The small whiteboard sign above the arrivals crowds simply said DAVIS and Mac made for it with his double suit bag and wheelie cabin luggage.
‘Edwin, how you doing, champ?’ said Mac, handing the suit bag to the Shangri-La driver, a well-groomed Filipino in a black chauffeur’s uniform and an Errol Flynn mo.
‘Good, thanks, Mr Richard – and how are you?’
‘Fit as a fox, thanks, mate.’
They made small talk as Edwin – something of an institution at the Shangri-La – navigated the black Mercedes-Benz S-class through the morning traffi c crush and fi lled him in on Indonesian politics.
‘SBY is good for country, but poor person don’t understand why it good,’ admitted Edwin. ‘Easy for, how you say, popular politician to promise anything to poor people.’
Mac gave a wry chuckle. Indonesia was in its fi rst full cycle of democratic government and they were realising that a reforming leader like Susilo Bambang Yudhuyono might be good in the medium term, but such a president made himself vulnerable to populist demagogues. ‘Sounds like Australia, mate. No difference.’
They took over an hour to get to the Lar, where Edwin took them around the back, into the hotel garage, allowing Mac to enter from the porter’s entrance.
The vast lobby and lounge area was busy with Malaysian businessmen, American oil guys and Aussie miners. Phones trilled, front desk people slapped thirteen-page bills on the counter, and Hong Kong bankers’ wives wandered behind porters’ trolleys laden with pink alligator-hide luggage sets.
Edwin hooked the Cutler suit bag on a porter’s trolley and Mac fl icked him some greenbacks, smiled and said, ‘Take it easy, mate.’
Edwin had once been a cop in Manila and was very useful to have on your side in a place like Jakkers.
‘Cheers,’ replied Edwin, trying to get his best Strine accent into the delivery.
Mac cased the lobby, looking for eyes, clothes and gaits that didn’t belong. There was a large easel alongside the massive front desk advertising the Powering Asia conference and welcoming delegates.
He waited for the senior manager guy and moved forward, clocked the name-tag and gave him a wink.
‘How’s it going, Steve?’
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘Davis,’ he said, sliding his passport and Visa card across the black marble top. ‘I’ll check in now for my wife as well, though she’s not here yet.’
Steve opened the passport, looked at his screen and smiled.
‘Welcome, Mr Davis. Mrs Davis checked in twenty minutes ago so we won’t require your passport.’
Mac baulked for a split second, then recovered. ‘Bloody women, eh Steve? The one time they’re not late it’s because they’re early.’
Steve laughed, handed him a cardboard folder with a door card in it. ‘You’re in suite fi fteen-oh-eight, fi fteenth fl oor. One of the porters will take you up,’ he said, and clicked his fi ngers.
Mac stood outside the room, took the Cutler suit bag, and paid off the porter, saying he wanted to surprise his wife. Taking a couple of deep breaths, he got himself into character. He hadn’t been on an op for almost two years, and he hadn’t done the Fred-and-Wilma for six or seven. All he knew about his ‘wife’ was that she was a former pro who was now also freelancing. That, and the fact that her code name was Primrose.
The porter rattled away to the elevator bank and, as soon as he was out of sight, Mac knocked three times, then leaned on the door so his hand was over the spy hole.
A female voice from behind the door said, ‘Sentinel,’ and Mac replied, ‘Primrose.’
The door swung away from Mac, revealing the new Mrs Davis.
She wasn’t a dog and she wasn’t a primrose. She was a product of MI6 and her name was Diane Ellison.
CHAPTER 28
Silence strained between them. It felt like forever.
She was still beautiful, blonde, lightly tanned, with amazing sapphire eyes and a classic oval face.
Diane broke the stand-off, diving into character with a Daaarling, how are you? as she moved forward into a hug and a kiss. She smelled of expensive body wash and German toothpaste and when she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him into the suite she looked at him in a way that spelled trouble.
Mac kept walking while Diane checked the hallway and then shut the door. He threw his suit bag across the sofa, put the wheelie against the wall and turned as Diane approached him with a smile, her white tank top accentuating her pale eyes. As ever, there was hardly any make-up on Diane’s face and she could still look at him as if she clocked every rude thought he’d ever had and some he hadn’t even thought of yet.
She pointed at the plasma screen TV on the wall and they moved into the bedroom, which had already been female-colonised with a large overnight bag, its contents sprawled across the bed.
‘Hi, darling, gee it’s so good to see you,’ he said with enthusiasm as he looked up at the ceiling.
‘God, Richard, don’t leave me alone again, you hear?’ she said in that plummy, spoiled English-rose accent that Mac had once fallen for.
He pointed to the bed, made a face. Diane smirked, nodded. Then she gave a little squeal. ‘Ouch! Shit, what is wrong with this fucking bed?! Oh my God! It’s a fucking cockroach!’
‘How dare they?’ said Mac, then made a fuss of going into the bathroom. He got the shower running and then made silently for the main door, holding up three fi ngers at Diane. He whisked down the fi re stairs two at a time and came out around the corner from the elevator banks in the retail sub-level of the hotel. Walking to the end of the bars and restaurants, he moved quickly up the guests’ stairs and into the large lobby lounge from the end opposite to the front desk. There was a stack of Asian Wall Street Journal s and, grabbing one, he sat in a club chair that gave him a narrow view through a couple of square marble pillars to the front desk.
Mac checked his civvie watch. He’d given Diane three minutes before she started her prima donna dramatics, and he watched as Steve took a call and winced, nodded a lot and fi nally crooked his fi nger at a junior manager. Diane could be highly persuasive when she wanted something, like a new room.
Mac waited, looking for signs of surveillance. That sign came after Steve was close to putting the phone down. A local man in a suit, about forty, leaned out of the back office and asked Steve something, probably along the lines of, ‘You didn’t give them a new room did you?’
Steve shrugged and the guy in the suit moved out into full view and nodded reluctantly before Steve and the junior manager moved to the elevators with a couple of porter trolleys. Solidly built, the bloke in the suit was Freddi Gardjito. He put his hands on his hips, pissed off, and when his eyes landed on Mac, he smiled thinly, shook his head and headed over to where Mac was sitting.
‘Freddi! How are things, old horse?’ said Mac, standing and shaking hands with Freddi, his old sparring partner from Indonesian intelligence.
‘Shit, McQueen – I thought you were out?’
‘I am.’
Freddi snorted. ‘You’re lending yourself, mite.’
‘Honest, Freddi,’ smiled Mac. ‘Just up for some R amp;R.’
‘In Jakarta?’
‘It’s the clean air, the unhurried atmosphere -‘
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Freddi. ‘Just promise me – no cop and robber, yeah? We’re too old for that now.’
‘Well,’ said Mac, looking around at some of the Powering Asia delegates networking in the lounge, ‘we could start with a room with a bit of privacy, huh Fred?’
‘Not what we got at APEC, McQueen.’
‘Oh, come on, Freddi,’ laughed Mac, knowing what ASIO and ASIS had got up to at the Sydney summit a year earlier. ‘That’s the whole point of APEC, isn’t it?’
