by Jock Serong
‘So why didn’t we get Joel?’ he asked absently.
‘You think he would’ve handled this better?’
‘No,’ he looked indignant. ‘Shit, I was just asking.’
Isi saw that she’d overreacted. Fraggle’s face was open and kind: there was nothing behind his question. ‘I gather you’ve done a lot of surf trips,’ she said.
‘Mm. Last few years I’ve been away a lot.’
‘Great seeing new places, hey.’
Fraggle didn’t even glance at her. ‘Travelling’s a way of making sure you’re not at home.’
He plainly didn’t want to add to that. Isi drank some water and offered it to him but he declined. She felt the urge to push through his silence.
‘Joel’s in Perth. He’s got problems. We’ve got problems. I wouldn’t have said anything, but I guess it’s pretty minor by comparison now, isn’t it?’
Fraggle said nothing, and she found herself going on. ‘It’s just me and him, the business. And things have gone wrong, like the bombings and the political bullshit between our government and theirs. And there’s big corporate players in the market now, and they can advertise and they can bung on all the luxuries. And when Joel spends money on the business he does dumb stuff, you know? Extravagant shit. The Indos rip him off pretty easy because he’s generous.’
‘So why are you in business with him? You could have a relationship with him without going into business together’—he laughed a little, then added—‘in a place like Bali.’
‘He’s a bloody good surfer and people respect him. You know, people like the Finleys and Tim. That should be enough…’
‘Yeah, but it isn’t, eh.’
‘I don’t know what it is that Indo does to Australian blokes. Turn into bloody cavemen: aggressive, but faking all this matey bullshit. Burn themselves black in the sun. They’re physical you know? Nothing on the inside.’
‘Christ that’s bleak.’
‘You know it’s true. You’ve seen them. It’s what you get when you give blokes all the sun and waves they want, and cheap piss and good times and zero fucking accountability. That’s what they’ll ultimately turn into, into a—’
‘I’ve got a signal.’
‘Shit! Go go go!’
‘Sending…’ Fraggle watched the screen, shading it with his other hand. ‘We’re done.’
She whooped with delight and hugged him while he remained awkwardly rigid. Far below them, the reef was empty now and Carl was paddling back. The wrecked boat had slipped off the inside edge of the coral into deeper water and disappeared from view.
TUESDAY AFTERNOON
Canberra
Cassius stared at the first photograph until it blurred, but if it held any secrets it wasn’t revealing them to him.
He pushed his papers away to both sides of the desk and laid the two images in front of him.
From high, high above the island, the surveillance image had been cropped down to show the lagoon, the reef and the hill behind the beach. The colours were beautiful, the leaching of one brilliant primary hue into another: deep water to shallow, coral to sand, beach to palms to rocks. In the middle of the bay a boat lay at anchor, the dark chain visible in the sunlight. Large tarpaulins extended over the decks, and the shadow of the boat made a triangle on the sea floor beneath it.
There were people on the beach.
Who are you? He thumbed through a phone list. Stella was yelling at him again from outside the room. Christ she was loud. He frowned at the phone list and sighed. But she wasn’t going away.
‘Hey! Rory goes for the Sea Eagles, yeah?’
‘Aha,’ he replied, absently. ‘Like his ol’ man.’
‘You know they’re playing here Friday night?’
‘Oh shit! Of course.’
‘You want me to get tickets?’
‘Great, great. Yes, please.’ Thank God for Stella.
‘That’s election eve of course. How bout I clear it with Media so we can call it a public appearance? Tip off the commercials—you and your boy, doing the family thing in your silly bloody scarf…’
He smiled to himself. ‘I love you Stella.’
She appeared in the doorway with a sarcastic grin. ‘I’m not your Moneypenny. Better talk to your ex—he’s due home sooner isn’t he?’
She was right again. Cassius typed an email while it was in the front of his mind:
Monica,
You might not be aware that on Friday night the Sea Eagles (Rory’s team) are playing the Canberra Raiders here in Canberra. I would love to take him to the game. Seeing as he’s already here, would it be all right if I kept him another 24 hours? C.
‘Tell her I’ll babysit the chicken,’ Stella yelled from outside. He found the number he was looking for and dialled it, kicking the door shut while it rang.
‘Sir?’
‘Nigel. All right, I’m looking at the two images now. Do you have them in front of you?’
‘Yes sir, I do.’
‘Now, the first one. Where’s that shot taken?’
‘It’s over a small island halfway between Roti and Sumba called Dana. Uninhabited. I mean, we’re talking here, it’s about a mile by a mile and a half.’
‘How did we get the shot?’
‘Core Resolve had an asset in the area. We put in a call to them after that Coastwatch report about a boat out there. So that’s taken from high altitude, but obviously zoomed right in. We took a series of shots across that sector and this was the only feature of any interest that we could locate.’
‘I can see a boat. Anchored?’
‘Yes, we think so.’
‘And people on a beach.’
‘Yes.’
‘Who are they?’
There was a long expulsion of air on the other end of the line. ‘Well, we don’t know. The boat’s a traditional Indonesian design. It’s timber, and you can tell the bow’s very high by the shape of the shadow. We’ve had a few people looking at that aspect, and they think it’s a phinisi, a fishing boat that comes from up in the north.’
‘So why’s it way down here in the south?’
‘They use them everywhere. Could be fishermen, could be insurgents, could be illegals headed our way.’
‘What’s the…it looks green round the cabin. Is it painted green?’
‘I thought that too. Not sure, sir.’
‘All right. Is it the boat we’d tracked a few days ago?’
Again, hesitation, breathing. ‘Well sir I don’t…Mr Smedley prefers we don’t speculate…’
‘I’m not going to hold you to it. But I want to know what your gut instinct is.’
‘Yeah, I appreciate that. Look, there’s a lot of variables in this game…I, er…’
‘But if you take the position where we located the boat on the… what’s that?’
‘The Savu Sea.’
‘This is not far away, right? So it’s the same one?’
‘Maybe.’
Cassius resisted the exasperation that was creeping over him now. Everyone was ducking and weaving: they all knew it was his job to be in the firing line for this.
‘What do you mean maybe? Forty-eight hours ago a boat matching this description was wallowing around just north of here. There was a big storm and now a boat with an identical profile is lying at anchor in a sheltered lagoon. It’s pretty compelling logic isn’t it?’
‘Yes. But that doesn’t mean it’s correct. Sir.’
Cassius began rubbing the surface of the desk with his open palms, willing himself to remain calm.
‘We don’t get boats anymore. We’ve sto—’ Something he’d taken as a certainty for so long. ‘Are we still getting boats and we’re sending them back?’
‘That’s a separate line of inquiry, sir. I can find out but I’d need to go to Core Resolve. Do you require me to do that?’
‘No, I just want to understand this. Why would anyone send a boat these days? It’s obvious that it won’t get through.’
‘With respect sir, that confuses the people sending the boats with the people on the boats. If you’re sending the boat and you’re holding the money, you don’t care much whether it gets through. And if you’re on the boat and you’ve been lied to, then…’
‘All right. Can I ask you a couple more questions? What are the squares on the ground, just behind the beach?’
‘Four of them? We think they’re tents, sir.’
‘Tents? Why would asylum seekers have tents? Why aren’t they sleeping on the boat, or on the ground? The boat’s got tarps over it.’
‘Well, some of these outfits are better equipped than others. They might’ve taken them with them, or the tents might already have been there on the island…could be lots of reasons. Also, there might’ve been a problem with the boat and they wanted to get off for a while. You know, something infectious, or a fuel leak, or a fight of some kind…it can get pretty tense on board these vessels.’
Cassius sighed and felt the claws tightening again. Twice in as many days. He waited a moment for the pain to ebb, picked up the other photograph with its beach and quiet lagoon and glorious tropical sky. And then—like biting into an exquisite fruit and finding half a grub—the overturned hull and the bodies. So beautiful, so macabre.
‘All right, the other shot. Now what’s this?’
‘We’re looking across a beach, sir, out to sea, and the question I guess is, is this the same location as the one that the overhead shot shows?’
‘Where did it come from? Is there any explanation for it?’
‘No. It’s public domain, whereas the other one isn’t. It was posted on an extreme sports social media service called Vipe.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘The kids use it, sir. Skating, surfing, that sort of crowd. From there it was re-posted by the left-wing media, activist groups. We’ve looked at some of their communications and they…’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well we’ve…we’ve gone through all their social media, done some work on their metadata, some emails…’
‘Are we allowed to do that?’
‘Yes, some of it comes within the user agreements these people sign when they join whatever the service is. And the rest comes under national security regs of one kind and another. There’s a protocol we run to ensure all the checks are covered by something.’
He appeared to be waiting for a further reaction from Cassius, but as there was none, he pressed on. ‘So we went through the followers on the account. You see, the company behind Vipe won’t give us account-holder details, and the guy who posted it just describes himself as Fraggle. He’s got a sizable following, but only under that alias: there’s no indication of who the individual is. So we worked through the followers on the account to see what we could cross-reference. And there’s a woman named…Veal. Joyce Veal in Rockingham. You want me to keep going?’
‘Yes.’
‘So Joyce Veal, it turns out, is the mother of a surf photographer called Alan Veal, and DFAT confirms he’s currently in Indonesia. In other words, he could be Fraggle. We’re trying to find a legislative basis to burrow into her comms and find the link.’
Cassius was struggling to keep up. The claws were digging in. ‘So the activists, the—what are they called?’
‘Open Borders.’
He squinted, then un-squinted. ‘Open Borders…what do they say the photo represents?’
‘They’re claiming it shows an asylum-seeker boat that’s wrecked on the reef. The caption with it doesn’t prove or disprove what it shows.’
‘Are those bodies?’
‘Possibly. That’s certainly what some of the commentators are saying. There must be a couple of dozen of them, which of course is too many for a fishing vessel. More consistent with illegals.’
‘And the’—Cassius flipped between the two images—‘the two shots. Do they show the same place? Because the calm water in the ground shot could be the lagoon in the shot from Core Resolve. I mean, it could be…’ He tried rotating them. He tried squinting again.
‘Yes, and the question then arises, is the upturned boat in the background the same boat that’s at anchor in the Core Resolve shot? And if so, what happened to it?’
Cassius looked at the shape. It was, unmistakably, a capsized hull, slimed with marine growth like he imagined an Indonesian fishing boat might be.
‘What do we know about the timing?’
‘The aerial view was taken last Sunday. We know precisely that the ground shot was taken thirty-six hours later. We had our tech people burrow into the image file to work that out. And they found something else, sir.’
‘Mm?’
‘The image has been manipulated.’
‘Manipulated?’
‘It’s no big deal. Just the colour saturation we think, but they’re still working on it. I don’t want to confuse matters with that, but you probably should know.’
Cassius thought fast, thought about the implications of the two shots, the clock running down to Saturday and everyone’s political fate.
‘All right. I want to go to the PM on this basis: the aerial view was provided via top-secret channels and shows an Indonesian fishing boat sheltering from a storm in a lagoon. The other shot is of unknown provenance and may show the same vessel overturned the next day. The incident is outside Australian waters and we have had no notification from the Indonesians that we have any cause for concern. Now is there anything about that that doesn’t ring true to you?’
‘Well, there’s a lot left to explain. There’s the bodies, the tents, and as you rightly point out there’s the origin of the second shot. It may come to light over the coming days…’
‘I can handle all that. So can the PM. But nothing contradicts me, right?’
‘No sir.’
‘Good. Thank you.’ Cassius was already bracing himself for the call to the PM.
‘Oh, sir?’
‘Yes?’
‘You said there were a couple of things you’d noticed about the overhead shot. The tents and…what was the other one?’
Cassius racked his brains. The headache was starting to subside but there was fuzz in its wake. ‘I can’t remember. I’m sure it wasn’t important.’
He put down the phone, scrawled out some notes and rang the PM’s office. He was assured a call would be returned to him within minutes. He spent those minutes comparing the two shots. What the hell had gone on here?
The PMO rang back: he was transferred from an assistant to the chief of staff and finally to the PM. Between the expected bluster and indignation, he made the points he wanted to make and they agreed that the PM would take care of the media briefing.
It should have brought him satisfaction. This slimy chain of inference clearly had its origins in some murky place. It was a grenade without a pin, and now someone else was holding it.
The PM wanted the win here. He needed to sweep aside the misty-eyed bed-wetters looking to generate a humanitarian crisis in the hours before polling day. And yet Cassius felt a residual sense of doubt. Something didn’t add up.
Two hours later the PM faced the press, timed to cut live into the evening news. Cassius was still in his office, two of the neurologist’s pills down his throat and the corridors blanketed in silence. He turned on the TV, found the ABC and watched as he fed his notes into a shredder.
The two photos, side by side.
The caption: Is this a wrecked asylum seeker boat?
Then the PM’s head, framed in the same doorway where Cassius had made his policy announcement. He had thrust his chin forward as he liked to do when there was a stoush on.
‘Some irresponsible members of the press have rushed to conclusions about these images that are frankly alarmist. I object—I mean, I really strongly object—to people trying to whip up hysteria when they are not in possession of the facts. So to lay this to rest once and for all: the aerial shot you see here’—he held up a laminated copy of the aerial image—‘sho
ws an Indonesian fishing vessel sheltering from a storm in a lagoon in Indonesian waters near the island of Sumba. Okay?’ He looked pugnaciously out at his imagined enemies. ‘We didn’t have to release that image—it comes from classified sources—but we chose to in the interests of openness with the Australian public.
‘And the second image, provided by certain groups with axes to grind, shows the same vessel, overturned, a day or so later. Case closed, ladies and gentlemen.’
A flurry of reporters’ questions. The PM continued to speak.
‘But let me tell you one other thing. One other thing. And this might be a lesson for some members of the media about judging a book by its cover. This image’—he shook the laminated copy of the ground shot—‘has been electronically manipulated. We can’t tell what was there, or what’s been inserted, but it is not in its original form.’
Half a smile played on his thick lips as he stared into the camera.
‘A drowning at sea—any loss of human life—is a tragedy, make no mistake. People may have died here. I don’t know. I don’t know if I can trust this image. I don’t know where it was taken, or by whom, or for what reasons. People pick things up off social media and treat them like they’re gospel. I don’t know why someone chose to fiddle with this image, or what their motivations were. My job, and minister Calvert’s job, is to protect our borders. And we do that based on evidence. Reliable evidence from the men and women of our Border Integrity Force, and our commercial partners at Core Resolve. Not this…this rubbish.
‘The boats have stopped, ladies and gentlemen, and despite what some interest groups might wish, they ain’t coming back.’
The questions came again, each one deflected with a combative monosyllable. Cassius tuned out and took himself home.
He’d hired a nanny for Rory but hadn’t had a chance to check in with her.
‘What a lovely boy,’ she said now as he paid her and showed her out.
The kid was asleep on the couch with a tablet propped in the folds of a doona on his lap. The chicken was huddled in a box of torn newspaper at his feet. Cassius could smell its shit in the sterile air.