Underground

by Andrew McGahan

  Phantoms. Except, here was one of them.

  I said, ‘Okay, if I’m not your prisoner, what exactly do you want with me?’

  ‘First of all, to keep you alive.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the government wants you dead.’

  I puzzled this through. ‘But how did you know about me in the first place? I mean, that I’d been kidnapped?’ I nodded towards the brooding Aisha. ‘And how did you happen to show up just when they were about to shoot her?’

  ‘Ah . . .’ Harry pondered the question for a moment. ‘I only know so much myself, you understand. I get orders and information from above, and I don’t always ask for explanations. But the Underground has contacts everywhere. Even, dare I say it, in the ranks of the AFP itself.’

  That did impress me. ‘Someone in the AFP tipped you off?’

  ‘Yes. But the truth is, this isn’t the first we’ve heard of our lady terrorist here and her group. We’ve been watching them for some time now.’

  Aisha’s eyes narrowed. ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Sorry luv, it’s true. And we’re not the only ones. It’s like this. About a year ago now our sources let us know that the AFP had become aware of a group called Great Southern Jihad. Our informers are only low level, admittedly, but they were confused, because no one in the AFP seemed very worried about these particular terrorists. In fact, orders came down from above that agents were to subject GSJ to only light, intermittent observation, with no interference. And that’s unusual. Sure, sometimes the Feds might watch a terrorist group for a while, to see who its contacts are, but this was different. These were “keep your hands off” sort of orders. Which is all pretty suggestive. So the Underground started its own surveillance of GSJ cells, wherever we could find them. We wanted to know what was really going on.’ He smiled at Aisha. ‘Your little cell was one of the first we started to track. We didn’t actually see you nab Leo, but we heard about it from our AFP sources, quick smart.’

  Aisha glowered at that. ‘The abduction was a mistake.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it was. But the question you should be asking is—how did the AFP themselves know about it? And so fast? I doubt that they were out in that cyclone, watching it happen. So who tipped them off?’

  She opened her mouth. Shut it again.

  ‘Exactly. Something stinks here. Our own AFP operatives don’t know the answer, but they said things went beserk when the news came through. People high up were angry. Not so much because Southern Jihad had kidnapped someone important. No offence, Leo, but to the AFP you really aren’t important. Or haven’t been, until now. But what really seemed to piss the powers off was that now they had to rescue you. Take action against Aisha and her boys. And that, apparently, was the last thing they wanted to do. For whatever reason, up until a few days ago, GSJ was not a target.’

  Aisha found her voice. ‘No. That isn’t right. We’ve always been a target. We’re at war with all of you.’

  ‘At war? You people?’ Harry turned back to me. ‘That’s what we can’t understand. I don’t know about all the GSJ cells, but the ones we watched were hardly big-time terrorists. Apart from a lot of talk, the most they’ve done in the last few months is let off the odd pipe bomb that killed hardly anyone. They’re mainly just kids. We’re not even sure they’re really Islamic.’

  Aisha sparked up again. ‘We are fucking so.’

  ‘Then you’re pretty damn weird about it, from what I’ve heard.’

  ‘They’ve done serious things too,’ I said. ‘I told you about Canberra.’

  ‘These knuckleheads could never have done Canberra.’

  Aisha was getting quite furious. ‘Yes we did!’

  Harry eyed her. ‘You personally? You brought in the nuke?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘I suppose someone higher up in your organisation told you all about it, said it was your comrades that did the deed. Is that the gist of it?’

  Aisha subsided, not answering.

  ‘I thought as much.’

  Now I was really baffled. Aisha’s crowd hadn’t nuked Canberra? I said, ‘You still haven’t told me how we ended up here.’

  He nodded. ‘Okay, we knew you’d been kidnapped, and we knew that the AFP was setting up an ambush to rescue you. Just for interest’s sake, I took a party of our own along to observe. Covertly. And things went very strange out there on that road. First they blow the fuck out of the postal van, like they don’t care whether anyone survives, even you. Then the American secret service puts in an appearance. Then the PM’s brother is getting a gun pointed at his head. And finally, the girl terrorist is about to get shot in the street, without any interrogation, after she’s been safely captured and neutralised. That’s not the way things usually work. That’s a sign that something else entirely is going on here. Something that the big boys really don’t want known. And that means the Underground wants to know. So I made the call, and we went in, guns blazing.’

  ‘Killing God knows how many Federal policemen.’

  His gaze turned flinty. ‘The AFP have killed hundreds of us, Leo. It’s a war out there, even if you’ve never heard anything about it. And to be completely bloody frank, it’s a war that the Underground is losing.’

  ‘It didn’t look like you were losing out there on the road.’

  ‘We got lucky today. Everywhere else, we’re on the back foot. We’re the AFP’s prime target these days, not the damn terrorists.’ He shook his head. ‘Except for now. Suddenly you two are public enemy number one. Why? What on earth for? A burnt-out hack developer, and a brat terrorist. What the fuck is so important about you two?’

  And amidst my complete confusion, what bugged me the most, perversely, was that he kept seeming to imply there actually was an ‘Aisha and me’—that we were linked somehow. I mean, I was sick of the sight of the woman.

  ‘It’s not me,’ I said. ‘I don’t know a thing.’

  ‘Maybe not. Maybe you don’t even know what you know.’ He was staring at Aisha. ‘But her, on the other hand, she must have some idea.’

  We both considered her.

  She sat up stiffly on the beanbag. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. And even if I did, why would I tell you?’

  Harry threw his arms wide, exasperated. ‘Don’t you get it? We aren’t your enemy.’

  ‘Everyone is my enemy.’

  ‘Fine! Get up and go then. Walk out the front door and just see how far you get. Everyone else in your cell is dead. There’re troop carriers on every street corner out there, roadblocks every two miles, your face is on every TV in the nation.’ He was pointing to the door at the top of the stairs. ‘Go on. Get out.’

  For a moment Aisha did indeed stare at the door, her lips pressed tight, her legs seemingly tensed to rise. But in the end she didn’t move.

  Harry sighed. ‘Look, you of all people should know the old saying, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This government wants you dead, and it wants us dead as well. So, at least for the moment, can we agree to cooperate a little?’

  Aisha bit her lip, still right on the edge, and then lowered her eyes.

  ‘I’ll take that as a provisional yes.’

  ‘I still don’t know anything,’ she said dully.

  ‘We’ll see about that . . .’

  I broke in. ‘Am I free to go as well?’

  He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Of course. You’ve got no money, no identity papers, no transport, you’re officially dead, and unofficially a shoot-to-kill target. Sure. Go where you like.’

  ‘What’s your plan then?’

  ‘First thing—get the both of you out of the area. Things are way too hot around here just to keep you hidden in a basement.’

  ‘You mean travel? I thought you said—’

  ‘I know. But we have ways. For a start, we can get you new identity cards that will stand up to most scrutiny. Enough to get you out of Queensland anyway. The real problem is your faces. We can’t hide them forever, and you two ar
e pretty recognisable. Aisha here sure as hell doesn’t blend in.’ He studied her glumly. ‘I guess first thing we do is cut the hair. Shorter, but not too short, they’d be expecting that. We’ll give you some sort of bob, and dye it, and colour your eyebrows. I don’t know what the hell we can do about your skin.’

  Aisha lifted her eyes again, a flash of anger, but said nothing. I didn’t for a minute think that she was really prepared to cooperate with all this, any more than I was. But I assumed that, like me, she was at least ready to wait and watch a while before making a run for it.

  Harry looked back to me. ‘But you, Leo, you’re half-famous. Sure, we play around with the hair, and you’ve got a beard going, which is good. But that face is too well known. Especially when it belongs to a dead man.’ He was out of his chair and walking around me, musing. ‘We really need some sort of plastic surgery. I’m not kidding. There are people in the Underground who could do it. We’ve got contacts in hospitals. Surgeons. But not in this part of the world. Still . . .’ He came to a decision. ‘Stand up a minute, would you?’

  I got out of the chair. He was peering at my face.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ he said, ‘but it’s the best I can do here and now.’

  He drew back his fist and slammed it straight into my nose.

  ‘Ow!’ I yelled, agonised, hands to my face. ‘Fuck!’ And it wasn’t just the pain. I was outraged. Despite the various beatings and rough handling over the last few days, my nose was one feature that had escaped any damage. ‘Jesus Christ!’

  He was all concern. ‘I really am sorry. C’mon, give us a look. Is it bleeding?’

  Gingerly I took my hands away.

  ‘No,’ he sighed. ‘Not enough.’

  And the prick hit me again.

  ELEVEN

  It astounds me even now.

  My brother wanted me dead.

  You might be wondering, interrogators, how I could have sat by passively in that snooker room and let someone else tell me how my life was going to be from now on. But you have no idea what it’s like to hear that your own flesh and blood has ordered your execution. Not that I ever doubted the truth of it. I was hurt and angry, and I didn’t understand right then why Bernard was doing this, but I never thought that it couldn’t be so. I didn’t wonder, for instance, whether this Harry person might simply be lying to me, for reasons of his own. I didn’t question whether the news footage I’d seen might have been an elaborate fake. I didn’t decide that I should put my trust in my brother rather than in a complete stranger.

  No. Deep down, it was all too easy to believe. After all, Bernard didn’t get to the top of Australian politics without being prepared to make the brutal decisions.

  It’s strange, though. If you look back to the dawn of Bernard’s career, there were few hints that he would rise so high. When he first joined the Liberal Party, his local branch was in the federal seat of Streeton, in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Streeton being a safe Liberal electorate, the branch membership boasted some of the party’s brightest young talents—but, take my word for it, Bernard wasn’t one of them. He was so dry, so dour, so flat, that the only role anyone could see for him was as branch treasurer. And as branch treasurer he remained, apparently content, working away quietly at the books for nearly ten years.

  Hardly a stellar beginning. Still, it was a fatal appointment on the part of his colleagues. You don’t give a devious operator like Bernard any sort of position—however mundane it might appear—without grave risk. Especially an administrative position, because it’s in the details that real power often lies. Bernard plotted in the backroom until the sitting Member for Streeton finally retired, and nominations opened to preselect a replacement. Then he struck, putting his name forward against three other hopefuls, all of whom were more experienced than he was, and far more highly regarded by the branch membership.

  Not that Bernard was worried. He disposed of the frontrunner by finding a technical hitch in the man’s Liberal registration papers, effectively dismissing him from the party for several months. (The mistake could have been overlooked, but Bernard had stacked the registration committee with party hacks as petty and pedantic as himself, and they gleefully refused to waive the issue.) The next contender he maligned by digging into the minutes of ancient meetings and discovering a motion the man had once put, in 1968, that the party adopt a platform backing a new design for the Australian flag. (A flag men had fought and died for! The infamy of it!) And his last rival he disgraced merely by spreading the story of a messy divorce in her youth, involving infidelity and an abortion—an incident Bernard learnt of by noticing a change of last name in her old membership records.

  So he was the only one left unsullied, and he was such an obscure and pallid individual that no one else had any dirt on him. Puzzled, and rather disappointed, the branch made him their official candidate. At the ensuing federal election of 1983, the seat of Streeton voted Liberal as always, and thus Bernard James, my own little baby brother, ascended to the House of Representatives—one of the youngest MPs of the day. It was a sad irony for him that the Liberals actually lost government in the same election, and wouldn’t regain it for another thirteen years, but still, he was on his way.

  Not that he made much of an impression, early on. His debut speech in Parliament gained notice only because he made references to the problem, as he saw of it, of declining birth rates amongst the anglo-European population, the simultaneous growth in Asian immigration, and the imminent destruction of Australian culture—sentiments seen as somewhat out of step for an age when multiculturalism was official policy. The party whip told him to pull his head in, and for the next ten years or so, even though Bernard held onto his seat, he was chiefly known as a reliably conservative but deadly dull nonentity.

  It was the seventies, as I said earlier, that had fixed his attitudes—the social chaos of that decade, and the madness of the Whitlam Labor government, hog wild with ideas like free education, universal health care and generous unemployment benefits. The accountant in Bernard was outraged; who the hell was paying for all this? The taxpayer, that’s who. No, said my brother, if people had to struggle and save to get to university, well and good—then they wouldn’t waste their time marching and protesting and causing trouble once they got there. The same with the dole—if it wasn’t so easy to get, then there’d be no hippie communes or artist collectives cluttering up the country, and the unemployed would move heaven and earth to get jobs, just as they should. As for universal health care, well, quite frankly, the most advanced treatments cost a fortune, and if that meant the best care was only accessible to the rich, so be it, all the more motivation for the population to become wealthy themselves. Private sector, user-pays, that was the principle.

  The government’s true role, according to Bernard, was to formulate high policy, and to maintain the social order. The latter meant no undue toleration of drugs, or homosexuals, or refugees, or land rights for Aborigines, or militant feminism, or greenies, or rampant abortion, or power-hungry unions, or . . . Well, you get the picture. Put simply, he had settled upon those two most basic (and to outsiders, oddly contradictory) of conservative tenets. Namely that, in their private lives, people should conform strictly to the rules and be financially responsible for themselves, but that for the corporate world, there should be no limits or responsibilities at all. Nowadays, of course, this is standard conservative fare the western world over. But back in the 1980s, when Bernard was cutting his teeth as a young MP, it was cold and dreary stuff, even for the Liberal Party.

  It certainly wasn’t the philosophy of the eighties Labor government, so the decade was a grim period for Bernard. Casting about for better models, he ended up spending a lot of time overseas. Many of his Liberal colleagues were enamoured with Britain, and with Margaret Thatcher’s way of doing things, but not Bernard. His inspiration was the USA. If there was a fact-finding mission to the States, or a deputation sent over there for some diplomatic reason, then he made sure he wa
s on it. And liking what he saw, he began, in his public pronouncements, to extol the virtues of the US system. He pointed to America’s military and economic authority, to its leadership in the overthrow of the USSR, and to its decisive history in defence of democracy. Australia, he insisted, had a responsibility to follow that sort of example. To bind ourselves to it. True, his faith was dented a little by the end of the Reagan era, and by the ascension of Clinton. But he maintained his friendship with the Republicans. Their day, he knew, would come again.

  In the meantime, he married Claire. Their only courting engagements, as far as I know, were Liberal Party fundraisers. There were no wild nights out drinking, no afternoons fucking in motel rooms. Bernard’s single requirement in a wife seemed to be the woman’s ability to fit in with his political career. Claire proved to be polite, sociable and correctly aligned to the right, so my brother declared himself in love and the date was set. After the wedding, the happy couple moved into a house only a few blocks from our family home in Camberwell. And for the little that his life changed, Bernard might as well have stayed at home. Claire cooked and cleaned for him just as well as our mum ever had. Not even for one day did he have to get out on the street and get dirty, fending for himself. How he later claimed to understand the plight of the working poor, or the social problems of the battlers in the outer suburbs, or the difficulties of running a small business, I’ll never know.