Mission- Outback Page 3

  “Where have they gone?” Lee asked, understanding now why he hadn’t heard about the affair; if it had all gone down in the last day or so, he would have missed the inevitable news reports, stuck as he’d been down the dirty sewers of the English capital.

  “Nobody knows,” Taylor said, “not exactly, anyway. But they want the exchange done somewhere in the Outback, up in the Northern Territory they say, outside of Alice Springs. They must have my boys stashed somewhere up there, right?” Taylor shook his head. “And I don’t trust those feds anymore with this, okay? We haven’t got details for another exchange yet, but I don’t want them messing it up again.”

  “You want me to help out at the exchange?” Lee asked.

  “No,” Taylor said shaking his head. “I want you to get up there into the Outback and find them. That’s what you, do, right? That’s what you do.”

  Lee breathed out slowly. That was what he did; but finding such a small group of people in an area as vast as the Northern Territory? It was, if Lee remembered, over half a million square miles of desert, mountain and wetland wilderness. Where, he wondered, would he even start?

  “What have you told the Federal Police?” Lee asked.

  Taylor shrugged. “As far as they’re concerned, I’m still on board, still playing their game. They don’t know I’m bringing you in.”

  “They’re there already?”

  “The local cops have set up an HQ, along with a couple of AFP protective service officers who were on the ground in Alice Springs. They’ve got a bigger group en route from the Darwin office, but the big shots from Sydney aren’t there yet.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m still in Sydney, I can’t get away at the moment, and anyway, the feds have advised me against traveling until we know exactly what’s going on.”

  Lee nodded. It made sense; until a new meeting was offered, it wasn’t sensible for Taylor to chase the kidnappers all over Australia, all it would do would be to diminish whatever reserves of mental and physical energy he had left.

  “What can you tell me about the boys? Let’s start with the basics first, names and ages.”

  “Monty’s got a file with all the info you need,” said Taylor, “including recent pictures.”

  Slim handed over a manila envelope, which Lee opened. It revealed various documents, including school and medical records, along with the promised pictures. Scott and Matt Taylor were eight years old, identical in every respect, physically at least. Quite tall for their age, slim, sun-bleached blond hair and deep tans that spoke of plenty of time spent outdoors. They seemed lively and cheerful, and Lee could only hope that they hadn’t been hurt.

  He didn’t want to ask the next question, but Taylor seemed professional enough to be able to deal with it. “Have you had proof of life?”

  Sometimes, Lee knew, the abductors killed the victim early on – either by accident, or because it just seemed easier – and they tried to get the money, with no intention of delivering on their side of the deal. It was important to establish that the boys were, in fact, still alive.

  “We know they were in Alice Springs earlier today,” Taylor said, “or at least somewhere close by.”

  “How?”

  “We got a call a couple of hours ago,” Taylor explained, his voice unsteady as he remembered. “The boys read the front page of a local newspaper, the Centralian Advocate. Gets published twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays. They read Tuesday’s – today’s – copy.”

  “It was both of them?”

  “Yeah,” Taylor responded instantly. “For sure. Most people think they look identical, but I can tell ’em apart, and the same goes for their voices. It was them alright, I’ll vouch for it.”

  Lee nodded. “Okay. So, they’re alive, and we suspect they’re being held somewhere up in the Northern Territory. Is there anything else you can tell me about them?” he asked, tapping the file. “Anything that isn’t in here? Have they had problems with other kids, are they scared of the dark, anything that I might need to know, anything that might help?”

  Taylor sighed, and shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know what to tell you. I feel terrible, okay? The truth is, I don’t know; I really don’t know, the bloody teachers and doctors probably know them better than I do. I’m busy, too busy running this damn ‘media empire’, and I’ve not been a good dad. I’ve neglected them, maybe. But I love them, don’t get me wrong, I love them more than anything, I just . . . I guess, until this happened, I just . . . took ’em for granted . . .”

  The tears started again, but Taylor quickly wiped them away. “Look,” he said, “I’m not asking for sympathy or anything, I know I’ve not done right by them, but this whole thing has made me realise what I’ve done, what I’ve missed, what I’ve lost, and I have no intention of missing out on anything else. I want them back, okay? I want them back so bad . . .”

  Taylor wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and Lee gave him a few moments before asking his next question. “How is their mother doing?”

  “Laura’s . . . coping,” he answered tentatively. “She was a lot closer to them than me, you should probably ask her for anything specific about them. Probably makes me seem like a horrible person, right? Don’t even known my own kids. But this business . . .”

  Lee didn’t judge him, however; he knew how the family dynamic often worked in such situations. When one of the parents was so heavily involved with work, they inevitably had little time for their children. They provided them with material goods and a high standard of living, but perhaps little else. And from what little he’d been told about Taylor, it seemed that his work would surely consume most of his waking hours, giving him little for much else.

  “Where is Laura now?” Lee asked, scanning the file to check on their marital status. They were still together, living at an address in Sydney.

  “On her way up to Alice,” Taylor said. “Cops advised against it, but she wouldn’t listen, she had to go up there, you know? Had to be near them, or as near as she could be. You should speak to her, you know. When you get up there yourself. She’ll tell you all the things about them that I should probably know.” He looked down at the floor, saddened at his failings. Then he looked up, eyes a little brighter. “It was Laura who convinced me to find you,” he said. “She’d read about you in the papers, liked the way you do things.”

  “The way I do things?”

  “Yeah. You don’t kill people, right? You’re a Buddhist, humanist, whatever. A pacifist, right? Anyway, she wanted to hire someone who she could be sure would help protect the kids, make sure nothing happens to them, no accidentally getting killed in the crossfire, you know?”

  Lee did know; although it was a niche market, there was a lot of money to be made in the “extraction” business, and certain groups were less scrupulous about how they got their results.

  “Truth be told,” Taylor said, “I’d already hired someone else. Hastings, Inc. Ever heard of them?”

  Lee’s blood ran cold at the name. He had heard of them, and even run into them on more than one occasion. Owned and operated by Max Hastings, a former US Marine colonel, the outfit was exactly the type to write off collateral damage as just another cost of doing business.

  “Tell me you’ve cancelled their contract,” Lee said.

  Taylor nodded. “Laura made sure of it, soon as she convinced me to get you.”

  Lee breathed a sigh of relief; competition from Hastings’s boys was the last thing he needed.

  “So,” Taylor said, “you’ll take the job, right? You’ll find my boys?”

  “Mr. Taylor,” Lee said seriously, tapping his watch. “I’m already on the clock. If Scott and Matt can be found, then I’ll find them.”

  “Thank you,” Taylor whispered, another tear threatening to appear in his eye. “Thank you.”

  2

  By the time they landed, Lee and Phoenix had already carried out a great deal of legwork.

  A call to Alexander Grayson – a former sports agent who worked as Lee’s business manager, often acting as a filter between Lee and the people who hired him – had confirmed that Taylor was who he said he was, and that the situation was genuine. In fact, it was she who had told Taylor where to find Lee, and had suggested he use his influence to get Lee out of jail. She also confirmed that the million dollars for the job had been transferred to Lee’s offshore account, as soon as Taylor had finished the call. And the promise of an extra five million was currently being committed to paper, in the form of a legal contract.

  And yet it wasn’t the money which interested him; he had little use for it, and little time to spend it. It allowed him to keep his Caribbean headquarters running, and provided funds for Mabuni to develop the equipment he needed, but it was only of minor consequence to Lee. He would have taken the job on for free, and he didn’t have to have a degree in psychology to know why.

  After what he’d done in Iraq, and his later escape from the hospital ward, Lee had found himself in the teeming backstreets of Asia; and from Bangkok, he had eventually ended up in a small Buddhist monastery in the northern border provinces, where he had discovered his first peace in years. From there, it was recommended he go to an even more remote monastery, hidden in the foothills of the Himalayas; and so he had gone on a pilgrimage to find it, walking over a thousand miles through Burma, Bangladesh and India before searching the forbidding, icy wastes of the Tibetan mountains for his destination. It had taken months, but eventually he’d found it, and – with a letter of introduction from the abbot of the Thai monastery – he had been welcomed into its sacred confines.

  The name of the abbot at this remote palace of contemplation was Zhao Xiaobo, and he had once been a monk at the famed Shaolin temple, thought by many to be the traditio
nal birthplace of the world’s martial arts. Certainly, this was one of the reasons Lee had been sent there by the Thai abbot; he had recognized a need in the man that he thought Zhao would be able to fulfil.

  And fulfil it Zhao did; the training at the mountain temple was harder than anything Lee had experienced before, and he had experienced a lot. And yet it wasn’t the physical training that had the most profound impact on the war-scarred Lee; it was Zhao’s ability to see the seething hole that lay within Lee’s soul, and develop a way of curing it.

  To a large extent, Lee had been surprised that his months of self-imposed exile, his discovery of peace, the lack of intense action and violence, had done nothing to quell his torture. Zhao though, it turned out, knew him better than he knew himself. He knew exactly what it was that Lee was lacking.

  A mission.

  And so, after he had been at the Tibetan temple for several months, Zhao had asked Lee to perform a task that not many men could have done – to enter the Chinese mainland, in order to rescue an ex-monk, considered by the Chinese to be a dangerous Tibetan rebel, from a secure military compound. Due to his respect for the abbot, Lee had reluctantly agreed, while making a solemn vow not to kill anyone during the mission.

  Entering Chinese territory alone and with no back-up, Lee’s old skills had quickly come back to him and he succeeded against all the odds, rescuing the abbot’s comrade and returning him safely to Tibet.

  Saving someone for the first time in years had – as Zhao knew it would – made Lee feel as if he had achieved something, helping to heal the rift in his soul. It had renewed his energy, given him a purpose in life, convinced him that he needed to use his unique skillset for the good of others.

  This self-knowledge energized him even now, the fact that he needed the mission to survive, to help people in order to achieve salvation for past sins.

  No, he thought, the money never interested him; the job was all that mattered.

  And what a job this was, Lee thought to himself as the wheels of the Gulfstream touched down on the tarmac of Alice Springs Airport. The flight plan had originally called for a landing at Sydney, but Lee hadn’t wanted to waste the time, and had requested to be rerouted directly to the Northern Territory.

  During the flight, Lee and Phoenix had also read and digested the file on the boys, and arrangements had been made back in the Bahamas with Mabuni and Hartman to ship weapons and equipment out to Alice at the first available opportunity. Hartman was also going to arrange local accommodation and transportation, in conjunction with Taylor’s bottomless checkbook.

  Phoenix had used her formidable computer skills to access the files of the Sydney PD, and the national AFP database, through her own secure laptop, and had put together a complete dossier on the current law enforcement operation.

  Taylor had been right – the ransom exchange had been a complete catastrophe.

  It had been supposed to go down at the fish market in Pyrmont, close to the working fishing port at Blackwattle Bay; the money, in a large suitcase, was going to be left at a certain point by Taylor, and when it had been successfully collected, the twins were to be released.

  But the police presence had been too heavy-handed. It wasn’t that the kidnappers had demanded that Taylor not contact the police – they were intelligent enough to know that contact would have been made the moment the bodyguards had been taken out, and the twins had been taken – but they had specifically warned them away from the fish market area.

  The AFP, however, had insisted on going in mob-handed, with plainclothes detectives mixing in with the hundreds of staff and customers among the stalls, while SWAT teams watched and waited for their chance to move in.

  The shooting had started before Taylor had even got to the drop-off area. One of the undercover guys had been made, and been shot immediately; whoever had done it had retreated into the background, but that didn’t stop the SWAT teams from moving in on the unknown targets, at which stage eight more cops had been shot, three fatally, and yet nobody had been identified or caught. And, it transpired sadly, fifteen civilians had also been caught in the crossfire, three of whom had died; and it was certainly possible that it was AFP officers who were responsible for at least one of those avoidable casualties.

  Images of the three suspected shooters had been captured on a combination of CCTV, and mobile surveillance cameras, but they had been heavily disguised. Specialists believed that they wore hairpieces and false beards under their hoodies, along with padding in their cheeks and under their clothes to mask their true shape. The footage, and the still images taken from it, were being analyzed by the AFP experts, and Phoenix forwarded the intel onto Yukio Mabuni as well, to see if he could get anything from it.

  The men – because it was generally accepted due to basic body dimensions, gait and hand size that the three shooters were all male – had used the same handguns. The Heckler und Koch USP Compact 9mm was a pretty high-end weapon, and not the sort of thing typically used by your average gangbanger. It meant that these guys were serious, and knew their stuff; not only had they taken out trained bodyguards to get the kids in the first place, but they had also won a gunfight with the Australian Federal Police.

  One upside of the weapons used was the fact that they were relatively rare, and could perhaps be traced; it wasn’t a certainty, but it was better than nothing, and Phoenix passed those details on to Mabuni as well.

  Lee, meanwhile, had spent a lot of the flight time reading up on Tom Taylor himself, swayed somewhat by the man’s carefully inconclusive answers to Lee’s questions about any potential enemies he might have. Taylor had proved evasive and unwilling to tackle the subject, which had immediately aroused Lee’s suspicions. Quite often in such cases, Lee had found, the kidnappers were known to the victims, or to the families of the victims.

  His research, however, hadn’t particularly added much to the man’s own noncommittal assurances that because he owned so many media platforms, “everyone” was out to get him.

  Taylor – or the papers and TV stations he owned – had certainly made plenty of enemies over the years. There were tales of corruption, embezzlement, vote-rigging, sexual harassment and more from the usual suspects of the government, police and military, as well as scandalous tabloid exposés of the rich and famous, both in Australia and from around the world. The list of enemies Taylor might have made was, indeed, seemingly endless; and Lee supposed that the man’s blasé response to his question had merely been because he had become so inured to it.

  There had, however, been apparent problems with Taylor’s proposed purchase of Titan Media Group, a large multinational company that would secure his position as the primetime kingpin. Costs were being hotly debated, hordes of lawyers were involved, and monopolies commissions were being called in.

  It had seemed to Lee that there might be a link; the timing might have been a coincidence, but it was worth checking out, and Lee called Taylor back in order to sound the man out about it. Taylor, however, was adamant that there was no connection; no mention had been made of the corporate takeover by the kidnappers, no threats had been issued in connection with it, and the only demands had been for the ten, and then twenty, million dollars. And Taylor said that even that was a drop in the ocean, in terms of what he was worth; he could, and would, have paid a lot more.

  Lee had also used Slim as a soundboard to inquire about any employees who might be suspect, either from within his media empire, or from closer to home, including his personal staff. Slim had been of little help, except to assure Lee that the AFP were busy investigating each and every person on that vast list. Lee had asked Phoenix to check into the AFP investigation, but so far, nothing had shown up.

  Lee didn’t think it likely that employees were responsible – the kidnappers seemed too highly trained for that – but it was always worth checking. Just because an angry staff member didn’t have the skills personally, didn’t mean that he or she couldn’t hire someone that did.