Double back am-3

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Just a bat, McQueen.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mac, resuming his digging. Now that he’d had some sleep, the memory of the death camp in Memo was affecting Mac big time. He was feeling drained and morose.

  Lowering himself carefully into Rahmid’s shallow grave, so he didn’t touch the body buried beneath, Mac started with the dead man’s breast pocket and then frisked down his torso to his chinos. Checking in the pockets of the dirt-covered pants, Mac again came up with nothing. He wasn’t certain what he’d been expecting: spies made a habit of not carrying too much with them, certainly nothing that could illuminate their identity. That’s why Bongo had only briefly ratted Rahmid before burying him, concentrating instead on a search of his room.

  ‘Nothing,’ muttered Mac, checking Rahmid’s rigid legs before trying to turn over the body. ‘Can I get a hand?’ he groaned as he tried to shift the deadweight.

  Mac checked the back pockets and then frisked the backs of Rahmid’s legs.

  ‘Maybe the shoes,’ said Bongo, looking around the cemetery, SIG Sauer held behind his back.

  Sliding his hands down Rahmid’s ankles, Mac felt something just above the left shoe.

  ‘Here we go,’ he muttered and pulled up the trouser cuff. There was a bulge on the outside ankle under a dark sock. Pushing his hand inside, Mac felt a Velcro flap.

  ‘Sock-pock, yeah?’ asked Bongo.

  Mac pulled out a wad of US dollars, which he handed up to Bongo.

  ‘Thousand-dollar notes,’ sighed Bongo as Mac reached for the other ankle. ‘Six of them.’

  ‘Toyota key,’ said Mac, smiling as he held up his find. ‘One of them.’

  Waiting on the cemetery wall for the 9 pm rendezvous with Raoul, Mac played with the Toyota key in his pocket. Short of discovering a cache of secret documents, or a well-used cell phone in that car, Mac would be leaving for Denpasar with nothing concrete. He’d sighted Rahmid Ali’s documents, allegedly a cry for help from a beleaguered Indonesian president. And he had the documents that Bongo had found in Rahmid’s room at the Turismo. He’d let the analysts at the section in Jakarta pick over whatever he could bring them, but it felt incomplete. He’d been sent to find Blackbird and establish the meaning of Operasi Boa; he’d done neither.

  ‘Don’t be hard on yourself, McQueen,’ said Bongo, picking up on Mac’s contemplation. ‘You’ve done the best you could – you were never going to walk in here and work it out in two days. Dili’s very complicated.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Mac, tired and hungry. ‘But I’ve been thinking that the key to it was really the Canadian – that’s where I should have started.’

  ‘Yeah, well you have a few things to take with you.’

  ‘Not much, mate,’ said Mac.

  ‘Not much, sure,’ said Bongo. ‘But forget these boys in the office, right, brother? They think secrets are just thrown in our face. What do they -’

  ‘What?’ said Mac.

  ‘You know, McQueen, they think -’

  ‘You said face,’ replied Mac. ‘ Secrets thrown in our face.’

  Bongo looked confused but Mac was already down the inside of the wall and casing the cemetery for Brimob.

  ‘Where you going?’ hissed Bongo. ‘Raoul’s here any second.’

  ‘Hold that cab,’ said Mac, setting off.

  Creeping among the white crypts of Santa Cruz, Mac got within twenty metres of the Salazar grave and crouched as he cased the immediate area for ambushes. When Bongo had spoken about things being thrown in his face, Mac remembered the note Rahmid Ali had retrieved from the drop box at the Salazar grave. He’d read something from it, then balled it in his fist and thrown it at Mac’s face. What had Rahmid said? Something like, She’s not here.

  Moving slowly towards the Salazar grave, Mac reckoned the note from the drop box might still be around the gravesite. It had only been two days, and it hadn’t shown up in Rahmid’s clothes.

  Mac had no doubt the note said more than Rahmid had voiced – especially if the drop box was the main avenue for communication between the Canadian and the firm. Besides, spies were experts at lying about what their documents contained. Mac once read aloud a steamy love letter to a female agent he was managing in Malaysia. The woman’s reaction confirmed she was a double agent; the letter was actually a supplies requisition variation from one part of Energy Australia to another.

  Jogging the last few metres, Mac dropped to his knees and searched the grassy area for the note in the light of the half-moon. It was one of the less-immaculate plots in the famously tidy cemetery and Mac had to pull apart stands of long grass. Crawling around the back of the casement, he found the balled-up white paper sitting between the grass and tombstone, and shoved it in his pocket.

  About two hundred metres to the south, Mac noticed movement and flashlights, suggesting a Brimob patrol. Crawling away from them, he found a line of crypts which gave him cover as he moved back to the cemetery wall.

  ‘About time,’ mumbled Bongo as he offered his hand and dragged Mac up to the top of the wall. Parked on the street was a minivan, engine running and lights on.

  Raoul asked no questions as they slid into the rear seats and drove for the Turismo using the route that avoided the main roads. Mac had him as a seasoned conduit for visiting spies, diplomats and journalists.

  Hitting the overhead light, Mac flattened the note from the drop box and had a look. It was a piece of A4 with one line of black print in 12-point Times New Roman, and another line handwritten in blue ballpoint. The handwritten line read: She’s not here. The printed line started with an asterisk and read: Nothing on ‘Tupelo’ or ‘Deetupelo’ – please supply more.

  Thinking back, Mac tried to work out what he was reading. In his note, he had asked if he could meet Blackbird. He’d watched the cut-out arrive, open the box, pull something out of his pocket and then the drop was over and Mac had watched him leave the cemetery as the Brimob made a pass.

  The only way it could have happened was that the cut-out carried a note from the firm in Denpasar or Jakarta to be dropped at the Salazar grave. So the printed reference to Tupelo was from Australian SIS, and when the cut-out saw Mac’s note, he didn’t even bother to transmit it to the firm – he simply wrote on the note.

  So who or what was Tupelo? wondered Mac as Raoul took them through the back passages of Dili, around the military checkpoints. He would follow it up in Denpasar but for now it meant nothing. The Canadian had made a query and ASIS didn’t know.

  ‘Mate, can I borrow your phone?’ he asked Bongo.

  Keying the numbers, Mac waited eight rings before an Aussie male voice picked up.

  ‘Devo,’ said Mac. ‘Davis, here. Richard Davis?’

  After hesitating slightly, Grant Deavers picked up on it. ‘Sure, Richard – how’s things, mate?’

  ‘Good, thanks,’ said Mac. ‘The contracts are all signed and I was going to send some of the product home – when does the next flight leave?’

  ‘Top of the dial,’ sighed Deavers, ‘into Darwin.’

  ‘Room for product?’

  Deavers paused and Mac was sure he heard the words fuck’s sake in the silence.

  ‘Should be room, but don’t be late, okay? Thanks, Richard, gotta go,’ said Deavers before hanging up.

  Raoul made a slow pass in front of the Turismo and then along the side entrance where the fenced car park was accessed, before stopping one block east in the darkness of a banyan. Thanking their driver, Mac and Bongo walked into the darkness and moved along the leafy street, past rubbish bins and stray cats. The warm night was not attracting people into the Dili streets; the Aitarak militia, headquartered at the Hotel Tropical, had made a night out a dangerous prospect.

  Slipping over the cyclone fence of the Turismo’s car park, Mac and Bongo edged around the borders of the dirt compound until they were squatting in a dark corner, away from the floodlight, looking at nine cars in a line.

  ‘Eight Toyotas,’ said Bongo above the din of crickets. �
�Lucky dip?’

  Shrugging, Mac pressed the ‘unlock’ button on Rahmid’s key and the silver Camry closest to the hotel gate blinked its indicator lights once.

  After a quick glance around, Bongo opened the passenger door, then reached in and shut off the interior light. Joining him in the Camry from the rear driver’s side, Mac searched the back seat while Bongo did the front.

  There was nothing left in the car – not even a chewing gum wrapper in the rubbish bag hanging from the glove box.

  ‘Let’s do the boot,’ Mac whispered as he pushed his hand under the driver’s seat.

  ‘Hello, mister,’ came a woman’s voice, very close. ‘You want the bag?’

  ‘Shit,’ hissed Bongo, hitting his head on the inside of the windscreen as Mac threw himself flat on the back seat, grabbing at the Beretta in his waistband.

  Looking out from where he lay on his back, Mac saw the shape of a large head on narrow shoulders peering down on him.

  ‘Mrs Soares,’ he said, trying to sit up and get his Beretta under his leg, his pulse whacking against his temples. ‘Nice to see you again.’

  ‘Mr Davis,’ she bowed, already in her silk housecoat, her hair in a net. ‘And Mr Alvarez. You must want Mr Rahmid’s bag, yeah?’

  ‘Bag?’ said Bongo, getting out of the car and pouring on the charm.

  ‘He left a bag with me, in the safe,’ said Mrs Soares. ‘You with him, right?’

  ‘A bag?’ smiled Bongo. ‘Gee, he confused us, right, Richard?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mrs Soares. ‘He not come back, I think, but you all friend, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Bongo. ‘Shall we take a look?’

  The safe was an old black German two-key hotel lock-box, about a metre high and covered in brass plates and filigree. Opening the heavy door, Mrs Soares pulled out a black leather overnight bag with a shoulder strap and side pockets and handed it to Bongo.

  Taking the bag, Bongo sniffed the air and spoke rapidly in Bahasa Indonesia. When Mrs Soares showed no interest in his sniffing, Bongo produced a US twenty-dollar note and Mrs Soares led them into the dining room, which had obviously been closed for the night.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ said Mac, his heart still going crazy from the fright in the car compound. ‘Intel will have eyes.’

  ‘They won’t think we’ll come back to Dili, let alone the Turismo,’ said Bongo, just as Mrs Soares appeared with two Tiger beers. ‘Besides, we gotta eat brother.’

  Going through the bag, Bongo turned up a manila dossier that had probably once contained the papers found in Rahmid’s room, and a copy of the orders that Rahmid had translated and given to Mac at Santa Cruz.

  After giving the documents to Mac, Bongo continued searching while Mac had a quick look at the dossier. It was in Bahasa Indonesia but all of the papers carried official Indonesian military and government letterheads. He’d get it translated at the section in Jakarta.

  Pulling out a manila envelope, Bongo handed that over too and they both covered up as Mrs Soares delivered the evening meal. As she walked away, Mac pulled out a thin stash of eight-by-five black-and-white photos.

  ‘Jesus,’ he breathed as he saw the shots: Mac wandering through the Bali Museum in Denpasar; Mac being walked into an entrance way of an apartment building in Denpasar, Bongo close behind with his hand on something in his waistband; Mac standing in front of the sliding glass doors of Bali International Airport, looking around with a black wheelie bag in tow.

  Each of the pics had a thin white tape along the bottom with date and location printed in black.

  Shuffling through them, Mac stopped at the last two, checking back and forth, making sure he was seeing what he was seeing. One showed an Asian man in sunglasses at an outdoor table under a Vittel umbrella – a man Mac knew as the Korean, a guest at the Turismo. The tape along the bottom gave the date as a month earlier, the location was HCMC – Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon.

  The first photo showed the Korean remonstrating with someone, his cigarette hand pointing at a person obscured by a waiter. The second photo showed another man, a middle-aged Anglo with thinning hair and sunnies, shrugging at the Korean with a smile.

  Mac had never met the man, but he’d been chasing his ghost. It was Bill Yarrow, the Canadian.

  ‘This is that Korean bloke,’ said Mac, too tired for this. ‘Did you meet him?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Bongo. ‘Jessica had some words with him when you had the heat exhaustion.’

  ‘Jessica?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Yeah, this guy thinks she a prostitute – asks her how much,’ said Bongo.

  ‘And?’ smiled Mac.

  ‘Jessica said, At least seven inches, buddy – sorry ’bout that.’

  ***

  Bongo killed the lights and brought Rahmid Ali’s Camry to a quiet halt on the west side of Comoro, opposite the military annexe where they could see the white United Nations C-130 being loaded under floodlights.

  ‘That’s your ride, McQueen,’ said Bongo. ‘Better get moving – I don’t want to be here all night.’

  ‘You not coming?’ asked Mac, confused.

  ‘Nope – heading north, I reckon,’ said Bongo, exhaling cigarette smoke.

  Suddenly feeling emotional, Mac opened his door.

  ‘Got enough?’ asked Bongo, pointing at Rahmid’s bag. It wasn’t a ton of stuff, but along with the Operation Extermination papers and the work-ups on the Lombok and Sumba companies, it might put some pieces together for someone in Canberra, especially on the eve of the independence ballot. It might even persuade some of the politicians that East Timor needed peacekeepers.

  ‘It’ll do for now,’ said Mac, though he felt piss-weak. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said, and they shook.

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ grinned the Filipino, plunging his hand into his breast pocket. ‘Half is yours,’ he said, fanning the thousand-dollar bills.

  ‘You keep it,’ said Mac, getting out of the car.

  ‘What?’ said Bongo, leaping out into the balmy night air. ‘Finders keepers, brother – you gotta take yours!’

  ‘What were they paying you? To bodyguard the Canadian?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Three hundred Aussie a week,’ said Bongo, flicking his ash.

  ‘You took a bullet for that, Bongo. What about this gig? The same?’

  ‘Sure,’ shrugged Bongo.

  ‘You saved me from the interrogation, mate, and then you got me out of Bobonaro with my nuts still attached,’ said Mac, wanting to be serious but chuckling. ‘That’s the bonus, okay?’

  Shrugging, Bongo walked Mac to the hole in the security fence.

  ‘What will you do with the car?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Dump it on the north side,’ said Bongo. ‘But you know what?’ he asked, turning back to the Camry.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You could do with a change of clothes,’ said Bongo. ‘You look like shit. Rahmid’s about your size – perhaps a little skinny. Could be some clothes in the trunk?’

  Walking to the back of the Camry, Bongo looked over his shoulder. ‘By the way, McQueen, no one can handle that stuff we saw this morning, okay?’

  ‘The -?’

  ‘That camp, okay?’ said Bongo, putting the key in the lock. ‘Too much death hurts a man here,’ he said, tapping his chest.

  Bongo lifted the boot lid open and they both jumped back.

  ‘Fuck!’ said Bongo as they looked down at the illuminated interior. It was the Korean with two bullet holes in his forehead.

  CHAPTER 28

  The Camry’s engine pinged as it cooled in the night air, punctuating their ragged breathing as they stared at the corpse.

  ‘Bloke from the hotel,’ mumbled Mac finally. ‘Ali did this, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Bongo, reaching across the corpse and grabbing the handles of a black Adidas sports bag.

  The Korean’s pockets yielded a Motorola mobile phone, a money clip containing US dollars and a small leather fold with a DBS Visa card and an American Express c
ard, both in the name of Lee Wa Dae. Reaching into the pockets under the card slots, Mac pulled out a stash of paper and unfolded it.

  ‘Bloke’s name is Lee Wa Dae,’ said Mac, ‘and judging by his love of the Hotel Maliana, he’s based in Kupang, or spends weeks there at a time.’

  Bongo gave a low whistle as he pulled a transparent plastic Ziploc bag from the Adidas bag and handed it to Mac before grabbing another. The size of a small cushion, the bag was filled with wrapped stacks of used US dollars, mostly hundred-dollar bills from what Mac could see.

  ‘Must be fifty, sixty thousand in here,’ said Bongo, checking the extremities of the sports bag and coming up with a stainless-steel Colt Defender – a compact automatic pistol favoured by women because it fits in a purse.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Mac, holding the plastic bag in front of Bongo and pointing at the Thai or Cambodian script stamped in blue ink on the bag. ‘That say Palace or something?’

  Nodding, Bongo traced his finger under the lettering. ‘Yeah, brother – I think it say Vacation Palace Hotel and Casino, Poi Pet, Cambodia.’

  ‘Isn’t that…?’ asked Mac, his voice trailing off as he saw lights moving through the trees at the other end of Comoro’s runway. They had company, probably military security.

  Heart thumping, Mac shut the trunk, plunging them into complete darkness. About a mile south a Toyota 4?4 with the military police light-bar on the top motored across the base of the runway. It slowed, then turned left towards Mac and Bongo.

  ‘Gotta go, brother,’ said Bongo.

  ‘Want some?’ said Mac, pointing at the Korean’s money as he picked up Rahmid Ali’s overnight bag.

  ‘Only if you take some too,’ said Bongo.

  ‘Not for me personally, mate, but take a bag for yourself.’

  Grabbing a cushion of money, Bongo hustled into the Camry. ‘I’ll put some into that safe-deposit box of yours. Remind me – Pantai in Makassar, right?’ he said, referring to a hotel in Sulawesi where Mac kept money, guns and alternative identity documents.