Mac had only been gulled by a female once in his career and that was early days, in China. Part of his early training with ASIS had seen him infi ltrating the Chinese Cultural Exchange Program, which was still a big tool for the People’s Republic into the 1990s.
The cultural exchanges and scholarships had become a joke. The Commies would announce that some academic, teacher, political researcher or journalist from a Western country had won one of their friendship junkets and then bring them over to China for a couple of weeks of offi cial wining and dining. They would tour them around the countryside, get them drinking at all opportunities, and wear them down with isolation, fatigue and fl attery. Then they’d lure them into compromising situations and record the whole thing, and when those people were settled back in Melbourne or San Francisco or Auckland, contact them and have a quiet word. The Chinese liked it best when their leftie was closet gay, liked children or had a money problem, gambling debts or a secret heroin habit. Strangely, a sense of being underappreciated was often the best lever for creating an agent.
The cultural exchange program was an old Soviet trick that had already been overdone by the KGB in the 1960s and 1970s, producing a stream of Marxists in culturally infl uential positions. But the MSS was still having fun with it when Mac joined up.
In the fi rst couple of years in an intelligence organisation, the brass would let the recruits have a shot at different things, to see where their aptitude lay, and also detect weaknesses. When Mac asked if he could infi ltrate the MSS exchange programs, his regional director said, ‘Go for your life.’
He posed as a freelance journalist, writing socially important articles for the Courier-Mail and the Age under the name of Andrew Stevens. He picked on subjects that the Commies loved: wealth distribution being appalling in the West; the education system not working for those with no money; women living in Melbourne’s suburb of Broadmeadows having fewer rights than females living in northern Pakistan; Australians and Americans were richer, but Cubans and Vietnamese were happier. All the classics.
Mac was amazed how easy the stories were to write. Academics spouted forth to him, statistics could be pulled out and twisted to mean what he wanted and social workers would say anything to get in print. He even won an award from a Sydney ‘peace institute’ that had been set up as a KGB front in the 1960s and had somehow become self-perpetuating after the Soviet Union imploded.
One day the letter from the People’s Republic of China arrived, containing the kind of fl attery and enlisting techniques that Mac knew well. It even quoted lines of his stories back at him. Mac got into character with a shabby suit and a bad haircut, developing a dreamy yet self-righteous manner that he remembered from the socialists at UQ. The Chinese interviewers saw a bloke who started every second sentence with, ‘I feel it’s so important that…’ and appended anti-capitalist remarks with ‘not that I’m really an average Australian’. The panel were impressed, looking at each other and nodding at each other as if to say, He’ll do.
In hindsight, the MSS probably knew who he really worked for before he landed. And wouldn’t you know it, Mac was bedridden with gastro four days into the junket and was assigned a woman to keep him company while the main junket pack moved on into the interior to look at hydro dams and tyre factories. So Mac lived in Beijing’s Palace Hotel for a week with a woman whose fi rst name contained a jumble of x s and vowels, but who was known in intel circles as Daisy Dau.
Daisy’s basic approach was to have lots of sex, drink lots of wine and fl atter a man or woman into incriminating confessions. The Palace was part-owned by the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, and it was wired like a recording studio.
When Mac got back to Canberra and debriefed, the older guys got a laugh out of that for a while. Every young Westerner got pounced on by Daisy Dau. She was beautiful, smart and sexy and renowned for comparing her male companions to Kevin Costner. Ooo, you such strong man, you so handsome, like Krevin Cottner.
Those had been early days. The Service wasn’t trying to trip him up. He was allowed to call it a learning experience. He didn’t know much and wasn’t a great pillow-talker anyway. He joked with the guys that the MSS listening post had a stack of tapes of an Aussie bloke growling energetically for about thirty seconds, followed by hours of snoring.
This Diane thing was in a totally different league. It had completely blind-sided him. Through her he had glimpsed a new life, a new way to be in the world. It wasn’t just her sexiness. She was the kind of woman you could have a laugh with and be serious with inside the space of fi ve minutes. She had an appetite and loved a drink, she was shallow and deep. When Mac was a teenager he used to fl ip through Virginia’s magazines, the ones with the sealed sections. He remembered the fresh-faced girls with their clean lines, tans and their fl ashy, confi dent smiles. He’d thought girls like that didn’t actually exist in his world, and even if they did, a boofhead from Rockie wasn’t allowed to meet them. Diane was one of those girls, and he hadn’t had to change a thing about himself.
She was the only woman in Mac’s adult life who had got him up for a dance. Even though she’d regretted it.
He’d wanted to go civvie for her.
He’d bought her a ring.
And she was screwing a rogue CIA agent.
Looking back now, there’d been lots of small clues, of course.
There were the subtle defl ections from Mac meeting Diane’s father which, in retrospect, shouldn’t have been a big deal. There were smaller things he could have picked. The fact she thought the ‘A’ in ADSL referred to ‘advanced’. Or the time he’d made a joke about IUDs – the contraceptives – and Diane, a bit drunk, continued what she thought was the joke, but punchlined with something about using Nokia phones for detonation. Mac had been confused until it clicked: she must have thought he’d said ‘IEDs’. There were only three types of people who really spoke in terms of IEDs: cops, military and spooks. Certainly, you’d have to be one of those to refl exively translate IUD to IED. You must have it in your head, on your brain, recently been at a symposium or rotated through one of the Israelis’ excellent specialist courses. The ones where they make you dress like a terrorist, show you your raw materials and then get you to make your own Improvised Explosive Device, just like they would in Syria or Malaysia.
The thing that Mac should never have overlooked with Diane was the occasion when he knew she was at a big IT trade show down at the Jakarta Convention Centre. He’d found her at the Atlas Network Security stand and surprised her. Atlas was in the same area as the stand for a computer security organisation called ASIS.
Mac had looked across, seen the ASIS – ADVANCING SECURITY
WORLDWIDE signage and quipped that the name certainly had a ring to it. Diane had touched her nose, eyes darting to the left and back again. Now why would a Pommie IT maven have even a clue what Mac had been smiling about, let alone react to it like that?
It was amazing how much information a bit of love could gloss over. But it sat there in your subconscious, waiting for the moment when you were ready. And suddenly there was the information, clear as day. A warning light you’d never miss if the agent was a hairy fella with bad breath.
It reeked of the old squirrel-grip. That and Chanel No. 5.
Sonny leaned around from his position in the front passenger seat of the LandCruiser. ‘Any big ideas, Chalks?’
Mac shook his head, ‘I’m waiting for a call from Zam. I don’t know what’s going on.’
‘That doesn’t help me, does it?’ said Sonny.
Mac shrugged, overcome with exhaustion, suffering excru ciating pain in his wrist and still in shock at the news about Diane. He was rooted.
‘Let me say that another way,’ said Sonny, getting annoyed. ‘It doesn’t help us much, right?’
‘I’ll talk to Cookie if you want, say it’s my fault,’ said Mac, looking out the window at the passing scenery.
They were on their way to Hasanuddin Air Base, the military facility that fringed the commercial airport outside of Makassar.
They’d opted for the scenic route to the Eurocopter because of certain cargo in the luggage compartment – a bound and gagged bloke Mac knew as Ray-Bans.
Sonny ignored Mac’s offer. ‘You get something out of that cunt back there and no one will have to take the blame for anything.
I mean, you’re the spook, right Chalks?’
This was the time that the military guy looked at the intel guy and said, Okay smartarse, do your thing.
But Mac had no answers. He wasn’t a torturer, didn’t get off on that kind of interaction. Hemi and Sonny had already beaten their captive to a bleeding pulp and it was amazing the bloke was still alive, let alone conscious. Mac had no insights into what the guy might know or not know. Garrison was Agency and Sabaya’s techniques were notoriously cellular, so they’d both be secretive. And Diane was starting to look like a very smart operator who would not be giving much away to the hired help. If Ray-Bans said he didn’t know what was going on then Mac was inclined to give him a fi fty per cent assumption of honesty. He didn’t think the bloke knew anything.
He was a Sabaya henchman, hired to get Mac out of the way.
‘The answer is in the Macassar Strait. Garrison and Sabaya are out there, you can bet on it,’ said Mac.
‘I don’t want to bet on anything, McQueen. Understand?’ Sonny fi red back.
Mac could see why Cookie used him.
Sonny and his team were being called back by Cookie for a mining situation – something that required a little more pressure than the local cops could exert. They’d want to know that they’d taken care of their excess baggage problems before they left.
Mac had got Boo and his boys spared on the basis that they weren’t so unlike Sonny and his boys. Mac had had to work on that, emphasising that dead APS blokes would bring POLRI’s Criminal Investigation detectives in from Jakkers. But he didn’t know about the bloke in the luggage compartment.
They drove past the turn-off to a popular family swimming hole where the waterfall emptied straight into a big pool. Mac’s mind worked overtime, struggling to work out what Garrison and Sabaya were doing, what the missing container in Manila contained and why Garrison had Diane working as a double agent months before this thing had gone down. He had to stay clear on that without the feeling of betrayal muddying everything.
His immediate goal was to create a scenario where the guy in the back didn’t have to die.
Mac leaned forward, whispered in Sonny’s ear, ‘I reckon I can get something out of this bloke if we’re alone. You guys go on, leave him with me. Whaddya reckon?’
‘I don’t care if you want to fuck him, make him your missus. All I want is something I can take to Mr B. Got that?’
Mac nodded.
Sonny’s sat phone trilled and he took the call before passing it back to Mac.
‘Hello,’ Mac rasped.
Cookie Banderjong wanted Mac to stay in touch. Reckoned there was still life in the Garrison-Sabaya thing. Said, ‘Don’t be a stranger, mate. Remember your friends.’
Cookie was really saying, The trail’s dead for now but if you come back to this island, you’re dealing with me.
Mac’s head spun and he struggled to breathe properly.
As Cookie was signing off Mac had a sudden thought. ‘Mr B, if the US military is shipping something to Johnston, what are they doing?’ he said.
Cookie chuckled. ‘They’re burying their mistakes, mate.’
Mac said nothing; he was beyond riddles.
‘Johnston Atoll is a US Army base about two hundred miles south of Hawaii. It’s a huge incinerator plant out there in the Pacifi c. Hush-hush, run by DIA,’ said Cookie.
‘What do they burn?’ asked Mac.
‘All their CBNRE stuff – diseases that don’t work, explosives that don’t meet stability specs, dogs with two heads. All that scientist shit.’
Mac was totally awake again, his heart thumping.
Behind him, someone groaned. A long, animal-like exhalation of pain.
‘Mr B, the secret cache at Clark – what was it?’ demanded Mac.
‘Oh that. About four thousand tons of VX gas,’ said Cookie. ‘Nerve agent. Nasty shit.’