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 business 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
