by Peter Cotton
‘I do love you,’ I said, my voice still croaky. ‘And we can make it work. I know we can. It’ll just take time. And once this is over, I’m going to need a big slab of time to get myself right. And,’ I swallowed, ‘I can’t do that without you.’
She stood and leant over me again, and our lips brushed. Then we kissed and held the contact. I was infused with Jean’s warmth and felt a soaring lightness. If I could’ve melted into her at that moment, I would’ve stayed that way forever.
She slowly withdrew and stood up. Her cheeks were flushed, and strands of hair covered one of her eyes. It was more than a simple kiss; we’d sealed a pact and we both knew it. I felt so energised, I had a sudden impulse to get out of the bed. I was injured, not sick. I needed to stretch my legs and feel alive, even if that enlivened feeling was the pain in my chest. I eased myself up into a semi-seated position and pushed the bed covers off.
‘What are you doing?’ said Jean.
‘Hand me that robe, will you?’ I said, pointing at a white terry-towelling robe hanging from a hook on the door.
‘Are you sure?’ she said.
‘The robe. Please.’
Sitting up, I could finally see out the window. It looked onto a car park and beyond it, to successive lines of high fencing topped with razor wire. Judging by the light, it was the middle of the afternoon. Jean placed the robe next to me on the bed and held my hand as I lowered my feet to the floor.
I stayed propped against the bed for a few moments, absorbing the pain in my chest. Then, using the crook of Jean’s arm to steady myself, I put weight on my feet. She helped me into the robe, and I walked slowly to the window with her close behind me. I put both hands on the windowsill, she stepped back a bit, and I looked across the top of the cars to the lines of razor wire. I turned, and Jean moved in again, her hands up in readiness to support me.
‘No doubt the media’s going nuts about the attack on this place,’ I said, leaning back against the sill. ‘Full of beat-ups and bullshit. Am I right?’
‘Not really,’ said Jean, stepping back again. ‘It’s so shocking, no one needs to exaggerate. And the interest is huge, so we’re throwing everything at it.’
‘What’s the PM saying?’
‘Nothing, yet, but the politics play to his strong suits. Law and order. Xenophobia. National security. So far, there’s been a lot of chest thumping by his minions, but nothing from Feeney himself. Essentially because he doesn’t know who to blame yet.’
Her questioning look invited me to speculate, even spill my guts if I had anything to spill. I gave her a hard look and shook my head. She was on a mercy mission, but she was still a journo.
‘Didn’t we agree we wouldn’t blur the lines between my work and your need to know? Remember? Well, the rule still applies.’
‘Sorry,’ she said, and she did look it. ‘The rule definitely applies. And I wasn’t trying to cadge a story. I’m just trying to get a better sense of what you’ve been through. I can’t use anything you say, anyway. I’ve signed my life away, remember? So, your secrets are safe.’
She smiled, which forced a few tears from her moist eyes.
‘That’s alright,’ I said, softening my voice. ‘So, how’s the Opposition playing it?’
‘How come you’re allowed to ask about my work, but I’m banned from doing the same with you? I’m okay with it, mind you. Just saying.’
She pulled her cheeky face and laughed, and I had to laugh with her.
‘Anyway, the Opposition?’ she said. ‘They don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of the argument, so they’ll support whatever the government does, as long as it doesn’t dither.’
‘That’d be right,’ I said.
I lifted my arm, indicating she should stand aside, and I walked back to the bed and turned to face her again. I did a few more laps between the bed and the window, and found that I could walk without too much pain if I bent my knees and didn’t jolt my body in any way. I finally eased back onto the bed, happy to have passed the test I’d set myself.
‘So, what happens with us now?’ I said, pulling the cotton blanket over myself. ‘We’re doing more than just getting back as we were, aren’t we?’
‘Yes. I guess that’s right,’ said Jean. ‘It could be marriage. I wasn’t looking for it, but we can throw it into the mix. Why not? If you want to. So, KL for a couple of days. I do that, then I’m yours.’
Before I could object to the trip, there was a rat-a-tat-tat on the door. Jean and I composed ourselves, and I asked the visitor to come in. Trainor and Stacey entered the room, accompanied by a well-built bloke in a naval uniform dripping with gold braid.
I nodded at Stacey and Trainor, and Trainor introduced her colleague, Lieutenant David Hollis. They were the debriefing team, she said. McHenry had agreed to the line-up.
Jean smoothed my hair. She leant in, we kissed self-consciously, and she left without another word.
Stacey, Trainor, and Hollis set their chairs on one side of my bed, and Stacey put a phone on my bedside table.
‘You’re recording us with that?’ I said.
‘One of the officers on the other end of the line will record what we say,’ said Stacey. ‘Your recent experience has raised a lot of interest.’
Trainor kicked things off, asking me to detail my contact with Jade’s boyfriend at the Jervis Bay store. She moved from there to my experience on the trawler, my contact with the men in black, and conversations in the water with Bynder and Jade. Her eyes narrowed as I recounted Bynder’s claim that the men in black had murdered Kylie Stevens and John Sheridan. When I’d finished, she made me go over most of it again. Then we went through it all a third time. Unsurprisingly, her most detailed questioning explored my take on the head goon and my conversation in the water with Bynder. It took a couple of hours, then Trainor suggested we break for some refreshments.
Lieutenant Hollis went to the nurses’ station to organise them, and I asked Trainor if they’d turned up anything on either Bynder or on the trawler the men in black had commandeered.
‘Nothing on the trawler yet,’ she said. ‘If they scuttled it, we might never find it. As for Bynder, we’ve got teams combing the bay. Along the shore and in the water. But with his head bleeding, the sharks would’ve been on him in no time. Like seagulls on the proverbial chip. The thing about Bynder is, his time was running out from the moment he stepped into this business, and he knew it.’
Trainor’s phone vibrated on her belt. She held up her hand to ask for silence and took the call. It lasted less than a minute. From her end, the conversation started with a ‘Yes, sir’, followed twenty seconds later by another ‘Yes, sir’. She finished the call with a ‘Yes, sir’, buttoned off, and looked at me. Gone, suddenly, was her usual business-like expression. Her face now projected a calm benevolence, bordering on compassion. The call had changed something.
‘My superiors think you’ve proved yourself, Detective Glass,’ she said, and she turned and nodded at Stacey, as if affirming something they’d already discussed. ‘And they’d like to bring you and the AFP in on things. Use you more intensively. Even wrap our investigations together. But first, understand that everything you’ll see and hear is core to national security. You’ll have to sign your life away, swearing not to divulge any of it to anyone. And if you breathe a word — to superiors, colleagues, or friends — you’ll rot in gaol for the rest of your days, and those you tell will be at risk of the same.’
Having Trainor remind me of my legal responsibilities didn’t bother me — it was almost clichéd for a spook to lace an offer with a threat. And while the invitation to finally blend our investigations came as a surprise, the confirmation that the case impinged on national security did not. Military intelligence had blocked us at every turn — what else would it be?
So, why were they bringing us in now? The reasons seemed obvious. Whether they li
ked it or not, we were already working the case. We’d also proved ourselves capable, as Trainor had said, and the extreme nature of the threat they were dealing with obviously required all hands on deck.
One other thing was also now clear: we weren’t looking for a simple murderer — Kylie Stevens had been collateral damage in a conspiracy to attack the Australian state, and the perps’ agenda went well beyond her murder and a one-off assault on Creswell.
As for Trainor’s invitation to wrap our investigations into one, it wasn’t up to me to agree to it, even though it was what we’d wanted all along. It was a matter for the top floor in Canberra. But if Trainor was discussing it with me, I assumed my bosses had already agreed. I’d have to speak to McHenry to get confirmation on that score.
I flipped the cotton blanket off and turned my back on the debriefing team as I dangled my legs over the opposite side of the bed. I took a deep breath, which sparked such pain in my chest that I had to stop mid-intake to steady myself.
‘I’ll call the nurse,’ said Trainor, getting to her feet, her notebook pressed to her lap.
‘No,’ I said, breathing rapidly through my mouth. ‘I’m alright. I’m alright.’
‘Shouldn’t you rest till the doctors clear you?’
‘No time,’ I said, lowering my feet to the floor. ‘Can I use your phone?’
She took her phone off her belt and handed it to me, and I dialled McHenry as I shuffled towards the door. I was out in the corridor by the time he answered. Knowing he wouldn’t recognise the number, I identified myself.
‘G’day, boss,’ I said, forcing a smile into my voice. ‘You still on the base?’
‘It’s you,’ he said, sounding suitably surprised. ‘Yes, I am. For a few more hours. What’s up? What’re you doing?’
‘Are you familiar with the section of the Crimes Act covering national security?’ I said. ‘And have you just signed something covering that bit of the Act?’
‘I’m not confirming or denying anything. That’d put me in contravention of the Act. Get yourself sworn in, Glass, then we’ll talk.’
‘The oath — the one I assume you’ve already signed — it trumps our oath to the AFP. If I sign it, I’ll be reporting to someone else until this is over.’
‘Sign it, and we’ll talk,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a phone on its way over to you.’
He hung up, and I shuffled gingerly back into the room. Hollis had returned with a trolley crowded with plates of sandwiches and fruit. He, Stacey, and Trainor all had a sandwich in hand. I picked up some pieces of apple and put one in my mouth. And Trainor held out a clipboard with a document and a pen attached to it.
‘Read and sign,’ she said, handing the clipboard to me. ‘We meet in thirty minutes.’
I scanned the document, signed it, and gave it back to her.
‘Your clothes are wrecked,’ she said, ‘so we’ll lend you something to wear. And when you’re ready, a nurse will take you to Peterson’s office. But, Glass, I have to ask, are you sure you’re up for this?’
‘Why does everyone keep asking me that?’ I said. ‘I’ll see you there. I’ve got something to do first.’
Jade’s face was hidden behind the welter of tubes and wires that kept her alive. Drip lines extended from both her arms up to fluid-filled bags that hung from stands attached to her bedhead. An array of machines beeped and flickered on the wall behind her.
It was hard to reconcile the damaged figure in front of me with the energetic and determined young woman who’d saved my bacon in the desert and fought so bravely in the water. Her courage at the end had reinforced my resolve to fight. It was only from this distance that I could appreciate how strong she’d been and the impact it’d had on me.
And while there was no winding back the clock, if Bynder had left her alone when she’d come back from Alice, she wouldn’t have ended up like this, and Daisy wouldn’t have landed in hospital, either. He didn’t intend for them to come to grief of course, but he bore a lot of the responsibility for what had happened.
We sat around a glass-topped coffee table in a small conference room just down the corridor from Peterson’s office. Trainor and Stacey had carried in one of Peterson’s comfortable leather chairs for me. McHenry and Peterson occupied two swivelling office chairs, while Trainor, Hollis, and Stacey sat in straight-backed wooden chairs commandeered from the officers’ mess. A vacant office chair completed the circle.
McHenry and I had already signed documents committing ourselves to secrecy in all things, and we’d been issued with security passes to the base.
Peterson called the meeting to order and said a historian would soon be joining us to ‘clarify some particulars of the case’. What? We were going to hear from a historian? Not a profiler or a criminalist? What sort of priority was that? I turned to McHenry. The disbelieving look on his face mirrored my own.
‘But before we hear from our guest,’ said Peterson, opening a thin file marked ‘Top Secret’, ‘information from pathology confirms our suspicions. Seven of those who attacked this place carried a unique national identifier: mild stains on their teeth, consistent with low-level betel nut consumption. The stains were more black than red, indicating a species of nut indigenous to Java.
‘And the contents of the stomachs we recovered indicated recent ingestion of rations produced in China for the Indonesian military. As for the physiognomy of the attackers, we sent 3D images of ten reconstructed faces to a senior anthropologist at the ANU. He described them all as “strikingly Javanese” — quote, unquote. In light of this evidence, it seems fair to deduce that Creswell was attacked by a force originating in Java — so, either Indonesian military or some offshoot.’
The room was silent as we digested this news. Would Indonesia really attack Australia? And, if they had, why would they target a well-defended naval base in the southeast corner of the continent using only a handful of men? Especially when there were a dozen or more Australian military bases much closer to Indonesian soil. It didn’t add up.
‘I know the Indonesians have plenty of reasons for wanting to bloody our nose,’ said Trainor, twirling her pen between her fingers, ‘but if you take the Jayapura business out of the equation, all the points of friction between us have been around for so long, they hardly provide new motivation for them to suddenly attack us, if that’s what they did.’
‘If motive was all the Indonesians needed,’ said Stacey, ‘it would’ve been on between us long ago. No, it’s got nothing to do with a specific motive and everything to do with China. Because, make no mistake, this is definitely traceable to some of the true heavyweights in Jakarta, which means it goes all the way to Beijing. The biggest Islamic country in the world doing the bidding of the richest and biggest country in the world. And they made sure we’d make the connection by leaving obvious identifiers on the poor bastards who did their dirty work here.
‘Everyone knows why they targeted Creswell. Other than our friends here from the AFP. So why don’t we enlighten them? They’ve signed their lives away, so they’re not going to talk, and you’ve agreed to blend your investigations. Let’s let them in on our secret.’
19
‘I noted some raised eyebrows around the room when I suggested a historian might best explain where we’re at and how we got here,’ said Peterson, turning to Stacey. ‘Is it time we put the doubters’ minds at rest?’
Stacey nodded, and Peterson asked Trainor to fetch their ‘guest’. I’d never used a historian on a job and I didn’t know why you would. Historians studied trends and events, not the micro-detail involved in a case like this. And enduring some lofty discourse felt like a waste of time, especially when these spooks hadn’t yet shared all they knew.
Trainor came back into the room.
‘He’s coming now, sir,’ she said, and she quickly resumed her seat.
Peterson stood, and what followed was the first in a
string of major surprises.
The person who entered the room seconds later was no stranger to anyone seated there. We’d all grown up watching Professor Aldridge Murphy present series after series of The Time Shapers on ABS TV. It’d been one of Australia’s favourite family programs for decades and Murphy was undeniably Australia’s best-known historian.
‘Aldi,’ said Peterson, extending his hand. ‘Good of you to join us. You’ve got everything you need, I hope?’
‘The arrangements have worked splendidly,’ said Murphy, removing his wire-rimmed glasses and putting them in the breast pocket of his blazer. ‘But the crew’s ready, and time is tight, so I’m limited to ten minutes here, I’m afraid. Any more, and the director will have kittens. But I’m happy to help, of course — as always.’
After quick introductions, Murphy took the vacant seat, poured himself a glass of water, and slowly drank half of it. He had a suspiciously full head of grey hair for a man well into his seventies, and looked fit and hyper-alert. What was he doing here? Couldn’t they find a low-profile boffin to spout whatever he was about to spout?
‘Well, gentlemen and lady,’ said Murphy, studying the remaining water. ‘Shall I launch into the topic, or are there burning questions?’
‘No,’ said Peterson, looking around the circle. ‘Launch away. We’ll have you pause if need be.’
‘Very good,’ said Murphy, draining his glass. ‘So. We begin with the Manhattan project — the effort during World War Two that produced the world’s first nuclear weapons. Australia’s Sir Mark Oliphant was hugely important to Manhattan’s success. He got the Yanks interested and he kept them interested. The Poms were in on the ground floor as well, and understandably, they developed a strong sense of ownership over the project.
‘But at war’s end, the Yanks also ended all collaboration on weapons research, thus forcing the Poms into a nuclear alliance of sorts with Australia. We allowed them to test their bombs here. On the Montebellos. And at Maralinga. And we assumed they’d reward us by sharing the resulting weapons technology.