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thigh, ‘has nothing to do with my previous experience?’
    ‘Of course it does!’ Connor grunted, blocking the kick with his shin and countering with a front-kick.
    Ling skipped out of range, then came back in with a body hook punch to his ribs. ‘Or my surveillance skills –?’
    Connor grimaced as the strike hit home. Ling might be small, but she was
lightning
fast.
    ‘Or my fighting ability?’ she demanded.
    Like a whirling dervish, Ling came at him with a flurry of kicks and punches. Connor fought hard to defend himself. He ducked her spinning backfist, blocked her cross and evaded her crescent kick. As he retreated from Ling’s relentless onslaught, Luciana goaded him from the ringside, ‘Some champion you are, Connor!’
    Needled by the taunt and wanting to get a word in edgeways with Ling, Connor now went on the attack.
    ‘Ling, I meant you got the job,’ he replied with a blistering combination of jab, cross and upper cut, ‘because … our two Principals … are girls. It therefore makes sense –’ he almost floored Ling with a back fist – ‘to have a
female
buddyguard.’
    Ling was driven into the corner by a pounding side-kick to the chest. She tried to fight her way out, but Connor kept her trapped with a series of punishing body blows.
    ‘You can go places I can’t,’ he said. Ling, taking the hits, fought hard to escape, but Connor maintained the pressure. He still had more to say. ‘And their protection is supposed to be low profile, so a
girl
bodyguard will be even less noticeable than a boy.’
    Connor grunted as Ling thrust a front-kick into his gut, forcing him backwards.
    ‘Is that low profile enough for you?’ grinned Ling, relishing the buzz of the fight.
    Connor ignored her and retaliated with a front-kick of his own that propelled Ling back into the ring’s corner pad.
    ‘So, apart from your core skills, being a
girl
makes you the obvious choice,’ explained Connor, moving to finish her off with a couple of head shots.
    But Ling displayed some nifty footwork and escaped the corner. ‘Fair enough,’ she said, with a disarming smile. ‘My mistake, please accept my apology.’
    She backed off from the fight and Connor dropped his guard.
Finally
he’d got through to Ling. ‘Of course I do. We’re teammates. I didn’t mean any offence –’
    Ling spun on her heel, shot out a leg and caught him bang on the jaw with a spinning hook-kick. ‘There’s my apology.’
    Connor went down like a sack of potatoes, his last conscious thought:
Ling
always
wins her fights
.

 
    Harry Gibb hurried through the deserted government office. He knew even his most eager civil servants wouldn’t show their faces until at least 8 a.m. That gave him two hours of solitude. Still, he glanced nervously around before unlocking the main archive room and ducking inside.
    Flicking on the switch, he waited for the fluorescent strip lights to cast their stark white glare over the rows and rows of grey filing cabinets. Each one was a carbon copy of the next, impossible to tell apart, but Harry knew exactly what he was looking for. Heading straight over to the sixth cabinet in the third row, he pulled out a thick binder of documents marked MINING RIGHTS, GOLDFIELDS, WA.
    Despite everything being stored digitally nowadays, there was
always
a paper trail in government. While he’d been careful to remove any evidence from his computer, these damning documents were the remaining crumbs that could lead to him and his under-the-table dealings.
    Yet he
wouldn’t
destroy the files. The contents of this folder, detailing his co-conspirators, were his insurance policy. Harry Gibb knew that those who had profited fromthe shady deals also had a vested interest in protecting his reputation. If he went down, so would they.
    Smiling to himself, Harry closed the filing cabinet, switched off the light and locked the archive room. Clutching the files to his chest, he scurried across to his office and bolted inside.