There was no one untoward or out of place in the eateries. Mac had a very strong sense of those who were professional watchers, and those who were not. All he could see in the Grand Hotel were civilians.
There was a solid patch of wet down his back when Mac got back to the Patrol. Limo had kept the motor running and the air-con felt icy as Mac got back inside. They confabbed: Mac grabbed the Shell map, sketched the layout on the cardboard cover. Then he handed over the operation to Sawtell.
‘I want the girl alive, okay?’
Sawtell barely heard him. He’d turned deadly serious, muttering, the crew all ears. They transformed from laidback boys to killers in a split second. A special forces hallmark.
Limo got the Patrol moving, they drove the two blocks and pulled into the car park behind the hotel. Not even nine in the morning and it was already thirty-eight degrees and dripping humid. Mac’s stomach churned, his right wrist ached, the greasy omelette breakfast wanted to come up.
Limo backed the Patrol up to a hedge and the Berets walked around to the back, opened the doors and got into their weapons cache. Most of the chat was aimed at Hard-on, whose surname was Harding. He seemed to be the key guy. They focused down like Mac wasn’t there.
Mac had done lots of snatches in his career; he was known for it.
But he didn’t want to go into these building situations with a military crew. They trained together, they did this as a job and one loose screw in the unit was going to get Mac shot. Or it would distract one of the military guys and risk him being shot too.
The lads tooled up and walked across the car park. Casual but menacing. They wore stadium jackets and fi eld jackets concealing M4 carbines, a sort of shortened M16. Mac was sure there’d be some stun grenades in there too.
He sat in the driver’s seat with the diesel running. When the Americans were all inside he slowly pulled away from the hedge and rolled towards the lobby area. The place was not busy. One tour bus sat away from the lobby entrance, the driver smoking, reading a newspaper.
Mac looked in, saw the desk guy being marched to the elevators with Sawtell and Spikey. Hard-on scarpered, probably for the stairwell.
Limo stood like a rock in the middle of the lobby, big bulge under his stadium jacket.
Mac had insisted they dispense with fi eld radios on this trip, hence the Nokias. If Garrison was out there with the girl, he was expecting military to come after him and he’d be prepped to pick up the fi eld radio signals.
Mac parked out on the street in the pre-arranged RV. He thought about Minky’s girl and how he was going to introduce that topic to Sawtell.
Four minutes later, Mac’s Nokia trilled. It was Sawtell, displayed as JS.
‘Yep?’
‘We’re here. Nothing,’ said Sawtell, panting slightly. ‘Manager says they checked out last night, in a hurry, no idea where they’re headed.’
‘Is he lying?’
‘Shit, McQueen – that ain’t my thing.’
Mac thought quickly. He could go in there and break the guy real fast, make him remember. But the whole thing was dragging on and there was no telling who was protecting the hotel. It was a big tourism concern, which meant someone was paying for the staff to turn up and not steal from the Westerners. The call might have been made already and Mac didn’t want to be a sitting duck when the POLRI commander or Kopassus colonel turned up.
‘Is there anything there? Anything they’ve left?’
The sounds of Sawtell snapping at Hard-on and Spikey echoed from the background. Sawtell came back on the air. ‘A few things.’
‘Get ‘em,’ said Mac, ‘and ask the manager what they were driving.’
Sawtell came back, said, ‘Silver Accord.’
‘How many?’ asked Mac.
There was a pause, then, ‘Three. Anything else, McQueen?’
‘Yeah,’ said Mac. ‘I want the phone logs from that room.’
‘Got it. See you soon.’
The Berets got to the Patrol at a canter. They piled in, Mac pulled out quickly and drove north, out of town. No music now, adrenaline retreating. After twenty minutes they pulled into a bushy wayside area.
Hard-on pulled out a bed sheet, put it on the ground and opened it.
First impressions: Mac could smell the Old Spice wafting off the sheet. He saw several empty steel bandage containers and a ripped-up chewing gum wrapper, shredded thin and purposefully, bits of loose foil everywhere. A surviving piece of green paper said BARTOOK
SPECIAL MINT. There was a paperback book in Tagalog. Not much.
Sawtell had the phone logs. There were fi fteen outbound calls, made in the last nine days. One number wasn’t like the others.
Mac looked at it. Couldn’t get the picture. He grabbed his Nokia, dialled a number in Jakarta, Telekom Indonesia.
No connection.
Mac swore. He’d forgotten the state of the Indonesian phone system. Telekom Indonesia installed cellular towers where the tourists were starting to come, but the locals had no coverage even a few clicks out of the towns.
They drove back towards Palopo. Mac used a pay phone on the outskirts. Called an old mate at TI, an engineer called Dougie Foster.
They swapped greetings, then Mac said, ‘Mate, I’ve got some numbers.
Can you run them?’
‘Shoot.’
Mac read the numbers. The lone wrong ‘un was a Manila area code. A silent address. Mac asked for as much info as he could get and Dougie told him to hang on. After a few minutes he came back. ‘Got a pen?’
Mac wrote it down. He had the telecom exchange that the number would have been connected to, and Dougie gave him an area: Intramuros, a suburb on Manila Bay that Mac knew well.
The other fourteen numbers were closer to home. Dougie said,
‘You’re in luck, Mac – there’s only eight numbers on that series.’
Mac wrote it down. They were heading north again, for Tenteno.
CHAPTER 9
They made good time on the road to Tenteno. Limo drove the Patrol, Hard-on rode shotgun. Spikey was in the middle of the back seat, Mac and Sawtell either side. Mac’s wrist was now bandaged and Limo had slipped him some anti-infl ammatories. But he agreed with Mac – a chipped bone in there somewhere, and the only cure was going to be resting the thing, something that was not going to happen on this trip.
They’d be arriving in Tenteno after dark and Mac wanted to case the place, have a chat to whoever was around. He wasn’t expecting miracles.
This was Sulawesi, the world’s eleventh largest island and basically unpopulated. Fishing villages dotted the coastline and highland tribes did their thing in the interior. It was all rainforest and mountains, and people trying to win forestry and mining concessions. If the trail went dead in Tenteno, Mac would give the intel guys in Jakarta a chance to come up with some piece of genius. That would set the hounds running.
If the mole was in Jakarta, he or she would make a move. Which would give Mac a chance to pull a counter- ambush.
But the trail didn’t go dead.
Mac and Spikey went into the general store on Tenteno’s main road as soon as they’d driven around the small lakeside town. The store owner was helpful, but didn’t know anything. Spikey kept it calm, doing small talk. Mac watched the owner clench and unclench his left fi st. He only did it once but it betrayed nerves.
