Sipping on a bottle of Carlsberg, Mac surveyed the offi ce – a restored colonial building now housing Benny’s fi rm of accountants and solicitors. It was an enormous space – about the size of fi ve or six standard corporate offi ces – with four ceiling fans high up, old silk rugs on the polished teak fl oors and a desk that looked like something J.P. Morgan would have owned.
Benny peered at his laptop screen over half glasses, his mane of grey hair pushed back like a mad professor’s. Making notes on a legal pad, he alternated between a square terminal to his right and the laptop, into which he’d downloaded Mac’s hard drive of the Alex Grant iDisk.
Now in his mid-fi fties, Benny Haskell was a legend of fi nancial espionage and countering. He was former ASIO, former ASIS and the former head of the Treasury’s special investigations unit. Mac had met Benny in Canberra in the early 1990s, when a bunch of ASIS, ASIO and AFP newbies were being shown the basics of how money laundering worked. It was a fascinating two weeks and Benny quickly became a sort of hero to them. A chartered accountant by trade, he was one of the architects of the AUSTRAC neural net that could track funds transfers between Australia and pretty much anywhere in the world. Now he had a lucrative offshore banking practice in Singapore, creating the kind of banking and fi nancial reporting trails that passed the smell-test with the Australian Taxation Offi ce.
Getting up, Benny wandered over to the French doors and looked out on the Port of Singapore. ‘Can we talk about this, mate?’
Mac tweaked to his tone and sat up in the leather armchair. ‘Ah, yeah. Sure.’
‘So, what’s the background?’ said Benny, sipping on his beer.
Sitting back, Mac went through what he knew: the Bennelong enrichment code, the approach from NIME, the knock-back from EFIC and the fact that the Bennelong deal might have been resurrected under the NIA.
‘That’s where I came in,’ said Mac, thinking about it as he spoke.
‘It was a bit of due diligence, checking end-users – covert but soft.’
‘Okay,’ said Benny. ‘But let’s agree to something, all right?’
Mac nodded.
‘Anything I tell you – anything – stays in this room unless you clear it with me fi rst, okay?’
Mac was silent. That was a big promise.
‘I’m serious, Macca. I don’t need some heavy-breather from the AFP thinking there’s any glory in pinging this little black duck.’
‘Okay – you got it,’ said Mac.
Benny paused, collecting himself. ‘You’re on the right track with Naveed and these companies, Ocean, Desert and Gulf. This is big Paki money and it basically owns NIME. Now it owns the material that these people -‘ He waved his hand around.
‘Bennelong.’
‘Yeah – Bennelong – have sold them. Looking at some of the connections and transfers, it’s Naveed’s old fronts and banks – we see this all the time. Naveed is putting up the money, same as he used to with Khan.’
‘A.Q. Khan?’
‘Any other?’ said Benny, reaching into his pants pocket for his smokes. ‘Naveed has been the banker to the Paki military and ISI for fi fteen, twenty years. Khan’s people used him to fi nance all the nuclear equipment they were on-selling to the North Koreans and Libyans.’
‘Makes sense,’ said Mac.
‘You’d always read about Khan’s hundred-million-dollar deals with Libya or Iraq, but it was Naveed making most of the dough. It’s always the bankers,’ said Benny, lighting the cigarette.
‘So where do I connect Naveed?’ asked Mac.
‘Hmm,’ said Benny, clearly reluctant to get into it. ‘You heard of a bloke called Hassan Ali?’
Mac almost choked on his beer. ‘Yeah, mate – um, that’s why I’m here,’ he spluttered, the acrid suds going up the back of his nose.
‘Really?’ asked Benny, eyes narrowing. ‘Might have told me that, mate.’
‘Sorry, Ben,’ said Mac, shifting his weight. ‘Maybe I didn’t explain properly. My due-diligence partner was shot by the Hassan crew. That’s why I’m a little beyond my initial brief. I’m, um, this is not -‘
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, mate. Soon as I saw the hair and the mo I fi gured you’d gone off-road,’ said Benny, blowing out smoke and moving towards the balcony. There was an ashtray on an outside table but he hesitated before he put his head out, casing the buildings beside the colonial building. ‘Weren’t followed, were you, Macca?’
‘Nah, mate.’
‘I’m serious,’ snapped Benny, stubbing his smoke. ‘Were you followed?”
Mac shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Because we got a little problem here, mate,’ said Benny, grabbing at another smoke and lighting it. ‘Not wired?’
Mac shook his head, took a shallow sip of the Carlsberg. ‘What’s up, Benny?’
‘Mate, six years ago I was asked to do some basic fi nancial sleuthing for Malaysian military intelligence, right?’
Mac nodded.
‘They’re on top of this JI wanker, Abu Samir, and there’s been some chatter – one of their informers is saying that something’s up.
Something big is about to happen.’
‘Six years ago?’ asked Mac. ‘You mean October ‘02?’
‘That’s the one. We did a few searches, found some medium-sized but regular transfers coming from an al- Qaeda front company in Dubai called Headlight Industry and going into a couple of JI accounts at the Dominion.’
Mac thought it through: in the early 2000s, the major Jemaah Islamiyah bombers – Samir, Top and Hambali – were living in Malaysia, lying low after Suharto’s people declared war on Islamic extremists. But they were still on the drip-feed from OBL via accounts at Dominion Bank of Singapore.
‘Anyway,’ said Benny, ‘I told the Malaysians this and we managed to trace back the JI company accounts and fi nd some of the bankers and businessmen who were the fronts for Samir, Top and Hambali.’
Benny paused. ‘But I was nosey. A lot of people trying to move money around the world – you remember I told you this in Canberra?
– will create several company names that are almost, but not exactly, the same and with sequential account ID numbers. They create shadows.’
‘So that,’ Mac picked up the thread, ‘when investigators run searches looking for a match on an account number or account name, the computer might list the shadows, but when a human eye is looking down thousands of lines of names or numbers, it subconsciously discards the ones that aren’t quite right. I remember you said that as far as computers go, the human brain is almost too good.’
‘Correct,’ said Benny. ‘So I went back over my lists and looked for shadow Headlight accounts and numbers.’
‘And?’ Mac fi nished his beer.
‘I found a Headlight Industrie – with an ie, not a y – and the same account number but one digit changed.’
‘So, this was al-Qaeda?’
‘Sure was, except they were paying a lot more money than the Samir transactions.’
‘How much?’
‘Ten million US.’
Mac whistled.
‘Yeah,’ said Benny, ‘and it was landing in a Cook Islands bank account for a mob called Desert Enterprises.’
‘Naveed?’
‘Well, from what you brought me tonight, I think we can say that Desert is a joint venture between Naveed and Hassan.’
‘The money guy and the ops guy.’
