Headhunters

Chapter Thirty-One

Milton went outside, checked that they were unobserved, and started the car. Matilda was watching through the window and she hurried out at Milton’s gesture and strapped herself into the passenger seat. He put the car into drive and they set off.

He had noticed the goods yard as he had driven to the motel. It was in Regency Park, toward the northern edge of the city, a confluence of railroads that accommodated several big diesel engines, each of them at the head of a long line of freight boxcars. It took half an hour to drive there; traffic had slowed to a crawl as rubberneckers gawped at a wreck on the side of the road. Milton drove carefully, watching his mirrors, but he noticed nothing out of the ordinary.

They arrived at the yard. The facility was protected by a wire fence, but stretches of it were in poor condition. There was a tyre iron in the trunk of the car and Milton was able to use it to prise the fence open wide enough for them to ease through. He knew that the yard would be protected, especially after 9/11, and he waited to ensure that there was no one in sight. Finally satisfied, he led the way and they hurried across the open ground, stepping across the lines, and reached the nearest boxcar without being seen.

The boxcars were identical. They were fifty feet long, with aluminium panels fitted to a yellow steel under-frame, and two big wheels on the front and rear axles. There was a door in the middle of the car in front of them. Milton unlatched the lock and hauled himself inside. The boxcar had been loaded with sacks of cereal. Milton examined the sacks until he found a bill of lading that identified the destination.

“We got lucky,” he said as he reached down to help Matilda into the boxcar.

“Melbourne?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“The delivery date is for tomorrow. So I’m guessing it’ll be soon.”

They had to wait. Milton kept the door open just a crack, not quite enough to be noticed from the outside but enough so that he would have warning if security drew too near. A white pickup went by on two separate occasions.

It was dusk when they finally heard the hoot of the horn and, with that, they felt the jolt as the boxcars were heaved into motion. Milton had wedged the door open with the tyre iron and opened it a little more now so that he could watch as the train picked up speed. They crawled through the suburbs, but, as they broke out into the outback once again, the engine opened up to full power and they accelerated.

It was more than seven hundred kilometres to Melbourne, and Milton estimated that it would take the train eight hours to cover the distance. They sat with their backs to the wall of the boxcar, the rumble of the wheels settling into an even and almost hypnotic rhythm. They had stopped at a garage shop on the way to the freight yard, and Milton took out the supplies he had purchased and arranged them: two bottles of water, packs of sandwiches and bars of chocolate. He tore the wrapper off a Cherry Roll bar and started to eat.

“How long did you do what you did?”

“Ten years.”

“And why did you stop?”

“Because I hated it.”

“But only after ten years. You didn’t hate it before?”

He thought about that. “I thought I was doing the right thing. The people… the targets… they were bad people.”

“So?”

“I didn’t ask questions when I started. You didn’t. You got your orders, you carried them out, you were debriefed and then that was it. You had a break and then it started again. I was a soldier for a long time before I was transferred. You don’t question orders, not unless you want a court martial.”

“You haven’t answered my question. Why did you stop?”

“Because I did start to question my orders.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I haven’t spoken about it before, not to anyone.”

He paused then, wondering whether he should go on. He hadn’t spoken about it, not to the psychologists who were employed by the British government to make sure the agents remained sane, or to the drunks who were in the meetings with him after he quit. But Matilda was watching him, her face open, softer than it had been since they had been abducted. He remembered the mantra that ran through every meeting: we are only as sick as our secrets. Milton had had too many secrets for too long.

“There was a job,” he said. “There were two scientists working on the Iranian nuclear program. They were set up. They thought they were meeting someone who would supply material for them. But it wasn’t what they thought. They were meeting me.” He paused again, his throat dry, and took a swig of the water. “I was waiting for them. I shot them both, and then I shot a policeman who shouldn’t have been there.” He stopped again, looking to her face for a reaction, but there was none. “I went to check the car that they arrived in, and there was a kid in the back. A little boy. He was just staring at me. Standard procedure was clear: you didn’t leave witnesses. Didn’t matter who it was: no one who could identify you could be left alive.”

Now she reacted; her lips parted a little, and there was the glint of something — horror? — in her eyes. “You—”

“No,” he interrupted. “I didn’t. I couldn’t. He reminded me of another kid I saw, just like him, years ago, with your brother. When we were in the desert.”

“I know about that,” she said quietly. “The madrassa.”

“Harry told you?”

“He said you were nearly killed trying to save him.”

“I don’t know about that.” Milton was silent for a moment, just listening to the rattle of the wheels on the track.

“What happened next?”

“I went back to London and told them I quit. They didn’t like it. They tried to persuade me it was a bad idea, and when I told them I wasn’t going back, they tried to kill me. More than once. It would have kept carrying on, with me hiding and them trying to find me, but my old commanding officer died and they replaced him with someone who trusts me. I thought I might get some peace, but then I ran into Avi again.”

The train rumbled on. Neither of them spoke for several minutes. It was dark now, and Milton slid the door all the way back to let in some air and what little illumination was still in the day. When he turned back into the boxcar, he saw that Matilda’s eyes were closed. When he went over to check, he saw that she was asleep. The dregs of the sedative, perhaps. He took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders, and then went back to the open doorway and sat with his feet over the edge. He had bought cigarettes at the shop, too, and he lit one, blowing smoke out of the door. The smoke was torn to pieces in the slipstream.