Ishi nodded as he lit up and took his fi rst drag. ‘He say he only feed information for money. Don’t know who they are. We check phone log – pre-pay phone.’
‘How did he get paid?’ asked Mac.
‘Cash, US dollar,’ said Ishi, dragging on his smoke. ‘He met at river three time; fi rst two, just young businessman.’
Ishi clicked his fi ngers and the man on the table brought a fi le over.
‘This is Lempo,’ said Ishi, handing over the black and white surveillance photo. ‘Taken in Cairo fi ve month ago.’
Lempo was a good-looking citizen of the world, sitting in a cafe in his white shirt and aviator sunnies. A middle-class hit man.
‘He in ISI, then he not. Then he in Pakistan army, then he not. Then he working for Khan, then Khan is stopped,’ said Ishi and shrugged.
‘What’s he doing now?’ asked Mac, the fatigue pulsing behind his eyeballs.
‘Khan been stopped,’ speculated Ishi, sucking on the smoke, ‘and Lempo and Hassan building own nuclear market now, yeah? Master retire, student now boss.’
Mac nodded. ‘What about the third meeting?’
Ishi pulled out another surveillance pic: a computer-enhanced black and white still from a security video. It showed a thick-set Pakistani man standing at a counter, his enormous shoulders and neck crowned by a big helmet of black hair. Mac’s skin crawled.
‘Mohammad Ali Shareef,’ said Ishi.
‘Gorilla,’ Mac mumbled.
‘ Benar,’ said Ishi, before adjusting back to English. ‘Yes, you’re right. Our man in there say he got Lempo and the other one their waiter jobs, but he don’t want to feed desk information. So they send Gorilla, and our man change mind.’
‘Where were they staying?’
Ishi looked at him, then yelled something at his crew. A man with his feet on the table leapt up and walked out a door on the left side of the room. Through the glass Mac saw the BAIS operative approach the unconscious hotel worker and kick him hard in the right kneecap.
The hotel guy woke up screaming, his voice squawking out through the speaker system. The sounds bounced back and forth, the hotel guy crying and begging while the BAIS guy hectored, slapped and threatened to punch.
After two minutes the sounds died away and Freddi turned to Mac. ‘Good call, McQueen.’
‘Why?’
‘One of Lempo’s gang dropped a matchbox when he lighting cigarette,’ said Freddi. ‘Our man pick it up – they were staying at the Galaxy Hotel.’
It took a little less than an hour for the Indonesian counter-terrorist police – D-88 – to clear the Galaxy Hotel for booby traps, trip lines and pressure pads. Mac stood with Freddi and Ishi behind the BAIS
LandCruiser while the guests milled around on the street, a side-feeder to the boulevard of Diponegoro. It was 3.06 am and Mac yawned as the D-88 captain approached Ishi, the visor on his black helmet pushed up. They swapped words and Ishi moved towards the Galaxy, Freddi and Mac following in his wake.
The D-88 captain, who smelled of stress and Old Spice, said nothing on their ride to the seventh fl oor. Getting out, they moved down a narrow corridor with walls that needed new wallpaper before stopping at a room with the door open. Inside were two single beds, a door to the toilet/shower area and a window looking over the night lights of Jakkers. Some of the carpet had been pulled up and inexpertly put back; there were gouges in the plasterboard under the light switches where the D-88 debuggers had checked for any nasties that might be lurking. The intensity of the IED-driven confl icts in Afghanistan and Iraq had bred paranoia in the Americans. And given that D-88 was American-trained and equipped, Mac wasn’t surprised that this was how they treated a terrorist lair.
They wandered around the room, which looked clean. Mac did the fi rst thing he always did and went straight for the rubbish bin, picking up and checking the dark green metal container. They stripped the beds, fl ipped over the mattresses, went through every drawer, lifted the cistern lid on the lav and had a nosey-poke behind the TV.
They looked at one another, shrugged.
They had similar luck in the next three rooms. They’d already been cleaned out, by people who knew to hide the same things that Mac and Freddi were looking for.
Mac was close to calling it a night. The shooting was now a police matter. Hassan’s gang had their pictures all over the POLRI, customs and port authority systems – and Mac couldn’t do much more. If tomorrow brought more information, then people like Freddi and Mac were more likely to be anticipating Hassan’s next move than catching him. Mac also had the feeling that Davidson was about to pull him out – Mac’s assignment was economic and contracted and the ASIS hard-heads in Jakkers would probably take over.
In the last room they checked, Mac noticed one of the beds – it didn’t look right. He slid it away from the wall, sending a cockroach scurrying up the wall. Searching around the bedhead Mac found a small white notepad from the Danau Toba International hotel. Freddi snapped on a latex glove and picked it up by the corner. There was nothing written on it but Freddi turned it into the light and it seemed likely the BAIS techies would fi nd latent writing on the pages.
‘I’ll get this down to the guys,’ said Freddi. ‘Might be useful.’
Mac nodded, but his mind was spinning back into the past, into a place of terror. The Danau Toba was in Medan, northern Sumatra.
CHAPTER 37
Edwin was waiting out the front of the Shangri-La in the black S-class when Mac got down there at 8.11 am. They sped south through the heat and traffi c while Mac got on the phone to Saba, the owner of an expat bar called Bavaria Lagerhaus in the embassy district of south Jakarta. Saba said he’d have his bodyguard waiting in the rear lane in ten minutes.
Edwin parked half a block away and Mac got out, walked the opposite side of the road looking for eyes. He ducked into a neighbouring park for some triangulated counter-surveillance, and then crossed back and nipped into the rear lane, his empty backpack over one shoulder. Saba’s bodyguard was waiting. A heavyset Javanese sporting a gold watch, he patted down Mac’s pants and shirt then fl icked his head slightly, indicating it was okay to enter. Closing and bolting the door behind them, the bodyguard walked past Mac, past the stacked boxes of Tiger beer and Beefeater London Dry, into a storeroom. After fl icking the lights, he walked to the end of the room, his chromed Desert Eagle handgun now obvious beneath the trop shirt.
The left wall of the room was lined with large black locker boxes used by intelligence people working in Jakarta. A former spy himself, Saba allowed other spooks to keep their undeclared belongings in this room. The bodyguard stood by Mac’s locker – number 9 – selected a key from a retractable chain. Pulling out his own keyring, Mac joined the bodyguard. They inserted at the same time and turned their keys.
The front of the locker folded down to create its own little picnic table, and Mac pulled the steel drawer out onto it. There were three cushion-sized clear plastic Ziploc bags fi lled with cash in denominations of US dollars, rupiah, Singapore dollars and one bag with a mix of yen, Aussie dollars and pounds sterling. There were also several packs of passports, drivers’ licences and credit cards, held together with rubber bands. He picked up the pack in the name of Brandon Collier, his unoffi cial cover – the one that ASIS didn’t know about – and put it in his pack, along with a black vinyl toilet bag with a full disguise kit.
At the rear of the drawer were three guns and boxes of ammo.
You weren’t allowed to touch fi rearms in Saba’s joint, so Mac pointed at the Heckler amp; Koch P9S handgun in the dark blue nylon hip rig and one box of. 45 loads. The bodyguard picked them up, put them in Mac’s pack. Then Mac took out the bag of mixed currency and a handful of US dollars, about $5000 worth.
Mac paused as he returned the cash bag. Lying along the bottom of the drawer was a yellow A4 envelope,
