Java Spider (7 page)

‘Morning Charlie!’

The shout came from Tom Marples, producer of the morning show, a gaunt, swarthy man who was old-fashionedly coy about his gayness.

‘Morning Tom.’

She hung her fawn coat on the wall hook behind her desk, then logged on to her terminal. The prompt flashed –
Mail
. Two service messages – an invitation to a leaving party for one of the VJs, and a style advisory from Ted Sankey on the need to avoid clichés. Then a third message which made her squirm.

Charlie! How could you? The guy’s a trainspotter. My dick’s twice the size of his. Fancy a nibble?

Charlotte felt the blood rush to her face, sensing everyone in the newsroom watching. A glance up, then down. No one looking. All too busy.

The log-in for the message was
newsroom
– a code made available for temps. Anyone could use it. No way of tracing the author.

It was that bloody cow Mandy, she decided.

‘Charlie!’ Tom again, calling to her. ‘Can we have words?’

She picked up a notepad and crossed to the producer’s desk.

‘Nice weekend, hun?’

She checked his eyes. The question was innocent. Marples was outside Mandy’s knitting circle.

‘Fine thanks.’

‘OK … For the headlines at six, we have three minutes. Top story – today’s health debate in the Commons. Not sexy, but important, and we’ll be taking a “live” later in the prog – Angus at the Wickleigh Hospital with a bunch of nurses.’

Charlie jotted a note. It would be her job to write the stories.

‘Then there’s super pics of floods in Kansas that came on the overnight CBS bird. There was a shooting in Belfast, and finally a real treat from Australia. A cycling kangaroo … It’s a hoot.’

‘Can’t wait. Nothing new on the missing minister?’

‘No. What
is
that about? There’s a weird note from Mandy saying you’re
on top
of things.’

Charlie winced. How long before the bitch got tired of her innuendoes?

‘Stephen Bowen,’ she explained. ‘Number two at the Foreign Office. Didn’t turn up where he should’ve done at the weekend. Had a tiff with his wife, according to Downing Street. The big test is whether he arrives for work this morning. If he doesn’t that’s when we start ringing bells.’

‘Sca-andal! Whoopee. But too late for the breakfast show, yup?’

Charlie nodded. ‘Probably.’

‘Pity. I’ll put it down as a watch.’

‘I’ll start bashing the phones around eight, just in case,’ Charlie told him. ‘And I’ll pull together some library shots of him.’

4.25 a.m. On air in ninety minutes.

Jakarta

11.30 hrs (04.30 GMT)

Stephen Bowen’s failure to return to England was a problem Harry Maxwell was determined he should not have to embrace. As Britain’s official MI6 representative
in
Indonesia, he was meant to be concerned with the minister’s security for as long as the man was in the country. But from the moment Bowen checked out of the hotel next to the embassy, telling the ambassador to mind ‘his own fucking business’ when asked where he was going, Maxwell had felt relieved of any responsibility towards him. His department head at Vauxhall Cross, however, who’d phoned him at home on Saturday night, hadn’t seen the matter in quite such black-and-white terms.

Maxwell was overweight and sweated a lot. He loathed the humid heat of the tropics. He’d been here a year, listed as a political counsellor at the embassy. Another two years on station and he’d be moved somewhere cooler, he hoped.

He pressed his damp forehead to the warm side-window of the taxi and eyed the glass and concrete monoliths, which were the phallic symbols of Asia’s ‘tiger’ economies. Alongside the taxi a
bajaj
motorised rickshaw waited in the jam, belching two-stroke fumes, its sweaty rider looking with ill-concealed envy into the air-conditioned car.

Stephen Bowen was the sort of politician Maxwell automatically suspected of malpractice. Last Tuesday he’d sat in on Bowen’s arms-deal press conference and concluded this was a man who found it easy to lie.

‘No bribes were paid to get this contract,’ Bowen had insisted, poker-faced.

‘Commissions then …?’

‘Normal practice. Matter for the companies concerned, not for politicians.’

Bowen’s look had been too smug to be honest.

It was a British journalist who’d posed the question. Few Indonesian reporters had shown up. Most demanded cash payments to attend embassy press
conferences
, an aspect of the local culture which Maxwell’s ambassador refused to go along with.

Bribery not a matter for politicians
? In this country politicians were in the thick of it, but to say so in print was a crime. Maxwell was on his way to court, to watch the trial of a young journalist who’d written an article saying the commission on the arms deal with Britain amounted to £45 million and was going to a close crony of the president. For diplomatic reasons the hearing had been postponed until after Bowen’s visit.

The car stopped outside the court. The driver took his money with a grunt. Maxwell got out. After the artificial chill of the taxi, the heat smothered him like a wet pillow.

The facia of the court house was Dutch colonial, its grandeur downgraded by the opening of a McDonald’s next door. Maxwell wore a pale-blue shirt and light-grey slacks. He heaved his bulk up the steps to the portico, a handkerchief to his forehead.

The air in the lobby was heavy with the sweet, clove-scent of
kretek
cigarettes, a last chance for smokers, because inside the courtroom smoking was banned. In large letters above the entrance to the chambers a sign read
PANCASILA
, the acronym for the five principles upon which the nation of Indonesia had been founded.
Social justice for all
was one of them. Maxwell had a sneaking suspicion that the half-million or more people whose murder had been prompted by the nation’s leaders in the past thirty years might have been short-changed.

He joined the swell of bodies, mostly younger than him, squeezing into the chamber, and craned his neck for somewhere to sit. His eye was caught by a young Javan grinning at him. There was a space beside him. The twenty-six-year-old journalist had a slim, almost boyish frame, and an alert face with a broad nose and thick lips. Abdul was one of what Maxwell described as
his
intelligence sources. A member of the semi-proscribed Association of Free Journalists, they usually met in quiet, un-public places. There’d be many young scribes here today, since one of their own was on trial.

‘Thanks my friend,’ Maxwell wheezed, easing his corpulence into the small space. ‘How’s things?’

‘Busy. Busy. This should be quite a show.’ Abdul tilted his head to the rows behind. Fifty or sixty young men and women in their twenties and thirties, friends and supporters of the accused. ‘Why you here, Harry? Come to defend your country’s reputation?’

Maxwell resisted the goad. ‘Curious, that’s all. Came for my education.’

The clerk called for silence. The air was electric. From a door at the far end of the white-walled court three black-robed judges entered, their faces like masks.

Then from a side entrance came the accused, escorted by a policeman in knife-sharp trousers. Aged twenty-five, black hair shiny with oil, street-wise face alive with excitement, he took his place at a table beside his defence counsel.

The accused’s bribes story had not been published. No editor dared print such stuff if he wanted to retain his licence and liberty. The journalist’s crime was to have
tried
to disseminate his heresy.

Maxwell’s knowledge of the local language
Bahasa Indonesia
was insufficient for him to follow the proceedings. The outcome, however, was not in doubt. The accused would be gaoled for ‘sowing hate’, a catch-all law that made insulting the president a crime that could lead to seven years in gaol.

Suddenly the prosecutor branded the young journalist a communist, which prompted the rear of the court to stir like a wasp’s nest. The bench called for order but the shout was ignored. The handful of police, there to
protect
the judges, eyed the crowd uneasily, knowing they hadn’t the numbers to stop the protests.

‘I don’t understand your country,’ Maxwell whispered.

‘Nor do I, and I’m Indonesian,’ Abdul grinned.

‘We’re in a police state, right? They’re going to gaol your friend to silence him, yet these guys behind us can come in here, shout the same stuff that he was writing, and get away with it! Make any sense to you?’

‘Easy. They want us to – how you say – let off steam?’ Abdul answered. His voice was almost girlish. ‘In this room we harmless, because no one dare report what we say
outside
the court.’

On the wall behind the judges hung a photograph of the president who’d had his way with this nation for over thirty years. Supported by the West as a bastion against communism, a man who’d used the development of the nation’s economy to fill his family’s coffers, Maxwell thought he saw a twinkle of amusement in those monochrome eyes.
Let them shout
, they seemed to say.
Words can’t harm me
.

‘What’s the point of all this, then?’ he asked, putting his mouth close to Abdul’s delicately formed ear. ‘Why do you guys bother to try to print stuff that’ll get you locked up?’

The noise in the packed chamber rose. The soft Malay-based language hardened into a bark. ‘Free the press! Free the press! No more gags!’

‘You won’t change things while
he
’s around,’ Maxwell bellowed, pointing at the picture of the president. ‘The man’s got a skin as thick as an elephant.’

Abdul held up a finger to stop him.

‘Yes …’ he shouted back. ‘But if you inject an elephant with a little poison each day, even
he
will become weak in the end …’

Maxwell smiled. It’d take a bigger syringe than the
one
these boys had. Yet he knew they were part of something bigger, a diffuse, disorganised democracy movement that was marshalling itself for the time when the ageing president gave up his hold on power. The regime was doing all it could to crush it. Hence this trial.

The sallow faces of the judges had the uneasy eyes of men administering laws they didn’t support. The accused was on his feet defending himself.

‘Free-dom! Free-dom!’ A new chant from the back of the court.

Maxwell saw strain on the judges’ faces, caught the uneasy glances between them. Not long now, he thought. The verdict came within minutes. Guilty. The sentence – two-and-a-half years. Long enough to stifle a voice of protest, short enough to limit the anger of the mob.

The court erupted. The judges slunk away.

Maxwell knew his own masters would be pleased with the outcome. Trade with this country would flourish best if little was said about the means by which it was secured.

‘Bad luck,’ he murmured, his mouth close to Abdul’s ear. ‘Lost another battle, but you can still win the war.’

Important to keep the boy sweet. Abdul was useful.

London – the News Channel newsroom

06.55 hrs

‘The re-write on the hospital … where the fuck is it?’

Tom Marples yelling, back from the gallery during a commercial break and haunted by the nightmare of a hole in his programme.

‘Shit! Sorry! It’s there! It’s there!’

Charlotte hammered her keyboard. She’d written the item but forgotten to save it.

Down at the Wickleigh Hospital, linked by satellite, political reporter Angus Addy was waiting to do his live-spot before interviewing nurses. Her script was the intro for the studio presenter.

Inside the narrow control gallery packed with monitors, Marples sat beside the technical director. Charlotte squeezed in behind them.

‘No probs?’ Marples checked.

‘Not yet,’ replied the director. ‘The Wickleigh bird’s up.’ He pointed to the monitor for Line 6 – Angus’s face in close-up, mouthing silently as he rehearsed his words.

Tom keyed the talkback override.

‘Hi, Angus. Hearing us OK?’

‘Hi, Tom. Yup. No worries.’ He pushed his earpiece in deeper. ‘I’ve got three interviewees beside me.’ The camera pulled out to show two middle-aged women and a young Asian man.

‘Great. We open on tape, then come to you live at about five minutes in.’

‘Fine.’

‘Thirty seconds!’ The director’s hands hovered over the start buttons for the tape machines.

Charlie found live-spots terrifying, whether out there as the reporter or here in the gallery. Always the risk of the link failing or a mind going blank.

‘Back on air!’

The title music rolled with the animated graphic of the station logo.

‘
Good Morning. Welcome to Breakfast News …!
’

In the studio two presenters, one male one female, chosen for their sexual chemistry, perched on stools at a fake breakfast bar.

‘
First the main news stories
…’

Little change from the last newsbelt half an hour before, except for a longer package on the health cuts.

‘Coming to you next, Angus,’ Marples warned.

‘
And now for more on the health service cuts
.’ The male presenter back in vision. ‘
Our reporter Angus Addy is live at the Wickleigh Hospital in south London
.’

‘
Good morning
…’

Addy was safely on air. Relief. Charlie watched his lips move, heard his soft lowlands drone, but didn’t take in his words. Angus was married with two young kids, but it didn’t stop her fancying him. Most men she fancied turned out to be married.

The director tapped her arm and she checked the interview captions on a preview monitor. She was impatient for the item to be over. Her stomach needed food and she wanted to start badgering the Foreign Office about their wandering minister.

Addy’s interview droned on. None of the nurses was strong.

‘Wind them up, Angus,’ said Tom Marples eventually.

Back to the breakfast bar. A suggestive line from the presenters linked into a long recorded item on swim-suits.

On the satfeed monitor Addy could be seen puffing his cheeks, relieved it was over. Charlie tried to guess from his face whether he’d had sex last night, a schoolgirl habit she’d never quite shaken off. Then the picture flickered and turned to ‘snow’. The circuit was cut.