‘Gerry,’ said the old warhorse, ‘I weren’t gonna hurt ya.’
‘I guess not, but I still don’t know about the money.’
‘Two Dales in two days,’ said Ern, eyes rolling back as his big voice fell to a whisper. ‘I thought I was smarter than that.’
‘Hey, Ern?’ said Gallen, as Dale went still. ‘Thanks for the cover.’
Pushing down Dale’s eyelids, Gallen stood and moved to the doorway. Pausing at the threshold, he checked the M4 for load in the breech and quickly examined the clip: he had more than twenty rounds left.
Getting a shoulder on a weapon he knew very well, Gallen controlled his breathing and eased into the empty showroom, covering the room with several sector-arcs of the M4, keeping his shoulders and face lined up with the weapon. It was clear and he jogged lightly across the lino to the other door. Looking around the corner, he saw a corridor with office spaces off it.
Moving along the hallway he checked off the rooms as he jogged from door to door. At the fourth one on the left, he found an old steel-framed bed with leather manacles at each corner. If Winter had been there, he wasn’t anymore.
Straining his ears for sound, Gallen moved out into the corridor and had started to his left when he heard it: a vehicle being revved, down in the car park.
Pushing through the door opposite, he got to the window and looked down. In the weed-infested parking apron, he saw the white Oasis van. A dark Crown Vic pulled up beside the van with a squeal. The doors flew open and the muscular, cowboy-legged form of Mike Ford dashed to the corner of the building as a puff of concrete flew up three feet behind him. From the other side of the car, Liam Tucker ran to the cover of a dumpster as the side windows were shattered.
Racing down the hallway, Gallen took a set of stairs to the ground level, dodging a wounded man who moaned at the foot of the stairs. Kicking the man’s rifle away from his feet, Gallen leaned out the door and assessed the ground: the Crown Vic was still running and he thought of making a dash for it. As he moved into the sunlight, more gunfire started from around the corner and then Ford and Tucker appeared, dragging the slumped form of Kenny Winter between them.
Laying down covering fire as he ran, Gallen reached the car, leapt into the driver’s seat and gunned the engine. Keeping his door open he lifted the M4 between the car pillar and the doorframe, clattering off the rifle’s magazine on full auto at a mound of gravel and weeds that seemed to be the source of the incoming.
Ford reached the car, tore the back door open and climbed in: it was easier to pull an unconscious man into a vehicle than to push him. Gallen kept his fire rate up and Tucker shot too, until Winter was in the back seat.
Flooring the accelerator as Tucker dived into the front passenger seat, Gallen pulled a three-sixty and hit the gas as Ford and Tucker shot at the gravel piles, the windscreen getting a star in the top left-hand corner as Gallen steered them to safety.
Hitting the main road, panting with fear, he saw the police cars coming from the opposite direction, lights flashing. ‘He okay? ‘ he yelled.
‘He’ll live,’ said Ford.
Gallen kept the car at a steady, legal pace as the police vehicles flashed past in the opposite direction. When they’d gone, he turned to Ford in the back seat. ‘Nice timing. How’d you find us?’
‘Thank this feller,’ said Ford, lighting a smoke and nodding at Winter’s unconscious form. ‘He managed to dial his phone while he was being worked over. Went to last number dialled — me.’
‘How’d you find the location?’ said Gallen.
‘Aaron has a cell-tower locator box,’ said Ford. ‘It told us the call was coming from a tower called East Village, so we drove around a bit.’
‘Saw the van?’ said Gallen, heading for downtown.
‘No mate,’ said Ford. ‘Heard a gunfight.’
CHAPTER 55
The night air was cold and Gallen caught a look at his watch as he breathed deeply. It was 10.23 pm, Thursday, and the off-the-books doctor that Aaron had provided had declared Winter’s gunshot to be a ‘flesh wound’—no bones hit, no arteries nicked. Gallen and Winter crossed the dark car park behind the surgery, pausing as they got to a long black car.
As they climbed into the Oasis limo, Dave Joyce, the PR guy, smiled from the rear seat. He nodded at Winter. ‘You okay?’
‘Yeah, it’s nothing,’ said Winter, looking down at his leg.
‘We clear?’ said Florita, who sat beside her PR guy.
Gallen shrugged. ‘Mulligan killed Ern; Ern killed Mulligan. I attacked Simon, got a pistol off him, but I didn’t kill him.’
‘We gotta talk.’ Aaron climbed into the limo and pulled the door shut.
‘The Ariadne launch is tomorrow,’ said Florita, crossing her legs. ‘You saw the briefing notes?’
‘Yep,’ said Gallen. ‘Still don’t get why you want a bunch of greenies down there.’
‘It’s simple, Gerry,’ said Florita, waving a hand at Winter’s cigarette smoke. ‘The media only cover oil companies when we spill crude or launch one of these monsters. So the media spread is fifty-fifty good and bad — it’s our job to ensure we get as much mileage as we can from the good because when the bad news comes around, the media and environmentalists will spin it out for months.’
Gallen and Winter swapped a look.
‘So when we have a close relationship with an organisation like ArcticWatch, and the head of that group wants to make a documentary on the Ariadne, then we’re going to bend over backwards to make it play well for us, okay, Gerry?’
‘Just so long as this Du Bois stays away from you,’ said Gallen, ‘I’m good.’
‘Well, they’re doing their doco on me, so—’
Gallen stiffened. ‘They?’
‘Sure,’ said Joyce. ‘A film crew. This is a doco, Gerry.’
Gallen was too tired for this. ‘I thought they were environmentalists. Who are they?’
‘Filmmakers, Gerry,’ said Florita. ‘Martina wants a broadcast-quality documentary. Dave teed it up.’
‘Martina, is it?’ said Gallen. ‘You best friends with this woman now?’
Joyce smirked. ‘They gave us five Polar Bears, Gerry.’
‘I don’t care if they gave you a panda’s paw for an ashtray. I don’t like the idea of an enemy being allowed on this vessel.’
‘It’s a done deal,’ said Florita, grabbing a bottle of water from the centre console. ‘Dave’s done an amazing job designing all this. His media briefing spells it out.’
Gallen had Joyce’s media brief; he’d seen how he and the crew were going to usher Fox News through the Ariadne separately to CNN, so both networks felt they were getting access to an area the other hadn’t been shown; how the BBC would be given information about the North-West Passage and Northern Sea Route and the Wall Street Journal would be given a lecture about how the submersible was going to lift the yield of the entire venture, giving a whole new shareholder-return profile to the site. Newspapers like the New York Times and Guardian were going to be briefed on how many seals and Inuit could be saved by having the maintenance and pumping side of the rig on the sea bed, not on a semi-submersible rig or a processing ship.
Gallen had already had Mike Ford plan the take-off of Florita, an irritating gap in security but one that the Aussie would handle better than anyone. Gallen simply hated the idea of the enemy coming inside the perimeter; it went against all his training.
‘So,’ said Aaron, ‘you find what you were after?’