dressed in fresh clothes. Then he lay on the bed thinking through what he wanted to do and how hard he was going to push things. He wanted to get an early night and walk out to the cemetery at Santa Cruz before dawn. It wasn’t a perfect way to trace Blackbird, but it was a start: get eyes on the cut-out, follow him and get him talking. For now it was the only approach he had.
What he knew for certain was that finding the Canadian was going to have to be dropped from his unofficial task list. The entire feeling in Dili was extremely dangerous and if the priority tasking was Blackbird and Operasi Boa, then he’d have to leave the Canadian to someone else.
Was he scared? Damned right he was.
The dining room was small and only three tables had been set. Mac took the table at the far wall, wanting a better observation point over Rahmid Ali. He expected Ali to have recovered from the morning’s conversation, and be ready to try another tack.
The specials blackboard said that ‘Baucau Chicken’ with rice was the chef’s recommendation for the evening. Chicken in East Timor was prepared in the spicy Portuguese style and was usually – for some reason – served cold. There’d be plenty of chances for cold chicken at the roadside warung that infested East Timor so Mac chose the fish of the day and asked for a beer.
The Korean announced his presence even before entering the dining room, yelling into his phone as he walked in and looking around with studied contempt. Putting the phone to his chest, the Korean faced Mac with his bottom lip slack, eyes yellowed with hard liquor.
‘That it?’ he asked, pointing at the specials board with his cigarette.
Giving him a wink and a nod, Mac decided not to engage the Korean in actual conversation. Snorting at Mac and then shaking his head in disbelief, the Korean swaggered out of the dining room leaving a fug of smoke and BO.
Relaxing into his chair, Mac mentally prepared his next twenty-four hours, trying to forget Benni Sudarto peering through that window at the Damajat meeting. Mac reckoned there was a fifty per cent chance he’d been made and it remained to be seen what Sudarto was going to do about it. Would he assign a tail, let Mac run? Would he shut Mac down and start pulling teeth? Feed him up with bullshit and send him back to Atkins with tall tales designed to confound Canberra? Or was he just keeping an eye on who Damajat was entertaining?
Slugging at the beer, Mac wondered how long he could keep his nerves at bay with alcohol. Catching a movement from his right Mac put his beer down. Expecting Ali, Mac found himself looking at a woman instead – early twenties, blonde and very attractive.
‘Is this the dining room?’ she asked in a North American accent, the set to her face making the question into a joke.
‘Actually, it’s the broom closet but we hide them away when we hear there’s an American coming to stay.’
‘Special treatment for special guests, huh?’ she smiled, open and natural.
‘Nah,’ drawled Mac. ‘Just means we can charge more for the room.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ she said, rolling her eyes.
‘What can I say?’ said Mac, standing. ‘You guys’ll pay anything.’
The woman laughed and Mac took a step forward, offering his hand. ‘Richard – how do you do?’
‘Jessica.’ Her handshake was firm. ‘Don’t tell me – went sunbathing, fell asleep on one side?’
Touching the scorch mark on his cheek, Mac retorted. ‘Cheeky Yanks!’
Sitting, he gestured for her to join him. ‘No sunbathing on this trip, I’m afraid – here to buy sandalwood, of all things. And you?’
‘I’m Canadian, actually,’ said Jessica, turning serious as she sat, ‘and I’m looking for my father.’
CHAPTER 12
Slipping through the tropical darkness, Mac stayed in the shadows of the trees that lined most of the avenues in Dili. It was 3.58 am according to his G-Shock and he was making good time, slipping along one of the minor streets behind the Dili Stadium, heading inland from the harbour.
Dressed in a black sweatshirt, dark baseball cap and Levis, he blended with the background and the moonless night as he alternated between running across open ground and waiting behind cover, heading quietly southwards.
A light flashed down the street from two blocks away, and Mac ducked behind a frangipani tree. Waiting, all his senses on high alert, he watched the Brimob SWAT van turn into the deserted street and move slowly towards him. A Brimob officer’s head and shoulders stuck out the top of the roof and swivelled a searchlight through the darkness as it approached. Ducking for cover, Mac used the lee of the frangipani to crawl into a stormwater culvert that ran the length of the avenue. Lying in the dog shit and rotting leaves he held his breath as the diesel growl of the Brimob truck came alongside his position. He exhaled, relieved, as it kept moving, ‘I Will Always Love You’ echoing out of the vehicle’s radio, sung rather painfully by an Indonesian male. One of the eternal wonders of the universe was why Indonesian men felt the need to record songs associated with Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Olivia Newton-John.
Dusting himself off, Mac got in behind the frangipani tree and watched the Brimob truck fade into the distance and then turn right – probably scouting for kids around the stadium.
Feeling naked without his gun, Mac kept a steady pace from one hide to another as he continued on. Heading left into a larger avenue, he became exposed to streetlights and crossing the dusty street to the sanctuary of the darkness on the other side, his panting and footfalls seemed to echo down the empty avenue. Suddenly a light went on in a mansion somewhere behind the trees he was hiding in. Mac froze as an Indonesian woman in a housecoat stepped out onto her veranda, not six metres away, and made a high-pitched musical call. Two cats darted out of the shrubbery and shot past the woman’s calves into the house like a couple of lightning bolts.
Pulling back into the house and shutting the door, the woman killed the lights. Mac gulped down the stress and moved on.
Using a small banyan to get himself to the top of the cemetery wall, Mac lay along the top of it for ten minutes, assessing the ground. There was no movement, no whispers and he couldn’t smell cigarettes or aftershave. Sliding down the opposite side of the wall, he found one of the walkways and moved swiftly to the main road of the cemetery. Staying twenty metres off the main track, he dodged and weaved through the tombstones and fenced plots until he located the twenty-first path. Finding it, he counted seven gravesites until he was looking at the drop: a modest plot, squashed between two larger ones.
Holding back for a few minutes, Mac waited for movement, wishing he hadn’t drunk so much beer the night before. Pretty girls with a ton of charm sure did make the world go around, but they didn’t help with work the next day.
Satisfied that he wasn’t walking into an ambush, Mac found a decent-sized tree and created a hide with a sight line to the drop box and also a view of the cemetery’s main road. Placing the water bottle on his ‘chair’, Mac left the hide and moved at a crouched jog to the main road, scuttled across it, wanting to check on how observable the water bottle was to those approaching it.
Moving to the other side of the cemetery, he numbered off the side paths until he was on the thirty-fifth on the right, and then numbered the plots back to the seventh on the left. Breathing deeply, he stayed still, waiting for movement or sound. The only action came from the trees where a bat was feuding with a bird. Fumbling in the dark, he ran his hands over a white marble gravesite and headstone. It was immaculately maintained, just like all the plots at Santa Cruz. The crypts were whitewashed, headstones were scrubbed and polished, there were no weeds and the edges were all trimmed. Mac marvelled at how the world’s poorest and most oppressed people so often had the most beautiful graveyards. He’d seen the same in Phnom Penh and Rangoon. Was it stupidity or defiance?
There were no moving parts on the grave cover or the headstone, and for a second Mac wondered if he was at the wrong site. Counting it back again, he confirmed he was at the right grave; then he lay down and got his face closer. Behind the headstone was a steel box with a lid and as Mac moved closer in the dark he saw the lid was padlocked.
