Authors: Mark Abernethy
Chapter 2
Three short knocks sounded on the suite’s door and Isla Dunford moved into the room. She’d just left her post at the hotel’s entry as Bailey had followed Kava into the lobby and assumed the surveillance.
‘Looking good,’ she said, pulling up a chair beside Johnson and peering at the laptop screen. ‘Kava’s in the hubcap.’
Among Aussie intel types, a meeting at the hubcap meant the Pan Pac’s lobby lounge, which had a huge round mezzanine ceiling floating above it.
‘We okay?’ said Mac. ‘You followed?’
‘We’re sweet,’ said Dunford, grimacing slightly as she pulled her Colt handgun from the holster at the small of her back and placed it on Johnson’s desk.
Isla Dunford was just starting her career with SIS and the fact she was actively in the field owed a lot to Mac championing her over the policy that women didn’t work on gigs involving firearms. Mac had noticed her at a field-craft module he’d given in Canberra two years earlier. Dunford was a smart, calm, good-looking woman and he’d fought for her not only because she spoke Cantonese, but because female officers broke up the male pattern and made it harder for counter-surveillance.
The chaps in Canberra had a sense of humour, and the first operation Mac had scored after his return from retirement featured Isla Dunford on the surveillance team. Now, seeing the bright-eyed youngster place her gun on the desk, the responsibility of his position came into focus. Mac could no longer just do the gig and go victory-drinking with the troops. When you ran the operation, the most important part was bringing everyone home with their fingernails intact.
All of Mac’s team in the lobby of the hotel were now stripped of radio gear. It wasn’t an ideal situation and it made Mac nervous to be off the air, but the Chinese comms-intercepts were so good that even the Americans and Israelis couldn’t rely on encryptions and scrambles when they knew the MSS was about. The next-door suite they’d wired for sound had no radio transmissions – it was wired directly into their own suite.
‘How’s the set-up in 1502?’ said Mac.
‘Good,’ said Johnson.
‘Check it again,’ said Mac, grabbing the field-glasses and having another look at the SingTel van on Raffles. It hadn’t been moved by the cops and the tradesmen were standing at a junction box, the door flapping open.
The suite’s door shut behind Dunford as Mac focused on one of the SingTel guys: his red overalls looked clean.
A voice crackled out of the speakers on the desk – Dunford speaking in Cantonese from 1502, next door.
‘What’s she saying?’ said Mac.
‘Here I am in the lounge, here I am in the bedroom, that loo needs a clean, and . . .’
‘Well?’
‘She’s saying, “When this is over, Macca shouts the beers.”’
‘Cheeky bugger,’ said Mac, lifting the field-glasses back to his eyes.
Once Lao was in room 1502 with Ray Hu, the meeting proceeded as expected, every word being downloaded onto the laptop’s hard drive. Johnson adjusted the speaker volume and translated as Ray Hu coaxed the Raytheon documents from Dr Lao’s attaché case and then kept the traitor talking about progress on the SEA 4000 upgrades: the key scientists, the names of the managers, the main difficulties and the testing that had taken place.
As the talk got more technical, Mac asked Dunford to grab the glasses and keep an eye on the SingTel van, tell him if there was any change.
Lao opened up about the AESA-defeat project at Raytheon which was going to form a major plank of SEA 4000. Lao explained that he was trying to get assigned to AESA-defeat but security was being run by the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the project was above his clearance.
Mac pricked up his ears at the mention of AESA, a high-tech radar that could take millions of snapshots around the plane it was mounted on, in such short bursts that it was almost impossible for detectors on the ground to pick up the radar emissions – one of the main ways that defence systems detected enemy aircraft.
An AESA-type system was probably the only hope the Chinese had to make their ballistic anti-ship missile – the DF 21 – operate properly. The DF 21 was being developed to fly between one and a half and two and a half thousand kilometres from China’s coast as a deterrent against US Navy carrier strike groups. A ballistic missile was a rocket that flew out of the atmosphere and on its downward trajectory took its warhead at great speeds onto the target below. To be accurate against a moving target such as a ship, it needed an AESA system onboard to steer it as it re-entered the atmosphere at speeds approaching mach 10. An onboard AESA system was about the only way that ballistic missiles could be controlled by terminal guidance – that is, the missile could be made to fly into its target rather than simply being aimed accurately at take-off or tweaked in its mid-course trajectory.
Raytheon was the AESA pioneer for the American military and it stood to reason that the same company would be working on a weapon that defeated AESA. So Mac wasn’t surprised that the Pentagon’s spooks were overseeing who did and did not work on the project.
Ray Hu’s interest had been aroused too. ‘You got your name down to work for Raytheon in the United States on AESA-defeat?’
Mac listened as Dr Lao stumbled. ‘What’s he saying?’
‘He’s saying, “No, you got it wrong – I don’t have to go to the US. I’ve been waiting to tell someone this”,’ said Matt, concentrating. ‘He’s giggling, proud of himself. Says he’s got good stuff.’
‘Yeah?’ said Mac.
‘Yeah, wait,’ said Matt, holding his hand up as the Cantonese bubbled out of the speakers. ‘He’s saying that he found out two days ago that an AESA-defeat prototype system is being brought to Queensland for beta testing – Raytheon and US Department of Defense are going to test it in the Aussie desert. Totally top secret: USEO.’
‘Shit!’ said Mac. When a project was stamped ‘US Eyes Only’, the problem became political.
‘It gets better,’ said Johnson.
‘Tell me,’ said Mac, his dream of doubling Dr Lao all but gone. There was no way they could put a Chinese spy with that sort of information back into circulation in the hope that he wouldn’t blab to his Beijing masters. It wasn’t worth the risk – not to Australian military security and certainly not to the US–Australian alliance.
‘Ray’s asked him how come the Australian outback. Why not Alaska, New Mexico?’
‘And?’ said Mac as the sound of laughter roared out of the speakers.
‘He says, “Nah – America full of Chinese spies.”’
‘Funny guy,’ said Mac, grabbing his handgun from under the sofa cushion.
Matt held up his hand. ‘He’s saying, “Aussie intel is only interested in beer and girls – we can be using the beta telemetry even before the Pentagon sees it.”’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Mac, checking his Heckler & Koch P9s for load and safety. ‘I’ll let ASIO know they have a fan club. Matt, get on the phone, tell Doug at the embassy to fast-track an extradition order for Xiang Lao. Make sure he gets the address and date of birth correct, okay?’
Johnson reached for the phone.
‘Isla, we need an AFP agent here now.’
‘We going to arrest him?’ said Dunford.
‘We need to formally arrest Lao for terrorism financing and conspiracy, and then we’ll trigger the transnational crime MOU with Singers,’ said Mac, trying to stay one step ahead of the game. ‘Don’t use Doug for that one – go straight to Tommy in legal. The Memorandum of Understanding needs to be cited and acknowledged by Singapore Police within twelve hours of the arrest, so shake a leg.’
‘Sure, boss,’ said Isla, standing and holstering her handgun.
‘This is now about containment,’ said Mac, moving towards the door as he shoved the Heckler into his waistband. ‘I don’t want that little weasel telling his secrets to some Chinese consular lawyer. If we do our job, the tests go ahead in the desert without any Chinese nosey-pokes.’
Looking back as he opened the suite’s door, Mac saw Dunford looking down through the window. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Yeah, the SingTel van’s gone. One less thing, huh?’
Mac stepped into the corridor of the fifteenth floor, approached 1502 and slowed, readying to go through that door and shut down Kava.
As he paused, he sensed movement from his right and then someone grabbed him by the hair. Knocked off balance, Mac tried to turn but his head was smashed hard against the hotel wall. Bouncing off the wallpaper, stunned, he was kicked hard in the solar plexus – so hard he doubled over. The hand grabbed his hair again and pushed him upright into the hessian-covered wall and a suppressed handgun was jammed into the back of his mouth.
Unblinking eyes stared out of a black ski-mask as a second man disarmed him and took the door card from his hand. The silencer drove further into the back of Mac’s throat, choking him and pinning him to the wall, making his eyes water. Lifting his knee reflexively, Mac thought about lashing out but his captor cocked the action on the 9mm handgun and pushed harder.
Mac watched in mute horror as the second shooter pushed the door card into 1502 and entered with the elongated handgun held down his thigh. Half a second later there were four popping sounds that Mac recognised as suppressed small-arms fire. Then the shooter was back in the corridor, walking up to Mac as he shoved a handful of casings into his left pocket.
Thinking he was about to be executed, Mac started his prayers as he panted for breath. But the second shooter didn’t level his gun – he raised it quickly and brought it down hard above Mac’s left ear.
Mac’s last thought before he blacked out was:
Red overalls – red SingTel overalls
.
Chapter 3
The Qantas 747’s engines changed tone as the plane banked for the final approach to Brisbane. It was a little after 6.40 am and to Mac’s left the Pacific Ocean wore a pink and purple halo, waiting for the sun to peek over the edge and turn up the heat.
He’d spent the last twelve hours reliving the scene in the hallway of the Pan Pac and berating himself. He’d seen the SingTel van on Raffles Boulevard, he’d noticed something wrong about one of the technicians, and he hadn’t acted. The old Mac would have gone into counter-measures, regardless of how unnecessary it seemed to those around him. But he’d let it slide and the price to pay was Ray Hu slumped in a hotel chair with bullet holes in the forehead and heart. Ray, who’d taught him the intricacies of banking and funds transfers in Asia; Ray, who knew exactly which corporate tax scams were being pulled by which accountants and bankers; flat-footed, desk-jockey Ray, who’d once held a gun to a bunch of thugs who’d cornered Mac in an apartment in Pandang – the chubby banker had stood tough even when he was shitting himself.
Catching his own eye in the reflection of the window, Mac turned away. His return to the Firm had been as a manager in Operations, a step up from his previous career as a field agent embedded in companies that operated across South-East Asia. As a vice-president of sales for Southern Scholastic Books, or as an executive with Gondwanda Consulting, Mac had been under constant stress, knowing that at any moment the Indonesians or Chinese might discover his real identity and whack him. But in that role he hadn’t been responsible for others. Now he was running operations and managing teams, and his first assignment had ended in a double murder.
The ice he held in a plastic bag against his left eye socket was melting and the second round of Nurofens he’d gulped down an hour earlier wasn’t doing much for the vein that throbbed against his cheekbone or the egg that was still growing above his left ear. Mac had never had a headache quite as bad as waking up in a hot tent with a rum hangover, but this was running a close second.
‘Can I take that, Mr Davis?’ asked the hostie, and Mac handed over the ice bag, which he’d wrapped in a business-class face cloth. He wasn’t just embarrassed about the shiner; people with concussion weren’t supposed to fly long distances, and he hadn’t wanted a bright-eyed hostie trying to throw the medical rule book at him. He’d have plenty of that waiting for him at home when Jen lectured him about how a father of two young daughters shouldn’t be playing dice with aneurisms.
Emerging from the customs hall with his black wheelie bag, he spotted a small ‘Davis’ sign above the crowd and headed for the casually dressed man who held it aloft.
‘Mr Davis!’ said the man. ‘Welcome back, sir – the name’s Kendall, the car’s this way.’
Mac let himself into the back seat of the white Holden Statesman standing at the apron.
Waiting in the back seat was Greg Tobin, the Firm’s immaculately groomed director of operations for Asia-Pacific. ‘Macca! Been in the wars, old man?’
‘Something like that, Greg,’ said Mac, shaking Tobin’s strong, soft hand. ‘How are things?’
Greg Tobin was only a year or two older than Mac but he’d succeeded the former director of operations, Tony Davidson, in the year he turned forty – an unprecedented elevation to run what was Australia’s most important espionage territory. Mac remembered Tobin from the University of Queensland, where he was studying law and dabbling in conservative politics. Even then there’d been something of the born-to-rule about the tall, athletic form of Greg Tobin. He was the sort of person who compelled smarter people to listen to him, then do as he said, and he did it with a combination of charm and authority. Even on the greasy pole of Canberra, Tobin had a reputation for never losing his temper.
Making their way across Gateway Bridge as the sun rose, Mac made small talk while his mind scrambled to understand why such a senior person had waited outside Brisbane International for him. It had to be bad – Operation Kava was a disaster and Mac had been running it.
‘So, Greg,’ he said, after they’d discussed why the Brisbane Broncos had missed out on a berth in the rugby league grand final, ‘you giving me a lift to Broadie?’
‘Afraid not, old stick,’ said Tobin, leaning in to indicate most-favoured status. ‘That Colmslie taskforce is reconvening.’
‘Great,’ said Mac, grabbing the handle above his door, wishing he’d slapped on some Old Spice. Taskforce Colmslie was the interagency group that had authorised Operation Kava and Mac dreaded having to face them – it would start as a debrief but inevitably would disintegrate into an exercise in blame-shifting between agencies.
‘When?’ said Mac.
‘Tapes start rolling at eleven, right, Kendall?’
Kendall kept his eyes on the Gateway traffic. ‘Correct.’
The Qantas flight from Singapore had taken off the previous night and Mac hadn’t slept. He’d had no respite since regaining consciousness in the operations suite at the Pan Pac and ordering the escape and evade phase of the operation, where the players scattered. Mac’s team all had their own rat-runs, right down to cars rented in certain identities and hotels ready to book into. Mac’s run had been the 9.25 flight out of Changi as Richard Davis, sales executive at Southern Scholastic Books; he could have taken earlier flights via Cairns or Darwin, but the basic rule in the spy game was that when travelling under an assumed identity, you took the direct flight when you could. You removed as many variables as possible – you rigged the game.
Tobin fixed him with a look of concern. ‘You must be shattered, Macca.’
‘Rolled up wet, put away dry,’ said Mac, as the car veered left off the freeway, swung right and headed west into Fortitude Valley. They drove in silence for eight minutes, before Mac recognised the area – west Valley, up against the Victoria Golf Course.
‘We’ll make it brief, I promise,’ said Tobin with a caring smile.
‘We?’ said Mac, wondering if Tobin had invited himself into the taskforce.
‘Just an informal chinwag, eh, Macca? Before we throw you back to the wolves?’
Kendall steered the car into the driveway of a three-and-a-half-star hotel.
‘You don’t mind if Kendall has the Davis collateral?’
‘No, Greg,’ said Mac, resenting it but staying professional. Handing over his Richard Davis phone, wallet and passport, Mac pulled out his chinos pockets to show they were empty then held open his sports jacket for inspection.
‘Perhaps let Kendall have the jacket?’
‘Ray was a friend of mine, Greg,’ said Mac, struggling out of the dark blue blazer. ‘You think I’m happy about this?’
‘Of course not, old man,’ said Tobin, passing the collateral forwards to Kendall. ‘That’s why I need some horse’s-mouth before you get cornered by ASIO and Defence.’
‘Okay, Greg,’ said Mac, fuming.
‘That’s yours,’ said Tobin, passing over a cardboard-wrapped room card. ‘There’s a change of clothes in your room – but let’s not use the phone just yet, right, Macca?’
‘Sure,’ said Mac, opening the door and getting out.
‘Meeting at eight-fifteen in room 403?’ said Tobin. ‘You might like a quick shower. There’s a good sport.’
Recounting the order of events at the Pan Pac, Mac noticed Tobin’s restlessness a few minutes into the debrief.
‘You didn’t enter 1502?’ said Tobin, reaching for the teapot and pouring.
‘No,’ said Mac. ‘When Lao started gasbagging about Raytheon’s AESA-defeat testing coming to Queensland, I decided to shut him down.’
‘Not –’ started Tobin.
‘No, no,’ said Mac, annoyed that his colleagues had characterised him as violent. ‘I was going to relieve Ray and let Lao know that the meet had been a set-up.’
‘Tell him he’d been caught out,’ said Tobin, ‘and have the AFP arrest him?’
‘Exactly,’ said Mac. ‘It was too risky to double him. This was the first time he’d blabbed about the AESA-defeat testing being carried out in Queensland and I decided to wrap him up with an extradition –’
‘Rather than let him talk to the Chinese?’
‘Yes,’ said Mac. ‘If we could get him on the terrorism charges, we could lock him away for a while. Remember, this Lao guy is an Aussie citizen and the Chinese embassy would have no excuse to go visit him.’
‘So you didn’t see Lao and Hu executed?’ said Tobin.
‘No. I saw the shooter open the door of 1502 and fire four suppressed rounds into the suite. I’m pretty sure it was a nine-mil – the one in my mouth was a SIG.’
‘The shooters?’ said Tobin, sipping the tea.
‘Brown eyes, SingTel overalls, ski masks – about my height and build. Perhaps shorter.’
‘No voice?’
‘None,’ said Mac, putting himself back in that corridor, feeling the suppressor jammed against the back of his throat. ‘They were totally pro.’
‘Hence, this,’ said Tobin, tapping a piece of notepad paper covered in ballpoint scrawls. ‘Federal Police liaison with Singapore Police got the initial crime scene report from the Pan Pac. It’s a double murder; victims are two men, Sino-Asian appearance. One they’re calling Chan and the other Lao. There were four shots – nine-mil soft-noses. No casings.’
‘Figures,’ said Mac. ‘The shooter came out with the casings and put them in his pocket.’
‘The deceased had single shots to the forehead and heart.’
‘It all fits,’ said Mac. You had to be highly trained to walk into a room, make four shots like that and still have the ticker to pick up your casings.
Tobin enmeshed his fingers. ‘The local detectives won’t hush this up.’
‘I think the Firm’s clean, if that’s what you’re asking,’ said Mac.
Tobin’s real job was to be able to tell the deputy DG that there were no comebacks to the Firm, so the deputy DG could assure the DG that Aussie SIS couldn’t be implicated, meaning any annoying interview requests from China or Singapore could be dismissed at the political level as well as the departmental. There was only one rule in spying: don’t get caught. And Mac was confident the E and E had worked.
‘Okay,’ said Tobin to Kendall, and his typing stopped – redundant given that when opening an ASIS debrief template, the MS Word document recorded audio.
‘How should I handle the taskforce?’ said Mac, aware that interagency manoeuvring was a key aspect of the debrief.
‘Tell them everything. I’ll talk with the deputy, recommend we hand this back to Defence. We’ll never hear the end of it if the Firm’s to blame for bungling those tests.’
Mac nodded. The Australian Defence Force relied heavily on being the respected junior partner in a very one-sided military alliance with the Americans. The entire culture of the ADF’s intelligence apparatus was to never give the Yanks an excuse to roll their eyes and mutter about ‘leaky Australians’.
Kendall shut down the laptop as Tobin slipped his hand onto Mac’s forearm and walked him to the door.
‘One thing,’ said Tobin, lowering his voice as they eased into the hallway. ‘I suppose you’ve had time to wonder . . . why those two . . .’
‘And not me?’ said Mac.
‘Well, yes.’
‘Maybe the shooters didn’t know who I was,’ said Mac.
‘Or maybe,’ said Tobin, ‘they did.’