Black Tide (Jack Irish Thriller 2) by Peter Temple

Author:Peter Temple [Temple, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Crime, recent
ISBN: 9781849164337
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2008-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

PLANES ARE good for thinking. Reading seems an unnaturally complacent activity when you are risking your life in a hissing aluminium tube that seeks to defy gravity. I studied the picture of Dean and his daughter. He wore rings on both little fingers, small rings with dark stones. He didn’t look like someone who did secret government work, away for months at a time. He looked like a man who repaired things, washing machines, fridges, photocopiers perhaps. Went home at night, Holden in the drive at 6.30.

Two more days with this bastard Connors and I’m home and fucking Black Tide’s over.

Dean Canetti was keeping an eye on Gary Connors on April 3. And he planned to spend two more days involved with him.

What did with Connors mean? Following him? Something else?

Two more days. Did that mean he’d been close to Gary for longer than the day of April 3? Gary had been overseas until April 2. He’d been away from home for more than a week when he telephoned on April 3. Had Canetti followed him overseas?

Canetti was from the government. But not the shopfront government. The hidden government. Gary was from somewhere else: corrupt policeman, then TransQuik, then a person consulted on security by impenetrable foreign companies, including Klostermann Gardier. But still a TransQuik person, according to Barry Tregear, a man not given to conjecture.

Canetti, the man from the government, and Gary Connors, the man from free enterprise, almost certainly bent free enterprise, came together. Presumably, the former was in pursuit of the latter. And then they vanished. On the same day.

Barry Tregear didn’t move in the world of high finance. He moved in a low-finance world where making money generally involved taking it away from someone else. If Barry believed that TransQuik could make it snow in the tropics on a given day, it meant that smart cops knew not to mess with TransQuik.

Smart cops didn’t mess with TransQuik. And the Director of Public Prosecutions didn’t mess with TransQuik.

That was a status jump.

Did this mean that no one messed with the assured and handsome Steven Levesque, multi-millionaire owner of a Sydney towerblock and of companies with exotic hideaways where Premiers relaxed? A man who was a major donor to a political party. And a man whose exalted name was invoked by a lowly female employee of a company that won a coastal surveillance contract. Invoked and smartly revoked.

Klostermann Gardier, acting for other interests, acting as a conduit, tried to buy part of TransQuik.

The bid failed because a journalist called Stuart Wardle gave Tony Rinaldi a question to ask. And Klostermann’s agent, Carlos Siebold, found the question so offensive that he showed TransQuik’s executives the door.

Steven Levesque bought TransQuik after Klostermann Gardier’s bid for a big chunk was abandoned.

Tony Rinaldi said something.

Klostermann Gardier don’t give up.

I, on the other hand, do. You can juggle bits of information for just so long. I asked a long-faced female steward for a whisky and soda. She smiled and went on her way.

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