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  When it had finished, the Director of the FSB let out a deep breath.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this before? What do you want from me?’

  ‘A search warrant, signed by you.’

  Later that day, Galina Aslanova summoned the team she had assigned to Operation Tectonic Plate. Four women. All fiercely loyal to her.

  The oldest, Lyudmila Markova, grey-haired and well over sixty, had served in the FSB for over twenty years. If she resented the fact that a much younger woman had been promoted over her as the Head of Special Ops, she gave no sign of it.

  They all were all curious. They knew that Galina had had a sudden unscheduled meeting with the Director.

  ‘What’s this all about?’ Lyudmila asked.

  Galina came straight to the point: ‘You’ve all watched the Skype conversations. We know there’s a video out there and we need to find it.’

  She told her deputy, ‘All the evidence points to some freelance activity in the FSB office in St Petersburg at the time of President Popov’s World Tiger Summit. I want you to take the team down to St Petersburg at once. I want you to find that video and bring it back here under lock and key.’

  Her voice hardened. ‘Get cracking, ladies. Don’t let them bullshit you. They’re a pretty macho bunch down there in the St Petersburg office. Do whatever you have to do, even if you have to kick them where it hurts.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Mickey Selkirk ran about 20,000 head of cattle on Lazy-T’s million acres; most of them destined for the lucrative beef export markets of Asia.

  ‘They’re going to bring in some cows today,’ Selkirk told them at breakfast. ‘We’ve been using helis – R22s – for mustering for the last ten years. Much the best way. A lot of cattle men are using helis for mustering nowadays.’

  Jack Varese’s eyes lit up. ‘R22s? I trained on an R22.’

  ‘In that case, we can use you. The heli-musterers normally work in pairs when they’re driving cattle. But one of the pilots is off duty.’

  Selkirk drove Jack Varese to the airstrip where a pair of small, red, two-seater helicopters were parked. A wiry young man, wearing jeans and cowboy boots, was already waiting.

  ‘We’re in luck, Jim,’ Selkirk said. ‘Ollie’s still sick but I’ve got a volunteer: Jack Varese. Don’t know if you ever go to the movies. You might have seen him.’

  The young herdsman touched his hat: ‘Don’t see a lot of movies round here. You flown one of these before?’

  Varese nodded. ‘Mother’s milk.’

  ‘Keep your eye on me when we’re in the air,’ Jim Jackson said, ‘and we’ll work it together. I try to anticipate where the cows might play up and give us trouble. You get to know what sort of move will be able to turn them. To guide them, you’ve got to get right down, almost to ground level. If your engine fails, you don’t have any time to react.”’

  Varese nodded sagely. ‘You can’t autorotate out of trouble at that height.’

  The two little helis took off and headed west. They had been in the air about ten minutes when they saw the first herd of cattle.

  Through the headphones, Varese heard Jim Jackson’s voice: ‘There are about 500 in that herd. We’re looking to bring in about a thousand this morning. So we’ll fly past this bunch, round up another herd, bring it back here, and drive ’em both in.’

  A minute or two later, they saw another large group of cows. As the helis dropped to tree level, the cattle began to stampede.

  ‘Get out behind them and turn them back,’ Jackson instructed. ‘I’ll hover here and stop them breaking south. Then we’ll drive them all back together.’

  Jack Varese got the hang of it quickly. Sometimes he flew so low that he could actually touch the backs of the cows with the helicopters skis, forcing them to turn.

  ‘Watch out for the trees,’ Jackson shouted into the RT at one point, as Varese manoeuvred through the bush.

  They brought about a thousand head of cattle back to Lazy-T that morning.

  While the herd was still five miles from the station, Mickey Selkirk drove Ed Barnard and Melanie in the Land Cruiser out to meet them. Rosie Craig rode one of the station’s horses.

  The two little red helis kicked up a cloud of dust as they landed beside the parked vehicle.

  Selkirk, ever the gracious host, had brought a large flask of tea. ‘You guys must be thirsty.’

  Jack Varese looked at Rosie Craig, holding her horse by the bridle, her face glowing. ‘Don’t you just look the part?’

  After lunch, Selkirk took them off to the Bungle-Bungles. ‘Just wanted to show Jack I can fly a helicopter too.’

  Of course, Mickey Selkirk was joking, but he was making a point as well. He wasn’t going to be out-flown by any young whipper-snapper.

  It was short hop from Lazy-T to the Bungle-Bungles.

  Selkirk flew the Bell 206 Jet-Ranger over the famous beehive domes in a figure of eight pattern. As the helicopter banked, Edward Barnard found himself staring into a series of steep-sided abysses, criss-crossing the mountain range, running for miles through the rock. He could even see tall, palm trees which seemed to sprout from the canyon floor.

  Later they trekked though one of the canyons. Taking a break in the shade of a huge overhanging rock, Selkirk gave them a little lecture.

  ‘This is one of the finest rock art sites in the area.’ He pointed to the rock face. ‘The people who lived here were some of the world’s earliest inhabitants. The paintings here could be over 20,000 years old. See this figure here? That’s an echidna, a kind of anteater. The aboriginal people believe the hills were formed back in the dreamtime, when an echidna was attacked by a “galah”, that’s a large white and rather noisy bird. The echidna fights for his life. As he digs to escape, that’s how the beehives and gorges were formed.’

  Listening to Selkirk talk, Barnard felt a surge of admiration. People were too ready to scoff at the man, he thought. Were they just envious of his success? What was it that drove him? Some elemental form of patriotism, perhaps. An urge to show that Australians too could rule the world.

  They flew over Lake Argyle on the way back. Mickey Selkirk gave them a running commentary. ‘This is the largest lake in Western Australia. They dammed the Orde River back in the 1970s. Now the Chinese are here in a big way. They’ve bought twenty-thousand hectares of irrigated land, as well as the old Kununurra sugar mill. A Chinese company has taken over KAI, Kimberley Agricultural Investments. There’s a whole Chinese community up here now.’

  Selkirk banked to the left. ‘Time to head back. I’ll get Ching to rustle up some tea.’

  Later, back in the staff quarters of the Lazy-T homestead, Ching Ze-Gong heard snatches of Australia’s most famous song.

  ‘Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong

  Under the shade of a coolibah tree,

  He sang as he watched and waited ’ til his billy boiled

  You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me.’

  What fools they all were, he thought. Didn’t they know that the world had moved on? Who cared about billabongs? What the hell was a billabong anyway?

  Thank God, thought Ching, the time was getting closer when Fung and he could return to the land of their ancestors, and to their beloved Wuxi, the prettiest of all China’s ancient cities. They had saved a lot of money working for Selkirk. And they had had a useful additional source of income. For the last ten years, he and Fung had served as undercover agents of the Chinese secret service. As Chinese investment in Northern and Western Australia increased, so did China’s network of agents. Hu Wong-Fu, the owner of Kununurra’s most popular restaurant, Kimberley Asian Cuisine, was his immediate superior.

  That very afternoon Hu Wong-Fu had sent him a text with short and simple message. ‘Do it tonight!’

  Li Xiao-Tong, sitting in his office in the Ministry of State Security, Beijing, reviewed the report he had received an hour earlier. Thank God for the Chinese Diaspora, he thought. There seemed to be almost
as many Chinese living outside China as inside, and many of those were fiercely loyal to the motherland. Take Ching and Fung, for example. They had never actually lived in China but they still regarded Wuxi as their ancestral home and planned to return one day. What a splendid idea MSS Agent Hu, owner of Kununurra’s Kimberley Asian Cuisine restaurant, had had when he proposed recruiting Mickey Selkirk’s two live-in staff as part of the MSS network of secret agents in Western Australia.

  You could hardly suspect Ching and Fung of being spies just because they innocently popped into town for a Chinese meal on their day off.

  What a good job they had just done! He clicked on the recording which accompanied the email and heard Mickey Selkirk’s unmistakably Australian accent: ‘So you don’t need to tell me why you’re here. But let me say one thing. I want to be perfectly clear about this. I can’t be bought, but I can possibly be persuaded. So let’s look at a deal that’s good for both sides.’

  If that’s wasn’t a smoking gun, Li didn’t know what a smoking gun was.

  Good work, Ching, he thought, picking up that whole conversation. Advances in technology made eavesdropping so much easier nowadays. If you were waiting at table, for example, you could just carry your phone around in your pocket with the record button pressed. Or you could hide the phone in some convenient nearby vessel and leave it there for the duration.

  He clicked on the photos Ching had sent. How good Rosie looked on a horse, Li thought. Pity Fung hadn’t managed to snap a few pics of Rosie in bed with Jack. They’d be worth a bob or two on the black market. You missed a trick there, Ching, he thought.

  Or maybe Ching had other plans for this kind of hot stuff. There were plenty of takers out there, he knew. Photos of Jack Varese and Rosie Craig in bed, even if they were just drinking a cup of tea and reading the Sunday papers, would go viral in seconds.

  Li made a mental note to ask Agent Fu to have a quiet word with Ching. If he was selling secrets on the side, somebody should be getting a cut.

  MSS held the whip-hand there, he reckoned, as far as Ching and Fung were concerned. That little house in Wuxi, reserved for them as long as they kept the reports flowing, might suddenly disappear off the list of homes available for loyal cadre if it came to it.

  Barnard had left the terrace door to his room open. He could still hear the sound of singing and laughter from the campfire.

  Ching Ze-Gong went to the store room, opened a crate, and removed a small wooden box. The box was locked but small holes had been drilled in the side.

  While the rest of the party was still sitting by the fire, Barnard had turned in early. He felt tired. Maybe the jet-lag was getting to him. Jack Varese, he noted, seemed totally impervious to fatigue.

  As the party broke up, Varese had taken Rosie aside, telling the others, ‘You guys mind if Rosie and I pop over to have a night cap with Jim and Ollie?’

  ‘Go ahead, Jack. Take the ute,’ Selkirk had said. ‘Please tell Ollie I’m looking forward to seeing him tomorrow. If he’s fit to drink, he’s fit to fly.’

  Barnard undressed as soon as he reached his room, putting his pyjamas on and slipping into bed.

  He felt the bite almost at once. A short, stinging pain, followed by a burning sensation.

  ‘What on earth’s that?’ he shouted aloud.

  He flung back the bedclothes to see a black spider, about the size of a baby’s fist, with a large red spot on its back, scurrying towards the open terrace door.

  Edward Barnard didn’t panic easily. He knew he needed a dose of anti-venom. Australia had some of the most poisonous spiders in the world. But you had to know which spider had bitten you.

  He picked up a shoe. Two thwacks. One dead spider.

  ‘Hello there!’ he shouted. ‘Can someone give me a hand?’

  Mickey Selkirk, like Ed Barnard, had turned in early, but Melanie, who been catching up on her emails in the sitting room, came running.

  ‘I’ve been bitten by a spider,’ Barnard gasped. He was already short of breath as the toxin kicked in.

  Melanie Selkirk took a look at the dead spider. She was puzzled. ‘Not sure what that one is. Looks a nasty piece of work. We need to get you to hospital. I’ll get Mickey.’

  They helped Barnard to the helicopter. Selkirk ran through the pre-take-off checks. He had taken plenty of shortcuts in his life but never when it came to flying planes.

  ‘Oh, heck,’ he swore. ‘We’re out of fuel. Can’t believe this. I thought I’d asked Ching to fill it up when we came back from the Bungles.’

  It was another five minutes before they were ready, in which time Barnard began to feel like death.

  They took the spider with them in an empty marmalade jar. Even dead, the insect looked lethally menacing.

  Dr Phillips, in the Accident and Emergency Unit in Kununurra District Hospital, was as puzzled as Melanie Selkirk had been.

  ‘Just give me a second.’ Taking the jar with him, he hurried out of the room.

  He returned less than two minutes later, looking strained and worried. ‘I showed it to Professor Cohen, our toxicology expert, who happens to be on duty tonight. It’s a Sydney Funnel Web Spider, the deadliest spider in the world. The Professor comes from Sydney. That’s the good news. We know what we’re dealing with.’

  ‘What’s the bad news?’

  ‘We don’t have any anti-venom here.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘There’s no call for it. Sydney’s the only place in Australia this particular spider lives, mostly in dark corners and moist basements. That’s why it’s called “Sydney”. It’s never been seen in this part of the world. Not until now that is.’

  Barnard lay on the bed in the A&E unit, while Dr Philips examined him. Barnard had been bitten on the right leg, below the knee. The whole lower limb was red and swollen.

  He prodded Barnard’s stomach. ‘Any abdominal pain?’

  ‘I feel as though I’ve been kicked in the stomach by a horse,’ Barnard replied.

  While the examination continued, Melanie tapped the words ‘Sydney Funnel Web Spider’ into the search bar of her Apple iPhone 7.

  ‘The bite of the Sydney Funnel Web Spider is usually painful, both due to large fangs and acidic venom. Convulsions may occur. Death may occur within an hour.’

  She checked her watch. It was already an hour since they’d left Lazy-T. Barnard wasn’t dead yet and he had hadn’t even had any convulsions. Always look on the bright side, she thought.

  A tall, white-coated man hurried into the room with a vial in his hand. Professor Cohen said, ‘Try the Red Back Spider anti-venom. It’s all we’ve got.’

  They gave him one vial of CSL Red Back Spider anti-venom first, injected intra-muscularly, followed twenty minutes later by another.

  ‘I feel much better already,’ Barnard said.

  ‘You look better too,’ the doctor said. ‘Do you want to stay overnight?’

  When Barnard politely declined, Dr Philips handed Melanie two more vials. ‘He won’t have a relapse,’ he told her. ‘But if he does, give him another shot.’

  They were back at Lazy-T before midnight. Barnard couldn’t believe he had recovered so quickly. At one point he’d thought he was going to die. The wonders of modern medicine.

  Mickey Selkirk was pleased as punch. He didn’t often fly the heli at night nowadays. ‘Do you want a drink before you turn in?’

  ‘No, but I think I’ll check the bed before I get in it!’

  Ching, meanwhile, had heard the helicopter return. He saw Barnard walk back to the house, with no obvious signs of distress.

  What the hell had gone wrong? he wondered.

  What kind of anti-venom had they given Barnard in the hospital? Mind you, he thought, if the old man hadn’t checked the fuel before take-off, they wouldn’t have made it to the hospital at all.

  Selkirk’s Lazy-T ranch had its own satellite dish. Ching tapped out a message on his laptop and pressed Send.

  Li Xiao-Tong’s computer pi
nged. A new email had arrived:

  ‘Regret unable to fulfil your order for one portion of prawn curry. Await further instructions.’

  ‘Damn and blast,’ Li Xiao-Tong swore under his breath.

  He went upstairs to report to the minister for State Security, Zhang Fu-Shen. He was expecting trouble. Zhang made a habit of saying, ‘Failure is not an option’.

  Zhang’s reaction to the news that Edward Barnard was still alive and kicking surprised him.

  ‘Forget about Barnard,’ Zhang instructed. ‘We have bigger fish to fry. You sent me the recording of Barnard’s Skype call with his wife. Well, I listened to it. She says her husband would never have worn US-Flag boxer shorts and I believe her. So the video we used to try to trap Barnard was faked.’

  Back in his office, Li fired up his laptop and clicked on the file. There was Barnard in the lift with the two girls; there was the fuzzy, long shot of the three of them on the bed, the man with his face obscured in the tangle of thrashing limbs and there – yes! – were the US-Flag boxer shorts, still lying where they fell, like a soldier on the field of battle, when Mr X hurried to join in the fun.

  He paused the film, and enlarged the frame. Close-up, the US-Flag boxer shorts looked rather attractive. Silky and inviting. Edward Barnard might take a different view but he, Li Xiao-Tong, senior official in the Chinese ministry of state security, rather fancied himself wearing Old Glory underwear.

  He enlarged the frame still further until the writing on the waistband of the briefs was clearly legible: ‘PUT AMERICA FIRST’ it said.

  Li racked his brains. Now who on earth would have ‘PUT AMERICA FIRST’ sown into the waistband of their underpants?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The specially constituted inter-departmental team had been studying the video film for more than two hours in the basement of MI5’s Millbank headquarters overlooking the Thames, and they were feeling the strain. Analysing frame by frame the video Barnard had brought back from China was hard work. The constant stream of messages from ‘upstairs’ – the Director-General’s office – asking for a report on progress contributed to the tension.