‘Which means whatever Hassan sold the rag-heads last time, he’s probably done it again.’
CHAPTER 42
The soap scum Mac had put under the door handle was intact and he barged into the room, his feet giving him hell from the coins.
There was a porcelain pitcher of water on the sideboard and, pouring a glass, he walked onto the balcony. It was just after nine pm and he could hear the jazz band from the courtyard of the Raffl es Hotel across the still, humid night. Glugging down water, he pondered his options. Atkins wanted Mac out of Jakarta, so his next moves had to be made carefully. The last thing he needed was an Australian Protective Service crew manhandling him onto a Qantas fl ight. That wasn’t how he wanted to be met at Brissie by Jenny and Rachel.
Contacting Joe Imbruglia was out of the question. He’d be required to report any contact and Mac didn’t want to put him in that position. If Mac pursued that avenue now, the trust would be broken and Joe would see him as a liability.
There were four people he could call; one was recovering from bullet wounds, the other’s voicemail seemed to have been tampered with. Number three would be Martin Atkins, but there was a chance of blowback, no matter how strong his appeal to Atkins about Hassan’s latest actions.
That left the fourth – Freddi Gardjito. Freddi had been more affected by Diane’s shooting than he admitted. When Mac had been talking with Diane about Sarah in that hospital room, Mac had glanced across and seen Freddi looking out the window with a thousand-yard stare, his right hand trying to rub his chin but shaking like a leaf.
Mac took a deep breath and decided to call Martin Atkins. The phone made ten rings and Mac was about to hit the red button when Atkins picked up.
‘Hi there – I’m home!’ said Mac.
‘Shit,’ Atkins mumbled. ‘McQueen?’
‘Last time I checked.’
There was a pause and Mac assumed Atkins was mouthing something at whoever was in his offi ce, probably Garvs. ‘So, where are you?’
Mac kept it conversational, wanting Atkins to play the aggressor.
‘In KL – took the MAS fl ight. Wanted to pick up a few things before going south.’
‘Oh really?’ said Atkins, forcing a chuckle. ‘I thought we’d talked about the eight o’clock into Perth. That would be a Garuda fl ight.’
‘Sure, Marty, didn’t quite get the eight o’clock thing. I actually got out of town earlier than you asked.’
Atkins exhaled, gave up. ‘Good stuff, mate. So have a good fl ight and we’ll see you on the next gig, eh?’
‘Marty, there’s something I needed to bring you in on,’ said Mac.
‘Me? Davidson’s your controller.’
‘Yeah, but Tony’s not answering his phone. Besides, this isn’t about end-users – any of that crap.’
‘No?’
Mac heard shiftiness in there somewhere.
‘Look, you’ve heard of Hassan Ali, right?’
Atkins paused then gave a facetious yes.
‘Mate, I have reason to believe he’s active in the area again and is primed to do what he did in Kuta in ‘02.’
‘Kuta?’ said Atkins. ‘That was Amrozi and Muchlas and Ali Amron
– all of those guys, McQueen. Where did you get Hassan from? Isn’t he the Dr Khan bloke?’
‘Yeah, but he was in Kuta the night of the bombings. Mossad and BAIS were on him. Didn’t you read my report?’
‘Oh, Macca!’ said Atkins, as if he was talking to a puppy that wasn’t properly house-trained.
‘What?’
‘When you say your report, do you mean the debrief you had to rewrite twice?’
There was a difference between a report and debrief. A report was a defi nitive version of events, whereas a debrief was merely a short summary of what a bloke had been doing with his time. And Joe had asked Mac to resubmit that debrief twice – he didn’t want Mac being ridiculed, not after the word had got around that McQueen was asking about nuclear stuff at the AFP’s Kuta forward command post.
‘Yep,’ said Mac, ‘that one. I think he’s back and planning the same thing he did last time.’
‘Which was?’
Mac paused; he didn’t know if he had the time to stuff around and he didn’t know if Atkins was having the call traced. International mobile calls were hard to track, but someone could be put on it.
‘Which was, Marty, the Sari Club blast.’
‘That was JI, McQueen,’ hissed Atkins.
‘That was a six-foot crater, twenty-three feet across.’
‘Shit, mate,’ said Atkins, derisive. ‘Your reasoning works like this: Hassan has worked for a rogue nukes guy. Hassan is in Kuta on the night of the bombings. Ergo, Hassan did the Sari Club with a nuke. It doesn’t work as an argument, mate, and the forensics don’t support your theory.’
‘Forensic said there was tritium.’
‘No, McQueen, forensic said it was a potassium chlorate bomb.
A thousand kilos, actually. I can read!’
‘Okay, so it was a shade over one US ton,’ conceded Mac, not wanting to get into the minute difference between the tonne and the ton. ‘But let’s talk about the explosive: fi rst it was anfo, then it was RDX, then it was potassium chlorate and then it was all in a report that went to the Indonesian government but that we can’t see. I mean, did you see the fi nal report to the Indonesians?’
‘Whatever, McQueen,’ Atkins sighed.
‘It’s worth getting this right, Marty. A twenty-three-foot hole needs one ton of TNT – that’s what the bomb engineers say, right?
Even if we knew it was a potassium chlorate bomb, a one-tonner is half the power of TNT.’
‘Really? Where did you get that from, McQueen?’
‘Demo section at Holsworthy,’ said Mac, hoping Atkins would drop it. The only thing Mac had ever got out of the demolition section at Holsworthy army base was shaky hands and a dislike of sudden noise.
‘Bullshit!’ said Atkins. ‘I’ve done Holsworthy twice and I never heard that!’
The air crackled between them. Mac could envisage the embassy’s intel section at night, overworked ASIS people squinting at screens, washed out by the fl uorescent lighting, craving a hot shower and a cold beer, pondering the fact that just because your salary was now called a package, it didn’t mean your pay went any further.
‘I’m just saying that it was a big hole for an IED. Oklahoma City had the same size crater from four and half tons of anfo.’
‘So?’ snarled Atkins.
‘Well, think about it. If Sari Club only involved one ton, why did it make a hole the same size as four and half tons? And remembering, Marty, that anfo is a lot more powerful than potassium chlorate.’
There was a pause and Mac wondered if Atkins was reading a note from Garvs.
‘McQueen, there was no mini-nuke, there was no pro crew, Hassan Ali did not dupe a whole contingent of Aussie cops, soldiers and intel guys – not to mention forensics – so just drop it.’
Mac didn’t have many other shots. ‘So what were BAIS and Mossad chasing?’ he asked, still unsure why his counterparts were so certain.
‘I don’t know, mate,’ whined Atkins. ‘You know what the Indons and the Jews are like: they’ll chase a conspiracy like a dog chases its tail.’
Mac signed off quickly and hung up. He thought about Atkins’ comment. That was exactly how Mossad and BAIS did not operate.
Freddi’s phone went straight to voicemail and Mac didn’t leave a message. It was almost nine-thirty which meant ten-thirty in Jakkers, and Freddi was getting some shut-eye. Mac felt stressed but not exhausted and he could do with a couple of beers to send him to sleep. Benny had asked him down to the Raffl es for a drink with him and an employee, which now sounded like a plan.
He removed the moustache and carefully stored it back in its case. As he wiped his face down, he thought about how Atkins had been both sarcastic and condescending. In the ongoing war between the fi eld guys and the bench-warmers, condescension and fl i
p dismissals were the preferred weapons of the offi ce dwellers. It gave them credibility with other offi ce guys while undermining people like Mac. But the cult of management was a dangerous game: in the wash-up of 9/11, the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence recommended the CIA stop its habit of reallocating operations funding into more management, which had been happening for more than twenty years. By the time the US invaded Iraq in ‘03, the CIA had only eleven Arabic-speaking fi eld people, while back at Langley they had so many managers that they had to fi nd more space to house them.
His face now clean, Mac eyeballed himself in the mirror. Atkins had used the word conspiracy, which in itself was an admission of ignorance. Way back in 1957, the old Joint Intelligence Service – forerunner of ASIO and ASIS – had commissioned one of its analysts to assess the probability of nuclear terrorism. That report, The Likelihood of Clandestine Introduction of Nuclear Weapons into Australia, was the world’s fi rst discussion of a terror campaign using a nuclear device, and the device it named was ‘a plutonium device the size of a cricket ball’.
A mini-nuke. Atkins and his ilk had taken the wrong turn by putting the idea of a mini-nuke in the crazy department – it was very real.
Mac understood why Atkins didn’t want to deal with it. If you were born in the 1960s, and grew up with the Cold War, you wanted to think that the chance of a nuclear nightmare had ended when the Berlin Wall came down. But Israel’s entire nuclear weapons program at the Dimona facility was about developing mini-nukes – devices that could be carried in a backpack. In the same year that Israel’s IDF bombed the Iraqi fast-breeder reactor at Osirak, they tested a joint-venture mini-nuke in the Indian Ocean. It was 1979 and the partner was South Africa.
So Mac wasn’t going mad – not yet, anyway. And Atkins’ own words had confi rmed it. He’d mistakenly admitted that Hassan was in Kuta before and during the bomb blasts, a fact that the Atkins lobby had previously contested. It wasn’t ringing alarm bells, but it was starting to niggle. Why did the fi rm want him out of Jakarta?
Eight minutes later, Mac walked into the courtyard bar of the Raffl es. The air was alive with soft jazz and raucous crickets and he saw Benny at a glass-topped table beside the fountain, drinking with a pretty Chinese woman in a pale blue blouse and navy blue Andrews Sisters skirt.
Benny introduced Suzi and ordered a round of drinks, a Tiger for Mac.
‘Mr McQueen is just up from Australia,’ Benny told Suzi. ‘Very smart fellow.’
‘What do you do?’ she asked in smooth English.
‘Due diligence for the government,’ shrugged Mac, wanting to get on to something else.
‘Due diligence on what?’ asked Suzi, her demeanour disproving the theory that intellect is in inverse proportion to looks.
‘Well, exporters.’
She sat forward, wanting more.
‘Okay,’ said Mac, ‘someone wants to export to Singapore and get the taxpayer to underwrite payment? The government might be prepared to guarantee payment, but they want to know who the parties are and what the deal actually is.’
‘Sounds interesting.’
Later, when Suzi went to the ladies, Benny leaned over to Mac.
‘By the way, champ, got so tied up in those documents of yours that I forgot to pass something on.’
‘Yeah?’ said Mac, taking a swig of his beer.
‘This is a free gift to Jen, right? Just so she knows there’re no hard feelings, and then we’re square, okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Mac, smiling.
At their wedding reception at the Jakarta Golf Club Jenny had cornered Benny and told him off for constructing and maintaining the kind of secret banking and business linkages – grey networks – that allowed the sex-slavers and human traffi ckers to get away with it. Jenny had had a skinful that night and her FBI friend, Milinda, had had to drag her away from what could have turned ugly.
‘Last week I was doing some work for a client and I got to see something I shouldn’t have seen,’ whispered Benny, scanning the courtyard for eyes.
‘Okay,’ said Mac, letting his body get lower to hear.
‘Well it seems our old friends from the Khmer Rouge are back in business, and there’s a lot of funds coming back into Singers right now.’
‘Where from?’ asked Mac.
‘South-east Queensland, judging by some of the numbers.’
‘Who?’
Benny eyed him and smiled. ‘Come on, mate, I’ve said too much.
Let’s just say that after years doing their thing in Indo and Thailand, the KRs have moved to where the real money is.’
After Suzi came back, the talk got more general. Benny was a great host as always and Suzi was a smart young lawyer fresh out of the University of Sydney Law School, doing her clerking with the legal side of Benny’s practice. Mac liked the tough but open character of middle-class Singaporeans. It was a similar trait to the Israelis. Both countries raised their kids with the knowledge that everything they took for granted could be snatched away tomorrow, so they should enjoy it – and fi ght for it. Both countries sat in the midst of an Islamic tide, both had been created by the West as Anglo-leaning capitalist democracies, and both had built the kind of national wealth that engendered nothing but resentment from those around them.
Suzi was appalled by the jihadists and their methods, in contrast to some of the students Mac had tutored at Sydney Uni, who thought the bombers had a point. There was a softness in younger Australians and an appetite for received wisdom that Mac found disturbing.
He told Suzi how in one tutorial discussion, a woman in her early thirties had upbraided Mac for talking about Indonesian aggression during Konfrontasi in the mid-1960s. She claimed Konfrontasi had been an attempt by Sukarno to stop an ‘imperialist land-grab in Borneo’ and that everyone knew this. Of course, in 1963 alone the Indonesian military had carried out more than thirty bombings in Singapore, many of them on civilian targets such as cafes and buses, and Mac had asked his student how this stopped Sarawak and Sabah becoming part of the Malay Federation? The woman had stormed out, calling him a
‘Bush-lover’.
‘I know – it’s true!’ Suzi said, wide-eyed. ‘Other students were saying to me Oooh, but the poor Muslims have a point, and I’m like, Naaahhh -‘ she said it with a theatrically downturned mouth and big smiling eyes, ‘ let them hang! ‘
Benny and Mac laughed, couldn’t help themselves. The Singaporean Chinese had no sense of why you’d make excuses for people who bombed cafes.
‘I’m like, to my Aussie friends,’ continued Suzi, ‘ When you live in Singapore, you know that you are Mantiqi One – lucky to be fi rst on their list.’
Mac met her eye as he tried to recall. ‘Mantiqi One – that’s…’
Suzi sipped her wine. ‘JI’s fi rst bombing zone. Singapore and Malaysia.’
‘Nice of them,’ growled Benny.
‘Yeah,’ said Suzi. ‘And if you’re in Western Indonesia, you’re Mantiqi Two. Mantiqi Three covers Sabah, Mindanao and Sulawesi, I think.’
‘Gee, what have they got for this – a spreadsheet?’ asked Mac.
Suzi giggled. ‘Don’t think you get off lightly. Guess where the bombs go off in Mantiqi Four?’
Mac shrugged. ‘What’s left? Flores?’
‘No, silly – Mantiqi Four is Australia.’
‘Really?’ said Mac, the humour draining from his face.
‘Yeah – Mantiqi Four. You know, the Fourth Brigade.’
CHAPTER 43
Mac was woken shortly before six am by the sound of a female voice hissing. Going out to his balcony, he looked down to the rear garden where Miss Rasmi was muttering insults and waving a broom at a koel bird in the tree. After a brief shower he reapplied his mo and walked around the corner to the Raffl es for some brekkie. Businesspeople sat around the restaurant, reading the Straits and texting on their BlackBerries.
Seeing a table by the rear wall, Mac dropped his phone and wallet o
n it and walked to the maitre d’ station, ordered the full cooked breakfast and a pot of coffee, managing to not blanch at the bill.
The coffee came quickly, in a large silver pot, and he surveyed the room for a tail while he poured. He clocked an early thirties Anglo or Euro male with short light brown hair and an athletic frame in expensive but anonymous clothes. The guy looked around the room for a fraction too long as he waited for the maitre d’, and then sat two tables away.
Mac gave him a wink. ‘How’s it going?’
Smiling, the bloke played it cool and turned back to his Straits Times. Mac decided he might have to fl ush the bird into the open rather than going stumbling into the bush. Firing up the Nokia, he redialled Freddi’s number. It rang twice before Freddi answered. ‘ Alo .’
‘Fred, it’s McQueen,’ said Mac, pushing his right hand onto his ear to block out the sound of the restaurant.
‘How are you?’ asked Freddi.
‘Bad time?’
‘If I say yes, you hang up?’
Mac laughed. He could hear a child talking in the background.
‘Mate, I’ll call back in thirty minutes.’
‘Okay.’
‘Thanks, mate – bye,’ he said and hit the red button, took a slug of surprisingly good coffee and made for the bain-maries.
As he sat with the bacon and eggs Mac made a show of looking at his watch, then sighed and stood up, grabbed his phone and wallet and walked out of the restaurant.
‘Back in a tick,’ he said, smiling at the head waitress as he headed out. Walking through the lobby at a brisk pace, he looked for eyes, although he didn’t expect to fi nd them in the lobby. There’d be someone outside and they’d have a prop: reading a newspaper, standing at a parking meter, sitting on a park bench with a phone to their ear.
Mac saw her as he was halfway down the Raffl es front steps. The other tail was a late-twenties Anglo or Euro brunette in a burgundy skirt suit, standing next to a car pretending to be on the phone. Mac continued down the steps and paused at the forecourt, looked directly at the girl and feigned surprise at being made. Running around the side of the building, through the gardens, he strode into the courtyard where he’d been with Suzi and Benny the night before and then let himself into the side alcove of the Raffl es lobby. Moving forward quietly, behind a porter’s trolley, Mac scanned the vast area, thankful for the air-con. To his left he could see the retreating form of the male tail, the large wood and glass doors swishing behind him.
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