Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent (7 page)

The clientele were expat. It was after eleven pm and most of them were bombed drunk. Lonely, overworked, overpaid whiteys stuck in a part of the world that was never going to accept them. Somehow the zero-taxation and cheap servants just didn’t cut it. He saw himself as lucky - a bloke with a woman. Then he checked that. He had
had
a woman. Now he had some running to do to get her back.

Halfway through his beer, Mac saw a Javanese man emerge from the lavatory corridor. He was early forties, full head of hair and very thickly built through the neck, chest and arms. An orange tropical shirt hung loose, covering what Mac knew to be a chromed Desert Eagle .45. Saba’s bodyguard.

The man cocked his head slightly at Mac and turned away, scanning the room with casual menace.

Mac left his beer at the bar, walked to the corridor. The bodyguard let him go past and followed him down the hallway. They stopped in front of a door at the end. The bodyguard moved in front of Mac, unlocked the door from a key chain, pushed through and waited for Mac to enter.

The room was an offi ce, large and cool. There was a wide oak desk at one end, a bank of screens along the wall and a white leather sofa suite set up around a low coffee table in the middle of the room. The place belonged to a man called Saba. He was ex-BAKIN, Indonesian intelligence from the Suharto days. Now he ran a bar which doubled as a safehouse. All spies had safehouses where they kept spare guns, unoffi cial mobile phones, contraband passports and emergency Amex cards in bogus names. It was no refl ection on the Service, it was just that spies needed to work untriangulated at times.

Mac never paid Saba. He owed him ‘favours’, and so far, the ex-BAKIN man had only wanted the occasional fi le and some telecom logs. But that would change.

The bodyguard patted Mac for weapons. Felt him for wires.

Scraped his fi ngernails over the area just behind the ears and under the hair, looking for the tick-sized fl esh-coloured transmitters that were now being used.

Mac put his arms down. The bodyguard moved to a door on the opposite wall. Opened it, gestured.

John Sawtell walked in, still in grey sweats. He was built like a brick, yet athletic. Mac remembered a detail from the fi le: Sawtell had played for Army as a running back. Mac wasn’t sure how that translated to the rugby codes but it was probably a position requiring high correlations of speed and power. Sawtell was
built
. And he moved smooth.

The bodyguard saw himself out.

The two men looked at one another. Sawtell broke the silence.

‘The fuck was that shit?’

Mac chuckled, took a seat on the sofa. Sawtell sat opposite in an armchair. ‘That was a mutual secondment,’ said Mac. ‘That’s what that shit was.’

‘Can we speak English, McQueen?’

Mac spelled it out: the Australian intelligence apparatus had statutory sanctions on performing paramilitary work. The US

intelligence community had similar laws making it illegal for them to conduct assassinations. It suited both DC and Canberra to ‘mutually second’ agents from one another’s intelligence operations to do certain things for one another that the politicians back home would crucify their own nationals for. Certain things that you may not want the military implicated in. Politicians and intel people called it

‘deniability’.

‘So you get to tap this Garrison dude?’ snarled Sawtell, not convinced. ‘And some Agency dickhead gets to do a job for the Australians? That it?’

Mac shrugged. ‘I don’t have many more answers than you, mate.

I was told to be in Jakarta this evening to hunt down a missing girl.

Now we have Peter Garrison pissing into the tent.’

‘You what?’

‘I assume he’s going to be a nuisance.’

Sawtell was up, moving to a water jug on the coffee table. Mac nodded, Sawtell poured two glasses, handed one to Mac.

‘So excuse my ignorance,’ said the American as he settled into the chair, ‘but who the fuck’s Garrison?’

Mac had a choice: clam up and play it tight, or let the American in on the joke. The smart way was to say nothing. Military guys with snippets of information could go off and actually start thinking for themselves. Not always a good idea. But Mac spilled. After all, that’s why he’d called Sawtell here, away from the full-time listening posts at the embassy. ‘Peter Garrison is a rogue CIA man. Very smart, very dangerous.’

Sawtell paused, looked at Mac, neck muscles fl exing. ‘And you know this, but the Agency doesn’t?’

‘Sure they know,’ shrugged Mac. ‘But he’s been useful, I guess.’

Sawtell looked away. Mac could see he was disgusted with the whole spook thing.

‘Look,’ said Mac, ‘he was stationed for a long time in northern Pakistan and then northern Burma. He’s pulled a lot of real freaky stuff. He’s been on our radar for years. Now he’s in Jakkers and he’s with one of ours.’

‘Freaky? Like what?’

‘Remember the bombing of that Pakistani police compound in ‘03?

CNN ran with it as “The Taliban still strong in northern Pakistan”?’

‘Sure.’

‘It wasn’t a truck bomb, champ - it was US Navy Hornets. An air strike.’

Sawtell cocked an eye at the Australian, like he was challenging that version of events.

‘You’ve called in strikes?’ asked Mac.

Sawtell nodded.

‘There were more codes, grids and passwords than
The
Da Vinci
Code
, right?’

Sawtell nodded. Looked away slightly.

‘We knew who called it in about two hours after the air-to-grounds painted the joint - about an hour after the Agency told their stooges at CNN that it was a Taliban truck bomb.’

Sawtell’s nostrils fl ared. ‘Why?’

‘The Pakistanis were fi nally pulling their fi ngers out and shutting down the heroin-for-arms trade.’

‘Was Garrison part of it?’

‘Sure, and more than just Garrison - remember, the Agency kept him on the leash. They sent him to Burma after the fi reworks.’

Mac watched the soldier’s jaw muscles bulge. Your average special forces guy lived in fear of a friendly-fi re incident since it was one of those things you could never train for, couldn’t control. The idea of some slippery pen-pusher calling in friendly fi re on purpose was the kind of thing that made soldiers talk about calling in their own personal head-shot.

Mac didn’t want Sawtell distracted. He just wanted him to know the calibre of the person they were hunting.

‘So where does the girl fi t in?’ asked the soldier, fi nally breathing out.

‘Don’t know,’ lied Mac. He looked at his civvie watch. ‘Gotta go, mate - we’re on a plane at fi ve.’

Sawtell stood and turned for the door he’d come through, then stopped and fi xed Mac with an X-ray look. ‘That was some shit in Sibuco, huh?’

Mac’s heart sank. He wasn’t close enough to touch wood. He hated talking about missions where someone carked it. ‘Yeah, those are some boys you got there.’

‘They call you the Pizza Man, by the way,’ Sawtell winked. ‘Just thought I’d warn you.’

The street was even quieter now than an hour ago. It was almost midnight and Mac sauntered the three blocks to the Aussie residential compound. He concentrated on relaxing from his feet to his head, breathing hibiscus fumes deep and slow and trying to concentrate on pleasant things.

But he couldn’t clear his mind. Sawtell had asked, ‘Where does the girl fi t in?’

The fi le on Garrison said he’d been seen with Chinese agents. In Jakarta. He was believed to be fronting at least two identities in Chinese intelligence’s preferred banking domicile of the Cook Islands.

Now Garrison had inveigled himself into the Australian China Desk, the Hannah bird was missing and their last known sighting was a place Mac had vowed to never visit again.

The morning fl ight was landing them in Sulawesi - land of a thousand nightmares.

Frank McQueen left nothing but shadow in his wake: rugby league star, North Queensland’s top detective and veteran of the Vietnam War.

When cattle-stealing season came around, all the young detectives put up their hands for Frank’s expeditions into the interior. Mac grew up poring over the newspapers with his sister Virginia, looking for the inevitable photograph of their dad dragging a couple of ringbarked bumpkins into the lock-up.

When Mac won a sports scholarship to Nudgee College in Brisbane, Frank gulped down some big ones. That was until he realised that the pride of Queensland Catholic education preferred rugby over rugby league. Frank regularly captained Country Police in their annual rugby league stoush with the Brisbane Cops and Frank didn’t like the idea of his son going to Nudgee to play a sport he declared was only for

‘wankers or ponies’.

Mac spent his privileged education smarting under the sneers of his father. Even making Queensland Schoolboys in his senior year couldn’t turn it. Everything hinged on Mac going into the Queensland cops and getting an armchair ride through the Ds as Frank’s Son.

The day he phoned his mother and told her he’d taken a job with a textbook company, his mum actually groaned. He didn’t tell her he was going to be a spook. Wasn’t allowed. Didn’t know that the fi b he told her would be a lifelong habit.

Frank got on the line, asked Mac a couple of questions and fi gured it pretty quick. ‘Don’t tell me, this place is in Canberra and Jakarta, right?’ Frank upgraded his insult about rugby players. ‘Intel people,’

said Frank, who was infantry in Vietnam, ‘are wankers
and
ponies.’

Which was what Mac was thinking about as he strode in a crowd across the sticky hot tarmac of Makassar’s Hasanuddin Airport, carrying a black suit bag over his shoulder, a black wheelie bag trailing behind.

In order to get the salesman cover going he wore a short-sleeved beige safari suit, Italian brown woven shoes and a pair of Porsche sunnies. His thin blond hair was gelled straight back and he had a thick gold chain at his neck. The tan was real but it could easily pass for one of those indoor jobs. It was the salesman look he affected for travelling as Richard Davis from Southern Scholastic Books.

If Frank saw his son like this, Mac’s cover would be secure. Frank would ignore him. Stone cold motherless.

Just after ten in the morning and the pilot had warned them that it was already thirty-eight degrees at the airport. To the south, massive cloud formations rose thousands of storeys into the air - black, blue and purple and staring down over the tropical sauna of southern Sulawesi.

There was no wind: the very air strained under the weight of what Mac reckoned was ninety-eight per cent humidity.

Mac glanced back at the Lion Air 737 cooling its wings behind him. Garuda was a nest of spies and informers during Suharto’s era, and no one in the intelligence community had trusted it since. Still, the Lion fl ight was comfortable, unlike what Sawtell and his boys would be going through: Jakarta to Balikpapan by helo and then a C-130

fl ight into Watampone across the peninsula from Makassar. It would look like a military milk run. No fl ags, no Chinese nosey-pokes.

The cabbie who drove him to the Pantai Gapura was understanding about Mac’s requests for a few detours here and there. There was no tail, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be. He got the room he wanted at the Pantai, 521, overlooking the pool bar. There were no balconies looking down on his room and there was only one other door on the fl oor. He checked with reception: no bookings in 522.

He threw his suitcase on the bed and opened it: a few loose clothes and samples. The samples were real: history, geography and mathematics high school textbooks in Bahasa. He took a blue Nokia from the bag and made a call to a number in Canberra which was routed through Singapore and into the government/military secured section of the Telstra cellular system in Australia. He confi rmed arrival and good health with his weekly logs.

Shortly before midday he opened the sliding doors onto the patio and clocked the sprawling resort with bungalows scattered amidst stands of old palms and saltwater pools. Nothing untoward, just screaming Malaysian kids in the pool and nagging parents trying to get them to swim in the shallow end.

Mac rubbed his eyes. He was tired, needed sleep. In two days he’d RV with Sawtell’s team and he’d need a lot of energy in the saddlebags.

Mac re-entered the room, locked the balcony door and swept the main bugging points: phone, TV, coffee table, under the bed, mattress, the lamps.

Nothing.

He found a box of matches and tested the mirrors for two-way vision. They looked okay but naked fl ame was not foolproof.

Running the shower hard he positioned himself behind the main door, where he could also see out to the patio. If the Chinese or Indons wanted to move on him, they’d do it while he was showering. Most business hotels in Indonesia were bugged, some of them for video. If he’d missed a comms point, this should fl ush them out.

He waited fi ve, seven, ten minutes.

Steam wafted into the room.

Nothing.

Ringing down to reception, he complained that the bed was broken. Told the girl he was going out for an hour and wanted it fi xed before he returned.

He hung up before the receptionist could confi rm and let himself into the corridor. Shutting the door he moved to the other end of the landing area, beyond the elevator doors and behind a planter box of indoor palms. He stood still, casual and humming to himself. Just some halfwit Anglo with a game of pocket billiards going on.

Five minutes. Ten minutes.

At fi fteen minutes Mac moved back to the room. If management were in on something, they would have had a spook up the stairs within two minutes to work over his room. The hotel was clean. This shift, at least.

Mac phoned reception again, told the girl not to worry about the bed. He secured the doors, grabbed a cold Bintang from the bar fridge, opened it and put it on the writing table where he watched it sweat. Then he stripped to his briefs, did fi fty push-ups and four sets of fi fteen ab crunches. He shadow boxed up on his toes for six minutes and rewarded himself with the beer.

He pulled the curtains and got into bed. Fatigue raced up on him and his brain swam: he thought of Diane, and what it would take. He thought of the Sydney Uni job and what he’d need to do to keep it on track. The Garvey briefi ng in Jakkers gnawed at him too. Judith Hannah was last seen - or not seen, depending on the quality of the intelligence