Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘No. You look. I’ve done it all by the book, I’ve done it totally the way Davidson and the department wanted it.’ Mac felt his anger coming up and he breathed deep. He could see Scotty was scared. ‘I’ve even landed a straight job. This Sydney Uni gig is Davidson’s doing.

  Look at me,’ said Mac, holding his arms out, looking down at his charcoal suit and black offi ce shoes.

  Mac realised he’d been yelling slightly and he calmed it. ‘Christ, Scotty, why didn’t someone just call?’

  Mac already knew the answer to that one. Getting into the spy trade was the easy part. Surviving the debriefi ngs, departmental threats and surveillance on your way out was another thing. Intel operatives never really left the life.

  Mac had been where Scotty was now back in ‘02. A fi nancial operative named Kleinwitz had tendered his resignation. The offi cial reason: he’d fallen in love with a local bird during a posting in Manila.

  Problem was, Kleinwitz was simultaneously applying to the Australian Trade Commission. Mac was in Manila at the time and was thrown the debrief.

  He didn’t like it. Kleinwitz just didn’t vibe in love. His fi le had no trail of love affairs - no wife, no girlfriends, no interoffi ce bed-work, no whoring. His colleagues had him as a professional robot.

  The girlfriend was news to them.

  Kleinwitz didn’t drink, smoke or gamble and his music tastes ran to Phil Collins - the ninety-nine per cent giveaway that this boy was no bounder. His induction fi le revealed a wave of girls, women and men paid to lure Kleinwitz into bed during his fi rst posting in KL.

  Standard procedure with new recruits. The accounting major hadn’t blinked. Mac recognised the name of one of the contractors paid to seduce the geeky young Australian at the embassy. If that bird couldn’t make Kleinwitz giggle, then something wasn’t right.

  Mac had run a two-week tail on the bloke. Yes, there was a bird -

  a dancer from Angeles City. She was clean. But a bit more digging and intel from the Australian Federal Police turned up her brother, a hoodlum named Miggy Morales. Miggy ran nightclubs, Miggy ran bare-knuckle fi ghts and, most interestingly, Miggy ran brothels where the bait was prepubescent boys. Mac reckoned Kleinwitz was being blackmailed into joining Trade. And where there was blackmail there was a rival intelligence outfi t - probably the Chinese - getting an advantage it shouldn’t have.

  Mac had cornered Kleinwitz in a basement room at Southern Scholastic Books. Helping out were two offi cers from the Service, Nguyen and Kritikos, along with the AFP’s intelligence liaison offi cer, Jenny Toohey.

  Mac started hard, accusing bug-eyed Kleinwitz of being a rock spider. Accused him of being blackmailed by Miggy Morales and his sister. Mac told Kleinwitz that as far as he was concerned, the Mindanao Forest Products infi ltration had gone pear-shaped because he was doubling. Kleinwitz was integral - as the accountant, he had constructed the whole fi nancial scenario. And a local asset had died.

  Kleinwitz stayed calm until Mac pulled out the black and whites of Kleinwitz on a bed with a couple of Miggy’s boys, who did not look to be enjoying the experience. Mac threw them on the bolted table top and watched impassively as Kleinwitz squirmed in his chair, the blood rushing into his face. Kleinwitz took another look at the pics and smirked. Jenny Toohey - standing fi ve-ten and a former Australian Universities basketballer - took a step forward and landed a straight right in his teeth.

  Canberra dispatched its I-team, a shady group made up of seconded cops, soldiers and intelligence types whose job was completing

  ‘sensitive disengagements from Commonwealth employment’.

  So Mac knew this part of the game. Didn’t like it, but he knew it.

  ‘When and where?’ he asked Rod Scott.

  CHAPTER 3

  She rose as Mac walked into the Happy Dragon.

  Diane.

  The Chinatown lunch crowd turned as one. She was wearing a sleeveless black linen knee-length dress, her honey-blonde hair falling to her bare, tanned shoulders. Mac’s heart rate bumped up a couple of notches.

  ‘Hi Richard,’ she purred, quietly cross at his lateness. ‘How did it go at the university?’

  ‘No worries. Yeah,’ said Mac, greeting her clumsily, a bit distracted.

  They leaned in and he kissed Diane’s hair rather than her cheek. Her kiss landed on his cheek, where it always did. Diane had a wet kiss - a kiss you still felt on your face two minutes later.

  He sat heavily and babbled about the uni job until he ran out of puff. There wasn’t much else to say. He’d been offered the job and he was going to take it.

  Diane smiled at him and raised her glass in a toast. ‘To Richard the Brainiac.’

  He tried to get with the spirit, have a laugh. But wine splashed out of Mac’s glass when he tried to drink. He could feel himself losing it. All that embassy life had given Diane a knowingness about life and men, and sometimes Mac felt she was looking straight through him.

  As if he would always be the small-town Queensland boy - a ton of energy but no class.

  Mac knew how to track, snatch and dispatch people. He could interview, interrogate and inveigle. He could manipulate perceptions with deceptive scenarios. But he had no idea how civvie relationships actually worked. He was used to cops and customs girls, embassy staffers, assistant military attaches, trade mission offi cers - the classic embassy-colony types. All of them work-obsessed, slightly worthy and deeply embedded in the politics of bureaucracy.

  In the last few weeks his professional demeanour had been falling apart as Diane came closer to the centre of his life and a new part of himself tried to emerge. She made fun of offi ce politics and jockeying for favour, and made it clear that the best thing about her job in IT

  was that she was largely her own boss. Diane thought men in suits were boring and the women who loved them were even worse. She was hilarious and had the vaguely piratical air of a rebellious person born to privilege. And Mac loved her for it, an indulgence he couldn’t really afford.

  The situation was ridiculous: Diane thought he was a textbook sales executive called Richard who spent a lot of time in South-East Asia. How long did you keep that up when you had feelings for a girl?

  In the Service they’d have said his nerves were going, that he was choking.

  Mac made a joke about the heat in the restaurant, and calmed himself by acting the part of a composed person. Diane twirled the stem of her wineglass between thumb and forefi nger. She leaned on her left hand and focused on him. ‘Are you avoiding me, Mr Genius?’

  Mac realised he’d sat down opposite her. Diane liked him to sit adjacent to her, so she could hold his hand under the table. The fi rst time it happened, at a restaurant in Jakarta, Mac had blushed.

  Now Diane raised her hand imperceptibly at the maitre d’ and three men descended on their table. Mac never liked this sort of carry-on. Diane gave a slight wink to the maitre d’ as he bowed, and asked him to change the setting for ‘Mister Richard’.

  The Chinatown lunchers smiled as Mac stood and waited for the setting to be changed. One bloke nodded at him with a silly grin, until his wife gave him The Look.

  When he sat down again, Diane grabbed his hand and put it on her lap. He tried to avoid her eyes. He took a peek. She was smiling, blue eyes sparkling.

  He was way, way gone on this bird.

  Mac found a small park under the southern approach to the Sydney Harbour Bridge as Japanese newlyweds hammed for their photographer.

  The lunch had not gone well. Mac couldn’t get his mind off what Tobin might want, and so close to his retirement. Diane had wanted to talk about something. Mac knew it was relationship stuff, an ‘us’

  chat - the future. He couldn’t do it and made sure she couldn’t take things in that direction. Then he’d claimed an urgent meeting and done a runner.

  He felt like he was tearing himself apart, four or fi ve ways at once.

  Mac took another look at the wedding party. He couldn’t look at a camera w
ithout thinking about surveillance; couldn’t look at a groom and his bride without wondering where their backup was and thinking, Is it a snatch or a hit?

  He couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t live two or three lives, operating under three names, working for bullshit companies, travelling on false passports, inducing weak people to be even weaker by betraying something they shouldn’t. Couldn’t pull missions and not even speak about them with colleagues.

  He couldn’t shoot up a terrorist camp in the outback and then schmooze the Dean of History two days later. Couldn’t break up a street detail and then go to lunch with the woman he loved like nothing was wrong.

  It was all wrong.

  No one in his world really had the nerves for what they did. To establish trust and then suddenly become the blackmailer, the torturer or the executioner to those who believed in you was not a question of nerves. It was about shutting off a part of yourself - a part that Mac had shut down to get through the Royal Marines and SBS.

  Diane had opened him up, and now there was no going back.

  He was out.

  He pulled his mobile phone from his suit pocket and turned it on. He assumed it was bugged. He thought about saying something smart into the back of it, but he didn’t.

  Play it cool - be the straight guy.

  The messages icon came up and he dialled in to the voicemail.

  The fi rst message was from Diane, wanting to know why he was late for lunch. The second started with Richard, I really wanted for us to talk at lunch … and ended with … I’ll send the books I borrowed over to the offi ce.

  Perhaps I could get my keys …

  Mac approached the back entrance to Southern Scholastic Books with Scotty two steps behind. They walked through the fl uoro-lit open-plan offi ce space, past ‘secretaries’ and ‘sales people’ who were mostly on phones or working screens. ASIS was supposed to have a foreign-only brief, but if you ran around Asia with a card from an Australian company, you needed an offi ce in Sydney.

  A group of Malays in a fi shbowl meeting room turned and looked as he walked past. He smiled, gave thumbs-up, and walked into a large corner offi ce reserved for the visiting brass. Greg Tobin looked up. Three men in dark suits sat on a sofa.

  Tobin came at him like a campaigning politician, the confi dence shining from his perfect teeth. He hadn’t changed since his glory days at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. He was still tall, tanned and athletic with perfect black hair, clipped close and pushed back.

  Although he had a large jawbone he still managed to look as sleek as a seal. Errol Flynn without the mo. A good-looking man used to having things happen his way.

  ‘G’day mate,’ he said heartily. Mac shook his hand and watched Tobin spin on a heel and walk back to a large dark desk. He smelled of success, like freshly mown grass.

  ‘Have a seat, mate,’ said Tobin as he leaned back in a leather chair. ‘Just on my way up to Tokyo and thought we might have a chat, huh?’

  Mac took a chair and scoped the three men on the sofa to his right. They stared back at him. Two of the men he didn’t know. The third he recognised: David Urquhart, who smiled briefl y without warmth before turning away.

  Mac didn’t like it.

  Urquhart and Mac had endured boarding school and uni together.

  They’d played footy, sunk beers and chased girls. But Urquhart was of a different tribe to Mac. He was one of those blokes who always moved in the slipstream of power and didn’t pretend he was anything other than the manager of his own upwardly mobile fortunes. He’d begged Mac many times to make more of his UQ background and burrow further into the power structure of Australian intelligence -

  a part of the Commonwealth bureaucracy that had been heavily infl uenced by UQ graduates over the years. But Mac wasn’t up for it.

  Didn’t have the ticker for the toadie routine.

  ‘So, Al, you’re leaving us?’ said Tobin, breaking into Mac’s thoughts.

  Mac nodded.

  ‘But according to my debrief, we have a few months more of your expertise available to us, right?’ asked Tobin.

  Mac said nothing. He had a velvet box in his suit jacket that would have to go back to the jeweller, he had a job offer from Sydney Uni that was suddenly looking very shaky and he had a transition agreement with Tobin’s predecessor which he assumed was about to be ripped up in front of his face.

  Davidson had said, Bring in Samrazi then take a break till you leave.

  Urquhart wouldn’t meet Mac’s eyes and Scotty moved his feet awkwardly in the doorway. Not a good sign. Scotty was embarrassed.

  ‘Good, good,’ murmured Tobin, then held out his hand to one of the fl unkeys on the sofa, a Commonwealth bodyguard by the look of him. The bodyguard reached into a black document case and came out with a fi le. He was meat-fi ngered and slow. Tobin almost clicked his fi ngers.

  The fi le was a standard manila folder, with plastic binders along the top. Tobin opened it and looked at Mac, closed it and half threw, half slid it across the desk. Mac had to get out of his chair to pick it up. Tobin creaked back in his leather chair, put a shiny black shoe on the desk and settled his fi ngers in the cathedral position.

  ‘Her name’s Judith Hannah,’ said Tobin, looking down at his two-hundred-dollar tie as Mac opened the fi le. ‘Smart, pretty, going places.

  So God knows what she’s doing with us, eh boys?’

  Tobin’s little gang laughed in that lifeless way of the politically astute.

  Mac opened the fi le and eyed a black and white photo of an attractive blonde in her twenties.

  ‘What’s she done?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Tobin. ‘But we’d like to fi nd out.’

  Mac turned to the fi nal page of Judith Hannah’s fi le. Her last posting was the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, her cover was ‘business development offi cer’ at Southern Scholastic Books. Mac couldn’t remember meeting her.

  ‘She detained?’

  Tobin shook his head. ‘She’s gone, mate.’

  Mac looked up. ‘Where?’

  ‘Gone from the embassy, gone from the compound. Seems to be on the run.’

  Mac looked at the sidekicks for a clue. They deadpanned.

  He looked back to Tobin. ‘From what?’

  ‘Like I said - we need to fi nd that out.’

  ‘From me? Where’re the Feds?’

  Tobin squinted at him. ‘Can’t do that, mate. There’s no crime, we have no complaint. Besides, the AFP already have a bigger network than us in Asia. Why give ‘em a free kick, eh boys?’

  The sidekicks nodded their agreement.

  Mac had what they called an S-2 classifi cation, which meant the Minister for Foreign Affairs had authorised him to carry and use weapons in the conduct of his duties. Because of the way the Service was structured, only a handful of colleagues knew of this secret status.

  But Tobin knew, and sending him to fi nd a girl recruit was like using a cold chisel to fi x a Swiss watch. What this was really about was the special access the AFP had gained to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet during the tenure of the current government, at the expense of intelligence outfi ts like ASIS. This was about empires.

  ‘What about I-team?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Steady on, old man! I said we didn’t know what she’s done.’

  Tobin laughed, then pretended to be collecting himself. ‘That’s why I need someone to just slide in there, have a chat and get things sorted.

  The I-team?! Shit, mate - fair dinkum!’

  Mac ignored Tobin’s song and dance. ‘No one in Jakkers can do this?’

  Tobin gave him a smile that said, Grow up.

  Mac exhaled through his teeth, looked at the ceiling. Fuck!

  Tobin changed his tone, fi xed Mac with a stare. ‘Mate, I need you on a plane tonight.’

  CHAPTER 4

  Mac was forty-two thousand feet over north Queensland when he pulled Judith Hannah’s fi le from his briefcase. He was in b
usiness class on the late-afternoon Qantas fl ight to Jakarta. Executives were sprinkled around the upstairs deck of the 747. Still in his interview suit, Mac sat alone by the window.

  Judith Hannah had a fi rst-class honours degree in law from the University of Sydney and an MA in history from the same place. Mac ran his fi nger down her bio: Protestant. Perfect credentials for the Foreign Service. But she had applied to ASIS and she was accepted on the fi rst go. Must have had a calling or something.

  Many people didn’t realise that ASIS was part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its operatives belonged to the same Commonwealth stable as the diplomats and were identical employment conditions and pay scales. The real difference was that ASIS offi cers had individual contracts with the Director-General which made it easier to sack and isolate them. But they all operated out of Australian embassies and consulates. In the parlance of diplomats, they were part of the same mission.

  If you really wanted to go places in the public service, you applied for a place in the elites of Treasury or the Foreign Service. That’s how you’d get to graduate to PMC - the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet - where all the real glory happened for ambitious public servants.

  If you wanted to get to PMC, you didn’t generally set out to be a spook.

  Mac worked through the pages. Judith Hannah had joined ASIS

  straight out of university in ‘01, then trained in Canberra. She’d had deployments in London, DC, LA, Manila and Jakarta. The Jakkers posting told Mac that Hannah was being groomed for interesting things. Jakarta was to the Australian intelligence community what DC

  was to the diplomats: where the action was; where the Americans and Chinese collided on a full-time basis within the enigmatic context of Indonesia - the world’s largest Muslim nation and one which had never fully committed to the US-Australian view of the world. Jakarta was the centre of the Western world’s counter-terrorism activity and Judith Hannah had been given a shot at it just two years into her ASIS career.

  He kept fl ipping. It seemed to be a largely uncensored fi le, a rare thing in intelligence circles, where someone was always trying to exert their right to keep information secret from someone else. There were performance reports with the expected conclusions: Hannah was a fast learner, earned people’s trust quickly and had very good ad hoc negotiation skills. A cool cucumber.