The Mandarin Code

by Steve Lewis

  Harry Dunkley tensed as the greyhound-sleek figure of Charles Dancer emerged, camouflaged in the mundane suit of a bureaucrat. The spook checked his letterbox for mail, then slipped inside.

  Dunkley waited five minutes, trying to steady his nerves. The path to the front door was paved with brick, a meander pattern diagonally laid across the metre-wide passage. A black metal door-bell waited to be chimed. Dunkley didn’t hesitate.

  He stiffened as the bell clanged. A surge of adrenalin drove up his heart-rate, his right fist clenched white.

  The door opened. Dunkley lunged. Dancer swayed like a boxer, let the blow pass and then pushed hard between Dunkley’s shoulder blades. The journalist slammed into the cold tiles. As he rolled, a foot crashed on his chest, pinning him to the floor. A gun was trained on his face.

  ‘I’ve been expecting you, Harry. And yes, it’s loaded.’

  Dancer sat, imperious, opposite the journalist, a fourth-generation Glock 17 on his lap.

  ‘Didn’t I say to you once before that you were out of your depth?’

  Dunkley was hurting. His mouth tasted of blood, his hip and left knee ached. He wondered whether he’d broken his wrist, but wasn’t about to give his adversary the pleasure of knowing.

  ‘Charles, I’ve met some liars in my time but no one like you.’

  ‘Oh? How have I deceived you, Harry? I showed you Bruce Paxton was corrupt and dangerous. You proved he was. I’ve shown you that China is a threat. That’s beyond doubt.’

  ‘Maybe, Charles. But you never mentioned the Alliance. Not once. It took our friend Kimberley to discover that.’

  ‘Tell me what’s wrong with a group of patriots looking at the long game? Yes, I work for them and I’m proud of it. They’re the generals and I’m their footsoldier.’

  ‘But whose side are you on? Australia’s? The United States’?’

  ‘Both. Don’t kid yourself like some neophyte. We need the US, much more than it needs us. These are the most dangerous days of our lifetime. China threatens everything.’

  Dunkley probed the inside of his cheek and felt a gash where his teeth had cut the soft inside flesh of his mouth.

  ‘And you’re prepared to bring down a government. A prime minister. To lie and scheme, just like your bosses have been doing, for what? Nearly fifty years.’

  ‘No, Harry.’ Dancer’s voice was firm. ‘I’ve made you an agent of truth, alerting the Australian people to the threat. This government’s fate is now in their hands.’

  ‘What about the Lusitania Plan? Lives were threatened. Is that the work of a patriot?’

  ‘No lives were in danger. We just showed a glimpse of the future. And make no mistake, our man in the lake, Lin An, was trying to warn us about the country he was fleeing. That embassy is a wormhole. China has tapped into our Five Eyes intelligence. Their stooge Catriona Bailey opened the door. There’s a war going on, Harry, and the front line is here.’

  Dunkley cursed himself as the reality of how badly he’d misread Dancer sank in.

  ‘I’ve been your pawn.’ Dunkley’s admission was barely a rasp.

  ‘You’ve played your role to perfection. And what do we do with pawns? We sacrifice them for the chance of victory.’

  ‘Who else have you sacrificed? Kimberley?’

  Dancer’s arrogance wavered. He lifted the Glock with his right hand, as if he needed a shield.

  Dunkley took a risk. ‘Charles, I thought the three of us were working as a team.’

  Dancer’s control was faltering.

  ‘She should have kept her investigation to Paxton’s Chinese links. That was her job. Her duty. That’s what we expected her to do.’

  ‘But she didn’t. You couldn’t control her. She was an individual and asked uncomfortable questions. Like who would want Paxton eliminated?’

  Dancer’s hand betrayed him with the slightest of trembles.

  ‘And now I wonder who would want to eliminate her?’ Dunkley pointed at Dancer. ‘Maybe you.’

  Dancer stood and began to prowl the room, shifting his gun from hand to hand, avoiding eye contact with his captive.

  ‘We are at war, Mr Dunkley.’ His voice was harsh. ‘The enemy is clear. Kimberley was never satisfied with accepting things as they are. As with her body, she forced them to fit her warped ideal. Her judgement was clouded. She threatened the project.’

  Dunkley pushed harder. ‘She threatened you. Confronted you with what you are. And you killed her.’

  Dancer stopped. His head dropped and he inspected the gun in his right hand.

  ‘I did.’ The admission came as a shock, to Dancer as much as Dunkley. The killer turned to the journalist and his eyes shone deadly with hate and fury.

  ‘Every day I feel the guilt of that. But it was my duty. People die in wars.’

  Dancer pulled back the slide on his pistol, dragging a bullet from the magazine into the handgun’s chamber.

  ‘And, Harry, never forget who got her involved. I pulled the trigger, but you loaded the gun. You didn’t care that helping you compromised her. You were chasing the only thing that’s ever mattered to you. A front-page story.’

  Dancer aimed the Glock at Dunkley.

  ‘Now you are a threat. And my job is eliminating threats.’

  Dunkley could see the fragility behind Dancer’s facade. A man who hated himself and took out his rage on real and imagined enemies. But that was precisely what made him deadly. Dancer’s masters used his self-loathing as their weapon.

  Dunkley did not doubt his life was in the balance. A shudder of terror swept through him and his heart pounded. But he was surprised by the strength and defiance in his voice.

  ‘Go on, kill me too.’

  The spy dropped his hands.

  ‘I don’t have to kill you. You’re already dead. No one will ever believe another word that you write. And you have no pages to write for.’

  The truth of Dancer’s words stung.

  ‘I don’t need a paper to expose your evil. I’ll publish on the web. Everything I know. Everything.’

  Dancer laughed, a rich baritone of ridicule, before throwing the Glock onto the lounge.

  ‘And then, Harry, you’ll be just another nut job on the internet.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  Canberra

  ‘It’s a lovely view, isn’t it, Brendan?’

  The soft croak of her voice was nearly unrecognisable.

  Catriona Bailey gazed out the window of a Senate office overlooking the lake. Her body had withered. She looked brittle, her skin like crushed paper, her hands reduced to tiny movements.

  A battered rag doll in a motorised wheelchair.

  Yet to Brendan Ryan she loomed as a grisly succubus. In his worst nightmares, the Labor warlord never dreamed he’d be having this meeting.

  So this is what it’s like to bargain with Satan.

  Her left hand pushed a lever and an electric motor whirred as Bailey moved to face the Defence Minister. Her body might be broken but her eyes were a blaze of steel and resolve.

  These eyes that had been her resurrection.

  ‘They tell me you find it difficult to speak for long,’ Ryan ventured.

  ‘The tracheotomy did a lot of damage. I can talk for about five minutes. Then I have to stop.’

  ‘Then this meeting will be mercifully brief.’

  ‘It will, because your presence here speaks volumes. Doesn’t it, Brendan?’

  Ryan knew they were here to barter for the last of his dignity. He only wanted one assurance.

  ‘The final matter to resolve is the date of the election. I will support you if you call it within a month of taking over as leader.’

  ‘What’s the rush? Toohey set September 14.’

  ‘Frankly, I want to minimise the damage that you can inflict, Catriona. On the party and the country.’

  ‘Yet the reason you want me back is to save the ship.’

  ‘Don’t kid yourself. The ship has sunk. I just want to stuff as many survivors
as I can into the life rafts.’

  Bailey’s eyes, a stain of dark blue, held Ryan in their vice for a brief, uncomfortable moment.

  ‘Done.’

  Ryan stood transfixed by the view. The out-of-the-way office had been chosen to avoid prying eyes.

  But he could not escape the glare of his conscience.

  What have I done?

  ‘What else could I have done?’ he muttered, as he put both hands on the window sill to steady himself.

  Ryan was an old-school right-winger, the son of a Victorian Catholic who’d stayed with the Australian Labor Party when the split had torn its heart out in the 1950s. His father had lost lifelong friendships in the turmoil, so he hammered a set of principles into the eager boy. Old, unfashionable ideas like duty, constancy and, above all, loyalty.

  ‘If a man isn’t loyal then he isn’t anything,’ his father would say. ‘You pick and stick son.’

  Ryan had settled his loyalties long ago. To his party, his country and its allies. Once he built those battlements, he declared war on his enemies. Life was about hard choices and a man had to realise that meant he couldn’t have everything.

  But Bailey?

  She personified everything he hated. A dictator who had hijacked and gutted his party, a vagrant Christian who shifted like a chameleon between denominations, and a multilateralist who embraced the impotence of the United Nations.

  Above all, Bailey was a clear and present danger to the alliance that protected the nation’s castle walls. Ryan had suspected that Bailey was the human equivalent of a computer virus: a long-dormant but deadly infection.

  One that had been cultivated by the Chinese.

  Ryan slumped into a lounge chair and put his head in his hands. Martin Toohey was a decent man but had been a disaster as prime minister. Ryan blamed himself for part of that failure. He had pushed Toohey into rolling Bailey, not realising that the coup would kill both leaders.

  Australians had never understood Bailey’s brutal dispatch and Toohey rose from the fight with blood on his hands.

  His mark of Cain.

  Then again, Toohey had made plenty of his own mistakes.

  ‘I tried to warn him. Tried to save him.’ Ryan shoved a small pile of coffee-table books onto the floor and stood up.

  He needed a cigarette and decided to have one; an act of defiance against another modern verity he despised. He pulled a packet of Benson & Hedges 25s from his jacket pocket and looked at the miserable image on it: a man with a gaping hole in a cancer-ravaged throat.

  How appropriate.

  ‘So this is for you, Catriona.’ Ryan took a lighter from his pocket, stuffed a fag in his mouth and lit it. He drew in a deep breath and blew a long and gratifying line of smoke into the room.

  He looked around for something that would serve as an ashtray before shrugging his shoulders and tapping the ash onto the carpet. He rubbed it in with the toe of his shoe, leaving a little grey smudge. He admired his handiwork. A small sin compared to the mortal one he had just committed.

  I have sold out to buy my party a few seats. A slim hope of redemption.

  Ryan took another long drag and blew smoke towards the window. Out of sight, just off Kings Avenue to his right, he knew there was a statue of John Curtin and Ben Chifley, frozen in a moment from 1945 as they walked to the Parliament.

  Curtin, the leader who had turned to America in the nation’s hour of greatest need. And the US had delivered.

  Now Labor was turning from America without understanding the consequences. His party needed time in the wilderness to reassess. But he didn’t want to see it destroyed and, under Toohey, that was inevitable. Bailey was the only viable choice. It was a huge gamble but a quick election would minimise the risk.

  Once she had minimised the losses he would bury her forever.

  And all it has cost me is my soul.

  Ryan threw the butt on the carpet, lifted his shoe to snuff out the ember, and stopped.

  He decided to let it burn.

  ‘I thought you’d be with me to the end, Brendan.’

  Martin Toohey’s voice was laced with sadness. The Defence Minister had hoped for anger. He could cope with a fight, but sorrow was more than he could bear.

  He couldn’t look at Toohey, who was standing behind his desk, or George Papadakis, who was slumped on a lounge in the Prime Minister’s office.

  Ryan looked at his feet as he spoke.

  ‘We had to . . .’ Ryan caught himself trying to deflect blame for his decision and started again.

  ‘I had to do it. I had to make a choice between my friendship with you and my loyalty to the party.’

  He forced himself to look at Toohey.

  ‘Martin, we’re doomed. The people have stopped listening to you. If you lead us to the election there will be a rout and it will take a generation for us to recover.’

  Toohey’s eyes gleamed. Like all leaders, he had a distorted image of his powers. He still believed he could turn the ship around.

  ‘That’s not true. We can claw our way back with the mental health plan. I can beat Landry.’

  ‘Martin, even if we get elected we can’t afford another huge welfare scheme. George, you know the truth. Tell him.’

  Papadakis lifted his head and fixed Ryan with hate in his eyes.

  ‘Truth. What would you know about the truth, Brendan? And don’t ever mention the word “loyalty” again. You have betrayed us for someone you despise. And if she wins what do you get? What promises has Bailey made to buy you?’

  ‘I got nothing beyond a commitment to an early election.’

  Papadakis snorted.

  ‘You know your Bible, Brendan. “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world yet lose his soul?” I thought you were with us.’

  ‘I didn’t sign up so you could empty Treasury to build a welfare state. If you keep gutting Defence, you’ll find your dreams mugged by reality. We’re facing war in the Pacific and slashing Defence is endangering the nation.’

  Toohey strode from behind his desk, knocking his iPad to the floor.

  ‘Don’t be such a fucking drama queen. The US and China can’t afford to go to war. Their economies rely on each other. Both will come to their senses.’

  Ryan shook his head.

  ‘No one ever wants to go to war. No one can afford to go to war. But nations go to war when the alternative is unacceptable. The preconditions for war now exist. America won’t be pushed back across the Pacific and China won’t stop pushing.’

  Toohey pointed to the map of the world on his wall.

  ‘Then we need to sit where we are on that map. In the middle. As the calm heads at the table. Not to always fall in behind the United States. Those clowns started this fight, Brendan.’

  Ryan waved at the briefs piled on Toohey’s disorderly desk.

  ‘What about the attacks on us? If a Chinese destroyer opened fire on an Australian ship, it would be an act of war. Yet Beijing has hit our airspace, banks and phones. Prime Minister, that is unacceptable.’

  Toohey moved closer to Ryan. They were separated by a coffee table.

  ‘You know as well as I do that verifying that kind of attack is dicey. I’m not starting a fight without being certain who broke the windows.

  ‘And is it any wonder that the Chinese see us as puppets of Uncle Sam? The Yanks keep dragging us into their fights. Maybe we need to reposition ourselves for the twenty-first century. To build a more nuanced set of alliances.’

  Toohey’s words confirmed Ryan’s worst fears.

  ‘Really? The next warning shot might be through your brain. Hitting air-traffic control was an act of war. And when did you decide to unwind the ANZUS treaty? When did that become Australia’s foreign policy?’

  ‘I do believe I am Prime Minister.’

  Ryan checked his watch.

  ‘Martin, I’ll be supporting Catriona Bailey and I’ll advise others to do the same. You will lose the ballot. I’m sorry about that. But the longer we’ve
spoken this evening the more I’m convinced that it’s the right decision. You’re forgetting that your first duty is to defend the nation.’

  Toohey put up his hand as Ryan turned to leave.

  ‘One last thing. Something’s been bothering me. I ran into Harry Dunkley and he had the most amazing conspiracy theory – that the US was behind those cyber-attacks, not China.’

  The Defence Minister weighed his answer.

  ‘Dunkley has been discredited. And, as I recall, you’ve never been a fan. It does sound like a wild theory. But some claim that Churchill dragged the US into World War I by allowing the Lusitania to be sunk. A thousand people drowned, but maybe millions were saved. If he did, was that a good or a bad thing? The war ended. We won.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Canberra

  It had been a gift from her mother in celebration of her eighteenth birthday, her passage to womanhood. She’d packed the pink brush when she’d left China; a link to a family and life left behind. Now it would go with her into exile.

  Weng Meihui glanced around her room as she counted down the minutes.

  What can you pack in one small bag when you are leaving your old life forever?

  She brushed away a tear, trying to subdue a feeling of dread as she contemplated this flight from a life of certainty into the unknown.

  Weng was from a Tibetan family who had embraced China. She recalled her handlers’ taunts when she trained to become a Mata Hari. Perfectly suited because ‘betrayal runs in the blood of your family’.

  But wasn’t she the one who’d been betrayed? By a state that didn’t hesitate to kill when your usefulness was spent. Her life was at risk if she stayed. She had to flee.

  It was 6.22pm. Eight minutes until the hire car was due. She would time her departure from the building to minimise the moments she’d need to wait on the kerb.

  Her cover had been carefully thought through. The Ambassador was at a parliamentary function. She was supposedly meeting the Canadian High Commissioner’s wife for a drink at the Hyatt, a short stroll away. The driver had been instructed to pick her up around the corner from the Chinese embassy, in Forster Crescent, opposite the rear entrance to the British High Commission. Bruce Paxton would be waiting at the airport.