by Graham Guy
But by Thursday morning, because of the lack of government denial, public comment and outrage was at fever pitch. At two o’clock in the afternoon a clearly bedraggled Prime Minister rose to his feet in the House of Representatives. Australia’s public, within earshot of a radio or television, held its collective breath. Was the leak the truth or just some glamour-puss trying to make a name for herself? Cameron tried to delay the inevitable as long as he could, outlining to the House the need for stringent cost savings in order to maintain a robust economy.
“Get on with it,” George Hanks urged, sitting in his office watching the speech on television.
His office was packed with staff as everyone waited on tenterhooks to hear if Georgette McKinley had blown it. There were many who were prepared to bet she was wrong and they’d be seeing the last of her before day’s end. Finally, the Prime Minister got to the key points of the budget. As he slowly and precisely read out the price hikes and cost-cutting measures, there was suddenly a thunderous round of yelling and applause. Georgette McKinley had got it right to every last detail. The House was in uproar. The Speaker was at his wit’s end trying to control so many angry politicians.
George Hanks got out of his chair and wrapped his arms around his star reporter. “I don’t know how you did it, but by Christ that puts you right up there now, young lady.”
She looked at him. “I was once told if you want to run with the big boys you better learn to piss in the tall glass. Does this mean I’m now pissing in the tall glass, George?” she asked, with more than a sense of déja-vu.
George Hanks’ direct line rang again. Before he had time to announce himself a voice said, “Monkhouse… Come upstairs and bring the girl with you.” Click.
He turned to Georgette, pointing up towards the ceiling. “He wants us upstairs… now.”
The first person Georgette saw when she entered the office of Sylvester Monkhouse was Tom Ricketts. Whenever she saw him, she physically wanted to vomit. This occasion was no different. As he approached her full of gush, she nearly did.
“Sit down, Tom; let me get to my star reporter,” Monkhouse bellowed, taking hold of Georgette’s hand. “Well, you really did it, girlie… g’day George… this’ll just about make her a legend, won’t it?”
“Er, the PM’s going to sue, sir.”
“Fuck him! Word I get tonight is there’s a meeting at midnight of the cabinet. And by the Jesus, they just might tip him over. Never been done before. Always a first time I suppose.”
“In favour of whom?” asked George Hanks.
“You won’t believe it. Bloody Talbot. Apparently he’s got the numbers. Cameron’s supporters are so pissed about the leak, and the fact that it was right… most of ‘em didn’t even know what was in the damn thing themselves, you know, and they’re spewin’. Then to have some bloody sheila get on television and blow the lot embarrassed the fuck out of them. Politicians don’t like being embarrassed. George. Yeah, it just might be that Lindsay fucking Cameron goes down in history as the shortest-serving Prime Minister to date. What did he get? Two days, for Christ sakes. What’s the time?”
“Eleven p.m. Mr Monkhouse,” chirped Tom Ricketts.
“Couple of hours should do it.”
“Are we on it?” George Hanks asked.
“No, we’re not on it. Should we be?” Monkhouse retorted.
Some of you bloody media owners wouldn’t know a story if it jumped up and bit you on the arse, Hanks thought.
“How strong is your information?”
“What if I told you it was from a minister who’s called for a spill and will be at the meeting?”
Georgette’s eyes lit up even brighter. “Can we use that?”
“Pretty bloody late… won’t catch the papers,” Monkhouse replied.
“No, but it’ll catch everything else,” George Hanks told him.
“Well use it… go on, get on it for Christ sakes! You want to go on camera, girlie?”
Georgette’s eyes flashed at George.
“Why not? You’ve gone this far,” he told her.
She gave the station owner an inquiring look. “So I can interrupt program with a newsflash saying an emergency meeting of cabinet is about to get underway in Canberra and the strong word is that Prime Minister Cameron’s job is on the line?”
“That’s all you’ve got to say. That’s all there is to say. Oh, you can drop in the bit that former Prime Minister John Talbot is tipped to have the numbers to restore him to the Lodge. That’ll get right up Cameron’s fucking nose.” Monkhouse looked at the clock on his wall. “You’re running out of time,” he told her.
Quickly Georgette grabbed an A4 sheet of paper off the station owner’s desk and began to write frantically. “No time for auto cue. I’ll just do it from this,” pointing to the script she was writing.
“In there, girlie. Use the suite,” Monkhouse told her. “Put the newsflash on this, Tom. You want to use the phone?”
Tom Ricketts picked up the intercom and called the studio director. “When’s the next break, Ian. It’s Tom.”
“Er, seven minutes,” he replied.
“Pull out the newsflash. Georgette will be going live. Where do you want her?”
“Two. It’s still set up from the game show.”
“Get rid of the backdrop. Put in the News logo and keep Georgette tight. She’ll be on for about thirty seconds.”
“Righto, Tom. Six minutes forty till the break.”
“She’ll be there.”
Georgette was busy doing a quick makeover when she heard the phone on the old man’s desk go.
“Really!” Monkhouse exclaimed. “So he’s fucked? You’re telling me the numbers are there to roll him?” He paused. “You bloody certain of this? Christ, if I drop that and it’s wrong, I’m fucked too, along with a lot of other people in this place. OK… Cameron’s gone… for sure. Jesus, that’s the first time since federation. Talk to you soon.” Click.
“Georgette,” he boomed.
She stepped into his office.
“Cameron’s fucked. Talbot’s got the numbers. I don’t know how you want to handle it, but that’s the go.”
“I’ll work around it,” she told him.
“Three minutes, Georgette,” Tom Ricketts told her.
“OK. Let’s go.”
The entire staff of the newsroom was still gathered discussing the enormity of the McKinley story when suddenly someone made a dive for the volume control of a television set. The theme from the newsflash killed all conversation. Georgette McKinley, yet again, scooped the rest of the country.
“In about thirty minutes from now,” she began, “an emergency meeting of cabinet will take place in Canberra. Major unrest and infighting has taken centre stage with ministers in the forty-eight hours since news of the Cameron budget first leaked. I am told several ministers are prepared to change their preference in a vote of no confidence against new Prime Minister Lindsay Cameron. If that’s the case, and I do believe it to be the case, then within the hour John Talbot will again be Prime Minister of this country… er, excuse me a moment please,” Georgette said as she picked up the phone that was ringing on her desk.
“Don’t say anything. Don’t change your expression. It’s Monkhouse. Talbot just rang me. He won’t accept the job.”
Georgette replaced the receiver and returned to camera, “Apologies for that. As I was saying, I do believe John Talbot will have the numbers to unseat Lindsay Cameron, but I also believe as a person he was so devastated at being so ruthlessly dumped by the party he’d dedicated his life to, he won’t accept the position. As soon as there’s a result, we’ll certainly bring it to you right here on RTN ELEVEN.”
The red light of the camera went off. Georgette slumped in her seat. Immediately the phone rang again. It was Monkhouse.
“Jesus, girlie, that was bloody magnificent. Top job.”
“You say John Talbot rang?”
“Yes,” he roared. “Christ, you’re ab
out into your spot, so I said you better hurry. He said ‘fuck ‘em, I won’t do it, they’re a bunch of arseholes’, so bugger it, thought you better tell ‘em that too. Goes to show, eh? Come back to the office. Might be a long night. As soon as we know the result, for the record, you better go back on.”
Georgette re-entered the room a minute later.
“Bloody hell! This is seat of the pants stuff, isn’t it?”
“How many scoops is that this week?” Monkhouse asked, turning to Ricketts. “Can we afford this girl any more?”
“I did tell you I thought she had wonderful potential.”
Georgette glared at him, but nobody caught the moment except Ricketts.
“Potential?” Monkhouse bellowed. “Come on, Tommy me boy, she’s pissing in the tall glass better than most of the blokes. Good on you, girlie, bloody good on you… stick it up ‘em.”
The office banter continued until twelve forty a.m., when Sylvester Monkhouse’s private line rang. “Malone in Canberra, sir. It’s as you called it. Cameron’s out. Talbot got up by seven but has declined.”
“So he won’t accept the job as leader second time round?”
“No, sir.”
“So who’s in?”
“Talbot’s original deputy, Sebastian McAlister.”
Monkhouse hung up and turned to Georgette, “Well it’s all go, isn’t it? Cameron’s out. Talbot got the numbers. Got in by seven. Turned it down. Our new prime Minister is now Sebastian McAlister. Now just who the fuck is Sebastian Bloody McAlister? Go for it, girlie. Get that on the air and I reckon you’ll have earned yourself a good night’s sleep. Come into my office at five o’clock tonight and I’ll give you a new contract. Christ knows, you’ve earned the bastard.”
For the next seven days, the turmoil within the government grabbed every front page in the country. Mentioned right along with it were the efforts of Georgette McKinley. All areas of the media couldn’t get enough of her, but, try as they might, nobody could gain an interview with her.
RTN ELEVEN bled it for all it was worth, but guarded her privacy with an iron fist. Sylvester Monkhouse gave her a new five-year, seven-digit contract. John Talbot made no further attempt to contact her, nor she him. She knew, he knew, it had run its course. At the beginning of the third week, as the dust began to settle on the enormity of what she had been involved in, George Hanks approached her desk.
“This came for you today,” he told her, handing her an envelope.
Chapter 15
Josh Emery had the engines running on the Cessna C441 as the four-wheel-drive with his passengers for the flight to Portofino came into view.
Even as the sun began to break into the dawn, it was obvious temperatures would rise. Be a stinker today, I reckon, Josh thought as he watched the dust thrown up by the vehicle rise into the early-morning air. Within minutes, Luigi had pulled the four-wheel-drive in close to the plane. Each had only the clothes they were wearing and a small piece of hand luggage which gave them a change of clothes and basic toiletries. The main cargo was two large suitcases. Josh watched as Franco and Enrico loaded the bags.
Bloody hell! There’s some weight in them, whatever they are, he thought.
All three said their goodbyes to Luigi and climbed on board the aircraft. Josh turned the Cessna’s nose into the wind and powered the engines. As the plane became airborne, he saw Luigi wave, then Josh did a low-level sweep over him before disappearing into the sky.
* * *
Unbeknown to Josh Emery, his passengers or Luigi Mogliotti on the ground, there were also some interested spectators witnessing the takeoff. Tucked away in the bushes and undergrowth a thousand metres from the airstrip were John James McGregor-McWeasely, Senior Sergeant Ken McLoughlin and his partner, Senior Constable Dave Bourke.
McLoughlin whispered to Bourke as both lay flat in the undergrowth eyeing proceedings with binoculars, “I’ve been on a few stakeouts in my time but by hell, this bastard’s got me totally stuffed. The fucking Weasel’s about a thousand metres off to our right. He’s watching the plane. Did you get its rego?”
Dave Bourke said he did.
“Check that later… be bloody false, bet your balls on it. Then there’s this prick delivering his passengers. What do you reckon, two blokes and a sheila?”
“Had trousers on, but yeah, I’d say it was a woman.”
“Way the fuck out here? That’s bullshit! Pretty strange place to pick up passengers for a sightseeing trip if you ask me.”
“Twin-engines, boss. Wherever they’re going, you can bet it’s going to take more than an hour to get there.”
“Yeah, but there was no luggage.”
“Unless everything was in those two suitcases.”
“Nup… no way. That was the hardware… whatever the bloody hardware might be.”
“What’s your gut feeling?”
McLoughlin swung his binoculars back to The Weasel. “Don’t have one. But if this prick’s involved, it could be anything. Now comes the hard part. He’s certainly going to follow the joker in the four-wheel-drive, but at a distance. And we’ve got to follow him—at an even greater distance.
“Talk about a bloody circus! We’ve come all this way. He’s not onto us. If he twigs we’re here, it’ll be shut the gate. But I’ll tell you one thing. He doesn’t know when the plane’s coming back. If he did, he wouldn’t have followed ‘em like he has, and he certainly wouldn’t be out here now. He’s flying blind, Dave. He got a tip about a job this lot are gonna pull, and he’s gonna move in on the spoils. But right now, we’re more in the bloody dark than he is. We don’t know who that mob are in the plane. We don’t know who the bloke is in the four-wheel-drive and we don’t know The Weasel’s involvement. Don’t know a hell of a fucking lot, do we? But as sure as hell they don’t know he’s here. In fact, I’m willing to bet they don’t even know he exists.”
Bourke listened intently as McLoughlin spoke his thoughts, then, “He’s moving, boss.”
“Yeah. He’s going to follow the bloke in the four-wheel. My guess is he’ll go back to Kununurra, keep his head down and keep this bloke in tow. When he makes a move, The Weasel will know the plane’s coming back. And we’ll need to be there, too.”
“Where’s that leave us?”
“Sleeping with one eye open. But I want to get a look at the greeter bloke. Might recognise his head.”
The two policemen waited for The Weasel to disappear from view then made a dash back to their vehicle they’d hidden and covered with a camouflage net. A short time later they arrived in Kununurra and cautiously drove around. They were doubly aware of The Weasel’s vehicle, having followed it all the way from Sydney.
“Sing out if you spot it,” McLoughlin warned, “preferably about a hundred metres before I’m on it. That way I can pull over.”
As they went slowly past a food store, Luigi Mogliotti was emerging, his gaze fixed to a newspaper. It allowed the two policemen to get a good look at his face.
“Know him?” McLoughlin asked his partner.
Bourke shook his head. “I reckon we should back off a bit. You can bet the bloody Weasel isn’t far away.”
“Yeah, good point. I’ll pull in.”
A short time later, Luigi went past their parked vehicle. McLoughlin and Bourke watched where he went and waited. Only moments passed and The Weasel also went past them.
“Jesus Christ, is this cat and mouse or what?”
McLoughlin spotted a vacant cab. “Grab that bloke, Dave. I’ll wait here. Follow those bastards.”
Bourke was soon in the cab and gone. He returned 20 minutes later.
“The greeter bloke’s in a caravan park. The Weasel’s parked in off the road about a hundred metres from it.”
“So little shit-face is just gonna prop and wait him out?”
“Looks that way.”
“Now what?”
“I reckon the greeter will stay put. He might go out for something to eat, but he’ll be there for the night
.”
“So will The Weasel. We’ll book in somewhere and get going again at first light.”
After three days on the road following The Weasel, rump steaks, cold beer and a hot bath were the orders of the day. They double-checked the location of The Weasel, then turned in early. They were up and ready to go by five-thirty a.m.
“Better check on our little friend,” McLoughlin said, as though it was part of their normal routine. He was still there.
When they repeated their routine the following morning, only later, he had gone. And so had the greeter. For several minutes they went into a blind panic, abusing themselves for leaving it so late before getting mobile.
Suddenly Bourke yelled, “Up ahead boss. That’s The Weasel’s car. The greeter’s on the move. Not too long in the one place routine. He’s obviously moved to that park over there,” he said pointing to another group of cabins. “See if his bus is in there.”
McLoughlin drove in around the cabins. It was. “Thank Christ for that! Obviously no movement yet.”
* * *
John James had a feeling Luigi would move. Once he had established where he’d be the second night, he went to work.
At his favoured time of ten to four in the morning, John James McGregor-McWeasely drove out to the airstrip where the Cessna had taken off. As dawn began to break he stepped the distance from his earlier hiding place in the trees and bushland to both ends of the landing strip. He then drove to both ends and erected a man-sized target at each. He took out the .50-calibre Barrett and adjusted the Leupold telescopic sight to 1250 metres. There was no wind. The skies were clear and it was too early for haze.
He knew that once he fired the first round of the .50 calibre, the sound of the shot would carry, probably for a couple of kilometres in the stillness of the morning. So he wouldn’t have long before there would be one or two curious on-lookers. John James pushed earplugs into his ears, loaded the rifle, then positioned himself flat on the ground behind the stock of the weapon capable of delivering one of mankind’s most awesome payloads.