Counter Attack

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Of course, you know none of this reflects on you, right, Macca?’ said Urquhart, like a man who lied because he could. ‘There’ll be no blow-back on your career; in fact, it might work the other way.’

  The departure board clicked up two notches and the top bars started flashing, one of them the five pm flight to Brisbane.

  ‘My career blew back a long time ago, mate,’ said Mac, standing and looking down on a person he’d once protected in the Nudgee dorms. ‘But I’ve learned to live with my anguish.’

  ‘Think about it,’ said Urquhart, holding out a card.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘My numbers,’ said Urquhart. ‘In case you want to talk.’

  ‘You wanna talk?’ said Mac, as he turned to leave. ‘Get a one-three-hundred number.’

  The house at Broadbeach was empty when Mac let himself in. A note on the kitchen bench from Jen said she’d taken the girls for dinner at Hungry Jack’s with Frank and Pat – she’d drop Rachel home to her mother afterwards.

  Stowing his case in the bedroom, Mac kicked off his shoes, grabbed a beer and clicked on the TV. Making his usual rounds, he shut the curtains from the side of the windows, checked every room in the house, ran his fingers around the TV screen to see if it had been pried open and then checked the wall-mounted phone socket and the phone itself. Finally, Mac picked up the handset and listened for the dial tone. The tone beeped back at him, signifying voicemail. Dialling in, he listened. He deleted the message and went to the second. He deleted the second message and hung up.

  An ABC current affairs show blared on television. Mac hit the mute button and thought about what he was going to do about Dave Urquhart and his ridiculous approach. As much as he loved telling Dave to go screw himself, there was only so long an intelligence officer could defy the Prime Minister’s office.

  He also had to act on the two messages. His heart beating in his temples, he grabbed his Nokia and made a secure call to ASIS head office in Canberra. Giving his code name of Albion, he was challenged for the week’s security code, and he gave the one that told the woman at the other end he was safe.

  ‘Field services, thanks,’ said Mac, and waited while he was transferred.

  ‘Henry, here. How can I help you, Albion?’

  ‘Henry, I need an immediate residential phone number reassign- ment,’ said Mac, sipping at his beer as he watched a TV reporter pointing down from a helicopter at Queensland’s bushfires.

  ‘Certainly, sir,’ said Henry.

  They both waited until Telstra’s government and consular system shut down Mac’s old number and reissued a new one. As Henry read out the new home number, a key rattled in the door. Jenny pushed through, Sarah on her hip.

  ‘Hey, darling,’ said Mac, going over to them and giving Jen a kiss as she handed him their daughter.

  ‘Do the honours, Macca?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mac, walking his sleepy daughter through to her bedroom.

  When he’d put her to bed and shut the door, Mac padded back to the sofa where Jen was curled up under a blanket, the TV switched off.

  ‘So, I guess you weren’t really in Perth, right?’ she said, her eyes boring into him.

  ‘This week?’ said Mac.

  ‘Don’t do this, Macca,’ said Jen, pushing dark hair out of her face. ‘You were with Ray. You were in Singapore.’

  ‘Would it make a difference?’

  One of the benefits of having a wife in the federal police was that the Firm’s vetting job had been made easy when he married her, but it was still difficult being a spy with a nosey cop in the middle of his life.

  ‘Don’t do the weasel words with me, mister,’ she said, raising her voice. ‘I can get a ton of that shit all day, in any interview room.’

  ‘Ray was a top bloke, and I’m very sad about this,’ said Mac, holding out his arm and letting Jen snuggle into his chest.

  ‘He was such a nice man. And what about Liesl? I should call her.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Mac, alarm bells ringing. ‘She’s a very private person.’

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ said Jen, pushing her athletic, shapely body into Mac. ‘Might give it a couple of days.’

  Mac stroked her hair and wondered what he was going to do. The two voicemails he’d deleted were addressed to Jenny Toohey; calls from Liesl Hu, asking Jen to become personally involved in her husband’s shooting.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. What made him change the phone number were Liesl’s final words, gasped out through her tears: ‘I think the Australian government is involved.’

  Chapter 8

  Packing his suitcase, Mac tried to focus only on the job ahead and the corporate cover he had worn for most of his working life. He had a routine for packing his wheelie bag and readying himself for the Richard Davis collateral that would be waiting at Brisbane International Airport.

  ‘Think we’ll be okay with Sarah,’ said Jenny, sitting on the bed with a towel wrapped around her chest, tied off in her cleavage. It was just past eight am but she’d already done her laps at Southport pool and would be starting work at the federal police building in Robina at ten o’clock.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Mac, distracted.

  ‘I’m sharing a nanny with Sian,’ said Jenny. ‘She’s flexible. Basically, I call her when I need the help.’

  Mac felt excluded. ‘Oh, when you need it?’

  ‘Yes, when I need it, Macca,’ she said. ‘Like this week. I don’t see you juggling when Sarah needs to be minded.’

  ‘Yeah, well . . .’ said Mac, taking his own Brut 33 deodorant from the toilet bag and replacing it with Richard Davis’s Old Spice. The SPF 30 sunscreen actually contained a gel that would turn his hair dark brown, and the tube of men’s face scrub was the Schwarzkopf N10 blonding agent that would take his hair back to its natural colour when required.

  ‘I mean, you only told me about this Auckland trip on Friday,’ said Jenny. ‘And you say you’re going for two weeks, but that’s not set in stone.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mac, reluctant to snap out of his focused state. ‘I told you as soon as I knew.’

  It was a marriage where both of them trod carefully around the subject of their work. Jenny didn’t like to feel guilty or distracted in her job any more than Mac did in his. It was made more difficult by the fact that when the juggling had to be done, it was Jen hitting the phones and calling in favours. Mac knew that, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it.

  ‘You can make it up to me,’ said Jen.

  ‘Sure,’ said Mac, preoccupied with getting his boat shoes into exactly the placement he liked. He travelled only with cabin luggage to minimise officials touching his belongings.

  ‘I mean, you know,’ said Jen, lying back on the bed, the towel falling off her hips. ‘Sarah’s watching the Wiggles, and . . .’

  Mac’s wife had been a high school swimming star and an Austra- lian Universities rep in basketball. She worried that her stomach was loose and her bum was sagging after having Sarah, but Mac reckoned that she looked better in a tank top and a pair of Levis than most women looked in hundreds of dollars worth of lingerie.

  ‘The Wiggles, eh?’ said Mac, moving to her.

  Putting her hand into his thin blond hair, she gave him the smile and Mac bent down to her, smelling the apple-scented shampoo that she used to get the chlorine out of her hair.

  Kissing her, Mac let his hand slide up under Jenny’s towel, feeling the muscles and curves. Jen hooked a thumb over the band of Mac’s undies, but then suddenly pulled away.

  ‘Door,’ she said, pushing his chest.

  Leaning into the hallway, Mac heard a famous song from the kids’ TV show, and a thumping sound that indicated Sarah was trying to dance to it.

  Shutting the door quietly, Mac crossed the floor to
the bed, where Jen had shoved the suitcase to the floor.

  ‘Thank God for the Wiggles,’ she said, grabbing him by the thigh.

  ‘Choo choo, chugga chugga,’ said Mac, and Jen giggled as she pulled him onto her.

  The Airtrain between the Gold Coast and Brisbane airport was crowded with backpackers and retirees. Summer was starting to kick in for real and the hiss of the air-conditioning in the carriage was almost louder than the rattle of the tracks as they headed north.

  Sitting at the back, Mac read the Financial Review and avoided eye contact. Something was niggling him about the Pan Pac shootings, and he couldn’t quite get it straight. The approach from Urquhart in Canberra had been a shock. Taskforces were put together to secure outcomes that were jointly agreed; even Grant Shannon from the AFP would not dispute the consensus. So why was Urquhart flitting about, looking for a traitor in ASIS?

  The scenery flashed past, made dark by the heavily tinted windows. Also annoying him were the phone calls from Liesl Hu – the tone of fear that rose above her grief. Mac didn’t feel good about his lack of contact, but it wasn’t in a spy’s DNA to soothe wives when the aim was to get out of Dodge before the crocodile clips got warmed up.

  Mac was worried about how much Liesl actually knew – or had guessed – about Operation Kava. Ray Hu’s cover in Singapore was genuine: he was a fund manager who took equity positions in small defence-oriented technology companies, even if many of his leads came from Aussie intelligence. He was the real thing and he was the embodiment of the espionage cliché of hiding in plain sight. He’d been written about in the Far Eastern Economic Review and was a regular in the Asian Wall Street Journal’s tips for hot investments in the new year. He was even on a Singapore government think tank for identifying future niche industries and getting universities to support them. But aside from this public profile, Ray was a stickler for secrecy and his double life with ASIS was walled off, even from his wife.

  So why, wondered Mac as the train pulled into the international airport station, did Liesl get on the phone to Jenny and allege Australian government involvement in her husband’s murder?

  He wasn’t comfortable about Liesl being a loose end, even if he did like her and owed it to Ray to look after her. Emotional, grief-stricken women making phone calls about Australian complicity in double murders in a foreign country was bad enough; when they were on the right track, it could be disastrous.

  As he stepped onto the platform, Mac turned for the bridge to the international terminal and breathed deeply as he walked. He had to establish if Liesl’s and Urquhart’s stories overlapped. And to do that, he would have to talk to Liesl Hu.

  Waiting for his courier, Mac sat at a coffee shop on the upstairs deck of the terminal, eating a filled croissant. His seat gave him a view to the lower airside level of the large, naturally lit terminal, while also allowing him to see anyone approaching on the upper level.

  At 12.15, the heavyset yet quick-walking gait of Rod Scott came into sight. He bought two Crown Lagers at the counter and moved to the table.

  ‘Cutting it fine,’ said Mac, whose Qantas flight left at 1.40. ‘And why’re you here? Bit below your pay grade, isn’t it?’

  Sipping his beer, Scotty put his folded Courier-Mail on the table and Mac pulled it towards him and let a plain envelope slide out of it and onto his lap. Removing the Richard Davis passport, he placed it on the table with his ticket in the name of Davis.

  ‘I thought we should chat,’ said Scotty, removing his sunglasses and rubbing his right eye with the heel of his hand.

  ‘Okay,’ said Mac, not wanting the beer.

  ‘Mate, what was Urquhart after?’ Scotty looked around discreetly.

  ‘Shit, Scotty. You had someone on me?’

  ‘No, mate – just a routine check of the tapes in the business lounge.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Mac, catching Scotty’s guilty smirk. ‘Urquhart tried to co-opt me – reckons what happened in Singers was due to a rotten apple in the Firm.’

  ‘Really?’ said Scotty, brow furrowed. ‘Urquhart came out and said this?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mac.

  ‘And you said?’

  ‘I told him to get fucked.’

  Scotty looked confused. ‘And that was it?’

  ‘He gave me a card, in case I wanted to talk.’

  ‘Really?’ said Scotty, relaxing.

  ‘He wouldn’t tell me who he worked for,’ said Mac. ‘Just that it was the executive arm.’

  ‘Got the card?’

  ‘No, mate – I’m clean, remember? But I can tell you the stamp on it was a federal coat of arms.’

  ‘Okay, leave it with me,’ said Scotty. ‘And if he contacts you again, bring him along and let’s see what he’s on about.’

  ‘I’ll let him talk,’ said Mac. ‘But I’m not snitching on my own people.’

  ‘Oh, by the way, Macca,’ said Scotty, chugging at the beer, ‘the name is Operation Dragon, the contact protocol is standard, and your team is in place.’

  ‘Team?’ said Mac.

  ‘One asset. Local.’

  ‘What about Bailey?’ said Mac, who’d wanted the former navy spook.

  ‘Bailey’s heading up to Thailand for an APEC junket.’

  ‘So who’s up?’ said Mac, tasting the beer.

  ‘Name’s Tranh. English is passable. Has his own little IT consulting business in Saigon. He hires himself out to visiting reporters and film crews as a driving contractor.’

  ‘Good cover.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Scotty. ‘He’s also nicely connected with some of the old ARVN networks and the black markets. He can get stuff, make things happen.’

  Mac looked around the concourse as a person with a Chinese name was paged. ‘Local, eh?’

  ‘Not that kind of local,’ said Scotty, clocking Mac’s face.

  ‘In Saigon,’ said Mac, ‘they’re all that kind of local.’

  Chapter 9

  Booking the express checkout option at Changi’s Crowne Plaza, Mac asked for a steak and chips to be sent up before taking the elevator to his fifth-floor room overlooking the drop-off aprons of T3.

  After a quick shower, he changed into fresh clothes and ate most of the steak before walking into the humid evening air. The cabbie looked at him once too often, so Mac asked him to take a left exit off Pan Island where he stopped outside a large shopping mall. Paying the fare, he walked through the concourse of the shopping area and out the side exit, where he hailed another cab and asked to go to Holland Park, but this time via the East Coast Parkway.

  The humidity of pre-monsoon South-East Asia created a smell of dirt and leaves as they hooked north out of the traffic and gradually got into the quieter and leafier streets. Asking to be dropped beside a pay phone, Mac alighted and stood in the booth, pretending to talk but watching the almost-dark streets for silhouettes in parked cars or headlights being switched off.

  Venturing out, he walked for eight minutes, passing Singaporeans as they took their evening walks, eventually stopping outside a plain white home. It was set back from the road, guarded by a stand of bamboo and a few palm trees. Walking past Liesl’s BMW and Ray’s Toyota, Mac chuckled at the different cultures of Hong Kong and Singapore: if Ray had lived in Honkers, he’d have worn garish gold watches and driven a Bentley. In Singers, he drove a Camry and owned a house that looked almost modest from the street.

  Walking softly across the paving stones, he stepped up onto the porch and rang the bell, shifting to the side of the door as he did so. Standing still, Mac rehearsed what he was going to say to Liesl, but nothing cute and insincere came to mind. He was going to wing it, look into her eyes and decide on the fastest way to the answers. If that meant getting on the turps and talking about Ray all night, he’d do it. If he had to scare her, take her immediately to the worst
case, he’d do that too.

  Looking through the glass side-panel beside the wooden door, Mac squinted to see if there was movement, and then pressed the doorbell again. Glancing back, he walked to Liesl’s blue BMW, put his hand on the bonnet. Cold. The Toyota too.

  Walking around the side of the house, he winced as the security lights came on, revealing a double camera which looked either way down the alley. A thick, deadlocked gate blocked his passage and he grabbed the top of it, pulling himself up until he could see over. Through the kitchen window of the house next door a maid washed pots and pans while a couple of young kids in pyjamas chased each other around.

  Easing over the gate to the other side, Mac caught his breath from the exertion and became aware of a new sound. Someone crying? Moving slowly down the side alley, he wished he was armed. Poking his head around the corner to a poolside area where he had cooked many barbecues and finished a few beers, Mac saw the source of the crying. The black cocker spaniel stopped his whining and stared at Mac, posing a challenge.

  ‘Woody!’ said Mac under his breath and the animal came to life in a squeal of joy and greeting. He released the slobbering dog from his leash and the beast sprinted down the side of the pool and darted under a tree to relieve himself.

  Opening the patio ranch sliders, Mac peered into the dark house. ‘Hello!’ he said, the silence ringing in his head. ‘Liesl? You home?’

  Easing into the living area, Mac listened and sniffed the air for alien aftershave or stale cigarette smoke – something to tweak him. But the front part of the house seemed empty.

  As he moved across the expensive carpet, the Chagall and a Basquiat glimmered out of darkness along one wall and the huge Whiteley hung over the Santa Fe fireplace. The massive Middle Ages chess board dominated an alcove like a challenge to anyone who entered this house; Ray was an excellent chess player and the chess set he called ‘the Dominican’ was one of his most cherished possessions.