CHAPTER ONE
Jack looked at the note. It fitted in the palm of his hand, white paper, folded neatly down the middle, now a little crumpled from spending a couple of hours in a pocket with his wallet. On it was two lines of neat hand writing in Ethan’s fastidious penmanship.
Iwan Salim is not your enemy. Followed by a date from a year ago.
Reading it over and over was like sliding a knife between his ribs. Each reread was like another centimetre of cold, sharp steel in his flesh. Any moment now, it was going to reach his heart.
“Whatcha got there?” Harry set a large takeaway coffee on Jack’s desk.
Jack resisted the urge to hide the note. Anything else related to Ethan he would have made sure it was kept secret, but this . . . this was too big. From the moment he’d found the note—while taking out his wallet to give Harry money for decent coffee—Jack had tried to deny its existence. The entire time it took Harry to leave the building, walk half a block to the café, get their coffees, and return, Jack had known he couldn’t ignore this.
It hurt. Holy Jesus fuck, it hurt and he just wanted to forget all about it, but he couldn’t because this was his job. And Ethan knew goddamn well he wasn’t supposed to be meddling in it anymore.
It suddenly all made sense. How he’d actually managed to catch Ethan by surprise yesterday, the odd behaviour when they’d fucked, the pretence of being sleepy when the moment he thought Jack was out of it Ethan left the bed and didn’t return. Not to mention that display this morning, with the low-riding track pants and the I’m-so-innocently-sexy-come-grope-me ploy. It had all been a fucking lie. A ruse to get this piece of paper into Jack’s pocket. Why? Because Jack had asked Ethan not to interfere in his job anymore? Or because Jack had interrupted Ethan from planting the note in the apartment and then disappearing?
The knife hit Jack’s heart as he handed the note over to his partner.
Harry perched his arse on the edge of Jack’s desk, sipped his own coffee, and read the note several times. His brow furrowed deeper and deeper. “What’s significant about the date?”
Jack had already wracked his memory, trying to work out what Ethan meant and come up skint. “No clue.”
“So where did you get this?”
“From a source.”
“What source?”
“Just a source.”
Frowning, Harry said pointedly, “But we got taken off the Delta Subject and Salim job last month. Why are you going to your mysterious source now?”
Jack rolled his eyes at Harry’s tone. “I’m not. That note just . . . happened to fall into my lap right now.”
Harry slurped more coffee. “Are you going to pass it on to Keri?”
Keri Sing was the Singaporean unit leader running the job on Iwan Salim, the leader of a large preman organisation in Jakarta. The Indonesian gangster had ties to terrorist groups throughout South-East Asia and had been on the Office of Counterterrorism and Intelligence’s watchlist for years. Jack and Harry had been brought in on the job at the start of the year to keep tabs on Delta Subject, the nephew Salim had sponsored to move to Australia for university. The young man had the right history to be a strong candidate to become a lone-wolf terrorist, but over the months they’d watched the kid, Jack and Harry had realised that was an incredibly unlikely scenario. Not that Keri had believed them, insisting they keep watching the youth as he went about his non-threatening ways. It had taken a nearly disastrous visit to an Oxford Street nightclub for Jack and Harry to be taken off the job. Jack didn’t even know if Keri had got someone else to take over the watch on Delta Subject or not. He’d just been glad to be rid of the pointless waste of time.
And now this.
Goddamn that crazy bastard.
“Yeah, I’ll give her a call.” Jack wasn’t quite able to keep the sting out of his words.
Singapore was two hours behind Sydney, which meant it was early there, but not so early Keri could get cranky about him contacting her. Jack could simply pass the information on to one of her team, but this was big enough to go straight to the unit leader.
Harry pulled out his phone and snapped a picture of the note. “I’ll see if I can find something about the date while you do that.”
The words to stop him bubbled up Jack’s tight throat, but he didn’t let them out. Amongst the simmering anger at Ethan for doing this, Jack was curious. It had to be something serious to make Ethan go to all the trouble of passing the information on in this manner.
So while Harry sat at his desk next to Jack’s and started researching the date, Jack called Keri Sing. Her phone went straight to message. Jack left a terse one asking her to call him ASAP. He then shot off another one through the Office’s internal system and one more to Keri’s second.
“Anything?” he asked Harry.
“Nothing interesting yet.” His second poked at his keyboard with two fingers. “There is a restricted file in Intelligence. I don’t have clearance to open it.”
“Probably nothing to do with this, then.” Jack checked his computer for return messages from Singapore and found nothing.
“Normally I would agree, but the file’s original author was an ITA asset, not an Intelligence one.” The tip of Harry’s tongue appeared out of the side of his mouth as he concentrated.
It wasn’t an unusual occurrence. Intelligence often took over files started by either Internal or External Threat Assessment, but something about this one caught Jack’s attention. Scooting his chair next to Harry’s, he peered at the screen.
Each Office asset had a personal code that consisted of three numbers to indicate their department, three to show their position and four to identify them individually. The code attached as the original author of the file was one Jack had spent a year looking at regularly.
“Fuck.” He shot to his feet and stalked towards the stairwell.
“Jack?” Harry called after him. “Where are you going?”
“We’re going down to Intelligence,” he snapped. “Hurry up.”
Harry caught up as they reached the sixth floor where Jesse Feitt, an Intelligence special investigator, worked.
After Ethan Blade had infiltrated the Sydney branch of the Office at the end of the previous year, it had been decided they would ramp up the search for information about him. Since Maria Dioli, the ITA asset assigned to the task, had been murdered, they’d handed the job over to Feitt. Jack liked Feitt and didn’t mind helping him out whenever the special investigator asked for his opinion on information they dug up about Ethan, even if it made Jack feel a bit uncomfortable when it coincided with one of Ethan’s visits.
Feitt worked out of a small operations room with a team of two techs. All three of them looked up when Jack knocked and entered all in the same move.
“Reardon,” Feitt greeted him dryly. Nothing much phased the man, which was needed when your job sent you trawling through some of the worst parts of human society. He nodded to Harry, then asked Jack, “Have you brought me something new about Blade?”
“Not exactly.” Jack showed him the note. “You have a file with this date on it. I need to see it.”
Feitt regarded him for a long moment, calmly assessing Jack’s demeanour. Seemingly satisfied, he nodded again and called up the file in question. “What’s it in relation to?”
“Another job that’s not related to Blade. At least not directly I don’t think.”
“Right. The file is one we inherited from Dioli’s investigation. What do you need to know?”
“Anything about this date. I’ll know it when I see it.”
With Harry leaning over his other shoulder, the Intelligence asset opened the file and slowly scrolled through it. Almost immediately Jack saw what he needed, but he let Feitt go further, just in case there was something else. After half the file went past with no other significant information, Jack thanked him and hurried out.
“Jack?” Harry galloped along behind him. “Where are we going now? And what did you see in the file? I didn’t see anything important. Just a bunch of stuff about Blade shadowing some Myanmar drug lord.”
“Exactly,” Jack snapped as they came out of the stairs back on the eighth floor. “Find out everything you can about Khun Sein. See if he has any connection to Iwan Salim.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“Check on something else.” He skidded to a stop by his desk and looked for messages from Singapore. Nothing.
Harry hesitated at his own desk. “Come on, just tell me what’s going on.”
Jack pushed gently on his shoulder, encouraging him to sit. “Just look up Sein. I’ll be back soon, hopefully with more information.”
“But Jack—”
“Harry, just do what I said.”
Harry’s brown eyes narrowed at him. “We’re supposed to be partners.”
Jack’s hasty departure stalled. Harry was right. Technically, Harry was his second and subordinate, but that was a thin distinction. In reality they had to work like equals to be effective. Jack may have had the power to veto any of Harry’s decisions, but over the past six months, he hadn’t found any reason to. Harry was smart, capable and after a few rough patches at the start, had settled into Jack’s work groove perfectly well, without losing his own means and methods.
“We are,” Jack assured him. “Trust me for a bit longer. I’ll fill you in when I know more.”
Harry nodded, sat and started work. Jack retreated to one of the break rooms. He locked the door behind him, shrugged out of his jacket and then lay down on the bottom bunk bed. His thoughts were racing a bit too fast to find the calm needed for even a light trance and the longer it took, the more frustrated he got. Especially when his circling thoughts kept going back to Ethan.
God, could Jack have been a bigger dickhead? After Ethan had disappeared without a word during his last visit, Jack’s hope that he would be back had slowly atrophied over the next several weeks. He didn’t have many clear memories of that visit, thanks to suffering a flu, but knowing what he was like while feverish, Jack could assume he hadn’t exactly behaved himself. Surely Ethan would have understood, though? He’d been relieved enough to find Ethan at home yesterday that he let himself be distracted by the sex, and desperate enough to keep Ethan close by that he hadn’t called him out on the fake sleepiness. It was easy to see it all for what it had been now. A distraction. Ethan hadn’t meant to be caught. Which hurt, deeply.
Jack forced Ethan into the filing cabinet in the back of his head. The man wouldn’t stay there long, but hopefully it would give Jack the chance to settle enough to access the deeper applications of his neural implant. It worked, and the moment the implant overlay appeared before his inner eyes, Jack found the file holding the bungled cognitive model he’d performed during that last visit. Normally, he needed to be in a deep meditative state to run a cognitive model, letting the implant access memories that could spark physical reactions close to a full-fledged flashback. Being mostly immobile during those times was the best for everyone. Yet somehow this one had run while Jack was delirious with fever, which meant the results couldn’t exactly be trusted, tangled up as they were with images of Ethan in compromising—for them both—situations. Thus Jack had been very reluctant to look at them. Thankfully, being kicked off the job meant he had even less reason to.
Jack had initially thought of running the model to prove his theory that Delta Subject wasn’t a threat, and as he scanned the results—internally wincing at the threads of Ethan woven throughout—he realised it had worked. He had all the information he needed to prove Delta Subject was innocent. Carefully, he dissected out the more salacious moments around Ethan and collated the pertinent data into a file he could export. It was messy but hopefully enough to convince Keri Sing and her director.
Coming back to full wakefulness, Jack returned to their desks and found Harry slouched over, head in one hand as he desultorily paged down and down on his screen.
“Hey,” Jack announced himself. “Find anything?”
Harry blinked and pulled a face. “Nothing. I mean, it looks like Sein’s organisation probably supplies opium to Salim for distribution but there’s nothing personal between them. How’d you go?”
“Better.” Jack sat and, closing his eyes, called up the overlay of the implant and sent the model file to his computer.
Harry stretched and leaned over. “What did you get?”
“Proof Delta Subject isn’t a lone-wolf candidate.”
“Great. What does that have to do with Sein?”
“Nothing, and everything, I think. Sein had connections to local terrorist-wannabe Samuel Valadian. He was part of Valadian’s network, or they were both part of some other entity’s network. The more we found out about Valadian, the more it looked like he was just a cog in a larger machine. What set Valadian apart, however, was just how deep he’d managed to get his fingers into the Meta-State.”
Harry nodded. Although he’d been stationed in Auckland at the time, he knew all about Jack and Ethan exposing Director Harraway as a traitor, paid by Valadian to ensure the Meta-State looked the other way on his dealings.
“Which has got to be worrying for someone like Khun Sein, and his bosses,” Harry mused. “Valadian paid Harraway money, but the others can’t be sure he didn’t pay in information as well.”
“Exactly.” Jack checked his computer again. Still nothing from Singapore. “I’m going to go see McIntosh and you can go to Tan and see if he can find out why Singapore’s being quiet.”
They trotted up the two flights to the tenth together, then parted ways as Jack turned towards the ITA director’s office, and Harry headed for that of ETA.
“Make it fast,” McIntosh said as Jack sat before her desk. “I have a meeting in five minutes.”
Used to giving quick debriefs, he explained everything to Donna McIntosh, showed her the note and sat in quiet dread as she looked over the results of the cognitive model.
“This is not your best work,” she murmured.
“I know. All the information is there, though.”
“Just. And the note, I assume you got it from . . . a source you’d rather keep to yourself.”
“Preferably, ma’am.” His anger sparked again, but he tamped it down. McIntosh knew he was still in some sort of contact with Ethan Blade, but Jack wasn’t sure if she knew exactly what that contact entailed and he wasn’t going to reveal it now by losing his shit over this in front of her.
“And what does Unit Leader Sing make of it?”
Back on safer ground, Jack told her how there’d been no answer from Singapore and that Harry was chasing it up with Director Tan. McIntosh called through to Tan’s office, listened for half a minute, then hung up.
“Sing didn’t clock in this morning and has been out of touch with her team for more than twenty-four hours. They’ve traced her to Changi Airport where she boarded a plane for Canberra.” McIntosh paused, then said softly, “Her family is also missing.”