by Steve Lewis
‘Excellent. You can put it in your memoirs. I can even give you the title. Webster’s code name for the deception was “the Lusitania Plan”. You’d appreciate the historical allusion to the Churchill conspiracy: let one of your own ships sink to suck America into World War I.’
Toohey turned to Dunkley, his voice now soft and pleading.
‘I can’t do this alone.’
‘Do what?’
‘Jack Webster.’
‘What about him?’
‘We can’t let this stand. It’s not just about me or you. It’s about the country. It’s about democracy. We have to expose this guy.’
A shudder swept through Dunkley.
‘Are you insane? Haven’t you been paying attention? I tried. Paxton tried. We had tapes that had him bang to rights. We published them online. He shut them down inside a day and sued. He released intelligence analysis claiming we fabricated the evidence.’
Dunkley’s heart was racing as he relived the agony of his fall.
‘What was left of my reputation was shredded. Webster took every last cent and there weren’t many to begin with. Paxton was drummed out of parliament and they won’t even give him a pension.’
Toohey sat back down on the lounge, poised on its edge, eyeing Dunkley earnestly.
‘You know what’s hammered into you when you join a union? There’s strength in numbers. It’s never been more relevant. I need you to help me get this guy.’
Dunkley shook his head.
‘Webster’s been knighted by Scott, and he’s adored by the public. He’s the nearest thing we have to royalty. Webster is untouchable.’
‘No one’s untouchable.’
Dunkley snorted. ‘Oh yeah? Didn’t you learn anything from what happened? You were mortally wounded by Webster. Then your Labor mates followed the blood trail, hunted you down and put that freak show Catriona Bailey in your place. Get it through your head, Martin. The bad guys won.’
‘Harry, I have to believe that good can triumph. Otherwise what is there to live for?’
‘Maybe it’s just about surviving. You seem to be doing all right with your plush car and rolled-gold pension.’
Toohey stood again, clearly agitated.
‘I got into politics to make a difference. God knows, amid all the shit, I tried. If I got turfed for my sins, fair cop, that’s democracy. The caucus and the people give you the job, they can take it away.’
He turned to Dunkley, his face alight.
‘But in Australia the generals don’t get to do that. Here the military obeys civilian orders. That’s what makes us different from South America and Africa, even Fiji, for God’s sake. Webster can’t be allowed to get away with an attack on my government. We have to stop him. I thought you wanted to make a difference too. Surely if journalism has any purpose that’s what it’s for, trying to do your little bit for democracy.’
Dunkley smiled. ‘Martin, great speech. If you’d given more like that when you were prime minister, you might still be in power. Christ, I might even have voted for you.’
‘So, are you part of the team, Harry?’
‘I’m enjoying being on the reserves bench.’
‘We call it the interchange in AFL.’
‘Call it what you want. Names don’t matter much to me. The only thing I care about is my sanity, and that’s only just coming back. Why the hell would I jeopardise that?’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Canberra
Gently he massaged the lotion into her shoulders. Her skin was fair, vulnerable to the harsh sun. She turned to him, offering a playful smile – trusting, caring, loving.
‘Oh that’s nice, Charles,’ she whispered.
Then his hands tensed as he drove his thumbs into her throat, leaning into the attack. Her eyes were stricken as she gasped for breath, horror distorting her pretty face. He tried to stop but couldn’t, so he closed his eyes and tightened his grip . . .
Charles Dancer woke to the suffocating still of the night. Another nightmare. Each was more intense than the last, and each ended with the same look of disbelieving terror. It was a spectral gaze he’d been trying to erase each night since August 2011. The night of his ultimate betrayal.
Dressed in loose-fitting silk pyjamas, Dancer lay tortured beneath his Egyptian cotton sheets as he sought to block the memory of murdering the one person he had truly loved: Kimberley Gordon, the brilliant but troubled transsexual. The security analyst’s death in Telopea Park had been easy to bury as just another gay bashing, but the residue of her last breath on that chilled Canberra night would not die.
Beside Dancer the digital clock glowed green. 3.33am. One half of the devil’s number. Not for the first time, he sighed and rolled over.
Kimberley had been his lover, but her death had been ordered so he had killed her. He was a warrior, a partisan above all else. He’d had no choice.
‘You should have known better, Kim,’ Dancer admonished his lost love.
She had been breaking the law, and she’d known it – but Dancer still held Harry Dunkley responsible. He was the one who had enticed Kimberley to pull the thread that threatened to unravel the clandestine network that ran Canberra. She would have done anything for Dunkley, her oldest friend, even take on the Alliance with him.
What fools.
Governments would come and go but the Alliance – as they called themselves – endured and ensured the realm was defended. Its leaders were positioned at the helm of Australia’s Defence and intelligence establishments, with links to their counterparts in Washington.
And Dancer was their Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of the underworld. That meant destroying any threat. Sometimes he was an invisible diplomat, erasing the footprints of his masters, fixing their messes. But always he was their assassin.
Until Dancer had brutally dispatched Kimberley he had never questioned the morality of what he did. The ends justified the means; that was self-evident from his lifetime of bitter experience. He prided himself on knowing how the world really worked, stripped of emotion and the comfortable delusions of the mob and the distorted ideologies of politicians.
Humanity had never really changed. To survive in ancient times, your tribe had to be ruthless. The weak were banished from history. The only difference in millennia was that tribes had become nations and so the stakes had risen.
Now the West had been destroyed from within by contemptuous intellectuals who tore at its traditions. Stripped of its foundation stones, it was teetering and could no longer defend itself. If it wasn’t for the Alliance and soldiers like him, the edifice of freedom would come tumbling down. Maybe he should let it fall.
But he couldn’t walk away from his responsibilities. Dancer had trained his whole life for this. When he’d been singled out from the recruits to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, he’d been told he was the kind of operative the Alliance needed. He was sent to train with the Special Activities Division of the US Central Intelligence Agency, the paramilitary service responsible for covert operations.
Then in 2001 he’d flown into Uzbekistan on a CIA L-100 cargo plane with the agency’s seven-man Northern Afghanistan Liaison Team, code-named Jawbreaker.
On September 26, Jawbreaker flew a CIA-owned Mi-17 helicopter over the Hindu Kush mountains, into the Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul, for a meeting with leaders of the Northern Alliance. Dancer distinctly remembered the gifts they had brought with them, millions of crisp US dollars for the Afghans to buy weapons and supplies. They mapped the frontline Taliban positions and reopened an old British runway in preparation for the US-led invasion.
It was just one of Dancer’s many shadowy missions. Working out of the Department of Foreign Affairs, but under Jack Webster’s direction, he’d long had licence to roam at home and abroad, to snuff out problems, to grind the meat that made the sausages. In a world of subterfuge, he knew where the bodies were buried. The super-secret Marmalade Files were littered with his deeds.
&nb
sp; But what was not recorded was the mission that had ended in Kimberley’s death.
It began with forcing a deeply compromised politician from office.
Labor’s former defence minister Bruce Paxton was a ‘panda’, a Chinese sympathiser. He’d been compromised by a Chinese spy and had threatened to slash the defence budget. So the Alliance hatched a plan: leak information about his past and invite the media to destroy him.
Paxton was a left-wing ideologue, but not bent. His sins paled by comparison to Catriona Bailey’s. She was the real threat, a genuine Chinese agent who had infected Defence’s computer systems. The aim of Dancer’s mission had been to ensure that Labor was forced from office and purged of its viruses.
But now with the Scott government reeling, Bailey again stood within reach of the Lodge.
Dancer could not allow that to happen. He had implored Webster to act against Bailey. His master had resisted, claiming the matter was in hand. Webster was resolute, but Dancer believed a real and present danger was being ignored.
For the first time the foot soldier had begun to question his orders. He had sacrificed Kimberley to protect the Alliance, but it was failing in its primary duty: to protect the realm.
Dancer turned again to the clock. 5.08am. The night was over; he was relieved. He swung out of bed and onto his feet with the fluid movements of an athlete.
Lean and muscular, Dancer was just a few years off retirement but could keep pace in training with men half his age.
Only one thing now animated him: to finish his mission.
CHAPTER NINE
Canberra
The full moon sat low on the horizon, casting a silver pathway across the lake to the colourful facade of the National Museum.
Perched on a bench, he whispered her name. They had huddled in this timber rotunda in Nara Park, mapping out their future together. She had clung tight, his Chinese princess, frightened by what she knew.
Nearly two years later, Bruce Paxton still couldn’t envisage his future without Weng Meihui.
The former Labor minister had fallen for her the moment they’d met in Beijing in the early 1980s, two young idealists drawn together through circumstance.
He was a brash union official from Western Australia, already destined for a life in politics. She was the ‘translator’ assigned to his Young Labor delegation, posing as a guide while acting as a spy for the Chinese Communist Party.
Paxton had soon guessed her role, but it made no difference to either of them. What mattered was that they were young and together. Their euphoria was not to last; given the divide between East and West, theirs was an impossible love, and time and circumstance drove them apart.
Then, after half a lifetime, she came back. Weng had been listed as ‘wife’ of the newly arrived Chinese ambassador to Australia, but her true role was to once more ensnare Paxton. They’d genuinely rekindled their affair, trying to outsmart Weng’s controllers, but from the outset it was clear that she was frightened and desperate.
They’d hatched an escape plan, Paxton leveraging his defence contacts to strike a bargain with the Americans. She would give them the information they craved in return for asylum in the US. Paxton would then join her.
But Weng had vanished on the night of their planned escape. The agony of that wait at Canberra Airport was like an open wound in Paxton’s chest that never stopped aching.
He’d searched, but never found her. No one would say if she was in Australia or had returned to her homeland, or whether she was alive or dead. It was as if she had never existed and he was the only thing keeping her memory alive.
He shuddered as a sudden chill descended from a crystal sky of a million stars.
These visits were a balm, the park his only connection to the past, to her. Here, he could imagine Weng emerging from the moonshadow, smiling, laughing, reaching out to touch him.
His mind shifted to another painful memory.
Paxton had used the only weapons he’d had to try to pressure the Chinese to hand over Weng, or reveal her fate. He had teamed up with the journalist Harry Dunkley and used parliament to level an extraordinary series of charges.
He’d railed against a shadowy organisation calling itself the Alliance, naming senior military and intelligence figures as agents acting against the democratically elected government. He’d linked the former prime minister Catriona Bailey to the Chinese, declaring her a spy. And he’d accused the Chinese of kidnap, even murder, on Australian soil.
Paxton managed a grim smile when he recalled what should have been his moment of triumph. He had picked his mark well. The acting deputy speaker had been half tanked and nearly asleep when Paxton got to his feet to address an almost empty chamber. He was three minutes into the damning allegations before the presiding officer was roused by the frantic calls of a duty MP. The deputy called on Paxton to resume his seat, but he ploughed on through his long list of allegations, even as his microphone was switched off.
The Serjeant-at-Arms was called. Paxton was dragged from the chamber.
Then the unthinkable happened. For the first time in ninety-five years, the House expelled a sitting member.
Paxton was hauled before the bar of parliament on substantially the same motion that had been used against Labor’s Hugh Mahon on 12 November 1920: ‘having by seditious and disloyal utterances . . . been guilty of conduct unfitting for him to remain a Member . . . and inconsistent with the oath of allegiance which he had taken’.
Paxton was banished by a vote of one hundred and forty-eight to one. His Western Australian seat was declared vacant and he was briefly charged with treason before the case was dropped.
The retribution went deeper. His speech was expunged from Hansard, the entry now merely reading as ‘a disturbance’. The tapes from the House monitoring system were erased. The media, on deadline as the speech was made, hadn’t clicked to it until Paxton was being evicted. They were told the speech was covered by a Special Intelligence Operation order and they risked five years’ jail if they mentioned it.
Only one reporter even tried: Dunkley. He had posted a transcript online before his website was shut down. Then he was arrested secretly by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, using its sweeping counter-terrorism powers, and held without access to a lawyer.
On his release, Dunkley was hit with a defamation suit by Jack Webster. It broke him, financially and emotionally. Dunkley’s illusion that the truth mattered evaporated, leaving him bereft, rudderless.
The last time the two had spoken was on the steps of the ACT Supreme Court on the day Dunkley had lost his legal case. The journalist had been inconsolable and Paxton winced when he remembered the look of anguish on his face.
Paxton turned to the brilliant night sky and breathed in the sweet, clean Canberra air. He tried in vain to think of anything he hadn’t done in his quest to find Weng.
He rose from the bench and crunched along a red-gravel path that curved towards the carpark. A small Toyota waited for him.
The ignition responded after a few false starts and he trundled onto one of the city’s quiet streets.
It was fifteen, perhaps twenty, minutes to his makeshift home, but he was going nowhere in a hurry. Not tonight, not tomorrow.
CHAPTER TEN
Beijing
Meng Tao placed his morning’s copy of the People’s Daily on his teak desk, smoothing his hands over a front page that captured his nation’s inexorable rise.
China’s insatiable appetite for oil to turbo-charge its economy featured prominently alongside an article reporting on the record numbers of Chinese travelling overseas, each an ambassador for the Middle Kingdom.
Trumping them, though, was a picture story headlined ‘A Night at the Opera’.
A prominent photo caught China’s propaganda minister, Jiang Xiu, arriving at the National Centre for the Performing Arts with his glamorous wife. They were both perfectly groomed and stylishly dressed and the crowd seemed to part before them as they wal
ked into the performance.
‘She is so beautiful, so elegant. He is as handsome as the president,’ gushed one smitten theatre-goer.
He’d read the article twice. It breathlessly described Jiang’s growing authority within the politburo, declaring he was ‘Meng Dada’s strong and loyal right hand’.
That much was true. Jiang was his confidant, the indispensable ally who had helped wrest control of the Standing Committee from the fossils of the past as they forged the new China.
The president stared at the photograph once more before taking a sip of rich black tea. There was a gentle knock at the door.
‘Come.’ Meng’s assistant opened the door wide enough to poke her head in.
‘Sir, Jiang Xiu is waiting for you.’
‘Yes, see him in.’
The head of China’s propaganda agency strode into the room, his face beaming.
‘Mr President.’
‘Xiu, how good to see you. Are you well?’
‘Very.’
The two men embraced warmly, Meng squeezing the shoulders of his loyal colleague perhaps a tad too hard. He stood well above Jiang and never missed an opportunity to demonstrate his physical superiority.
He motioned to a seat and offered tea to his friend who seemed eager to share an update on a crucial project.
‘Good news. Australia’s Cabinet has agreed to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.’
Meng clapped his hands. China had been expecting this decision, but it still sent a thrill through him. Another piece of the geo-strategic puzzle was falling into place. He had been planning this strategy for years, recalibrating the global financial order. The new China Bank would suck power from the American-controlled World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Truly, Meng and his underlings were creating the financial, trade and military architecture to reshape the world. The shift of power from West to East had leaped a generation. With the humiliation of the imperial superpower in the Taiwan Strait, China had roared an unmistakeable message: it was again at the centre of all things. Meng and Jiang had capitalised on the moment, rapidly expanding China’s economic and military footprint, pushing ever outwards while America reeled.