It wasn’t the kind of mistake he could afford to make. It wasn’t the kind of mistake he’d normally anticipate, either. He gave Nicole his ticket and watched her fingers on the VDU keyboard. Island Air flew to King Island twice a day, at 11.30 a.m. and 3.30 p.m. He was booked on the eleven-thirty, timed to connect with a TasAir flight from King Island to Wynyard. It was a long way home, costly and tedious, but Wyatt liked to avoid showing his face in the terminal building of major airports. He had a car at Wynyard. From there to the flat he rented in Hobart was a three or four hour drive.
Nicole’s smile was a wide seam of white teeth. She leaned on the counter and pointed to double-glass doors at the side of the terminal. ‘Through there, Mr White.’
Island Air flew twin-engine, ten-seater Chieftains on the King Island route. The flight took fifty minutes and Wyatt ignored the other passengers and read about the magnetic drill gang’s raid on a bank in the Upper Yarra region outside Melbourne. The Age gave it a bare, three-sentence outline. The Herald-Sun police reporter gave it ten sentences and was inclined to be hysterical. She finished the story with a quote from a man in the street: ‘It certainly makes you think.’ If that’s a gauge of the ordinary Australian’s powers of reflection, Wyatt thought, then he deserves everything he gets.
King Island looked green and hilly in the water below, dairy farms stitched together in irregular patterns by narrow roads. The Chieftain touched down at twelve-twenty; ten minutes later, Wyatt was aboard a fifteen-seater Heron. He was offered sandwiches and coffee but his first hesitant bite of the sandwich fired up his bad tooth and his first sip of the coffee made it worse. He swallowed two paracetamol tablets and closed his eyes, the thin planes of his face drawn together in strain and exhaustion.
He awoke, senses dulled, when the Heron bounced down at Wynyard. On the drive south, Wyatt judged that he had about another twelve months with Jardine. They wouldn’t have a falling out, they wouldn’t get caught- Jardine would simply run out of good jobs for him. What then? Wyatt couldn’t see any big scores on the horizon, he couldn’t see himself doing contract work for organised people like the Sydney Outfit, he couldn’t see himself putting teams of unknowns together again. The old ways were gone, it seemed. Men like him-private, professional, meticulous-were anachronistic in a world given over to impulse and display.
A great deal was at stake. Ten, fifteen years ago, Wyatt had been able to pull just a few big jobs each year, living on the proceeds, spending weeks or months at a time in places where no one knew him. He liked having a safe haven, a place where he was unknown and overlooked, a place he could slip home to between jobs. He’d had it once, a comfortable old farmhouse on fifty hectares on the Victorian coast south-east of Melbourne, bought with the proceeds of a bullion heist at Melbourne airport. His windows had looked out over the sea and Phillip Island, and for Wyatt living there was like a rest from running.
Then everything had gone wrong and he’d been forced into a life of mistakes and betrayals and looking over his shoulder for the man carrying a gun or a knife or a badge. For three years he’d felt hunted, on edge. But now he had a chance to regain the things he’d lost and control the strings that had pulled him into risks he should never have taken. He had sufficient money to live on, no one in Tasmania knew who he was and, once he’d paid his debt to Jardine, he would buy an end to his running.
He crossed the Derwent at five o’clock. Traffic was mounting up but that didn’t mean anything in Hobart. He followed a minibus past the Government House lawns and looped down through the streets of the city. Tomorrow he’d go back there and find himself a small downtown dentist who ran a busy practice and get his tooth filled. The old sandstone buildings looked soft-edged and warm, glowing softly in the last hour before the sun settled behind the mountain. Below him, on the left, there were the same masts in the yacht basin, the same timber workers’ vigil outside the Parliament building. Then he was climbing again, curving up and left into Battery Point.
The apartment block was a squared-off, three-storey beige brick construction from the 1960s, set into a steeply pitched part of the Battery Point hillside overlooking the Derwent. According to tourists, environmentalists and people living on the hill behind it, the building was a blight on the landscape, but it suited the tenants, who could see the water and the mountain. Wyatt had a one-year lease on a street-level flat-street level to cut down on his escape time if anyone with arrest or death in mind for him came snooping around. The rent was low, he could walk everywhere, the neighbours left him alone. There was no one to notice or care if he should slip away for a day, a week, a month. No letters came, the phone never rang, no one looked at him with interest or emotion.
In fact, if any of those things were to happen, Wyatt would hit the ground running.
Twelve
Two weeks after his meeting with Springett, Niekirk was back in Melbourne. Riggs arrived that evening, Mansell the following morning. Both had taken rostered days off work. They made it a rule never to fly in together. They met in a motel room in St Kilda Road, and Niekirk had to wait while Mansell gabbled away about his flight down from Sydney. Mansell was like most people, governed by a set of conventions that said you wasted a few minutes kicking pleasantries around before you got down to work.
When Mansell was finished, it was Riggs who spoke first. ‘What’s the target?’
Niekirk wordlessly tipped floor plans, photographs, a security-system map and a page from a street directory onto the double bed. Mansell bent to pick up a photograph, then straightened, groaning, stretching his back, making a show of it.
Riggs, as stolid and featureless as a slab of rock, crossed to look at the plans. ‘Jewellery heist?’
Mansell peered again at the photograph. ‘Lovely bit of rock.’
Niekirk picked up a second photograph, a necklace, white gold catching the light softly, emeralds, rubies and sapphires hard and sharp against the gold, like ice splinters in the morning sun. ‘The Asahi Collection,’ he said, ‘on loan from Japan.’
Valued at $750,000, according to the newspapers. Niekirk had calculated his return if he were to try fencing the stones himself. Ten cents in the dollar? He knew he wouldn’t do it. There was no one he could trust, and De Lisle had a long reach.
He watched Riggs and Mansell. Riggs was examining the plans now, giving them a grave scrutiny as if he were putting the hit together himself. He had still, capable, long-fingered hands, his body loose in grey cords, a check shirt and a heavy yachting pullover. He could have been anyone-thief, cop, car mechanic-but someone who kept himself calm and ready, and someone with an unpredictable, vicious streak. Sensing Niekirk’s scrutiny, Riggs said, ‘Where?’
‘We’re going there now.’
Niekirk took them into the city, to a region of tiny arcades bounded by major streets. Satisfied that they hadn’t been tailed, he led them into a snack bar. They sat on stools at a bench that ran the length of the front window of the place. The air smelt of vinegar and superheated oil, shaken apart by a radio tuned at full volume to an easy-listening station. Niekirk’s elbow was stuck in a smear of tomato sauce but he ignored it and pointed to a raw new building across the street from the snack bar. It was a narrow, black glass department store, six storeys high, called Soreki 5. Japanese, and it had only just opened for business. There were branches like it all through the Pacific. This one had a gallery on the first floor, and management intended to show fur, porcelain, painting and jewellery collections month by month.
Under cover of the shouted conversations around them, the radio and the thick smacking of cafйteria crockery behind the stainless steel counter, Niekirk said, ‘Their first-ever exhibition starts tomorrow morning, and will be here for the next month, so we go in tonight.’