‘I’m just saying that it was a big hole for an IED. Oklahoma City had the same size crater from four and half tons of anfo.’
‘So?’ snarled Atkins.
‘Well, think about it. If Sari Club only involved one ton, why did it make a hole the same size as four and half tons? And remembering, Marty, that anfo is a lot more powerful than potassium chlorate.’
There was a pause and Mac wondered if Atkins was reading a note from Garvs.
‘McQueen, there was no mini-nuke, there was no pro crew, Hassan Ali did not dupe a whole contingent of Aussie cops, soldiers and intel guys – not to mention forensics – so just drop it.’
Mac didn’t have many other shots. ‘So what were BAIS and Mossad chasing?’ he asked, still unsure why his counterparts were so certain.
‘I don’t know, mate,’ whined Atkins. ‘You know what the Indons and the Jews are like: they’ll chase a conspiracy like a dog chases its tail.’
Mac signed off quickly and hung up. He thought about Atkins’ comment. That was exactly how Mossad and BAIS did not operate.
Freddi’s phone went straight to voicemail and Mac didn’t leave a message. It was almost nine-thirty which meant ten-thirty in Jakkers, and Freddi was getting some shut-eye. Mac felt stressed but not exhausted and he could do with a couple of beers to send him to sleep. Benny had asked him down to the Raffl es for a drink with him and an employee, which now sounded like a plan.
He removed the moustache and carefully stored it back in its case. As he wiped his face down, he thought about how Atkins had been both sarcastic and condescending. In the ongoing war between the fi eld guys and the bench-warmers, condescension and fl ip dismissals were the preferred weapons of the offi ce dwellers. It gave them credibility with other offi ce guys while undermining people like Mac. But the cult of management was a dangerous game: in the wash-up of 9/11, the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence recommended the CIA stop its habit of reallocating operations funding into more management, which had been happening for more than twenty years. By the time the US invaded Iraq in ‘03, the CIA had only eleven Arabic-speaking fi eld people, while back at Langley they had so many managers that they had to fi nd more space to house them.
His face now clean, Mac eyeballed himself in the mirror. Atkins had used the word conspiracy, which in itself was an admission of ignorance. Way back in 1957, the old Joint Intelligence Service – forerunner of ASIO and ASIS – had commissioned one of its analysts to assess the probability of nuclear terrorism. That report, The Likelihood of Clandestine Introduction of Nuclear Weapons into Australia, was the world’s fi rst discussion of a terror campaign using a nuclear device, and the device it named was ‘a plutonium device the size of a cricket ball’.
A mini-nuke. Atkins and his ilk had taken the wrong turn by putting the idea of a mini-nuke in the crazy department – it was very real.
Mac understood why Atkins didn’t want to deal with it. If you were born in the 1960s, and grew up with the Cold War, you wanted to think that the chance of a nuclear nightmare had ended when the Berlin Wall came down. But Israel’s entire nuclear weapons program at the Dimona facility was about developing mini-nukes – devices that could be carried in a backpack. In the same year that Israel’s IDF bombed the Iraqi fast-breeder reactor at Osirak, they tested a joint-venture mini-nuke in the Indian Ocean. It was 1979 and the partner was South Africa.
So Mac wasn’t going mad – not yet, anyway. And Atkins’ own words had confi rmed it. He’d mistakenly admitted that Hassan was in Kuta before and during the bomb blasts, a fact that the Atkins lobby had previously contested. It wasn’t ringing alarm bells, but it was starting to niggle. Why did the fi rm want him out of Jakarta?
Eight minutes later, Mac walked into the courtyard bar of the Raffl es. The air was alive with soft jazz and raucous crickets and he saw Benny at a glass-topped table beside the fountain, drinking with a pretty Chinese woman in a pale blue blouse and navy blue Andrews Sisters skirt.
Benny introduced Suzi and ordered a round of drinks, a Tiger for Mac.
‘Mr McQueen is just up from Australia,’ Benny told Suzi. ‘Very smart fellow.’
‘What do you do?’ she asked in smooth English.
‘Due diligence for the government,’ shrugged Mac, wanting to get on to something else.
‘Due diligence on what?’ asked Suzi, her demeanour disproving the theory that intellect is in inverse proportion to looks.
‘Well, exporters.’
She sat forward, wanting more.
‘Okay,’ said Mac, ‘someone wants to export to Singapore and get the taxpayer to underwrite payment? The government might be prepared to guarantee payment, but they want to know who the parties are and what the deal actually is.’
‘Sounds interesting.’
Later, when Suzi went to the ladies, Benny leaned over to Mac.
‘By the way, champ, got so tied up in those documents of yours that I forgot to pass something on.’
‘Yeah?’ said Mac, taking a swig of his beer.
‘This is a free gift to Jen, right? Just so she knows there’re no hard feelings, and then we’re square, okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Mac, smiling.
At their wedding reception at the Jakarta Golf Club Jenny had cornered Benny and told him off for constructing and maintaining the kind of secret banking and business linkages – grey networks – that allowed the sex-slavers and human traffi ckers to get away with it. Jenny had had a skinful that night and her FBI friend, Milinda, had had to drag her away from what could have turned ugly.
‘Last week I was doing some work for a client and I got to see something I shouldn’t have seen,’ whispered Benny, scanning the courtyard for eyes.
‘Okay,’ said Mac, letting his body get lower to hear.
‘Well it seems our old friends from the Khmer Rouge are back in business, and there’s a lot of funds coming back into Singers right now.’
‘Where from?’ asked Mac.
‘South-east Queensland, judging by some of the numbers.’
‘Who?’
Benny eyed him and smiled. ‘Come on, mate, I’ve said too much.
Let’s just say that after years doing their thing in Indo and Thailand, the KRs have moved to where the real money is.’
After Suzi came back, the talk got more general. Benny was a great host as always and Suzi was a smart young lawyer fresh out of the University of Sydney Law School, doing her clerking with the legal side of Benny’s practice. Mac liked the tough but open character of middle-class Singaporeans. It was a similar trait to the Israelis. Both countries raised their kids with the knowledge that everything they took for granted could be snatched away tomorrow, so they should enjoy it – and fi ght for it. Both countries sat in the midst of an Islamic tide, both had been created by the West as Anglo-leaning capitalist democracies, and both had built the kind of national wealth that engendered nothing but resentment from those around them.
Suzi was appalled by the jihadists and their methods, in contrast to some of the students Mac had tutored at Sydney Uni, who thought the bombers had a point. There was a softness in younger Australians and an appetite for received wisdom that Mac found disturbing.
He told Suzi how in one tutorial discussion, a woman in her early thirties had upbraided Mac for talking about Indonesian aggression during Konfrontasi in the mid-1960s. She claimed Konfrontasi had been an attempt by Sukarno to stop an ‘imperialist land-grab in Borneo’ and that everyone knew this. Of course, in 1963 alone the Indonesian military had carried out more than thirty bombings in Singapore, many of them on civilian targets such as cafes and buses, and Mac had asked his student how this stopped Sarawak and Sabah becoming part of the Malay Federation? The woman had stormed out, calling him a
‘Bush-lover’.
‘I know – it’s true!’ Suzi said, wide-eyed. ‘Other students were saying to me Oooh, but the poor Muslims have a point, and I’m like, Naaahhh -‘ she said it with a theatrically downturned mouth and big smiling eyes, ‘ let them hang! ‘
