Read Underground for Free Online Page B

properties in the tangled Queensland hinterland. With hippies and gun nuts and bitter old dairy farmers for neighbours, all of whom would diligentlymind their own bloody business. I didn’t even bother yelling for help.
    They threw me in the back, and we were on our way. It sounded like all four of them were there, the driver up front, and the woman and the other two guards with me in the rear. I wondered a moment—why wasn’t she sitting up forward? But then I realised. A burqa in the front seat of a postal van? Nothing suspicious about
that
.
    Still, they couldn’t be planning to take me far. With the cyclone gone, the roadblocks would be back in force, and even an Australia Post van couldn’t rely on getting through them without being searched. Sure, there were always the back roads, but it would be impossible to get near a town of any size without identity checks and vehicle inspections. Then again, if their aim was merely to find the first bit of dense bush in which to dump a body, what did it matter?
    We drove, and I dwelt upon the shabby facts of my life.
    Was I a good man? Not really. I couldn’t think of a single thing, right then, that I’d done for someone else’s sake. And my ex-wives, and my daughters—well, I knew what they would say. A successful man? Hardly. Oh, I’d always scraped out a living. I always had money. Lots of it, at times, from a dozen different careers. But none of those careers were what you would call honourable, and three quarters of them were only a step above outright fraud. A shark-like existence, that’s what it had been, always in motion, always hungry. So . . . a man who would be mourned by his friends? Ha. What friends would that be?
    But it was the only life I had,
my
life, and there had been some fine wine in there, and good food, and the sun on beaches, and bright lights in casinos, and even some wild nights of fucking that I would never forget.
    And oh boy, I did not want to die.
    ‘You don’t need to kill me,’ I said, trying not to actually beg, but feeling very low. ‘If you let me go, I wouldn’t tell anybody.’
    The woman answered. ‘That’s the problem with you faithless people. When your time comes, you can’t even face it with dignity.’
    An insane thought came that maybe, if I promised to convert to Islam, then they would let me live. But it seems that even in terror, my hypocrisy stretches only so far. I could feel my mind going a deathly blank colour. And tears were close.
    Then all calamity broke loose.
    The van was screeching to a halt and we were all flying about the cabin, the air filled with yelling. For a moment I was sure my head was up against a female breast. Then there was a booming, tinny voice outside. Someone on a megaphone. More yelling, from inside the van and out. And then shooting. Lots of it. Metal ripping. Thuds. Shrieks. The name of Allah, taken in vain.
    An explosion like a grenade. Then silence.
    I lay there, wide-eyed and panting. And not, by the feel of it, riddled with bullets. The back door of the van was torn open and I was dragged out. Hands fumbled at my ropes and lifted the hood from my head. Sunlight dazzled me. I saw a narrow country road. Scrub all around. The postal van, parked askew, bullet holes in the side, two of its tyres deflated. Dead bodies, male, my young abductors, one sprawled half out of the driver’s seat, the other two contorted in the back. The smell of shit and piss. A car blocking the road in front of the van. Another behind it. Gas drifting from a canister in the gutter . . .
    This was no normal roadblock. This was an ambush—I recognised it even then. And uniformed men were everywhere. Federal Police. Such a wonderful, wonderful sight.
    A man was shaking my shoulders.
    ‘Leo James,’ he said.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Federal Agent Spencer, sir. Glad we weren’t too late.’
    And above it all, the sound of a female voice I knew, screaming.

SEVEN
    The Australian Federal Police.
    You know, I can