Black Ice Read online

'You can stay the night.'

  Jill took the phone away from her ear, held it in front of her face. Stared at it. Hard. She brought the phone back to her ear.

  'No. That's okay.' She spoke slowly, as though communicating with a lunatic.

  'You're undercover,' he said. 'It'll be easier.'

  Okay, first, how does that follow? And second, 'How do you know that?'

  'We shouldn't talk about it over the phone,' said Gabriel, a little sternly, as if she had brought it up. 'So, I'll see you at seven.'

  I give up, Jill thought. 'Great,' she told Gabriel. 'That would be great.'

  'Don't forget your toothbrush,' he said. 'I've only got the one.'

  Seren rinsed her hair a third time. Even though they wore paper caps, her hair always smelled like iron after work, the stench of blood and shit permeating everything, even her cropped locks. She towelled it off and stepped out of the shower.

  Pay day. Rent day tomorrow.

  She stepped into knickers and a bra and then kneeled at the side of her bed. She stretched a hand underneath. Further. Her heart shot to her throat. Where . . . Her fingers finally found the edge of the box and she dragged it towards her.

  Just a box. Well, it was the Louboutin shoebox; the nicest box she'd ever seen, and in addition to that, it held her wages. She'd been told that the boss paid cash until you'd been there six months; eighty per cent of people didn't last that long, and that was all good to him.

  Seren counted the cash. One more item of clothing was all she'd need to buy for herself, then she figured she could get the rest of her clothes free. After dinner with Christian at Altitude, she planned to hit him up for pressies. After all, he knew he owed her. He just had no idea how much.

  Although it was only a Tuesday night, this was going to be tricky. Seren took eighty dollars from the box. That left just the rent. She prayed that Marco wouldn't need money for sport or an excursion this week. She mentally itemised the food she had for the week: potatoes and lettuce, flour, pasta, bread, cheese, eggs, butter, garlic, milk and Vegemite. That was it. So, sandwiches, omelettes, potato bake, pancakes, macaroni and cheese. Breakfast, lunch and dinner until next Tuesday. It would have to do.

  She gnawed her lip. Was she seriously going to go and spend this eighty dollars on herself – on new clothes for godsakes – when she didn't otherwise have a cent to live on?

  And what would eighty dollars get her anyway? Eighty dollars wasn't enough for a haircut in Christian's world; it was definitely nowhere near enough for a whole outfit.

  Seren stood, and thought she caught another whiff of chicken blood. Maybe the stuff can soak into your skin, she thought, like a curse, a permanent reminder of the way she made a living – the slaughtered chickens' last revenge.

  She made her way back to the shower. She had to come up with something.

  31

  Tuesday 9 April, evening

  'What would be nice with lamb?' Jill asked the man behind the counter of the bottle shop. She had no experience with wine of any quality.

  Fifteen minutes later, with the bottle and a block of dark chilli chocolate in hand, Jill pressed the intercom button at Gabriel's unit block in Ryde, located in Sydney's northwest. The buzzer sounded and the door lock clicked without Gabriel asking who it was.

  Sloppy, she thought. For a cop. A federal cop at that. She climbed the stairs and knocked on his door.

  'That's a piece of shit,' he said, smiling, when he opened it.

  'Sorry?' she said. He couldn't mean the wine; it was in a brown paper bag.

  'That car,' he said. 'What a shitbox.'

  Jill shrugged. 'What are you gonna do? Company car.' She followed the gorgeous smells into the apartment, placed her purchases on the bench and glanced through the kitchen window. While the balcony of this unit overlooked a grove of native eucalypts, the view here, from the sink, was of the visitors' car park. She pulled down the blind, shutting out the sight of her Magna, illuminated brilliantly under a lamppost. Gabriel had obviously seen her drive in.

  'Where's your stuff?' he asked.

  She flushed. 'Well, I did bring a change of clothes. I left them in the car,' she said, speaking fast. 'It is a bit of a hike back there to Fairfield, and I figured that I should make the most of the time I can spend with your databases.' She moved her eyes in every direction but his.

  'I meant your files,' he said.

  Jill flushed. Had he been joking about staying over? Fuck! She felt like opening the sliding doors and scaling down the huge tree that mushroomed outside Gabriel's balcony. She couldn't speak.

  'Ha! Just shitting you,' he said. 'It's good you're staying. I'm bored. We can get a lot done. I've been looking into this Kasem Nader.'

  'What?'

  'Nader. We've looked at him before, but only in connection with some of his associates. He's got some cousins hooked up with a group of gun runners from Melbourne and the UK.'

  'How do you know Nader's part of my assignment?'

  'Superintendent Last,' he said. 'We keep in touch.'

  So much for a secret undercover operation, Jill thought. Still, she wasn't terribly disturbed that he was aware of the assignment. She realised that she trusted him. Wow. That brought the number up to around five adults on the face of the earth.

  But trusting him didn't mean she felt comfortable.

  She peered around the kitchen, looking for something to do, to fiddle with, until they could eat or start work. The bench tops were clear. She tugged at her top, a little unsettled with her uncharacteristic choice of clothing this evening. She wore a sheer black shirt over a black singlet. At the last minute, tired of the pants she'd been wearing most days since she began this assignment, she'd changed out of her jeans into black tights and a snug black mini-skirt.

  He watched her discomfiture; then added to it. 'You look like some kind of comic book secret agent,' he said.

  Probably she should just go home.

  'Not in a bad way,' he continued. 'Just the black clothes with your blonde hair; maybe it's more a ninja look?'

  'You having fun?' she said.

  'Yeah. A little bit,' he said.

  'At least I don't spend time designing a website no one's ever going to use.'

  'Have you ever designed a website?'

  'No, but . . .'

  'There, then.'

  Jill laughed. You couldn't win an argument with this guy. She didn't want to right now. 'The lamb smells delicious,' she said.

  It was. After they'd eaten, they carried their dishes to the sink and Gabriel began to wash up. His little grey cat, Ten, sat on the windowsill above him, performing her own ablutions. It seemed to be a well-worn routine. There wasn't a lot of room in the kitchen to help out, and they seemed to have it covered, so Jill hoisted herself up to perch on the benchtop. She picked up her glass of wine.

  'You okay that I'm sitting up here?' she asked.

  'Why wouldn't I be?' he replied, as though she'd asked if it was okay that she turn on a tap. 'So what've you got so far on Nader?'

  'Well, it was just word on the street until today,' she said. 'Plenty of people throw his name around like he's a big player. So, I got close to a friend of his. I suppose you'd call him a friend.'

  'What's this person's name?'

  'Everyone calls him Jelly. I haven't gone too far into his background. He's not a target.'

  'Jeremy Simons,' said Gabriel.

  'Yeah?'

  'Yep. AKA Jelly. Agree he would not be a target; he's had IQ problems since birth.' Gabriel continued soaping pots. 'He came up as an associate when we were looking into Nader.'

  'Anyway,' Jill continued, 'I got Jelly to introduce me to Kasem and I was invited over to his house in Merrylands.'

  'The Nader house?'

  'Yep.'

  Gabriel gave a low whistle. 'What was that like?'

  'Nothing remarkable,' she said. Except that my frigging sister was there. 'No sign of any criminal activity that I could see. Of course, that is his parents' house. T
hey were overseas.' She kicked her shoes off and they dropped to the floor. Ten gave her a haughty look; went back to cleaning. 'So,' she said, 'I had nothing else until I got a little more intel from two small-bit locals. They say they buy their stuff from a couple of blokes named Agassi and Urgill. So, I followed it up and, yesterday, I see these guys at the Station Hotel, shaking hands with Nader.'

  'So?'

  'So, it looked like a business shake, if you know what I mean.'

  'Yeah. Worth a look.'

  Gabriel finished the last pot.

  'Want a hand?' she asked. Big smile.

  He threw a tea towel at her head. 'Let's go,' he said.

  They moved into the lounge room and Gabriel took the armchair. Jill dropped down onto the couch. 'Aren't we going to do some searching?' she said.

  'I thought first I'd give you what I have on ATS in the area.' ATS. Amphetamine type stimulants. The acronym used by those who worked in this field all the time.

  'How do you know so much about amphetamines?' she said.

  'I did some work with the ACC,' Gabriel told her.

  Phew. The Australian Crime Commission, a statutory body headed up by the Commissioner of the Federal Police. The head honchos. Their brief: to draw together all arms of law enforcement and intelligence-gathering in order to battle organised crime. Jill knew that the ACC were conducting a special intelligence operation into Amphetamine Type Stimulant production in the Asia–Pacific region. She'd guessed that the findings from her current job would get back to these people eventually, but she knew she was just a grunt in the trenches to the ACC.

  'So, you want some history first?' he asked.

  Jill reached out to the coffee table for the bar of chocolate. She broke off a few squares and threw the rest over to Gabriel. She tucked her feet up underneath her and said, 'Go.'

  'Well, believe it or not, ephedrine, the key ingredient in amphetamines, dates back to 2760 BC,' he said. 'It was used in Chinese medicine. Westerners cottoned on to it in the late nineteenth century; and when they got worried they'd run out of the natural supply, they synthesised it. Doctors tried it as a treatment for pretty much everything, but it got its biggest roll-out in World War II. All sides wanted their soldiers to have a little extra firepower.'

  Gabriel ate a piece of chocolate. 'Anyway,' he said and then his face contorted in a grimace. He reached for a tissue and wiped his mouth. 'What is that?'

  'Chilli chocolate,' she said.

  'Oh,' he said, and snapped off another piece, popped it into his mouth. Jill smiled.

  'When the war ended,' he continued, 'the supply was dumped into the civilian market. Japan was flooded with the stuff and they reckon up to one and a half million Japanese were abusing it. Governments around the world started cracking down, and made it prescription-only, but enough was still leaking out to make it uninteresting to major crime. There was the demand, but plenty of supply, therefore little profit. That was until the seventies, when the rates of amphetamine psychosis around the world were becoming a pain in the arse, and governments got serious.'

  He reached for the chocolate and broke off another row. 'Good shit, this,' he said, wiggling his eyebrows. 'Anyway, you're as up to date as me with recent history. When supply dried up, organised crime got involved,' he continued, after swallowing. 'In Australia, it's mostly been about outlaw motorcycle gangs, as you know.'

  Gabriel knew that Jill had received a promotion and a lot of cred when she'd been instrumental in shutting down a bikie meth lab in Wollongong.

  'And your current corner of the world looks to be quite the hotspot,' he said.

  'Yep, plenty to go around out there, that's for sure.'

  Gabriel divided the rest of the bottle of red between their glasses. The merlot was spicy and delicious. Jill took a sip, savouring the wine. Her lips tingled from the chilli in the chocolate, and she sank back into the lounge. She felt relaxed for the first time in months.

  Gabriel repositioned the lounge cushion behind him so that he could also recline a little. He swung his legs up over one of the arms of the chair and leaned into the crook of the other. 'We're predicting trouble at the moment with our neighbours,' he said. 'The AFP is pretty sure that there's a sizeable clan lab set up in one of the Pacific islands, supplying Australia with a great deal of a few of the precursors used to manufacture ice.'

  'The Pacific islands?' said Jill. 'I'm surprised. I mean, I knew that Southeast Asia was a problem . . .'

  'Yeah, didn't you hear about that clan lab busted in Fiji a few months back? One of the biggest ever found in the world,' he said. 'Enough precursors in there to pump out five hundred to a thousand kilos of crystal meth a week.'

  Jill whistled.

  'Yep, a shitload,' he said. 'It would have been devastating over here. We got another big bust in 2006 in Malaysia. It was in a shampoo factory. They could've cooked sixty kilos of ice a day. In each case, Australians were in on the syndicate. The crims know that Aussies are cashed-up and will pay a lot more than users in other parts of Asia, so big traffickers want in on this market. And because a lot of the Pacific islands have shit customs controls, they're perfect for factory-scale production.'

  Jill sat up on the couch and put her empty glass on the table. 'It would make sense if there's a big lab in production,' she said. 'I mean, we're pulling in a lot of dealers, but there's just so much out there. Someone's got a big operation going on.' She paused, thinking about the addicts who lived near her. 'It does such a lot of damage,' she said.

  'Even in ways you maybe wouldn't necessarily think of,' Gabriel agreed. 'I mean, did you know that the current rise of HIV in Australia is linked to amphetamine use? Everyone's loved-up and ready to party and they're doing it several times a night and never with a condom.'

  'It's the little kids that get to me,' Jill said. 'Since I've been undercover I've had to call DoCS at least once a week. The fuckers get so violent when they're coming down off ice, and the kids are in the middle of it all.'

  'It's gotta be pretty hard out there, huh?' said Gabriel.

  'There's so much screaming,' she said. 'You wouldn't believe the shouting at night. Never fail, there's a major domestic every single night.'

  'Yeah? You getting tired of it?'

  'Well, I was tired of it the first day,' she said. 'But I'm not ready to stop yet, if that's what you mean. It doesn't feel right to.'

  There was silence for a few beats. Jill let her hand drop, and absentmindedly stroked Ten, who punched her whiskery cheeks into her ankles, tail held high.

  'You know,' said Gabriel, watching his cat headbutting Jill's hand, 'I worked for a while with a guy who got posted to East Timor. Good bloke. But he came back from deployment and couldn't settle down to things again in Australia. Told me he felt guilty just living life over here while people were suffering back there. In the end, he dropped out of everything. Quit the feds. Went back.'

  Ten did some yoga poses on the carpet, angling for a tummy rub. Jill tickled her with a toe. She didn't speak.

  'So what's with the drinking?' Gabriel said.

  'With the what?'

  'You and the wine. That's new.'

  'A bottle of wine with dinner. Well, half a bottle. You drank the rest. What's with your drinking?'