Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike (6 page)

‘G’day, Joe,’ said Mac.

‘Red setter thirty,’ replied Joe Imbruglia, and then hung up.

Mac stared at the phone. He was too tired for this shit so early in the day. He was expecting plane loads of federal cops, DFAT and Australian military to descend on the place in a few hours and most of them would be trying to prove they were better investigators than the next guy. Each Commonwealth agency would be travelling with its own public affairs fl ak and it would be down to Mac to control what they released and what messages they gave to reporters. And now his station chief was going all cloak and dagger on him.

Mac moved south down Legian Street and saw a Wartel store on the right. There were hardly any TI phones in Kuta so visitors used private phone agents who sold you phone cards that only worked in their phones. Mac bought a pre-paid mobile phone and SIM card set and headed for Poppies Restaurant.

He turned right on to Poppies Gang, a secondary road that ran west from Legian Street to the ocean at Kuta Bay. There was an attractive woman outside the restaurant spruiking for customers. The blasts had cleared out the foreign tourists and the watering holes were empty. Mac walked on, doubled back, cased the place and looked for eyes. He hated the feeling of being trapped in a restaurant or bar. He liked exits.

Finally walking up to the woman, he asked if they were open. She almost hugged him, then virtually dragged him into the cool of the place. He asked to sit down the back, near the fan, as the heat built to what Mac reckoned was going to be thirty-seven degrees. After ordering green tea, rotis and nasi goreng, he tore open the mobile phone and put in the battery and the SIM. Once the girl had walked into the kitchen Mac reached behind him, unplugged the fan and plugged in the phone to get some charge. When the plain silver Nokia had some juice it worked without dramas, and he texted in the codes from the SIM and then input another code to activate the extra credit he’d bought.

Mac waited in the cool for the girl to come back with his stuff.

His watch said it was twenty-one minutes since Joe’s call. He ate then sipped the tea, and when his G-Shock said it was 10.34 am local he called the pay phone that looked out over the back gardens at the Manila Hotel.

After ringing once, a man’s voice said, ‘Red Setter.’

‘Albion,’ said Mac.

Joe read out a new mobile number and hung up. Then Mac rang the mobile number with a Philippines prefi x and was through.

‘Christ, Joe - what’s this about?’ snapped Mac as the connection was made.

‘Mate, you know what Commonwealth phones are like,’ said Joe.

Mac snorted. One of the fi rst things he had learned at ASIS craft school was how to run a phone surveillance, and his fi rst sit-ins were listening in on Commonwealth employees - the ones who were having affairs, trying to buy drugs, that sort of thing. ‘Yeah, of course, but what’s up?’

‘We need to get your brief straight,’ said Joe.

‘So shoot.’

‘There’s going to be some pressure down there to, umm, widen things.’

‘Widen? It hasn’t started yet, has it?’ asked Mac.

‘Ah, yeah. The Indons might have a broader view of what went down, right?’ said Joe, sounding embarrassed.

‘Well they’re talking about three blasts - guess any cop is going to want to start with them as separate events,’ said Mac.

‘Well, umm …’

‘Yes, Joe?’

‘Our job is to keep it sensible,’ said Joe.

Mac felt bile rising. He was trained for this, it was what he did. But he was the son of a police detective and he knew how investigations got twisted and bent by higher authorities with all sorts of different motives.

‘Sensible?’ asked Mac.

‘Yeah, mate. There’s no point in letting this get beyond what it obviously is, eh?’ chuckled Joe with false bonhomie.

‘Obviously?’

‘McQueen, don’t give me that tone …’

‘What, the
you’re full of shit
tone?’

Joe let out a long breath. ‘Mate, let’s keep it simple: this is an investigation into Indonesian jihadists carrying out an IED attack on Australians and other Anglos, right?’

‘Just your good old anfo light show. Ammoniuum nitrate and fuel oil strikes again?’ said Mac, trying not to sound snide.

‘Well, you know how the Indons get - all those conspiracy theories about the Christians and the Jews trying to discredit the poor Muslims.’

‘You been down here?’

‘McQueen, this is JI carrying out their threats. It’s pretty clear, right?’

‘Oh really?’

‘Fuck’s sake, McQueen. You want that UN gig? Well get with the program!’

Mac couldn’t believe the threat. He’d
earned
the right to New York.

Joe sighed. ‘Mate, sorry ‘bout that. I just need you to make this happen, okay? That’s what you’re being paid to do down there. I told them I’d send my best guy.’

Mac watched a group of Aussies come into the restaurant. Two young men were supporting a middle-aged woman who was beyond distraught. It looked like her legs were going to give out before they got a chair under her. Tears poured down her face.

The hairs went up on the back of Mac’s neck. ‘
Them
? Who’s
them
, Joe?’

There was a pause while Joe thought of the right offi ce guy words.

‘You know,
Canberra
.’

‘DFAT?’

Mac heard Joe swallow. ‘No, McQueen - we’re working for PMC

on this one, okay?’

Cover-within-cover had become second nature for Mac. As an S2

intelligence offi cer who undertook paramilitary operations, he was completely beneath the radar of most embassy types, as well as the majority of ASIS personnel. Holding an S2 status from the Minister for Foreign Affairs meant you had the right to carry and use fi rearms.

Only the Minister, the Director-General of ASIS and Mac’s controller on the particular job knew what was really happening.

Over the years he’d acclimatised to the fact that there were American soldiers, Indonesian spies and British diplomats who knew more about his real occupation than some of the Aussies he had lunch with once a week. That was cover-within-cover, the Russian Doll effect. It meant deceiving co-workers in a casual way, but now Joe was dragging him into a whole new level of internal deceit. Mac’s employer was DFAT, but for this operation he’d be taking orders from PMC, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

PMC was the super-department in Canberra, the place where the truly power-obsessed bureaucrats, soldiers, spies and economic advisers wanted to be. It was the card that trumped everything else, even DFAT, Treasury and Defence. PMC was the only department in the Australian government where all initiatives and policies trickled down from one politician - the Prime Minister. Every other department’s senior bureaucrats worked on the ‘capture and control’

method of bending a new minister to their will. PMC was the one department where you didn’t have to justify your expenses claim or be concerned about staying in some four-star hovel. You fl ew in the front of the plane, you stayed in hotel rooms that were more than one room.

Mac fi nished his green tea, trying to get to the bottom of his nagging paranoia. He didn’t like high-ranking politicians meddling in the operations side of things. And he didn’t like it being the politicians who wanted him to lie to his colleagues. If he wanted to deceive someone, he’d make that call. The fact that Joe was using a new pre-paid mobile meant he was already operating clandestinely in the Manila embassy too, trying to defeat the ASIS listening posts. Joe and Mac had become a Loop of Two, the second easiest asset to deny, after the Loop of One.

Leaving some money on the table, Mac unplugged the Nokia and made for the front doors.

One of the Aussies who had been supporting the grieving woman looked up as he passed and Mac stopped.

‘Need anything?’ asked Mac.

‘Sister,’ said the bloke, shaking his head, tears welling in bloodshot eyes. ‘Gone, mate. Bronnie. Fucking gone!’

The woman - Mac guessed the mother - started wailing again and put her face in her hands, her back heaving with the sobs. Mac saw that the two blokes, both mid-twenties, were covered in dirt, blood and grazes. Their sneakers were cut up and there was dust and dirt through their hair. They’d been up all night, guessed Mac, searching through rubble.

Mac put his hand out. ‘Alan McQueen - Foreign Affairs.’

‘Dave,’ the young man replied. ‘David Bruce. This is my brother-in-law Gavin Taylor - Bron’s husband. And my mum.’

The mum looked at him, bereft, but Gavin looked away, clearly one of those blokes who didn’t like to cry. Mac took it in: an Aussie family on a cheapie holiday and suddenly they’re minus a daughter, down one sister, missing a wife.

‘Bron’s eight months pregnant. It’ll be the fi rst grandchild on either side,’ added Dave.

Mac said he’d do what he could and gave them a card. Then he wrote David’s hotel number on the back of another card. As he did so he had a fl ash of the man who trained him at induction: Rod Scott.

Scotty had once told him, over eight or nine beers in Basrah, that spooks grew cynical because they gave their loyalty to an idea for too long at the expense of loyalty to their people. The penny fi nally dropped, right there, looking at this mother and her grief. Something shifted and Mac realised that PMC only trumped other
ideas
, it didn’t trump human beings.

Bronnie! Shit, every Australian knew a Bronnie.

Mac saw his tail the moment he left Poppies. Close-cropped sandy hair, big build that fi lled out a black trop shirt, Levis and well-worn black Hanwags - the European version of Hi-Tecs. Mac had him as intel or military. He stood amongst a bunch of locals and tourists against the roadblock barriers on Legian Street. As soon as Mac made him, the bloke turned away slightly.

Moving across the street until he was at the bloke’s six o’clock, Mac started walking towards the tail really fast. If the bloke was a pro he’d look away from Mac for at least eight seconds before taking another butcher’s, and when he did Mac would be right there. Mac wasn’t trying to be dramatic. The bloke had a black pouch around his waist similar to that which Jenny wore when off-duty in Jakkers or Manila. To ninety-nine out of a hundred people it looked like a tourist’s bumbag, but Mac knew it as a disguised handgun holster and he would rather face that head-on than have the bloke behind him for the rest of the morning.

As he speed-walked up behind the tail, Mac shifted to his four o’clock to get further into his blind spot. Three, two, one … Mac didn’t slow, walked at speed to his tail’s two o’clock as the heavyset man turned to his left to case Mac again. The guy’s torso tensed and he craned his neck slightly - all people did that when they expected to see something and didn’t.

‘Gotta watch that, mate,’ said Mac.

The tail snapped back, eyes wide through his sunnies, his hands dropping straight to the pouch.

‘Lotta thieves round here, champ - good money for a handgun,’

added Mac.

They looked into one another’s eyes through their sunnies. The tail was Mac’s height but had another fi ve kilos on Mac’s one-oh-fi ve. He was a front rower to Mac’s centre. Mac glimpsed a POLRI on the other side of the barrier and looked back at the tail. The bloke’s eyes darted to the POLRI, and then Mac saw the tension run out of that thick neck as he smiled, showing lots of small teeth and a ton of gum.

‘Ah, Australian!’ said the bloke with a thick Russian accent.

‘Einstein, right?’

The Russian threw his head back, laughed at the sky. ‘You weren’t supposed to be seeing me, fuck the mother!’

They sat at the window table of a bar on Legian Street, Ari - the Russian - with a Tiger beer, Mac with a glass of Pellegrino and a chunk of lime.

‘So, Ari, you’re a little out of your way?’

Ari chewed on gum, looked out at the diminished tourist fl ow on Legian, did one of those Russian shrugs that Mac always took to be the start of a fi b. The Russian intelligence services had an enormous presence in East Asia and the subcontinent, but their activities out of Jakarta were usually confi ned to countering the Chinese, Japanese and Indians along with shadowing the Americans and British. Mac and his peers from Indonesian intelligence and the CIA knew that the Ruskies were around but weren’t used to confronting them.

‘Indonesia is such an interesting country, don’t you fi nd, McQueen?’

Ari had used his real name but Mac let it go, since for this investigation he was operating under Alan McQueen, his card the standard DFAT goods with the gold bunting and the south Jakarta address of the Australian Embassy. In the general run of things, intelligence people honoured each other’s aliases and to use their real name unbidden could be seen as aggression.

‘Bali got very interesting last night,’ said Mac. ‘Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’

Ari paused, allowed the translation to sink in, then laughed. ‘I see, I see.’

Mac fl inched as Ari reached for the holster-bag so the Russian slowed his hand, turned his fi ngers into a pincer and pulled the side fl ap open. Mac saw a packet of cigarettes and Ari pulled them out along with a cheap red plastic lighter.

‘Guess what I’m saying, Ari, is that you’re here for the bombing.

And since it looks like my country is going to be in a joint investigation with the Indons, I’m going to be getting a lot of information you’d like to get your hands on.’

Ari nodded as he took his fi rst draw and then held the cigarette upright between his thumb and index fi nger. He had a wide face with big slabs of cheekbone and a surprisingly childish mouth that moved constantly into new emotions. His eyes were ice-pale and he had a medium-sized gold crucifi x dangling beneath his trop shirt on a tanned hairless chest. Mac saw the crucifi x had the Orthodox Church titulus of
INBI
across the portion where the short plank crossed the upright. On a Catholic cross it would be
INRI
.

‘We might have to be talking, yes?’ said Ari, smoke drifting out of his nose. ‘You are scratching my back and I then am scratching your back, yes?’