The Mandarin Code (8 page)

‘Your government then feels it has to retaliate. Then we have an unpredictable chain reaction that could lead to outright war. In the virtual world no one knows where the red lines are.'

Sloan felt uneasy listening to a new doomsday scenario. Now he understood why the spooks he knew were paranoid, always glancing at the shadows in search of an enemy that may or may not exist.

‘So how do we protect ourselves?' the MP asked.

The general's eyes wandered over his gleaming twenty-first-century war-room.

‘When you think about success on the battlefield, you say your artillery has to be the best. Your armour has to be the best. Your infantry has to be the best. The same logic applies in the cyber-domain.'

Sloan had worked his way towards the one question that was keeping
him
awake at night.

‘So who should Australia fear the most?'

The general caught Sloan's gaze and didn't miss a beat: ‘China.'

‘Why?'

‘You matter to China. You're a reliable source of the resources it needs for it to rise as the next superpower. But it sees you as tied to us, the current superpower, through ANZUS. That presents a problem. No matter what you say in public, in China's mind you can't straddle that divide forever. One day you'll have to make a choice.

‘So China needs to know your deepest thoughts. The relationships at the heart of your leadership, right down to who is literally fucking whom, if you'll pardon my French. That's why they opened up your parliamentary communications systems. When we found out about it we warned you. But we believe that they had access for a year.'

Sloan's heart sank. He was well aware of the damage. ‘Yes, it was like a fucking open-cut mine.'

‘Indeed, and right now there's a warehouse full of Chinese analysts poring over every line of what they took, looking for weaknesses.'

‘I don't doubt it.' Sloan shook his head.

‘And since our President decided to muscle up to China on its currency manipulation we've been recording attacks on our systems every day that are off the charts. You could be in the line of fire, too.'

‘Why? What have we done? If anything our government is doing too much to appease China.'

The general frowned. ‘Yes, we've noticed that. But in the end, you're our ally. You have access to all this.' Hargreaves swept his right arm across the bridge. ‘So that makes you a target.'

Suddenly the general rose from his chair. The audience was over. The spymaster had real work to do, but he had one last message to send. He leaned in close to deliver it.

‘Matthew, if there is one thing that you should tell your government, back in Canberra, it is this: the enemy is already through the gates.'

Canberra

Harry Dunkley rolled out of his double bed, the remnant of a dream already fading. It was nearly 7am and the press gallery veteran rubbed an ache in his hip, a reminder of too much rugby in his reckless youth.

The soft early morning light cast a glow over the sleeping Celia Mathieson. She seemed to shine from within and looked younger than her thirty-two years. Her beauty and their fledgling relationship still astounded him.

They'd met in October when Mathieson, back in Canberra after eight years overseas, was hired by
The Australian
as a ‘data journalist'. Dunkley had rolled his eyes when told of the new position, assuming it was something dreamed up by Gen Y backoffice types.

Mathieson was the only daughter of one of Canberra's most senior mandarins, the fearsome Roger Mathieson – AO and all-round shit. Mathieson snr had bulldozed his way to the top of the public service, serving as deputy secretary in half a dozen agencies. Perhaps it was to escape from her father's long shadow that Celia had taken off overseas soon after graduating with honours in Advanced Computing from the Australian National University. She'd only returned when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

A month after she'd started at the
Oz
, Dunkley had enlisted her help to trawl through the entitlement records of every MP and senator. She'd taken her time completing the task but Dunkley had been astounded by her computer skills. He'd shouted her a joint byline on the subsequent story and asked her out for a drink after she'd given him a tantalising ‘thank you' kiss that lingered a tad too long.

Their relationship had blossomed from spreadsheets to bedsheets, and now, as Dunkley watched his sleeping angel, he felt the guilty lust of a man who couldn't quite believe his luck. He shook his head in wonder. What does she see in me?

He headed to the bathroom, splashing his face to wash the sleep from his eyes before examining last night's damage. He tried to convince himself he was still handsome despite the creased face that looked all its fifty-five years and offered a little too much history. Still, the first flourish of grey added a certain Clooney lustre, he thought.

Not too shabby, mate.

His hands pinched at a belly several kilos heavier than he would have liked. But the back was ramrod straight and his arms retained enough muscle tone to suggest this body was a fine athletic specimen. Once.

He was still entangled in his physical stocktaking when the bathroom's digital radio burst into life. The familiar trumpet of the ABC's NewsRadio heralded a lively discussion with Marius Benson about the morning's headlines. Dunkley turned down the sound so as not to disturb his sleeping beauty.

A cursory run through the Fairfax papers and Murdoch tabloids was the warm-up for a full-scale dissection of
The Australian'
s front page. Not all of it complimentary, either.

‘Thank you Marius,' Dunkley muttered caustically.

He stifled a yawn as he opened the front door to his small apartment. He avoided reading the papers online whenever possible, and was pleased to see real-world print resting with reassuring tactility on the porch.

As he carried the five mastheads inside, he was dismayed by their meagre weight. The rise of the internet and changing reading habits were strip-mining advertising dollars from the old media, by the millions. And as the cash dried up and profits shrank, the farewells for journalist colleagues were becoming routine. Every paper in the country was fighting for its survival, slashing costs as it shed hardcopy readers. Jesus, even his local newsagent, Chris, was toying with scrapping the paper run.

‘It's costing me money,' Chris had told Dunkley recently as he'd settled his monthly account. ‘I only do it 'cause of customers like you. And you're getting fewer every year.'

It had hit Dunkley like a punch. Something that he'd assumed would be a permanent feature of his life was about to vanish. That reassuring thud of paper-on-grass would soon, like the clink of the milk run, become a story that grandparents told to wide-eyed youngsters. He thought about that often. He had always revelled in unwrapping the papers and spreading them out on his kitchen table, as he did now.

A quick scan of the headlines to see if he'd been scooped by one of his colleagues in the blast furnace of the federal parliamentary press gallery, still the most competitive marketplace in journalism.

Patrick Lion from the
Tele
had a small-beer yarn about yet another Coalition MP forced to pay back money for a dodgy travel claim. The MP had retreated with a template excuse. The jaunt across the country to attend a colleague's birthday was a legitimate expense given the important matters of state that were inevitably discussed. But, just to clear the matter up and ‘to ensure the right thing is done by the taxpayer and alleviate any ambiguity', the MP had agreed to repay $5000 clocked up in airfares and expenses.

You grub.

He knew Lion and his other rivals would be frothing over his own story – and, more importantly, so would their editors.

By habit, Dunkley saved the national broadsheet until last.

Despite nearly thirty years in the game, Dunkley still felt the same kid-in-a-toyshop thrill when he broke a yarn that would set the agenda. One that would be the envy of his mates and enemies on the Hill.

A tingle took hold as he gazed at today's headline:
TOOHEY IS TERMINAL
.

Farrrkkkk.

Dunkley shuddered and for once it was not the result of a late-night drinking bout but the sheer thrill of re-reading the lead on a yarn that hit like a prizefighter.

Labor risks electoral annihilation with just one in four voters now backing the embattled Toohey Government, secret internal ALP polling reveals.

The credibility of Prime Minister Martin Toohey has also crashed with voters abandoning a government that has been rocked by crisis.

The polling, details of which have been obtained by
The Australian
, shows voters in battleground seats in western Sydney and Brisbane have lost faith in the government's ability to manage the country.

Labor insiders fear the party is beyond salvation and the public has stopped listening to the Prime Minister.

‘They are waiting with baseball bats and chainsaws,' one senior source said. ‘When the election is held, the streets will run red with our blood. Toohey's a great guy but this can't go on.'

This government is in more strife than Speed Gordon.

But unlike the mythical superhero, there would be no salvation in the final frame. Half the front page of the national broadsheet was devoted to delighting in the latest piece of bad news for the Toohey Government, dissecting the troubles of a once great and proud Labor Party. Pointers promised more thrills inside, including a thundering editorial which would point out that, once again, the judgement of the
Oz
had been vindicated.

A historical analysis revealed that Toohey was the least popular prime minister since Billy McMahon. The paper's caustic ‘Cut and Paste' column amused itself with a series of quotes from the ABC and Fairfax ripped from Toohey's days of early promise, all designed to show the multiple delusions of the ‘Love Media'.

Just to make sure that not a single reader was left in any doubt as to where the newspaper stood,
The Australian'
s chieftains had published a photo of a glowing Opposition leader, Emily Brooks, as she left a function full of cheering Tory types, with the caption ‘Headed for the Lodge'.

Dunkley flinched. He had no trouble going in hard with the facts and Labor had brought most of its woes on itself. But he did worry that the paper looked as if it was barracking for the Opposition when it ran puff pieces on Brooks, as rarely had he met a more objectionable individual. While the country seemed poised to throw the government out, the punters weren't hungering for the alternative. Would Brooks be better able to provide the three key things Dunkley believed Australians craved from their leaders – predictability, certainty and competence?

Dunkley blamed most of the government's grief on the now catatonic Foreign Minister, Catriona Bailey. The deposed prime minister had laid such rocky foundations in the first two years of her chaotic reign that she had been on track to be the first PM since Scullin in '32 to be tossed out after a single term.

Bailey had pissed record ratings up against the wall. She had started dozens of grand projects and never finished a single one. Her obnoxious and high-handed style coupled with a deluge of demented demands had alienated the bureaucracy inside six months.

She'd lost Cabinet in the first year. But the real problem was the scorn she'd heaped on Caucus, totally misunderstanding that in a parliamentary democracy a prime minister is selected by her party, not the people.

Caucus despised her.

So they pulled the trigger in a minute-to-midnight coup just months out from a general election. But the unexpected and largely unexplained shift to Martin Toohey shocked and confused the public. The election had seen the major parties' share of the vote split down the middle, leaving neither with the numbers to form government.

Toohey had cobbled together a minority government. But the compromises, and the messy aftermath of the Bailey era, had crippled him.

Bailey refused to go quietly, undermining him at every opportunity.

At another time, under different circumstances, Dunkley believed Toohey might have made a decent PM. But that was a fantasy. History had punched Toohey's card and before the end of the year his brief, unhappy term in office would be over.

The sun pouring through a small eastward-facing window lit up a dust-covered Walkley Award, among a pile of other ill-treated honours on a cluttered shelf. The chaos of the Bailey–Toohey years had been the most successful of Dunkley's long career covering politics. Labor had been good for journalism and he'd led the pack.

So what.

No award could mask the pain that followed the death of his only real friend, Kimberley Gordon. It was only after she was gone that he realised how alone he really was.

He'd met Kimberley at university when she was a he: Ben Gordon, a hard-running rugby forward. The two were both instinctively loners, destined to find one great friendship in each other. They clicked instantly and shared every high and low for over two decades. They'd grown even closer through the years of Ben's torment over his sexual identity. He'd finally decided to make his way as a woman. Dunkley wasn't good at life advice but he was the one thing his friend had needed: someone to talk to.