Bruny

by Heather Rose

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s a contract but nobody seems to realise that when the Chinese do a deal, whatever happens in writing won’t happen in reality. Very rare that things are as they appear. Unlike here, there is no central legal system in China. Agreements are made to get the job done but they’re always fluid. Once the thing is signed it’s “Okay, now what we’re really going to do is …”’

  ‘You’ve talked to the PM about this?’

  ‘I can’t breathe a word. I found out another way. If I wasn’t told, I’m not meant to know. I’ve raised it delicately, the idea of doing business with the Chinese but, as we know, he’s not very smart. This is a Viper masterplan. I’m sure you feel the same about him as I do. I’ve watched him working behind the scenes for years making everything grubbier. Setting people against one another. He’s a dinosaur and they need to make those people extinct in the Liberal party. But it won’t happen soon enough for this. That’s why good people keep resigning from parliament. Especially women, once they work out that, ultimately, no matter how hard they work, they’re just window dressing.’

  ‘How did this even get mooted?’ I asked.

  ‘A few years back, JC hosted a little event called TasInvest,’ Beck said. ‘It was hatched by Viper. It was meant to be a way for Tasmanian businesses to connect with the greatest global market in the world. The Chinese president came. There were tours and talks. A great deal of schmoozing. Remember how the Chinese were in Tasmania in the 1800s for the gold rush? There was this sense of welcoming them back. That was part of the tone of the event. I was here because my minister at the time was Agriculture. The Chinese delegates—and there were hundreds of them—were shown the fish farms, the poppy farms, the dairy farms, the wineries, the tourist destinations, heritage homes, acreages, the vast unoccupied tracts of land throughout Tasmania and the many, many businesses who would happily take on a Chinese investor or two. They were shown the hydro schemes. And they were shown the wilderness, with its seemingly endless rush of pure, pristine water.’

  I sighed. ‘Did Tasmania benefit in any way from this?’

  ‘It got Chinese funding for a longer runway so planes could fly direct from Hobart to China,’ said Becky.

  ‘No new trade at all?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. Some of the best farms are now Chinese owned and operated and the food they produce—vegetables mostly but fish and seafood, too—is flown straight from Tasmania to China every day thanks to the runway extension. All the abalone.’

  ‘Crayfish. Lots of salmon. Milk. Yes, I’ve heard,’ I said.

  ‘And wine,’ she added.

  ‘Absolutely. Sitting ducks,’ I said. ‘But how do they expect to get Tasmanians to accept … how many Chinese?’

  ‘Five million over the first five years. It will be a building boom,’ she said.

  ‘Tasmanians are never going to allow that!’ I said. ‘If this is true, it would be like living in a Chinese state.’

  ‘Tasmanians won’t be here, Ace,’ said Becky. ‘That’s what the bridge is for. Tasmanians are being moved to Bruny Island.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  I felt the world stop then.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Becky. ‘That’s what the bridge is for.’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘Tasmanians are going to leave their homes and move to an island with a current permanent population of six hundred people? How is that going to happen?’

  She shrugged. ‘How would you do it? You’re the conflict resolution specialist. Imagine you’re the Chinese.’

  ‘Build facilities?’ I said. ‘Offer everyone a lot of money?’

  She nodded. ‘First a bridge to take them easily back and forth. And every Tasmanian will be offered three times the valuation of their home. Given the way housing prices have shot up over the last few years, a lot of Tasmanians are going to get rich. Plus anyone below the minimum wage will receive a universal basic income for the rest of their lives. It gets rid of the whole welfare burden, the pension burden. People here will be more comfortable, have more economic certainty, than any other people in Australia. It will be an excellent research model.’

  She paused.

  In the distance, growing clearer as the day brightened, was the huge arc of the Bruny Bridge beyond Tinderbox.

  ‘The accommodation on Bruny will be varied,’ she said. ‘Some low level, some high-rise. Almost thirty per cent of Tasmania’s population is over fifty now, so retirement enclaves will be the norm. With the bridge built, it’s close to Hobart. Around an hour’s drive for those who will still be required, or will choose, to work. Roads, hospitals, schools … it’s all planned out.’

  ‘Will money do it?’ I frowned. ‘I mean, these are Tasmanians. They’re not going to go quietly.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t rely on a few protestors to spark Tasmania to rebel,’ she said. ‘This is going to be way more complicated.’

  ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘the rest of Australia won’t stand by and see a part of Australia excised and handed over to a foreign power?’

  ‘Ace, your altruism is showing. Why do we do nothing substantial about climate change? Why do we do virtually nothing to improve the lives of the poor? Or bother about those refugees on Nauru and Manus? We like our comfortable lives. We don’t want to give anything up. We fear the loss of comfort. This Chinese deal means the rest of Australia is safe for the meantime. Think twenty-six million mainlanders against half a million Tasmanians. Most Australians have never even been here. Those that have think it’s beautiful—nice art, good food. But they’re not going to give up their Saturdays to protest. And with the new protest laws, who’s going to want a five-thousand-dollar sting? I don’t think we’re going to see any great demonstrations in Federation Square or Martin Place. Probably a few on the lawns of Parliament House here, but people get poor fast with five-thousand-dollar fines.

  We’d found this cave when we were seventeen, the one place within half an hour of Hobart where we could hide from all the world. We’d smoked drugs, lit fires and brought boys here. Pretended everything beyond here didn’t exist. Now it was almost forty years later, and we couldn’t hide from the world anymore.

  ‘You knew when you took this job,’ she said, ‘that there wasn’t time to really do anything other than bury the bridge protesters under layers of better public relations than the protesters can manage. I don’t mean to devalue what you’ve done. You’ve done it well. Their voices have been drowned out. And after the bombing, the Chinese look like our saviours. Bruny Island is half the size of Singapore with a tenth of its population. Singapore has almost eight thousand people per square kilometre. Hong Kong has nearly seven thousand. Tasmania has approximately seven people per square kilometre. Seven. If you put half a million Tasmanians on Bruny, you’ve still only got around fourteen hundred people per square kilometre. That’s only a little higher density than Sydney. It looks like luxury to a lot of people in the world.’

  ‘I’m going to need proof,’ I said.

  ‘It was delivered to me. The Tasmania/China Project. Top Secret.’

  ‘Deliberately?’ I asked.

  ‘It looked just like Amazon had sent it. Before Christmas. I’ve been sitting on it all this time.’

  ‘You haven’t noticed anything else. Anyone following you? New people wanting to get close?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have it with me. I haven’t let it out of my sight. It’s in the lining of my suitcase.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. Not liking that at all.

  ‘So I have a question for you,’ she said. ‘Can you do something, Ace? Can you find someone who will break it?’

  ‘I thought you said it would make no difference.’

  ‘We have to let people know. Give them a chance. Before the bridge is finished. Once it’s done and the deal comes into play …’

  ‘Break the rules,’ I said.

  ‘Break the rules,’ Becky repeated. ‘I don’t want to have to perjure myself at some point in
the future. But I’m a Tasmanian. And so are you. If this comes out, I want it to have been for something.’

  ‘Maybe whoever sent it to you was a Tasmanian,’ I said.

  ‘I thought that too,’ she said.

  She looked at her watch. ‘I have to go. And today we’re in a meeting where we have to revert to being two people who, to all intents and purposes, know almost nothing about one another.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So how do you want to do this?’

  ‘I could just give it to you today, at the end of our meeting. It’s in a manila envelope now. Looks just like any large file.’

  ‘No, not direct. Someone might put it together later. You could leave it somewhere for me to collect.’

  ‘I’m having a drink with Edward this afternoon before I jump back on the plane,’ she said.

  Tasmania. Where everyone knows everyone.

  ‘I could ask him to pass it on to you.’

  ‘Can you trust him?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course. I’ve known him almost as long as I’ve known you.’ I’d have preferred a dead drop, but in light of the limited time, maybe this was a good solution. ‘Okay,’ I said.

  We clambered up through the bush out onto the path. Back at the turn-off to the car park, she said, ‘What comes next, after this, is up to you, Ace.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said. ‘And, Beck, you need to end it with JC. I mean really let him go. It’s time.’

  ‘That’s the choice I just made, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I don’t want to wreck his life. If it came out, it would kill me. I’d rather share a state secret than that.’

  I felt as if we’d both aged in that cave. Any vestige of still feeling seventeen had gone.

  ‘He must know, Ace,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how much, but he must know some of it. I tried to get a sense of that last night, but everyone on this is so tight. I can only imagine he’s justified it as his way of saving the Tasmanian people. His legacy. You know how he feels about that. It’s just that now it will be on Bruny.’

  This almost winded me. The idea that JC knew. I wanted to scream. The duplicity. The underhanded, conniving, manipulative, deceitful …

  Suddenly I was remembering all those little moments.

  ‘Ace, you know I’d never build a bridge to nowhere.’

  That meeting with the Chinese in JC’s boardroom.

  The lunch with the two Henrys and the laughter at the reference to Bruny.

  Max saying, ‘It was a COAG meeting.’

  Max saying, ‘Something about this bridge doesn’t add up.’

  Dad saying, ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’

  JC saying, ‘We’re part of the future. We promised we’d be that, and here we are. Changing the world, twin.’

  JC saying, ‘Don’t let all this conspiracy shit get to you.’

  Viper saying, ‘Your brother may need you to stay on after the election.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m going.’ It was barely a whisper.

  I handed her phone back to her. She looked inexpressibly sad as she turned away. We both did.

  There are better men. There are much better men, I wanted to tell her. But I wasn’t so sure. She lived in Canberra.

  Who knows what love is? Who knows what marriages are? Who knows what loyalty is? It was as if we’d both already been convicted.

  I sat in my car and felt ancient.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  That evening, Edward Lowe called me.

  ‘I have something for you from Becky,’ he said.

  ‘I’m in town if you want to meet?’

  ‘I thought we might make lunch this week instead,’ he said. ‘How’s tomorrow?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I can do that.’

  ‘Trio, midday?’ he asked.

  ‘Perfect.’

  I don’t just gather information for the UN. I do it for my other employer. The CIA. Deep in CIA headquarters, people have been keeping a very close eye on the axis moving from democracy to tyranny in the United States. With the current president there’s been interference in our work at the highest levels. Everything has become political and there’s an agenda running that’s disturbed a lot of us. Our response had been to create black cells. Rogue units that are quietly protecting democracy wherever we see it being threatened. The blowing up of the Bruny Bridge and the passing of the foreign labour laws shifted something here in Australia. That’s why I had come. JC had asked, but the team back at Langley had instructed. Call back your brother. Say yes. Tell him you changed your mind. I had been sent home to see just what it was that had the Chinese government so very interested in Tasmania.

  I chose to work for the CIA a long time ago. I was recruited during my time at Columbia and it fitted with the UN. It fulfilled something in me, this other part of my life that no-one knew about. No wonder Ben felt he never knew me. He didn’t, but he could have. If he’d watched carefully. But he wasn’t that sort of man. Maybe that was why I’d married him in the first place. Marriage can be a strange mix of hope and secrecy. Beyond loving Ben, our visibility gave me a veneer of invisibility. The very good-looking Jamaican with his flourishing academic career and his white Australian wife working for the UN. We were what we were. And not at all.

  There had already been talk of sending me to keep an eye on this big bridge being built with Chinese money. I hadn’t wanted to go. I didn’t want to do surveillance on my own family. After the bomb, things changed. Enter the conflict resolution specialist stage right.

  Those files I’d been amassing at Bruny, all of that had been going back to our team at Langley. Until Becky agreed to meet in a cave, everything I’d amassed was speculation. But now I knew. And I was about to know a great deal more.

  Trio had booths and I had already discovered their benefits. It was one of the rare places you could be private in public. I wondered why more Hobart cafes and restaurants hadn’t invested in booths, so people could have the much-needed reprieve from always running into people they knew. Sitting in the farthest, quietest booth was Edward Lowe. I was on alert. This wasn’t going to be a simple thing. I could see that in the blandness of his expression.

  ‘Hello, Astrid,’ he said, standing up to greet me.

  ‘Hello, Edward,’ I said.

  He kissed me on both cheeks and we sat down.

  Edward ordered a white that was good and local. We ordered food. I might have done better with someone like him. A straight version of him. I was probably quite useless at choosing the right men, I decided. It may have been a lifelong weakness.

  ‘So Astrid Coleman,’ he said, ‘I want to know who you really are.’

  ‘In what way?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d like to know what the premier’s sister is doing playing the spy. Trading files with the prime minister’s senior adviser? It’s very intriguing.’ Had I been set up? What did he know?

  I saw a cold, highly trained Edward, just under his skin. Analyst. Observer. Operative. Ah, I thought, not such a nice guy after all. Perfect. But dangerous.

  I feigned innocence at his question. Was he federal police or was he ASIO? If he was ASIO did he have eyes on Becky or eyes on me? Without the file, there was nothing anyone could prove. But he might have been wearing a wire.

  As if he sensed my thought, he said, ‘I’m not here to trap you, Astrid. If anything, I’m here to protect you. I could have had Feds waiting when I handed over the file.’

  So he was ASIO. Fine.

  ‘Becky and I go back a long way, too,’ he said. ‘We lived in a share house together in Battery Point when we were at uni. She was escaping her family and I’d come back to Tasmania after travelling for a few years. She used to talk about you, her friend who had left for New York. I first met JC then, too. She had him on the run.’

  ‘She did,’ I agreed.

  ‘Does she still have him on the run?’ he asked.

  I had a feeling he knew all about JC and Becky. ‘It was a long time ago,’ I said.
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  He leaned back. ‘You’re a good sister, Astrid. Are you a good Tasmanian?’

  ‘Is this a job interview?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. I wondered if he was going to ask me to work for ASIO. That would make things interesting.

  He said, ‘Answer the question, Astrid. If we put aside world peace for the moment and we ask you to choose between your brother or Tasmania, what would you pick?’

  So many of the most terrible conversations have taken place in benign settings. This one was accompanied by gnocchi with blue cheese and a delicious sauvignon blanc. Millions of lives have been decided over poorer fare.

  ‘Did Becky explain the contents of the file she wanted to give you?’ He observed me carefully.

  ‘You opened it?’

  ‘I didn’t have to,’ he said. ‘I am very familiar with that file.’

  ‘You sent it to her?’

  ‘We are the Tasmanian diaspora, Astrid. We go out into the world and sometimes we come home again. Believe me when I say this thing has stayed inside a tiny bubble of people in Canberra. Fewer than ten.’

  ‘Meaning … ?’ I said.

  ‘Meaning, do you understand the counterintelligence laws?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘Twenty-five years without parole for having this information in your hands. Twenty-five years for me handing it to you.’

  ‘And if I said I knew nothing?’ I asked.

  ‘Do you have any idea what an interrogation feels like?’

  I nodded.

  ‘They train you for that?’ he asked.

  I nodded again.

  He said. ‘If I thought you were a threat, or that I couldn’t trust you, I would never hand over this file.’

  I wanted to say, ‘Edward, I don’t just work for the UN. Just like you are clearly not just a consultant. I’m almost certain you work for ASIO. I gather information for the CIA. We are both keeping an eye on the same thing. That the good guys win. We just work for different agencies.’ But I didn’t. While ever I could fly under the radar, I would. This thing didn’t need to get any more complicated. An Australian agent handing top secret government information to a foreign agent—we wouldn’t just get twenty-five years without parole. We’d be gone forever.