Headhunters Read online

  Milton registered that: they knew her name, too. He already knew that this wasn’t a random thing, but there was the confirmation. They had done their research. He filed that away with everything else.

  Matilda did as she was told and Milton sat down next to her.

  “Don’t worry,” he said quietly to her.

  “No talking.”

  “Stay calm. It’ll all be all right.”

  The man came all the way up to Milton and pressed the gun right up close, in the centre of his forehead. Milton was thinking about that extra few pounds of pressure that he would need to exert to fire the first shot, the fractions of a second that that would buy him. The man was close enough now for Milton to gamble, jerk his head out of the way, sweep his arm up to try to knock the gun away. The man left the gun there for five seconds, long enough for the muzzle to leave a faint indentation on his skin, and Milton thought about taking action for every one of those seconds. He decided against it. He was confident that he would be able to disable the man with the gun, but there were three others now.

  “I said be quiet,” the man repeated. “I meant it.”

  Milton raised his hands in surrender and the man stepped back again. One of the men from the door walked over to him and the two conversed. They spoke quietly, and Milton was unable to eavesdrop. Instead, he looked over at the van. It was parked in a particularly dim part of the warehouse, but there was enough light from the flashlights for him to see that it bore the livery of UPS. He could guess why they had brought them here. They were going to be transferred from the Nissan to the van. It would be easier to transport them covertly in the van. It would have been more difficult to be discreet with them visible in the rear seats of the four-by-four. They had chosen to leave the van, collect them in the Nissan and then make the exchange here. If their abduction had been less smooth, and if a chase had been necessary, the powerful Nissan would have been a much better bet to catch Matty’s Jeep.

  More planning. Milton was impressed.

  It looked like the man with the gun was in charge of the two new arrivals, too. He said something, his tone assertive, and the other man went to the van, opened the hood and checked the engine.

  The leader turned back to Milton and Matilda. “You want to use the bathroom, now’s the time,” he said. “We won’t be stopping again for several hours.”

  “Where are we going?” Milton said.

  The man smiled humourlessly and ignored the question. “Her first.”

  Matilda got up and followed the man to the back of the room.

  Milton was about to stand, but the man waved the gun as an indication that that would not be a good idea. He stayed where he was and watched them.

  Matilda was five minutes. When she came back, the man asked whether Milton wanted to relieve himself.

  “Yes,” he said.

  The two newcomers followed Milton to the bathroom. He took a closer look at both of them as he made his way past them. One was around six feet tall, around the same height as Milton, with a head of curly black hair. He was handsome. The other was not; his hair was a messy thatch and his eyes black nuggets, mean and cold, sitting just a little too close together. They followed behind him, their weapons drawn. They had new Berettas, too, he saw. They all did.

  The bathroom was a room with a bucket. There was a thin aperture in the wall, just below the line of the ceiling, and a little streetlight was admitted through it. The floorboards had been taken up and he had to step over the exposed joists. He could see from the discoloured earth in the corner that the bucket was just tipped out when it was full. There was enough waste there for him to guess that the men had been here for a few days. This appeared to have been a base for them.

  Milton relieved himself into the bucket, zipped up his fly and turned back to them. There was no play for him. They had him covered, and Matilda was alone in the main room. Even if he had been able to disable these two, he wouldn’t have been able to leave without her. Any kind of move would put her in great danger. It was impossible. He dutifully led the way back to the van. The rear doors had been opened. He paused and felt one of the Berettas pushed into the small of his back.

  He couldn’t see Matilda.

  “Get inside.”

  He was pushed, hard, between the shoulders and stumbled against the tailgate. Matilda was already in the back of the van. She had the bracelet of a set of cuffs around her left wrist. He pulled himself into the van and sat down on the floor next to her.

  “Put the cuff on,” the man ordered.

  Milton put the cold metal around his wrist and pressed it together until it locked with a click. “Done.”

  “Show me.”

  Milton shook his hand to demonstrate that the cuff was secure.

  The man swung the door shut. The interior was swamped with darkness.

  The chassis rumbled as the van’s engine started.

  He heard Matilda give a little sob.

  Milton reached out until his hand was atop her knee. He squeezed it. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s going to be fine.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “I know. It’s fine to be scared. But if they were going to kill us, they would’ve done it here.”

  “So what’s going on?”

  There was nothing else for it but to be honest. “I don’t know.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  THEY SET off immediately. There was no light now, and he couldn’t see a thing. He could feel Matty sitting next to him. She had pressed herself up close. He spent the first five minutes probing the cuffs, but the mechanism was solid and he knew that he would be unable to unlock them without a tool. There was no point in struggling, so he moved on to making them both as comfortable as possible. They had pressed themselves up against the wall, with the arch of the back right wheel up against Milton’s right side. Milton brought his legs up a little to brace himself against the swinging motion of the van. His right wrist was connected to Matty’s left, and they laid their arms down with only a little play between them.

  He stretched out his free hand and pressed as much of the wall as he could reach. It felt solid.

  “It’ll be okay,” Milton said. “Try not to worry. I’ll get us out of this.”

  She didn’t respond, and Milton didn’t press. He used the quiet to think. He couldn’t narrow down the list of people who might want to do this to him. It was a long list, and no one stood out any more than anyone else. He let his mind wander over the problem and realised that he had been too restrictive in his thinking. What if it wasn’t anything to do with him? What if this was something to do with Matilda, instead?

  “Matty,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Can you think of anyone who might have a reason to kidnap you?”

  “Me?”

  “Think. Is there anyone who holds a grudge against you?”

  “No. A couple of ex-boyfriends I didn’t split with on the best of terms, but they’re not the kind of guys who’d want to do something crazy like this, not even for a joke.”

  “What about Harry? Has he upset anyone recently?”

  “You know Harry. He’s too nice to have enemies.”

  “What about rivals to the business? Any disputes, anything like that?”

  “No. I mean, there have been some issues with the unions, but that’s usual.”

  “What kind of issues?”

  “There was a strike six months ago. The shearers said they wanted double the pay and stopped work until they got it. But they’re already making a lot of money, and the way Harry saw it, they weren’t growing the wool or looking after the sheep or the land—they just came in at the arse end of it and made all the money. Anyway, Harry and the other graziers near Booligal flew in Kiwis to take over. You can imagine how that went down. There were a lot of problems. Lots of fights between the locals and the Kiwis, and those lads are tough bastards.”

  “And?”

  “And the strikers backed down.”


  “You think they resent Harry?”

  “He was the one who was on the TV. He was the spokesman. If they were going to go after anyone, I guess they’d go after him.” She paused. “But that was six months ago. It’s been good since then. Things have been patched up. I’ll give you two examples: Eric and Mervyn. They’re union boys, and you know how much they grumble. They were some of the first to stop working. Six months ago, you ask them what they think of my brother and they’d tell you he was a capitalist bastard screwing down the honest hard-working shearer. But you look at them now. Happy to have a beer with him, laugh at his jokes, best mates again.” She stopped. “No, John. I can’t see it. It just doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that they would do.”

  Milton thought. It seemed unlikely, but it was worth keeping it in the back of his mind. Both of them had begged off coming out tonight. It wasn’t like either of them to turn down a night on the beer, especially one where Matilda was along for the ride. Maybe they wanted to get themselves out of the way. Was it possible? Maybe.

  If he could understand the motive, it would help him work out the best way to proceed.

  The van rumbled along and they were quiet for a moment.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Anyone who’d want to do this to you?”

  He paused. She knew nothing about what he had been doing for the last decade. Harry didn’t know, either, at least not the specifics. He had explained to him that he had been recruited into the intelligence services, but he had purposefully left it vague after that. It was better for all concerned, and there were some questions that Milton did not want to be asked. He realised, as he sat there next to Matilda, that he especially didn’t want her to ask him those questions.

  “I’ve upset a few people through the years, just like anyone else.”

  “And?”

  “And I can’t say any more than that. Maybe this is about me. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s about Harry. Maybe it’s about you. We just have to stay calm, do what they say, and keep our eyes open.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  TIME PASSED. Milton estimated that they had travelled for another hour and, as far as he could tell, they were still heading east. There was no pausing, no stopping for junctions or stop signs. There were no junctions out here, not for hundreds of miles. It was difficult to be certain, but he knew that the road was straight and he knew that he would have been able to tell if they turned around. An hour, travelling at between fifty and sixty miles an hour. He tried to picture a map of the area in his head, and tried to work out where that kind of distance would put them. In broad strokes, it was somewhere in the outback between Wilcannia and Dubbo. He tried to remember the map he had studied with Harry in the shed at Boolanga. There was nothing out here on the A32. It was just thousands and thousands of acres of outback and the long, straight arrow of the road cutting through the heart of it. It was a wilderness, one of the harshest places on Earth.

  They had to be going to Dubbo.

  He was grateful for one thing: it was night. It didn’t bear thinking about what the inside of an unventilated van would be like once the sun came up. They could only hope that they reached wherever they were going before dawn.

  Milton wasn’t prone to worrying about things that he couldn’t control. It was a waste of energy. He had considered all the angles and concluded that there was nothing to be done. He would fall back on his training. Conserve his strength. Observe and assess. Be ready to strike when the opportunity presented itself. And there would be an opportunity. It might only be a slight lowering of the guard, but there would be a moment when his captors became more vulnerable. If Milton decided in that moment that the risk of inaction was greater than the risk of resistance, he would take his chance.

  *

  MATILDA HAD been quiet next to him. He had no idea what she must have been thinking. She had rested her head on his shoulder and, for a moment, he wondered if she had fallen asleep. But then, he felt her shift, pushing away from him until she was upright again.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “What is it with you and drink? You never really said.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why do you have a problem with it?”

  He would have preferred to say nothing, but he felt that he owed her something.

  “There are some things I’d like to forget.”

  “What?”

  “Some things that I’ve done.”

  “I don’t understand. The army?”

  He fidgeted uncomfortably. “No. After that.”

  “You never told me what you did after.”

  He was anxious to get her off this subject as quickly as he could. “I know I didn’t. There are some things I can’t talk about.”

  “Why can’t you talk about them?”

  “Legally. It would be against the law to talk about it. What I did was secret. It still is.”

  That was partially true. It wasn’t the main reason, though. He couldn’t talk about what he had done because she would hate him if she ever found out.

  She laughed drily. “What are you saying? You were a spy or something.”

  “Or something,” he said.

  The van started to slow. That was odd.

  “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Are we stopping?”

  He doubted it. They couldn’t be near where they were going. Not yet. Dubbo was still hours away. Why would they stop out here?

  He was concerned. “Is there anything else out here between Wilcannia and Dubbo?”

  She thought about that. “Poopelloe Lake? That’s about it. The rest is just the outback.”

  “And what’s there?”

  “At the lake? Nothing really. I think you can fish. Not sure if there’s anything beyond that.”

  The van’s suspension rattled as they ran off the asphalt and onto the pitted surface of a track. They started to slide forward, toward the cab.

  “We’re going downhill,” Matilda said. “A lake would probably be in the bottom of a depression. Maybe the road runs above it.”

  Milton hated to guess, but guesses were all he had. “The lake,” he urged. “Think. What’s there?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been. I saw something on the TV once. Something to do with fishing. That’s all I know.”

  He tried to listen for anything that might give him an idea what was happening, but the only sound coming from the driver’s compartment was the muffled noise of music. The throb of the engine obscured everything else. The van bumped over uneven ground and they were thrown together. The van took a sharp corner and Milton reached out to grab the wheel arch to prevent them both from sliding across the floor.

  The van slowed to a crawl and turned sharply to the right.

  Matilda reached for Milton’s hand and, when she found it, he grasped it and squeezed tight.

  “Try to take it easy,” Milton said.

  “Are you nuts?”

  “They don’t want to kill us. There’s something else that they want.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Whatever they say. Don’t give them any attitude. If they think we’re going to be compliant, they might let their guard down.”

  “And then?”

  “I won’t need asking twice.”

  “To do what?”

  “To get us out of here.”

  The brakes applied again and the van rolled to a full stop. The engine was still running. Milton heard the passenger door open and then, shortly afterwards, the sound of rusty hinges squeaking.

  “It’s a gate,” he said.

  The passenger door slammed again and the van set off. The surface beneath the tyres was gravelled, crunching as they proceeded onward, the driver keeping to a slow speed. Milton estimated that they travelled for another ten minutes, although there was no way of telling whether it
was to the north, south, east or west. Finally, the engine changed back down through the gears and the brakes were applied again. This time, the engine was switched off. The two doors ahead opened and slammed shut and they listened to the sound of footsteps on the gravel. After that, too far away to decipher, came the sound of voices. Milton held his breath and tried to listen, but it was just a low murmur.

  The conversation stopped and footsteps approached the rear doors.

  Milton squeezed Matilda’s hand.

  The mechanism cranked and the door was pulled back.

  Blinding light.

  A powerful flashlight. It lit up the interior. Milton couldn’t see anything behind it. He looked down quickly, knowing that he would compromise his vision for moments that could prove to be crucial if he looked into it for too long. He raised his hand to shield his eyes and, as the flashlight jerked down a little, he looked up again. He thought he caught sight of trees and, perhaps, a body of dark water.

  “We’re here,” the man holding the flashlight said. Milton recognised the voice: it was the man who Milton guessed was in control.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that we’re finished for now.”

  “Can we get out?”

  “You’re staying in there tonight.” A jerk of the flashlight indicated the van.

  “Come on,” Matilda protested.

  “No arguments.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Matilda snapped.

  “You don’t have too much longer to wait. This will all be settled tomorrow.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Milton squeezed her hand again. He knew that there was no point in trying to negotiate. Better to focus on the concessions that he could win. “We need water,” he said. “And if we’re staying in here, we’re going to need somewhere to relieve ourselves.”

  “Piss in the corner.”

  “At least let her have a moment outside,” he said. “I’ll stay here.”

  There was a momentary pause as the man considered the request.

  “All right,” he said. He jabbed the flashlight at Matilda. “Come forward.”

  “Go on,” Milton said, wishing that he could tell her what he needed her to do, and trusting that she was smart enough to do it without needing to be asked.