Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent

by Mark Abernethy

  Mac let it hang. He waited. Waited. The girl looked into the distance, she turned back. ‘Like I said …’

  She trailed off. Looked away.

  Mac shook his head. ‘Even if he said he loved you.’

  He watched her eyes refocusing.

  ‘Wasn’t Matt was it?’

  She kept looking away.

  ‘Okay,’ said Mac. ‘Gimme the mic. I’ll have a chat to the bloke.’

  He pretended to be going for the ear device that Mac was guessing was hidden by her hair. The girl pulled back, put her hand to her ear.

  Bingo!

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Mac. ‘I’ll tell him what’s what.’

  The girl was on her feet. ‘Like I said, sir, I think you have the wrong girl.’

  She picked up a blue backpack and walked away. He watched her walk across the mall area, down past the Gucci and Vuitton stores, along the cafes and up to the toilets. She looked into shop window refl ections to check on him, then she disappeared into the ladies.

  Mac had one minute before she fi nished her conversation with Matt, was yelled at for losing eyes, and then came back out.

  Mac turned, unzipped his backpack and took out the Nokia, while heading across to a Swiss watch emporium where the hockey players were ogling the price tags. He had a look at something that cost $5200, looked closer, dropped his clothes bag, bent to pick it up and deposited his Nokia in a mesh water bottle holder that sat on the side of one of the hockey boys’ bags.

  Had another look at the $5200 watch - was happy he had a G-Shock habit.

  Scooting over to a garbage bin, he dumped his old clothes out of the plastic shopping bag, put his backpack in the bag, then sat back down where he’d been with the girl.

  The conversation he’d had with Garvs the night before was too pat. His one-time friend had made a point of giving the Nokia back to him, which Mac took to be a decoy gesture - it meant Garvs was going to microdot Mac’s clothes. Microdots were the size of a very small bindi and they stuck to clothes just as easily. You couldn’t guarantee you’d get conversations off one but they were a great location device.

  The good thing about them was you could place them on a person by touching them on the sleeve or patting them on the back.

  Now Garvs was going to be tracking Mac to the local dump.

  The girl came back into sight. Mac’s fl ight was called. He stood, walked past her, winked. Smiled. Stopped.

  ‘The worst thing about spooks?’

  The girl said, ‘What?’

  ‘All twenty-second wonders, mate. Are they coming? Are they going? Who can tell?’

  He thought he saw a smirk, made a wiggling sign with his little fi nger as he moved off.

  The girl laughed, looked away.

  Good-looking bird, thought Mac. Shame about the circumstances.

  He reached immigration at Changi at about fi ve-thirty am. He’d made a point of changing his ticket from a transit to a stopover from the public phone at the Lagerhaus. Matt would have checked - would have known. He moved through the arrivals lounge looking for the tail and found it easily: early thirties Chinese-Aussie, white short-sleeved business shirt, black slacks, paper under his arm, pretending to talk into a mobile phone. The bloke wasn’t too bad.

  Mac moved straight to the gents, the shop bag now in his backpack. Getting into the last booth, he pulled the shop bag and the toilet bag out of his pack, put them on the toilet seat. Then he stripped off his shirt and stashed it in the pack, unzipped the toilet bag and pulled out its contents: passport, driver’s licence, credit card, business cards, Customs ID. Pulled out more: three unmarked screw-top jars, a travel pack of Wet Ones, a pair of owl-eye spectacles, a rolled-up dark neck tie, a black plastic hair comb and what looked like a red plastic compass box of the type a student would have for geometry class.

  He went to work rubbing the contents of the small jar around on his hands, smoothing it through his hair; forward, back and both sides. Next, he combed his hair, giving it a left parting. Opening the compass box he pulled out a dark, hairy mo and a tube of theatre make-up glue. Squeezing the glue onto the back of the mo, he rubbed it with the tip of his index fi nger and then pressed the mo down across his top lip.

  He put on the specs, changed into the size 38 trousers, used the Wet Ones to wipe around his neck and hands, which were covered in black residue.

  He put on the too-large shirt, buttoned up and put on the tie.

  The spare clothes and Richard Davis ID went into the backpack. The jars and containers went into the toilet bag, apart from one of the unopened jars. The toilet bag went into the backpack. The backpack went into the shop bag. He took his shoes off, put a coin in each, face down. Put the shoes on again, picked up the shop bag and moved into the washroom area. There was one last thing. Pulling a dark contact lens from the jar, he put it in fi rst go. He hated the sensation. Did the other. He was lucky: his pale eyes and blond hair were such beacons in South-East Asia that changing them to dark rendered him almost invisible. He hoped.

  He hadn’t been more than seventy seconds in the booth. Someone moved quickly to take his place.

  He examined himself critically in the mirror, hoping he had at least two more minutes before the tail wandered in. This was the moment of truth: he pretty much matched the photo on his driver’s licence and passport. He was now Brandon Collier - a dark-haired, spectacled bloke whose baggy clothes were hiding a pudgy body.

  The coins would alter his gait slightly, and gait was a more powerful identifi er to the human brain than just about anything else.

  He went out the door, the coins in his shoes making him walk upright and jerky. The Collier character, Mac decided, was confi dent about his nerdiness. So he put a superior smirk on his face and walked down the concourse with his 38 pants giving him an elephant arse. He didn’t look, just walked like a man with all the time in the world.

  Mac found the Singapore Airlines ticketing right beside the transit desk. People were yelling and carrying on. Mac got in line behind a Dutchman lecturing his wife. The Dutchman then took his turn lecturing the Singapore girl. He shrugged a lot about what kind of a country this was, had some long story he wanted to tell, with spittle fl ying off his lips in that guttural way the Dutchies speak. His wife nodded a lot.

  The SIA girl gave customer service a good name. She smiled and nodded and sent them on their way without them getting what they wanted.

  Mac stepped up, put down his passport. ‘Some morning you’re having, huh?’

  She smiled. Tired, late thirties, smart. Once pretty, she was now just sexy. Her shift would have started at midnight and she’d be getting all the crazies, the ones who hadn’t slept, or who had fl own in from the West and had no idea what was happening to their circadians.

  ‘Bloody Austrians,’ said Mac. ‘How rude can you get?’

  ‘They were Dutch,’ said the girl.

  ‘Germans, Dutch. All look the same to me, mate,’ said Mac, winking.

  She smiled as if she really shouldn’t.

  ‘You’re not the girl, are you? You know, with the parasol and the geese?’ asked Mac.

  She looked confused, then suddenly got it. Smiled big, looked at her screen too intently, looked back. ‘No - I’m not her.’

  Mac asked for a one-way to Surabaya.

  She asked, ‘Economy?’

  Mac nodded.

  She shook her head. ‘Economy’s sold out on the 7.35 fl ight.

  I can get you on the evening fl ight in economy.’

  Mac shook his head. ‘How much is fi rst class?’ he asked, fanning out his Singapore dollars on the counter.

  She looked back at the screen, chewed her bottom lip. Said,

  ‘I think we can do this.’

  Mac fl ew fi rst class on an upgrade. The food was great, the leg room was even better, the brand new Airbus was out-fucking-standing. He grabbed a cold orange juice, reclined and had a think about what the hell he was doing. Five days ago he’d had a soul-weary f
eeling about this profession - just wanted it to be over, get into uni life. He could have walked away that morning, jumped the south-bound fl ight for Sydney, sunk a few cheeky ones, then stretched out in business class and slept all the way into Kingsford Smith. The Service apartment was valid until the end of January so he could have spent some time working out how a mortgage was going to happen. Could have booked into the Coogee Bay Hotel for a couple of nights, lain on the beach, knocked back cold beers, inspected the insides of the eyelids.

  Could have spent Christmas with his mum and dad at their retirement home in Airlie; taken up some pressies for his nieces, spoiled them rotten, annoying Virginia big-time.

  But Mac wasn’t going home. He was heading back into a potentially ugly situation, partially blind on info and with no Commonwealth backup. A regular boy scout running into a snake pit.

  He laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. At some point every bloke turns into his father.

  Mac remembered the summer of his last year at UQ. Virginia had just started uni. She came home with a bloke called Miles who she’d been seeing. Mac had seen Miles too. He wore John Lennon glasses and got around in bare feet, beret and a rat’s tail of hair down his back.

  He had a ‘Meat is Murder’ T-shirt and a Mao lapel badge on his WWII great coat. Mac had fi rst seen Miles with a megaphone in his face on the vice-chancellor’s steps at the St Lucia campus, banging on about Palestine or Guatemala and saying things like ‘fascist’ and ‘pigs’.

  Then Virginia turned up with the bloke, who sat there at Sunday lunch telling Frank how it was with human rights and the corrupt pigs and the brutality against protestors. Frank didn’t say a word.

  Finally, Miles challenged him, said, ‘Okay - so why are you a cop?’

  Frank looked around, put down his fork, said, ‘Because it needs to get done. ‘Cos most people can’t.’

  If Mac was honest about why he ended up in public service when he could have done a lot of other things, it had a lot to do with what Frank had told Miles.

  But it hadn’t helped Frank much. The last time Mac had been in Airlie, the federal election was on and Mac was amazed that his father had become a silent voter - a good man trying to disappear beneath the radar while the criminals who would harass him roamed free.

  Frank had looked at Mac a bit sheepish after he told Mac. ‘Things sure changed, didn’t they, mate?’ said Frank.

  They sure did.

  And people like Mac just kept stepping up for it.

  They touched down at Juanda airport mid morning. Mac hired a Honda Civic from Avis with the Orion Visa card. If anything was going to come up strange on a neural-net system, it was going to be a car rented on a Visa card that had been issued fi ve years before and never been used. But someone would have to be looking for that. They’d have to realise that the only way for Mac to slip off everyone’s radar would be that he’d assumed a new identity. And when they couldn’t fi nd any fl ags on the IDs they knew of, they’d have to backtrack and go looking for new ones. That’s what Mac would do, but a lot wouldn’t.

  And he hoped that the people who were now following him were as hopeless as he used to think they were.

  He pulled out of the enormous Juanda rental car parking lot, hit the air-con as the heat started to grip and took the direct feeder on to the Trans-Java Highway.

  Then he headed west, for Jakarta.

  CHAPTER 17

  Mac hit the fi rst toll road, to Mojokerto, paid in cash, keeping off the databases. There were toll roads all the way west to Jakarta and he could have used the e-tag on the rental car to speed straight through and be billed when he took the Civic back. But if Matt found a one-off credit card usage, he could cross check it with the toll road databases and the rego of the rental car. He’d have the time and everything.

  He stuck to the speed limit while trucks fl ashed past him. No excuses for the POLRI to pull him over. A white Commodore followed him for a while so he pulled over, let them pass, got right in behind them. The Commodore took an off-ramp fourteen minutes later.

  He pulled into a shopping area, bought water, fruit, cotton buds and nail polish remover. Sat in the car park, removed his mo. He did it slow. If you looked after those things you could get three uses out of them - maybe four if you weren’t getting into fi ghts.

  He found a local band on the AM radio dial playing covers of Billy Joel, Phil Collins and Olivia Newton-John. Hard to tell if they were in Bahasa or bad English. He’d re-strapped his wrist but the worst seemed to be over. The swelling was on its way down and the lump behind his ear was much better. He felt okay and kept his spirits up by slugging water from a large bottle on the seat beside him. And tried to sort himself out.

  Garvs had said, ‘It’s over.’ It was far from that for Mac. He’d been through this before, in East Timor. The politicians and Service lunchers had wanted him out, but Mac had gone back in. That had been a clearer scenario and he’d been vindicated, made the offi ce guys look good. This wasn’t clear, and Mac was confused about his next move. He didn’t know what Garrison was up to, didn’t know what his connection might be to someone in the Service. He needed to know more about Eighty and where he fi tted. He also had no backup in the embassy, since there’d be a general low-level alert out for him.

  Mac’s main role at the Service was in trade, banking and fi nance.

  It wasn’t what they’d sent him to the Royal Marines for all those years before but it’s what he’d spent most of his time doing. That’s where Mac overlapped with Judith Hannah. She was tailing the Chinese intelligence blokes who were working on a maritime security system to protect Chinese trade. Indonesia was the key to it, given it had the world’s worst piracy problem in the world’s most valuable shipping lanes: the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea.

  Mac and others - including many people in the US State Department - knew that the Chinese approach to maritime security was ultimately the establishment of a Chinese naval base in Singapore.

  They’d been hinting at it, enlisting cocktail drinkers to it and generally seeding the idea for most of the 1990s. It was a simple piece of arithmetic: if your booming economy relied on making lots of stuff really cheaply, then you had to be able to transport lots of stuff really cheaply. Every time there was another act of piracy in the South China Sea, another maritime terrorist warning in the Malacca Strait, or another bluewater heist in the Java Sea, you added more slices of a per cent to the costs of your goods. Once those slices rose too high, either your profi t margins eroded or your buyers in Italy, Bahrain, Malaysia or Australia had an excuse to buy elsewhere.

  And the Chinese economy was not able to handle an erosion of margin.

  China had annoyed the region and the Americans by trying to establish a PLA navy base in the Spratlys in the 1990s, as an attempt to patrol the South China Sea. But the People’s Republic really needed to have its ships on the Malacca Strait. It couldn’t get a base in either Indonesia or Malaysia and the Chinese had threatened to go to Burma, which would mean pumping billions into the Burmese junta’s military.

  It could even end up in an independent Aceh.

  But it really had to be Singapore - ethnically Chinese, the unoffi cial banker to Chinese Communist Party cronies, and the controlling maritime presence in the Malacca Strait.

  What had infuriated the PLA generals was the successful lobbying in the 1990s for the US Navy to build a military pier at Singapore’s Changi Naval Base. On completion in 2001 the pier was large enough to birth a Nimitz-class supercarrier, making it essentially the US

  Navy’s hub in the western Pacifi c. Far from dousing the naval base aspirations of the Chinese, it merely intensifi ed their efforts. Even during Mac’s time in South-East Asia, Singapore had turned into a lobbying bazaar where every offi cial, professional, business person or public servant now had strongly held views on Chinese naval involvement in Singapore. The Chinese-Singaporeans were either pro-or anti-PRC; they either took their messages from the CIA or the MSS - Ch
ina’s Ministry of State Security. You could go to cocktail parties or symposia where the room was divided in two.

  But when Mac knocked this around with what Cookie had told him, he came up with nothing. What did a CIA rogue like Garrison and his Asian friend called Eighty have to do with Chinese maritime security issues?

  It didn’t make sense.

  Mac fi lled up at the Pertamina roadhouse just out of Bandung, dashed into the gents and pulled out the dark contacts. He bought a coffee and a roti and grabbed a white plastic table by the window. The coffee was crap - there was no excuse given the island they were on. Nibbling on the roti, he fl ipped through a transportation trade mag that had been left on a neighbouring seat.

  Mac read the editorial: about the importance of foreign investment in vital infrastructure. The boring stuff. The kind of issues that Mac did for a living. He was even driving on the result of some of his work: the Trans-Java Highway. It was going to be completed over the next decade and would cost billions more than the government had.

  The missing link was foreign investment and the problem was a thing called sovereign risk - the risk to bankers that the government would renege on loans, resume assets or fi x components of the market so investors couldn’t make an economic return on the asset. The way around the sovereign risk issue hinged to a certain extent on internal regulations and anti-corruption measures; but it also rested on the banks being able to own not only the asset, but the land it sat on. That was a big cultural problem in a place like Indonesia, where the ability to control territory or shipping lanes was the source of all power.

  Mac and a Malaysian spook worked on it for years and fi nally found the gap - one of the big Golkar powerbrokers was a fi rm opponent of ceding land titles to foreign fi nanciers. A Suharto-era, old-school oligarch, he was TNI-aligned and steadfast in his opposition. He was also homosexual. Least, that’s what Mac took from the video footage and recordings he had of the bloke. Mac and his counterpart had a word in the shell-like with a couple of lads from BIN - the president-controlled intelligence service, which luckily had its own rivalry with the military-controlled intel group called BAIS. They sat back, waited for the announcement. Later, it was the Malaysian and Aussie bankers who announced they were taking fi rst lick at the low-hanging fruit that was Java toll roads.