‘I bought it from the city, fair and square,’ McBride said.
He was building a resort, a cross between a country club and a casino, had insisted on giving Vic and Skip a tour of the construction site. He’d made expansive gestures as he’d strutted along, pointing to the stony stretch of ground where the eighteen-hole golf course was going to be, pointing to the stakes that outlined the extent of the dome under which the main building and guest cabins would shelter amongst a landscaped arboretum.
‘Know the Hotel California?’ he’d said. ‘Of course you do. This will be six times the area, semi-tropical. Palms, banana plants, that kind of thing. Imagine staying in a place where you can pick oranges or bananas right off the tree. I’m going to bring in animals too. Once my lawyers have cut through the red tape. Monkeys, parrots. Tigers. White tigers in their own enclosure. Paradise.’
Saying now, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if I could get around that stupid law, get the old pit working again? Revive some of that rough, tough pioneer spirit. I always wish that I’d been here at the beginning, before the UN started imposing its rules and regulations. Before the fucking corporations started coming in. There’s a McDonald’s drive-through now, you believe that? I couldn’t, when I saw it. Shopping malls, for Christ’s sake.’
‘And golf courses,’ Vic said.
‘If you want to survive, you have to go with the flow. See where things are going and try to get ahead.’
‘Is that something you thought up in prison?’ Vic was trying to needle the man, make him annoyed and careless.
But McBride was smiling. ‘Fuck, no. I’ve been diversifying my portfolio for some time now. Set up my own company, everything legit and above board. This project stalled while I was away, but I’m getting it back on track. And I have some serious interests in the Elder Culture artefact business. We haven’t explored five per cent of the planet yet, not properly. We don’t even know everything about the territory around Petra.’
‘So you’re starting a new life,’ Vic said. ‘Trying to go legit.’
‘Trying? No, that’s what I am now. A businessman. Plain and simple. I was trying to remember where I saw you,’ McBride said to Skip. ‘And now I remember. You were with the Mayor at some do. I have a memory for faces.’
Skip said, ‘We met the new boss of your old business. Danny Drury. Interesting bloke.’
Vic detected the slightest hesitation before McBride said, ‘He’s a smart boy. Should do well for himself. With my blessing, of course.’
‘So no hard feelings between you and Mr Drury,’ Skip said.
‘He has his business, I have mine. There’s plenty of room out here for all kinds, after all.’
‘You just gave up on the drug business,’ Skip said. ‘Walked away from it.’
‘You want to see what prison can do, how it can put a man on the straight and narrow, here I am,’ McBride said.
Vic said, ‘You’re talking about the good old days you know nothing about, talking about starting up the pit again…’
‘Which will probably never happen. Thanks to the fucking conservation regulations.’
‘So I have to wonder,’ Vic said, ‘if you haven’t entirely let the past go.’
‘Oh, now we’re getting into it, huh?’
‘You thought it was a courtesy visit?’
‘As soon as I saw you, I knew you were trouble.’
Skip said, ‘And what kind of trouble might that be, Mr McBride?’
‘If this is about those three dealers killed last night, I told you, I’m out of that game. Well rid. Leave it to the Serbs and the French and the fucking Turks, I say,’ McBride said, his face perfectly blank. Impossible to tell if he was playing them, or if he really didn’t know why they were there.
Vic touched his ear, the signal to change up the game. Skip said, ‘Where were you two days ago, around nine in the evening?’
That was the time the security guard had spotted the van speeding away from the murder scene.
‘You mean Landing Day?’ McBride smiled. ‘I was at a restaurant. Area 51. It had a special tasting menu.’
Skip said, ‘Would you mind telling me who your dinner companions were?’
‘You mean who could give me an alibi? Jesus fucking Christ. You think, just out of jail, getting back on my feet, I’m going to do something stupid?’
‘If you didn’t do anything,’ Skip said, ‘there’s no harm telling us who you were doing it with.’
McBride stared at him; Skip stared back.
‘All right,’ McBride said impatiently. ‘Just to get you off my back. I was with my good friend Eva Winkler. And I said hello to a couple of dozen acquaintances, too. Ask anyone who was there, they’ll remember me.’
Vic said, ‘We will. By the way, talking of Elder Culture artefacts, I hear you know something about ray guns.’
‘That old shit? All kinds of accusations were made, but none of them were ever proved.’
‘Because you went to jail. And while you were there, Danny Drury moved in. Took your house and your business. I was wondering if he also took your ray gun.’
‘I wouldn’t know anything about it.’
‘But I bet you’d like to see Danny Drury go down, maybe get your old business back.’
‘If you think I’d grass him up, you got the wrong idea about me,’ McBride said. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I have to get back to work. Paradise doesn’t build itself.’
Vic eased into the passenger seat. He felt old and cranky. The car smelled of stale sweat and the disinfectant someone had used recently to rinse off the back seat.
Skip said, ‘They both had their alibis ready.’
‘I hate to say it, but I think McBride might be telling the truth. Hard to sneak out of a restaurant, kill someone, and come back as if you just went for a piss.’
‘But easier, maybe, to sneak out of a big party.’
Vic smiled. ‘We both like Mr Drury for this, don’t we? But we can’t put him at the scene, and we have no reason for him being there.’
‘I guess we should check their alibis.’
‘Why not?’
As they drove back to the city, Vic thought the playa looked nothing like Australia, and nothing like Mars, either. No, it looked like the world had looked before people had started in on it.
15. Red Weed Country
London — Norfolk | 8 July
Henry Harris, the driver of the Range Rover, was a security consultant who worked for Ada Morange’s people. A wiry man in his late fifties or early sixties, with a bony boyish face, a deep outdoor tan, and a bright gaze that didn’t miss much. Chloe had seen him visiting Daniel a couple of times, knew that he had once been in the army, allegedly in the SAS or some other crack unit.
His presence was a condition of Chloe being allowed ‘off the leash’, as Daniel had put it. To make sure that she was protected from journalists, to keep her out of any trouble that might attract the attention of Chief Inspector Nevers and the Hazard Police, and to represent Ada Morange’s interests.
‘Which are also our interests, of course,’ Daniel had said.
But not necessarily Chloe’s, or Fahad Chauhan’s. But there wasn’t much she could do about it. If she had headed off to Norfolk on her own it would have been as good as writing a resignation letter. And besides, she’d already told Daniel where she needed to go; Henry Harris would have soon caught up with her.
As they drove towards the M25, he asked her to switch off her phone. Chloe told him that she was using a throwaway. ‘I paid for it with cash a couple of days ago. It isn’t traceable.’
‘Have you used it at work or at home? Yes? Then it’s probably compromised. Let me take a look,’ Henry Harris said, and held out his hand.