by Steve Lewis
Harris stood and began pacing the room, his face creased in a frown that emphasised his gaunt features. He was clearly torn, as if he needed to talk to Dunkley but was wrestling with his fears.
‘I know someone, Harry, someone who goes looking for missing treasure. He’s told me a few things . . .’
Harris’s voice trailed off, as if he’d changed his mind. He moved to the curtains covering the window and tugged at a tiny crack that was letting in light.
‘Go on,’ Dunkley urged him.
Harris rolled back his shoulders and let out a gusty sigh.
‘My contact tells me that the entire Defence computer system was replaced – every server, every PC, every keyboard. A massive job. But, and this is the extraordinary part, it was apparently all done off the books. They hid it from government, burying the spending in big procurement projects.’
The former analyst turned around, his face a mask of anguish.
‘Then people started dying.’
‘Who?’
‘Whelan, of a heart attack. Aged forty-six. Forty-six! He was a fitness fanatic, had just finished a run, Friday evening out at Stromlo Forest cross-country track. Left a wife and three kids.’
Harris was pacing wildly and speaking rapidly.
‘Six months later, DFAT’s David Joyce ran off the highway near Murrumbateman. He was alone; the police put it down to fatigue. He’d driven back from Melbourne.’
Harris stopped in front of Dunkley and marked off the body count on his fingers.
‘So, that meeting I told you about, there were four people present – Webster; Richard Dalton, the head of ASIO; Joyce and Whelan. Only two are alive – Webster and Dalton.’
Harris sat down, breathing heavily, as if the effort of telling the story had exhausted him. He reached out to grip Dunkley’s arm.
‘Remember when we first met, two and a bit years ago? I told you how the signals directorate scooped up information from everyone. How we had bugged the planet. The technology is getting better all the time. There’s nowhere to hide. Absolutely nowhere.’
He took a sip from his coffee before continuing.
‘That mobile phone in your car will be traced. Child’s play. So they will know you’re here. If you’d brought it in they would be using it to listen to us now. If they’re really keen and have put a detail on you, they could have listened to our conversation at the door . . . well, your conversation.’
Harris looked over his shoulder and then waved his hand about, as if encompassing the room.
‘I regularly sweep this house for wires. I have a lifetime of experience in surveillance so I know what I’m doing and this room is clean. But I also know what they can do.’
He pointed to the curtains.
‘A tiny opening would let them listen to us with a laser microphone picking up the vibration of our voices off the glass. I could rig up that kind of unit on my kitchen table with twenty bucks’ worth of electronics. They spend billions. Now they have “through-the-wall” spying systems that use radio waves. The signal is weak, so they use cleaning tricks developed by NASA to decode signals from space.’
The pressure was etched on Harris’s face. Clearly, he saw threats in every shadow.
‘Don’t think they haven’t come after me either. After helping you. I still have enough friends in the service to tell me when I’m on the watch list and I know the signs. My communications were tapped. My movements online followed.’
Dunkley noticed a slight tremor in Harris’s hands and a twitch in his cheek. He felt guilty.
‘I’m sorry,’ Dunkley said. ‘But this won’t end unless we end it. I have to talk to your mate about what’s been going on in Defence.’
Harris shook his head.
‘Harry, let me think about this. Please. I don’t want to drag more people into your messes. You have a habit of leaving a trail of collateral damage . . .’
Dunkley put his hand on Harris’s shoulder.
‘If we give up, he’s won. And you will be a prisoner in here forever.’
Harris didn’t speak.
‘I can’t do this without you, Trev. You’re an insider. You know how these people think, how they work, how they plot and scheme. I know how to pull the pieces together, provided I have a little help. Only you have the skills to get us inside.’
CHAPTER THIRTY
Canberra
The front page screamed a single word: BETRAYED.
It hung over an unflattering portrait of Elizabeth Scott, her mouth curled in a sneer and her fist raised as if she was preparing to strike the photographer. The story under the headline left no doubt as to the sympathies of the Adelaide Advertiser.
The paper’s Canberra political correspondent, Tory Shepherd, had been leaked details of Cabinet’s decision to abandon South Australia as the hub of the nation’s naval ship-building industry, by purchasing submarines from Japan. The leak was an extraordinary breach of Cabinet confidentiality. It was also political sabotage.
The reporter didn’t hold back as she tore into the prime minister.
Thousands of local jobs will be jettisoned and the state’s economy torpedoed under a secret deal to buy Australia’s next generation submarines from Japan.
Elizabeth Scott’s backhander to South Australia is likely to see the closure of the ASC shipyards at Osborne. Furious senior government sources say it will also trigger a public backlash that will threaten every Liberal electorate in the state.
One Liberal Party elder familiar with the clandestine plan said it would see the party routed at next year’s federal election.
‘The prime minister is our very own suicide bomber. This is unbelievably stupid,’ he said
‘“Pig Iron” Scott has killed us in South Australia. The Labor Party will have a field day.’
Inside, the paper devoted four pages to dissecting the ‘captain’s call’, while the editorial thundered that it had been made ‘in total secrecy by a prime minister who lacks empathy with the working men and women who have made this nation great’. It encouraged voters to wield their axe at the ballot box.
Multi-millionaire Elizabeth Scott just doesn’t get working people. This decision reinforces the view that the prime minister’s silver-spoon upbringing clouds her ability to act in the interests of ordinary folk.
In her office, the prime minister slowly read through the online version of a paper that had near saturation coverage in South Australia. She reached for a tumbler of water, noticing a slight but discernible tremor in her hand as she lifted it to her mouth. She took a quick sip, then another, conscious of the small group of advisers gathered in her office.
Her primal instinct was to scream and rant, but common sense and the desire for survival said this was no time for hysterics. The prime minister was finding it difficult to know who to trust, and an outburst could trigger another story.
She should have anticipated that the decision to buy the Soryu subs would be leaked. It was the latest in a long thread of strategic drops, from Cabinet and the party, that were a gift for the cartoonists who drew Scott at the helm of a listing life raft.
The acts of sabotage were coming more often, her authority eroded with every strategically placed article, every piece of bastardry.
What was so concerning about the Advertiser’s scoop was the level of detail provided by the minister, or ministers, who didn’t seem to care that her fall would drag them down too.
Disunity is death: the maxim had never been more resonant as she contemplated which of her eighteen Cabinet colleagues was responsible. She stopped counting at nine.
Scott had never felt more isolated or less able to pick up the phone for a chat with a colleague. Her status as the nation’s leader, as the most powerful person in the land, was illusory.
She scanned the room of hardened professionals, hoping for sympathy, encouragement, a thought. Instead she was met by wall-to-wall bemusement.
In the hours before her meeting with the Japanese prime minister, a
month earlier, Jack Webster had convinced her of the merits of the Soryu submarines, the ‘Blue Dragons’ of the water.
They were a new class of diesel-fuelled attack submarine, powered by a Swedish stirling air-independent propulsion system. The Soryu was much larger than the earlier Oyashio-class boat and able to stay submerged for longer. The boat ticked two crucial boxes: Australia’s geography demanded long-range subs and its politics demanded that they couldn’t be nuclear powered.
Just as critically, the Soryus were furnished with American military and anti-surveillance weaponry, the latest in technology, which meant they were like underwater stealth bombers. It also meant that the subs would be interoperable with the US fleet, something her brass coveted more than gold.
Finally, the fact that the subs could be ordered ‘off the shelf’ meant they would save billions on construction costs. So the disaster of the locally built Collins class – a ship buried forever under a single tabloid headline: DUD SUBS – would not be repeated.
Webster said it was a no-brainer, but Scott had underestimated the depth of community support for local manufacturing, irrespective of the cost to the public purse. She’d ignored the advice of her industry minister who’d previously warned her that the protectionist streak ran deep in the Australian psyche.
‘We might have torn down tariff walls, Elizabeth, but the punters still like the idea that we can actually build something here,’ he’d counselled.
‘Right, let’s get down to business,’ Scott said now to her despondent band of advisers. ‘We can sell this. For starters, the story is wrong. The ASC will not be closed; there will actually be more maintenance jobs there in the future than there are now. We need to get the message out that we are getting a better sub while saving billions of taxpayer dollars. This is a good decision. It makes economic, strategic and military sense.’
Scott’s principal media adviser raised her hand.
‘Yes,’ Scott said, hopeful of some useful input.
‘Then why did you make it in secret?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Cooktown
It was hotter than Satan’s sauna and Rafael Weiss was melting. The Labor pollster was three hours north of Cairns and the air conditioning in his rental had died without warning.
The bitumen on this Far North Queensland highway was blistering, the tropical air wet and humid. Cramped in his Hyundai, with another hour of driving ahead of him, the native Victorian tugged at a tailor-made shirt that stuck to his ample frame like cling wrap and cursed Catriona Bailey.
The opposition leader had dragged him from his comfortable Melbourne office to meet up with her manic, non-stop tour of electorates near and far. ‘Campaign Insane’, one insider had dubbed it. Today she was in the seat of Leichhardt; specifically, Cooktown. Population: 2330.
‘There are more people in Fountain Gate on a Saturday afternoon than in that pissant town,’ Weiss yelled out the window. ‘Why. The. Fuck. Am. I. Here?!’
He knew why. Like everyone else he was terrified of the former prime minister whose relentless pace had seen a mass exodus of staffers. The body count was now in the dozens. But in spite of her temper and her disability, she ploughed on, determined to visit every electorate before the next poll.
The professional pollster shook his head. Privately and grudgingly, he would admit that her campaign was working. The polls showed that. Bizarrely, the political cyborg was Ms Popular.
He picked up his mobile, bored by the track that was playing. He needed a dose of good old-fashioned rock; he needed Kiss. He wanted his favourite track from his favourite album.
The first few chords of ‘Hotter than Hell’ crashed through the stereo. Weiss yelled ‘Come on!’
Then the car speakers fell silent as its Bluetooth signalled ‘No service’.
‘Faaaarrrkkkkk.’
The Police Citizens Youth Welfare Association could hold four hundred people, but Weiss counted twenty-three. Of these, five were Bailey staffers and there was a youngish reporter from the Cairns Post.
The pollster had been told to wait until Bailey finished a question-and-answer session scheduled to run for twenty minutes.
That was ninety minutes ago, and Weiss noticed even the Labor diehards were drifting off to the toilets and not returning.
Then he heard the first cheerful words of the day: ‘I think we’ll leave it there.’
Weiss finally got his audience with Bailey at 10pm, but only after the Labor leader had cleared a list of appointments she deemed more important.
Despite the long delay, Bailey offered not so much as a ‘thanks for coming’.
‘How are the tracking polls going?’ she demanded, as she examined a print-out of the next day’s schedule.
‘I’m well thanks, Catriona, how are you?’ Weiss replied.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ he said, quickly adding, ‘The polls are good. Just like they were a fortnight ago. You’ve maintained a consistent lead across all demographics since last year’s Budget.’
Bailey was impossible to read. While she beamed in public she rarely smiled in private; instead she exuded disdain, bordering on contempt.
Weiss had sometimes wondered why Bailey was a professional politician, when she so clearly despised people. Now he knew the answer: power.
‘What about the focus groups?’ she snapped.
‘People think Scott stands for nothing. The knights and dames stuff killed her, confirmed their worst fears. They think she’s never had a tough day in her life, but you . . . in that wheelchair . . . that alone shows you know what it’s like to suffer.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes. People are getting very nervous about the state of the world. The rise of radical Islam and the aggression of China and Russia are really bothering the punters. In a dangerous world they think Scott is weak on national security.’
‘What makes people feel safe?’ Bailey’s expression changed almost imperceptibly. Clearly this shard of information was intriguing.
Weiss mopped his face with a drenched handkerchief.
‘The cops. The army. Our alliance with the United States. Forget what the luvvies say about the Americans, most voters want the eight hundred–pound gorilla at their back.’
Bailey nodded. Then without a hint of thanks or a farewell she glided from the room, driven by the whirr of an electric motor and the adulation of the people.
Weiss called out a piece of advice in her wake.
‘So Catriona, whatever the question, the answer is “Back the Yanks”.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Canberra
The towering bronze letters paid homage to the Australian expanse: WIDE BROWN LAND.
It was early evening and Harry Dunkley had driven to the National Arboretum for a rendezvous with a mate of Trevor Harris. He’d been given few instructions except to meet by this sculpture in the heart of the new botanical garden at the western end of Lake Burley Griffin, overlooking the city.
The sun was setting and a breeze from the Brindabellas was pushing the temperature south.
At first he thought he was alone, but as he neared the sculpture a slightly built man emerged from the shadows. He wore a smart overcoat and offered a tentative smile as Dunkley approached.
Dunkley thrust out his hand a little too forcefully. ‘Harry Dunkley.’
‘Yes, I know. Benny Hadid. Nice to meet you.’
Elfin-featured and pallid, Hadid looked like he’d stepped from a Tolkien novel. He was probably in his mid-forties, although an excessive comb-over may have exaggerated his age. Dark brows and deep worry lines hardened his face, and a nervous twitch hinted at a lifetime of avoiding other people’s gazes.
Whatever his peculiarities, Hadid was considered one of the best forensic accountants at the Australian National Audit Office, a dogged public servant who loved to sniff around the financial entrails of big government deals. Trevor Harris had given Dunkley the threads of Hadid’s career: of Armenian des
cent, he’d spent two decades inching his way up to being the auditor’s top gun through good old-fashioned hard work. Looking at him now, Dunkley suspected there was little in Hadid’s life beyond his job.
He’d risen to become the Executive Director of the Performance Audit Services Group, exposing numerous questionable schemes along the way. Under his leadership, the group was charged with running the ruler over Defence and its multi-billion-dollar procurement budget. It was a rich field. Defence had been a notorious money pit for decades. After 9/11, the task of holding the military to account had become even more fraught as successive governments ladled ever greater amounts of public money into building Australia’s national security capability. And the brass thought they were gods, above the reach of mortals and hostile to the scrutiny that Hadid believed was essential in a democracy.
Harris had said that while Hadid might appear timorous, when it came to defending his work he was fearsome and intense.
Dunkley pulled on his jacket to ward off the breeze that was washing over the arboretum. He was uncertain how hard to press this new contact, reluctantly given up by Harris. Flattery was usually a good way to start.
‘Trevor tells me you’re one of the best in the business.’
‘Does he? That’s nice of him.’
‘You two go back a way?’
‘Yep, a few years now.’
Hadid was fidgeting with a button on his coat, his eyes darting around the deserted landscape.
Christ, thought Dunkley, there’s no one here, mate.
Dunkley had been in this dance for information many times. The first few steps were always awkward. Move in too hard and the waltz could end before the band warmed up. After all, they were little more than strangers. But there was one thing the veteran journalist was certain of: Hadid had shown up at the meeting. That meant he wanted to talk and sometimes the best approach was to say nothing and let the whistleblower lead.