Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike

by Mark Abernethy

  Jen tore open the soft pack, pulled a cigarette out of the ragged silver paper and lit it. When Jenny was stressed or unhappy, she smoked and drank. And she did it alone. Mac didn’t want her walking around in this state - all it would take would be one young stud getting fresh with the darlin’ or sweetheart and next thing Mac’d be getting a call from the cops.

  ‘You okay?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Right as rain,’ said Jenny, staring into the distance.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Girl’s gotta do, Macca,’ she said, blowing a plume of smoke straight up into the night air. ‘Girl’s gotta do.’

  CHAPTER 25

  It was 4.48 am when Mac was woken by Rachel’s burblings, her signal that she was ready for a new day. The fi rst hint of dawn streaked the sky over the Pacifi c as Mac lifted her out of the cot and walked her through to the kitchen, changed her nappy and put her in the highchair. Giving his daughter the warmed-through bottle of formula, Mac ate a banana and they watched Fox News together.

  Rachel drained the bottle with enthusiasm and when she’d discarded it and her little legs were starting to kick with impatience, Mac switched the menu to a small bowl of mashed pears he’d heated up.

  The news anchor said there were problems in Pakistan which were spilling into Afghanistan, and the White House seemed to be distancing itself from General Musharraf, Pakistan’s president. Mac snorted and Rachel stopped chewing and stared at him, big dark eyes trying to work out where Dad was at.

  Mac smiled at her and thought about how the Indians, Russians and Israelis - not to mention a few Australian diplomats and spooks

  - had been trying for years to get the Americans to stop treating Pakistan like a protected species. Pakistan’s intelligence service had created and funded the Taliban in the early 1980s with the approval of the CIA, ostensibly to create an anti-Soviet counter-invasion force.

  But the Taliban, its Pakistani masters and some of the CIA handlers had evolved into what could only be described as a massive heroin syndicate.

  Mac had watched some very smart, totally committed men and women walk away from a career in the Agency as it slipped from bad to worse. People didn’t get a fancy degree and choose government service over private wealth to become facilitators to drug dealers, slavers and arms barons. You didn’t go into the spook life to be a guardian angel to the Pinochets, Noriegas and Saddams.

  And now that the wheels were falling off Pakistan’s openly corrupt system, the CIA was walking away with a supercilious smile on its face, attentions now focused on getting the State Department to start bringing Burma in from the cold and inoculate its junta against criminal investigations for heroin traffi cking. Mac reckoned within two months there’d be a concerted push via global media outlets

  to rehabilitate the junta as a necessary ally in the War on Terror. You could forget Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s accurate portrayal of Rangoon being one of the worst regimes in the world, because by the time those speechwriters and ghosters from Langley were fi nished, Burma’s fruit-salad brigade would look like a cross between Clark Kent and Sister Immaculata.

  Mac turned off the TV, put a John Fogarty CD in the stereo and started cleaning up while Rachel banged her spoon on her highchair table to the beat of ‘Centerfi eld’. Starting with the outside decking, he emptied Jenny’s ashtray and brought her empties inside before putting the garbage out the front. Then he packed the dishwasher, wiped the benches and did a quick clean of the kitchen and breakfast/dining area lino fl oors. Jenny was many things, but houseproud was not one of them, and since Mac was raised by a working mother, he took cleaning, cooking and laundry as a given. Jenny never mentioned their housework arrangement to anyone, even as a compliment to Mac. Aussie girls seemed to have an instinctive grasp of how the male ego worked.

  There was a blue current-model Ford Falcon sitting by the kerb as Mac walked to his silver AirTrain Connect car. The driver was waiting but Mac kept his black leather document satchel rather than handing it over.

  ‘Morning, Mr Davis,’ said the driver, smiling as he opened the passenger door to the Holden Calais. ‘Getting an early start?’

  Mac gave him a wink as he slid in, then held his hand up as the bloke went to shut the door. ‘Just a tick, mate.’

  Mac got out and walked to the Falcon, knocked on the driver’s window and waited as the glass came down. There were two male cops in the front seats, in dark suits. The driver was late thirties, had a round face, full head of black hair and a dark cop moustache.

  ‘Help you, sir?’ he said.

  ‘Watching out for her?’ said Mac, nodding at the townhouse which looked uninhabited in the dark of early morning.

  ‘And you’d be Mr McQueen …’ He said it slow, wanting to assert his authority.

  ‘Correct,’ said Mac, putting out a hand.

  The cop looked him up and down and decided to take Mac’s hand. ‘Doug Fletcher. Just keeping an eye on Jen, you know, with that Bartolo prick causing dramas.’

  ‘Good stuff. What’s their go?’

  ‘Laying a complaint against the AFP,’ the cop shrugged. ‘Usual shit.’

  ‘All these brutish women wandering around -‘

  ‘- streets aren’t safe for hard-working criminals.’

  Mac nodded. ‘Who’s the Thai?’

  ‘He’s Cambodian,’ said Doug, ‘and he’s trouble, that’s who he is.’

  The AirTrain Connect car dropped Mac at Robina station and he walked straight onto a carriage containing one person - a middle-aged woman with a large green suitcase in the luggage enclosure. He sat three seats behind her, his back against a bulkhead. On his right the sun was nudging over the Pacifi c, a sight Mac never tired of.

  Back in Rockie as a teenager, Mac and his mates would head out for Great Keppel Island during the holidays, sleep on the beach and spend all day snorkelling and spearing fi sh. Waking up at six am as the sun crested the Pacifi c was something you never forgot, and Mac allowed that sun to warm him again as the train stopped at Nerang and a bunch of rowdy Pommie travellers staggered on, drunk. There must have been a win to a footy club overnight because they were talking about a goal, and when one of them grabbed a bloke’s cap and started throwing it to their mates, there was a wrestling match with the bloke who wanted his hat back.

  Mac saw the woman in front of him fl inch. He got up, sat beside her, started talking. Her name was Minnie and she was fl ying to London to see her daughter, who’d married a Scottish lawyer and was eight months pregnant. The Poms saw Mac’s move and calmed down. Mac smiled to himself. In about twelve hours’ time they’d just be coming in to land at Changi, wishing to God they’d got some sleep the night before.

  Mac got off the train at the domestic airport terminal in Brisbane and paused at the head of the stairs that went down to the terminal entrance. He pretended to check his phone, wanting everyone on that train to be in front of him. When they’d fi led past, he lowered the phone and used the elevation to recce his approach to the airport building. The action was just starting to warm up at the set-down area, with all the business and government types being dropped off for the morning shuttle to Sydney, Canberra and Cairns. Everything looked okay and he strolled down from the raised station and went into the concourse.

  Tony Davidson was exactly where he’d said he’d be: in the Qantas Club lounge on the fi rst fl oor of the building. Mac fl ashed his Qantas membership card to the concierge, grabbed a cup of coffee and a crois sant and moved over to where the windows looked out on the tarmac.

  When Mac sat down, Davidson barely looked up. ‘Macca,’ he said through a mouthful of bacon and eggs.

  ‘Tony. Good fl ight?’

  Davidson sat back, wiped his mouth and lifted his cup of tea for a sip. ‘Can’t complain - slept most of the time.’

  Davidson had semi-retired to the Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane, but coming back to ASIS had meant reconnecting with his old corporate cover in Perth, on the other side of the continent. His four-a
nd-a-half-hour morning fl ight from Perth to Brissie left Perth at half past midnight and got in to Brisbane just before six am. And now Davidson was going to be on a fl ight to Canberra in forty minutes.

  You needed a sense of humour when you travelled around Australia.

  They made small talk for a couple of minutes, most of which Mac had gathered from their phone calls. Davidson was back in - he’d never really left - and was building an economic operations team. Mac clocked the charcoal suit, the plain blue tie and white shirt - nothing to catch the eye or set him apart. His late-fi fties face had jowls and the full head of salt ‘n’ pepper hair was cut like you’d expect from a former representative cricketer and career spy. Again, nothing to make anyone look twice. Mac’s dark chinos, pale blue polo shirt and boat shoes completed a pattern of anonymity. There was no reason to look at either of them: no tats, no piercings, no jewellery, no hairdo, no iPod, no message T-shirt, no need to differentiate.

  If you became a banker, a lawyer or a political adviser - as most of Mac’s university peers had - you spent your early career as a young man attempting to build a projection of self-importance. You had to be noticed, even if people thought you were a wanker. But in the spy trade, you took smart blokes with good degrees and showed them how to fade into a crowd, to have people forget what they looked like, to be the man who wasn’t there. Which was why Mac sat still, his hands on his lap, as he spoke with Davidson. Anyone trying to observe them wouldn’t even have body language or mannerisms to decipher.

  ‘Happy with the terms?’ asked Davidson.

  ‘Sure, Tony - ten a week and expenses is fair,’ said Mac, who liked that his former boss was straight-up about money and expenses.

  ‘Not bad, really,’ mused Davidson.

  ‘And no wet work - I can live with that,’ said Mac, happy that he wouldn’t have to be pulling the Heckler out of mothballs. ‘So what’s up?’

  ‘EFIC has a situation.’

  Mac nodded. EFIC was the Commonwealth’s Export Finance and Insurance Corporation, essentially a government instrumentality for ensuring that large exports of Australian goods and services to volatile countries would have payment guaranteed. Most developed nations had their version of EFIC. The US one was called Ex-Im Bank and had funded Saddam’s military program in the late 1980s, before George Bush launched Desert Storm in 1991 and destroyed all the hardware.

  When Saddam had started his post-war rebuilding he relied once again on the loan guarantees of the American taxpayer to rebuild the weapons of mass destruction that the Americans would later claim was their reason for going back in and destroying it all again.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asked Mac.

  Davidson poured more tea. ‘Bennelong Systems - heard of them?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ said Mac. ‘They do power station control systems.

  That them?’

  ‘And?’

  Mac looked out on the tarmac where three Qantas 767s were being loaded and refuelled in the early morning light. ‘Let’s see, didn’t they emerge out of an earlier company that made C and C systems for the navy? They had something to do with over-the-horizon, right?’

  ‘That’s them,’ said Davidson, looking up at a businessman walking past and allowing the bloke fi ve steps before he continued. ‘Bennelong is on the verge of signing on to a very large project with a private power-generation consortium in Indonesia.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘Consortium’s talking about total construction of fi ve billion US.

  Could be a drink of between three hundred and fi ve hundred million for Bennelong.’

  ‘How nice for them,’ said Mac.

  ‘Yes, but there’s some issues in there.’

  Mac waited, sipped his coffee.

  ‘The EFIC guys turned this down as a loan guarantee,’ continued Davidson. ‘In fact, they sent it back three times. They don’t want to write it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Initially, they didn’t like the end-user certifi cation. And when the deal boomeranged the fi rst time, they made an inquiry with the Organisation,’ said Davidson, referring to ASIO. ‘And it got handed around the community, and what with one thing and another, the chaps saw it and asked EFIC not to write the guarantee.’

  Mac raised an eyebrow. The ‘chaps’ referred to people like Mac and Davidson who worked at ASIS. If they’d asked EFIC not to do the guarantee, there was probably a good reason.

  ‘It was a lucky catch,’ said Davidson. ‘Someone in Jakkers saw Bennelong mentioned as part of a power-generation trade show, realised that the consortium was about to announce Bennelong as a full technology partner - on an equity basis - and they got on to the Tech Desk in Canberra.’

  Australia’s SIS head offi ce had a Technology Desk that tracked harmful and helpful technology and the various incarnations of the companies it existed in as they were merged, acquired and moved offshore. The idea was to track the technologies, not the corporate packaging they moved around in.

  ‘And what was there?’ asked Mac, interest triggered. This was what he was trained for.

  ‘Well the guys threw it around and it turned out that Bennelong was called Thomas Technology back in the early 1990s. Before that, they’d been subject to a management buy-out of a specialist division of a small outfi t called Betnell Corporation. Heard of them?’

  Mac had. Betnell was to the eighties and early nineties what Halliburton was to the 2000s: a massive contractor to the US

  Department of Defense and a global builder of large-scale public infrastructure projects.

  ‘What did Betnell’s specialist division do?’ asked Mac, his antennae now fully alert.

  ‘They built the control software for hydro power stations and coal-fi red power stations -‘

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘- and nuclear power stations.’

  Mac sipped on his coffee. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Yes, okay. But what we think Thomas Technology ended up with as a legacy item after the MBO was all the sequence code for a reactor called the Type-3.’

  ‘And what was that, Tony?’

  ‘The Type-3 was Betnell’s reactor that enabled uranium enrichment.’

  A pause opened between them and Mac let his eyes drift to a man reading the Australian Financial Review three tables away. ‘That’s a serious reactor.’

  ‘Yeah, but at the time, Betnell was being investigated by the audit offi ce in Washington for some commercial irregularities.’

  Mac chuckled; commercial irregularities in the Washington context were when you defrauded the United States government.

  ‘And besides,’ said Davidson, ‘GE Corporation apparently had a cheaper, better enrichment reactor and it could be built in half the time. So Ex-Im Bank were writing loan guarantees for the GE reactors like they were going out of fashion. And don’t forget that the French and Russians were building these reactors for clients too.’

  ‘So the Type-3 withers on the vine, GE steals the market, but the code is still there?’ said Mac.

  ‘Forgotten, unloved,’ said Davidson. ‘But quite usable.’

  ‘The code?’

  ‘Yeah - had a chat to the Tech Desk and it seems that these sequence codes for enrichment reactors are so complex that the code written twenty years ago is still being used. There was no point in reinventing the wheel at every upgrade in reactor types, so the original sequence code still works on modern enrichment reactors.’

  Mac was now totally enlisted.

  ‘So, fi fteen or twenty years later,’ said Davidson, ‘we have a private power consortium in Indonesia bringing in Bennelong not simply as a contractor but as an equity participant, and there is a difference.’

  ‘You think this consortium is after the uranium-enrichment code?’

  ‘I’d like to cross it off my list.’

  ‘So, the fi rm had a word in the shell-like with EFIC, and they spiked it?’ asked Mac, slightly confused.

  ‘Yep, EFIC understood.’

  ‘So?’<
br />
  ‘We got overruled,’ said Davidson, shaking his head.

  ‘Politicians?’

  ‘Who else? It was sent back to EFIC four days later as NIA.’

  If the accountants, bankers and lawyers at EFIC didn’t want to write a loan guarantee, the National Interest Account was an override device from the Prime Minister’s offi ce, which held that the deal in question was in the national interest.

  ‘So someone’s got a friend in cabinet?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Damned right. But anyway,’ said Davidson, leaning back and visibly relaxing, ‘before the chaps could grab hold of Urquhart and kick up a stink at PMC I mentioned that we might let the horse run, see where it leads us, eh? Have a peek into who these people are and what they want. With me, Macca?’

  Mac nodded. ‘With you.’

  ‘How’re Jen and Rachel, by the way?’ asked Davidson with an avuncular smile as the Qantas Club steward took his plates away.

  Mac warmed to the new conversation. Tony Davidson and his wife, Violet, had never had children and they doted on the kids of the younger intel offi cers. ‘They’re great, thanks, Tony,’ said Mac.

  ‘Jen’s okay about all this?’

  ‘Yeah, good as gold,’ said Mac, avoiding the point that he was the one who wasn’t necessarily okay with going back in the fi eld and being away from his girls for extended periods.

  ‘She’s okay about a bit of travel?’

  ‘Yeah,’ croaked Mac, not liking where this was going.

  ‘Good,’ said Davidson. ‘Because this power consortium is meeting with Bennelong in Jakkers, Friday arvo.’

  Mac winced. It was Thursday morning.

  CHAPTER 26

  Finding himself a rear bulkhead seat on the southbound AirTrain, Mac pulled out the fi le that Davidson had slipped into his document satchel in the Qantas lounge. The operation was called Mainstreet and his cover would be Richard Davis, his old textbook salesman identity, only this time he’d be spruiking himself as a former EFIC operative who could make things happen in Canberra.

  Mac fl ipped through the business cards. His fi rm was Davis Associates and the landline routed to the ASIS front of Southern Scholastic Books in Sydney, while the mobile number went directly to the Commonwealth secure SIM that Davidson had included in his starter pack. There was a new Commonwealth Bank Visa credit card issued in Richard Davis’s name, a printout confi rming his booking at the Shangri-La and a folder of business-class tickets for Emirates, the eight pm fl ight that night. The tickets suggested Davidson had intended to apply time pressure, not give him time to equivocate, and, more importantly, not allow Jen to kick up a fuss.