Free Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 by John Birmingham

the life paths that had led these men to their deaths at her hand. Nor that they may’ve had full, even worthy lives outside of the hours each day when they wore the uniforms in which they’d died.
    She merely killed them and moved on.

5
     
CENTRAL SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES
     
    Jules scoped the hitter well before he made his move. She caught him watching her in the mirror behind the bar of the small neighbourhood dive. At first she thought he was just an old perv, eyeballing her in her fabulous new silk shirt. She had tied her dark hair, recently dyed black, into a ponytail, and he wasn’t the only man whose attention she’d caught. His was definitely unwanted, however.
    She’d been drinking here at the Idler Bar for the past three weeks and had come to know most of the regulars, at least on a nodding basis. It was a local haunt, the clientele drawn from the warren of streets and back alleys of The Rocks, all within a five-minute walk: Australians, younger Brits and other travellers who’d overstayed their visas after the Wave had hit in March ’03 and who’d lucked in when the government granted an amnesty a few weeks later.
    And there were Americans, of course. Everywhere she went here, always Americans. Enough of them that Sydney was now the third largest American city in the world. Bigger even than Darwin. That’s why her Romanian hitman stood out. She recognised the fierce guttural accent when he demanded the waitress bring him a glass of Palinca, cursing the poor girl when she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
    Displaced Europeans were not uncommon in Sydney, but they tended to come from the older EU countries, bearing professional qualifications and bags of money. She knew of a small Russian enclave out at Bondi Beach – an unusual mix of businessmen, academic refugees and gangsters – but apart from them and the city’s original, thoroughly assimilated postwar Slavic migrants, refugees from Eastern Europe were thin on the ground. Especially those from collapsing shitholes like Romania. The Australian Government may have thrown open the floodgates to certain types of migrants and refugees after the Disappearance, but to others the way to the great southern sanctuary was irrevocably closed. The best an illegal could hope for if they were caught was a couple of years on a government prison farm before being deported.
    Not her problem. As a subject of Her Majesty, Lady Julianne Balwyn was free to come and go as she pleased from the antipodes, and for the moment it pleased her to stay exactly where she was, in a quiet bar where nobody knew her real name. The Idler was a small, cosy, almost domestic space; it looked very much as though somebody had thrown open the downstairs rooms of their home to passing drinkers. Because they had. The proprietors had converted the bottom floor of what had been a private residence into a bar, completing the circle of life for this 160-year-old building, which had been built as a pub in the former slum district back when some of the older residents could still boast of having arrived in the colony in the holds of convict transports.
    Jules liked the Idler because it felt like some of the old drinking holes she remembered from her college days. Right down to the Home County accents. Fitting in here was not a problem for her. The Romanian, on the other hand, stood out like tits on a bull. A cheap leatherette jacket, two sizes too big and way too heavy for the humid, summer evening; a bright Hawaiian shirt, shiny pants and slip-on shoes – the only reason he’d got past the bouncers was because the Idler didn’t have any. It was a cool place that relied on its patrons’ good manners.
    The Romanian caught her eye when she was halfway through her second gin and tonic, and deep in conversation with a young American couple who’d got out of Acapulco a day before she had. She’d actually been enjoying herself here. Relaxing for the first time in weeks. Spending some