Counter Attack

by Mark Abernethy

  Delaney laughed. ‘No, you’re not. That wasn’t my call, but I’ve come to agree that we should keep it in-house, hence the Firm.’

  ‘So, what’s the theory?’

  ‘Well, people have seen him in Cholon – Chinatown,’ said Delaney. ‘It’s not damning but he’s been looking terrible and there’re fears about who he’s hanging around with, I suppose.’

  ‘Think he’s spying?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Delaney.

  ‘Any top-secret access?’

  ‘He’s TS-PV,’ said Delaney, meaning Jim Quirk had Australia’s highest non-codeword security clearance, with a PV or personal vetting. ‘But he’s no longer seeing anything sensitive.’

  ‘What’s this about the divorce?’ said Mac. ‘He on the sauce?’

  ‘Definitely,’ nodded Delaney. ‘He split with Geraldine recently and it went downhill from there.’

  ‘The drinking followed the divorce, or the other way around?’ said Mac, trying to set the scene.

  ‘Can’t remember,’ said Delaney. ‘I wouldn’t want to get that part wrong. What I do know is that I’ve been waiting two weeks to get someone up here. We kept being told to let Jim run, that we’d have a team soon.’

  ‘Is he stealing anything?’ said Mac. ‘I mean, illegal downloads or files tucked down his shirt?’

  ‘Our dip-security guy’s been keeping an eye on him – hasn’t caught him doing anything.’

  ‘Where does Quirk live?’ said Mac, wondering if he should be having this chat with the first assistant secretary, diplomatic security – also known as the dip-sec.

  ‘At An Puh,’ said Delaney. An Puh was the expat compound across the river in District 2. ‘The BP compound. He’s got an apartment near the supermarket, I’m told.’

  ‘He drives?’

  ‘A red Corolla.’

  ‘What time does he get in to work?’

  ‘Eight-thirty.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Mac, slugging at the beer. ‘But tell me – why am I up here? What happened to the resident in Hanoi?’

  Delaney smiled. ‘Can’t use any of the Firm’s people down here if they’ve been in Hanoi, Hong Kong, Shangers, Beijing or Seoul.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, Alan,’ said Delaney. ‘The Chinese know exactly who they are. If we used them on Jim, the Chinese would have an insight we don’t particularly want to share.’

  Chapter 13

  Emerging from the double doors of the Grand at 7.28 am, Mac turned sharp right and walked up Dong Khoi Street. The one-way traffic came towards him in the first trickles of what would be a deluge in half an hour; Mac was hoping to make any vehicle tails show themselves by having to turn against the traffic or make a box-loop to catch him at an intersection.

  Before he could get to the next intersection, Mac crossed the street to the cover of trees on the other side, and ducked up the side street to a cafe where he ordered coffee and an omelette and watched for unwanted interest.

  The coffee was dark and strong and he picked up a day-old Jakarta Post from a pile of newspapers by the cutlery and flipped it as he surveyed the street. The anchor story along the bottom of the Post’s front page carried the headline missile tests provocative: clinton, and was followed by the regular Asian media obsession with the North Korean missile tests, predicting whether they would fly over Japan and their boosters fall in Japanese waters. While few countries in the western Pacific were friendly with North Korea, the region held its breath for the day Japan had an excuse to abandon its self-defence force and start rebuilding its military. Mac chuckled grimly as he read the US Secretary of State’s careful words: they reflected the delicate situation America found itself in whenever it stood between the two Koreas, Japan and China. If diplomacy in the Middle East took place over a gunpowder factory, North Asian rapport was built on a thermonuclear trigger.

  Across the road two youths tried to strap a large sofa onto the roof of a tiny Suzuki van as all around them people came out of doorways and started motorbikes or clipped their trousers before they got on bicycles. Pretty soon the flow of motorbikes, carts and vans would hit full force as the locals went in search of a living.

  Even though he considered himself an experienced traveller, Mac was always confused by Saigon. How did Ho Chi Minh ever think he was going to make the people of the Mekong Delta adopt communism? Or even aggressive socialism? Like most Aussies of his generation, Mac had been raised on post-1975 Vietnam as a story of ‘reunification’ in the face of imperialist France and the United States. Yet most people living in the south of Vietnam saw 1975 as a Communist invasion and subsequent occupation.

  Convinced he wasn’t being tailed, Mac keyed the phone and gave Tranh the okay to pick him up.

  Climbing into the silver van four minutes later, Mac kept looking through the back window until they’d turned right and accelerated for Le Loi.

  ‘Where to, boss?’ asked Tranh, who Mac noticed was now wearing a small silver crucifix.

  ‘BP compound, An Puh,’ said Mac, grabbing the water that Tranh had left for him on the floor. ‘I think it’s called APSC now.’

  Crossing the Saigon Bridge heading north, they stuck with the flow of the traffic on Hanoi Highway for a few minutes and took a left turn into Tao Dhien Road, a quiet residential street that looked more like a suburb in Brisbane than Saigon.

  On their right loomed a supermarket, indicating the beginning of the huge expat residential compound that extended to the river. Mac asked Tranh to keep driving as if going to the end of the street.

  Doing a u-turn and pulling in at the kerbside a hundred metres short of the compound entrance gate, they stopped the van and rolled down the windows as the heat rose.

  Tranh lit a cigarette. ‘We going to follow?’

  ‘Just establish his route,’ said Mac, pulling field-glasses from the glove box and getting eyes on the gate. ‘I want to get a feel for his day.’

  At 8.08 am, a red Corolla stuck its nose out of the compound’s gate and Mac lifted the glasses. It was Jim Quirk.

  ‘Okay, Mr Tranh,’ said Mac, ‘let’s see your field craft.’

  Following Quirk at between three and ten car lengths, Tranh was an excellent tail, sometimes letting the Corolla get a long way ahead, and at other times pulling up near to it but in another lane. The best tailers broke the pattern that people like Mac looked for.

  Crossing to the west side of Saigon Bridge, Quirk went into the massive roundabout and made a looping left turn onto Nguyen Huru and drove south past the water treatment plant, following the river. As they drew parallel with the shipyards on their left, Mac lost interest in Quirk and turned in his seat to see who was behind them.

  ‘Shit,’ said Mac. ‘See that white Toyota?’

  ‘Cong An,’ said Tranh with a shrug. ‘They found us after we crossed the bridge.’

  Mac saw a coffee cart ahead, just past the Buddhist pagoda. ‘Pull in here,’ he said.

  Watching the white Camry sail past, Mac lifted his field-glasses and focused on the registration plate. It was the same car that had followed him to the market.

  Mac pointed. ‘Okay, let’s find Apricot again.’

  They wound southwards, through the heavy traffic, but Mac and Tranh had to stop at the lights where Nguyen turned left into the riverside drive, and they lost the red Corolla.

  ‘Okay,’ said Mac, slugging on the water, ‘let’s do a box, come around to the Landmark building the wrong way.’

  Tranh took a secondary street running parallel to Quirk. Then they turned and went with the traffic down Dong Khoi Street, hooked left and drove north up the riverside road towards the consulate.

  ‘All okay, boss?’ said Tranh as they drove clear of the Landmark.

  ‘Depends what you mean by okay,’ said Mac as they passed the white Camry, parke
d and waiting beyond the consulate. ‘If we need the Cong An to help us follow Quirk, then we’re great.’

  * * *

  Shortly before midday, James Quirk walked out of the consulate and headed for the bus stop. Keeping a good distance behind the Cong An, Mac and Tranh followed Quirk’s bus into Cholon – the world’s largest Chinatown. Situated about a ten-minute drive from Mac’s hotel in downtown, Cholon had a reputation for harbouring some of the hardest criminals and canniest entrepreneurs in South-East Asia. Whether you wanted your husband murdered or to shift massive amounts of cash to another country, you could get it done in Cholon. Mac’s overwhelming memory of Cholon was of a place with a million bookmakers. Fancy a bet on a cockfight in a storeroom, a bare-knuckle fight on a local gangster’s rooftop, a girl fight in a warehouse, or a horse race at the Puh To track? Cholon was where you found the odds. Cholon was an exporter of its culture: after the arrival of the Communists in 1975, it was harder for the Cholon tongs – the crime families – to make a living, and the South Vietnamese diaspora included a lot of Cholon criminals. By the 1980s, the kidnap gangs of Hong Kong, the casinos of Macao and the cage fighting in Bangkok and Manila were all run and protected by the spitting patriarchs of Cholon – old men who lived humbly above shoe-repair shops and controlled rivers of cash around the South China Sea.

  Jumping off at a bus stop, Quirk – in a light charcoal suit and no tie – hit the pavement and kept walking, scything through the milling locals, around a corner and into a side street.

  ‘Quick,’ said Mac, as the watcher Mac had met on the motorbike got out of the Camry and followed Quirk. ‘Right here, and head him off at the pass.’

  Accelerating down a parallel side street, Tranh slowed at the mangle of cyclos and motorbikes at the next intersection and turned left. As the streetscape opened up, Mac watched Quirk dart across the street and disappear into a club called Mekong Saloon. But it was the action around the club that Mac noticed. Frantically, Mac looked around him: one man sat at a bus stop bench; he folded his paper as Quirk entered the building, turned and walked away.

  ‘Keep moving,’ snapped Mac, his breath coming shallow and fast. ‘Don’t look around.’

  Tranh sped north, down Hau Giang and out of Cholon.

  ‘You get that third item Paragon would have mentioned?’ said Mac, when they were almost back at the riverfront.

  ‘Yes, Mr Richard.’

  ‘Good. Show me.’

  Parking in an alley north of the Landmark building, Tranh led Mac down to a series of small private jetties on the river.

  ‘What happened back there?’ said Tranh.

  ‘I’m trying to work it out,’ said Mac, thinking about the men around that nightclub: not Cong An and not Aussie intel.

  At the end of the jetty, Tranh stopped at a powerboat with a large black outboard motor on the back. Climbing into the cockpit after Tranh, Mac watched him unlock the small hatchway to the space under the bow deck. Climbing down, Tranh grabbed a steel box off the small mattress and slid it across the cockpit. Picking up a stainless-steel Ruger handgun from the box, Mac weighed one of the two 9mm clips that came with it and then slipped it into the handgrip and slammed it home.

  Mac looked around the small marina. ‘No Hecklers, eh?’ He usually used a Heckler & Koch P9s.

  ‘No, boss – but Ruger is okay, right?’

  ‘Ruger is great,’ said Mac, stashing the handgun in its box.

  Having established his regular meeting places with Tranh – a rotation of four cafes around Dong Khoi Street at nine each morning – Mac asked Tranh to time Quirk’s return to the consulate. If his trips were regular, it made things easier and faster.

  Walking along the riverside boulevard, Mac tried to recall everything about the man he’d seen waiting outside the Mekong Saloon. Euro in looks, but not in dress: 1980s sunnies, the Sansabelt trousers and the shoes just short of nerdy. As if someone had tried too hard to dress down, or had never lived with a woman.

  And it wasn’t just that man: Mac had seen another two, just the same, acting casual around the Mekong. They weren’t cops and they weren’t Asian.

  Mac wandered into the shade of the Cyclo Cafe and slumped in a wicker armchair. He needed a cold beer, and then he needed to work out why another team was tailing Jim Quirk.

  Chapter 14

  Finishing his Operation Dragon update on the codeword-secure computer at Southern Scholastic Books, Mac hit ‘send’ and watched the intranet system issue a log number and time/date/location stamp for the filed report. Then, having made a pot of coffee at the small kitchenette at the back of the first-floor office suite, he picked up the secure desktop phone and dialled.

  ‘Scotty, it’s Mac,’ he said when the phone was picked up.

  Intelligence officers sent reports in the Firm’s format, not unlike the way newspaper stories had a certain structure. But if it wasn’t going to endanger the operation, Mac also liaised directly with his case officer.

  ‘Macca, how are we doing?’

  ‘In place, made contact with Apricot today.’

  ‘Route?’

  ‘Into Cholon, to a nightclub that’s open during the day.’

  ‘The Mekong Saloon?’

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘It’s a Loh Han property. You read the file, right, Macca? They’ve got places in Vung Tau, Nha Trang and around Saigon.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Mac, distracted. ‘I read it.’

  ‘You all right? Drinking heaps of fluids?’

  ‘Yeah, mate,’ said Mac, pushing the coffee aside and reaching for the water bottle. ‘Any further intel on Quirk?’

  ‘No. We asked Chester and his security guy to hold off on the questions. Why, what’s up?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mac, trying to form the thought. ‘It was just . . . there was this guy outside the Saloon this arvo. I didn’t like it.’

  ‘Surveillance?’

  ‘Probably, but I couldn’t be certain.’

  ‘Asian?’

  ‘Euro,’ said Mac. ‘Mediterranean Euro.’

  Scotty scoffed. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘I didn’t like the set-up.’

  ‘You’re hinky,’ said Scotty.

  ‘Don’t start that paperback detective stuff,’ said Mac.

  ‘Got a pic?’ said Scotty.

  ‘I didn’t want to use the camera,’ said Mac. ‘The Cong An’s been hanging round the hotel and following me in the street.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Scotty, knowing that a camera full of surveillance photos had been the downfall of too many intelligence officers. ‘I might send up this whiz-kid from Bangers.’

  ‘Oh really?’ said Mac, reluctant to have someone foisted on him. ‘Who?’

  ‘Lance Kendrick – one of the new guard.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Mac. Aussie intelligence had been finding it harder to recruit youngsters from university who hadn’t used drugs, who didn’t have tattoos and who didn’t lie in interviews. ASIS was recruiting so many women because they didn’t seem to lie as much as the young blokes, and ‘new guard’ was code for men who ten years earlier would never have made it past the second interview.

  ‘Yeah, his thing is technology,’ said Scotty, as though it was shameful. ‘Knows about BlueBerries and Tweetering – all that shit.’

  ‘Can he use a telephoto?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Run a concealed video? Wire a car for sound? Won’t get me light beer when he goes to the bar?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, mate,’ said Scotty. ‘He does cyber counter-measures, and he’s a whiz with getting data out of phones and making phantom chat sites or whatever they’re called. He’s done rotations with the NSA. He’s one of these modern spooks, mate – gonna put us out of business.’

  ‘I don’t care how modern he is,�
�� said Mac. ‘Don’t send me some spinner.’

  ‘Thought you might like to hear some post-modern theories about how the Vatican is worse than Hitler’s –’

  ‘Watch it, mate,’ said Mac.

  ‘– Third Reich, or how the White House is the same as al-Qaeda.’

  ‘I’ll give him a first-hand demonstration of what al-Qaeda’s internal security people do to defectors,’ Mac said. ‘And it’s a little meaner than outing some diplomat’s wife as CIA.’

  Scotty turned serious. ‘Look, he’s an individual but he’s smart and he’s trained.’

  ‘I don’t care if he’s one of a kind,’ said Mac. ‘If he’s got a pierced tongue and he’s taking ecstasy, then he’ll come back to you in a diplomatic pouch, minus a few teeth. Got that, mate?’

  Scotty laughed. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Deadset, Scotty,’ said Mac, looking around him. ‘Saigon is no place for a spy who wants to stand out.’

  Locking up the offices, Mac skipped down the stairs and into the brightness of the street. Squinting, he reached for his sunnies and decided it was time to buy a couple of trop shirts before he started swimming in his polo.

  The shop owner folded the green, black and sky-blue trop shirts on a large piece of brown paper, and then put Mac’s polo shirt on top.

  ‘That twenty dollar, mister,’ said the man, giving Mac a wink as he sellotaped the brown paper parcel and slipped it into a plastic bag.

  Handing over two US ten-dollar notes, Mac grabbed the bag and adjusted to the loose fit of the dark blue trop shirt he was wearing. With the pre-monsoon humidity he needed something that ventilated itself, although he usually avoided wearing them: fifty years of CIA men charging around South-East Asia dressed like Ferdi Marcos had made many Asians think that a white man in a trop shirt was armed.

  ‘I like that colour,’ said a woman’s voice, close enough that Mac jumped slightly.