As they left the airport, heading for a main arterial road, they passed a small parking lot. Sitting on the hood of a battered blue-grey Range Rover-styled vehicle, a tall, angular male figure in jeans, open-necked shirt and broad-brimmed hat gazed intently into the sky over the airport through a pair of binoculars. With his hat shading his face, his features were blankly anonymous under the brilliance of the mid-afternoon sunlight.
Except to Liz, there seemed nothing special about him. Liz had noticed him. She'd seen how, at the last minute, before the car threw up a screen of dust in their wake, the man had turned his binoculars on the two vehicles. Now, with a frown, she tapped Trask on the shoulder where he sat in front of her.
'That man back there/ she said, hurriedly. They were negotiating a bend and the parking lot was already disappearing in the driver's rearview. Trask turned his head, looked back where Liz was indicating; he saw nothing but a dust-plume and a distant shimmer of heat-haze.
'A man?' he said. 'What about him?'
The intercom was on, and the chauffeur — a special agent — asked, 'Something suspicious, miss? A man, did you say? Back there? What was he doing?'
'Sitting on a car,' Liz answered. 'He was watching the sky through binoculars.'
'A plane-spotter?' Through the plate-glass screen that divided them, they saw the driver shrug. 'A wannabe fly-boy member of the club. Hull Some hope. Flying is for rich folks.'
But Liz leaned forward and quietly, right in Trask's ear, said, 'The last thing I saw, he was looking at us.'
They were turning onto the main road and picking up speed. 'Let it go,' Trask told her. 'It may have been nothing, and in any case it's too late now. If we've been made we've been made. But if we've been made, then obviously someone was sent to make us — sent by someone. Now all we have to do is find out who and where.'
Liz nodded, said: 'And… he was wondering about us.'
'That's all you got?'
'Yes.'
Trask shrugged, but not negligently. 'Maybe he was simply curious. But by the same token maybe this wasn't as discreet as it might have been. Two chauffeur-driven limos, doing reception at a small, private airport? I mean, turn the situation around and I might be curious myself. Do you think you'd recognize him again?'
'Probably,' she answered. 'There was something unpleasant, spidery about him.'
'Well, if you do see him let me know,' said Trask. 'Once is coincidence. Twice… this spider might need stepping on.' And the cars sped for the near-distant city…
Back at the parking lot, the long thin man got into his car and called a number on his portaphone. A disinterested female voice said, 'Xanadu, reception?'
'I want to speak to Milan,' the thin man told her.
There was a pause and she said, 'Your identification?' Now she was a little more animated.
'Mind your business/ the thin man replied, with the emphasis on 'mind', but with nothing of rebuke or unpleasantness in his voice. It was simply a code.
'Just a moment, sir,' said the girl. And the phone played some indifferent Musak.
While he waited, the thin man coughed to clear his throat, mopped sweat from his brow, got his thoughts in order. His employer — Mr Milan, to whom he was about to make report — had a liking for ordered minds; he much preferred to hear and understand things clearly and precisely the first time around. And in a little while:
'Milan speaking/ a deep, accented, seemingly cultured yet vaguely threatening male voice replaced the Musak. 'What do you want?'
And the thin man told his employer what he had seen of the jetcopter, gave him brief descriptions of the people he'd seen getting into limos outside the flying club's main building, and closed by saying: 'They drove off towards Brisbane.'
There was a brief pause before the other queried: 'And you didn't follow them?'
'It was the chauffeurs/ the thin man answered. 'They were too good to be true. No one looks as neat, tidy, and as cool as they looked — not in this weather — without they're trying real hard. They looked like government men. And if they were, they'd be on me like flies on shit as soon as they spotted me in their rearviews/
'I see/ said the foreign, Mediterranean-sounding voice of Mr Milan. And in a moment: 'Would you know these people again?'
'Sure.'
'Good. I think this may be what I've been waiting for. You can call your other observers off, Mr Santeson. Let them report to you in Xanadu. From now on I think you will find your duties more to your liking up here at the resort. Just be sure to come and see me as soon as you get in/
'I'm on it/ the thin man said. And under his breath, when the phone went dead: 'What are you — some kind of mind-reader? But anyway, you're right — that's just exactly what I wanted to hear after a day spent sweltering in all this heat, sweating my balls off, watching, waiting, and trying not to look suspicious. Shitty work, in weather like this. But up there at the Pleasure Dome.. p>
… Up at the Pleasure Dome, he thought, putting the car in first and turning out of the parking lot, life is sheer luxury! The pools, the broads in their bikinis, the good food and drink — even the casino, huh! — where I can spend my money almost as fast, or faster, than Mr fucking Milan pays me! And he grinned.
But on the other hand, no one could call Milan mean. Garth Santeson, a private investigator for twenty years and then some, had never had it so good. What? Milan, mean? No way! Shady, definitely — how else would you describe a guy who only ever comes out at night? But never mean — hell, no! The way Aristotle Milan throws money around, it's like… like tomorrow there'll be no use for it!
Never knowing just how close he had come to the truth, and in more respects than one, Santeson headed his battered vehicle for the ring road south around Brisbane. Then he would look for the signpost for the town of Beaudesert, which would put him on a heading for the Macpherson Range right on the border with New South Wales. Eighty miles of good road, and he'd be up into the mountains, yes. And finally Xanadu…
On the way into town, Jake said, 'Now I remember!'
'What you were dreaming about?' said Lardis Lidesci.
'Eh?' Jake looked at him.
'On the plane, you were dreaming about something. When Liz woke you up you couldn't remember.'
Jake shook his head. 'No, not that,' he said. 'I'm talking about Brisbane — I'm remembering about this place. Looking down on the city from the chopper, I thought it looked too neat, too new. Well, that's because it is new.'
Jake and Lardis were travelling in the first limo with the team's top technicians, a pair of young, whizz-kid computer and communications types who were fully-fledged members of E-Branch but not espers as such. One of these, Jimmy Harvey — a compact, prematurely bald man of perhaps twenty-six, with lush red sideburns and bushy eyebrows that together were trying hard to make up for his baldness, grey, watery eyes, and a genius for electronics — wanted to know: 'Jake, where have you been hiding out these last three or four years? I mean, on the Richter Scale of national disasters, Brisbane's Great Fire of 2007 ranks several notches higher than the sinking of the Titanic, and very nearly as
high as Krakatoa!' There was little or nothing of sarcasm in Harvey's comment, just surprise.
Jake sighed, shrugged apologetically, and said, 'Yes, that was what I remembered. As for where I've been: mainly I've been doing my own thing. My world has been — I don't know — kind of a small place, for a long time. I've only had room for personal problems, things that I need to get sorted out.'
'Aye,' Lardis grunted. 'Your vow! I can understand that.'
'My vow?' Jake frowned at him. As usual, he found the old boy full of indecipherable statements. But now: