Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Cheers,’ replied Edwin, trying to get his best Strine accent into the delivery.

  Mac cased the lobby, looking for eyes, clothes and gaits that didn’t belong. There was a large easel alongside the massive front desk advertising the Powering Asia conference and welcoming delegates.

  He waited for the senior manager guy and moved forward, clocked the name-tag and gave him a wink.

  ‘How’s it going, Steve?’

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  ‘Davis,’ he said, sliding his passport and Visa card across the black marble top. ‘I’ll check in now for my wife as well, though she’s not here yet.’

  Steve opened the passport, looked at his screen and smiled.

  ‘Welcome, Mr Davis. Mrs Davis checked in twenty minutes ago so we won’t require your passport.’

  Mac baulked for a split second, then recovered. ‘Bloody women, eh Steve? The one time they’re not late it’s because they’re early.’

  Steve laughed, handed him a cardboard folder with a door card in it. ‘You’re in suite fi fteen-oh-eight, fi fteenth fl oor. One of the porters will take you up,’ he said, and clicked his fi ngers.

  Mac stood outside the room, took the Cutler suit bag, and paid off the porter, saying he wanted to surprise his wife. Taking a couple of deep breaths, he got himself into character. He hadn’t been on an op for almost two years, and he hadn’t done the Fred-and-Wilma for six or seven. All he knew about his ‘wife’ was that she was a former pro who was now also freelancing. That, and the fact that her code name was Primrose.

  The porter rattled away to the elevator bank and, as soon as he was out of sight, Mac knocked three times, then leaned on the door so his hand was over the spy hole.

  A female voice from behind the door said, ‘Sentinel,’ and Mac replied, ‘Primrose.’

  The door swung away from Mac, revealing the new Mrs Davis.

  She wasn’t a dog and she wasn’t a primrose. She was a product of MI6

  and her name was Diane Ellison.

  CHAPTER 28

  Silence strained between them. It felt like forever.

  She was still beautiful, blonde, lightly tanned, with amazing sapphire eyes and a classic oval face.

  Diane broke the stand-off, diving into character with a Daaarling, how are you? as she moved forward into a hug and a kiss. She smelled of expensive body wash and German toothpaste and when she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him into the suite she looked at him in a way that spelled trouble.

  Mac kept walking while Diane checked the hallway and then shut the door. He threw his suit bag across the sofa, put the wheelie against the wall and turned as Diane approached him with a smile, her white tank top accentuating her pale eyes. As ever, there was hardly any make-up on Diane’s face and she could still look at him as if she clocked every rude thought he’d ever had and some he hadn’t even thought of yet.

  She pointed at the plasma screen TV on the wall and they moved into the bedroom, which had already been female-colonised with a large overnight bag, its contents sprawled across the bed.

  ‘Hi, darling, gee it’s so good to see you,’ he said with enthusiasm as he looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘God, Richard, don’t leave me alone again, you hear?’ she said in that plummy, spoiled English-rose accent that Mac had once fallen for.

  He pointed to the bed, made a face. Diane smirked, nodded. Then she gave a little squeal. ‘Ouch! Shit, what is wrong with this fucking bed?! Oh my God! It’s a fucking cockroach!’

  ‘How dare they?’ said Mac, then made a fuss of going into the bathroom. He got the shower running and then made silently for the main door, holding up three fi ngers at Diane. He whisked down the fi re stairs two at a time and came out around the corner from the elevator banks in the retail sub-level of the hotel. Walking to the end of the bars and restaurants, he moved quickly up the guests’ stairs and into the large lobby lounge from the end opposite to the front desk. There was a stack of Asian Wall Street Journal s and, grabbing one, he sat in a club chair that gave him a narrow view through a couple of square marble pillars to the front desk.

  Mac checked his civvie watch. He’d given Diane three minutes before she started her prima donna dramatics, and he watched as Steve took a call and winced, nodded a lot and fi nally crooked his fi nger at a junior manager. Diane could be highly persuasive when she wanted something, like a new room.

  Mac waited, looking for signs of surveillance. That sign came after Steve was close to putting the phone down. A local man in a suit, about forty, leaned out of the back office and asked Steve something, probably along the lines of, ‘You didn’t give them a new room did you?’

  Steve shrugged and the guy in the suit moved out into full view and nodded reluctantly before Steve and the junior manager moved to the elevators with a couple of porter trolleys. Solidly built, the bloke in the suit was Freddi Gardjito. He put his hands on his hips, pissed off, and when his eyes landed on Mac, he smiled thinly, shook his head and headed over to where Mac was sitting.

  ‘Freddi! How are things, old horse?’ said Mac, standing and shaking hands with Freddi, his old sparring partner from Indonesian intelligence.

  ‘Shit, McQueen - I thought you were out?’

  ‘I am.’

  Freddi snorted. ‘You’re lending yourself, mite.’

  ‘Honest, Freddi,’ smiled Mac. ‘Just up for some R&R.’

  ‘In Jakarta?’

  ‘It’s the clean air, the unhurried atmosphere -‘

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Freddi. ‘Just promise me - no cop and robber, yeah? We’re too old for that now.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mac, looking around at some of the Powering Asia delegates networking in the lounge, ‘we could start with a room with a bit of privacy, huh Fred?’

  ‘Not what we got at APEC, McQueen.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Freddi,’ laughed Mac, knowing what ASIO and ASIS had got up to at the Sydney summit a year earlier. ‘That’s the whole point of APEC, isn’t it?’

  Freddi gave him the ‘Don’t bullshit me‘ look, with the same slow Javanese blink his President couldn’t help but give to condescending foreign leaders. ‘You got a clean room now, okay mite?’

  ‘Thanks, Fred,’ he said, slapping the other man’s bicep. ‘So what’s the gig for you guys?’

  Freddi shrugged, non-committal. ‘You know - UN shit.’

  Mac vaguely recalled something in the brochure about the UN.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘UN DESA, the infrastructure guys. They’re funding this conference.’

  ‘DESA’s a problem?’

  ‘Well, someone comes in with UN credentials and our government people start talking because they think it’s okay.’ Freddi gave a big shrug, opened his hands at Mac. ‘But maybe not UN. Maybe they our friends, yeah?’

  In spy circles, our friends referred to other professionals in the fi eld.

  ‘At least you’ll have fun following them, eh Fred?’

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ he said, looking pained. ‘A tour of Jakarta brothels - Meena gonna love that one.’

  Mac laughed at the reference to Freddi’s wife. It had been six years since their failed operation in Sumatra and in a strange way he had wanted to debrief with Freddi about the whole affair, get a few things off his chest. Freddi might want to do that too, but it probably wouldn’t happen. The rule amongst male spooks was simple: you erected a wall around your true feelings and you kept it there with smart-alec humour, gee-ups and mind games. Intelligence agencies didn’t recruit people with confessional personalities.

  ‘Thanks for the room, mate,’ said Mac. ‘Couldn’t send up a comp bottle of wine or something could you? Keep the little lady happy?’

  Freddi shook his head and started to walk away. ‘Later, brother.’

  ‘Thanks, Fred.’

  Freddi suddenly stopped and turned. ‘And by the way, McQueen?’

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘If you want a clean room, don’t check into the La
r with MI6

  agent. Not how it working,’ he said, then stalked off, mumbling into his suit lapel as he moved across the lobby.

  They walked along the Ciliwung River, under palms and in front of some of the restaurants that lined Jakarta’s artery in the south and central districts of the city. The further north you walked, the more the Ciliwung turned into a sewer lined with kampungs - the scavenger communities - rather than the nice boardwalks and greenery of the wealthy south. By the time the Ciliwung disgorged into the Java Sea it was black.

  Diane was more comfortable with the silences that opened up between them than Mac was. They had been very close two years earlier and Mac had even bought a ring. He had planned to propose to her and everything, in spite of the social gulf between them. Mac was a Rockhampton Catholic boy with a cop dad and a nurse mother.

  Diane grew up in British diplomatic residences and had a walk-up entry into Cambridge. The fact that she was an MI6 spy hadn’t been the big revelation; it was the fact she’d been sleeping with a rogue CIA operative called Peter Garrison while she was supposed to be in love with Mac. Garrison had been trying to kill Mac during this overlap, a detail that had gutted Mac at the time. He wondered if Davidson knew about Diane and him.

  They found a park bench overlooking the river and under the shade of a palm. Diane crossed her legs and wiggled the red toenails poking out of her dark blue Birkenstock health sandals.

  ‘Shall we get the crap out of the way fi rst, darling?’ she asked, her eyes hidden behind tortoiseshell Ray-Ban Wayfarers. ‘The conference starts in a few hours.’

  Mac sighed. He wanted to recriminate, tell her off, make her feel terrible. But the truth was he was very happy with Jenny, loved Rachel.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘what happened, happened, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But I don’t hate you. In fact I think we can both count ourselves lucky to have got out from under that wacko boyfriend of yours without getting killed,’ he said, smiling.

  Diane laughed. ‘Christ, he was wacko, wasn’t he!’

  ‘Lunatic.’

  ‘A complete nutter,’ she giggled. ‘Thought he was the world’s greatest lover.’

  ‘Just ask him - he’ll tell you.’

  ‘He did enough of that,’ she smiled, then turned to him, getting serious. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t have to be.’

  ‘I know, but I am sorry,’ she said, looking him in the eye.

  They were close enough to kiss and for a split second Mac thought she was going to try it on.

  ‘Accepted, Wilma, now let’s -‘

  ‘ Wilma? ‘

  ‘Yeah - Fred and Wilma.’

  Diane was blank.

  ‘You know, The Flintstones? On TV? Fred and Wilma Flintstone?’

  Diane shrugged.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Mac. ‘Let’s work up an approach.’

  They went through the basics: Vitogiannis was the pants man and Grant the techie bloke. Mac saw it as a double action. Diane would appeal to Vitogiannis’s vanity, especially his narcissistic vision of himself as a man who could take a wife off a husband. If Mac’s knowledge of that personality type was accurate, Diane could get him big-noting himself without even having to get him into bed.

  ‘We’re looking for an escalation with this guy. The more you’re impressed by the small shit - like the fact he has a company doing business with NIME - the more he’ll tell you.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’ asked Diane.

  Mac thought about that. ‘Either Vitogiannis has engineered this as a way to legitimately sell that enrichment code to a foreign consortium or he’s being gulled by NIME. I just want to know how much he knows, okay?’

  ‘Sounds fair,’ said Diane. ‘What about Grant? What’s his key?’

  ‘He’s an engineer, trained in the RAAF, did his MBA at MIT Sloan,’

  said Mac. ‘He’s really thorough and I reckon he’s done some probity work on these NIME guys.’

  ‘Got a lure?’

  ‘Canberra has held up the loan guarantee,’ said Mac. ‘And by now the two of them should have got word that the NIA needs some tweaking.’

  ‘NIA?’

  ‘National Interest Account. It’s when the politicians override our bureaucrats because they have a businessman they want to look after.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Well, yeah. My cover can get them that tweaking.’

  ‘A lobbyist, right?’

  ‘That’s it. I think I might persuade Mr Grant to write a bullshit end-user description, so the certifi cate on the eventual loan guarantee looks really strong.’

  ‘Not a real end-user?’

  ‘Funny thing about telling lies to governments,’ said Mac. ‘You have to establish where the truth is before you navigate around it.’

  Diane smiled, put her chin in her hand. ‘That’s very manipulative for a Rockhampton footballer.’

  ‘I do my best.’

  CHAPTER 29

  The plan was to get inside the Bennelong Systems cordon as fast as possible and then work out the way into NIME. Mac wanted to make this a fast gig, fi nd out who was behind the power-station consortium, write his report, get back to the Gold Coast and forget that the Fred-and-Wilma thing ever happened. He catalogued old pain as he worked the shampoo out of his hair, fi nding his injuries and telling himself he was healed now. It was a showering routine that allowed him to calm his thoughts and get his body relaxed.

  There was an old problem in his right wrist, a cracked sternum, a broken nose from high school rugby and some chipped teeth on the right top from a fi ght Garvs had started in a Manila bar, which Mac had had to end.

  And there was also his most recent injury. He hadn’t been as forceful as he might have with Jenny; hadn’t pointed out that being married to a female cop meant constantly having to trust her on long jobs and drinking sessions with male colleagues. All that time alone in cars - not every bloke would go along with it. But he hadn’t had the chance to say his piece because someone had tried to crush his urethra. Now it hurt to take a piss and it hurt to pull up his pants. It would probably also hurt to be aroused, which was what Jenny might have been thinking.

  Through the glass sides he saw the door open and Diane walk into the steamed-up bathroom. Mac went to say something but she cut him off. ‘Sorry, just getting a fl annel,’ she said in a singsong voice, as if the real problem was his uptightness.

  She was irritating him. He had let her go fi rst in the bath, gave her a good hour at it, so he could then move in and do his thing, come out to a ‘wife’ who was basically ready to go. But she was still walking around with a towel around her middle and another around her head.

  Diane had done many more husband-and-wife ops than he had

  - it was one of the reasons for having female spies - and she was a natural at keeping up the patter of married couples. It would really pay off when they got into public with their ease and momentum, but Mac felt she was playing with him. And playing with men was something she was very, very good at.

  After Mac’s debacle with Garrison - a supposed VX nerve agent attack that had really been a massive gold heist - Joe Imbruglia had told him a story about Diane. During a stint in Thailand in the early 1990s, she’d apparently sparked a strange bit of ethnic cleansing. She’d been posing as a journalist and had joined a plutey Bangkok tennis club to get close to a general in the government. She’d done a little too well, the bloke had fallen for her and the wife had gone mental -

  so mad that she’d talked the tennis club into passing a by-law limiting the number of pale-eyed members. The wife had delivered the letter of expulsion to Diane personally, or so the story went. Diane had just smiled at her and said, ‘You can have him back now - I’ve had my turn.’ The members had still been trying to restrain the screaming wife as Diane drove her Audi out of the club’s car park.

  Mac’s suit, dark blue and single-breasted, was draped on the sofa when he got into the living are
a of the suite. Diane had also polished his shoes, there was a new pair of socks that he recognised from the incredibly expensive men’s store underneath the lobby and his blue shirt was hanging off the curtain rail with the hotel’s iron cooling on the table beside the window. She’d ironed his shirt.

  He felt grateful, touched; this wasn’t the service he got in Broadbeach. Then he could hear Jenny saying, She’s playing you, Macca, you great big goose!

  Mac walked to the windows and watched the city lights going on outside as Jakarta fell into one of its plush tropical twilights. Moving over to the huge mirror he looked into pale blue eyes and a rugged face that was wide at the top and tapered in to a solid jaw. He still had all of his blond hair although it was thin, and he brushed it back straight off his face. His belly was still reasonably fl at and he had shoulders and arms.

  He pulled on a clean pair of undies, pulled on the new socks and then slipped into the ironed shirt. He thought things through, allowing each piece of clothing to put another layer of cover on him.

  When he was fully dressed, he was no longer Alan McQueen from Rockie; he was Richard Davis, professional fi xer for anyone trying to fi nd their way through the maze of EFIC and the land of taxpayer-backed export loan guarantees.

  He was happy with the look and was glad for the advice that his ASIS mentor, Scotty, had given him when he fi rst started. Scotty had recommended Mac get a ‘real’ suit as soon as he could afford one. ‘In the world you’re going into,’ the intel veteran had told him, ‘you have no idea how far a good suit will take you. Trust me on this.’

  When Mac had some spare coin, he’d gone down to a well-known tailor in Sydney and ordered their most conservative suit: dark blue, single-breasted, with spare pants. It had cost twice as much as the next cheapest, but he was still wearing it twelve years later and it allowed him to circulate among senior bureaucrats, bankers, barristers and wealthy businessmen without giving off a whiff of the pretender.

  After shooting his cuffs, he fastened his dress watch. He felt cold and on edge - he wanted a fast turnaround.

  They grabbed their name plates at the desk as they entered the Shangri-La’s ballroom on level two for the opening-night reception. It was huge and noisy, perhaps two thousand people yelling above the jazz quartet. Waiters in white tunics and black pants or skirts circulated with silver trays of booze and food, navigating between the crowds of animated Malaysians, Filipinos, Indonesians, Indians, Chinese, Australians, Thais, Japanese, Americans and Koreans.