Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘You know,’ continued Mac, ‘you go through all that shit to break one bunch of slavers, and you think you’re not getting anywhere, right? Well you’ve probably made thirty or forty parents real happy, huh? Gotta take the positives, mate.’

  Keith was looking in his stein again. Slumped.

  ‘So don’t worry ‘bout this prick …’ Mac pointed his steak knife at Garvs. ‘He’ll get slapped, don’t you worry ‘bout that.’

  Keith laughed. ‘Thanks for that.’

  Mac gave him the wink as he went back to his mates, then turned back to Garvs, who was making a face like Who’s the fucking boy scout?

  Mac swigged his beer, pointed at Garvs with the knife. ‘You behave yourself.’

  Mac had never fi gured out how it worked, the whole organisational thing. Garvs and Mac had started in the Service about the same time, trained together, always been deployed in similar areas and with similar goals. But right from the get-go Garvs had been pegged as management, while Mac was always going to be the operations guy.

  Garvs had an offi ce and a team. Mac had assignments - Mac was the team.

  He’d been so busy, for so long, that he had barely noticed the transformation in their friendship. One moment he and Garvs were bullshitting their heads off to get to the Malaysian F1 Grand Prix for a weekend on the piss courtesy of a Tommi Suharto company. Next thing, Garvs is sitting there shovelling him manure about Judith Hannah, shrugging too hard, giving the old gee-whiz look while knowing full well that Mac looked straight through all that shit for a living.

  ‘Mate, let’s make this the last one, huh?’ said Garvs abruptly.

  He must have clocked Mac’s surprise. It wasn’t even ten o’clock and Anton Garvey was piking. Garvs was not the kind of man to run screaming from a cold beer.

  ‘Not like you, Garvs. Doctor’s orders?’

  Garvs called the bierfrau over. ‘Nah, mate, but I’ve got you on the morning fl ight into Sydney. You know how early you have to leave.’

  The Qantas morning fl ight out of Jakarta departed at 4.10 am and went through Singers before heading south. The drive to Soekarno-Hatta took an hour, and on a bad morning, clearing security could take an hour. Mac had drawn the crow.

  ‘Not trying to get rid of me, are you, mate?’

  Garvs’ face told Mac that’s exactly what was happening. ‘Nah, Macca. If that was the case you’d have been on the night fl ight.’

  The beers arrived. ‘I have to talk to Hannah. You know that, don’t you?’ said Mac.

  ‘Don’t worry - we’ve got it from here,’ said Garvey.

  Mac remembered when ‘we’ used to have him in it.

  Garvey had changed. Or had Mac? He remembered one of the fi rst times they’d got on the turps together, in KL. It was one of those embassy functions where they pull out the big TV screen, fi re up the barbie and turn on the booze for the Bledisloe Cup - Kiwis and Aussies on the razz. And locals looking on amazed that two nationalities could stand there giving each other a total shellacking and be laughing about it. Garvs and Mac had bonded on the schools thing since they’d both gone to a St Joseph’s school: Garvs in Sydney, Mac in Brisbane. Mac had decided to have some fun with the bloke, said, ‘Shit, if you’re a real Mick then what happened to the Mac at the front of your name? Not one of them closet Prods, are ya, mate?’

  Garvs had come back fast as you like, said, ‘Mate, if we dropped the Mac off your name we might be getting closer to the truth, huh?’

  That was pretty much how their friendship had continued. Always taking the piss. No one ever getting the last word.

  Now, Mac’s skin was crawling. He pushed again. ‘So who’s we, mate? This a Tobin thing? Urquhart?’

  Garvey snorted through his nostrils. Shook his head as if to say, This is all too tedious. ‘Oh, by the way, Macca. We found your Nokia. Bus driver. We got it pouched in from Makassar.’

  Garvey pulled the blue phone out of his breast pocket, like he’d just remembered it was there. Threw it on the table.

  Mac smiled. ‘Damned things - got a mind of their own, huh, Garvs?’

  Garvey stared at him too long. ‘Mate, the listening post is for your own safety, you know that. You take things so personally.’

  Mac could have made an allegation about the Minky ambush, could have pushed the conversation into there being a mole, or at the very least someone on the Garrison payroll. Could have got on his high horse and asked how that was contributing to his safety.

  But he didn’t. His friendship with Garvs had run out of gas, right there, right in front of him, after knowing the bloke for almost fi fteen years. Garvs wasn’t going to let him talk to Hannah, wasn’t going to let him stay in Jakkers for a second longer than he had to. For the fi rst time in his career Mac was not really being debriefed. He was being dismissed.

  Mac thought back to the warning Banger Jordan had given them about offi ce guys being the most dangerous of all. He realised that it wasn’t the fact that Garvs had become an offi ce guy that had thrown him. What got his defensive instincts going was that Anton Garvey wanted a bigger offi ce.

  CHAPTER 16

  Garvs left before fi nishing the last beer, the farewells were hollow.

  Looking around the Lagerhaus, Mac thought about old times, thought about mates, thought about another drink. A hand waved from the bar. Keith, pointing down at the taps. Mac gave thumbs-up, thought, What the hell: last time in Jakkers with a false passport, I may as well go out with a king-size hangover. A real Barry Crocker.

  He grabbed the Nokia, fi red it up as Keith approached with two steins in one hand. Mac pegged him as similar to himself: a small-town bloke who hadn’t been quite good enough to play footy for a living, so he’d had to fi nd something useful to do with himself.

  Keith plonked down, slid the Becks over. Put out a hand: ‘Keith Cavanaugh.’

  They shook, keeping it soft.

  ‘Richard Davis.’

  They chatted, Keith had some stuff to get off his chest: like how do you stop the sex-slavers with all these Aussies and Yanks arriving with their hard currency and willing to pay a thousand dollars to rape a child? How was a mere cop from Victoria supposed to tear down the police, military and politicians who were either behind the trade or protecting it?

  Keith kept shaking his head, not in a good way. Some of the stuff he’d been exposed to was well beyond how they did it in the Mallee. He had a fi ancee, but working up here was putting him off having kids.

  Keith wanted to talk about ‘this thing’ that had gone pear-shaped.

  Mac knew about the Lombok incident, even though Keith only alluded to it. In August a combined AFP-FBI-POLRI transnational sexual servitude taskforce had fi nally cornered a gang of child slavers in an old factory. The Aussie and American cops had only got that far because of the amount of information they’d kept from their POLRI colleagues.

  In the last hours before the planned raid, the slavers were tipped off. When the Aussies and Yanks got there, the place was already ablaze, destroyed, the ‘evidence’ with it. The evidence in this case was an estimated eighty-three children, both genders, ages ranging from four to twelve.

  Mac only knew how distressing it had been for the cops because his friend Jenny Toohey had described fi nding a dumpster behind the factory. It was fi lled with soft toys.

  Women cops had an ability to turn that sort of thing into a stronger resolve to catch the bastards. Men found it much harder for some reason; hit the piss, got depressed, didn’t see out their rotation.

  Jenny had been up here for years. She was one tough girl.

  ‘Take it easy, champ,’ Mac said as Keith shook and left to get back to his boys. He’d bet Keith already had an application in for stress leave. This just wasn’t his go.

  Mac leaned back, had another look at the Nokia. Three messages: the fi rst two from Garvs - offi ce shit.

  The last had been left little more than an hour ago.

  Diane!

  His heart raced as he listene
d, fl ustered. Diane was in Jakarta, staying with her dad at the British compound. Had some big client to schmooze. Mac smiled, he could have listened to that voice for hours.

  Then came the clincher. ‘Richard, I didn’t hear back from you about my, er, message. Did you get it? I’ll be back on Thursday - can we talk then? We could go for a drink, right darling?’

  Relief poured through Mac and he laughed at the ceiling - he adored the way she called him ‘darling’.

  Mac tried to sober up. Diane thought he was in Sydney. He’d surprise her, but not now. He had no idea who was sitting at what listening posts.

  He ordered a coffee, asked for Saba. The bar manager came over, went to a phone, came back, pointed at a small CCTV camera up near where the Glenfi ddich and Grey Goose lived. Mac looked at it for four seconds. Looked away.

  Sipping on the coffee, Mac waited. Saba’s bodyguard came to the entry of the toilet corridor wearing a white trop shirt that didn’t hide the gun bulge as well as his last ensemble. He looked around slowly, glanced briefl y at Mac, fl icked his head very slightly.

  Mac moved to the corridor and down to the security door. Took the pat-down and scraping behind the ears. They walked into the offi ce, out through the door that Sawtell had walked through fi ve days earlier.

  The room they entered looked like a store for booze and snacks.

  It was cool, musty. Behind piles of cartons the bodyguard opened a security door using a key from a retractable key chain and hit the fl uorescent lights. There were a dozen black strongboxes bolted to the wall, each one the size of a mid-range TV set. The bodyguard made straight for the one marked 9, pulled out his key chain again, rattled through some keys and opened the box. Then he walked outside, standing where he could see Mac. He snarled slightly, reminding Mac of the small detail: this guy’s uglier brother was a professional cage fi ghter in Manila.

  Mac slid out the drawer on its rails, lifted the lid which was hinged at the rear of the drawer. In the box was a typical assortment of passports, drivers’ licences, credit cards and guns. There was also a clear plastic seal-lock bag fi lled with cash. He grabbed the pile of Singapore dollars, and gave it a quick fan. He reckoned maybe three thousand. Trousered it. He grabbed a third of his rupiah, stashed that too.

  The passports, drivers’ licences and credit cards were strapped into single units, held together lengthwise with rubber bands. He picked up one. The rubber band held a small stack of cards in the name of Brandon Collier, Vice president, Sales, Orion Forestry Consulting (Aust.). There was a passport, a NSW driver’s licence and a Visa card.

  Mac had always worked under two main identities in this part of the world, but this was not one of them. He’d never used Collier as a name and the Service didn’t know it existed. Most people in his business had some sort of fail-safe identity and credit card. Some had their ‘pensions’ stashed in credit card accounts under these names, which ran out of banks in the Cook Islands or Fiji.

  Mac didn’t have a ‘pension’. What he had was a valid incorporation of Orion Forestry Consulting in Singapore, with a DBS business Visa card in the name of Collier and Orion. The bank account was legit, so was the company. An old associate of his - Benny Haskell - had done the incorporation. Benny was one of the accountants who worked on the original incarnation of AUSTRAC, the Australian federal government’s money-tracking neural-net. Now he had a thriving banking-domicile practice, with an Australian solicitor, in Singapore.

  Benny had spruiked the taxation benefi ts of incorporating in Singers but Mac had just wanted the banking secrecy laws. Besides, when his days with the Service were done, forestry consulting might be his fallback gig. There was certainly enough work to go around if things didn’t work out as a university lecturer.

  He trousered the whole bundle, went to another bundle and pulled out a laminated ID card. It was an Australian Customs Service ID in the name of Richard Davis, allowing him access to bond stores and restricted parts of airports and container ports.

  Picking a black toilet bag out of the bin, he motioned with his hand to the bodyguard. The guy swaggered over.

  ‘The Heckler, thanks, champ. Plus a clip,’ said Mac.

  The bodyguard pulled out the Heckler & Koch P9S in the black nylon hip rig. Picked up one clip.

  ‘Can you load it?’ asked Mac.

  The bodyguard sneered, handed Mac the clip. Mac loaded it himself from the box of Winchester .45s in the bin. In Saba’s bar only one person ever touched a fi rearm, and that was Saba’s bodyguard. Mac wouldn’t get his Heckler until he was standing in the back alley.

  Mac stood on the back steps, unzipped the black toilet bag. The bodyguard put the Heckler in it, looked left and right, stood back and shut the door.

  Mac walked the blocks to the Aussie compound. He had a mild sense of being followed but it felt like light surveillance. Felt like Garvey doing something for Mac’s own safety.

  A knock sounded at the door at 2.15 am. Mac was showered, shaved and had only a mid-sized hangover. It was Garvey’s lackey, a bloke called Matt. They piled into a red Commodore, hit the airport freeway.

  Matt was about thirty, tall, Anglo, educated. He was confi dent without being full of himself - a good lad to put on Mac’s case. Mac wondered if he had someone on the plane with him, or another tail waiting at Singers. Wondered if Garvs was just testing Matt, to see if he had the ticker.

  They parked in the consular annexe of Soekarno-Hatta, went through the consular security clearance and into the consular ticketing for Qantas. The girl behind the counter was a pretty local and Mac hammed it up with a back injury, trying to get an upgrade to Singers.

  The federal government had an eight-hour policy for travelling business class: you fl ew under that and you fl ew in the back, unless you were SES. Jakarta-Singers was way under eight hours.

  The girl didn’t smile, didn’t react. But she gave him the upgrade.

  ‘Wish they did that for me,’ said Matt.

  They walked into the main concourse. It was 3.20 am but the place was packed. Lines for the Qantas fl ights stretched out of view.

  Kids moaned, dragged on their mums’ arms. Other kids snored on top of bags on the trolleys. They passed a group of Aussies with a state hockey team emblem across their cabin luggage. Mac slipped the wink to one of the blokes. ”Zit going, champ?’

  Mac walked towards the huge security clearance section that transitioned passengers from the public concourse into immigration and the airline lounges. It stretched the width of the building and looked like a tollgate for humans. POLRI stalked back and forth with the low-hanging peaks on their caps. German shepherds, beagles, metal detector wands. Colt M4 carbines hanging across their chests.

  Mac made a note of the M4. The Indon government’s anti-terrorism unit, Delta 88, had been equipped by the US government with fl ash new toys such as the M4 assault rifl e and Mac was glad to see they were actually being deployed rather than sold on by a general with a Ferrari habit.

  Mac turned to Matt, shook his hand. ‘Thanks, champ. Let you get back to sleep now, huh?’

  Matt smiled. They both knew Matt was going straight back to a listening post where he’d give regular updates to Garvs.

  Mac had replaced his wheelie bag with a small black Puma backpack that had been lying in his room. Inside was the Service Nokia and the toilet bag, minus the Heckler. That was in the mail with his ovies and Hi-Tecs, posted from the Australian diplomatic compound by the night manager, Conzo. Conzo was an Indon who Mac had helped out a few times with money after his betting sprees at the Pulo Mas track in North Jakarta had gone awry.

  So when Mac gave Conzo a package at midnight and asked him to mail it to Mac’s PO box in Jakarta, Conzo was straight on it. He parcelled it and addressed it, put a franking stamp on it and put it in the mail bag, all the while telling Mac about his latest losing streak at Pulo Mas.

  The 38s were too big so Mac asked the shop girl to bring him the bone-coloured chinos in the 36. The girl swung the pants over
the change room door. The 36s fi tted. He left them on, along with his new navy blue polo shirt, before heading into the Ralph Lauren shop barefoot. Sitting on a fi tting seat he asked the girl to bring over a pair of dark brown boat shoes - size 10. Asked for a couple of pairs of socks and got a brown leather belt.

  It all fi tted, it was all good. Mac asked the girl if she could also hook a pair of dark blue 38 chinos and an XL white cotton Oxford shirt from the racks.

  She was quick. He put his backpack in front of him on the counter to shield the transaction, put his blue chinos and white shirt in the pack. His old clothes went into a shop bag. He sauntered out into the giant mall that Soekarno-Hatta had become and walked straight up to his tail, an Aussie Vietnamese girl in a red Nike T-shirt, blue jeans and runners who was pretending to read the Economist.

  Mac sat down beside her. She was mid-twenties, just learning her stuff. ‘Don’t tell me - too smart for the federal cops, too good-looking for the diplomats, huh?’ he said.

  She looked up from the magazine, said, ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The spying thing? Thought about the cops, thought about foreign service, but settled on this. Can make a real difference, right?’

  The girl feigned confusion. She was good at it. ‘Umm, sorry -

  think you got the wrong person.’

  She had a nice voice. Low register, good long vowels. Smart but sensitive.

  ‘Your mum doesn’t get it, right? You can’t tell her what you do, but you can’t get engaged to that lawyer she’s lined you up with. Holy shit! Not the lawyer.’

  Mac was going for the mum connection. When he’d fi rst seen her he’d noticed a slight pronation of the left ankle. In gait psychogenics the Israelis would say she had an ongoing dispute with her mother.

  Mac guessed it was to do with having some bullshit corporate cover yet a total lack of interest in suits.

  The girl turned to him slightly, said, ‘Like I told you, mister, you got the wrong person.’

  Mac was almost there. ‘By the way, the worst thing you can do in this business if you’re a girl? Sleep with a colleague. Doesn’t matter how profound it was, the blokes will call you a slut.’