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

of her stash. The Americans, Donna and Jeff, were on their second bottle of chardonnay and Jules had fallen so easily into chatting with them that she’d finished her first drink before she picked up on the warm, but unmistakably sexual vibe coming off the woman. Jules smiled, a little flattered that they were trying to pick her up and . . . Well, what the hell. It’d been a long time. The hot night, some very chilled tunes, the mellow warmth of candlelight flickering on the bare sandstone walls of the bar . . . it all put her in a generous, open frame of mind.
    That is, until she caught a glimpse of the man in the heavy imitation-leather jacket regarding her with the cold, flat stare of a snake sizing up a newly hatched chick. His eyes flicked away as soon as she’d made him. He shifted in his seat, pretending not to have noticed her. The nasty, ill-fitting jacket grabbed under his armpit, outlining something there. A gun, she was certain.
    A chain-mail fist clenched just under her heart and all of the warm, mellow feeling she had been enjoying sluiced out of her in an icy rush.
    ‘Are you all right?’ asked Donna, reaching over and lightly running her fingertips down Jules’s forearm. A few minutes earlier it might have elicited a tingle of sexual response. Now, she felt nothing.
    ‘Sorry. I have to go.’
    ‘Hey,’ said Donna’s boyfriend, ‘is everything okay? Did we . . .?’
    The Englishwoman regarded him kindly, but with detachment. She could’ve told them that there was a man in the bar who may have been paid to kill her. But Jeff would likely get himself hurt, or worse, by fronting the guy. And if she left with them now, they’d either get in the way of what she had to do or get themselves killed. There was nothing for it. She had to shut them down.
    ‘Sorry,’ she repeated. ‘Gotta go.’
    Julianne pushed away the unfinished drink, picked up her bag and left without another word. Estimating there might only be a few moments before the Romanian followed her (and assuming she wasn’t being a paranoid head case, of course), she hurried away from the small tavern.
    The streets were still busy. The Rocks, which had once been one of the most densely populated slums in Sydney, was crowded again, with long terraces of old stone houses playing host to the latest wave of migrants adding to the city’s human alloy. It was common to find a dozen or more of them bedding down under one roof, hot bunking in many cases – one mattress shared between somebody working night shift and another who worked days. Sometimes even couples or whole families took turns like that. It was a curious ghetto, however, given the money the displaced had brought with them. Poor refugees could not afford to stay in the city. Most lived in the outer suburbs, where jobs could be found at the industrial parks, or on the work farms beyond the mountains. Closer to the harbour, life was still pressured, but more pleasant, as it had always been.
    Small knots of drinkers stood about on the footpath in front of micro-bars like the Idler. Others weaved along the pavement, singing and laughing as they moved between venues. She could hear the distant, sibilant roar of the crowd down at nearby Circular Quay, but instead of heading towards them, Julianne set her course for the shadowed, less populated streets on the far side of the rocky headland. There were many paths down to the wharf district, but Ferry Lane, a paper cut through the massive sandstone ridge overlooking Walsh Bay, was the one she needed.
    On her first night in Sydney, an old sea-dog propping up the bar at the Hero of Waterloo had told her that Ferry Lane was the site of a bubonic plague outbreak back in 1901. Said the first victim had been a drinker at the Hero, and was one of the few who contracted the disease and survived. ‘Thanks to his medicine,’ the old coot had added with a grin, hoisting up a pint of dark bitter. Not really caring whether the story was true or just a