“A few questions and you won’t see me again, okay? I can arrange for an extra week’s paid leave, which you can spend here in the city, or maybe in a Gold Coast resort—next to the sea. Be nice, that. Big change from Kintore. You can be with Toby while he recovers. That’s something we all want, isn’t it?”
Ben hesitated, clearly hating himself for being tempted.
“It’d be good,” Dani said tentatively.
Ben ignored her. “How about it, big fella?” he asked Toby. “Only if you’re up to it.”
“Game on, Dad.”
Ben glared at Yuri. “Be quick.”
“Sure.” Yuri knelt down so his face was level with Toby’s. “Did the doctors fix you up okay?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“So, you were playing football, right?”
“Yeah, with some of me mates. It’s my ball, see. Dad gave it to me. I think it’s gone now. I didn’t see it after.”
“I’ll get you another one,” Ben said.
“Was all this happening at the end of Fountain Road?”
“Yeah.”
“And what happened?”
“Jaze kicked it. Hard, like. I went to bring it back.”
“From the electric station?”
“Yeah, it didn’t go in or nothing. Honest. Dad’s told me it’s dangerous in there.”
“Your dad’s quite right. So you got the ball?”
“No. This woman was shouting, stuff like ‘no’ and ‘go away.’ She ran at me.”
Yuri held up a small tablet, which was showing Savi’s picture. “Is this her?”
“Yeah.” Toby nodded solemnly. “That’s her.”
“She ran at you—then what?”
“Picked me up. She was really strong. Then it happened, the bomb. It went off.”
Yuri could see the moisture glinting in the boy’s eyes; he was starting to withdraw. It was too vivid, too terrifying. “Now this is important, Toby. I need to know about what happened after. What happened to the woman?”
“They took her,” Toby said simply. “She was hurt bad. There was…was blood. It was all over her.”
“The police took her?”
Toby nodded, silent as he relived the memory.
“What did they take her away in?”
“Big car. Bigger than a normal police car. Same color, though. They carried her into the back, along with the other bloke.”
“Another man? Was he injured, too?”
“I guess.”
“Did they say anything to you?”
“Just that I’d be okay. He said they’d called the paramedics.”
“The policeman that talked to you, what did he look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. Was he black, white, Indian, Chinese? Short guy, tall guy?”
“I don’t know. He never took his mask off.”
“What sort of mask, Toby?”
“They were all in armor. It was black. You know the dull kind of black.”
“I do, Toby. Thank you.” Yuri stood up.
“You finished?” Ben asked.
“Sure. Hey, Toby, you did okay. You’re lucky to have a dad like this.” He watched as the Reardons went into the lift.
“Threw them into the back of a car?” Kohei said skeptically.
“Savi told us she was with Ketchell and Larik. But there were more activists scouting ’round for them.”
“So it was likely Ketchell or Larik who was caught in the blast with her. Everyone else would have got lost fast.”
“They were both badly injured. Let’s start with admissions to hospital emergency departments.” Yuri let out a reluctant breath. “And morgues.”
—
Yuri’s office had full access to all the information from more than a dozen primary medical networks across Australia. Their reports covering the last week were open, swamping a pair of his desk screens. The Security Department G5Turing was even running a real-time scan through hospital emergency department files for a Jane Doe matching Savi’s description. So far it had turned up precisely zero. Savi had effectively vanished from the digital world the moment the bomb went off.
He was more concerned by Connexion Security’s own logs. Kintore’s files of first fall day had been deleted from the Sydney office’s servers, transferred to New York under Poi Li’s authority. Yuri’s repeated requests to review the drone videos of Fountain Street had been blocked. There was going to have to be a showdown with Poi Li, and soon. Savi had taken the worst of the blast, protecting Toby Reardon. She needed treatment—if she wasn’t already dead.
And the Sydney department was running another eight current operations, which all required his complete attention, all as important as the infiltration of Akkar’s group. Those agents were depending on him as well. He dropped his head into his hands and massaged his temples. The text of the screens was out of focus no matter how many times he blinked.
The three empty coffee mugs lined up underneath the desk screens made him sigh. According to Boris, his mInet, he’d been in the office for eighteen hours straight. Yuri
There was a swift rap of knuckles on his door, and Kohei Yamada came right in without waiting. “Sorry, chief, we have an incident outside. It’s odd.”