Second Strike am-2

by Mark Abernethy

  When guidebooks for foreign business travellers said Asia was all about protocol and formality, they were only half right. Tomorrow at the sessions there’d be a lot of bowing, card-swapping deference and people using full titles. But tonight it was about booze and making jokes, jockeying for popularity and establishing social connections. As he looked around him Mac knew there’d be an unfortunate karaoke bar in Jakarta tonight where a bunch of drunk Koreans and Chinese would insist on each doing their own version of ‘My Way’. He’d been there, sung that. It was Seoul ‘01, with bottles of Chivas Regal, a Korean Air Force grandee, a Taiwanese shipping magnate and a bunch of hangers-on. By the time it was Mac’s turn to sing the Sinatra standard he was so drunk that he sang the whole thing with a Korean accent, right down to too few to rention. His hosts had almost died laughing.

  He sensed Diane beside him, not looking too hard yet seeing everything. She was very good. Eyes fell on her as they strolled even though she’d dressed to play down her looks, wearing a simple white linen dress and blue and white sandals. She wore no jewellery and held a small silk clasp that was so discreet it was almost hidden by her left hand.

  Eventually they paused and two waiters converged on them at once. Mac grabbed a beer and Diane asked for a glass of champagne, which both of the blokes wanted to get for her.

  ‘At my ten o’clock,’ smiled Diane, grabbing Mac’s beer and taking a sip. ‘The Bennelong boys, and no wives,’ she said, giving the beer back.

  Mac turned slowly, making it look like a scan of the room. They were fi fteen metres away and surrounded by yelling Malaysian and Thai men and their wives. Vitogiannis had his back to them but Mac could see he was a man who took pride in his appearance. Their conversation looked intense and Grant was pointing at his partner, poking the air.

  Diane’s champagne fl ute arrived and Mac gave her a wink. ‘The pants-man cometh.’

  Alex Grant looked up as Mac virtually walked into him. Mac feigned surprise. ‘Alex Grant,’ he said, as if sifting through his memory. ‘Not the Thomas Technology Alex Grant? The controls guru?’

  Grant peered at him for a split second and then burst into a modest smile. ‘That’s me, although I don’t know about the guru bit, er, Mr…?’ He looked at Mac’s name plate ‘… Davis. Pleased to meet you, Richard.’

  ‘G’day, Alex – meet my wife, Diane,’ said Mac, bringing Diane into the circle between Vitogiannis and himself. As they greeted each other Mac sized it up. Grant was tall and lean, in an off-the-rack suit and cheap shoes. His skin was pinkish and his teeth au naturel. He had come up in the world but in his heart he was still an air force engineer.

  It wasn’t hard to separate Grant from his business partner because Vitogianni had leapt straight into the Diane web. About fi ve-ten and fi t-looking, Vitogiannis was well-dressed. His silky black hair was swept back off his face and his teeth were expensively maintained.

  ‘So, Richard,’ asked Grant, grabbing a new beer from a waiter,

  ‘what does Davis Associates do?’

  ‘A bit of lobbying,’ said Mac. ‘Facilitation, making ends come together.’

  ‘Sounds like a broad brief,’ said Grant.

  Mac went for modesty. ‘Well, I guess facilitation sounds a bit grand.’

  ‘What do you facilitate?’

  ‘Technology transfers, cross-border JVs,’ said Mac, swinging his beer bottle in a casual arc, ‘you know, big projects up here that need a little shoehorning from the Canberra end.’

  ‘Shoehorning?’

  ‘Well, yeah – blokes in Canberra hate that term, but you know, the Ministers are busy, the bureaucrats are busy. I just put the case for a deal, for jobs, balance of payments. You know, that shit.’

  Grant looked around him and moved closer to Mac. ‘Well,’ he smiled, ‘tell me more.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, how does… What kind of background would someone like you have?’

  Mac shrugged. He wanted this fi rst meeting to be a teaser, and was projecting reluctance. ‘Well, I suppose my previous lives seemed fairly boring at the time, but it seems Aussie companies need a guide through the exporting labyrinth, huh? And you know, Alex, not all exports are simple. Some are services and often they’re strategic services. It’s complex, mate, and that usually means some shoehorning.’

  Mac grabbed a spring roll, keeping the napkin for wiping his fi ngers. He looked away, looked back. ‘But this is all probably boring for you -‘

  ‘So, you were a diplomat?’

  ‘No, no,’ laughed Mac. Grant was hooked – the tease had only taken ten seconds and he was about to lift his skirt. ‘Actually I used to work in a place called EFIC, heard of it?’

  Grant’s eyes went wide and he nodded. Mac continued. ‘Terrible name, but interesting work. I was on the risk side and then on the deals side – due diligence, debt pricing, that sort of stuff.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Alex Grant, transfi xed.

  ‘Yeah, it was great, fascinating. But I ended up in Canberra as a specialist adviser to the Minister for Trade.’

  ‘Advising on what?’ asked Grant, looking Mac up and down.

  ‘Oh, well, you probably wouldn’t have heard of it,’ said Mac, looking away.

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Deals that come under a system called NIA – it’s not well known but they can be really big, really complex deals.’

  Grant stared at him like he’d seen a ghost.

  Mac went on, ‘That’s National Interest -‘

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I know what it is,’ snapped Grant. He looked around him, obviously frazzled. ‘Tell me, Richard, is that what you facilitate?

  NIA?’

  ‘Well, yeah – that’s most of it actually. If the loan guarantees are written by Sydney, then it’s all fi ne, right? You’re in.’

  Grant nodded.

  ‘But it’s when it’s knocked back and you’re lucky enough to get a second chance with NIA – that’s when the fun starts,’ chuckled Mac,

  ‘because then it’s going political.’

  ‘Shit!’ said Grant, looking at the ceiling.

  The bloke was hooked and Mac affected a chortle. ‘I perhaps shouldn’t tell you this, Alex, but once it gets into a minister’s offi ce, if you’ve got no one to walk you through it, you’re fucked, mate.’

  Grant turned sullen. ‘Don’t need you to tell me that.’

  ‘Shit, Alex. Sorry mate,’ said Mac, feigning disappointment in himself. ‘I had no idea – I shouldn’t have said any of that. I take it back.’

  ‘No, no, it’s okay,’ sighed Grant. ‘That’s the fi rst honest thing I’ve heard anyone say about this entire fucking process.’

  Mac waited, something catching his eye in the background.

  ‘I have breakfast at seven,’ said Alex Grant. ‘Can we meet?’

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ said Mac, handing over his card before his attention was taken by a waiter on the other side of the ballroom.

  CHAPTER 30

  The lights of Jakarta seemed to sprawl forever as Mac stood in front of the vista window at the end of the living area, briefi ng Tony Davidson from his Nokia. It was 9.16 pm local, which meant it was 11.16 pm in Perth, where Davidson worked from his corporate front offi ces.

  Once an op was underway, Davidson and Mac totally lived it and were considered Old School in that regard. If getting it right meant taking calls when you were lying in bed or drinking with your wife, that’s what you did.

  Intelligence outfi ts often ran themselves low on good fi eld guys, not because the recruits didn’t have the smarts but because they didn’t have the stamina for an infi ltration operation that could last two days or two months. Those people were routinely reassigned to a desk, to management or SIGINT analysis – something with a forty-hour week.

  People like Mac and Davidson weren’t the world’s smartest people, but they had the ticker for getting immersed in something for months at a time.

  ‘That’s great, mate,’ said Davidso
n after Mac fi nished his briefi ng on the Alex Grant meeting. ‘Bloke can almost smell the money – a bit of greed goes a long way.’

  ‘I’m meeting him tomorrow morning, but I don’t think I’ll crunch him – he’s already coming along,’ said Mac.

  ‘Your call, Macca,’ said Davidson. ‘But remember: the old ways are the old ways because they work.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ said Mac.

  Under the old ways, Mac would not have allowed Alex Grant to name the meeting time and place. If you wanted to draw a person closer and eventually own them, you always changed the meeting slightly. Mac should have told Grant he’d meet him in the lobby lounge at seven before they went in for breakfast, saying, I have something I want you to see, or some bullshit like that. But Bennelong was really the Trojan Horse for NIME, and if Bennelong was going to come across with a tease and a fl irt, then Mac was inclined to go with that.

  ‘Another thing,’ said Mac, not quite knowing how to raise it.

  ‘I clocked some surveillance tonight, at the reception. Primrose saw it too.’

  ‘Friends of ours?’

  ‘None of the usual,’ said Mac, ruling out spies from BAIS, BIN, CIA, MI6 and the Philippines’ NICA. ‘I’m not sure they’re locals – bit too intense.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Two – that we saw. Males; Malay, Indian perhaps.’

  ‘Who was the subject? You or Bennelong?’

  ‘Can’t be sure. We weren’t tailed into the lobby or up to our room so I’m thinking that Bennelong has some minders?’

  ‘Sounds right,’ said Davidson. ‘If NIME are doing what we think they’re doing, then they’ll be keeping tabs, see who’s sniffi ng around.’

  ‘That’s why I don’t want to crunch the bloke. He thinks I can help him and I’m going to play to that.’

  ‘It would help to know who these watchers are.’

  ‘Well, yeah. I need something more on NIME,’ said Mac. ‘Those profi les in the fi le were fronts, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Reckon?’ said Davidson.

  ‘Yeah, and I’ve only got library-level access on the fi rm’s intranet

  – can you get me something more?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ said Davidson.

  As Mac put down the phone he saw Diane take a bottle of wine from the mini-bar and head for her room.

  Looking out over the sprawling mass of west Jakarta, Mac thought about that waiter he’d seen. He’d been athletically built and moved like a soldier, although he’d tried to conceal it with a baggy hotel tunic. It wasn’t just that the bloke was watching Mac and Grant with a different intensity to the waiter scanning a room for a raised glass. No, there was something strangely familiar about that waiter. He couldn’t put his fi nger on it. The face? The hair? Or was it the gait?

  Faces, eyes and hair could trigger connections but it was gait that really formed code deep in the brain. Scientists at the Shin Bet academy in Tel Aviv had concluded that humans were reliant on gait analysis to identify friend and foe because before the advent of language, anthropologically very recent, that’s all they had to go on. Even from a distance the human brain could pick up if someone was a warrior, injured, tired, aggressive, male or female, strong or weak.

  Mac knew that waiter’s walk, but couldn’t place it.

  Behind him the sofa squeaked slightly. ‘Pay extra for the view,’ said Diane, who wasn’t a great fan of Jakarta’s vistas.

  Mac turned, took her in and struggled to keep it tight. She was sitting on the edge of the sofa in white bra and panties, rubbing lotion into her tanned legs. Looking up, her sapphire orbs sparkled like she was taking the piss. She knew he was married but she couldn’t help herself. Mac hated that and, in spite of himself, he felt his jaw clench, searching for the best way to tell an ex-lover that her charms were still working but he was no longer a buyer.

  ‘Look, Diane -‘

  ‘Yes, Richard?’

  Diane was an extraordinarily manipulative person. To offset her own betrayal of Mac with Peter Garrison, she was highlighting that even when he was on the verge of proposing marriage to her, he let her call him Richard rather than coming clean. She was daring him to take the high moral ground, an unstable place for a couple of pros.

  ‘Got some more info on the NIME guys – the real principals,’ said Mac, trying to take his eyes off her.

  ‘Want to talk about Michael?’ she said, knowing that it would irritate him to hear Vitogiannis referred to by his fi rst name.

  ‘Sure – did he hit on you?’ said Mac.

  She chuckled. ‘Of course not, darling. He saw how devoted I was to my husband.’

  Without taking her eyes off him, she started with the lotion on her belly.

  ‘So that’s it?’ he asked.

  ‘No, Michael’s very excited about the deal. He says Australia has the right technology and expertise for Asia during an infrastructure build-out, and he thinks NIME is an exciting partner.’

  ‘So, he’s legit?’

  Diane looked at him. ‘He said something about how the Australian government weren’t coming to the party, or something like that?’

  Nodding, Mac pushed. ‘So he was open about it all?’

  ‘He didn’t lie, except for when he said partner and partnership. Why would he lie about that?’

  ‘Because he’s got no interest in a partnership with anybody. He’s a venture capitalist – he wants to exit, wants to be bought out.’

  Mac was getting really annoyed, uncomfortable. Then he smelled the liquid she was rubbing, and he lost it. Before he knew what was going on, he was in front of the elevator banks, breathing shallow, gulping, banging on the ‘down’ arrow and muttering to himself.

  He got to the bar by the lagoon and settled into a bar chair where he could scan the comings and goings out of the hotel lobby. Positioning himself so he wasn’t looking straight into the security camera above the top shelf single malts, Mac looked for eyes, but could only see animated businessmen. Exhaling, he let the tension run out of him.

  ‘Evening, Mr Davis,’ said the barman.

  Mac smiled, realised he still had his name-tag on. He unclasped it, slid it across the bar and, looking at the bloke’s name-tag, asked for a beer, and Bundy on a rock.

  The beer arrived and Mac said, ‘Thanks, Clyde,’ then drank from the long neck and felt its coolness rush down his throat. He remembered the days when he was dating Diane between Sydney and Jakarta. It had been early summer in Sydney, and on a beautiful Saturday morning the woman he’d fallen in love with had wanted to go swimming at a beach. Mac had suggested Bondi or Manly, something with a bit of oomph, something to put the willies up a Pommie girl. But Diane wanted to go to Camp Cove, a harbour beach in Sydney’s east with no waves and a lot of fl oating rubbish.

  Mac remembered carrying a big seagrass bag behind Diane, who was dressed in a see-through pink sarong that revealed she was topless. He tried to be sophisticated and not too Rockhampton about the topless thing. He was trying to impress this bird.

  They had walked up the Camp Cove beach and continued under the trees and around the point. He wanted to tell her they’d gone too far but they’d kept walking around the point and gone down a cliff path at the next beach. He’d followed her to a position in the middle of the sand where a lot of tanned bodies lay around like seals, and as Diane was fi nishing off a story about a nympho secretary at the British High Commission in Islamabad, she unfurled her mat on the sand and removed her sarong. And then took off her undies.

  He could remember it like it was yesterday. He’d turned slowly to see what reaction the crowded beach was going to have to this dramatic nude form and then the penny dropped: it was a nude beach.

  Everyone was starkers.

  Mac had been running full speed to try to stay with her, to downplay the provincial Queensland thing and make it about his education, his worldliness. But when Diane had said, ‘Come on, get those shorts off – it’s good for you,’ Mac had run headlong into w
ho he really was, which was a Mick footballer from Rockhampton who had never been on a nudist beach in his life and had no intention of removing his shorts now he’d found himself on one.

  He’d stood there humiliated and embarrassed as Diane lay down on her mat, pulled her Evian and then her squirty bottle of carotene oil from the seagrass bag. He’d tried to leave that nudist beach quick-smart but Diane wouldn’t go, just lay there laughing at him from behind her Ray-Bans. ‘You silly old thing,’ she’d taunted with her plummy English accent. ‘No one’s looking. You are so funny, Richard.’

  He’d broken the deadlock that day by dropping his daks and lying down on the damned towel, clenching his bum like he was trying to crack a walnut, praying to God that no one from HMAS Watson up on the cliff could recognise him. His enduring image of that day was the smell of carotene and the vision of a tanned woman who was waxed all over. An enigma of a woman who had left him for dust.

  Now, sitting in the pool bar at the Shangri-La, Mac felt physically relieved not to be standing on the beach at Lady Bay. Clyde put a glass on the bar, dropped in one large rock and poured a double of Bundy rum over it. Jenny said it was a hick’s drink but the Queensland rum was comforting for Mac. He gulped a mouthful and, opening his mouth slightly, felt the fumes evaporate into his mouth and sinuses.

  An Anglo male, fortyish, with an IBM salesman haircut, sat down at one of the tables near the pool and, leaning back, read the Economist .

  The Economist at nine-thirty in the pm? Spies always carried a prop such as a magazine or newspaper into a public place, but to Mac’s brief glance the bloke didn’t seem like a dire unfriendly. Maybe a Canadian or Kiwi embassy intelligence designate, just merging into a conference and seeing if Mac was up for a chat. It’s how the vast majority of human intelligence was conducted: with a smile, over a beer.

  He smelled her before he saw her, and then Diane’s arm was over his shoulder and she was kissing his ear.

  ‘Hello Mr Grumpy Pants,’ she whispered. ‘Still sulking?’