The Shadow Game (2 page)

Once more, he turned to the east where the sky was tumbling and growling, demanding to be heard. Thick mutinous clouds were rolling in from the coast, stalking a city tormented by crushing humidity.

Summer's fury had wilted the people's spirit; now, on narrow Sydney streets, they scurried for cover, pampered suits and preening hipsters alike, anxiously glancing at a sky preparing to explode.

For the past few hours he'd wandered aimlessly in his stinking rags, a cask of cheap red coursing through his veins. His mind writhed and swirled like the clouds above: twin demons, inside and out, pummelling his soul.

He was weaving down Albion chasing a poetic memory from his youth. He searched for a title but it had been lost, like so much else, in the months he'd spent living in parks, sleeping on benches, a soul adrift.

Sometimes he would wake not knowing where he'd been or where he would go. Always he would drift back to the Place, watching as they kept their distance, afraid of catching his virus, the sickness of desolation.

Among the masses he was alone.

In the few brief hours of clarity he snatched each day, he would beg for money in the hope of settling the gnawing in his stomach. Mostly, though, it went on booze. It was never enough to drown the memories that clawed at his brain and pushed him to the edge of sanity.

He had to forget who he had been, how far he had fallen, how even his name had lost its meaning. If he was anyone now he was the Hobo of Holt Street, the scornful epithet he knew they used to describe him.

Over and again the same verse echoed in his brain, though he couldn't place the words or erase them from his thoughts:

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire.

A sheet of lightning turned the sky into a lake of fire, and a clap of thunder reverberated like a thousand angry drummers. It stopped him dead as it drove others to sprint for safety.

Midnight-dark clouds loured between the broken teeth of the city skyline. The first drops of rain hissed as they hit the pavement
with staccato ferocity. The smell of ozone flooded his nostrils and momentarily lifted the fog in his brain.

The sky flared again as a stab of light shattered a telegraph pole, showering timber and sparks across the street, snuffing out the lights in surrounding buildings.

Satan had come to claim him.

He threw back his head and opened his arms, screaming in the face of the tempest. Talons of rain drenched him, embraced him, cleansed him.

He was not ready to be taken. The vagrant turned and looked at the facade of the building behind him. The Place. News Corporation.

The storm had driven him here and ignited the rage in his soul. For the first time in months he had a purpose.

He strode into the semi-dark building, ignoring cries to stop as he dashed towards stairs that led to the editorial floors of Rupert Murdoch's most influential mastheads.

He bounded up to Level 2, where a sign in the shape of Australia told visitors they'd arrived at the national broadsheet. He kicked it hard, barely pausing as it crashed to the floor.

No one saw him emerge into the dim newsroom. He stopped, chest heaving, as he searched for a weapon. There it was, a sports editor's prized cricket bat.

He felt the reassuring familiarity of the handle and the well-balanced weight of an expensive bat. His first swing was a square cut that burst a computer into a hundred pieces of plastic and glass. Sparks flew and the air filled with acrid smoke.

Heads turned and journalists froze at the sight of the intruder, his grey-black matted hair and beard framing a face contorted in a snarl, his eyes blazing with a crazed and dangerous light.

A guttural scream tore from the madman's throat and staff fled as he cut a swathe of destruction through the newsroom, smashing his way to a glass-walled office where the heavyweights had gathered for an afternoon conference.

With a fearful swing he obliterated the door. Tiny missiles peppered the room's occupants as they cowered in a corner.

Only one was defiant. Editor-in-chief Deborah Snowden stood in front of her troops like a warrior queen, flint hard and ready to confront the invader.

Their eyes locked as he raised the weapon above his head. This beast had a name, a past, a motive. She pointed her finger and uttered a single word, ‘You!', as two burly guards crash-tackled him to the floor.

He woke to the sound of jackhammers in his head and the taste of blood in his mouth.

Gingerly he massaged his swollen face, then reached for his left shoulder which felt ripped from its mooring.

‘Easy, mate.' He lifted himself onto an elbow as his mind sought to sift fact from fiction. His memory was grainy, but he recalled his head slamming into the conference table.

With some effort he forced his eyes open. The light was a hot
poker into his brain. He closed and reopened them, trying to focus until he could clearly make out his surroundings.

The cell was small and clean, a steel-and-concrete tomb with a single bed, a washbasin and a toilet. Sunlight streamed through thick bars onto his face and he drew comfort from its warmth. An odd sense of calm enveloped him.

‘Those with nothing have nothing left to lose,' he mumbled through a split lip, caring little for what happened next.

He looked for the time but his wristwatch was missing. Mid-morning, he reckoned. Should he call room service? He smiled. Some men feared jail but these were comfortable lodgings, the best in months.

A lone siren wailed nearby, another petty criminal on the loose. Then the clip of footsteps on concrete, getting louder, and the sound of a key in a metal door. The creak of hinges. He closed his eyes and lay still, yearning for solitude.

Someone was in his cell, treading softly towards his bed. He could feel a presence, the cast of a shadow.

Theatrically, the man cleared his throat. ‘The once famous journalist Harry Dunkley, I presume.'

He stirred at the sound of a name he'd sought to bury. Lifting and turning his head was painful and as his eyes opened all he could see was a black silhouette etched against the bright rectangle of the window.

‘You're standing in my sunshine.' Dunkley's voice was thick.

The visitor stepped aside and Dunkley's eyes slowly readjusted to the daylight. He pushed himself up and sat in silence for a few moments as his mind grappled with what he was seeing.

‘Well, well,' he croaked. ‘The fallen prime minister, Martin Toohey. What the fuck do you want?'

‘The same thing as you, Harry. Redemption . . . and revenge.'

The gold braid curled across the front of the deep-blue uniform, resting near the Order of Australia medallion, while serried ranks of service ribbons covered the left breast, air force wings flying proudly above them. On one sleeve a thick light-blue line below three thin ones bragged there was no more senior figure in the Australian Defence Force.

Air Chief Marshal Jack Webster caught a satisfying glimpse of himself in the window of his Commonwealth car – ADF 1 – as his staff officer shut the door. He had been dubbed ‘the four-star' from central casting by one women's glossy – with good reason, he thought. Standing six foot three in the old money, the 57-year-old military veteran knew he had the chiselled features of a man half his age. Ramrod straight, his broad shoulders tapered to a waist taut from a lifetime of discipline. Inveterately vain, the
Chief of the Defence Force always had one eye on himself and the other on the enemy.

He was a warrior, a hard man whose career had been settled in the cradle. In a childhood short on sentiment, his father, a brigadier in the Australian army, was never to be called Dad, only Sir.

Webster had long ago given up wondering what his life would have been like if his mother hadn't died when he was twelve. But he often thought of the lessons his father had taught him.

‘Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more,' the brigadier would say, quoting his hero, the famed American general George Patton, as he pushed young Jack through his daily pre-dawn fitness regime.

Webster's father was convinced that General Patton had been assassinated for threatening to expose Allied collusion with the Russians that had cost American lives. He had drilled a vital lesson into his son: trust no one.

How ironic, Webster thought as he double checked the polish on his shoes, that
GQ
magazine had published their profile on him with the headline: ‘Hail to the Chief: Australia's Most Trusted Man'.

This steamy Sydney morning, Webster was opening a new wing of the Concord Repatriation General Hospital, for men and women who had suffered on the frontline and then succumbed to their frailties. Webster had championed the cause of military personnel with post-traumatic stress disorder and been instrumental in raising money for a specialised psychiatric ward.

He sensed the phalanx of local dignitaries quivering with excitement as he was guided by the local federal MP to a
makeshift stage and a lectern emblazoned with the Defence Force crest.

Bright TV lights shone in his face as he looked out at the group of luminaries, doctors, nurses and patients. He briefly glanced at his speaking notes before clearing his throat.

‘I too have felt the horrors of war,' Webster began in his measured, rich, powerful bass. ‘I know the price that our people too often pay when they are in the midst of conflict they don't understand.'

Webster knew theatre and his voice lowered a notch as he dipped his head and recalled a painful memory.

‘I will never forget the shock of seeing the blackened corpses of Iraqis whom I had a hand in killing when I was attached to a US combat group during the first Gulf War.'

He lifted his gaze to the crowd, his eyes now carrying a mix of pity and determination.

‘I took no joy in it. None at all. My only comfort was knowing that I was doing my duty. This is what our country sometimes asks of us. This is the burden we agree to bear.'

Webster's eyes blazed as he warmed to his favourite theme.

‘But we cannot be squeamish about fighting. Every nation, in every age, must have warriors. Perhaps the problem today is that we in the military are too good at our jobs, that the threats seem so remote that some folk believe that peace can be bought by purchasing a bumper sticker. One of the main dangers to the West is the fools in our midst who believe that talk of peace achieves peace.

‘Peace is bought and maintained at the highest price: by blood, force and vigilance.

‘We cannot be complacent about our democracy. It is constantly under siege, from within and without. We fighters, you and I, are democracy's frontline. We are charged with defending the liberties we enjoy. And everyone who lives behind the shield we build should remember that our nation's security trumps all other priorities.

‘Internal weakness only encourages external threats. Right now, on a host of fronts, our resolve is being tested: by people smugglers on our borders, by terrorists in our midst, and by nations who would make us their servants.

‘We must never lose the guts to fight for what we believe in. To fight, we need men and women like you, with the courage to take up arms. Yes, we are a democracy, but our votes have been bought with our guns. As a great man once said, “The gun which produces the vote must remain its security officer – its guarantor. The people's votes and the people's guns are always inseparable twins.”'

The small crowd erupted in applause and Webster let it wash over him. As it subsided he turned again to his notes, his voice carrying the weight of a terrible toll.

‘Forty-one Australian soldiers died and two hundred and fifty-six were wounded in the desert wastelands of Afghanistan.'

He shook his head and slowly looked into the eyes of each patient in the room.

‘But there are many more who carry invisible scars from their time serving this great nation. They are no less damaged, and no less deserving of our help.

‘For those who find the burden too heavy, we must lend a hand. I will not leave my men and women on the battlefield. And
if the horror of battle comes home with them, through minds tormented, then I will be there with them.

‘That is what leaders do. It is both my duty and my greatest honour.'

Webster settled into the soft leather seat of his BMW, waving to the crowd as the driver merged into Sydney's traffic chaos. His phone rang, a call he'd been expecting.

‘Jack,' cooed the familiar female voice, ‘I was watching you on Sky News
.
It went splendidly and it's obviously money well spent. I'm glad you convinced me of its merit.'

‘Thank you, Prime Minister.'

Elizabeth Scott was as besotted by Webster as everybody else: he knew he had something she craved – a genuine connection with the people. But while his popularity soared, hers sank.

Webster had moved effortlessly from triumph to triumph, watching as the nation's leader had stumbled from disaster to catastrophe in her unhappy seventeen months in office. She was constantly in damage control and paranoid about those within her ranks who were feeding the media tales of dissent and disharmony.

And as Scott's position became more grim, her calls to Webster became more frequent. He had become her confidant.

‘Jack, I like your idea about changing the honours system,' she said now. ‘It will be a risk, but I agree that I need to reach out to the Right in my own party.'

Webster smiled, but his voice was all concern and caution.

‘You know, PM, it was just a thought.' Webster exuded humility. ‘I'm not a political adviser; I'm just a humble foot soldier. You need to test the idea with your team of political professionals.'

‘Hah!' Scott could not hide her contempt. ‘You mean the geniuses who dug the hole I'm in now. No, it's my decision, Jack; I'm happy to accept any credit, or blame, that follows. And I've hatched a brilliant idea to make sure that the public applauds me for it.'

Webster's face tightened to a grin. ‘What is that, Prime Minister?'

‘Arise . . . Sir Jack.'