‘The EFIC guys turned this down as a loan guarantee,’ continued Davidson. ‘In fact, they sent it back three times. They don’t want to write it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Initially, they didn’t like the end-user certifi cation. And when the deal boomeranged the fi rst time, they made an inquiry with the Organisation,’ said Davidson, referring to ASIO. ‘And it got handed around the community, and what with one thing and another, the chaps saw it and asked EFIC not to write the guarantee.’
Mac raised an eyebrow. The ‘chaps’ referred to people like Mac and Davidson who worked at ASIS. If they’d asked EFIC not to do the guarantee, there was probably a good reason.
‘It was a lucky catch,’ said Davidson. ‘Someone in Jakkers saw Bennelong mentioned as part of a power- generation trade show, realised that the consortium was about to announce Bennelong as a full technology partner – on an equity basis – and they got on to the Tech Desk in Canberra.’
Australia’s SIS head offi ce had a Technology Desk that tracked harmful and helpful technology and the various incarnations of the companies it existed in as they were merged, acquired and moved offshore. The idea was to track the technologies, not the corporate packaging they moved around in.
‘And what was there?’ asked Mac, interest triggered. This was what he was trained for.
‘Well the guys threw it around and it turned out that Bennelong was called Thomas Technology back in the early 1990s. Before that, they’d been subject to a management buy-out of a specialist division of a small outfi t called Betnell Corporation. Heard of them?’
Mac had. Betnell was to the eighties and early nineties what Halliburton was to the 2000s: a massive contractor to the US
Department of Defense and a global builder of large-scale public infrastructure projects.
‘What did Betnell’s specialist division do?’ asked Mac, his antennae now fully alert.
‘They built the control software for hydro power stations and coal-fi red power stations -‘
‘Yes.’
‘- and nuclear power stations.’
Mac sipped on his coffee. ‘Okay.’
‘Yes, okay. But what we think Thomas Technology ended up with as a legacy item after the MBO was all the sequence code for a reactor called the Type-3.’
‘And what was that, Tony?’
‘The Type-3 was Betnell’s reactor that enabled uranium enrichment.’
A pause opened between them and Mac let his eyes drift to a man reading the Australian Financial Review three tables away. ‘That’s a serious reactor.’
‘Yeah, but at the time, Betnell was being investigated by the audit offi ce in Washington for some commercial irregularities.’
Mac chuckled; commercial irregularities in the Washington context were when you defrauded the United States government.
‘And besides,’ said Davidson, ‘GE Corporation apparently had a cheaper, better enrichment reactor and it could be built in half the time. So Ex-Im Bank were writing loan guarantees for the GE reactors like they were going out of fashion. And don’t forget that the French and Russians were building these reactors for clients too.’
‘So the Type-3 withers on the vine, GE steals the market, but the code is still there?’ said Mac.
‘Forgotten, unloved,’ said Davidson. ‘But quite usable.’
‘The code?’
‘Yeah – had a chat to the Tech Desk and it seems that these sequence codes for enrichment reactors are so complex that the code written twenty years ago is still being used. There was no point in reinventing the wheel at every upgrade in reactor types, so the original sequence code still works on modern enrichment reactors.’
Mac was now totally enlisted.
‘So, fi fteen or twenty years later,’ said Davidson, ‘we have a private power consortium in Indonesia bringing in Bennelong not simply as a contractor but as an equity participant, and there is a difference.’
‘You think this consortium is after the uranium-enrichment code?’
‘I’d like to cross it off my list.’
‘So, the fi rm had a word in the shell-like with EFIC, and they spiked it?’ asked Mac, slightly confused.
‘Yep, EFIC understood.’
‘So?’
‘We got overruled,’ said Davidson, shaking his head.
‘Politicians?’
‘Who else? It was sent back to EFIC four days later as NIA.’
If the accountants, bankers and lawyers at EFIC didn’t want to write a loan guarantee, the National Interest Account was an override device from the Prime Minister’s offi ce, which held that the deal in question was in the national interest.
‘So someone’s got a friend in cabinet?’ asked Mac.
‘Damned right. But anyway,’ said Davidson, leaning back and visibly relaxing, ‘before the chaps could grab hold of Urquhart and kick up a stink at PMC I mentioned that we might let the horse run, see where it leads us, eh? Have a peek into who these people are and what they want. With me, Macca?’
Mac nodded. ‘With you.’
‘How’re Jen and Rachel, by the way?’ asked Davidson with an avuncular smile as the Qantas Club steward took his plates away.
Mac warmed to the new conversation. Tony Davidson and his wife, Violet, had never had children and they doted on the kids of the younger intel offi cers. ‘They’re great, thanks, Tony,’ said Mac.
‘Jen’s okay about all this?’
‘Yeah, good as gold,’ said Mac, avoiding the point that he was the one who wasn’t necessarily okay with going back in the fi eld and being away from his girls for extended periods.
‘She’s okay about a bit of travel?’
‘Yeah,’ croaked Mac, not liking where this was going.
‘Good,’ said Davidson. ‘Because this power consortium is meeting with Bennelong in Jakkers, Friday arvo.’
Mac winced. It was Thursday morning.
CHAPTER 26
Finding himself a rear bulkhead seat on the southbound AirTrain, Mac pulled out the fi le that Davidson had slipped into his document satchel in the Qantas lounge. The operation was called Mainstreet and his cover would be Richard Davis, his old textbook salesman identity, only this time he’d be spruiking himself as a former EFIC operative who could make things happen in Canberra.
Mac fl ipped through the business cards. His fi rm was Davis Associates and the landline routed to the ASIS front of Southern Scholastic Books in Sydney, while the mobile number went directly to the Commonwealth secure SIM that Davidson had included in his starter pack. There was a new Commonwealth Bank Visa credit card issued in Richard Davis’s name, a printout confi rming his booking at the Shangri-La and a folder of business-class tickets for Emirates, the eight pm fl ight that night. The tickets suggested Davidson had intended to apply time pressure, not give him time to equivocate, and, more importantly, not allow Jen to kick up a fuss.
There were people at the end of his carriage but no one was interested in him, so Mac pulled out the dossiers and had a quick look. The Bennelong folder had a brief history of the fi rm. As Davidson had said, it had grown out of Melbourne defence contractor Thomas Technology, changing its name to Bennelong Systems in 1999 when it shifted to Sydney.
The two principals of Bennelong were Alex Grant, a former engineer in the RAAF who had done business studies at MIT Sloan, gone to work for Betnell’s Australian arm and then been part of the management buy-out in 1992. Partnering him was Michael Vitogiannis, a former head of sales and marketing at IBM Australia and the owner of a venture capital fi rm called Vitogiannis Partners.
