CHAPTER ONE

This morning there’d been another sniper attack, this time in suburban Sydney. The victim was a middle-aged stockbroker, standing on Milson’s Point railway station with a crowd of other commuters waiting for the 8:05 train to the city. The sniper had been on the roof of an adjacent multi-storied building. The stockbroker had died instantly from a clean hit, right in the center of his forehead. In the mad scramble to escape further shots, a schoolgirl had fallen headfirst down the stairs to the platform and broken her neck.

At the Australian Security Intelligence Organization headquarters in Canberra, Australia’s federal capital, 300 kilometers southwest of Sydney, the news was received with grim resignation. It had been six days since the last sniper strike, and after the first one, all the subsequent attacks had been at intervals of five to seven days.

Cynthia and I both worked for the ASIO. She was my control when I was undercover in the field, and I’d been summoned to her office for one of our last face-to-face meetings before I assumed my new identity.

I always found it a rather startling room. No standard-issue government furnishings for Cynthia. Strange, contorted sculptures of vaguely human shapes sat in the corners, holding down a rectangular grass-green rug. The walls held paintings that were mostly frantic swirls of luminescent rainbow colors. Cynthia’s clothing matched the room—odd outfits in bright shades that would appear ridiculous on most people but somehow managed to look just right on her.

Cynthia never merely sat on chairs, but perched on them in yoga-like poses. She was so supple, I imagined she could have had a career as a contortionist had she not decided on intelligence as a profession.

She was very attractive, in her own strange way. At least I found her so. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Cynthia was an enigma to me. I had only the sketchiest information about her private life, and I’d never liked to probe too obviously as I was pretty sure she’d object. I valued our working relationship too much to jeopardize it.

Sunlight lancing through the window lit up Cynthia’s mobile face. She had a charming, crooked smile, and was displaying it now, as she observed, “I see you’re working on looking the part of urban terrorism expert. I like the no-nonsense specs. Nice touch.”

I took off the severe black frames. Since I’d had laser surgery, I no longer needed contact lenses or spectacles, so these were plain glass. “How about the hair?” I asked. My usual streaked blond now tended towards mousy brown.

“Boring hairstyle, boring color,” she said. “Perfect.”

Cynthia’s hair was the antithesis of mine, spiky and often an extraordinary color. Today it was a deep burgundy.

“In contrast, Cynthia, you have an interesting hairstyle, arresting color,” I remarked.

“Courtney,” she said. “Get the name straight, Denise.”

“That would be Ann, thank you, Courtney. Ann Meadows, actually.”

She grinned at me. “Touché.”

Cynthia assumed a different name for each new assignment. Once the planning was underway, for practice we were always supposed to refer to each other by our pseudonyms, even when at ASIO headquarters.

“I much prefer the name you used on my last job,” I said. “Zena was more you. Courtney doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

This was very true. I could never tell her, of course, but when she’d been Zena, my long unrequited, not-quite-serious yearning for Cynthia had led to some quite spectacular warrior-princess fantasies.

“Ann suits you,” she said. “It’s brisk, plain, down-to-earth. Exactly what one would want a consultant on terrorism to be.”

This was to be my new undercover role—expert in urban terrorism. I was part of a concentrated effort by all the Australian intelligence agencies and the Australian Federal Police to track down an organization that called itself Righteous Scourge.

Three months earlier, the name had been entirely unknown to the intelligence community. Then ASIO had been alerted to the existence of a new terrorist website calling itself Righteous Scourge, and had already added it to the long list of sites under constant monitoring, when the first public mention of the group was made on Josiah Lyttle’s extremely popular radio program.

I’d never been part of Lyttle’s audience. I didn’t share his particularly virulent, ultra-conservative beliefs, but I’d later listened to the radio station’s recording of the session.

Josiah Lyttle’s high-pitched, nasal voice had launched into the topic with frothing-at-the-mouth rhetoric. “Do you want your loved ones to suffer agonizing deaths at the hands of pitiless terrorists? Could you bear to see the tender bodies of your children shredded by nail-filled bombs? Can you visualize their contorted faces as they choke on sarin gas, or die horribly from smallpox or anthrax?”

He paused, apparently for his listeners to reflect that no, they didn’t, and then he was off again. “The lefties and the tree-huggers and the deviants wring their lily-white hands, bleating about privacy rights and individual rights and homo rights and killing-unborn-baby rights, while the threat to our national security and our God-given way of life grows day by day. Wake up! We’re under attack, people! A case in point—and you hear it here exclusively on my program—is a repellent, vicious Web site that calls itself Righteous Scourge. Take a look at it, people! While the radical left is moaning about loss of freedoms, sites like this are inciting wholesale slaughter of innocents! More in a moment…”

The program broke for a set of commercials. I’d said to my trainer, who’d been listening to it with me, “Lyttle’s done the Righteous Scourge people a big favor. You can’t buy that kind of publicity.”

“You’re right, of course, but no link’s been found. And believe me, we’ve looked for it.”

The combined might of Australia’s intelligence organizations, plus help from Britain and America, still had produced no firm evidence of links to anyone or anything. Three months after the website had appeared we were essentially in the same state of ignorance.

“Am I interrupting?” Keith Francis, director of covert surveillance and officially my boss, put his long nose through Cynthia’s door. He didn’t wait for an answer but came right in, seized a chair, turned it around and sat down with his arms resting along the back.

His narrow nose was matched by his thin face, skinny limbs and bony hands. Any weight Keith put on went straight to his belly. If he’d been a woman, I’d have assumed he was in the last weeks of pregnancy.

I was quite fond of Keith, although he could be quite a stickler for rules and regulations, and I had a tendency to bend them a little—sometimes a lot—and this had led to friction between us in the past.

Cynthia was giving him her characteristic interrogative look. One eyebrow went up, and almost like a counterweight, the corners of her mouth went down. “Something’s happened?”

“You could say that.” He turned to me. “The name Roanna Aylmer sound familiar to you?”

I blinked. It was the last name I expected to hear. I saw her in my mind’s eye—tall, dark-haired, her face reflecting a rebellious arrogance I’d found irresistible. “You know it does,” I said.

“Seen her lately?”

“Of course not. I’m forbidden to.”

Keith’s smile was cynical. “And you always obey orders, Denise, don’t you?”

“I try.”

Cynthia’s lips twitched. She knew me well.

I’d fallen hard for Roanna while playing an undercover role to unmask the Aylmer family as traitors and murderers. Three of them were presently serving life sentences, but Roanna remained free, as there had been no direct evidence to connect her to the crimes. Even though she’d repudiated her family and been a witness against them, she was still regarded as a security risk, so there was no way I, working for ASIO, could have any personal contact with her.

At first, this hadn’t stopped me, and we’d had passionate, clandestine meetings. However, as the months passed, two things combined to make our relationship untenable. First, I wasn’t willing to give up my career and therefore had the constant fear that ASIO would discover what I was doing. Second, Roanna had taken over the running of the family’s tropical resort near the Great Barrier Reef and could spend very little time away from the island.

“So what’s with Roanna Aylmer?” I said casually.

“She’s coming here today. I’d like both of you to sit in on the meeting. My office at three.”

The sudden realization I was about to see Roanna again was a jolt. My face felt hot. I hoped I wasn’t visibly blushing.

I became aware that Keith was frowning at me. “Is there some problem, Denise?”

“No problem.”

“Because I’m quite aware you and Ms. Aylmer have—how shall I put it—some history together.”

Cynthia’s mouth tightened. “On that assignment, Denise’s instructions explicitly included infiltrating the Aylmer family by any means available.”

I glanced at her, surprised she was defending me. She didn’t meet my eyes.

Keith gave an ironic chuckle. “Rarely have instructions been so enthusiastically followed by an agent in the field.”

I gave a nonchalant shrug, not sure if he knew I’d continued the relationship for some time after the assignment had ended.

All amusement abruptly left Keith’s face. “Roanna Aylmer claims to have a lead to Righteous Scourge. I remind you, Denise, that she was never cleared of espionage. There was simply not enough concrete evidence against her. She could be playing a double game here. I’m relying on you to find out if she is.”