Freefall Read online

  UNDER EDEN

  Part 2:

  FREEFALL

  ——-

  MARK FURNESS

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  About UNDER EDEN

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  UNDER EDEN. Part 2: Freefall

  About UNDER EDEN

  Gar Hart is a journalist with a gun. It might help him live long enough to break this story...

  Why would a billionaire’s son mutilate his lips in a prison cell?

  The family blames mental illness and begs for privacy. Hart might have swallowed the PR line – if the people he’d quizzed about the incident weren’t being murdered.

  “GAR HART, A BLOODY-minded press hack twisting the tail of a leviathan as submerged as le Carré's dark webs. Furness crackles out fire and ice in a wry voice, piles on inventive and ingenious mysteries, body-slams action like it's hot type, and bleeds characters as damaged and compromised as any Child, Connolly, or Grisham." Tom Flood, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.

  IN Part 2: Freefall ...

  Hart travels to London from Sydney to farewell his dying father-in-law, Malcolm Halliday. A former newspaper editor, Halliday provides an unexpected lead in Hart’s quest to uncover links between the billionaire Charles East and the shadowy British tycoon, John K Baker – links that Hart has dubbed ‘The Ebola Network’.

  As Hart ventures from ritzy inner London to beachside Brighton and the old Roman city of Bath on the trail, he learns that flying close to Baker can be as hazardous to him and his children as the real Ebola virus.

  Why does Hart turn up in the emergency department of a London hospital? The police aren’t persuaded by his explanation.

  Hart is a master of the self-inflicted wound, and his enemies work up a plan.

  UNDER EDEN IS A THREE-part mini-series of breakout international crime thrillers that follow Hart and his colleagues from The Citizen online news service across the world as they try to expose secrets that the wealthy and powerful will kill to keep.

  The author of Under Eden, Mark Furness, was a foreign correspondent who lived and worked in the US, the UK, Australia, and East Asia. He’s also been a corporate spin doctor and political lobbyist. He claims his novel is a work of fiction. The good characters are based on real people. The black hats are purely fictional. Truly.

  I

  THE RED Emperor restaurant on the King Street Wharf corporate eating strip on the western edge of the Sydney CBD was a roaring waterfall of voices. The glass and steel box was chock full of men and women in suits, with bigger waistlines and blander faces than the younger, finely chiselled mob that frequented the Babel Bar that I’d propped up a few nights ago. Steele was already seated, reclining like he owned the place, with a bottle of white wine half consumed and a few heavily pecked starter dishes littering the table.

  “Nasty,” I said. I couldn’t miss the parallel red and yellow scratch marks on the skin near his left ear.

  “It wasn’t Karen,” he said, stroking the scratches, sliding his wine glass over the tablecloth so the waiter could get an easy pour. “One of my nephews in the swimming pool.”

  I wasn’t convinced. Karen Steele was, on balance, a tolerant wife: volcanic at times. Steele, on the other hand, cruised through life like a basking shark, feeding opportunistically on stray delights. I was waiting for the right moment to talk to Steele about Karen’s appearance. The last time I saw her, her muscles were toned like she’d been going to the gym, she’d cut her hair shorter and dyed out the grey. She looked good and so did her clothes. My father displayed similar signs, including teeth-whitening, before he walked out on my mother.

  “How’s Beth?” I said. I’d not seen his teenage daughter since her birthday almost three months ago.

  “Karen reckons she needs counselling.”

  He must have noticed the quizzical look on my face. “Beth,” he clarified.

  Steele gazed blankly from our balcony table over the flashy wharves stocked with charter sailing catamarans and multi-story fibreglass cruisers. He clearly found the seas of family rough going, so I changed course to someone else’s troubles.

  “So what do you know about Bart Hills death? True he was a regular heroin user?”

  “Ah,” he said, brightening. “The story’s changing a little. His flatmate says no. Apparently he was with a stray woman that night; they were playing magic shit with a Ouija board in his room, but she’s disappeared off the radar. She may have been the supplier. Cops say he got knocked by some extra pure. There were half a dozen other deaths around the city via the same gear. Of course none of the other corpses had a neon name like Hills and his dad, the celebrity baby whisperer, so there hasn’t been any publicity on that wider point - yet. No-one at my paper gives a shit about Jack Nobody and his girlfriend. But I’ve managed to squeeze in a comment piece for tomorrow. A community service announcement. Hopefully the weekend users will read it. ‘A little dab’ll do ya’ - that’s our message. Though the smack-head food chain should have twigged by now and diluted it for economic purposes.”

  “I tell you what,” I said, “the Easts have thrown so much at me in the last couple of days, there’s got to be a serious cover-up. Problem is I can’t get a clean line on anything. Charles is kissing my arse one minute, then threatening me the next. His kids are working behind his back, or appear to be. Then the old fucker’s lunatic chauffeur turns up at the Pickled Pig this morning, dressed like a banker, with a stiletto in his jacket and tries to terrorise me.”

  I told him what I knew about Oscar ‘Silver Dog’ Petersen.

  “Tricky,” said Steele, swirling the dregs of pale wine in his glass, holding it up to the sunlight like he was trying to discern the future.

  “What can you see?”

  “Grief. Infinite grief.”

  “You’re perking me up.”

  “Ah,” he said, putting his glass back on the table and reaching across to pat the back of my hand. “Petersen’s probably just a run-of-the mill psychopath who’ll self-destruct. Unlike you, mate.”

  I told Steele about the Easts’ murky links to John K. Baker and Cavalcade, and that something smelled around the drowning of Baker’s partner a few years ago, the event that put Baker on top of the Cavalcade heap in London.

  “That’s great,” he said. “But you’re just telling me a story about some apex predators who like to share horses and yachts, and one fell in the water.”

  “What? You reckon I should call it quits and go back to chasing fire engines like Silver Dog says?”

  “Let’s face it. You might be barking up a tree without a cat in it. And now you’re just annoying the tree’s owners.”

  Steele’s phone rang. He walked outside to take it. Maybe Steele was right about the empty tree. I felt tired, flat as a dropped beer, as my father-in-law likes to say.

  A whole roasted snapper was lying on a plate on the table of the diners beside us. I could swear it winked at me. I saw myself back in the bush with my head stuck in the wombat hole. I crossed my fingers that the fish wouldn’t start talking.

  Steele returned from his phone call, ruffled my hair and sat down. He bared his teeth a
nd pretended he was curling an invisible moustache with his fingers. He’d either scored some stimulating drugs, some information, or he was on a promise with a stray feline. Maybe all three at once, he looked that pleased.

  “Cheer up. Just got something for you, hand-delivered a moment ago.” He pulled a white envelope out of his pocket. “I might have found the cat that’s up your tree.”

  I took the blank-faced envelope. It was gummed and closed.

  “Don’t read it here,” he said, pouring himself another glass. “We’ve knocked off for the day.”

  “I need a hint.”

  “It ties Henry East and Bart Hills together in a right nefarious little caper. But you’ll need a clear head to decipher it.”

  We ate and drank, and in their absence, we verbally savaged most of the people we knew. It was a large list of names which took time to get through, so we were forced to consume several bottles of white then red.

  “You know what I don’t get?” said Steele, filling his glass. “Your mate Charles East owns six hundred million bucks, probably more. Why wouldn’t he just put it all in the bank at five per cent interest per annum - I’m talking on average - and make what? Thirty million a year, like fucking clockwork! He pays the same price for a coffee as you and me. How much does someone want, for fuck’s sake?”

  “Some people can never have enough,” I said, waving my empty glass at him.

  My phone pinged. It was a text from my artist neighbour at Moon Hill, Tania Watson, whom I’d sent a note to after winding up with my head down the wombat hole: Just got your message. Angels Tears = my magic mushroom potion. Fell from my bag. Help yourself, but proceed with caution. I’m heading OS. Xx, T

  “Hallelujah!” I blurted.

  Steele grinned, like he knew I’d just got some good news, and then he waved like the queen at four fat men seated at the table beside us who appeared disapproving of my lowbrow religious outburst. “Pop your teeth back in,” he advised them.

  Tania’s text had me feeling like I did when my parachute popped the only time I went skydiving. In a hushed voice, I told Steele about my night with Tania, and the aftermath. The punchline, just received, was that her tequila was infused with hallucinogenic psilocybin from some Blue Mountain’s toadstools, meaning my brain had not stuffed up of its own accord. Steele wanted to drive straight out to the bush for a swig.

  I pointed out that neither of us was in the best shape for driving. Steele countered that we could give it damn good crack. But I came up with a better idea.

  “Call the Drug Squad.”

  “Excellent thinking.” Steele hit speed dial on his phone. Nancy Cross, the Personal Wealth Editor of The Sydney Daily News, semi-secretly known as the head of the paper’s in-house Drug Squad, could get the best cocaine in the city. He left a voice message.

  We decided to proceed to a newly opened bar named The Present, mainly because it was a short walk and would limit the wasteful gap between drinks. Soon we were clumping down stairs into the underground venue, gripping the handrail, passing a neon sign that read: Welcome to The Present. No Past. No Future. Steele added bourbon shots to our opening order of red wine and cigars.

  I remember clicking my jaw with the ambition of making a set of Olympic rings from the smoke. Through the resultant fog, I tried to explain to Steele the feeling I had about the East case, of sticking my hand through a hole in a wall into an invisible place and not being able to pull it back because something had grabbed me.

  I believe Steele handed me fresh shots and said: “Let’s smash the wall and see what’s there.”

  II

  I WOKE on my bed, jacket on, shoes and all. The radioactive green digits on my alarm said 8:55. From the blaze of light through my window, I figured it was AM. My brain felt like a grimy inner-city neighbourhood, overcrowded, crawling with thoughts. Images of weird people in bars flashed on and off. To top these sensations off, a bunch of lunatics grabbed jackhammers and started demolition work on the inside of my skull. I would have hit them with painkillers and water if they were handy, but they weren’t.

  I used my hands to turn my head to face the ceiling. After a bit more effort I managed to prop myself up on the pillows. From a distance, my face looked okay in the wall mirror. At least I was at home. I put a finger to my jugular to measure my heart rate and blood pressure, and weigh the odds of a brain bleed coming on. I was in the safety zone, I thought.

  I put my hand in my jacket pocket, searching for the envelope that Steele had given me at lunch time yesterday. It was there. I tore the envelope in my rush to open it and extracted several sheets of A4 paper. They were printed copies of a chain of emails. I was too nauseous to read more than a sentence and dropped the papers on my bed.

  I reached into the other pocket of my jacket for the memory that never lies: my phone. I checked for voice messages, text and email. There were fifteen calls to the Drug Squad’s Nancy Cross from my phone, none of them answered. I gave up looking at my call register after the first couple of pages. The night had been all beer, wine and spirits – a terrible combination. Things got worse as I sifted through more embers.

  I found a photo, taken at 3:21am. Steele was puffy-faced and slit-eyed holding a tumbler of tea-coloured fluid on ice. He had a young woman I recognised under his other arm. Vicky Gleason had been a cadet journalist under both Steele and I. Now she worked in PR somewhere.

  There were other photos. My newish work colleague Claire Styler and her husband were caught in a red-eyed flash, seated on a purple sofa. There was another of me looking far too friendly next to Claire. I didn’t remember crossing paths with her until I saw that photo. What did I say, and to whom? Who else had we encountered?

  I stood slowly and shed my stained clothes beside the bed. They were going to make my dry cleaner rich.

  “Good night?” asked Alice as I staggered naked, dragging a towel, past the kitchen on my way to the bathroom. I hadn’t heard her come home from the airport.

  “Excellent, thanks.” I struggled to get the towel around my waist.

  “What’s that on your back?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Scratch marks. On your back.”

  “I had a wrestle with Steele.” I made that up. I hoped Alice was joking.

  “It looks like the hug of the beast,” she said.

  I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. There were scratch marks on my back, on the skin just under my shoulder blades. I counted four each side. Fingernail marks?

  The hot rain of the shower brought me back a bit. About fifteen minutes of it, plus several glasses of cold water to drink with a couple of codeine-based painkillers I kept for emergencies. Wrapped in a towel, I sat on the end of my bed holding a wodge of toilet paper over a bleeding razor chip on my Adam’s apple. My phone started its police whistling. The name on the screen: Karen Steele. She’d be fact-checking Steele’s story about last night, if he even went home. I let it ring out.

  I managed to get dressed in a fresh suit: stuff the tie. Fred arrived to pick Alice up and take her and some clothes back to his parents’ house, which helped my headache. I padded down our front steps and drifted into the street where I flagged a taxi and headed to the office at Circular Quay. My phone whistled again. Jack Darling was calling. I licked my lips to muster my best diction.

  “Hey, mate,” I said too brightly.

  “Gar, you have a problem. A serious problem.”

  “What is it?”

  “Why the fuck would you make a death threat against Charles East?”

  III

  “A WHAT?”

  “A death threat,” said Jack. “His lawyers lodged a complaint this morning with the New South Wales Police. They’ve copied our head office in London and HQ has passed it to me. East wants you charged with making a threat to kill under the Crimes Act. It carries a penalty of up to ten years in prison.”

  “This is bullshit. How am I meant to have done this?”

  “Did you phone East last
night?”

  “No ... I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t THINK so? Fuck, mate. They also want the police to press another charge of using a telecommunications device in an offensive manner. That carries a prison term too. What the hell were you doing?”

  I stopped the taxi, handed the driver some cash, and stepped on to the pavement. My legs were wobbly, my mouth dry, my eyes burning. I walked into a nearby park and fell to sitting with my back against a tree. I told Jack what had happened over the past week: about my encounter with Bart Hills before he OD’d; my suspicions about Sandy Wallace scouting for East; my visit to Tamerlane and my video call with Henry, culminating in the threats from the silver dog yesterday.

  “You’ve fucked up big time, mate. You’ve given East the opening he wanted to shut you down.”

  I put my phone on open speaker while Jack read me the nauseating details of East’s complaint. While Jack talked, it enabled me to scroll through my handset’s call register. Charles East’s number wasn’t on the first page, or the second. It was on the third.

  “I did make two calls,” I said. “Or more accurately, the calls were made from my phone.”

  “Are you saying a third party used your phone?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ve listened to the voice recording they attached to the complaint, Gar. The one East’s lawyers have given to the police. It’s you! Unless they’ve found a very good fucking actor.”

  “What next then?”

  “London HQ says if you did it, we have to suspend you. You need to get a lawyer and get advice on dealing with the police. Don’t go to the office. I’ll talk to Claire. She’ll be in charge for now. I don’t know if I can save your job this time. I’m going to have to think this through. I’ve got to go.”

  Jack emailed me a copy of the complaint, and attached the audio file and a typed transcript. East was a fast mover, I had to give him that. I guessed that I must have ripped into him live on the first call, because there was no recording of it. But he cleverly rejected my second call and diverted me to recorded voice mail, which is where I came to grief. I listened to the file to check that it was my voice: “Listen you thieving old fuck. You’re the one who should be insuring your family. You’re the fucking dead man. I know where you live. I know where you are. I know you. Bang, bang, horse-face. You and your silver dog.”