Over the years he’d acclimatised to the fact that there were American soldiers, Indonesian spies and British diplomats who knew more about his real occupation than some of the Aussies he had lunch with once a week. That was cover-within-cover, the Russian Doll effect. It meant deceiving co-workers in a casual way, but now Joe was dragging him into a whole new level of internal deceit. Mac’s employer was DFAT, but for this operation he’d be taking orders from PMC, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
PMC was the super-department in Canberra, the place where the truly power-obsessed bureaucrats, soldiers, spies and economic advisers wanted to be. It was the card that trumped everything else, even DFAT, Treasury and Defence. PMC was the only department in the Australian government where all initiatives and policies trickled down from one politician – the Prime Minister. Every other department’s senior bureaucrats worked on the ‘capture and control’ method of bending a new minister to their will. PMC was the one department where you didn’t have to justify your expenses claim or be concerned about staying in some four-star hovel. You fl ew in the front of the plane, you stayed in hotel rooms that were more than one room.
Mac fi nished his green tea, trying to get to the bottom of his nagging paranoia. He didn’t like high-ranking politicians meddling in the operations side of things. And he didn’t like it being the politicians who wanted him to lie to his colleagues. If he wanted to deceive someone, he’d make that call. The fact that Joe was using a new pre- paid mobile meant he was already operating clandestinely in the Manila embassy too, trying to defeat the ASIS listening posts. Joe and Mac had become a Loop of Two, the second easiest asset to deny, after the Loop of One.
Leaving some money on the table, Mac unplugged the Nokia and made for the front doors.
One of the Aussies who had been supporting the grieving woman looked up as he passed and Mac stopped.
‘Need anything?’ asked Mac.
‘Sister,’ said the bloke, shaking his head, tears welling in bloodshot eyes. ‘Gone, mate. Bronnie. Fucking gone!’
The woman – Mac guessed the mother – started wailing again and put her face in her hands, her back heaving with the sobs. Mac saw that the two blokes, both mid-twenties, were covered in dirt, blood and grazes. Their sneakers were cut up and there was dust and dirt through their hair. They’d been up all night, guessed Mac, searching through rubble.
Mac put his hand out. ‘Alan McQueen – Foreign Affairs.’
‘Dave,’ the young man replied. ‘David Bruce. This is my brother-in-law Gavin Taylor – Bron’s husband. And my mum.’
The mum looked at him, bereft, but Gavin looked away, clearly one of those blokes who didn’t like to cry. Mac took it in: an Aussie family on a cheapie holiday and suddenly they’re minus a daughter, down one sister, missing a wife.
‘Bron’s eight months pregnant. It’ll be the fi rst grandchild on either side,’ added Dave.
Mac said he’d do what he could and gave them a card. Then he wrote David’s hotel number on the back of another card. As he did so he had a fl ash of the man who trained him at induction: Rod Scott.
Scotty had once told him, over eight or nine beers in Basrah, that spooks grew cynical because they gave their loyalty to an idea for too long at the expense of loyalty to their people. The penny fi nally dropped, right there, looking at this mother and her grief. Something shifted and Mac realised that PMC only trumped other ideas, it didn’t trump human beings.
Bronnie! Shit, every Australian knew a Bronnie.
Mac saw his tail the moment he left Poppies. Close-cropped sandy hair, big build that fi lled out a black trop shirt, Levis and well-worn black Hanwags – the European version of Hi-Tecs. Mac had him as intel or military. He stood amongst a bunch of locals and tourists against the roadblock barriers on Legian Street. As soon as Mac made him, the bloke turned away slightly.
Moving across the street until he was at the bloke’s six o’clock, Mac started walking towards the tail really fast. If the bloke was a pro he’d look away from Mac for at least eight seconds before taking another butcher’s, and when he did Mac would be right there. Mac wasn’t trying to be dramatic. The bloke had a black pouch around his waist similar to that which Jenny wore when off-duty in Jakkers or Manila. To ninety-nine out of a hundred people it looked like a tourist’s bumbag, but Mac knew it as a disguised handgun holster and he would rather face that head-on than have the bloke behind him for the rest of the morning.
As he speed-walked up behind the tail, Mac shifted to his four o’clock to get further into his blind spot. Three, two, one… Mac didn’t slow, walked at speed to his tail’s two o’clock as the heavyset man turned to his left to case Mac again. The guy’s torso tensed and he craned his neck slightly – all people did that when they expected to see something and didn’t.
‘Gotta watch that, mate,’ said Mac.
The tail snapped back, eyes wide through his sunnies, his hands dropping straight to the pouch.
‘Lotta thieves round here, champ – good money for a handgun,’ added Mac.
They looked into one another’s eyes through their sunnies. The tail was Mac’s height but had another fi ve kilos on Mac’s one-oh-fi ve. He was a front rower to Mac’s centre. Mac glimpsed a POLRI on the other side of the barrier and looked back at the tail. The bloke’s eyes darted to the POLRI, and then Mac saw the tension run out of that thick neck as he smiled, showing lots of small teeth and a ton of gum.
‘Ah, Australian!’ said the bloke with a thick Russian accent.
‘Einstein, right?’
The Russian threw his head back, laughed at the sky. ‘You weren’t supposed to be seeing me, fuck the mother!’
They sat at the window table of a bar on Legian Street, Ari – the Russian – with a Tiger beer, Mac with a glass of Pellegrino and a chunk of lime.
‘So, Ari, you’re a little out of your way?’
Ari chewed on gum, looked out at the diminished tourist fl ow on Legian, did one of those Russian shrugs that Mac always took to be the start of a fi b. The Russian intelligence services had an enormous presence in East Asia and the subcontinent, but their activities out of Jakarta were usually confi ned to countering the Chinese, Japanese and Indians along with shadowing the Americans and British. Mac and his peers from Indonesian intelligence and the CIA knew that the Ruskies were around but weren’t used to confronting them.
‘Indonesia is such an interesting country, don’t you fi nd, McQueen?’
Ari had used his real name but Mac let it go, since for this investigation he was operating under Alan McQueen, his card the standard DFAT goods with the gold bunting and the south Jakarta address of the Australian Embassy. In the general run of things, intelligence people honoured each other’s aliases and to use their real name unbidden could be seen as aggression.
‘Bali got very interesting last night,’ said Mac. ‘Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’
Ari paused, allowed the translation to sink in, then laughed. ‘I see, I see.’
Mac fl inched as Ari reached for the holster-bag so the Russian slowed his hand, turned his fi ngers into a pincer and pulled the side fl ap open. Mac saw a packet of cigarettes and Ari pulled them out along with a cheap red plastic lighter.
‘Guess what I’m saying, Ari, is that you’re here for the bombing.
And since it looks like my country is going to be in a joint investigation with the Indons, I’m going to be getting a lot of information you’d like to get your hands on.’
Ari nodded as he took his fi rst draw and then held the cigarette upright between his thumb and index fi nger. He had a wide face with big slabs of cheekbone and a surprisingly childish mouth that moved constantly into new emotions. His eyes were ice-pale and he had a medium-sized gold crucifi x dangling beneath his trop shirt on a tanned hairless chest. Mac saw the crucifi x had the Orthodox Church titulus of INBI across the portion where the short plank crossed the upright. On a Catholic cross it would be INRI.
‘We might have to be talking, yes?’ said Ari, smoke drifting out of his nose. ‘You are scratching my back and I then am scratching your back, yes?’
Mac hesitated, and then put his hand out. They shook and swapped mobile phone numbers before Mac got up to leave.
‘If you’re working with the Indonesian police,’ said Ari, ‘perhaps you can tell me: are they checking passports?’
