CHAPTER 15

Freddi walked Mac to the desk of the Polonia Hotel in the Medan business district, gave the desk staff the nod and left to see some people about a certain piece of human cargo whose memory was malfunctioning. Mac checked in courtesy of the Indonesian Republic but when the woman gave him the door card he took one look at the cardboard sleeve and smiled, shook his head.

‘Mr Freddi never books me in a room with a nine,’ he said, shrugging like it was a misunderstanding. ‘I must be in the other one

- must have got them switched.’

The woman got fl ustered, touched her nose and then called the manager. He was a local with the name-tag of MASON, his face going stony as the girl babbled something in his ear. All Mac heard was Gardjito.

‘This sometimes happens, eh Mason?’ said Mac.

Mason couldn’t come up with anything plausible, so he spluttered,

‘I am sorry Mr McQueen, but 509 was defi nitely booked as your room.’

Mac kept smiling but insisted that his room must have been 510, and to sort it out he should call Freddi. Mason called Freddi and then handed over the phone, his forehead creased like corrugated iron.

‘Fred! You don’t phone, you don’t write,’ said Mac with a grin as he took the phone.

‘McQueen, you are lending yourself!’ snapped Freddi.

‘What can I say, mate, you know how I am with nines.’

Three minutes later Mac was throwing himself on the king-size bed of 510, happy to be in a room without listening posts.

He plugged in his Nokias for more charge, did fi fty push-ups, a hundred crunches and some basic shadow-boxing, up on his toes, making his breath rasp and his glutes burn. Then he had a quick shower and paced the large, neo-Baroque room with a cold Bintang, trying to get really clear on what was going on. First, he’d snatched Akbar from the Penang Princess as his last bit of paramilitary work before heading for New York and the Land of the Long Lunch. Then he was called into Kuta to organise public affairs in the aftermath of the Kuta bombings, only to fi nd the Feds bristling at that. Then he’d been rotated out again and back into Operation Handmaiden because Akbar had been sprung from one of Indonesia’s secret detention facilities, apparently by serious pros. Akbar may have been one of Osama bin Laden’s bagmen but it was the people he was fi nancing who were the real focus. Abu Samir and Hassan Ali, both of them incredibly dangerous in their chosen professions and both with a timing overlap for the bombings.

The weird twist was Akbar being sprung from detention only to be shot by one of his minders rather than letting him be caught by BAIS. Now why would you have to drop the bagman if the operation was already complete?

Mac sat on the bed and looked out the window as fatigue settled on him. He was so tired and he had the mildest of shakes in his hands and face. He looked at his G-Shock: 10.18 am, yet it felt like the middle of the night. He pulled the curtains, depowered the Nokias and hit the hay. Sleep crept up fast and he let it come.

The light on the bedside phone was blinking red when Mac came to.

Lifting his head so he could see the clock-radio, he groaned at the time: 12.43. Less than two and a half hours since he’d fallen asleep.

Rolling out of bed, he checked the hotel message system. Freddi was at the BAIS interrogation into the tree-bound shooter and wanted Mac to check in. Mac dressed in clean civvies but kept his sweaty Hi-Tecs. Detouring into the business centre, he spent fi ve minutes on one of the computers setting up an email account, then did some quick counter-surveillance on the lobby.

There was a light breeze taking the edge off the thirty-seven-degree heat as Mac walked out of the lobby and into the glare, feeling woozy, like he was jet-lagged. He pulled his sunnies down and powered up the Nokias as he walked north through the business district of Medan, a city of 1.5 million, many of whom regarded themselves as Malays rather than Indons. The clean Nokia had no messages but the Service handset did and he dialled in as he checked for eyes, swapped street sides, stopped to look in the abundant mirror glass of Medan’s CBD

to check for tails and doubled back on people who happened to be walking behind him. Medan was the Dallas of Indonesia, and as soon as the Black Gold started fl owing, the newly wealthy liked nothing more than a ton of mirrors around the burg.

The message was from Ari: short of breath, panicking and wanting to talk. Mac called him as he found the street mentioned in the Polonia’s brochure as having several rental car yards. Ari’s phone went straight to voicemail, so Mac left a short message with no specifi cs. Just one rotation at the telecoms end of counter-espionage was enough to never again leave a detailed voice mail on a cellular service. It was like nailing your intentions to a lamp-post.

The big-brand rental-car companies were out of four-wheel drives. ‘You should book in advance, at least one week,’ said one of the clerks.

He wasn’t game to hire a people-mover or a sedan given the state of some of the roads in the interior of Sumatra, so he kept walking, down to the Deli River, the largest of three that ran through the city.

There was a riverside coffee shack on a boardwalk and Mac dipped in out of the sun and ordered a coffee. In Indonesia, it didn’t matter what kind of coffee you ordered - latte, espresso, short, long - they’d just bring it black, strong and hot along with a glass of water so you could adjust it to the strength you wanted it.

The shack had both river and side frontage and Mac positioned himself where he could see people approaching from both the boardwalk and the street. The ambush scene on that jungle road was haunting him. Those kinds of set-ups were only dreamed up by people who knew exactly what they were doing and those kind of people were usually special forces. These were serious people, operating with an intel component. If Mac wanted to take the conspiracy theory to its logical extreme, he would conclude there was government-level participation in Hassan’s work.

A middle-aged local woman with a happy round face brought the coffee and Mac ordered three fi sh skewers with a curry sauce.

One of the things that irritated Westerners about Indonesia was the frequency with which restaurants and cafes were all out of certain foods. But Mac liked that, because the Indons only served fi sh from the morning’s catch, and when it was gone, it was gone.

He took a few sips of the coffee and when he was calm he hit redial on the clean Nokia and waited.

Joe picked up on the fourth ring.

‘Can’t talk now,’ whispered Joe. ‘Call back, okay?’ and he hung up.

Putting the clean phone on the table, Mac picked up the Service Nokia and was about to dial when he changed his mind, grabbed the clean Nokia and called KL directory. The call-centre person connected him direct to the George Institute, a government-funded research facility in George Town, Penang.

The George Institute was supposed to do medical-related work on radiological medicine, and sometimes did, but it was better known as a nuclear weapons skunk works that did a lot of contract trials and tests on behalf of the US Department of Defense. Three months after the September 11 attacks, the Bush White House had launched its Nuclear Posture Review, which changed US nuclear policy from

‘pre-emptive nuclear war’ based on incontrovertible evidence to

‘preventative nuclear war’ based on a belief that such a strike might be necessary. The Yanks had started the nuclear arms race again and a lot of countries and companies were making billions from the technology upgrade from the 1980s.

Mac asked for the extension and the phone was picked up on the second ring.

‘Hello, who is this?’ came the slightly paranoid voice Mac remembered from his Ukrainian engineer friend in Iraq.

‘Vikkie!’ yelled Mac. ‘How the hell are ya?’

There was a pause and then Viktor clicked. ‘McQueen! You mad Orssie!’

Mac asked how Vik and his new family were going.

‘Still kicking and screaming,’ announced Vik with confi dence.

When Mac and the Ukrainian engineer both realised they were being moved on from INVO for failure to stick with the lies they were supposed to be telling, they’d had a huge night on the piss after Mac told Viktor that in Australia a sacking had to be endured with a certain vigour. ‘Gotta go out kicking and screaming, right, Vikkie?’

Viktor had never heard that piece of Strine and was fascinated with how it sounded. People who had grown up under the Commies were astounded there was even a term for that kind of defi ance, let alone that it was a proud character trait. It had become part of Vik’s lexicon that night in Basra and Mac smiled to think he was still using it.

After the catch-up chit-chat, Mac got down to business. ‘Mate, I’ve set up a gmail account in the name of that bloke who poked you in the chest that night in the hotel car park. Only I’ve put the names in reverse order, okay?’

Vik listened, focusing in on the Pommie spy who tried to make him change an inspection report one night to ensure that a tractor part was recorded as a centrifuge arm.

‘The password is VIK7979,’ said Mac. ‘Open the fi rst message, and when you’ve read it, delete it, okay Vik?’

‘Sure, McQueen.’

‘And, mate, if you have a computer outside the Institute -‘

‘I get this,’ said Viktor, long enough under the Soviets to know what was going on.

They rang off, with Vik promising to respond within the hour.

The curry fi sh arrived and, as he ate, Mac’s clean Nokia rang.

He took the call and didn’t stuff about. ‘Joe - Akbar’s dead,’ he whispered.

There was a pause, two seconds of dead air.

‘You there?’ asked Mac.

‘Yeah, mate, yeah,’ came Joe’s voice.

‘So, Akbar -‘

‘Yeah, look Macca,’ said Joe, searching for a tone. ‘Yeah - Akbar.’

It was uncharacteristic for Joe to stumble. Before being restreamed into ASIS management and becoming a controller, he’d been a top-notch fi eld guy out of Beijing. Joe was fl uent in Cantonese and Mandarin at a time when Foreign Affairs had Australians who generally only spoke one or the other. He used to joke that, because he grew up in a house with a Calabrian mother and a Roman father, he had to balance peasant Italian with the highfalutin language of the metropole. He saw the same distinction between China’s two main languages - he didn’t see a drama. After Joe got married he’d pulled back a bit and then when the fi rst of his three kids arrived, he asked for a desk job - Wife’s Orders.

‘So, you saw it - I mean Akbar?’ asked Joe.

‘Confi rmed,’ said Mac, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. ‘Had eyes.’

‘Fuck!’

‘What I said.’

Joe heaved a breath. ‘Who?’

‘One of Hassan’s crew. Shot him in the back rather than let him be taken by the BAIS team.’

‘Jesus!’ Joe spat, a cross between amazed and disgusted.

‘So you know about Hassan?’ asked Mac, trying to get Joe to connect the dots.

‘Yep.’

‘Know he’s one of Doctor Khan’s operators?’

Joe sighed. ‘Look …’ he started, then trailed off.

‘Joe, we’re talking about people who sell enriched uranium.’

‘McQueen -‘

‘Abu Samir is part of the crew. Did you know that, mate? He’s JI, case you were wondering.’

‘Okay, so look -‘ Joe started again.

‘- we’ve got an atomic weapons dealer running around with Jemaah Islamiyah and they’ve already bombed Kuta, killed a carload of BAIS guys and assassinated an Osama bagman -‘

‘Macca -‘

‘So what the fuck’s going on?’ snapped Mac.

‘Mate, some people have just joined me, I’ll get back ASAP.’

‘What’s the mission, now?’ asked Mac.

‘Stay put, help BAIS fi nd the other -‘

‘Other?’ asked Mac.

But Joe had hung up.