Mole creek, p.28
Mole Creek, page 28
The woman’s name was Trang Minh but we called her Lucy. When I left Vietnam, I didn’t know that Lucy was pregnant by me. She had a daughter that she didn’t tell me about, her name is Linh and she is your aunt.
When Linh was just a few months old, Lucy was killed by an intruder in her bar. I was always led to believe the killer was an army deserter called Weighorst. I have recently learned this could not possibly have been the case.
It is to my eternal shame that I didn’t investigate this crime when it happened, but now I want to make amends. I have recently spoken to Colonel, formerly Major, Tang, who knows who killed Lucy and why – although all he has told me was that the killer was a friend and ally.
However, according to Colonel Tang, this man had been compromised years earlier during an incident in an area of Saigon called Soul Alley.
As a result, he was recruited as an agent – a spy, if you like – for the USSR, which was financing the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army. Lucy was apparently killed because she was going to expose this person to Tang, not realising that he was a double-agent.
Having been falsely accused of spying herself (while I was there), she effectively signed her own death warrant when she told Tang she was going to expose the spy.
Tang is long retired now so he has finally told me he knows for certain who killed Lucy. But I know his tricks and he may be looking to get some advantage by falsely accusing someone who wasn’t culpable or in any way involved. Suffice it to say that I had two close friends in Vietnam and I believe one of them was Lucy’s killer.
I am not going to name either of them until I’m sure. You know better than I in these times of internet trolls and the like, any accusations may as well be a guilty verdict.
I am writing this now because I think in investigating this crime, I may have kicked over a hornets’ nest and maybe even put my life in danger. I believe the person responsible for Lucy’s death is still working for the Russians, probably now as a sleeper.
I’ll say no more at this stage except that I am calling my prime suspect ‘Alden’. If I am right, the stakes are much higher than you could ever imagine. If I am wrong, at least a good man won’t suffer the consequences of a false accusation that could destroy his reputation, his legacy and what’s left of his future.
Pete McAuslan
Mole Creek
Xander has just finished reading this when his phone vibrates. It’s Althea. He thinks about not answering, there’s a text file that he wants to read simply called, Linh, but takes it on what must have been the last ring.
‘Oh, thank God!’ she says. ‘You at the cottage?’
‘Uh-huh,’ he replies.
‘Okay, you gotta get out now.’
‘Why?’
‘There are police officers on their way to arrest you.’
‘Arrest me? What for?’
‘They found your DNA on the jack that killed Johnny Spangler.’
‘They what!? That’s impossible.’
‘I know. I tried to tell them. But Danzig …’ Her voice tails off, but then gathers renewed urgency. ‘You need to get out of there now.’
‘Okay.’
‘One other thing. The council dog pound was broken into last night. Someone took Lorenzo’s dogs.’
‘Shit!’
‘Yeah. He could be paying you a visit too. Just so you know, Pete’s gun is in the top drawer of the desk.’
‘Who …? How?’
‘Never mind. Get it and use it if you need to. But right now you need to get out of the cottage before my colleagues arrive.’
‘Okay. On it.’
‘And don’t try to contact me. I’ll try to fix it at this end then come to you when the coast is clear.’ She hangs up before he can ask how long that is likely to take.
Xander hesitates before putting the laptop and USB drive in his bag and grabbing his hiking jacket, a groundsheet, some water, a couple of protein bars and Pete’s binoculars. He goes out through the back door and runs across the narrow clearing to the edge of the pine forest. It’s a commercial plantation so the trees stand in uniform rows, like an army ready to swoop down the hill and swamp the village below. The gaps between them make it easier to run deeper into their sheltering ranks. Xander finds a spot where he can see the cottage but is unlikely to be seen himself, and settles down to wait.
About ten minutes later, a police car cruises up the road from Mole Creek and turns up the track towards the cottage. Two uniformed cops get out and cautiously approach the house, their hands on the hilts of their undrawn weapons. Xander is still focusing the field glasses when one of them disappears inside the house. He reappears moments later, shaking his head. They go around to the side of the cottage and spend an inordinate amount of time examining the old Volvo, inside and out. Eventually they return to their vehicle and sit with both doors open, allowing the cooling evening breeze to dissipate whatever funk they have accumulated on their day’s driving. After about forty-five minutes, as the first shadows of dusk stretch across the paddock, they close up and drive off.
Xander sits in the shaded solitude of his lair and waits. If they’re smart, they’ll come back and look for signs of life. He decides to chance it, raises his laptop’s screen and reads the file called ‘Linh’. It’s a computer translation of a file probably written in Vietnamese. He reads and re-reads it. Some of the recent events in his life start to make sense. Not everything, not by a long chalk, but enough.
About an hour later a vehicle’s headlights penetrate the misty gloom on the main road and the police car stops at the paddock gate. Xander surmises that they have been to the pub and, now refreshed and relaxed, they can’t be bothered to negotiate the airlock gates, seeing the cottage sits in complete darkness. The car turns around and disappears along the road, back towards Mole Creek.
Sitting in the dark, tree branches rustling gently above him, cold rising through the groundsheet, Xander waits but the police car doesn’t return. He has plenty of time to think about his predicament and knows he is in danger, but he’s not sure from whom. He knows Althea has lied to him, but then she warned him about the cops. The question of how his DNA ended up on the jack that failed and killed Johnny Spanners can wait. He has the perfect alibi – he was sleeping with a cop – but only if she chooses to confirm his story. Meanwhile, both she and Donnie Carrick are pointing at Lorenzo. Was he seduced by the feeling that his grandfather’s friend was so like Pete? Is that what Lorenzo wanted, so he could manipulate him? And what about Pete’s note? Someone who was a good friend of Pete’s is a sleeper mole for the Russians. Now Althea says Geoffrey knew Lorenzo was a spy. After another ten minutes of waiting, enveloped by darkness and doubt, Xander gathers up his kit, makes his way cautiously back to the cottage and re-enters through the back door.
Waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark, he notices a triangle of white protruding from the jamb of the front door. He opens the door and it falls to the ground. In the half-light he can see it is a police business card. He picks it up and reads the message scrawled on the back in thin black ballpoint. Squinting at it, he reads: ‘We think you might be in danger. Please call us as soon as you get this message.’
The guys sent to arrest him think he’s so dumb that he’ll invite them back to his home. Xander laughs and shakes his head just before a burly arm goes around his throat from behind and he feels something sharp, he’s guessing the point of a knife, jab the skin on his neck, precisely on his carotid artery.
‘Don’t fucken try anything and we’ll all be okay,’ a familiar voice whispers in his ear. Then a dog licks his hand.
Chapter 38
Xander is glad that he’s been exercising again, not because he’s in any position to engage in hand-to-hand combat, but his muscles are loose enough to allow his hands to be tied behind his back and to a table leg as he sits on the floor.
In the gloom of the cottage’s front room, he can make out Lorenzo’s shape, but not his expression. The big man is also sitting on the floor, well out of sight of anyone passing on the road below, his back against the rear of the sofa. The dogs lie either side of him, blissfully content to be with their master again. He is holding a handgun.
‘Give me one good reason I shouldn’t shoot you,’ he says.
‘What for?’ Xander asks.
‘For telling the cops about my hide-out.’
‘I didn’t, that would be reason number one. But before you do anything, explain why you killed Pete.’
‘I didn’t fucking kill Pete,’ Lorenzo says. ‘He was the only friend I had in world.’ The dogs stir at the anger in Lorenzo’s voice. ‘Only human friend,’ he corrects himself.
‘If you found that gun in the desk drawer, it was Pete’s,’ Xander says.
‘Shit. I haven’t felt the weight of one of these in years. You sure it was Pete’s?’
‘Althea told me I’d find it there. I’m guessing she maybe hoped I would shoot you with it if you turned up.’
‘Your fuck-buddy.’
‘My alibi.’
‘For what?’
‘Killing Johnny Spanners. I was with her at the time.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Why?’
‘If you’d done it, I couldn’t have.’
‘I didn’t. Sorry.’
‘Me neither,’ says Lorenzo. ‘Okay, convince me you didn’t tell your cop girlfriend where my cave was and I’ll let you go.’
‘Well, I can tell you who did tell her.’
‘Go on.’
‘You,’ says Xander.
‘Me?’
‘And me too, I suppose. Not directly, but you told Johnny that you had watched me along the trail until I was about an hour from the main road. He told Althea. I told her how long I had been walking. I guess they triangulated from that.’
‘Fuck,’ says Lorenzo. ‘And you are sleeping with this girl?’
‘Hey, as far as she’s concerned, you’re just a crazy Vietnam vet living illegally in a national park. A potential danger to yourself and passing hikers. Oh, and a spy.’
‘A spy,’ Lorenzo splutters. ‘Who the fuck for?’
Xander’s phone rings, loudly and unexpectedly, the light from its screen illuminating the looks of surprise on both their faces. Lorenzo takes it off the desk and shows the screen to Xander.
‘Who is it?’ Lorenzo asks.
‘No idea,’ Xander replies.
‘Want to take it?’
‘I think I maybe should.’
‘Okay. No funny business.’ Lorenzo swipes the answer button and presses ‘speaker’.
‘Xander?’ a woman’s voice says. ‘It’s Nicole. Nicole Swift.’
‘Hi, Nicole. Good to hear from you again, and so soon.’
‘Xander, is there something you’re not telling me?’
Xander looks at Lorenzo, who shakes his head and puts his finger to his lips. ‘Be careful’ is the clear message.
‘Not sure what you mean,’ Xander says.
‘You said you visited Donnie Carrick in Canberra.’
‘I did,’ he says. ‘He was a friend of my grandad’s in Vietnam.’
‘And you weren’t working on a story?’
‘What story? He’s a diplomat, that’s all, and we didn’t even talk about that stuff.’
‘A diplomat for now,’ she says. ‘The word around the traps is that he’s being considered for the top job at the Pentagon when he gets back to the States.’
‘The what?’
‘The current Secretary of Defence has got himself into some sort of sexting scandal and the Yanks are saying – off the record, of course – that your lunch buddy is in line to take over. He’s a bit of a star over there. This guy has been there, done it all, and has a chestful of medals that would do a South American dictator proud.
‘He gets around.’
‘The rumour is that Canberra is just a staging post while he runs down the clock on the seven years he needs to be out of the military before he can take over at the Pentagon. That’s the law there. And to make sure there’s no chance of any controversy or scandal before he gets promoted, I guess.’
‘That makes sense.’
‘And you’re telling me that you had lunch with the man who is going to be the most powerful civilian in the free world, after the president himself, and you didn’t even know?’
‘That’s awkward. I had no idea. How did you hear about it?’
‘When I asked around about him, all the Canberra Defence bigwigs were creaming themselves at the thought of that level of direct access to someone they know,’ she says, adding, ‘and like.’
‘He said nothing to me,’ Xander says. ‘But then why would he?’
‘You sure you’re not holding out on me?’
‘Nicole, I don’t even have a paper to write for if I was. If I hear anything, you’ll be my first call.’
‘I better be,’ she says. ‘Bye.’
‘You went to see Donnie?’ Lorenzo says as he clicks off the call.
‘Didn’t you suggest it? Anyway, I found out Pete had been in Canberra. The reason why seemed pretty obvious.’ Xander squirms. ‘Now do you believe that I didn’t give away the location of your cave?’
‘Yeah … and maybe the fucker who killed Johnny got something out of him too.’
‘True,’ Xander says. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could untie me.’
‘Oh, sorry, kid,’ Lorenzo says. ‘I forgot about that.’
He produces a knife of Crocodile Dundee proportions and slices through the bindings on Xander’s wrists. They both stay sitting on the floor facing each other, Xander rubbing his hands.
‘Okay, what did Donnie say when you met him?’
‘Aaah, this is going to be awkward too,’ Xander says. ‘He was the one who said you were a spy and you got Johnny Weighorst to kill Lucy because she was going to expose you.’
‘Fuck. I wish I hadn’t untied you now.’
‘It’s okay. I know that’s bullshit. I know who really killed Lucy and I think I know why Pete was killed too.’
‘Okay, Mr Storyteller, do your thing.’
***
The story comes together in Xander’s mind as he tells it, based on Pete’s notes, Linh’s message and his own research.
‘Imagine an up-and-coming young army officer had been blackmailed and turned in Soul Alley, just as Althea said you had been,’ he tells Lorenzo. ‘Althea just took what happened to this officer and replaced his name with yours. That’s why it all sounded plausible.
‘But the guy who was turned, every time he did one more favour for the Russians, they had their claws in him deeper. Back then, the Russians were investing so much money and political capital in the Vietcong, they needed a reliable source of information. Who better to provide unbiased intel than someone on the other side?
‘Then, when Vietnam is over, the officer returns to America and moves up through the ranks and then eventually into the diplomatic sphere, probably a sleeper as the Russians wouldn’t want to risk exposing him until he’d gone as far as he was likely to go.’
‘Secretary of Defence good enough for you?’ Lorenzo says.
‘Exactly,’ Xander says. ‘And let’s not rule out the possibility that the Russians engineered the sexting scandal that has the current guy on the skids. But just when the Russians’ prize asset was about to truly bear fruit, ascending to the highest echelons of the Pentagon – a juicy prize they wouldn’t have dared dream about – Pete starts asking questions about Lucy’s death, not realising that the man he was asking for help was her killer. Well, not until he figured out that he’d been lying to him.
‘Carrick sensed Pete was suspicious and believed it was only a matter of time before he joined the dots. They may not even have known that he had tracked down Linh, his daughter, and that she was coming to Mole Creek to help her father piece together what had happened to Lucy. Whatever happened, she got here before they did. According to a note she put on the memory stick, she took Pete’s laptop, planning to backup all his stuff and return it.’
‘Why?’ Lorenzo says. ‘What’s the rush?’
‘She says Pete was distraught and maybe a bit drunk. He wouldn’t tell her the name of the man who killed her mother – he gave her the cover name, Alden …’
‘The Quiet American …’ Lorenzo says. ‘I looked it up.’
‘Me too, but I didn’t make the connection until I after met Carrick,’ Xander says. ‘That’s what Pete used to call him. Anyway, according to Linh, Pete was very drunk and so ripped apart at being betrayed by someone he had loved and trusted, that he was talking about erasing all his notes. Deleting the whole thing. I guess he didn’t know about Carrick’s impending promotion. Linh wasn’t having it. This is about her mother’s killer, remember? She took the laptop away so she could copy all Pete’s files for safe-keeping – from Pete, if no one else. After she was gone the Russian came here and killed Pete, making it look like suicide by sending a ‘goodbye cruel world’ note from his phone. When Linh went back to return Pete’s laptop, he was dead and the police were already there. Meanwhile, the Russian set about tracking down and erasing every file that had anything about Carrick on it.’
‘You do realise how nuts this all sounds, don’t you?’ Lorenzo says.
‘It gets crazier, trust me. Two days before he killed Pete, the Russian broke into my flat in Sydney and took all my computer files. Then, when I got here a couple of days later and refused to believe Pete took his own life, he broke into my hotel room and deleted all Pete’s backup files and bricked my computer. He probably thought that would be enough since there was no other evidence to implicate Carrick. He possibly didn’t know Linh had made a copy of everything on a memory stick before she left Pete’s laptop at the airport. Even if he did, he probably thought she’d keep for later. She’d be easy to track down when she was back in Vietnam.’
