‘What about it, Kip?’ Barney Tench implored. ‘You saved this city once. You can save your country if you act right now.’

‘Come on, honey,’ added Barbara. ‘You know what’s right.’

Kipper turned back and gazed out of the window. The crowd looked to be hundreds of thousands strong. He could see them bunched up at the bottleneck of Faben Point, a great mass of people emerging from the suburbs. He could see a similar crowd heading over the Evergreen Point Bridge to the north.

Telephones began to ring all over the floor, as voices rose in confusion, surprise and even awe. His secretary, Rhonda, came bustling down the hallway and into the room with Suzie trailing behind her. She looked surprised and delighted.

‘Barney!’ she cried out. ‘And Barb!’

‘Hey Ronnie.’

‘Hiya Ron.’

She turned her attention back to Kipper and said, ‘I’m sorry, boss, but it’s General Blackstone’s office on the phone. They desperately need to talk to you and the other department heads. What should I tell them?’

Kipper smiled.

EPILOGUE

ONE DAY

The killer awoke, to find a stranger by her bed.

No, not a stranger, the guy who had saved her. The civilian in the room on the top floor. She could see him clearly now, as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes.

‘Where am I?’ asked Caitlin, her voice cracking in her dry throat.

‘London,’ replied the man. ‘A special hospital. They had to operate on you.’

‘My friend the tumour,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me he’s gone.’

The man shrugged. ‘I’m not a doctor so I don’t know. Or a relative, so they won’t tell me.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Name’s Melton,’ he said. ‘Bret Melton.’

Caitlin tried to lever herself up but found she had no strength in her arms at all.

‘Well, Bret Melton, thank you for saving my sorry ass. And to think I might have popped a cap in yours.’

He seemed to take that without offence.

‘You probably saved mine, Miss Mercure. I holed up in that joint after my vehicle got hit by an RPG. I was pretty much out of it, just trying to get as far away from the street as possible. If those guys had been even half competent they’d have checked and found me unconscious up top. Probably would have cut my head off.’

‘Probably,’ she agreed. ‘And my name’s not Cathy Mercure, by the way. That’s a cover. I’m sorry they felt the need to tell you that. My name is Caitlin.’

Melton took that without obvious concern, too.

‘In my experience,’ he said with a half-smile, ‘ladies who sneak into snake pits and twist the heads off vipers can pretty well call themselves whatever they feel like. You should know, by the way, that I’m a reporter. I’m not going to write about you. Not even going to ask what went down in that house. They made me sign a piece of paper that says I lose my nuts if I do. But I just wanted to get that out there for you.’

Caitlin felt a wave of lassitude steal through her body. She was aware of great damage that had been done. ‘Thank you, Bret,’ she said weakly. ‘But it’s all right. I’m retired now, a lady of leisure, as of two minutes ago.’

‘Okay then.’ He nodded and they lapsed into silence.

Her eyelids fluttered heavily, and she felt herself drifting back towards sleep. ‘Bret,’ she said, ‘did they get him? Did they get my guy?’

His voice seemed to come from far away. ‘I don’t know, Caitlin. They got a lot of guys.’

She forced her eyes open. For the first time she noticed the window off to the side of her bed. It opened onto a garden scene, although the trees were leafless and the grass had all died off.

‘What are you going to do, Bret?’ she asked. ‘Will you go home?’

He shrugged again. ‘What’s home?’

‘I don’t know.’

She started to fade out again. ‘I don’t know.’

ONE WEEK

They buried their dead according to whatever beliefs the departed had lived by. Gathered on the heavily damaged boat deck at the stern of the Aussie Rides, the surviving passengers and crew said their prayers or quiet goodbyes for friends and loved ones who hadn’t made it.

Julianne had never known Fifi or Pete to be in the slightest way religious, but while tidying Fifi’s quarters in the days after the last battle, she found an old Gideon’s bible, stolen from a motel somewhere, annotated by her lost friend’s large, childlike script. The story of Noah and his ark had come in for a lot of attention. That’s just like us, except for all the animals, she had written. Elsewhere, Please Lord, smite that asshole Larry Zood was followed in a different-coloured ink by: Damn! This prayer shit really works!

It was evidence of a secret, inner life that Jules would never have imagined of Fifi Lamont, and she asked Miguel to add a few Hail Mary’s to the endless rosaries his extended family were sending skyward for old Adolfo, the only casualty their party suffered. Dead of a heart attack a full day after the gunfight.

‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus…’

Grandma Ana smiled and nodded sadly at Jules and then at the two bundles that had been her friends, and she realised that Miguel’s family, who had been praying in Spanish, had changed to English without her noticing. The Mexican matriarch waved a thin brown hand at Pete and Fifi’s bodies, indicating that the change was for their sake. Out of reflex, an earlier, more cynical Julianne Balwyn would have smirked and rolled her eyes at the idea of an omniscient God needing a translation, but now, on this bright and cold morning, Jules let the tears come freely as the age-old prayer to the mother of Jesus was whipped away on a freshening southerly breeze.

The sea state had dropped down to a long, rolling swell and only a few wisps of cirrus cloud spoiled an otherwise perfect sky. Time at last for a burial. Eight bodies lay wrapped in sheets and blankets on the large, bullet-pocked diving platform at the stern. Fifi and Pete, the last two bundles on the starboard side, she had placed there herself with a lot of help from Shah and Mr Lee. The gravity and sorrow of the moment was undercut somewhat by the frozen stiffness of Pete’s remains. He’d been lying in the largest of the galley freezers for over a month, and Jules wasn’t sure she’d have been able to contemplate moving him had Shah and Lee not helped.