Counter Attack

by Mark Abernethy

  Paying off the cyclo rider, Mac descended to the footpath in central Phnom Penh. The streets teemed with locals and Mac felt like the last Anglo left on the planet as he moved among the throng.

  Ducking into a street-front cafe, he ordered fish curry and a beer and sat with his back against the side wall, from where he could see most of the street. The clouds were building high and dark and the humidity closed in as if a heavy drape had been dropped on the city. Although his stomach was clenched with stress, he knew from experience that he had to make himself eat. You never knew when the next meal was coming so it paid to force it down when you could.

  The curry was excellent and the beer cold, and as he waited for Charlie to call back, Mac pondered the Bongo Morales complication. Bongo was about eight years older than Mac, a former Philippines intel operator who’d also been trained by American outfits such as US Marines force-recon and made a name for himself in Mindanao, chasing and killing terrorists. He didn’t just outgun the bad guys – he could out-think them as well. One of the stories that had created the legend of Bongo was the time his cover as a first-class steward on Garuda Airlines had been exaggerated and he’d ended up sitting at the flight deck, flying a 737 to Denpasar. Bongo was the original chameleon spy who could switch from a peroxide-haired gay hustler working out of the Shangri-La to a jungle-stalking hit man – and make the transition faster than most people could tie their laces.

  He’d gone freelance in the mid-1990s and become a consultant to the Indonesian Kopassus regiment as they tried to subdue the GAM separatists in Aceh, at the north end of Sumatra. When the Indonesians wanted to test their new American-supplied cluster bombs on civilian villages, Bongo had not reacted well. The result was the Kopassus colonel decided not to push his luck, and Bongo walked away.

  Mac had worked with him in East Timor during the independence ballot of 1999. In a very ugly finale to a flawed gig, Mac had been left on an airfield in East Timor to face the Indonesian Army, while Bongo had flown away in a borrowed helo. In the soldier world, Bongo owed Mac – owed him big. On the other hand, Bongo had saved Mac during a shootout in a Dili warehouse. Regardless of what Mac thought of the IOU equation, he knew Bongo would decide for himself. Which was the main problem with Bongo Morales: whether you worked with him, for him or against him, he was never confused about what he was going to do next, and he sure as hell didn’t need anyone’s input on the matter.

  Now, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff had decided that in order to save the PM from political embarrassment, Scotty and Mac were going to get to Geraldine McHugh before Bongo Morales. That sort of challenge could only have come from a whiteboard in Canberra. Bongo Morales might enjoy the rivalry or he might not. But if he resented the intrusion, there was a high likelihood that he’d remove the threat. Just like that. You’d be pig food before you had a chance to utter a single fuck you, Morales.

  Sipping on his beer, Mac remembered the last call he’d wanted to make.

  He dialled the number in Singapore and was put through to two intermediaries before a switch clicked over and Benny Haskell was on the line.

  ‘Macca,’ he barked. ‘You ducking me?’

  ‘No, mate. Changed phones.’

  ‘Secure?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mac. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Thought you might like an update, courtesy of my mate at the ministry,’ said Benny, who had a friend in Singapore’s internal intelligence agency.

  ‘What’s he got?’

  ‘The investigation took a strange turn when the Americans turned up,’ Benny told him.

  ‘Americans?’ said Mac, massaging his temples.

  ‘Yeah, these men in black have been running around, going through all of Ray’s books for the funds.’

  ‘The investment business?’ said Mac.

  ‘Yeah. So someone asks one of these Yanks what they’re looking for. They can’t see what it has to do with Chinese spies and ballistic missiles and Ray’s execution.’

  Mac was lost. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Two hours later, my mate is officially warned off by the Singaporean Prime Minister’s office.’ Benny laughed. ‘Told him to let the Yanks have what they want and back off.’

  ‘Who are the Yanks?’ said Mac.

  ‘This is the good part,’ said Benny. ‘The senior bloke’s from US Treasury intel, and the underlings are Secret Service.’

  Mac reached for his beer. ‘The Secret Service guys guard the President, don’t they? What do they want with Ray’s fund?’

  ‘Guarding POTUS isn’t their only job,’ said Benny.

  ‘Remind me,’ said Mac.

  ‘They also have a big intel and investigation unit for protecting the US currency.’

  ‘Currency?’ said Mac. ‘You mean they catch counterfeiters?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Benny. ‘Look, I have to go now but I’m having a drink with my mate tomorrow – I’ll call you if there’s anything more.’

  ‘Okay, Benny.’

  ‘And Macca – be careful.’

  Chapter 34

  Finding a small internet cafe in the locals-only part of Phnom Penh, Mac bought a pot of coffee and took the computer in the far corner. Using the protocols Charlie had given him, he went through a series of pop-up windows until a tag-line in the bottom right-hand corner informed him he was operating from the remote computer network Charlie had stipulated; by the jumble of letters, it looked like a tractor parts distributor based in Wisconsin.

  Activating the graphics-free Mozilla browser, Mac found the ASIS website, logged in with his passwords and held his breath, almost expecting Urquhart, Lance and Marlon to burst in the door as soon as he was in the ASIS system.

  He searched in the ASIS databases for mentions of Israeli, IDF or Mossad activity in Indochina. There were fifteen files, and Mac opened them one by one. The oldest, from the 1970s, were scanned files in PDF format. He grinned as he scrolled through the old typewritten and telex-printed reports and memos, some sent over the wire from consular communications offices in Hanoi and Bangers, others typed and pouched out of Saigon, Nha Trang and Phnom Penh. One looked like it had started life in Vientiane – an Aussie SIS asset, a coffee importer from Melbourne, had run across a couple of interlopers in the Laotian capital who were talking about big coffee contracts and trying to talk down the Aussie and North American coffee buyers. The report noted that they looked Lebanese but used names like ‘John Baker’. One claimed to be from San Francisco, but he hesitated when talking about the view from Russia Hill: a view he should have known. The local asset decided they were Israeli when he saw their appalling driving.

  Chuckling, Mac cycled through the files. They were in a report format – there was no desk analysis on Israeli intelligence in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Peninsular Malaysia or Thailand, and there were no assessments generated in Canberra based on field intelligence of Israeli activity.

  The reports rattled off the basics: Mossad and IDF special forces had trained units in the Philippines, Taiwan and Singapore; Israel, according to one report, had paid informers in northern Burma, but that didn’t mean much – a paid informer in South-East Asia was someone who’d been shown a stack of greenbacks, and didn’t see the harm. Mac didn’t take it too seriously because many European intelligence agents in South-East Asia allowed the locals to think they were Mossad, as a way of covering where they really came from. It evened out since Mossad agents liked to intimate that they were from the CIA or British SIS when dealing with informers. There were entire cadres of Mossad agents trained to pass for Syrians, Iraqis and Jordanians.

  What he was looking for was mention of a bunch of hairy-chested Mossad operators, not hiding behind a film production company or a photography bureau. The kind of pros who would push Quirk for access to a computer network and then drop him when it suited them; a bunch of tough guys who would put a l
ight-bulb bomb in Mac’s hotel room. People like that – no matter how far they’d drifted off as privateers – always gained attention during their official careers.

  Pouring his coffee as the traffic outside went about its theatrics, Mac looked at the last file in the ASIS search result. It was stamped April, a year ago. He clicked it open.

  It started with a basic intelligence bio card, which was a file containing a passport picture and all the information that defines a person. It was titled RADOFF, Bernard Levi and proceeded to list details of Mr (Bernie) Radoff’s social persona: a French businessman, former banker, now an import-exporter with textile and printing interests in Thailand, Burma and Cambodia.

  The second part of the file told the real story: Bernie Radoff was born Marcel Beyer, French-Israeli, former IDF air force, graduated with a law degree from the University of Haifa in 1991, post-grad economics at the Sorbonne in 1992, trained at Mossad in the early 1990s (while still in Paris), joined Banque Nationale in 1993 as a management trainee in its institutional division and spent the rest of his career drawing two cheques: one from the French bank as a bond writer, and the other from King Saul, the Tel Aviv street where Israel’s famous security service was located.

  The file noted that Beyer had risen to a senior position with BNP and run the bank’s bond desk out of Hong Kong and then Singapore. Australian intelligence estimated that Beyer ceased being an active Mossad agent in 2005.

  Mac was about to log out when he realised there were two attachments to the Marcel Beyer file. The first was a story from Associated Press, tagged Bangkok, Thailand, from eight months ago.

  Reading quickly, Mac grew impatient with the lack of clear information.

  The Thai Ministry of Finance has confirmed that French national Mr Bernard Radoff has been handed a suspended sentence in exchange for a guilty plea in a four-month legal action that has been shrouded in secrecy.

  The Ministry continued its suppression of proceedings in the Supreme Court today, claiming the charges against Mr Radoff – a French financier with many business interests in South-East Asia – were ‘classified’ under national security laws and would not be disclosed.

  ‘Mr Radoff has pleaded guilty to the charges brought by the government and the court has passed sentence,’ said a brief written statement from the Ministry. ‘The Ministry of Finance has no further comment.’

  Mr Radoff was arrested five months ago following a series of spectacular raids in Surin province. His suspended sentence means he is free to go – foreign nationals given suspended sentences in Thailand are usually allowed 48 hours in which to leave the country.

  Mr Radoff’s lawyer, Mr Mati Sutramat, scoffed at questions about his client’s possible ties to the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok.

  ‘I can be arrested for talking about the facts of this case,’ he said. ‘The matter is closed.’

  The other attachment was a black and white photograph. It showed Radoff in what looked like the forecourt of the Sheraton Saigon on Dong Du Street, just around the corner from the Grand. He was sleek, tanned and arrogant, and grinning at the camera, which was being wielded by a photographer from the Saigon Times. The caption read: French financier Bernard Radoff has been touring some of Vietnam’s pulp and paper operations in the Mekong region as he looks for suitable investments to augment his holdings in Thailand and Cambodia.

  Mac was about to close the photograph when something caught his eye. Radoff was standing in front of a white 4x4. Mac looked closer – it looked like a Ford Explorer SUV, although he couldn’t be certain. The photographer had cropped the picture so only the front portion of the Explorer stuck into the picture – it stopped at the windscreen pillar. The window of the vehicle had a faint glare bouncing off it but Mac could see that a driver sat behind the wheel, a baseball cap pulled over his eyes.

  His pulse quickening, Mac used the Photoshop software in the ASIS system to draw a box around the driver’s face and magnify it.

  Saving the magnified image to a notepad, Mac selected the ‘repixelate’ option in the menu and waited for the processors in Canberra to take the blown-up, blurry pixels of that driver and make their estimations about how it should look as a reconstituted image.

  The result stunned Mac as it finally clarified like a fog lifting. Despite the glare of the glass and the shadow-forming peak of the cap, he knew he was looking at the Israeli with the scary eyes – the man in the red shirt who’d killed Quirk.

  Cutting and pasting the repixelated image into the ‘search’ field of the ASIS databases, Mac clicked on the ‘match to identity’ option and hit search.

  The search tumbled for more than six minutes as the digital information was thrown at every facial image in the Australian intel database – a database which had been compiled over eighty years.

  Finally, a bio card popped up. The man’s name was Joel Dozsa, born 20 March 1970 in – as Mac had surmised – Hungary.

  Dozsa had emigrated to Israel as a teenager, and it was suspected he’d been recruited by Mossad in his first months of university at Haifa, Bernie Radoff’s alma mater.

  Joel Dozsa had done his doctoral work in military history at the Australian National University in Canberra, and had augmented his research with a junior lectureship at the Royal Military College Duntroon, teaching Australian Army officer cadets.

  Having finished his thesis, Dozsa was offered a lecturer’s position at Duntroon but the offer was suddenly withdrawn after an unfavourable report from the Defence Security Authority, the military’s internal intelligence and vetting agency. The reason for the retraction was not in the report, but Mac assumed the Mossad connection had filtered back to DSA.

  The last paragraph of the Joel Dozsa bio was both vague and clear:

  Mr Dozsa did not dispute the retraction of the job offer and departed Canberra airport for Melbourne two hours after being informed of the retraction. DSA officers XXX and YYY followed Mr Dozsa to Melbourne, where he disappeared in what appeared to be ‘aided’ counter-surveillance. Defence Security officers PPP and QQQ attended Mr Dozsa’s apartment in the Duntroon residential halls and found a stripped apartment. Fellow residents said two men in grey coveralls had loaded a small van with the contents of Mr Dozsa’s apartment. Surveillance tape of RMC Duntroon showed a Toyota HiAce van with false registration plates. Subsequent interagency discussions revealed Australian Federal Police had opened a file on Mr Dozsa following an ANU exchange week in Bangkok, June 1993. Mr Dozsa was observed by an off-duty AFP officer at the Siam City Hotel in Phayathai, Bangkok – a known RV of French national Bernie RADOFF. Radoff is an institutional banker with BNP and a private investor across the Mekong Delta region; he is also understood to be a senior Mossad ‘agent-runner’ responsible for many deniable operations on behalf of the Israeli government. DSA made a pro forma request to the Israeli Embassy for explanations as to Mr Dozsa’s sudden and ‘aided’ disappearance at Melbourne airport. No explanation was forthcoming.

  Mac finally breathed out. He now had a name and bio. Joel Dozsa was smart and organised, and he’d almost embedded himself in Australia’s military establishment. RMC Duntroon trained the elite of Australia’s and the Pacific’s military leaders, and a powerful position such as lecturer would have given Mossad some interesting leverage in the Asia-Pacific region.

  Logging out of the ASIS portal, Mac stared at the bare-bones Mozilla screen, still operating off a parts department hard drive in Wisconsin. Bringing up Google, he typed in the words: light bulb bomb Thailand 1993.

  The first item was an old Associated Press report from July 1993 – Thai criminal investigators were resiling from their initial statement that the Indonesian businessman Ibrahim Sarno had been killed at his golf-resort bungalow at Phuket because of a freak gas explosion. The police investigation had been joined by a team from Thailand’s military intelligence agency and the possibility had been raised that Sarno had b
een blasted to pieces while turning on the bathroom light . . .

  Mac looked around, his skin crawling. He’d seen first-hand how the light-bulb bomb worked, and he felt nauseous having to read those words.

  Police, according to the AP report, were now accepting the possibility that Sarno had been assassinated by some form of IED triggered by the light switch. The journalist had obviously got wind of foul play once the military spooks had entered the investigation, because the writer concluded with the sentence: Police refused to confirm that Ibrahim Sarno was a conduit for South-East Asian funding of the PLO, or that his suspicious death was an assassination by Israeli intelligence agents.

  Mac had his man. The light-bulb-in-the-bathroom MO confirmed it. But what now played on his mind was Dozsa’s possible success during his time in Canberra.

  Mac wanted to believe that the people Dozsa had approached would have told him to rack off, but experience told him otherwise . . .

  Chapter 35

  The clouds had lowered and darkened by the time Mac paused at the threshold of the internet cafe and pushed out into the street, making for a cyclo rider waiting at the kerb. He wanted to get back to the Holiday International, make a proper search of the Americans’ bags, take what he needed and move to another location. Having tapped into the ASIS website and called Benny Haskell, now would be a good time to confuse the trail.

  Giving his instructions to the rider, he pulled up the sunshade and checked his phone as they moved with the traffic. Looking up, he noticed they’d turned hard right, and there was now shadow where there should have been oppressive heat.

  ‘Hey!’ said Mac, turning, but it was too late.

  The steel pressed into the back of his head and as he froze and lifted his hands, the Colt was lifted from his waistband.

  ‘Shit, McQueen,’ came an Aussie voice. ‘That was easy.’

  Turning his head, he saw Lance, who pushed a Glock in his face.