Double back am-3

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Maybe they were?’ asked Mac, unobtrusively clocking every set of eyes in the pedestrian traffic.

  ‘Well, maybe,’ she shrugged. ‘But if that American – Jim – hadn’t hooked me up with Manny, I wouldn’t have lasted long.’

  ‘What about your mother? Brothers or sisters?’ asked Mac. ‘They pitching in?’

  ‘Only child… and Mum hates Dad,’ she said, in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘They divorced when I was fourteen, and even though our comfortable life ran on his money, she made it hard to know him.’

  ‘Handy dad for a place like UCLA,’ said Mac. ‘It’s not cheap.’

  ‘Actually,’ she said, fixing him with a stare, ‘Dad pays my fees and accommodation – I work for everything else.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Mac. ‘You work?’

  Sighing at him, she crossed her tanned arms. ‘Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays at a campus bookstore, and I do telemarketing for a company in Century City. And there’s no end in sight now I’m in the School of Law.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Mac, surrendering.

  ‘Oh, and you might have noticed – I buy my own drinks.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ said Mac, raising his glass.

  ‘Dinner doesn’t count,’ said Jessica, clinking glasses and giggling. ‘I’m independent, but I don’t go Dutch.’

  Jessica made a production of ordering the dishes, but without losing her sense of humour. And as she handed the menu to the bowing waitress, she fixed Mac with a grin.

  ‘So, Richard – how does a man trying to find sandalwood opportunities end up driving around with someone like Manny Alvarez?’

  ‘Same as you,’ said Mac, as light as he could. ‘You stay in hotels like the Turismo often enough, then you meet people like Manny. If you find them useful to travel with, you make a friendship, come to an arrangement.’

  Sipping at the excellent New Zealand sauvignon blanc, Mac wished Jessica would get off the occupational line. He lived his work and there were times when he just wanted to enjoy the wine, appreciate the company and not have to do the dance of the seven veils.

  ‘You know, Jessica, I’ve been wondering about you.’

  ‘That’s a good start,’ she said.

  ‘Well, actually – you’re probably sick of talking about you,’ said Mac, smiling.

  ‘Oh, you bastard!’ she shrieked, but finding it funny. ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘I was wondering why you don’t have a boyfriend? I mean, you’re -’

  ‘You mean, am I a psycho?’

  ‘It had occurred to me,’ said Mac.

  ‘Ha!’ she laughed, looking around. ‘I had a boyfriend. Wayne.’

  ‘Can he still chew food?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Very funny, Mr Richard!’

  ‘Social issue?’ Mac asked.

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like at fifty-seven, why’s Wayne living with Mum?’

  Jessica chuckled and then lowered her voice. ‘Actually, when men say they like a smart girl, they don’t always mean it.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Undergraduate was fine – making law school was a bridge too far for a man just starting his career as a junior marketing manager.’

  ‘So?’ asked Mac.

  ‘We were dating. I got accepted. We broke up. The end,’ she said, shrugging but sad.

  Sipping in silence, they avoided one another’s eyes until Jessica put her hand across the table and grasped Mac’s forearm.

  Opening her mouth to speak, nothing came out.

  ‘Yes?’ said Mac.

  ‘Umm – nothing,’ said Jessica, releasing her grip and sitting back. ‘Where’s the bathroom?’

  Standing beside the taxi as it idled outside the officer apartments, Mac was torn. He could get in the cab, do the Harold Holt and go to Darwin airport, or he could try to make amends with Jessica. Perhaps say a proper goodbye. The past few days had been emotional for both of them, worsened by his reticence about starting a relationship with a girl who didn’t even know his real name. If they’d met while he was visiting his folks in Rockhampton, he’d have been plain old Alan McQueen. But, short of marrying her – not on the cards at this stage of his career – Mac was not going to reveal his true identity. There was no statute of limitations on the kind of anger he’d engendered in his professional life. His only protection was hiding his identity, an advantage ruined once you revealed it to a civilian woman.

  But there was one conversation he could have with her, if he could convince himself that it wouldn’t ruin his other objectives.

  ‘Shit!’ he said to himself finally, and asked the driver to hold for a minute.

  Knocking on Jessica’s door, he was edgy, even if he hadn’t worked out what he was going to say.

  ‘Go away,’ came Jessica’s muffled voice from behind the door.

  ‘Look, Jessica,’ he whispered, not wanting half the base to come out and ask him what was up. ‘I’m sorry about the flight, okay?’

  ‘Oh piss off!’ came the response.

  ‘It was the only flight to Denpasar, and my company booked me on it – I’m sorry,’ said Mac, trying not to yell.

  ‘Sorry?!’ she said, the door opening with a flourish. ‘You take me to dinner, and take me to bed, and then as an afterthought you tell me you’re flying out tonight?’

  ‘Can we keep it down?’ asked Mac, looking around. ‘People are trying to sleep.’

  ‘It’s ten past nine,’ said Jessica, and Mac could see her eyes were puffy. ‘I wanted to spend time with you, Richard – I can’t do this on my own.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mac, putting his arms around her.

  ‘I’m scared,’ she sobbed into his neck. ‘ Really scared.’

  Over Jessica’s shoulder, Mac saw Gillian Baddely emerge from an apartment, give him a nasty look and shake her head.

  ‘I have a plane to catch,’ mumbled Mac, and pushing himself away he headed for the cab, trying to put Jessica’s sobs out of his mind.

  The one thing he could have told her was that her father was last seen in the Kota Baru barracks in Baucau. But Mac had decided not to, and he didn’t want Jessica looking into his eyes.

  CHAPTER 32

  Mac’s new Nokia buzzed while he was standing with other travellers at Bali International Airport, waiting for the stragglers to assemble in front of the minivan driver with the Natour Bali sign. Looking at the phone, Mac dialled into the secure voicemail servers in Canberra and got a message from Marty Atkins: the late-night debrief meeting was postponed, new time eleven o’clock the following morning.

  After running some basic security checks on his bungalow at the Natour, Mac jammed a chair under the door handle, stripped and made for the bathroom. The shower felt good and Mac sensed his energy making a comeback as he padded through the spacious bungalow at the Natour, keeping the lights down and checking the windows from the side of the curtains. Grabbing a cold Bintang from the mini-bar, he sat at the writing desk and opened his wheelie bag, taking the seven pages of logs from Rahmid Ali’s phone.

  The account had only been opened three weeks earlier and Mac ran his eyes down the list of dialled numbers, looking for the patterns. There was one number that recurred – Mac noticed it because it had a ‘61’ prefix, followed by a variety of mobile numbers, meaning Australia.

  Another cluster of numbers showed eighteen calls to a number with a ‘6221’ prefix on the day Mac flew into Dili. The times for the calls went from the morning of Mac’s arrival to the morning of the next day. So Rahmid Ali had been feverishly calling someone in Jakarta, even as he watched Mac at Dili’s airport.

  The numbers, dates and durations started from the left side of the pages, and on the right were the work-ups on each number. They were notated as if in stylised speech bubbles for a cartoon. Most of them were to the Presidential Building in Jakarta, where Ali probably had his office, or at least someone to answer to. There were calls to the Dominion Bank of Singapore in Singapore – not surprising, since most educated elites in
Indonesia had their doctors, banks and dentists on the island republic, even as they spruiked Indonesia’s place in the world.

  These weren’t what Mac was looking for. He wanted something that looked like a front or a cut-out – a number either unlisted or burdened with a nondescript name. As Mac leaned back, rubbing his eyes, he suddenly remembered the business card Rahmid Ali had given him in the garden of the Turismo.

  Mac rummaged through the side pockets of his wheelie bag and pulled out the card. In dark blue printing were the words Andromeda IT Services and then the sat-phone number which Ali had underlined in fine black ballpoint. It also listed a corporate address in KL, a landline and a fax number. Comparing the numbers with the phone logs, Mac ran his finger down the list but didn’t come up with a match. The Andromeda numbers were fronts, and when Rahmid Ali really wanted to speak with his organisation, he probably did it direct with Jakarta.

  Keying his Nokia, Mac waited for the pick-up and the challenge. He gave his code and the operation name, and even though it was one o’clock in the morning in Canberra, he still had a research assistant on the end of the line. The Telstra mobile service he used wasn’t the kind you could buy retail – it ran on the government-consular security network, and when he worked in South-East Asia it was diverted through Singapore’s security cellular system.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked the woman, who had a faint subcontinent accent.

  ‘Leena, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, Leena, I need a reverse-listing on a Kuala Lumpur number, and then we’re going extension hunting, okay?’

  Leena was fast and good – in twenty seconds she had the physical address for the KL numbers which Mac wrote down on the Natour Bali letterhead.

  ‘Okay, Leena, can you get the phone book for the Presidential Building in Jakarta, please?’

  Leena said she’d call back when she had the book, and Mac rang off.

  Grabbing another beer, Mac thought about his debrief with Atkins. Operation Masquerade was still active as far as Mac was concerned. Blackbird remained missing and Boa unexplained. Mac’s problems with Atkins would come with the revelations about the death camp in Memo and the increasingly out-of-control environment in Bobonaro. Mac would argue that matters were sufficiently serious in East Timor that Masquerade continue, without getting so carried away that Atkins would worry that the operation was going to result in a damning report about the behaviour of the Indonesian Army.

  Operasi Boa was worth investigating, thought Mac. It was serious enough that the Indonesian President’s spies were trying to contact ASIS directly. And besides, a false flag was not as outlandish as it sounded. Military intelligence operatives routinely swapped operations, created ‘ghost’ documents, inserted false information in the more openly available files and held deliberately inaccurate briefings, all in order to misinform the spies, the media and their own leaders – many of whom couldn’t be trusted with sensitive military information. When Mac first rotated into Iraq at the end of the Gulf War, Rod Scott’s abiding lesson in intel gathering was to treat everything as a lie – especially the ‘hidden’ documents covered in EYES ONLY stamps, the ones in the military files that pointed a finger at the politicians, the ones in the intel files that blamed everything on Saddam’s secret police, and the coincidental files ‘found’ by the fleeing Sunni elites that fingered their Shia underlings for every criminal decision. So the idea of Operation Extermination veiling something more serious wasn’t troubling Mac; the puzzle was Operasi Boa itself.

  Remembering himself back at Santa Cruz that day, Mac recreated the scene and tried to evoke Ali’s voice in his mind. As he played the scene over and over, Mac was sure that when he’d looked up from reading Operation Extermination, he’d summed it up as a ‘deportation’ project. Ali had agreed with Mac’s interpretation but had later rephrased deportation as ‘depopulation’.

  Was there a difference? One meant shipping people out of a territory, the other translated as?

  Mac’s mobile rang and he grabbed at it.

  ‘Leena,’ he said, sitting back at the desk. ‘Got it?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she trilled in that uniquely musical Indian way. ‘And we’re in luck; its last update was ten days ago.’

  They worked through the numbers in the Presidential Building and one by one Mac put a cross beside them. There was a number in accounts, a number for the main switchboard and two for the chief of staff’s office.

  Mac was looking for more, something a little out of the ordinary, something that connected Rahmid Ali to another name. Before he stomped into a potential diplomatic snafu in Jakarta, he needed to know exactly who Ali was aligned with. Jotting the notes down as he went, he flipped through the pages again and picked up a mobile number with a Singapore prefix – the notes to this number had a user ID of Penang Trading Co. with a postal box address in Singapore.

  ‘Leena, can you get me our person in SingTel, get me a street address for a Singapore mobile number? I’ll hold.’

  Waiting for Leena to complete the inquiry, Mac wondered about Operasi Boa, the mere mention of which had resulted in Blackbird and Bill Yarrow being snatched and Bongo shot. Weren’t the Indonesian military now beyond embarrassment? This was an organisation that had systematically terrorised and repressed East Timor for twenty-four years, in which time they’d already wiped out a quarter of the province’s local population.

  ‘SingTel confirms a physical address at that mobile number,’ came Leena’s voice over the phone.

  Writing the address on his pad, Mac wasn’t overly hopeful about what it would yield. Commercial front organisations were set up the same way all over the world and the goal was to avoid being surprised.

  As he went to sign off, a small column of letters grabbed Mac’s attention. Looking down the column of the logs, most of the spaces in the column had a dash, which was why he hadn’t noticed it, but at the end of the document a few lines of the column held a simple letter ‘S’.

  ‘Leena, what does the S mean on these sat-phone logs?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Which bill is it?’ she asked.

  Looking around the header, Mac found the TI logo. ‘It’s Telkom Indonesi, and underneath it says Powered by InMarSat.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Leena, the sound of a pencil clicking against her teeth as she flipped through her telecom manuals. ‘The S on the TI sat phone means setempat.’

  ‘Remind me…’ mumbled Mac, embarrassed that he had such basic Bahasa Indonesia after working for so long in South-East Asia.

  ‘Setempat means local – a local call.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Mac, his adrenaline pumping in his temples. Running his finger down the last page to Rahmid Ali’s final activity on the sat phone, he found a cluster of calls made to an ‘S’ number during the two days that Ali had been in Dili. Maybe Rahmid’s connections weren’t in Jakarta or KL. Perhaps they were in Dili the whole time.

  Reading out the number, Mac asked for a reverse-listing. He wanted a street address.

  ‘Nothing on that one, Albion,’ said Leena.

  Looking back at it, Mac saw the last numerals were 4216.

  ‘Leena, try it again, but the last digits are four, two, zero, zero.’

  Tapping rang out from a cheap keyboard. ‘No luck there.’

  ‘Okay, try four, zero, zero, zero, as the last four digits,’ said Mac, massaging the side of his face.

  The keyboard rattled again and Leena – warming to the chase – chuckled. ‘That’s pretty good, Albion.’

  As he listened to Leena read the street address, it immediately registered and Mac could see it as if he was standing there. He didn’t need her to give the listing’s name; it was PT Watu Selatan.

  ‘Thanks, Leena,’ he said, signing off and walking around the room. Watu Selatan was a large organisation, and the next challenge was to find out who sat behind the extension that Rahmid Ali had called. Mac had been in there, sat with Adam Moerpati, and Moerpati had tried to butter him up, get him into the Resende.


  Staring at the phone logs from the other side of the room, Mac told himself it couldn’t be – Habibie’s personal intel operators surely wouldn’t be that brazen… would they?

  Sitting at the desk again, Mac picked up Adam Moerpati’s business card and looked down the list of phone numbers. The first was for the switchboard, the second was his direct number: it ended in 4216.

  ‘Well, fuck me,’ whispered Mac in the gloom. The President’s men weren’t simply brazen, they were near suicidal: they had a spy across the road from army headquarters.

  CHAPTER 33

  After walking each side of the street for six minutes, Mac moved to the entrance of a three-storey building tucked between Denpasar city centre and the suburbs. Having been identified by the receptionist, who pushed a button on her desk to unlock the glass entrance door, Mac walked into the nondescript offices of Triangle Associates, a once-thriving Perth construction consulting firm. Aussie SIS had bought out Triangle’s partners in 1991 and slowly let the best people go. Now it was operating in Denpasar and headed by Martin Atkins, which – Mac used to joke – was where you landed when you got rid of your best people.

  ‘Macca!’ said Atkins, reaching out a hand of greeting in the lobby. ‘Sorry about the change of plans, but someone flew in overnight.’

  Leading Mac through to the meeting room, Atkins chirped on about the weather and Indonesian politics. Mac’s heart sank as a fifty-something Anglo male with a bullfrog neck stood and held his tie to his stomach.

  ‘G’day, Alan, how’s it going?’ said the bloke, trying an overhand shake.

  ‘Not bad, Carl,’ said Mac, looking into the wonky eye of Davidson’s long-time rival, Carl Berquist. ‘Didn’t expect you to be here.’

  ‘Oh, you know, mate,’ said Berquist, trying to be chummy. ‘Just keeping an eye on what we’re up to.’

  Mac managed not to snigger at the optical reference – Berquist’s punter’s eyes could be disconcerting if you hadn’t been around them for a while.