Second Strike am-2

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘What’s this about a fucking mini-nuke?’

  ‘Mate, I’ll let you get back to it – I’ve got my security, how are we with the Sydney end?’

  ‘Yeah mate – Feds’ Sydney offi ces are on it.’

  ‘I needed to talk,’ said Mac.

  ‘So talk, Macca.’

  Mac heard a ciggie being lit and the fi rst inhale, meaning Scotty was standing outside.

  ‘Remind me about Dave Urquhart.’

  ‘Me? He’s your old uni mate.’

  ‘Yeah, but as soon as we joined the fi rm, I went off to Iraq and Urquhart burrowed into the political end.’

  ‘Gee, that was a short book. What are you getting at, mate?’

  ‘I’m clutching at air, that’s what I’m doing.’

  ‘Gimme a clue.’

  Scotty was a good bloke and Mac didn’t want to use him or hurt him professionally, but if anyone could turn over the stones right now it was him. Besides, Scotty was one of the internal watchers of Australian intelligence. He surveilled people from ASIO, ASIS, Foreign Affairs, the military, Trade, Customs and the Feds, Treasury and PMC.

  And he did so in Australia and all over the world. The job was his because he knew every damned trick in the double-agent’s manual.

  Mac took a breath, ‘Okay – long shot, right?’

  ‘Go,’ said Scotty.

  ‘Mate, on the way to Sydney I remembered you telling me about a spot check you were doing of Commonwealth employees in the United States, maybe ten years ago?’

  ‘Sounds like me.’

  ‘There was a navy bloke in New York, at the UN. Word was he was on the piss and you thought the Chinese had hooks in him.’

  ‘Yeah, but it turned out he was actually depressed. And the Chinese wasn’t PRC – she was Singapore. Good sort, too.’

  ‘You told me once that you ended up taking a lot more notice of a Pommie bloke. He was MI6, but posing as UN.’

  ‘Yeah. Tall bloke, slick dresser.’

  ‘And it annoyed you because you had better things to do than wonder if some wanker from Six was cultivating one of ours.’

  Scotty laughed. ‘Shit, you’re good. Yeah, what was that wanker’s name?’

  They tossed it around and it fi nally dropped for Scotty. ‘Fitzgerald, Fitzsimons… ‘ he mumbled. ‘That’s it! Fitzgibbon. Danny Fitzgibbon.

  Shit, what a tosser! Swear to God.’

  The APS car fl ashed past Miami High School’s sports grounds and Mac felt the excitement come up. ‘Mate, I have to know. Was the person he was cultivating Dave Urquhart?’

  ‘Nah, mate,’ said Scotty. ‘Dave was out of New York by then.’

  ‘So who, Scotty?’

  ‘That smarmy prick who’s in Jakkers now. Martin Atkins. Didn’t warm to him much either.’

  There were two Ford Falcons parked in the street outside Mac’s townhouse when he got out of the car. One of the federal cops in blue overalls and a Kevlar vest made straight for him, hand on his Glock handgun.

  Mac put his hands out.

  ‘Agent Hamilton, Australian Federal Police – sorry, sir, but this is a restricted area right now.’

  The APS guy introduced himself, introduced Mac, and handed over to Agent Hamilton before getting back in his car and speeding away.

  There was a mix-up with Mac’s ID – he wasn’t carrying any Alan McQueen collateral – and so another cop knocked on the townhouse door while Hamilton kept an eye on Mac. Jenny opened the door, Rachel on her hip, both of them breaking into smiles as they saw him.

  Jenny ID’d him for the cops and they kissed as he kicked the door back. Mac tried to pull back but she pushed in on him as he dropped his bags, pinning him to the wall. Whatever other problems Mac had with his wife, she was a fantastic kisser. Rachel smiled and waved her red plastic spoon at him excitedly when he came up for air, and Jenny passed her over.

  Jenny looked at Mac closely, ran her fi ngers up to the gash on his left forehead and into his hairline. When she looked into his eyes, he didn’t want her to see his pain and fear, so he turned to Rachel and tried to kiss her but she whacked him on the nose with the red spoon, her little legs going crazy in the sleepsuit as she said da da over and over. He looked into her big dark eyes, full of love and hope, and he smelled her unique smell and he wondered why he couldn’t just be a standard loving dad.

  They lay on the sofa watching Rachel do her thing on the rug with her plastic boxes and abacuses. She was now dressed in nappies and the yellow Singapore T-shirt with the red dragon on it. Ke, the Thai boy Jenny had told Mac about, sat at the kitchen table with a colouring book. He looked at them occasionally, his face solemn, not talking.

  Jenny shrugged. ‘He’ll start talking soon. He’s a kid, he won’t be able to help himself.’

  Mac kept his conversation vague about the Diane shooting and Jenny let him tell it his way.

  ‘I didn’t sleep with her, okay?’ he said and she nodded. ‘I didn’t kiss her and I didn’t want to. Whatever happened in the past, it’s more like she’s a sister now.’

  They looked into each other’s eyes, Mac happy he had nothing to hide. ‘Please believe me.’

  Jenny smiled. ‘I do.’

  ‘And what about you? asked Mac, pleased for a diversion. ‘Have George and that Cambodian been behaving themselves?’

  Jenny smiled the way cops do when they’re discussing criminal dickheads. ‘They’ve gone to ground – haven’t turned up here, if that’s what you mean.’

  Then came the tough part of the conversation. Tony and Vi Davidson had been at their wedding reception at the Jakarta Golf Club and Vi had insisted on using her family money to pay the booze bill for the function. Then she’d given Jen some hilarious advice on how to stay sane around people like Mac and Tony, most of it centring around dishing up wide-eyed female fl attery at every chance. Vi had been a unique Aussie character and a favourite of the embassy community.

  Tears fl owing, Jenny put her arms around him.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked.

  Mac shook his head, looked over her shoulder, out the ranch-sliders to an apartment complex with a swimming pool. ‘People spend their whole lives trying to stay off the radar, never really able to retire.

  In some ways he would have been expecting it.’

  Jenny’s expression changed with the reality of what Mac was saying. She sniffl ed.

  ‘By the way,’ said Mac, ‘before I forget – Benny has a tip for you.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ she said, sceptical.

  ‘He says there’s KR money coming out of south-east Queensland.

  Seems to be new channels but the front companies in Singers are old and it’s all Khmer Rouge.’

  Jenny sat upright. In her world, the Khmer Rouge was synonymous with the slaving rackets. ‘When did the funds start fl owing?’ she asked.

  ‘A month or two ago, I think,’ said Mac. ‘Don’t quote me – I’ll give you Benny’s number.’

  ‘You do that,’ she said.

  ***

  Mac tried to have a normal family day, but the federal cops who strolled along behind them reminded them of the lives they had chosen. They had a few beers with their seafood lunch in Cavill Avenue and then went Christmas shopping. They ended up at the Southport swimming pool and Jenny sat in the baby pool with Rachel and Ke, Mac’s daughter shrieking with joy and her mother all strength and kindness. Ke even managed a smile at Rachel’s antics. Mac sat in the water, taking it in, savouring every second.

  Later they lay in bed, listening to the early evening rain making a tapping sound over the hiss of the air-con unit. Jenny felt good in his arms: muscular but also curvy. She snuggled in and put her hand up to Mac’s ear and fondled it. Jenny had not been happy with the news that Mac had another daughter and had grilled Mac about Sarah’s exact age and the timing of the Diane affair. She swung between calling him a bounder and telling him how he’d better pay child support. Although Jen did give him full marks for speaki
ng to Diane’s mother, Felicity, and inviting her and Sarah up to the Gold Coast for Christmas.

  She pulled his face into hers, only an inch away. She smelled of toothpaste and he could see her big dark eyes.

  ‘You’re in luck, Mr Macca,’ she whispered. ‘You married someone with a horrible father.’

  Mac gulped.

  ‘I could never begrudge a girl having a father as wonderful as you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Mac.

  ‘But here’s the deal. Sarah’s your daughter, but Jenny’s your wife, okay?’

  Mac fell asleep like that. In bed with his wife – arms around his best friend.

  CHAPTER 54

  The Christmas crowds were building by mid-morning and Mac felt relaxed wheeling Rachel through the outdoors area of the Pacifi c Fair shopping mall in Broadbeach.

  A female plainclothes AFP agent walked behind them and Ke walked alongside Mac, not saying a word. He looked intelligent and sad, about eight or nine, thought Mac, and had obviously been traumatised by something. Mac wasn’t a great fan of Jenny taking on kids, but the Department of Immigration’s facility for illegals was over-capacity and they did not take on unaccompanied minors over an agreed ratio of offi cers to children. So occasionally they farmed them out to a federal cop – someone who they knew would say yes

  – and Mac was giving her a few hours off while she took care of some things.

  Walking through the enormous Coles supermarket, Ke’s eyes nearly popped out of his head as Mac did the basic shopping amidst all the Christmas bunting and the piped carols. They stopped by a Santa Claus doing juggling and balloon shapes and Mac got Rachel out of the pram and let her yell and carry on at the show, her little legs kicking. He looked down and saw Ke smiling too and he decided he’d take them for a bite.

  Finding a child-friendly cafe, Mac ordered a babyccino and a biscuit for Rachel, and a Coke and a chocolate brownie for Ke. While Rachel put biscuit all over her jumpsuit, Mac tried to get Ke talking.

  He was at least engaging Mac with his eyes, which was a start. When Mac asked Ke where he was from, the boy seemed to understand.

  Mac said ‘Thailand’, and Ke smiled and put a fi nger up: sign for wait a second. He walked over to a window for a travel agent where there was a big airline promotional poster for Thailand – Phuket, Koh Samui and Bangers. Mac nodded but Ke shook his head, and pointed to the country immediately to the east of northern Thailand. He was pointing at Cambodia.

  Checking for tails and eyes, Mac cleared his PO box at the outdoor section of the post offi ce. This was his postal address for Richard Davis, and all of the mail came with the yellow redirect stickers on them.

  The way it worked with most postal addresses for a corporate front was that you listed one PO box but had it constantly redirected. It wasn’t foolproof but it eliminated the opportunists who might hang around a post offi ce for a few weeks waiting for a show. He stashed the fi ve bits of mail in the shelf under Rachel’s pram and they all walked home.

  With Rachel having her mid-morning sleep, and Ke honing his soccer skills with a baby’s ball on the back patio, Mac sorted the mail, chucking it all out except the car insurance renewal notice and the letter from the Shangri-La, which contained a bill with Paid in full printed on it. He hadn’t offi cially checked out but they’d closed the account and taken it off the Davis Visa card. Looking down the bill, he found the charge for the tennis racquet Diane had used and they’d also invoked the three-hundred-dollar security deposit. Cheeky buggers.

  He put it aside – another chance to go to war with DFAT accounts.

  Having mopped the fl oor, vacuumed the bedrooms and put on a load of washing, Mac kicked the soccer ball with Ke and got the little bloke laughing about the big Anglo’s clumsiness. He seemed like a nice kid, though Mac was mindful of not becoming too attached since he’d be gone in a few days. Then he made a cup of tea and, letting Ke watch TV, sat out on the rear patio and called Ted.

  ‘How’s it going?’ said Mac as the old brother picked up.

  ‘Surviving, mate,’ said Ted.

  They talked about Tony and Vi. The cops had made it fairly routine and Ted had helped them with their inquiries.

  ‘A lot of the old boys are upset,’ said Ted, referring to the retired spies and diplomats at Noosa. ‘The old Brownings and Colts are back out of the mothballs, I can tell you. But anyway – how are you doing on the chase of our associates and their device?’

  ‘Mate, I’ve been taken off it. It’s in the hands of the CT guys now.’

  Ted understood – if you went to a border-protection footing you couldn’t have every Commonwealth employee trying to get involved.

  ‘I was thinking about that,’ mused Ted. ‘Aussies know what they’re doing, but I hope they’re putting some thinking into concealment strategies.’

  ‘What do you mean? asked Mac, sipping his tea.

  ‘Well, you know what the freighting systems are like into this country now, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mac, knowing that they were pre-cleared and scanned and sniffed and inspected and otherwise seriously worked over.

  Milinda, Jen’s FBI friend in Jakarta, had once told him that Australia had a better forward-protection barrier for incoming freight than even the United States.

  ‘So the way to bring a device in without it being detected would be as a concealment, maybe on your person, right?’

  ‘I suppose it’s portable. That what you saying?’ said Mac.

  ‘For sure. Those Israeli-South African devices were about fi fty kilograms and fi tted in a pack.’

  ‘Or maybe not a concealment.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ agreed Ted. ‘Could even be open about it, tell them that it’s actually something else. Remember, it’s a simple alloy cylinder, a ubiquitous shape.’

  ‘You’d need a distraction,’ said Mac.

  ‘A human distraction,’ said Ted.

  With Ke still in front of the telly, and Rachel sleeping, Mac thought he’d have a quick search on the internet, follow a small snippet that Ted had mentioned. Ubiquitous alloy canisters and human distractions.

  It might be worth a look.

  Firing up the computer in the spare room, he searched under canisters, Australia, imports. He looked through all the industrial suppliers of waterproof, dust-proof, anti-magnetic and self-sealing canisters. Some were for cigars while others were moved in semi-trailers. After twenty minutes, it was a canister world and Mac closed the internet browser before he sent himself mad.

  He looked over at Ke as he emerged from the spare room and wondered why Jenny had had to duck out. Ke wasn’t Thai, as Jenny had claimed over the phone; he was Cambodian and Mac had a strange fear that his wife was poking around in places that could get her hurt.

  Jenny would have misled him knowing that any connection between a homeless young boy and Cambodia would have someone like Mac thinking about the Khmer Rouge’s slavery business.

  Emptying the dishwasher, Mac thought about the other point Ted had made, about the human distraction. As young recruits, spies were taught how to create distractions – or, at least, how to dilute themselves out of a person’s vision or thinking. And the best way to do that was by numbers: have a wife, travel with an assistant, blend in with a team, move with the crowd, attend a conference, move with a celebrity…

  Putting the last of the cutlery in the drawer, Mac walked back into the spare room, sat at the computer screen and opened the internet browser again. If it was too hard to bring a mini-nuke in by air or sea, could it be done by walking a ubiquitous canister through Customs with a human distraction? A sports team? Someone well-known?

  The search under ‘sports team December 2008’ wasn’t encouraging. Swim teams from California, a schoolboy cricket squad from Bangladesh. No chance of camoufl age there. He tried a search under ‘conferences December 2008’, but it was a fl ood of junk, mostly sites advertising logistics and catering and venues.

  About to shut the browser down again, Mac tri
ed one more thing and put ‘international’ in front of the conference search and made it an Australian search.

  The third entry was headlined as Darwin 2008 – Water and Rights: New approaches to public water supply. Darwin, Australia’s gateway to Asia and the fi rst place in Australia Freddi Gardjito had thought of when they were surmising where a long-range King Air 200 could get to from northern Sumatra. Clicking on the search link, Mac was taken into the Asia Development Bank website; the Asian Development Fund division of the organisation was running the water conference.

  He scrolled down through the site, reading it as a future controller of an economic team might, looking for matters of interest, names that made a pattern, companies that broke a pattern. It was all water, power, hospitals, swamp drainage, roads. He ran his eyes down the line-up and saw that Darwin’s conference was starting tomorrow, a one-dayer.

  He felt his breath quickening. The keynote speaker was a Canadian engineering academic named Dr Hamish Gough, whom Mac had read about in Time and the East Asia Economic Review. A lecturer at the University of Malaya, Gough was well-known in Asia for his brilliant and practical public infrastructure solutions and he was the subject of a breakout box in the conference program.

  Mac read the caption: apparently Dr Gough had designed and manufactured reverse-osmosis scrubbing canisters that created potable water from sea water. The break-through with his design was that the membranes in his canisters worked under natural water pressure so a village could store sea water in a tank and drop it into a canister which would slowly turn the sea water to drinking water and would do so without the massive power usage associated with typical desalination plants. The story said Gough had developed hand-winched tanks that dropped down slipways into the sea; when they were fi lled with sea water, they were then winched up to a stand and hooked up to the hoses that fell straight into the canisters. If you wanted more potable water and faster, you just used more canisters, more hoses. Now Dr Gough wanted the world’s corporations to contribute to a fund that would manufacture these things and give them away to rural villages in the developing world. He didn’t want to make a profi t, he said, but multinationals had to accept that if their enormous water consumption took the precious resource from subsistence villagers – which was still one-half of the world’s population – then they should furnish them with a way of getting potable water from the sea and other brackish water supplies.