He glanced over at the nightstand. He’d covered the bright face of the alarm clock with a towel to keep the light out of his eyes, but his Doxa watch was resting beside it. He scooped it up, checked the luminous hands, and realized it was almost two o’clock in the morning.
He threw the covers off, climbed out of bed, and walked over to the desk. If he couldn’t find sleep, maybe he could find some answers.
He opened his laptop and took a drink of water while it booted up. A quick Internet search regarding the ASIO brought up numerous articles. He didn’t expect to find a list of secret operations, but he thought there might be something indicating what they were dealing with. Maybe something obscure enough that he could put two and two together.
With no luck there, he thought about Hayley.
“Who are you, Ms. Anderson?” he muttered. “And what are you mixed up in?”
He ran a Google search on her, and a wealth of links appeared.
To Kurt’s surprise, Hayley was a scholar: a theoretical physicist tenured at the University of Sydney. She’d authored a number of papers with incomprehensible titles. There was a more easily read article about her turning down an invite to Oxford. He found another where she was trying to explain something about gravity and why Einstein was wrong in his understanding of it.
Kurt poured himself a glass of scotch. He found himself more baffled than before. What on earth was a young woman who could prove Einstein wrong doing in the middle of a terrorist investigation?
Finding no answer to that question, or any public link between her and the ASIO, he turned his attention to the dead informant.
Kurt was certain the man had been suffering from decompression sickness. The question was: how did he get it?
DCS had once been called caisson disease, because it was originally noticed in construction workers who were toiling away in the pressurized caissons used to build the foundations of great bridges. But it was most commonly seen in scuba divers.
The dead man Panos had arrived in a boat, racing across Sydney Harbour. That also suggested he might have been diving. But he wore grimy street clothes, not a wet suit, and he smelled like days of perspiration, not the fresh salt of the sea. That, along with the mining connection and the ASIO’s belief that some terrorist group was operating in the outback, weighed against Kurt’s theory.
He found a register of lakes in Australia and painstakingly scanned through them. Just as Bradshaw insisted, most of them appeared to be shallow or even transient, drying up completely in the summertime.
“Not the kind of places one gets the bends,” Kurt said.
He put the list down and began scanning a satellite image of Australia. Moving westward from Sydney and out over more arid territory, it was easy to see how quickly the terrain became barren. Occasionally, he came across a swath of green.
Much like the American Southwest and the Egyptian Nile, wherever a stream or river flowed, vegetation grew up around it. Even if it didn’t flow year-round, there was often underground water to be had. But that water was locked away in permeable sands and aquifers, not hidden lakes that one could swim in. And even if he could find a lake, that didn’t explain the toxins on the man’s skin.
About ready to shut down, Kurt used the touch pad to scan a few more sections of the map. He stopped when a strangely colored spot caught his eye. He tapped the ZOOM IN command a couple of times and waited.
The map blurred and refocused, with the iridescent spot taking up a quarter of the screen.
He was staring at a lake. A lake of brilliant rainbow hues, brighter than anything in nature had a right to be.
Right away, Kurt knew what he was looking at. The pieces came together quickly after that. He knew why the lake was so outrageously colorful, and he also knew why the informant had both DCS and metal toxins all over his body.
It seemed he and Bradshaw were both correct.
He reached for the phone, dialed up a number from memory, and waited for an answer.
“Come on, Joe,” he whispered to himself.
A click on the line followed.
“Hello,” a sleepy American voice said.
Joe Zavala was Kurt’s best friend, his most loyal and trusted ally. Others would use the term partner in crime.
“I hope the women of Cairns haven’t worn you out,” Kurt said, “because I need your help on something.”
A yawn came over the line. “I have to ask: is it dangerous, illegal, or otherwise likely to result in serious bodily injury?”
“Would you believe me if I said no?”
“Probably not,” Joe said. “Especially considering what you’ve been up to down there.”