18. Flight booking

Magpies! Now he’d seen it all. This latest effort on the Letters page of The Canberra Times really took the biscuit for stupidity. Was it important if a few birds were inconvenienced? No, of course not. This Ann Ounce, whoever she was, was grandstanding in some way. Showing how clever she was, or how compassionate. Or how irrelevant. And what a stupid name. Presumably made up.

There’d be a few to agree with her. The same few who fought passionately to save the rare habitat of the common sun lizard if it happened to be needed for a road or an office block. The same few whose names turned up on every petition, every protest against a government initiative.

The same powerless few every time.

Kim cut the letter out, pasted it into his file, made a copy for Colonel Kern, and turned to the computer.

Ann Ounce of Ounce Books turned out to be a real person. Campbell resident and business owner. Interesting background, dual citizenship, some brushes with criminal activity in Sydney. Long list of what the file referred to as “close international relationships”. Facebook page provided a photograph and some more details. Relationship shown as “It’s complicated.”

And, perhaps most intriguing of all, no previous history of writing letters to the editor. Not in Canberra, not in Sydney.

So, Kim mused, she is fired up enough to write her first ever letter for public consumption about … magpies. Why on earth would anybody do that?

He’d be keeping an eye on her.

In fact, now that he thought about it, he already had.

Interesting woman.

An alert on his computer screen. Another problem. Potential problem at CIA. Canberra International Airport had been shut down. Bomb scare. Disposal specialists en route. Local chat radio was getting updates from onlookers with mobile phones.

No action required. Not yet.

He picked up the phone for Colonel Kern.

“Kern here!”

“Kim. I’ve got a new package for you.”

“Good man! Handover as agreed, right?”

“Time of seven this evening good for you?”

There was a pause. Kim really couldn’t get away earlier.

“It’s winter. Winter in Canberra. I’m not a young whippersnapper like you, and I walk my dog at four, when there’s still some light and warmth in the world. See you then.”

“Yessir!”

Kim hung up. There had been something sharp in the old colonel’s tone. Something that made him jump.

His phone rang.

“Kern here. The first meeting of our protest group is Friday night. I’ll contact the people we’ve got and get them geed up. I’ll give you the details this evening.”

Kern hung up.

Kim reached for his calendar. Uh-oh. He had a big red circle on that day. Marked “Z”. Z for Zoe.

Timing could be a problem here. A big problem.

Well, they paid him to sort problems. He’d have to juggle things. Keep his balls in the air.

He flicked his iPod off. St Germain faded away, the beat continuing on in his mind for a few moments. The local radio replaced it, the voice of someone on a mobile phone, shouts and weep-wop-weep emergency noises in the background.

“He’s in some sort of padded bulletproof suit. Looks like a robot or a spaceman. Just bending down over the thing now. Can’t see what he’s doing from behind this tape, but he’s got some tool out…”

Bloody hell. Bombs at the airport. Experts fiddling with screwdrivers and wirecutters. It’s always the red wire in the films. Cut the wrong wire and the movie’s over suddenly.

But the crisis passed as he listened on. A whimper, not a bang. The best way to sort out crises.

The diverted airliners, the stranded passengers, the emergency response teams, they’d take time to sort out, but that was someone else’s problem.

Four o’clock, and they were just two men out for a jog through Campbell’s streets, making the most of the watery sunlight. Military officers, football players, fitness fanatics – the suburb had men in faded jerseys and running shoes at all hours.

David from the next office had agreed to get out in the field with him. He looked the exact part – chubby and not quite so fit, the very sort of jogger who might pull up with a cramp.

They started behind the school, after-school children running around on the oval, supervised by young women with clear voices. A few warming and stretching exercises and they were off.

“Bloody airport,” David complained as they headed up the hill. Slowly at first.

“Yeah. If it’s anything to do with air travel, they just go nuts. Why couldn’t someone just pick it up and look inside?”

“That’d make too much sense. They want to get dressed up, get their emergency pay, tick all the boxes in the response book.”

“And the airport gets closed for two hours.”

“You know what they say. Better safe than sorry.”

“You know how much it costs the airlines? Not to mention all those people missing flights and getting cranky.”

“Could have been worse. Could have been Thursday afternoon with Parliament going home.”

“Yeah. All those MPs pulled out of the lounge, standing outside in some cold old car park. We’d never hear the end of it.”

“You’d think someone would have just opened it up. A book, for God’s sake! Just open the bloody thing up.”

“It had a picture of a bomb on the cover.” Kim had read the same reports.

“Yeah. And baby food has pictures of babies on the tin. But there was a clue inside. Some numbers.”

Kim hadn’t heard this.

“You ever hear of BookCrossing?”

Kim had, as it happened, but he wasn’t going to admit it.

“Here’s our man.”

David stopped, suddenly bent double, holding a hand to his side and gasping. Kim took off his backpack, rummaged around, pulled out a water bottle and offered it to his companion. A green shopping bag fell out and unfolded itself in the grass.

An elderly gent came up, his dog growling at David’s ankles. The man put down a shopping bag, fastened a leash to the dog’s collar, nodded apologetically at the two men, picked up his bag and moved on.

“He was rolling his eyes at us!” David complained.

“He’s a character all right.” Kim was certain that Kern had been trying hard not to laugh at the performance.

They turned down a side street and completed the circuit back to the oval.

Kim looked through the papers in the bag.

“Christ. Who holds a public meeting at six thirty on a Friday night?”

 

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay