Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘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?’

  CHAPTER 6

  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 activiti
es 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?’

  Mac hesitated, and then put his hand out. They shook and swapped mobile phone numbers before Mac got up to leave.

  ‘If you’re working with the Indonesian police,’ said Ari, ‘perhaps you can tell me: are they checking passports?’

  Mac was about to say, Why the hell would they be checking passports? But he just shrugged, said he’d fi nd out.

  Walking into the heat, Mac buzzed with what he’d just found out.

  The Russians didn’t believe the bombers were locals either.

  CHAPTER 7

  After changing into clean civvies, Mac headed downstairs and Julie grabbed him as he walked into the hotel lobby. For someone who never seemed to rest, she had a clean, fresh look. Her dark drill skirt was pressed and her white short-sleeved blouse was free of the dust that everyone else picked up in Kuta.

  ‘Chester needs you, Mr McQueen,’ said Julie as Mac stopped, ‘for signing the Memorandum of Understanding with the Indon National Police.’

  She didn’t wait for an answer, just turned and walked.

  Mac followed. ‘By the way, Julie …’

  She looked over her shoulder.

  ‘Call me Mac, huh? All this “Mister” stuff will just get everyone confused.’

  She smiled, got to a dark door and leaned on it. ‘Okay, Mac. The big one in the suit is from the Indonesian President’s offi ce and the one with the fruit salad is Indonesian National Police. It’s now a joint op and DFAT has carriage from the Aussie side.’

  ‘And the MOU?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Joint AFP and INP. We’re doing forensics and DVI; the Indons are doing the investigation.’

  Mac smiled. ‘Good thinking. That Chester’s not just a pretty face, huh?’

  She laughed. ‘It gets better. The MOU precludes any foreign investigations and the INP will write the fi nal report. Non-negotiable, no dissenting opinions.’

  One of Julie’s phones rang and she stepped away from the door, motioning for Mac to go through. There were fi fteen people in a small business centre. The ones with any clout sat around the oval wooden treaty table while the lawyers leaned down and pointed at documents with silver Parkers and black Montblancs.

  Chester rose and introduced Mac and the Indonesians at the table all smiled and did their little bows at him. Despite being a bit of a dick, Chester was in his element in a diplomatic forum.

  ‘Alan, just to bring you up to speed,’ he said, with genial authority,

  ‘we now have an MOU with the Republic of Indonesia to run the investigation and associated logistics as a joint operation.’

  Mac saw that one group at the table, the AFP representatives, were conspicuously not smiling and wondered what kind of arguments had erupted in the back rooms before the cops conceded it was now a DFAT show.

  ‘Mr McQueen will have overall sign-off on the public affairs side,’ said Chester, smiling like he was ingratiating a boyfriend with someone’s father. ‘I think we’re all in agreement on the need for a single interaction point with the media, yes?’

  Afterwards Mac lunched with Chester in the main restaurant. They ate quickly and moved across the basics. The AFP would do all the heavy lifting, with the support of the Australian Defence Force. The cops would build the forward command post, and Defence would organise the chow tents, sleeping quarters, toilets and showers for the two hundred Aussies expected to descend on Bali in the next few days.

  Of most signifi cance to Mac was the fact that the Indonesian National Police would write the only report. If Mac knew Indonesia even half as well as he thought he did that report would never be released to the Indonesian media and perhaps not even to their parliament. The INP answered directly to the Indonesian President’s offi ce, and that’s where the report would disappear.

  ‘Doesn’t leave much for us, mate,’ quipped Mac.

  Chester smiled with the superiority of the diplomat as he chewed on his tuna. ‘I see our role as more the project manager - thought-leadership, if you will.’

  Mac gagged slightly on his veal. If Jenny was here she’d be in the bloke’s face for that sort of comment. She had no time for men and their endless extra layers of management.

  ‘You okay, McQueen?’ asked Chester as Mac drank iced water and thumped himself in his still-tender sternum.

  ‘Good as gold, thanks,’ Mac spluttered.

  As he put his glass down Mac saw John Morris, the AFP’s senior counter-terrorism bloke, patting his chest pocket like he was going for a ciggie as he ducked out of the restaurant. Mac got up to go, but turned back to Chester. ‘By the way, mate, I’ll need an assistant.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Chester. ‘Pick anyone … except Julie.’

  Mac smiled. ‘I’ll take Julie.’

  Chester stopped chewing and they stared at one another.

  ‘Perhaps we could get Canberra to decide?’ asked Mac.

  ‘That won’t be necessary, McQueen. She’s yours. For now.’

  Mac checked his voicemail as he made for the hotel’s side exit. Most were from Julie or Chester. The one from Jenny said she wouldn’t be able to catch up with him before he left for New York because she was being rotated into Kuta immediately for the bombing. He wondered what his relationship with the cops would turn into once Jenny started stirring things up.

  Outside, Mac found John Morris with another cop in the side garden area.

  ‘Well, look what the cat dragged in,’ Morris sneered, his dark cop moustache rising up like a living thing.

  ‘Boys,’ said Mac, offering his hand to the bloke he didn’t know - a tall, athletic Anglo with a tanned, shaved head. ‘Alan McQueen, DFAT.’

  ‘Jason Cutler, Federal Police.’

  John Morris cut into the pleasantries. ‘Jase, if you wouldn’t mind giving us a second,’ he snapped, impatient.

  Jason fl icked his butt into the shrubs and left without saying another word.

  Six foot tall, short dark hair, squarish face and built like a front-rower, John Morris was about ten years older than Mac. His pal
e blue business shirts were always perfectly pressed and he wore a tie regardless of the temperature. Even in fi eld operations, Morris never wore overalls like most other AFP cops did.

  ‘Came to gloat, did ya, Macca?’

  ‘Mate, I’m supposed to be getting packed for the UN gig in New York. I didn’t want this,’ sighed Mac.

  ‘An outside agency running the media side? That’s bad enough.

  But shit, Macca - DFAT is coordinating the whole show? I don’t even know where to start with that.’ Morris fl icked his butt, fi shed immediately for another smoke. ‘These incidents are what we train for. Since when did the Australian Federal Police need babysitting?’

  Mac didn’t want to get into it. He had a girlfriend who had laid it all out for him on many occasions with a great deal more force than Morris was giving it.

  ‘John, I don’t think it’s like that.’

  ‘Oh, really, Macca? So why’d they bring in a spook from Manila to run the media side? Afraid we might tell the truth?’

  ‘Mate, do you mind?’ said Mac, eyes darting around the garden.

  ‘I got no problem with intel, you’ve got a job to do. But that, out there,’ said Morris, pointing with his slightly shaking cigarette hand,

  ‘that is a fucking mess, right? My guys are telling me a hundred and fi fty, maybe two hundred dead. We’ve got hospitals where the burns victims are lying in storage rooms, screaming their lungs out ‘cos there’s no morphine! We’ve got two blast sites fi lled with burnt body parts, Macca.’

  ‘Look, John -‘

  ‘Don’t fucking look me, McQueen!’ Morris cut in, his voice starting to tremble. ‘Our fi rst job is to build a comms centre and victim database that can handle the incoming. Those are real families with real pain, mate, and most of them are Aussies. Okay?!’

  Morris’s eyes were wet now and Mac did the Aussie male thing, looked away for a few seconds. Morris was right: it was a fucking mess out there. As Mac looked back, Morris was dabbing his left eye with the back of his hand.