Headhunters

Chapter Twenty-Four

Adelaide Parklands terminal was three kilometres from the city centre. Milton had read about it in a corporate magazine he had flicked through on the train. It was adjacent to the suburb of Keswick and had been developed as a dedicated long-haul station. It was the only station in the world where passengers could catch trains for three distinct transcontinental routes: the Ghan ran to Alice Springs and Darwin; the Overland went to Melbourne; and the Indian Pacific, their train, between Sydney and Perth.

Matilda was on the platform, making her way to the exit.

“Matty!”

She turned, her face livid with anger. “What are you doing?”

“Please, Matty. Don’t.”

“Leave me alone.”

“I can’t. It’s not safe. I know you’re angry with me — that’s fine, but you have to trust me. They’re looking for both of us.”

“Not here, though,” she said.

She broke into a trot and he matched it, keeping pace with her. “You don’t know that. Matty, please.”

“Leave me alone, John.”

A flight of stairs ascended from the platform, offering access to a bridge. She climbed them quickly, Milton just behind her.

She reached the top and turned to face him again. “I’m serious. Leave me alone.”

“I can’t.”

She turned and nodded towards the gate line. A guard was checking tickets.

“If you don’t, I’m going to tell him that you’re stalking me. How do you think that’s going to look? If you follow me, I’m going to have you arrested.”

She headed away from him.

Milton believed her. He held his ground, watched her go through the gate, but then followed fifty feet behind. He gave his ticket to the guard and then angled away so that he could skirt the edge of the building and stay out of sight. She walked straight through the terminal and out through the doors into the brightness outside. He kept the same pace, slowing in the lobby to allow his eyes to adjust to the glare from the open doors so that he could fix her position in his mind. As he came to a stop, he realised that he couldn’t see her. He opened the tinted glass door and stepped outside into the broiling heat. The building was new. It was a single-storey construction opening out onto a parking lot and then, beyond that, Wikaparntu Wirra park.

Milton stayed in the shelter of the doorway and scanned left and right.

Matilda was a hundred feet away, waiting to cross the road that would take her to a taxi rank. There was a line of cars, a truck waiting to turn at a red light, and a handful of passengers milling about outside the station.

He didn’t know what to do. He could try to persuade her again, but she was stubborn and it was difficult to deal with her once she had made up her mind. But if he didn’t do that, what was he going to do? Leave her? Could he really do that? He mused on that, wondering whether there might be a measure of safety for her after all. He saw a bank of telephones and thought that perhaps he could call Harry, tell him what had happened. Matilda would go back to Boolanga. He would tell Harry that he needed to keep his sister safe.

Milton had almost persuaded himself when he heard a scream.

He had taken his eye off Matilda for a moment, and, in that time, one of the group of passengers had disengaged from the others and approached her. It was a man; Milton was too far away to get a good look at him, and he was facing away, but he looked as if he was of average height and build. He was wearing a ball cap, a red T-shirt, a pair of cargo shorts and sneakers. There was nothing about him that looked unusual for a place like this. Milton hadn’t registered him when he had seen him before. Now he had his hand around Matilda’s wrist. She was trying to jerk her arm away, but it looked as if his grip was too strong.

Milton’s urge was to run, but he stalled. Haste would be dangerous. The guy would be armed, and he knew that the Mossad often sent their katsas out in pairs. They were looking for him, and, while this might be an opportunistic snatch of one of the targets, he couldn’t ignore the possibility that she was being used to bait a trap. He could blunder into the middle of it and make things worse. Instead, he took a step back into the lobby. There was another door farther along the building that offered access at a point adjacent to the taxi rank. Milton sprinted for the door.

He covered the distance in twenty seconds.

He arrived at the door as a car raced along the road that adjoined the station. A red Mazda CX-5. It came to a sudden stop and, before Milton could do anything, the man hauled Matilda to the rear door, bundled her inside and got in after her.

Now Milton moved.

The Mazda had set off to the east, along Greenhill Road in the direction of Veale Gardens. The road outside the station was busy, with two lines of traffic halted there by a red light. Milton ran. There was a Toyota Corolla at the back of the queue, and he made for it. He slowed to a fast walk, careful not to draw attention to himself if the agents in the Mazda were looking behind themselves, as was very likely. The Toyota was in the outside lane, next to a metro stop where a clutch of people were waiting for their tram while trying to shelter from the sun. He approached it from behind a parked Land Rover, using the bulk of the four-by-four to hide him from the Mazda.

The light changed to green. The Mazda pulled away.

Milton opened the driver’s door of the Toyota. It was being driven by a middle-aged man in a business suit. Milton didn’t waste time with negotiation. He reached over to unclip the safety belt and then hauled the man out. The people waiting for the tram were right alongside. None of them was brave enough to intervene, but Milton knew that they would all have got a very good look at his face. He didn’t have time to worry about that now.

He got into the car, put it into drive, and hit the gas.

The Mazda stayed on Greenhill Road. Milton stayed a safe distance behind. He was aware that this could be a ruse: taking Matilda to draw him away from the people at the station, perhaps lure him to a location where they could muster reinforcements. The other possibility was that they hadn’t seen him. He guessed that it was a two-man team: one carrying out surveillance on the station and the other standing by with transport. They had seen Matilda and taken their chance. The most likely explanation was that this was an opportunistic snatch. They would interrogate Matilda for his location and, if she didn’t know where he was, they would use her to flush him out.

The Mazda merged onto Glen Osmond Road and picked up speed. It settled at sixty-five and followed the route to the southeast. They passed through Frewville and Glen Osmond. Milton stayed ten car lengths behind them, hiding in a moderate flow of traffic. He looked up at the signs as he flashed beneath them, looking for anything that might give him a clue as to their destination. If they broke out of Adelaide and continued to Mount Barker or Murray Bridge, at some point the traffic would thin out and an agent with even the most rudimentary grasp of counter-surveillance would be able to make him. He decided that if it looked as if they were heading out into the open country, then he would go on the offensive before he lost the element of surprise, assuming, of course, that he had ever enjoyed it at all.

The Mazda continued through Glen Osmond and then, at Urrbrae, it followed the majority of the traffic onto the M1. It was scorching hot, and, even though Milton had the air conditioning pushed all the way up to maximum, he still found that he was damp with sweat. He closed in a little, leaving six cars between the Mazda and his Toyota. A sign reported that Mount Osmond was ahead. Milton knew about the town from a previous visit to the area when he was operational with Group Fifteen. It was a suburb of Adelaide, located in the foothills that marked its eastern boundary. There was a golf club there, he recalled, a high-end one that attracted a lot of money to the area and had ameliorated the reputation for roughness that had been generated by the town’s previous reliance on mining.

The Mazda took the exit that was signed to the town. The road executed a sharp switchback and then, as it straightened out, it began a steep ascent.

There was only one car between them now, and Milton had no choice but to drop all the way back.

He hoped that he would still be close enough to see them if they turned.

They continued to follow the road, the golf club passing by on the right-hand side and then, as he passed onto a stretch of clear road, Milton looked to the left and saw Adelaide spread out in a spectacular view. The Mazda passed a sign that welcomed drivers to Mount Osmond and then took a sharp left, turning onto Sherwood Terrace. Milton stopped at the end of the road, leaving the engine to idle, and watched. The road was residential and, as he observed, he saw the Mazda’s brake lights glow as the car decelerated, and then the indicator flashed as it turned off the road and onto a driveway.

Milton waited, wiping the sweat from his eyes. The driveway was steep and shielded by a hedge and a telegraph pole. Only half of the Mazda was visible. The rear door opened and the man who had taken Matilda stepped out. Milton was too far away to see whether he was armed, but, as he saw Matilda’s arms half raised as she slid out of the car after him, he knew it was safe to assume that he was.

The man took Matilda’s wrist and led her up the drive and out of sight.