Читать книгу Pike's Pyramid - Michael Tatlow - Страница 12

Alex settled in her window seat beside him. Blarney suddenly and reluctantly decided that he had to add to her angst. He leaned closer to her and said, ‘Darling, I didn’t stay back there to pick up my pen. I’d better let you know that a gang of thugs—hired killers, I reckon—tried to terminate the two of us at the airport.’

Alex stared with her mouth agape as he told her about the dramas in the toilet and behind her in the lounge. As a few tears dropped from her watery eyes, Alex stretched to the right and hugged him. ‘My life,’ she said, ‘you saved it. Thank you. That hypo needle would have poisoned me, all right.’

After a moment’s silence, Blarney held her right hand and said, ‘From my phone call three and a bit hours ago, the only ones who would have known we’d be at the airport then were Harbek and his staff. Harbek would commission those four rats. He sure would want us silenced. So the ones who tried to murder us were Argo thugs.

‘Hell,’ he blurted, ‘I’ve just realised that they might be the rats who killed Jack!’

‘Yes,’ Alex muttered tensely. ‘You’d better tell the police.’

‘I will later,’ Blarney promised. ‘But if I’d collared the two behind you and then called the cops, we’d be stuck in Prague for weeks; giving evidence and risking more murder attempts. ‘That woman and the thuggish-looking bloke with her obviously understood me. Like the two in the lavatory, I reckon they’re Yanks or Brits.

‘To drive them off, and get a bit of revenge, I told the woman and man that the two in the toilet were dead. They sure raced off to the men’s as I followed you to the plane, love.’

Alex found a thin smile. ‘A good one,’ she said quietly. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you’d actually killed the four of them.’

He nervously wondered to himself what poison was nearly injected into Alex. He now wanted to go back and find and collar the four. Doing that could even result in charges being laid against Harbek. He could let Alex fly on alone. But the plane was taking off. He was annoyed that he had not grabbed the drivers licences or passports from the two he had knocked out in the toilet.

Alex’s long pony tail of hair flopped over her right shoulder. Blarney was pleased to see her go to sleep an hour later as the aircraft flew west above clouds over the Indian Ocean.

He grimaced as he remembered Argo chief Harbek’s bragging about how his empire had enriched networkers in Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Argentina, Mexico and Indonesia. And before then the United States, Canada, Australia and Mexico. The system, Abe had sworn, was infallible.

Dear Jack, a rich American living alone at the hotel, had been a tempting mark for an opportunistic thug. But why such grisly torture? Blarney asked himself again. If Jack was slain to silence him, his papers the killers took would tell them the Australian journalist and his wife were Jack’s confidantes, loaded to report Jack’s evidence to the world’s media. The attackers at the airport, or their bosses, had probably seen the papers. Oh well, he smiled, two of the rats would be crippled for months. But those with Jack’s evidence also had the Pikes’ address in Stanley.

He smilingly re-lived that big jerk of an Argo agent from Budapest elbowing Alex out of the way in their hotel’s lobby a week back as the jerk tried to muscle in on a potential new sucker. Pike had erupted. A left jab, a knee in the Hungarian’s balls and a right cross that flattened his nose. He smiled at the memory of the raw fear on the thug’s face from the floor of the lobby.

Alex had grinned, pointing discreetly at the glowing G. She called his temper The Irish; the half Irish in him. For all its blarney, she had punned, The Irish could land him in big trouble one day.

He looked more like his Tasmanian Aboriginal half, she reckoned. Big brown eyes, strong forehead, big shoulders, curly black hair, skin that looked tanned. At one hundred and ninety-five centimetres, a bit over six feet in the old numbers they preferred. The Abo in him made him gentler, Alex said, but stubborn. She credited the Irish for his gift of the gab. A stingy term, that, for eloquence; he smiled again.

From Melbourne he phoned De Groote and offered to meet him in the top-floor revolving restaurant by Hobart’s harbourside Wrest Point casino hotel.

‘With pleasure, champ,’ the professor said. ‘A team like us can fix this problem over the entree. And I insist on paying the bill, my friend. Must go.’ He hung up.

Pike was surprised he was not asked if he had rung Jerry Bell. Perhaps De Groote knew he had not. Blarney told his bride he would rent a car and be home in Stanley that night.

‘As soon as you’re home,’ Alex murmured lustfully in his ear, ‘to bed.’

One press on De Groote’s cellular phone raised Jerry Bell. ‘He’s seeing me for dinner tonight but he’ll still be angry. The wife’s going to Stanley. I’ll find a way to gag her.’

‘Do you want to go to Prague, Richard?’

‘Hell, no!’

‘Want me to ring the restaurant? Flatter him?’

‘Never fuel an angry man’s posture. He’s tough, as you say. He also needs us, vitally. And,’ De Groote smirked at the phone, ‘we know his weakness’.

‘Don’t burn him, Professor,’ his Australian leader advised.

A south-westerly whipped up the broad Derwent River estuary, cooling a hot Friday. It jostled Pike’s rented Ford as he crossed the Tasman Bridge into central Hobart, capital of the island state of half a million residents.

Mount Wellington was a black silhouette over the city. A great, ragged log in an orange fire of sunset. Snow up there was months away. Tasmania’s winter would not be so cold and grey, nor so polluted, he reflected gladly, as what he had left in Europe. It was good to be back.

A Friday crowd was chattering and glowing in classy evening wear as he was shown to the window-side table De Groote had reserved in the restaurant high over the estuary and city. The smell of garlic reminded him of their hosts in Moravia.

A shower, shave and change at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport into a blue suit that needed pressing had only slightly eased Pike’s exhaustion. His eyes felt rusty. The silk tie Alex had bought him at Bangkok’s airport felt jaunty. ‘Your Thailand tie,’ she had joked.

He spotted Richard’s twelve-metre cabin cruiser, coyly named Argo, moored to a jetty eighty metres below. He recalled boisterous, boozy cruises on it with local network leaders.

Tonight, in the power game, B Pike was determined to prevail.

What did his leader stand to lose if Prague fell in a heap? Pike’s arithmetic being so atrocious, it was Alex the mathematics teacher who had calculated that Argo was returning Richard some $380,000 a year. More than the state Premier earned. It was ten times the Pikes’ profits so far, after Richard and other Argo seniors like Jerry Bell took their cut.

Bell, they understood, was netting a million a year. Abe Harbeck, Grand Platinum, orchestrating from New York City, was rumoured to be cleaning up a million a week. Argo heavies never revealed how they earned it all. Even openly talking about that was called cross-lining, putting in the know the sheep they fleeced.

He yearned acutely for the time and money to share with Pru and Peter. To try to assuage the black shadow of guilt that shamed him so suddenly now as he thought of his two children back in Sydney. He had rung their divorcee mother Elizabeth’s number from the airport before calling Richard. No answer. They still had no answering machine, dammit.

A few years after their marriage in Sydney, Liz had become angry about Blarney coming home drunk a couple of nights a week after sessions at clubs and pubs with fellow journalists. It had prompted her affair with the company director for whom she was the receptionist. Blarney’s learning of that had sparked the divorce.

Pike abominated Argo’s brain washing and social engineering, which was on a scale that would hearten Hitler.

As a waiter delivered the bottle of non-alcohol cider he had ordered, the loudspeaker above him crackled. Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm stridently broke his reverie: Who wants to be a millionaire? I don’t. And go to every swell affair? I don’t…

This had to be organised by puppeteer De Groote! They had sung that song over and over at the late-night celebration at the Pike home after their first open pitch meeting at the Stanley Town Hall. Richard, dressed like a grazier, had played the canny congregation with flair and wit.

That, and the maestro’s glowing edification of Alex Dvorak and Blarney Pike, had scored a clamouring twenty-four recruits, with more about to commit.

Back at the Pike home early in the celebrations, Richard had said their success was awesome—the Pikes’ first of many awesomes from him. Over a rivulet of champagne and later claret, he had bragged and fantasised to a core of recruits until the stormy dawn. Singing that song. Changing it to I do!

Pike had woken after the celebration with a headache, his mouth like a bag of dried fish bait. Alex had clattered dishes in the kitchen. He ruefully recalled looking out at the Nut; the freak monolith, sheer and dark and looming over his home. Perched precariously at the edge of the precipice was a lump of basalt as big as the bedroom.

He called it Brinky Bill. It began to fall towards him. It took him a bewildered half minute to realise the clouds were rushing north, over the Nut. Brinky Bill was not crashing south, to demolish him and the house.