Jules wished she had thought to pack a novel in her getaway bag, but entertainment hadn’t seemed like a high priority when she put it together. She was just going to have to sleep through most of the trip. Luckily they were driving through the night.

‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen, my name is Tim Blair and I’ll be your coach captain for the run up to Lismore.’

Oh God. Shoot me now, thought Jules, a fucking coach captain. Where do they find these dropkicks?

Blair started in on his pre-departure spiel, explaining the ‘features’ of their state-of-the-art vehicle. Julianne stared out of the window and tried to ignore him. A baby started crying somewhere a few seats behind her. The emo zombie across the aisle turned his MP3 player up to an eardrum-shredding volume.

‘. . . and we’ll be stopping for dinner just after midnight in the town of Hexham,’ said coach captain Blair, ‘which in the opinion of this professional long-haul transport systems operator does the finest chicken’n’chips in the southern hemisphere.’

For the first time since she had slotted the Romanian, Lady Julianne Balwyn wondered whether she might be better off staying in Sydney and taking her chances with whatever contract killer Henry Cesky sent after her next.

*

Too keyed up to sleep properly – not that it was really an option on a bus anyway – she spent the first four-hour leg of the trip, a frustrating, drawn-out, stop-and-start crawl through the gridlock of the CBD and the semi-permanent traffic jam of the northern suburbs, throwing a little pity party for herself. Julianne knew she had much to be grateful for. Unlike Pete and Fifi, she was at least drawing breath. She hadn’t taken a bullet during a pirate raid, and she’d dodged any number of bullets since. In spite of Cesky’s best efforts to get at her. And in the larger scheme of things, of course, she knew she should be grateful that they hadn’t pushed their yacht a little harder back in ’03, to make the rendezvous with the Pong Su, a North Korean freighter carrying four million dollars worth of perfectly counterfeited US currency that they would take in exchange for the one million worth of genuine greenbacks, somewhat soiled by their connection to a series of drug transactions, stashed away in the hold of the MV Diamantina.

If Pete had been a more diligent smuggler they’d have been about ten nautical miles inside the Wave when it swept over the Pong Su. Thankfully, Pete was a doofus. A great mate, to be sure, and she missed him terribly, but a doofus.