The Price of Life

by Nigel Brennan

  We ask the meeting whether the Canadian is family doing something similar. Are things going to be held up if our respective governments have different approaches to making funds available? What is the government’s expectation with respect to reimbursement?

  Most of these questions are skimmed over or skirted around using public service jargon. We all scribble notes down madly and look up at them, saying, Huh? What does that mean? Only the easy stuff gets answered and it becomes clear that these guys are masters of spin.

  Then we ask a question we’ve put to them numerous times.

  ‘Will DFAT discuss with its Canadian counterpart about providing the Lindhouts with similar payment options so that the onus for Nigel and Amanda’s release does not solely rest on Nigel’s family?’

  James’s response is nonsensical.

  ‘The AFP is constantly reviewing the strategy but I don’t think things will have changed since I last talked to them so all I can undertake with you is your need for an immediate response, but I just caveat that by saying the minister is overseas.’

  How do you go about trying to construct a counter-argument when someone speaks like that? At the end of the meeting Mum, Dad and I ask to speak to James alone and off the record.

  We tell him that if we were to sell Mum and Dad’s house in Brisbane, we could raise up to US$100K. Prior to the meeting we had offered US$25Κ by selling off our shares, bringing the amount available to US$50K. Once Rouen Road sells we’ll have a total of US$150K that the negotiators can use to bring Nigel home.

  As a result of Adan now calling Nairobi more often than Moore Park, the negs get rotated down from twenty-four-hour to shifts from 2 p.m. till 2 a.m.; that is, the time the calls have traditionally come in – daylight hours in Mogadishu.

  ‘What happens if I get a call outside those hours and neither of you are here?’ I ask the negs.

  ‘You take and tape the call. Work methodically through the strategy points and get someone else who is in the house to call one of us.’ Christ, how is that for being thrown in the deep end without being told how to swim?

  ‘But,’ I argue, ‘didn’t the proof-of-life call come in outside those hours?’

  ‘Yes, but since then all other calls to both here and Canada have come within those hours,’ comes the response.

  Great, I think, just ignore that the anomaly phone call was the most important one to date. The negs’ phone numbers are put on our mobile phones and on speed dial on the landline. We put in a new line upstairs, seeing as Mum and Dad’s phone is now dedicated to taking calls from Somalia. Quite a few friends get a shock when they ring the number and receive a very polite response from me telling them they are being recorded by the AFP. The adrenaline surge I get from these false alarms makes me feel like a brown snake producing shot after shot of venom.

  So now I could be taking the calls unassisted. I guess the overtime budget must be looking pretty insane down in Canberra and cuts have to be made somewhere, and that somewhere is Moore Park. But this is an international kidnapping case, I can’t help thinking.

  A call from Adan comes in – outside the shift hours predictably enough – and Mum quickly phones the negs to get their arses down to the house. Meanwhile, I calmly breathe, press the record button, and get on with my role of NOK negotiator – dealing with some slimebag across the world who is holding not only my brother but me and the rest of my family to ransom.

  Nigel

  The Light House

  Tuesday, 30 September

  The last morning of the month Jamal comes in with a small plate of dates. He’s all smiles and high spirits. He exclaims, ‘Eid whan axin, Eid whan axin.’ We ask him what it means and he tells us that Ramadan has finished. Both Amanda and I had thought that Eid was tomorrow. He tells us we have to break our fast before we join the boys in a special prayer in another room.

  Everyone seems extremely happy and there is a buoyant feeling in the house. We are even brought sweets and some freshly roasted goat.

  They allow us to sit outside in the early afternoon, at which point Amanda tries to get Romeo to pass on an Eid card she has made for Abdi and the drivers. Romeo basically screws it up and puts it in his pocket, again showing us exactly where we stand. We’re to have no contact at all with our colleagues.

  Eid is meant to be a three-day celebration, with family, friends and feasting but there isn’t much for us to celebrate. The thought of entering another month is agonising, but both of us are focusing on the date that Ahmed has promised to release us.

  OCTOBER 2008

  Team Brennan

  Kellie

  Newcastle

  October

  Up at Heather and Geoff’s, phone calls from Adan come and go. Nicky is directing all talk of money back to the Nairobi negs. She has been told to tell Adan that a family friend in Nairobi is doing all the negotiations for Nigel and Amanda. There have been a couple of POLs but less and less information is coming through to us. We take this as a good sign – the negotiators in Nairobi seem to have convinced Adan they are the people to speak to. Nic is still training morning and night – I figure by now she is probably better qualified and more experienced than all of the AFP put together.

  A pattern has emerged. Each night the Feds in the house come upstairs to update the family about what’s going on in Nairobi and what progress – if any – has been made. Then we get a call from Moore Park with the latest. After that, the family writes down loads of questions to be answered by either the AFP or DFAT, which are mostly ignored or glossed over. This goes on and on and on. It seems that whatever the family feels is important – the questions we need answered – the AFP thinks is trivial. For example, I ask for a copy of the AFP information guide to Muslim culture so that the family can understand some of the customs. The logic being that this might be a way of understanding what Nige is experiencing, and if we can plot the holidays and holy days, we’ll know to expect less communication during those times. Even though the AFP agrees this is a good idea, the information never comes our way.

  Each day Matt and I email our questions for the nightly meeting, but rarely do we get answers. It’s either because they just don’t know, or they can’t confirm the little they do know. We’re constantly being told they will get back to us. No one seems to be making any progress – we’re all treading water.

  Too little information is more damaging than too much. The family takes to the internet with a vengeance and email each other whatever we can find. Sometimes we work ourselves into a frenzy.

  Not a day goes by when I’m not reminded of Nigel’s kidnapping. When I drop the kids off at school, everyone wants to know the latest titbits. It’s consuming my life. Meanwhile, the story has been out of the press for more than a month and already to Joe Public the name ‘Nigel Brennan’ has been forgotten.

  Nicky

  Moore Park

  Early October

  Lorinda, Amanda’s mum, has been getting many more phone calls than us for a while, though it takes us a while to realise it. News of a call travels from her home in Red Deer to Ottawa, then from Canberra to Brisbane and then on to us. The content of the calls is vetted at every stage to the point where we get no detail at all. After constantly questioning the AFP about it, I eventually get to the bottom of why this is so. The information isn’t being passed on to us because we don’t have the right security clearance.

  Finally, we break this cycle. After I get a call from Adan, I take to phoning Lorinda to give her a full run-down of the conversation. When we are told that Lorinda has had a call, we ring her for the same thing. We get so much more information this way than through the official channels.

  In almost all of his calls to Lorinda, Adan indicates that Nigel is not well. It’s almost impossible to manage Mum over this and the only government help I receive comes from Gayle. The AFP and DFAT believe it’s a tactic the kidnappers are using to pressure the family. While I understand this, it’s not much help when it comes to dealing with an incr
easingly distressed mother. One of the negs, Kath, is particularly good with Mum; she comes from a big family and actually gets how ours work. I manage to get her rotated back a number of times. Mum makes her a beautiful quilt for her birthday, and then we never see or hear of Kath again. It seems that as soon as any emotional attachment is formed – and we’re not playing by the AFP’s rules – the neg is pulled forever.

  Mum is insisting that if Nigel is sick, we need to get medicine to him. It’s a question we put in writing: Can we send over a care package? We finally get a response via the negs during one of our more heated evening family updates.

  ‘Nairobi will endeavour to identify Nigel’s illness and get medication to him,’ is what Canberra quotes to the negs, who relay it to Mum.

  Reading between the lines in the evening updates, there seem to be problems with the Nairobi communications. The information is very sketchy and we have to piece it together. There is no interpreter in Nairobi. Adan is not contacting a new guy called Dave, who is the primary negotiator – he’s taken over from Mark. Apparently there was some language trouble that led to a mix up with a $20K amount put to the kidnappers at the end of the first week. This will come back to bite us.

  Mum suggests that since Adan is so difficult to understand, surely we would be better off talking to him in his own language via a translator. The AFP and DFAT outright refuse to even consider the idea. Again, it turns out to be a security issue. I’m surprised at this – surely interpreters for the Department of Immigration are professionals who have some neutrality.

  The explanation we are given is that if the conversation is in a language the analysts don’t understand, they might miss nuances. The calls have to be transcribed, which takes time, and then the AFP needs an interpreter to interpret the interpreter. This is the single most spectacular Yes, Minister moment we have had to date.

  The government’s opinion seems to be ‘if we can’t do it, no one can’.

  Monday, 6 October

  Lorinda gets a call from Adan with a ten-day deadline. If we don’t pay before then, the HTs will kill Amanda and Nigel. So 16 October is D-day. The AFP is convinced this is a scare tactic. As a result Nairobi is calling their bluff: there will be no communication with Adan until the seventeenth.

  Mum is not in a good place about this: what if they’re wrong? She is close to begging the negs downstairs to get in touch before then.

  I am warned that if a call comes in to the NOK phone, I should be prepared for increased pressure from Adan. I do a lot of threatening practice-calls, using all the deflective strategies I’ve been taught.

  Friday, 10 October

  We get a visit from our new Senior Investigating Officer (SIO), Brian, from the Brisbane MIR. He’s the one overseeing what seems to be known as ‘Operation Mane’. I only discover this via a bit of paper left sitting on the desk. I have no doubt I’ve broken some sort of code, but I’m also gleeful and a little bit proud of my sneakiness. Brian is accompanied by Canada’s negotiating guru, Gordon.

  The meeting starts promisingly. Ham and Amy join us via conference call but the line is shocking, so they hang up and have to rely on my notes to update them later on. I ask about the current situation. Gordon explains that ‘at the moment the HTs have all the control and nothing can be accomplished until we reverse the situation. We need to develop a rapport with them. We have to change the dynamics. We have nothing in common with these people culturally, and the lines of communication are dismal; all these things slow the process down’.

  Ever practical, Mum asks, ‘Okay, how do we continue to build rapport if you keep changing things?’ She’s referring to the negotiators, both the ones dealing with us and the ones in Nairobi.

  ‘We must move people in and out to keep them at an optimum level,’ he replies. ‘We have strategies to replace people; experience has shown that optimum performance falls off over time. The hostage takers view this as “our side and the other side”. Any change of who he is talking to won’t matter to Adan – he just views it as the “other side”. They are going to get tired and worn out, and then we can condition the HTs to respond to us.’ Adan has to interact with them as they are the only option he has.

  Gordon turns to Mum, and I worry that we’re about to get a ‘let us bow our heads together and pray’ moment. He says, ‘We sympathise with the family because we are in your personal space, but the experience we have to draw from is great. We have an international group of negotiators working together on this; there is huge international assistance. This has never failed us. Take strength from this, Heather.’

  Oh, he’s good.

  ‘Okay, if it doesn’t matter who is on the phone, can we change the NOK negotiator?’ I ask.

  Gordon replies that it’s better to keep one or two people consistent. ‘We need to have the same people on this; this will help Nige and Amanda.’ Just enough praise and some guilt to make me stay put. Like I said, this guy’s good.

  Our old nanny, Julie, who is a journalist and doco maker, has suggested that we look at placing an infomercial on Al Jazeera television, just as the Woods brothers did, to clarify that Nigel was in the country to show the plight of the Somali people to the world, that he is a good person and not an agent of the government. Dad broaches the topic and it gets a reaction from both Gordon and Brian, but not the one I was expecting.

  It goes along the lines of ‘Al Jazeera is not your ally. These are not our kind of people. Family appeals right now would be contrary to what we’re doing. Nigel is not a humanitarian worker; he’s a journalist. It could backfire on us. There are lots of people missing in Mogadishu; why would Nigel and Amanda be more important than anyone else? They may not have released all of the [ransom] video, there could be a lot more to it. Al Jazeera is not your friend. We’re westerners; they have no use for us.’ He is certainly forthright.

  I’m trying to digest this information and write it down at the same time, a challenging task. I’m trying to work out if Gordon is implying that Al Jazeera sympathises with the hostage takers and showed the video for that reason. Dad has spoken to the Woods family and didn’t get that impression from them. I thought it was a respected Arabic station. While I’m thinking through all this, the conversation has moved on to the actual video.

  ‘… the video had a message for the family and a message for the government. They have tried to emulate an al-Qaeda video. There are men with guns in the background. Amanda is in a hijab and Nigel is barefoot; they rehearsed all that. Nigel is bored and, as Lorinda said, the message that Amanda has sent to her is that she is okay – she is sitting upright and staring straight ahead.’ This is fantastic information, exactly what we needed from them when the video first came out last month.

  We all clamour to tell Brian and Gordon what we noticed in the video. Gordon stops us all talking over each other. ‘Our cultural expert viewed the video and picked up things like that, and what we did was not respond to the video, and this was a deliberate tactic. If we’d reacted, it would have changed everything. These people have a plan and expect a reaction. We have to give them something they don’t expect.’

  He then has a dig at us calling ourselves ‘Team Brennan’, and reminds us that everything we’re doing is about Nigel and Amanda; it’s not about us and how we’re coping with it. It’s only ever about them.

  ‘We’re the people who are trained to bring them home. We might seem like cold bastards, but we are the experts and you need to trust us. It’s not Team Brennan, you should be calling it Team Nigel; that’s what they’re doing down in Canberra.’

  We all look at each other sheepishly.

  Then we spend some time discussing how unhappy we have been to date about the communications black hole, and how we get no responses to any of our questions. I am especially burred up about some dick down in Canberra recommending to the negs that ‘communication via email cease between family members’. This little comment was accidentally included on one of the evening family talking-points sheets. The
sheets are essentially a breakdown of the points the negs plan to discuss with us, updates and so forth. Someone in Canberra apparently objected to us emailing Kel and Matt and Ham and Amy the discussion points and telling them about the latest developments.

  Apparently the negs were meant to have amended ‘cease’ to something more family-friendly, but overlooked it. No matter what the AFP said or how it said it, communication between family members would keep occurring. We were all in this together. The thing really getting up my nose was that both Brian and Gordon were treating the discussion points as some sort of state bloody secret.

  ‘There may be things on the papers that are strategic and could cause problems,’ says Gordon.

  ‘That’s complete bullshit,’ I say. ‘Let me get my diary.’ I glue all the daily reports in there. I want to prove to Gordon they didn’t contain any classified information. This man is held in very high esteem but it’s taking all my will power not to swear at him. I mean really swear – ‘bullshit’ doesn’t count.

  Brian takes the thread. ‘The purpose of these notes is strategic development. Some things we want to shield from you. These notes are considerations not final sign-offs … this relationship will mature but we need to ask for your trust.’

  I glare at Brian. This is the biggest steaming pile of horse shit I have ever heard. It’s an arse-covering exercise.

  As the increasingly heated discussion goes on, I’m flicking through my diary.

  ‘Ah, here’s one. Twenty-nine September: “No contact with Adan in Nairobi. Continuing to wait till he calls; nothing new to report.” ’

  Gordon continues, ‘Your emails are on a public server; there’s no confidentiality.’