Zero Hour (NUMA Files 11)

“Okay, Austin, I’m going to cut you a little slack,” he said. “I’m also going to assume you’re not dumb enough to open your mouth about what you’ve seen here. But if you’re not sure you can stay quiet, I can find a nice ovenlike jail out beyond the Black Stump where you can sit and think about it to your heart’s content.”

Kurt wasn’t sure where exactly the Black Stump was, but it sounded far away. Like a trip to Siberia only hotter.

“I remember the drill,” he said. “You want me to sign something? See a hypnotist to forget this ever happened? That’s fine too. Just show me the way out, and I can head to the beach like I intended. But you might want to check your own ranks for a leak because someone knew this little meeting of yours was going down.”

Hayley and Bradshaw exchanged a glance. Something unspoken passed between them.

Bradshaw turned back to Kurt. “Not likely,” he said with a smug look on his face, then changed subjects. “But since you’re here, maybe you’d care to offer your professional opinion.”

“On what?”

“Start with the dead man’s last word: Tartarus. Does that mean anything to you?”

Kurt looked at the setup once again. They were prepared to digest a lot of information. At least three analysts were on-site, plus Bradshaw. Whatever they were hoping for, it came in short. Way short.

“Only what I told Hayley,” he said.

“We’re dealing with a threat to Australian national security,” Bradshaw insisted. “Maybe even to other countries. We have four dead contacts, two before this event. One of them led us to a shipload of exotic mining equipment. You said Tartarus was underground.”

“That’s right,” Kurt said. “In Greek mythology.”

He glanced at the desk where the laptop was. “As you’ve no doubt discovered, it’s a mythological prison for the gods. But unless you know something I don’t, it’s not real. Whatever that guy was trying to tell you, I doubt he meant it literally. Tartarus is probably a code word or a cipher for something. Maybe related to the papers he gave you.”

Bradshaw took a second to digest this and then waved Kurt over to the conference table. “You claim to be an engineer. These look like schematics to me. You see anything here that might ring a bell?”

Kurt studied the cryptic papers. There was so much blood on them, the writing was obscured and smeared in places. What he could see looked like gibberish. He saw complex equations populated by symbols he didn’t recognize. The second page was definitely part of a schematic, but it seemed to describe a circular-shaped dome.

“Afraid not,” Kurt said. Despite his earlier guess, he couldn’t imagine a single word unlocking the clutter he was looking at.

“What about the boat?” Bradshaw asked. “Did you see anything in it before it burned? A backpack? A suitcase? A computer?”

“Is that what they were bringing you?”

“Just answer the question.”

“No,” Kurt said, “I didn’t see anything like that.”

“What about the driver?”

Kurt’s mind drifted back to the scene on the promenade. “He asked me to leave him and help this guy. He called him Panos.”

“That’s it?”

“We didn’t exactly have a long conversation.”

Hayley looked away sadly, and Bradshaw sighed with disappointment. “Well, you’ve been a tremendous help,” he said sarcastically.

“He did save my life,” Hayley pointed out.

“That he did,” Bradshaw agreed, speaking with a note of humility in his voice for the first time. He stepped toward the door. “Sorry to be so nasty, Mr. Austin, but it’s been a damned awful day. Enjoy your vacation.”

“Hold on a second,” Kurt said.

His mind was drifting back to the incident. He couldn’t recall any luggage in the boat or anything else out of the ordinary except that he remembered Panos wincing in pain when he was dragged from the boat. He recalled the odd way the man’s fingers had curled up and how he struggled to walk. There was something strange about his hunched-over appearance as he lumbered away from the boat. Something familiar too. Kurt had seen that gait before.

“That guy was your informant?”

Hayley went to speak, and Bradshaw stopped her.