The Broken Ones Read online

  Also by Stephen M. Irwin

  The Dead Path

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Stephen M. Irwin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  Originally published in slightly different form in paperback in Australia by Hachette Australia, an imprint of Hachette Australia Pty Limited, Sydney, in 2011.

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Title page photograph by Josef Kubicek/Vetta/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Irwin, Stephen M.

  The broken ones : a novel / Stephen M. Irwin. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PR9619.4.I79B76 2012

  823′.92—dc23 2011039733

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53466-6

  v3.1

  For Kitty.

  The key to it all.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  They haunt me—her lutes and her forests;

  No beauty on earth I see

  But shadowed with that dream recalls

  Her loveliness to me:

  Still eyes look coldly upon me,

  Cold voices whisper and say—

  “He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,

  They have stolen his wits away.”

  WALTER DE LA MARE, “Arabia”

  Prologue

  From page 1, The Argus,

  September 10

  EDITORIAL

  Three Years on—Still No Answers

  The ability of humankind to emerge from calamity into better times has manifested again and again throughout our history. The plague-ridden and religiously extreme Middle Ages birthed the Renaissance, the opening of the world by sail, and the Enlightenment’s bright lights of science. Last century’s appalling World Wars, with their unprecedented casualties, spurred discoveries that have yielded extraordinary peacetime benefits: penicillin, rockets, and jet travel. It remains, however, difficult to imagine what reward could come from the dark event that occurred three years ago today, the repercussions of which continue to be felt by each of us, in every corner of the globe.

  On that Wednesday—commonly known as Gray Wednesday in the West, Black Wednesday in Russia, and the innocuous Day of Change in the People’s Republic of China—few of us could have predicted how different our world would be today, three years on. None of us could have been expected to; no single event has so definitively tied psychological harm to economic depression and technological failure. The hallmarks of disaster, though, were instantly apparent: at just after 10:00 GMT, the earth’s poles switched. Every compass in the world swung 180 degrees, and two hundred and sixteen passenger jets either collided or simply fell from the skies, with their navigation systems fatally flummoxed. No one knows how many smaller aircraft also fell, but estimates range between seven and sixteen thousand. Almost all post–Cold War satellites met a similar fate, with their onboard computing systems instantly and simultaneously failing, plunging global telecommunications into a new age of darkness from which we have only barely begun to recover. Few civilian organizations—indeed, few governments—have been able to launch new satellites because of the economic despair that now seems so deeply entrenched that many are regarding it as the new status quo.

  We still tell our children that the sun rises in the east and Santa Claus lives at the North Pole, but we all know that north is south and the world is upside down in so many ways. The state of the global economy is dire. Unemployment here remains at 21 percent; in the UK, the USA, and Germany, it is closer to 25 percent. Japan, which was still recovering from nuclear disaster when Gray Wednesday occurred, is worse still, with unemployment at around 30 percent and rising. We don’t know what is occurring everywhere; Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Serbia are among the countries that have sealed their borders. But in those nations which are still attempting to participate in world trade, it is not just their blue-collar industries that have been decimated by depression and suicide: all sectors of all industries were hit hard by Gray Wednesday. The lack of a reliable workforce in the mining sector has resulted in coal shortages and power outages. Oil companies have suffered similarly, resulting in a rapid escalation in the prices of crude oil and refined fuels like gasoline and diesel. Most manufacturing industries have reported significant downturns as a result of erratic supplies of material, power, and workers. Crop and livestock industries are, if anything, even worse off; the rice, tea, coffee, cocoa, and rubber industries have all shrunk enormously in scale, and the resultant explosion in commodities prices has escalated inflation in countries too numerous to mention. With the sharp collapse in the value of legal tender, people everywhere have turned to older-fashioned means of exchange. Black markets have burgeoned, and almost everyone now uses barter at least a little and sometimes exclusively, further reducing governments’ tax incomes. Poorer governments mean poorly paid government workers and a commensurate vulnerability to bribery. The conviction last month of the federal agriculture minister for contempt of Parliament is the tip of a large iceberg. As companies collapse and their surviving contemporaries scramble to fill the voids, graft and blackmail are becoming well-honed tools in all sectors of business.

  The challenges to national economies have been worsened by a dramatic shift in global weather patterns in the past thirty-six months. Rainfall patterns have changed on all continents, and average temperatures have swung by up to seven degrees Fahrenheit: summer heats are rising, and the past three winters in the Northern Hemisphere have been the coldest on record. Climatologists speculate that the cause of this was the switching of the poles, but detailed research may take decades to conduct and unravel. Some people are not prepared to wait that long: in Turkey two years ago, and in South Korea last month, members of religious sects committed suicide on a massive scale—four thousand lives in total. Death on a smaller, more murderous scale o
ccurred in January, when four men and a woman drove a bus packed with explosives through the main gate to the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva: the explosion killed them and twenty-three staff members.

  Nothing, however, has ameliorated the situation that Gray Wednesday has left us in. The federal Commission of Inquiry drags on, now under its second commissioner and still with no tangible results. Government-funded and private policy institutes have made innumerable recommendations to help preserve liquidity and protect jobs, but none have made any inroads toward finding a solution. Our country is not alone; the rest of the world is just as baffled. Our guests that arrived on September 10 three years ago seem fixed to stay; the psychological impact of their arrival may have to be judged by future generations. In the meantime, our economies run flat and our stomachs get emptier. The question remains: Where is the silver lining? Where, in short, is the hope?

  Chapter 1

  Not many years from now

  A boy emerged from the deep shadows under a dripping doorway awning, a cautious mollusk venturing from its shell. He was sixteen or so, his face a small, pale triangle above dark clothes, eyes hidden by dark lank hair and gloom. When he saw Oscar’s car, he retreated into darkness.

  Inside the tired sedan, Oscar Mariani gripped the wheel unhappily. Dusk: the hour when Delete addicts and street prostitutes rose to score or hook. The car’s engine kept the repainted police cruiser’s interior warm, and the windows were lightly fogged. Rain tapped on the roof, the sound muffled by the sagging hood lining. It was not a muscular downpour but a constant, weeping drizzle barely more substantial than mist. Oscar wondered if this rain would ever stop. It would ease, certainly, then a foggy morning might open onto a rare day of sunshine, then an inevitable storm … and another week of this god-awful wet.

  He’d parked on the cruddy street opposite the mouth of a lane so narrow it was almost an alley. Halfway down it, the red and blue lights of patrol cars intruded, slicing through the drizzle, reflecting off the dull eyes of windows and turning the droplets of water on his sedan’s windows into startling instants of sapphire and blood. Somewhere down there, dogs barked.

  Oscar reached for the door handle and stopped to look at the man staring back at him in the rearview mirror. The stubble on his thin face badly needed either taming with a razor or grooming into a beard. Under thick coppery hair, his tall forehead was beginning to wrinkle as thirty faded and forty loomed. But it was his own stare that held him: gray, wide-set eyes that one woman long ago had called beautiful and another much more recently had called disturbed. Now they just looked exhausted.

  Down the alley, figures crossing in front of the turning emergency lights cast long, insect shadows with scissor legs and swollen heads. Another polished white police car, glistening with raindrops, rolled around the corner near Oscar and turned down the alley to join the others. By its headlights, he could see a woman in a yellow raincoat hunched under an eave near the collection of squad cars. Neve was here already.

  Oscar sighed and pulled on his waxed cotton motorcycle jacket, patched in several places but warm and blessed with lots of pockets, all full. From the seat beside him he took his black hat—a wide-brimmed squat thing with all the style of a dropped towel—and pulled it low onto his head. It was ugly, but it kept the rain off.

  And the rain was cold; it whispered shyly on Oscar’s shoulders and hat as he put the car key in the door and gave it an arcane series of twists until it caught and locked. He headed toward the flashing lights.

  Old townhouses crowded in on both sides of the alley; their small back courtyards were separated from the garbage-strewn thoroughfare by a continuous fence that was an alternating patchwork of graffitied brick, graffitied timber, graffitied metal, and barbed wire. Despite the steady rain, the air smelled of burned things and urine. Three white patrol cruisers stood out like pearls in a coal hopper; in front of them were a Scenes of Crime van and an unmarked patrol car. Onlookers had gathered under awnings and in doorways: gray-faced people loosely hunched in tired clothes, smoking silently and watching with the attention of seagulls observing picnickers, wondering what might be left behind.

  “Where have you been?” Neve asked.

  Neve de Rossa was more than ten years younger than Oscar. He was tall and she was petite; the top of her head barely reached his shoulders. Her blonde hair was wet and plastered flat, its peltlike sheen reflecting the emergency lights. Her face and shoulders were taut, as if she were in a ceaseless flinch, always anticipating a blow.

  “Doing my face,” Oscar replied. “I like to look good when I meet real cops.”

  Neve grimaced at his rusty stubble and stepped from cover, arms tight about herself.

  “Cold?” he asked.

  “Need to pee.”

  At a sheet-metal gate stood a uniformed constable in a clean blue slick, watching them approach from under his visor. From behind him came the loud barking of the dogs.

  “You could have gone in without me,” Oscar said.

  Neve’s cheeks, already pink, reddened a little more. “You’re the ranking officer.”

  Oscar said nothing. He knew very well why she didn’t go in alone. There wasn’t much pride in announcing their unit. Over the past three years, Oscar’s original small team of officers and public servants had dwindled, each quietly transferring away and rarely replaced. He’d become so used to the regular hemorrhage of faces that when Neve joined his unit over a year ago he’d treated her with frosty detachment, expecting her any day to realize her error and leave. For some reason, she hadn’t. Now it was just him and her.

  They showed their identifications to the constable, who didn’t bother suppressing a smirk. The metal gate squealed as Oscar pushed it open, and the dogs redoubled their barking.

  The tiny yard was all mud. Puddles of dark water reflected the glum light from the townhouse’s kitchen window. Two dogs were frenzied shadows in the corner of the yard, straining in savage arcs against their heavy chains. Rain and evening had made their coats black, but their teeth shone a striking white. Their loud, brutal barks sent primal shock waves into Oscar’s gut. The air was dense with the reek of dog shit.

  Up a short rise of concrete stairs, the back door was open; within was a huddle of crisp blue uniforms. Silent lightning flashed behind them. Oscar coughed. The detective in the doorway turned; she had a scarred chin and unblinking eyes. Oscar tried to recall her name. She regarded him and Neve coolly, then said loudly, “Barelies.”

  Oscar’s lips tightened. The nickname still rankled. Three years ago, when the Nine-Ten Investigation Unit was created, some wag thought “Nine-Ten” sounded enough like “Nineteen” that everyone soon began calling his unit the Barely Legals, an epithet thought doubly amusing because it also connoted a lack of law-enforcement power, which, like all good jokes, was at least half true.

  The kitchen was so small that a man could touch opposite walls with outstretched arms—but not now in the crush of pressed blue trousers, shining blue raincoats, and gray wool suits. Oscar instinctively pushed through first, making room for Neve. She shrugged off his help. The ceiling was high and stained by decades of smoke and hot grease. The fridge was the yellow of an old tooth. A single bare bulb glowed feebly from the end of a perished rubber cord. The furniture looked salvaged. A figure lay on the floor, obscured by the forest of blue and gray torsos and legs. Flash: another photograph.

  “Detectives Mariani and de Rossa.”

  A hush fell, and the ranks parted to let a tall officer stride into the kitchen. Haig’s iron-gray mustache was neatly trimmed, and his visor was the polished black of a cavalry horse’s hoof. On each shoulder epaulette was bright “birdshit”—three silver diamonds and a gold crest.

  “Inspector Haig,” Oscar said, glancing around the room at the blue uniforms crowded around the single body. “Outnumbered?”

  Haig’s smile was like a split in ice. “This one’s homicide. Clean and clear. Save yourself and”—he nodded at Neve—“the young lady tro
uble.”

  Oscar shrugged and waited.

  Haig’s wide jaw tightened. “Ian?”

  “Done,” said the police photographer, scurrying aside.

  The dead man lay in a puddle of blood that was seeping away through the join between two curled sheets of old linoleum. His once white dressing gown was stained in a dozen places with vibrant red rosettes of blood. He lay in a flamboyant pose, legs akimbo, an arm above his head, his surprised face turned half to the light above. One eye was a blank stare, the other a collapsed, leaking sac. The hem of his robe had ridden up a fat thigh to reveal pale flesh so streaked with veins it looked like a side of marbled beef. One stubbled cheek gaped open in a strange new mouth, a slit rimmed with blood. His neck, hands, arms, and buttocks had all been stabbed. Some of the wounds still leaked. In the blood sat two upturned dog bowls forever out of the dead man’s reach, their ground-meat contents turning rufous as they absorbed his liquid.

  “Darryl Ambrocio Tambassis.” Haig hardly had to raise his voice to be heard above the dogs outside. “Forty-one, unemployed. Still warm. Around thirty stab wounds.”

  Oscar looked at the dead man’s hands; the nearest lay curled like a pale crab, and there were three clear stab wounds in its puffy flesh.

  “Did you find the weapons?” asked Oscar.