Jules wrote down on the notepad: Shah targeted by rivals?? She circled the question three times. She didn’t believe for a second that that was the case, but the Nepali himself had folded his massive arms and nodded once, grunting in approval. When she’d sought him out after arriving in Darwin, Shah’s assumption about the bombing was that rival security operators, most likely one of the big mercenary companies like Sandline, had lost patience with his refusal to accept their buyout offers. But she knew he didn’t think that now. He agreed with her, that the most likely attacker was Henry Cesky. The construction magnate had means, motive and form.

‘Have you received any threats?’ Palmer asked. ‘From business rivals, I mean.’ He seemed highly sceptical.

‘These are not people who are foolish enough to make threats,’ replied Shah, before his legal mouthpiece could answer. ‘They decide. They act.’

Neither of the detectives was comfortable with the idea of a turf war breaking out between rival military companies in their city. For one thing, the police would be completely overmatched in any such scenario. Shah Security was relatively small, but some of the bigger operators, who provided border control and interdiction services, ran to some serious heavy metal in their inventories. Helicopter gunships, light armoured vehicles, even jet fighters operating out of private airfields in Papua New Guinea and on a couple of islands throughout the Indonesian archipelago, where they usually protected giant mining operations. The mercs weren’t allowed to deploy anything like that here. And even if they were, they themselves would’ve been completely outclassed by the huge military presence in and around Darwin.

Nevertheless, the large PMCs still had thousands of personnel stationed throughout the city and the Northern Territory, almost all of them ex-military with combat experience. Their declared role in Australia was to provide ‘aid to the civil power’, a conveniently ambiguous mission statement. These duties encompassed everything from running the giant government farms down on the Ord River – prison farms, really, for hundreds of thousands of refugees from countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines, but not, curiously enough, the US – to anti-piracy patrols and even search-and-destroy missions throughout the remnants of the Indonesian state. The long chain of thousands of Indonesian islands, fanning out north and north-west of Australia, had fallen into anarchy and an impossible confusion of internecine revolt.

Shah’s lawyer lazily tapped at a sheaf of notepaper with an expensive-looking fountain pen. Jules was almost certain it was a Mont Blanc. ‘So perhaps,’ he said, ‘you officers might consider focusing your initial investigative efforts on some of the PMCs that have made it quite clear to my client that they seek a hostile takeover of his operation, should he not be disposed to entertaining thoughts of a more amenable arrangement.’

‘Amenable to Sandline and Blackwater,’ added Shah.