Thankfully, they’d agreed to a détente before the next box of Crayolas had arrived. And so far so good, although the latest carving and the hidden chalk were a concern. He was also worried what would happen if a guard found the phone.

The Serpent was up to something. The ritual was evolving.

CHAPTER 8

Long Bay Correctional Complex, Sydney, NSW, Australia

A CLICK, followed by a buzz. Instinctively, Jax pulled his hands in front of his face.

False alarm. It wasn’t the door. Of course not: the door was only locked at lights-out, which was hours away; no one had to unlock the door to get to him here in the afternoon, they could just walk straight in. No, it was just the cell light going on. Jax shook his head. No wonder they kept it in a cage.

A week had passed since his admission and he still hadn’t been bashed, fucked or murdered. He hadn’t even been threatened. Even Robbo, the drug addict who’d harassed him, had barely said a word since the wing had been flooded with ‘H’ three days earlier. The unusually strong heroin had so zombified him and his addict mates that they spoke only nonsense if they spoke at all.

One had already overdosed. Jax had seen the guards wheel him out on a gurney before muster. His death was not treated as murder, even though everyone knew it had been a hot-shot. Inmate 59035 had run up a debt he couldn’t pay, so they’d laced his gear with rat-kill. No one cared: his own fault, should have paid. And no one talked about how they’d got in his cell: wasn’t unusual, happened all the time.

Jax had managed to stay anonymous for the best part of a week. So by now he should have felt better, safer. But calm always precedes a storm. Thunder and lightning were still coming. He could feel it in his bones.

He’d thought that nothing could scare him after Afghanistan. Just four days after arriving at Camp Hadrian, he’d been sent on a clearance patrol. Walking in front of the convoy, all he’d had to protect himself against the armour-piercing bombs that were buried all over the desert was a metal detector, no better than the kind used by a Sunday treasure hunter at Bondi Beach. From right to left and left to right he and the others swept. Painting the road, they called it.

Dicko found the first one. A bucket full of nails and ballbearings, buried two metres off the road. Not the first place you’d look.

‘Stop!’ he’d yelled. ‘Nobody move.’

Jax froze mid-step. Almost shat himself.

‘Not another fuckin’ inch,’ Dicko ordered as he began pulling up a wire running out from the bomb.