Java Spider (15 page)

A hand on his shoulder. The guard pushed him into a cell then clanged the door shut. On the high ceiling a lamp shone brightly inside a metal grille. Worn tiles covered the floor, white gloss paint on concrete walls, four rattan mats aligned with the corners. On one a middle-aged man slept, knees pulled up to his chin. On the other a younger person sitting cross-legged, stared up at him.

‘Professor Bawi!’ the youth whispered hoarsely. ‘Don’t you know me?’

Junus gave him a cursory glance.

‘No.’

‘I was a student. Three years ago. You remember?’

‘No. I have so many students …’ Junus kept his eyes on the floor. He knew what this was about.

‘They keep me here three days, but I tell them nothing,’ the youth whispered. ‘Bad …’

Junus looked away.

‘I suppose for you, it is better you co-operate,’ the youth went on. ‘They know everything about you, so it is better not to lie. Am I right? They know you send supplies to the mountains. Everyone knows. All the students, even.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about …’

Junus lay down on a mat. No pillow or padding, but the discomfort was preferable to conversation with an oafish stool pigeon.

He heard a whimper from the corridor and a door clanging. Someone returning from interrogation. Then the footsteps of the guards came closer, rubber soles squeaking on the tiles.

The gate opened.

‘Bawi! You come.’

Wasting no time, he thought. An urgency he’d not experienced before.

They marched him to the far end of the corridor. A thick wooden door opened into the block that ran between the men’s and women’s wings. It was here the interrogations were done by the sick men from intel. From somewhere close he heard the dull thud of a beating.

Junus’s courage failed him. He sensed suddenly that this time he too would be tortured. For a moment he lost control of his legs. The guards grabbed his arms and propelled him forward, his feet trailing on the ground.

A door opened in front of them and a man was dragged out, the white of his shin bones showing through his bloodied skin.

The soldiers pushed Bawi into a darkened room then closed the door. Pitch black. He felt himself swaying. He held his breath, knowing there’d be others in this room. But how many? And
where
?

Suddenly he heard someone clearing his throat. Then a low chuckle.

The light snapped on. A single floodlight on a stand pointed at him. Bawi shielded his eyes. He counted three pairs of legs, one in uniform green behind a table, the others in a darker cloth.

‘Dr Bawi …’

Junus recognised the voice of Colonel Widodo, head of ABRI Military Intelligence.

‘Professor, you’re keeping us waiting …’

Widodo had interviewed him before. He knew the man’s games. He saw the chair, pulled himself straight and moved towards it, his courage returning.

‘Why have you arrested me?’ he demanded, sitting down.

Widodo brought his fist down on the table with a deafening crash. A flask of water fell to the floor and smashed.

‘Because,
kamu
, you are a liar! LIAR!’ he screamed.

Kamu
was the intimate form of ‘you’. Used here it was offensive. Bawi stayed silent. Argument would make things worse.

‘But this time you will tell me the truth. You will tell
us
…’ Widodo swung his left arm wide to indicate his two plain-clothed thugs. Men with stone cold eyes. Bawi glimpsed the hands of one of them. Fingers encrusted with metal rings like knuckle-dusters.

Widodo was squat, with a round, light-brown face and straight, oily hair. Bawi knew his mood could switch from light to dark with mercurial speed.

‘What is it you want to know?’ he asked, trying to control the tremor of his voice.

Widodo raised a brow and leaned forward, elbows on the table, his chin supported by balled fists.

‘Tell me about the kidnap of the English foreign minister Stephen Bowen …’

Bawi swallowed to wet his dust-dry throat. He’d guessed this would be it.

‘I heard about it on the radio,’ he answered. ‘The BBC. I can tell you what they said, if you didn’t hear it …’

Widodo shook his head. He mimed despair. One of the thugs chuckled, the other cracked his finger joints.

‘Tell me what
you
know, Dr Bawi. Not what the radio said.’

‘That’s all I know, colonel. I heard nothing about it before or since.’

‘Liar!’ The fist on the table again.

‘It is the truth …’ A rough hand slapped his face. Hard enough to twist his neck. He’d not noticed one of the plain clothes men creep round behind him.

‘Who planned it? You or Kakadi?’

‘I tell you, I know nothing.’ Bawi flinched, waiting to be hit again.

‘I don’t believe you.’ Widodo switched his expression to one of pleading. He leaned forward. Bawi smelled garlic on his breath. ‘They are Kutu people, the kidnappers. They say it themselves. OKP people. And you say
you
were not involved in planning this?’

‘I am a professor of language. I teach students about the culture of their island. Like most people of Kutu I am opposed to the mountains where our ancestors’ spirits live being robbed and destroyed by foreigners, but …’

‘
Foreigners
? You call Indonesians foreigners?’ Widodo screamed, his face ablaze. ‘Kutu
is
Indonesia!’

Bawi wished he’d chosen better words.

‘The English and Australians in KUTUMIN are
foreigners
. Indonesians of course, are not,’ he answered mollifyingly. ‘Whatever my views about the mine, I have never advocated violence as a means to oppose it. That is not my way. A kidnap is an act of violence. I could never be involved in such an act, however much violence is used against me and against the people of this island.’

A derisive slow hand clap came from behind him.

‘So it is Kakadi?’ Widodo’s thin, curved eyebrows rose, waiting for confirmation.

‘I know nothing about Soleman Kakadi,’ Junus answered wearily.

‘When did you last see him?’

‘You know the answer. You asked me last time. It was one year ago.’

‘How often do you communicate?’

‘Never.’

‘Liar! Why do you still lie to me?’ He waved a hand at the thug with the rings. The man stood up and left the room.

Bawi’s stomach knotted into a ball.

‘Lies, lies, lies!’ Widodo muttered, half to himself. He moistened his lips. ‘You pretend you don’t support violence, yet you send your son out to throw stones at soldiers …’

Bawi began to shake uncontrollably. The ring man, he realised, had gone to fetch Obeth.

‘I tell you he was not out last night,’ he pleaded, pointlessly. ‘You’ve made a mistake.’

No mistake. They knew. But they would use him anyway. Against his own father.

Widodo stood up and stretched. ‘Show me,’ he said, turning to the side and stifling a yawn.

From the shadows to Junus’s right the man who’d hit him emerged with a metre-long cane which he laid on
the
table. One end was bound with string for a handle, the other frayed and split.

Widodo picked it up, swished it, then thwacked it down, his eyes watching Bawi with cold contempt.

‘Children need discipline,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t you agree, professor?’

Bawi’s gaze fell to the floor. If there was anything he knew that would stop what was about to happen, he would tell it to them. Even,
Yes, it is Kakadi who is responsible for the kidnap
.

‘I don’t know anything,’ he wept. ‘That’s the truth, colonel!’

‘We’ll soon see.’ Widodo turned away, pulled a toothpick from his military shirt and worked at his mouth.

Bawi stood up to protest or beg, but a thump on the chest knocked him back on to the chair. He heard the door open and the sniffing of a child. He turned to look. Obeth came in, barefoot in his T-shirt and shorts, his face smeared from crying, one skinny arm gripped like a doll’s by the hideous ring man. The thug thrust his thick fingers into the boy’s hair and twisted his head round so he would see his father.

The boy cried out and made to go to Junus. Then he saw the tears coursing down his father’s face.

‘You threw stones at soldiers, little boy …’ Widodo yelled. ‘Very stupid. Very dangerous. You could kill someone.’

‘No, no…’

A big hand clamped across Obeth’s mouth.

‘Like your father you don’t know the difference between truth and lies. We have to teach you to tell the truth.’

Widodo picked up the bamboo switch and shook it.

‘No … Please …’ Obeth blubbed.

Through the shroud of his own tears, Bawi saw the
brute
holding his son pull the boy’s shorts down to his ankles, exposing his small, tight buttocks and hairless genitalia. Then he tugged the grubby T-shirt up over Obeth’s head, baring the unblemished brown back.

The man with the rings bunched his fist and ran it down Obeth’s flesh, the sharp metal drawing thin, dark rivulets of blood from the smooth skin.

Junus saw his son’s legs buckle and water spurt uncontrolled from his penis. He shook with sobs, powerless, knowing that nothing he could say would stop this outrage. They were all victims. Even eleven-year-olds.

Widodo handed the switch to his torturer. Holding Obeth upright by his hair, the brute slashed the sharp strands of cane against the cuts he’d made with the rings. He beat with a practised rhythm until the boy’s back and buttocks were cross-hatched with blood.

Then he let him drop to the floor to lie in the puddle he’d made.

Bawi blinked the tears from his eyes.

Non-violent resistance – his credo, his mantra, all his life – Kakadi had told Bawi he was wrong. Told him that fire had to be fought with fire.

Yes. Now at last he agreed. They’d left him no choice.

He would join Kakadi, behind the barricades.

Eight

Jakarta

Tuesday 10.45 hrs (03.45 hrs GMT)

THE TRAFFIC ON
Jalan Sudirman was as slow and dense as a lava flow. The taxi which disgorged the young Chinese woman into the humid heat outside the Australian Embassy had stopped on the wrong side of the dual carriageway.

For several minutes she stared through smudged lenses at the grind of cars and buses, hoping for a gap that would let her cross. Before long she understood what natives of Jakarta already knew – that a gap would never come. Not far down the road was a footbridge.

She was as frightened as at any time in her life by the act of betrayal she was about to commit. More frightened even than during the miserable darkness of the past night, when her pounding heart had made sleep impossible.

She was a dumpy, bespectacled woman in her thirties, with black hair and a round, open face, dressed in a red skirt, tight on her fleshy hips, and a pink silk blouse. She carried the black vinyl briefcase which every member of the delegation had been given before they left Beijing.

This was her second visit here in two years. Relations between Indonesia and China had a history of hostility that had only recently improved. Diplomatic contacts, severed in 1967 after the Chinese communists were accused of involvement in the attempted coup in
Indonesia
were not restored until 1990. Since then visits by trade delegations had become more commonplace.

Her shoes felt tight. Designed for looks, not walking. They pinched as she climbed the steps of the footbridge. She didn’t dare look back, fearful she’d been followed despite the trust she knew the delegation leader placed in her.

Would the embassy let her in? Could she make them understand? The only language she spoke was Mandarin Chinese. In her briefcase was a dictionary. Last night in the bathroom of the hotel room she shared with another woman from the Trade Ministry she’d sat on the toilet, searching for the English words she needed. Then she’d copied the unfamiliar script on to a page of hotel notepaper.

In the middle of the bridge she stopped to ease the discomfort of the shoes. The small obstruction she caused provoked hostility from those brushing past. Javan Indonesians disliked the Chinese in their midst, jealous of their prosperity.

All around towered mirror-polished marble and gold-tinted glass, displays of power and wealth which seemed to mock her. She looked down from the bridge at the oleanders lining the strip between the carriageways. She eyed the swishing conga of vehicles and wondered whether death mightn’t be a better solution for her. Then she dismissed the thought. Too much at stake. And it wouldn’t just be
her
life she was destroying.

She couldn’t call what she was about to do a betrayal of her country. A betrayal of its leaders, yes. But then it was
they
who were the real traitors, killing, imprisoning those who opposed them, and, as she now believed, plotting to extend their iron fist across the South China Sea.

The grey blockhouse of the Australian Embassy looked remote and inhospitable on the far side of the
road
. Quelling her terror, she tucked the briefcase under her arm and allowed the throng to carry her towards it.

At ground level, the pavement was cracked and uneven. Muddy holes held water from last night’s rain. Twice she stumbled, nearly falling to her knees. Suddenly she was there, standing before the thick glass window of the police post at the embassy gate.

‘Visa,’ she mouthed, the only word in English she had learned to say.

The guard opened the electronic security gate and pointed up the path towards the main entrance. Her mind flipped back three years to the last time she’d approached such a menacing-looking edifice – an abortion clinic in Beijing.

The entrance door swung open as she approached it.

‘Good day!’ A man in his fifties, smiling politely, held the door for her and tipped his Panama hat in salute. She fumbled with the clasp of her briefcase, thinking to give
him
her note. He gestured with his head that she should go inside.

‘They’ll help you at reception.’

She guessed his meaning.

The entrance lobby was a sealed chamber, all doors leading from it protected by swipe-card locks. It felt like a prison. She shook with terror.