18: Doperunner

Crash sat down on the couch beside me, and Danny sat on the coffee table.

“Oh God,” said Crash.  “I forgot about your phonecall.  You think he’s still down there?”

“Nah, I met a Kthuu last night who thought I was him.  ID’d me as Jack Slate, I said I was his brother.  Said she’d found him in a bunker on Earth II, taken him to Dessalines.  From there, saw him at a distance on Vezzp, then met him on Ispania.  Last known position was the Savillo Markets in New Barcelona, five days ago.  She says he seemed nervous and possibly panicky—you know how Kthuu aren’t great at reading human emotions—and he said he was in trouble.  He then gave several names, asking if she knew them.  They were all aliases of mine.  She said she didn’t, so he asked if she knew ‘Diamond Kondrake’.  Again negative, says he seemed to see something in the distance, and turned tail.  Disappeared into the crowd, hasn’t seen him since.”

“Who’s Diamond Kondrake?” asked Crash.

“No idea.  I don’t even know if it’s a person.  Now, when Trish—she’s the Kthuu female—when she found him on Earth II, he mentioned something about a cache.”

“As in, a cache of weapons, or food, or gear?” asked Danny.

“No,” said Crash, thinking.  “He would have meant a cache with a message, like when we were kids.  If he meant weapons he would have said ‘stockpile’.”

I nodded.  “That was what I thought, too.  She said he was delirious when she found him, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he meant a message cache.”

Danny shook his head, raising his hands in surrender.  “Wait, naw, I’m missing something.  How would you know he meant that?”

I laughed.  “Sorry, should have made that clear.  The missing guy is my brother.  When we were all kids, back on Australia, we would leave secret messages for each other.  Vig, Crash and me are from military families, so we picked up a lot of the lingo early on.  We used to have hiding places for messages, called caches, and we had secret codes and slang that we came up with ourselves, based on military jargon.”

Crash had her mobile link out and was searching through it.  “Sam, I’m gonna call Vaughn, try to rustle up a ship for us.”

“Whoa, whoa, a ship?” said Danny.  “Ashleigh, what do you mean ‘us’?”

Crash chuckled, putting the link to her ear.  “Yeah, us.  You wanted to go to Haiti?  I’ve got a better idea.  Bobby and Fraz aren’t going to find you on Earth II.”

Danny looked at me, but I just shrugged.

Ten minutes later, Crash, Danny and I were in a lift.  We got out on the seventh floor and tried to navigate our way through the maze of corridors.  Crash was walking a little way ahead, peeking along the corridors to make sure there were no hostiles on our route.  We all had our handguns stuck down our trousers, but Danny had left the rifle in the apartment.  Taking one final corner, we reached a dock.  The last five feet of the corridor were a thick plexiglass tube, and a ship was docked alongside.  Vaughn’s ship, the Raven, was a two-hundred-foot Mitsubishi doperunner—a nickname for any kind of sleek, fast boat so favoured by drug couriers.  She held a six-man crew and was painted all in matte black.  Small laser turrets were mounted just below the windscreens, on the topside and on the flanks, all perfectly legal as per Confederate maritime self-defence laws.  We dialled the intercom, and Vaughn’s familiar voice buzzed from the speaker.

“G’day, g’day!  Come on in.”