Zero Hour (NUMA Files 11)

“Stay with us,” Hayley shouted.

He didn’t respond, and she began to perform CPR. “We can’t let him die.”

Kurt felt for a pulse. He didn’t feel one. “It’s too late.”

“No, it can’t be,” she said, compressing the man’s chest rapidly and trying to force life back into him.

Kurt stopped her. “It’s no use, he’s lost too much blood.”

She looked up at him, her face smeared with soot and tears, her white dress stained red.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You tried.”

She sat back and turned away, looking exhausted. Her hair fell around her face as she looked to the ground. Her body shook as she sobbed.

Kurt put a hand on her shoulder and gazed at the damage surrounding them.

The wreck of the boat still burned on the promenade, while the blazing hulk of the Eurocopter lay where the shattered façade of the Concert Hall should have been. Volunteers were hosing it down, desperately trying to keep it from setting fire to the building, while onlookers poured from the keynote address on underwater mining, half of them gawking as the rest moved quickly in the other direction.

It all happened so fast. Chaos sprung on them from nowhere. And the only man who might have known why lay dead at their feet.

“What did he say?” Hayley asked, wiping the tears from her face. “What did he say to you?”

“Tartarus,” Kurt replied.

She stared. “What does that mean?”

Kurt wasn’t convinced that he’d heard the man correctly. Even if he had, it made little sense.

“It’s a word from Greek mythology,” he said. “The deepest prison of the underworld. According to the Iliad, as far below Hades as Heaven is above the Earth.”

“What do you think he was trying to tell us?”

“No idea,” Kurt said, shrugging and handing her the papers. “Maybe that’s where he thinks he’s going. Or,” he added, considering the grime, dust, and stench that covered the poor man, “maybe that’s where he’s been.”

FOUR

Red and blue lights flashed across the famous sails of the Opera House in series of intersecting patterns, while blinding white spotlights illuminated the wreckage of the powerboat and the charred shell of the dark blue helicopter. They remained where they’d crashed, smoking and smoldering, as fire trucks poured waves of foam onto both vehicles to prevent any chance of reignition.

The spectacle drew a crowd from both the land and the water. Police tape and barricades kept the shore-based onlookers at bay, but the number of small boats crowding the harbor had grown to more than a hundred. Cameras and flashes snapped in the dark like fireflies.

From the shadows of a doorway, Cecil Bradshaw of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation studied the man responsible for all the damage.

An aide handed him a dossier.

“This is awful thick,” Bradshaw said. “I need only the highlights, not every bloody clipping on the man.”

Bradshaw was a stocky man in his mid-fifties. He had pile-driver arms, a thick neck, and a short buzz cut. In a way, he resembled a giant human bulldog. He liked to think of himself in similar terms. Get on my side or get out of my way, he often said.

The aide didn’t stammer in his response. “Those are the highlights, sir. If you’d like, I have another fifty pages I could print out for you.”

Bradshaw offered a grunt in response and opened the file. He leafed through the pages quickly, studying what the ASIO knew about Mr. Kurt Austin of the American organization NUMA. His activities read like a series of high-stakes adventure novels. Before that, he’d apparently had a successful career in the CIA.

Bradshaw couldn’t imagine what strange permutations of fate had brought Austin to this very spot at this precise moment, but it just might have been a break the ASIO desperately needed.

Austin might do, Bradshaw thought to himself. He might do very nicely.