The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  ‘Nothing specific on that, and nothing we can do about it. It just underlines that there are people ready to have a crack. That’s Sydney. From Melbourne, we’ve got a report from one of our own people’—he looked down and read—‘Constable Brian Devitt tells us that one Ivan Pavlovic, aged thirty-six, of North Melbourne, someone he’s known for quite a while, has told him, quote: “I am going to Canberra in my car, I have a gun too and will kill the bastard myself for coming to Australia to make trouble for Croatians.” Unquote.’

  ‘I know that name, Pavlovic,’ said Sharp. ‘He’s HOP, isn’t he? Croatian Liberation Movement.’

  ‘He is, and intel from informants, confirmed by his own statements, indicates he was a member of the group that has been planning to go to Spain this year, for the purpose of training for a further armed incursion into Yugoslavia.’

  ‘His own fucken statements,’ said Price, unable to conceal his contempt. ‘He wants to be stopped. He’s like a bloke looking for his mates to hold him back from rushing into a brawl.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree, Wal,’ said Harper. ‘This fellow’s a housepainter with four kids, but we’ve had to put him under 24-hour surveillance. He’s planning to drive to Canberra today for tomorrow’s Croatian demo at Parliament House. He’s the registered owner of a rifle so we’ll have to stop him and search his car en route, and we need to find out where he’s staying here. Keep him on edge and keep him quiet. Wal, I’m going to leave that to you and Ray. You’ll liaise with Melbourne.’

  ‘Okay, boss,’ said Price, taking the telex.

  ‘They pulled the demo forward to Sunday?’ said Sullivan. ‘I missed that.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry, Ray—you’ve had a lot on your plate. The community finally listened to reason and cancelled their plans for a demo when Bijedic is here. That would have been a security nightmare. They’ve brought it forward to tomorrow. So there’ll be an influx of angry Croats coming to town today and tomorrow morning, and we need to keep track of the dangerous ones.’

  Sharp interrupted. ‘We’ve had a team putting together a list of houses in the local Croat community where people might be put up,’ he said. ‘It’s a big list, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And we can’t follow everyone or raid every house,’ said Harper. ‘Our target list will concentrate on known militants, and especially those our informants are pointing us to.’ Harper pulled up a fresh telex and continued. ‘In that category is another Melbourne resident with family here. Blaz Kavran is a name familiar to most of us. He’s also been overheard threatening to shoot Bijedic during the visit.’

  ‘I know him, all right,’ said Sharp. ‘He was meant to have taken part in the Bosnian incursion last June, but he was arrested on another matter. He missed the whole thing because he was in jail.’

  ‘That’s him,’ said Harper. ‘And like Pavlovic, he has been named as one of the group of nine who are planning to go to Spain to train for another incursion this year. He’s also under surveillance and he’s headed for Canberra. Another one for you, Wal.’

  Harper handed the telex to Price.

  ‘We’re going to be stretched thin, boss,’ said Price.

  ‘The whole of the ACT Police are at our disposal, along with elements from the army and air force. This was always going to be difficult; we can’t lock down the whole city, but we can’t ignore specific targets.’

  ‘Any more of them?’ asked Sullivan.

  ‘Even without Bijedic we estimate there’ll be more than two thousand Croatians here for tomorrow’s demo.’ Harper paused to hand the last two telexes to Sharp. ‘Al, you’re going to have to work with Mr Price’s team. We need a complete roster of surveillance ops finished today and we need to respond to new threats as they arise. If anyone gets anything new, from whatever source, come straight to me. We’ll do a triage and allocate resources where we need them most.’

  As if on cue the tea lady came rattling in and they gathered around as she poured cups for each of them.

  33.

  At 3.30 the following morning, Al Sharp and his team were outside a Canberra house where the Melbourne housepainter Ivan Pavlovic and his family were sleeping. Pavlovic had been fool enough to boast of his intention to assassinate Prime Minister Bijedic. Now he was subject to targeted harassment. The previous day his Pontiac had been stopped and searched en route to Canberra, his family forced to sit on the roadside for two hours while police pulled the vehicle apart and riffled through their belongings.

  ‘This is the police, open up!’ shouted Sharp.

  He bashed on the front door with his fist until he woke the house. When the sleepy-eyed owner, one Franjo Till, cracked open the door, Sharp demanded to know if Ivan Pavlovic was inside. Pavlovic, his family and their hosts were soon ushered out on to the driveway while the house was searched. The suspect’s wife, Barbara, repeatedly shouted at Sharp: ‘It is only in communist countries you can expect something like this.’

  Nothing was found in the Till house, nor in any of the other residences raided that night.

  By 8 am on Sunday, the day of the planned Croat demonstration in Canberra, the Bijedic team had reconvened at police headquarters. On his desk the exhausted Al Sharp found a telex that jolted him like a shot of adrenalin. It was from the NSW Police Electronics Unit, the same team he had worked with after the Sydney Town Hall bombing: Nigel Daltrey and Bob McCafferty.

  The Unit had been engaged to tap the home phone of Ivo Katich, the secretive leader of the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood. None of the intercepted calls to and from the house had produced anything useful. It was obvious that both Katich and his callers assumed that the phone was tapped. Nonetheless, McCafferty had noticed a series of unanswered phone calls to the house, during which Katich’s phone had been left to ring, on different days at different times. On the first occasion it had rung once and stopped; then twice on the second occasion; then three times on the third. On the fourth occasion the phone rang once again.

  McCafferty suspected there was a pattern to the calls. His assumption was that someone was contacting Ivo Katich with a prearranged signal at prearranged times. He assumed that the caller was using public phones and that Ivo Katich, alerted by the message, would go to a public phone himself to call one of a sequence of numbers in his possession.

  McCafferty had not been able to establish the phone box numbers of the incoming calls—they did not register if left unanswered. But he recommended, on the basis of his theory, that Commonwealth Police urgently re-establish 24-hour physical surveillance of Ivo Katich. If they could at least track him to a public phone, they could check the outgoing logs on that phone and find the location of the public phone at the other end.

  After months without a single breakthrough, Sharp felt a surge of excitement. His lower back gave an alarming twinge as he leapt to his feet and ran to Harper’s office.

  ‘Boss, we may have something!’ he yelled.

  Harper looked up from the reports he’d received on the overnight raids and saw his rotund colleague, leaning against the doorframe, a hand pressed to his lower back, as if to support its crumbling superstructure.

  ‘I’m not working you too hard, am I, mate?’ asked Harper.

  Sharp winced as he sat down opposite the inspector.

  ‘These raids are just for show,’ he said. ‘But they take time and effort, and stretch us thin. I’ve got something here from the Electronics Unit that looks like real intelligence.’ He handed Harper the telex from McCafferty. ‘But we’re going to have to act fast.’

  Within thirty minutes Harper had pulled every string he had at his disposal and dispatched a surveillance team to the Katich house in the Sydney suburb of Leichhardt. Safe in the knowledge that they were securely in place at 9.30 am, Sharp went back to his office. Alongside the intelligence reports on his desk, he found a series of written phone messages sent in from the switchboard operators. There were four of them, each with the same message: ‘Urgent, please call Anna Rosen’. The messages included a number in
Sydney he didn’t recognise.

  Sharp picked up his phone and dialled. Anna answered after two rings. Wherever she was, she was clearly sitting next to the phone, waiting for him to call back. He soon found out why.

  For the next twenty minutes he took notes, stopping from time to time to clarify some puzzling point. Tom Moriarty, you say? With a gun? And who were these armed men?

  Anna’s story about the murder of Petar Katich was shocking, but he was inclined to believe it since it fitted with his own knowledge of the young man’s unexplained disappearance and the dried blood on his mattress. The information that young Marin Katich had returned to Australia as the only survivor of the Bosnian incursion, and that he very likely had competence in the use of weapons, sent a chill all the way down his aching spine.

  When Anna had finished, Sharp double-checked a few facts, told her that she had done the right thing, and hung up. The story was improbable but also totally believable. It fitted McCafferty’s theory about Ivo Katich’s coded communications. Perhaps they had got lucky—or perhaps they were too late.

  Al Sharp rose gingerly from his desk and hurried to tell Harper that, despite all the false trails they had been forced to follow, he now believed he knew the identity of codename Cicada.

  At 10 am, as thousands of Croats began arriving for the demonstration at Parliament House, a call was placed from the capital to the Sydney home of Ivo Katich. Not far from the Katich house, sitting in the smoke-filled rear cabin of a surveillance van disguised as a PMG maintenance vehicle, Nigel Daltrey pressed the record buttons on two tape recorders.

  ‘Incoming call,’ he said to his elegantly dressed companion, and she extinguished a cigarette whose harsh-flavoured Bosnian tobacco made her yearn for Sarajevo. Dusanka Andric, the Serbo–Croat translator attached to the police Electronics Unit, slipped on her headphones and wrinkled her brow as she listened. As always, the sound of Ivo Katich’s voice—so intimate, so close in her head—triggered a wave of revulsion.

  ‘His caller, a Croat man, is talk about raids last night on houses of Croat peoples in Canberra,’ she said to Daltrey as she scribbled shorthand in her notepad. ‘Many raids, he says, in middle of night. Is like back in Yugoslavia, like the communists. They hit homes in which are staying one Pavlovic, Ivan; one Kavran, Blaz; and others, too. Katich says these are bastards who do this, ones who fuck their own mothers; he is very angry. He is worried, too, I think. I have not heard this in his voice before. He has hung up now. He has cut call short and hung up.’

  Daltrey picked up a walkie-talkie and spoke into it urgently. ‘Mad Dog One to Mad Dog Two.’

  The thing screeched in his hand like a cockatoo.

  ‘Mad Dog Two receiving. Over.’

  ‘Something’s happening,’ said Daltrey, clearly enunciating the words into the mouthpiece. ‘Be alert. He just got some bad news. He may be on the move soon. Over.’

  ‘Roger … Roger. We’re ready. Over.’

  Five minutes later the Mad Dog Two surveillance team watched Ivo Katich leave his house in a hurry. He locked the front door, pulled on a coat and strode to the big sedan in the driveway. He backed out fast, almost side-swiping a telephone pole at the edge of his drive, then accelerated down the street. The rear end slipped and slid as the wheels fought for traction.

  Two cars tailed him, leaving from different locations. A third car was circling the neighbourhood ready to join the pursuit.

  Katich drove only a few kilometres, stopping next to a phone box close to a public school. The nearest team pulled over to watch him from a discreet distance. The other cars took up positions out of sight at either end of the street.

  Through binoculars, Katich was observed entering the phone box. He was seen to place a call and then hang up, holding down the disconnect button while keeping the receiver to his ear.

  ‘Mad Dog Two to Mad Dog One. Over.’

  In the surveillance van, Daltrey grabbed the handset again. ‘Mad Dog One, receiving.’

  Daltrey quickly jotted down the address of the Katich phone box as it was relayed to him. Then, crouching, he manoeuvred around Dusanka and out the back door. ‘Hold the fort!’ he called to her. ‘Won’t be long.’

  Next to the van was a PMG tent, and Daltrey stepped quickly inside it and took up the phone set he’d rigged to the maintenance box. He dialled a number, which was quickly answered by Bob McCafferty, who had been waiting at the PMG main exchange.

  ‘You were right, Bob,’ said Daltrey. ‘You’re a dead-set fucken genius.’

  ‘The address, Nigel, quickly!’ said McCafferty.

  Daltrey gave it to him.

  ‘Got to go,’ said McCafferty. He hung up and turned to the PMG technician waiting next to him. ‘Mate, here’s the address of the phone box,’ he told the man. ‘We need to find that number and put a tap on it as soon as possible. Lives are at stake, so no fiddle-arsing about.’

  The man said nothing. He just looked at the address and began leafing through the directory of public phones. He’d soon found it and led McCafferty through the maze of alleys in the exchange. Each one had vast banks of wires and connections, incomprehensible to anyone except the small priesthood of techs for whom the whole system, mapped and laid out in precise order, could be interpreted by numbers such as the one in his hand.

  It took time—an excruciatingly long time—for McCafferty, who could imagine Ivo Katich in the phone box, gazing out on to the empty playground of the public school next to him. Then the tap was in and McCafferty had the headphones on, and heard two men talking down the line.

  ‘… there’s no time, you must go,’ said the first voice.

  ‘I know. I’m going. You may not hear from me again.’

  ‘Marin.’

  ‘Don’t say it.’

  ‘God will guide your hand.’

  ‘You know that’s bullshit, don’t you?’

  ‘Put faith in him.’

  ‘I don’t have faith in anyone or anything. I’m gone.’

  The phone hung up.

  McCafferty slammed his fist on a box of wires. ‘Fuck! Fuck!’ he yelled. ‘So close.’

  ‘Did they say anything at all?’ asked the curious technician.

  ‘Something,’ said McCafferty. ‘We got something. But only if we can find the bloke he was talking to.’ He pulled off the headphones and turned to the man. ‘Can you get the last outgoing numbers dialled from that phone?’

  ‘I can do it,’ the man said. ‘But it’ll take some time.’

  ‘How long?’ said McCafferty. ‘Time is what we’re running out of.’

  ‘Half an hour, maybe less if we get lucky.’

  McCafferty clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Get going then,’ he said. ‘God will guide your hand.’

  Marin Katich moved swiftly through the house, gathering up his belongings. There weren’t many of them—he had been ready to move, even before his father rang using the emergency code.

  The rifle, cleaned and oiled, required the most attention. He took time to wrap it and pack it in its case. Then he stowed it in the boot of the car.

  The woman over the road looked up at him as she watered the garden. He gave her a wave and stepped back inside for the remainder of his gear. The biggest danger was that she would be able to give a description of the car, but he was prepared for that. Another vehicle was parked four blocks away on a quiet street. He would have to get there quickly.

  He went from room to room, looking for anything he might have left behind, anything that might betray his intention. The last thing he took was the plastic bag full of rubbish. The place was clean. He threw the rubbish into the back seat, nodded to the woman still watering her garden, and climbed into the car.

  He drove away sedately, past two men further down the street in adjacent houses, both mowing their lawns. He slowed down, lest he leave the impression of flight, even if he did have to fight down that sensation in his body.

  A short distance away he parked under a tree and swapped cars. Again, he t
ook everything with him and left the first vehicle as clean as he could. His fingerprints were everywhere, of course; he wiped down the obvious surfaces in the car, just as he had in the house, but he knew he would miss some.

  As he drove the new car slowly along the street, Marin heard a posse of vehicles moving fast through the quiet suburb, their highly tuned engines roaring, their wheels squealing as they took corners too fast. He hoped there were no children playing on the road.

  As he reached the stop sign, the posse—four large, black sedans, moving at high speed and packed with men—passed in front of him in a blur. When they had gone, he turned his car in the opposite direction and drove fast from the neighbourhood. As he did so, he imagined the woman with her garden hose and the men crouched over their lawnmowers looking up in shock as their quiet Sunday morning was interrupted by the fast-moving motorcade, the sudden screech of brakes, and the armed men leaping out even before they had rolled to a stop.

  *

  Harper and Sharp walked through the empty house.

  ‘Turns out it’s owned by a local Croat,’ said Sharp. ‘His wife’s Australian and the property is in her name, so it never turned up on any of our lists. We’re trying to locate the owners, but it seems they’re on an overseas holiday. The woman over the road has given us a description of the man who stayed here for the past week. Tall, athletic, olive complexion. Dark hair, she thinks, but he was wearing sunglasses and a floppy hat each time she saw him. She saw him coming and going a few times. He drove a green Toyota sedan—no idea of the numberplate. She never spoke to him.’

  ‘Now he’s in the wind he’ll probably ditch the car,’ said Harper, shaking his head. ‘Anything at all from Forensics?’

  ‘A few partial fingerprints so far,’ said Sharp. ‘Looks like the place has been wiped clean. One weird thing, though: the dressing table in the bedroom is really untidy. There are open make-up bottles and powder compacts and used sponges all over the place. Maybe he’s been disguising himself.’

  ‘What as? A very tall, athletic woman?’