At Hell's Gate

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  One of the people at the table was a little older than the ‘scientists’. His name was Dr Bodo and he wore a tailored grey suit and white shirt with no tie. ‘Mr Mike, thank you for meeting with us. We are interested in finding the people who committed a homicide during yesterday’s raid at Samson Ramdi’s camp.’

  I almost corrected him on ‘raid’ but let it go. ‘Okay, when I entered the main bomb factory – at what I believe was around 11.20 in the morning – I found these two in the shed.’

  I looked at the beaten-up bloke and he shook his head, like I was an idiot.

  ‘No one else?’ asked Dr Bodo.

  ‘They were the only active players in the facility, and I took their surrender to be a ruse, and incapacitated them.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ said Dr Bodo, clearing his throat. ‘Did you see anybody else?’

  ‘There was a shooter on the floor of the main factory area – he’d been shot and was bleeding-out,’ I said. ‘And there was a deceased man on the floor of the sub-room lab, who I identified as Samson Ramdi.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘I found a man in his early thirties, with gunshot wounds in his chest. He was jammed in one of the fridges.’

  Dr Bodo nodded and wrote in his notebook.

  ‘Three alive and two deceased,’ I said. ‘I thought the killing had been done quite recently.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Dr Bodo, now looking up.

  ‘The rim of the blood pool under Ramdi hadn’t hardened,’ I said. ‘My colleague pushed his finger through the edge of the pool and the blood ran. And the blood was still warm.’

  ‘Warm?’ asked Dr Bodo.

  ‘Yes, it was recent. The body in the fridge? The blood ran out of the door when I opened it. The air smelled of fresh blood.’

  Dr Bodo tapped at his pad. I had a fair idea of what was coming. This was that time in South-East Asia where the bloke with the power throws you in the slammer for the next forty-five days, before slapping you on the back and letting you go. Big smile, no hard feelings. I was glad I was sitting in the embassy of a foreign power, not in an Indonesian police station. But the accusation didn’t come.

  ‘Mr Mike, do you have a theory about those homicides?’

  I shrugged. ‘I assumed we had the shooters tied up.’

  ‘You thought it was these two?’ said Dr Bodo.

  ‘They were in there alive and two were dead.’

  ‘You had evidence?’

  ‘Whoa!’ I said, waving them away. ‘Slow down. I’m not a cop – I was doing other things.’

  ‘Other things?’

  I looked at Brandon, who said nothing. He just looked at Dr Bodo and shook his head slightly.

  There was a big pause and Dr Bodo handed off to the male ‘scientist’, who looked at me. ‘We’re looking for a man who ran into the bombmaking facility, and shot dead Ramdi and then Dr Wirando.’

  ‘Wirando? The guy in the fridge?’

  The scientist nodded.

  ‘It would have been before I arrived.’

  ‘A few minutes before,’ said the scientist. ‘We’re assuming he was with whichever force you travelled with.’

  I cleared my throat, and Brandon leaned over and said, ‘Let’s not anchor this to anything of substance, okay? Friendly chat, right?’

  The male scientist nodded. In the intelligence world agencies will help their counterparts but only with information that can’t tie anyone to something that may or may not have occurred.

  ‘The person who came into the bomb factory was around thirty, a person who looked to be from Indonesia or Malaysia.’

  ‘How was he dressed?’ I asked.

  ‘Black fatigues, no markings,’ he said, keeping his eyes on me.

  ‘Anything else?’ I asked.

  He mulled it over. ‘The shooter wore a black cadre cap, but I’m pretty sure he had a plait down the back of his neck.’

  ‘Not very army,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said the woman scientist. ‘Not very Indonesian.’

  *

  When the meeting was over Brandon walked me out. I had kept my theories to myself because regardless of how informal a chat might be, I only see an opportunity to gain information. I don’t like to give when I can take instead. A bit old-school, but there you are.

  ‘Any ideas on the shooter?’ said Brandon as we paused at the embassy checkpoint.

  ‘I might have seen him in the EOD truck,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t until that woman questioned whether he was Indonesian that I remembered.’

  Brandon looked at me. ‘Remembered?’

  ‘One of the soldiers on the EOD truck looked private to me,’ I said. I’d seen a chromed weapon on that soldier’s hip. It could easily have been the .44 that John thought the shooter had used.

  I told Brandon what I’d seen and he stared at me.

  ‘Keep that to yourself, okay?’ he said, and offered his hand.

  We shook and I asked, ‘Were we compromised?’

  ‘Not us,’ the career spy said.

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘A few,’ said Brandon, not giving.

  I nodded. And then I walked past the checkpoint, into the sunshine, thinking about easy egress and an arrival in Australia that didn’t entail too many questions.

  Epilogue

  The day ended earlier than anticipated after I got the levels right on the house I was renovating. Now I could bring in my go-to roofing crew in Romsey. They’d been waiting for my call and they’d be at this house at 6 am the following day, ready to roof what was now a level house.

  I helped Tom pack up his laser levels – he’d come over with this excellent gear early in the morning and we’d grunted away in the heat, raising corners with prop-jacks and reinstalling studs and beams until the roof level on that house was truer than it had been the day it was built.

  I dragged Tom down to the pub and bought him a couple of beers and we had a chat about projects and a property he wanted to go halves in with me. He reckoned we could pick it up from a solicitor for under $500,000, do a turnaround on it and flog it at auction for $800,000-plus. I knew the property he was talking about and I reckoned $900,000 might be closer. I was interested and told him I’d think about it. As Tom stood to go to the gents, my phone buzzed and I had a quick look: a prompt from my other service. I’d brought my tradie briefcase with me to the pub because I hadn’t wanted to risk leaving it in the car park, and so I pulled out my other phone and saw a message on it from ‘John’, the bloke I’d just worked with in Indonesia.

  I opened it and found a message that simply read, Café, south of Palembang. Guess who?

  Palembang was the old city in South Sumatra. So John had moved on and was working in Sumatra?

  There was a picture beneath the message and I gave it a double-tap, and the picture expanded to fill the screen of the smartphone. I turned the screen on its side – my breath becoming a little short – and used pinch-and-slide to zoom in on the two people John had photographed under an umbrella, at an outdoor café table.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. At the table was Brandon, and he was in a close conversation with a Thai-Malay man in a black t-shirt. The man had a rat’s-tail braid touching between his shoulderblades. It was the person who’d been with the Indonesian EOD soldiers when we’d gone to confirm Samson Ramdi’s ID, the one wearing no insignia. I was stunned. They were working together, all along? So there’d been three operations on that gig!

  My jaw muscles tensed, like I was back in all that shit. I looked again at the picture, seeing how close and relaxed these two were. If I was reading it correctly, Brandon had three sets of contractors on the same gig: one to confirm Ramdi’s ID; one to work with the Indonesian military; and one to ensure there was no chance of Samson Ramdi talking.

  I hi
t the reply icon. I was going to say ‘thanks, mate’ and ‘stay safe’ and all the usual. But when I wrote, I was still so shocked that all that came out was some tradie slang.

  fmd.*

  * Fuck Me Dead

  1

  The auctioneer was going a little fast for my liking. Me and Tom, my builder buddy, were down at the equipment auction located in a large warehouse in West Melbourne, among all the tradies and hoping to pick up a well-maintained bargain from a large corporation. We were waiting for the ex-Telstra air compressor trailers to come through, but we’d got ourselves in a part of the auction house where the speakers were tinny and giving us more headache than information.

  ‘Can’t hear a fucking thing,’ said Tom, and hared off through the mobs of tilers, builders and concreters, closer to the podium where the auction staff were poised. Behind them was a massive screen, and as the auctioneer started up again the lot-number ‘209’ flashed across it along with a brief description of the Atlas Copco generator-compressor that you could tow behind a ute and run air tools off. They were the 70–135 cfm models – not the biggest – but on certain jobs they were invaluable. There were seven of them for auction that morning and Tom and I were going halves in one. I reckoned there’d be plenty for everyone but Tom always became agitated at auctions, so as the auctioneer tried to get the bidding started I could see Tom almost having to hold his arm down so as not to thrust that big yellow registration tag up in the air. We had an agreement at these things, to always bid together, to a budget, and I could see he was furious at me for having lost his trail and got caught in the crowd.

  It was so loud in that place that I almost missed the call. In fact, it was a text message sent from my other phone service, and I only noticed it because it buzzed against my leg. As I got to Tom, I pulled out the phone and saw the message alert for a voice mail. I knew what it was, because in the normal run of things, normal run-of-the-mill people don’t call me on the number that was diverting.

  I decided to let it go for the time being. We’d come down to West Melbourne to buy one of these compressors and I wasn’t about to go off the boil for a text message. We bid for the first of the compressors but there were other groups going above our budget of $5000. The first one went for $6200, the second sold for $6500 and the third went for $6100. It seemed a lot of Melbourne tradies had the same idea as us: buy a second-hand compressor that’s been maintained and logbooked by Telstra Corp. When the sixth unit was sold at $5700, Tom had had enough of my discipline. ‘We’ll have to go to six,’ he said, wide-eyed and a little short of breath. ‘I’ll throw in the difference.’

  About ten people away was a group of Leb tradies who had already bought two of the units and I knew what Tom was thinking: he didn’t want them gazumping him again and he didn’t want to walk out of there empty-handed. He’d see that as a defeat, and then he’d start giving lip and guess who’d have to step in and calm the waters? It was a Wednesday morning – I didn’t need the grief.

  The bidding started on Lot 215 and went to $5200 very quickly. I was about to flag it when the phone buzzed against my leg again. I looked and it was the same alert from my other service. Two calls in forty-five minutes – someone was keen. Tom bid $5500 and the auctioneer couldn’t get another bite. ‘Have I got $5700?’ yelled the auctioneer, and a crowd of tradies deadpanned him, waiting for the trucks with the Hiab units and the decommissioned Portaloos to come up. The hammer-banger gave the room three chances and then pointed his rolled-up catalogue at Tom. ‘Sold . . . to bidder number eighty-six!’

  We fixed up the cashier lady who was like every cashier lady at every equipment auction: you try a bit of tradie humour, slapping your pockets and making faces like you’ve lost your wallet, and she’s heard it all before. ‘We have your address, but remember there’s an excess if we have to bill you.’

  That’s where the laughter stops.

  So we fixed her up and I went halves on the thing, and we scooted around the back to hook up the trailer. As Tom shook the paperwork at the yardie I got another alert, so I sat in the passenger seat of Tom’s Land Cruiser and dialled in to my other account’s voice mail.

  A plummy British male voice identified himself as Gregory, from ABC Telecom. He gave a return number and said, ‘I need to speak to the Contractor.’

  2

  So that’s how it usually begins. A phone call to my other work line, diverted to me as an alert that I have a voice mail message. I assess the message and glean what I can from it. Most people who are really serious about my services will leave enough information so I can form a view. If you ring me and want to play peekaboo about who you are and where you’re from, I generally won’t return the call. I work in a networked, person-to-person environment, not unlike the tradie world. It’s just that in my private intelligence contracting, the network is global. Me and my intel buddies can get a little spooky, sure, but when we play on the same team we triangulate one another. It’s part of the game. This Gregory had given me a bit to go on – enough, at least, for me to know whether I’d be bothered calling him back.

  So that evening, when American Pickers had finished, I gave Liz a peck on the cheek and she asked me if I was going to bed. ‘Only if you are, love,’ I said, raising my eyebrows, and she gave me a playful punch. I’m lucky that my wife is also my best friend, which helps in some of the extra understanding I need when I have to be in another part of the world and working dark. You can’t do what I do in spite of your marriage – you have to turn it around and ensure the career has its perimeter set by the marriage. People who force it to work the other way? Well, I’ve been there, tried that, and I have the divorce to prove it.

  I slipped into my home office – the Control Centre – and fired up the laptop, with all its firewalls and mirrors and every IT device to ensure that no one can identify my physical location just by isolating my IP address. The intelligence world is as subsumed in cyber as any other part of society, with all the trails and clues that are generated by being connected. So we rely on our IT engineers to give us an advantage. I’m certainly a hands-on operator but the clever IT people who work with me – from Moscow and Hong Kong – are vital parts of what I do.

  First things first: a search of ABC Telecom. I found a functional by not fancy website – a British telecom services company with its registered office in London and branch offices in Dubai, Singapore and Cape Town. Okay, so ABC was concentrating on developing economies and the site showed me why: they specialised in low-cost, semi-temporary cell phone infrastructure. They erected cell towers and associated equipment in rural Africa and the Middle East, and in South-East Asia they also installed ‘booster’ technology, whatever that was. The company had registrations or licences around the world, including with OFCOM in Britain, various acronym nightmares in Gabon, Nigeria and Ethiopia and ATRA in Afghanistan.

  There was a subheading for ‘analogue’ and I had a look. They claimed to be specialists in legacy analogue cell networks and ground systems, keeping them active while the world passed on into digital. I smirked – there were parts of the world that still used old Nokias and Ericssons, with real buttons and scroll menus.

  It looked legit, and I even found in the ‘who are we’ section mention of a Gregory Crowther, the Chief Operating Officer of ABC Telecom. He was the only Gregory, so I felt I had my man. The picture showed an able-looking mid-forties Anglo male with thinning hair pushed back off his face and a fit, tanned look about him, like he spent more time outdoors than he did at a desk. Could be a skier, I thought: could also be ex-military.

  I took one of my many burner phones from my desk drawer and, ignoring the number Gregory had left me on the voice mail, I called the ABC Telecom corporate number in London and asked for Gregory Crowther. I was put through to an assistant who told me that Mr Crowther was in a meeting, and I told her, ‘Tell him this is the Contractor, and I’m returning his call. It’s late here so if he doesn’t call me by 10.30 you
r time, tell him not to bother.’

  I hung up and looked at the computer clock: 9.24 pm my time, meaning Gregory had six minutes to call me, or I was going to bed and he could find another contractor.

  I stood to make a cup of coffee and my daily-use phone buzzed: a text alert for a voice mail. I smiled and used my burner to call the corporate switchboard, and when she put me through to the assistant again I said, ‘We going to play hard-to-get all day, or should I speak to Greg?’

  She apologised and put me straight through.

  Why do I call a business direct, rather than using a supplied number? Before I get to know you and your set-up, I prefer to know where you are geographically.

  ‘Gregory,’ I said, friendly but loud as he picked up. ‘You called?’

  ‘Umm,’ he said.

  ‘You wanted my autograph, was that it?’

  He paused and hesitated and then tried to put on a strong voice. ‘I’m sorry, who is this?’

  ‘The Contractor,’ I said. ‘You left a message?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I did.’

  I calmed him down and we got talking. He’d got my number from an operator at one of the big London insurers that I do a bit of work for. My reputation, as they say, had preceded me, and while I found that soothing for my ego, I still wasn’t sold on this bloke.

  ‘We need a delicate job performed, with some discretion,’ he said. ‘We have some infrastructure that we want removed, but not with any public fanfare, if you see what I mean?’

  ‘That sounds like me,’ I said. ‘What’s the gig?’

  He hesitated and it was obvious that he didn’t want to say what he had to say over the phone. That’s entirely normal in my world, by the way.

  ‘So how do you want to do this?’ I asked.

  ‘I was hoping I could meet you halfway.’