilapidated signs on the construction site.
The Congress was completely sealed off. Tanks were rumbling into position on all the roads surrounding it. Crash barriers and barbed wire fences were being erected in a circle on the outer ring-road.
Two rotorcraft, one a surveillance craft, the other a gunship, were circling, maintaining a constant vigil overhead.
“Looks like they’re expecting us,” Wall said.
“They’re expecting something,” Price said.
“So much for no more hold-ups,” Barnard said.
Price wriggled slightly closer to the edge.
Rusted scaffolding and tattered tarpaulins encased the building like a decomposing, peeling skin. It had been under construction when the Bzadians had invaded. They hadn’t completed it, nor had they bothered to tear it down. It stood tall, silent and slowly decaying.
The Angels had found a place to hide the fire truck amid the empty containers and deserted site offices at the rear of the building.
From the second-to-top floor they looked out across the Congress. A rectangular complex in the middle of two concentric ring-roads, it had been largely dug out of a hill. Two curving shapes, like boomerangs, outlined a huge field of long grass above the buildings, which were topped by a massive metal flagpole.
To the east, a blanket of grey smoke suffocated the horizon. The low sun lit the top layer of smoke.
“They’ve locked the place down,” Wall said. “Looks like nobody is getting in or out.”
“We might as well turn around and go home,” Brogan said, and smiled before anyone could say anything. “Just telling it like it is.”
“What do we do now?” Wall asked.
“I don’t know,” Price said with a pointed look at Barnard. “Perhaps if I had more information about the purpose of this mission.”
“It wasn’t necessary,” Barnard said.
“It was necessary for me to do my job,” Price said.
“And if you’d been captured?” Barnard asked.
“I wasn’t,” Price said.
“You nearly were,” Barnard said. “We all very nearly were.”
Price stared at Barnard, fuming, but knowing the other girl was right. The moment was broken by Brogan.
“Where is the rendezvous point?” she asked.
Price answered without taking her eyes off Barnard. “There is a service entrance near the kitchens. We were supposed to meet him there.”
“Well, that’s easy then,” Brogan said. “Ryan won’t just give up. If we missed the rendezvous, he’ll keep trying. All we have to do is to find a way in.”
“Oh, is that all?” Barnard said. “Past armed guards, concrete crash barriers and two giant battle tanks. Why didn’t you just say so before?”
Chisnall looked around frantically. He had a few seconds at most. The kitchen was almost deserted. The chefs were all at the formal greeting of Azoh in the meeting room.
His eyes fell on an industrial-size spray can of cooking oil. Footsteps sounded in the corridor behind him. He snatched up the can and placed it on top of one of the gas elements on the cooking hob, and spun the knob around. The electronic igniter clicked a few times and he could smell the gas, then it lit with a small whoosh. Flames lapped at the base of the spray can.
He upended a large cooking pot and placed it over the can and the clawing flames, concealing them. He moved away from the stove and opened a cupboard, intending to hide the salt shaker, just as Goezlin entered behind him.
Goezlin wasted no time.
“Search him,” he said.
“What are you doing?” Chisnall asked, as the two large PGZ agents grabbed him by the arms.
Goezlin said nothing.
“I am just a chef,” Chisnall protested. “All I did was to forget the salt!”
“Really,” Goezlin said as one of the PGZ agents showed him the salt shaker he had just taken from Chisnall’s pocket.
“A simple mistake,” Chisnall said. It sounded incredibly lame.
“Have it tested,” Goezlin said to one of his agents. “And be careful with it. I doubt that it contains salt.”
“What are you talking about?” Chisnall said.
“You were at Uluru and Wivenhoe,” Goezlin said. “Your name is Chizna.”
“You are mistaken,” Chisnall said. He carefully avoided looking at the pot on the stovetop.
“I did not recognise you at first,” Goezlin said, “because you have changed your appearance. It will be very interesting to see what is in that salt shaker. Perhaps we have just witnessed a human plot to murder Azoh.”
“No!” Chisnall cried.
“I must get back to the meeting,” Goezlin said. “Take him to headquarters. Isolate him. He is extremely dangerous. No one starts the interrogation until I get there.”
Rough hands grabbed Chisnall’s wrists and hauled them to his neck, where a neck cuff secured them in place.
As he was dragged out of the kitchen, Chisnall allowed himself one last, desperate glance at the stove.
Goezlin disappeared back towards the meeting room. Chisnall stumbled along between the two large PGZ agents, wondering how everything could have gone so spectacularly wrong.
And then the oil bomb exploded. Heated beyond its limits, the aerosol can burst, releasing a mist of inflammable oil onto the flames of the stove.
Chisnall didn’t have to see the pot hit the ceiling; he heard it, just as a sheet of flame erupted out through the kitchen door behind them.
Then he was running, taking advantage of the shock that loosened the grip on his arms.
The sprinklers had kicked in. Water was cascading down his face and the floor was slippery. Fire alarms were blaring.
He skidded around a corner and burst through a door, not knowing or caring where it went. An office, it led into a series of larger offices, and he could see another door on the far side. He slammed into the door, but it wouldn’t open. The door he had just come through crashed open again as the PGZ agents reached it. Chisnall ducked down, below the level of the desks, searching for another way out. A door, a window, anything!
He could see nothing, and slid under a desk, hoping against hope that they would somehow miss him. He wrenched at his neck-cuffs, trying to free his hands. Footsteps sounded just metres away. He crawled into a corner, bunching himself up in the shadows. It didn’t help.
The desk above him was suddenly no longer there, tipped over on its side. What replaced it was the large shapes of two PGZ agents.
He barely saw the guns. All he could think about was the salt shaker.
Goezlin would test it. He would find the poison. In his eyes this would be a plot by humans to kill the Bzadian spiritual leader.
The Bzadians were teetering on the brink.
Chisnall had a horrible feeling that he had just pushed them over the edge.
But perhaps that had been Kozi’s plan all along.
A large black bird, a crow, was watching Price, pausing only to peck at something under its feet. Price watched it back. Crows made her uncomfortable. There was something sinister about them. This one watched her, turning its head from side to side, then went back to its meal.
Looking at its claws, Price saw what it was eating. The carcass of another bird. She picked up a stone and threw it at the crow to scare it away. It ignored her and carried on eating. She looked over at Brogan. One question that had never been answered was why Brogan had agreed to come on the mission. Brogan had been close to Chisnall, very close. But she had betrayed him. Now they were within sight of their goal. How was she feeling about seeing him again? Brogan caught Price’s gaze, staring back at her.
“So what are we going to do, LT?” Brogan asked. “Time’s a-wasting.”
“In a hurry to see Chisnall again?” Price asked. The words sounded more bitter than she intended them to.
“What if I am?” Brogan asked.
“He’s not going to have you back,” Price said. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Oh, really?” Brogan said. “Because that’s why I’m really here. To kiss and make up with an old boyfriend.”
“Whatever you think, it’s not going to be easy,” Price said.
“Sure. Life’s hard. And then you die,” Brogan said. “There’s a mousetrap at the end of the maze.”
“She’s right, we got to do something, LT,” Monster said.
“As soon as that bushfire burns through and those Puke soldiers emerge from the stream, they’ll all be looking for us,” Barnard said.
“What the hell?” Wall’s voice dragged Price’s eyes back to the front.
Across the grassy fields of the Congress, people were pouring out of the doorways of the building. The sound of sirens came clearly through the air, already hazy with the smoke from the bushfires.
A thin plume of smoke was rising, somewhere near the centre of the building.
“Chisnall,” Brogan said.
“You don’t know that,” Wall said.
“She right,” Monster said. “Is Chisnall.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s him or not, that fire is our ticket in,” Price said. “We are Oscar Mike, right now.”
The Tsar was still unconscious when they got back to the fire truck.
“Hit the sirens,” Price said.
Monster swerved the machine out of the construction site, around a corner and onto the main road towards the congress. The road was lined with trees, as was the median strip. They crossed an intersection and travelled through a small forested area. Although she had seen aerial photos, Price was still amazed at the amount of greenery and foliage surrounding the building. If the bushfire made it this far, it would find plenty of fuel, she thought.
The soldiers on the barricades saw them coming and wasted no time, pulling back the barricades, waving the fire truck through. Their truck was yellow, not red, a bushfire truck not a city fire engine, but in the heat, the panic of a fire in the heart of their government, no questions were asked. The soldiers left the gates open, and behind them Price heard the wail of more sirens.
“What now?” Wall asked.
“The service entrance is around to the left,” Price said. “Keep an eye out for Chisnall. If they are evacuating the building, then he will be somewhere outside, and that’s the most likely place.”
The fire truck leaned as Monster veered sharply around another corner onto the perimeter road.
“That’s the service entrance, right ahead of us, up that slip road,” Price said.
She had barely finished speaking when Brogan said, “There he is.”
“Where?” Price asked.
“That’s him, that’s Chisnall, straight ahead of us.”
Three figures emerged from the service entrance. One of them with his hands to his neck, the other two holding him, one to each arm.
“You can’t make out his face at this distance,” Barnard said.
“Yes I can,” Brogan said.
“I believe her,” Wall said. “I think she’s right, and my eyesight is not as good as hers.”
“Damn,” Price said. Chisnall’s captors wore the blood red uniform of the PGZ. They shoved Chisnall roughly into the back of an unmarked, white car which took off at speed, emerging on the perimeter road behind them.
Monster gunned the engine, spinning the fire truck around in a handbrake slide, smoke pouring from the tyres. The truck surged forwards after the car as it rounded the corner, then turned onto the bridge to the outer ring-road.
“Do not let them get away!” Price shouted.
If the PGZ agents in the car in front thought there was anything suspicious about the fire truck heading away from the Congress, it didn’t show in their actions. The car moved over slightly to the left to let the fire truck pass.
The white car was in the middle of the overbridge as Monster pulled up alongside. Price looked down to see Chisnall in the back of the car, a PGZ agent next to him. Chisnall’s hands were cuffed to his neck.
Chisnall’s eyes widened as he recognised Price, but only for a second, because that was when the fire truck smashed into the car.
The car had no chance.
The truck hit the side of the car at speed, just behind the door pillar, spinning it sideways then slamming it into the concrete side railings of the bridge in a tangle of bent metal, rubber and broken glass and a shower of concrete shards. The car teetered for a moment on the edge of the bridge, then it was gone.
There was a terrifying silence that seemed to go on forever. Then came the crash as the car hit the roadway below.