Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent (26 page)

Totally froze.

Held his breath.

Hangover throbbed.

Walking south from T1-B, straight towards him, past the Air Batavia and Kartika Air checkin suites, was a person he recognised.

Shapely, tall, very good-looking. Female. Vietnamese-Australian.

Mac was hungover enough to actually say ‘Fuck’ as he turned as smoothly as he could.

A disaffected teenager looked up, a bit spooked that an oldie was more disaffected than her. He took off back to the Lion Air suite and around the corner. Back into the set-down area. He did it smooth but he was burning inside. The ASIS bird was there, which meant Matt was there.

He stood on the set-down apron, saw the sun coming up, felt the heat and humidity starting to move into the air. Airport police were walking the lines of cars and cabs, telling drivers to move on: beagles for drug mules, German shepherds for those with a reading disability.

Mac stared at Rami’s cab, coming to grips with something he’d just seen in the terminal. Something other than the ASIS bird. As he’d walked to the doors, he’d looked over to his right, where an Aussie surf clothes emporium beckoned shoppers with massive posters of young Anglos enjoying their unfettered lives in southern California and Surfers Paradise.

Dominating the main window was a huge poster of Kelly Slater, the famous Californian surfer. The surf company had named their latest range after him. They called it ‘SL8TR’.

Mac’s thought process had gone like this: that’s a clever marketing ploy in South-East Asia because of the acronyms and contractions the locals use with one another’s names. They contracted long multi-word names into one short one, such as Hispran, the Indon-Islamic leader from the 1970s whose full name was Haji Ismail Pranoto. Or they used acronyms, such as with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, known as SBY.

Once they had their contractions or acronyms, they fi led them down so they became a word in their own right. If you were an outsider, you could pick up the word but never know what it really meant.

Mac stared over Rami’s cab, out over the sprawling megalopolis of Jakkers, where the brown haze was starting to rise. Acid rose in his throat. When Minky had told him the name of the person who had snatched his daughter, he had said ‘Eighty’, but Minky didn’t mean eighty, like the number. He was using an acronym: AT, the teenage nickname for an aspiring actor from the southern Philippines, whose name had been Aldam Tilao - before he’d changed it to Abu Sabaya.

Abu Sabaya: pirate, bandit, terrorist and the most dangerous man in South-East Asia. Supposed to be dead.

Peter Garrison and Abu Sabaya. Two psychos. Two very, very smart psychos. Now acting together? In league with someone in the CIA?

Being helped by someone in ASIS? Or both?

It scared Mac. He had to get to Makassar, start putting this thing together.

He looked to his right, saw POLRI approaching, a shepherd straining on its leash.

Rami was in front of him. Right there in front of his face. Mac came to. Shook it off.

‘You okay?’ asked Rami.

Mac nodded, knowing there’d be little colour in his face, that his pupils were probably dilated. He turned to the POLRI guy, smiled, tapped his G-Shock. ‘My fault, offi cer - moving on now.’

Rami turned, saw the POLRI guy and the shepherd and ran to his cab. Mac followed, leaned into the back seat, picked up the black pack.

‘Here you go, champ,’ said Mac, handing over the last hundred-dollar greenback. Rami smiled, took the money, turned to his right, wound down the window to talk with the POLRI guy. Mac noticed Rami averting his eyes, not actually looking at the cop. A car parked outside a public building was no big deal in Australia. In Indonesia it meant plenty, and Rami obviously didn’t want to be mistaken for someone with an ammonium nitrate experiment going on in the back seat.

Rami put the cab into drive, and Mac said, ‘Mate, I just realised I need a blazer for my meeting in Makassar. You take Singapore dollars?’

He nodded at the blazer hanging on the rear passenger’s handle.

‘Um, yeah. How much?’

Mac showed a wad. Said, ‘There’s fi ve hundred there. For the college fund.’

Rami smiled. ‘Sure.’

Walking into T1 in his too-small dark blazer, Mac heard an announcement that included the words ‘Ujung Pandang, Makassar’.

He guessed the fl ight would be boarding in fi ve minutes, closed in twenty.

He found the biggest group of travellers and mingled through them, up into T1-B and T1-C. His stomach churned with fear but it helped him focus. He hopped from group to group, fi nding camoufl age, then he saw what he was looking for: Matt, walking away towards the end of the T1 hall. Mac watched him stop, talk to the breasts of a pretty Kartika stewardess.

Boob-talker.

He looked back, got on his tippy toes, saw the ASIS bird back at T1-A. Mac realised what Matt had done: he was simply covering the two departure gates that led into the departure lounges. He was waiting for Mac - knew he was heading for Makassar, knew it wouldn’t be on the major airlines.

Someone knew.

Mac would have to go through them, and if they’d been doing their job they would have looked through the surveillance tapes from Changi and realised what Mac now looked like.

Mac couldn’t get through.

And he couldn’t not go to Makassar.

He had about two minutes to make a decision. He hadn’t even checked in.

He saw a local bloke in a sports jacket and cream chinos. Black shoes, strong build, wide in the stomach and hips. Five-ten, about Mac’s age. Radio on his belt. A cop.

Mac drilled further into the large group, pushed his hand into his pack and came out with the Heckler and the hip rig. He wouldn’t have time to set the whole thing up, thread it through all the belt loops, so he stripped the belt component out of the holster and put the holster and Heckler under his belt, just in front of his right hip bone. He took the specs off, trousered them. Then he edged up to the cop, keeping his back to the ASIS bird. Pulling out the Customs ID in his right hand, he folded it back slightly to obscure the picture page.

Then he leaned into the cop, kept his voice down. ‘Federal Agent Collier, AFP.’

He showed the bent-back ID, fl ashing the photo and badging, but looking around - furtive, serious - as he put the ID into his inside blazer pocket. The cop looked Mac up and down, looked into him.

Mac faked it out, leaned into the bloke’s ear. ‘This is embarrassing, but my radio’s rooted. One of those useless American jobs.’

The cop warmed to that. All cops have problems with radios. All cops think it’s the fault of some offi ce guy who’s trying to save money.

Mac did a cop-like hands on hips, let the bloke see the Heckler, put his hand out. ‘Name’s Brandon - with the JOC.’

‘Samo.’

They shook and Mac watched the wheels whirr, watched Samo realise that he was talking with someone from the Jakarta Operations Centre. Mac had Samo’s attention: this wasn’t about catching mules or credit card fraudsters. JOC oversaw the counter-terrorism joint effort between Indonesia and Australia.

‘Some pen-pusher’s still lying in bed, getting his beauty sleep, huh?’ snarled Mac. ‘And here’s us out here at sparrow’s, and they give us radios that don’t work!’

Samo shook his head, looked away disgusted. Mac wondered how long a graveyard roster lasted for Jakarta cops. A month? Two months?

Working through the early hours hurt no matter what country you lived in.

‘They got a million people a week going through this airport, and I have a team of ten!
Ten!
I don’t believe. I don’t believe!’

Enlisted.

Samo was just getting going. ‘You say that to senior person, but they not know. Why they care?’

He did the big Javanese shrug, a gesture that made the Gallic shrug look like a mere tic.

‘My people are all over the shop,’ said Mac. ‘Can I get some backup on my detail?’

‘Sure,’ said Samo.

Matt and the ASIS bird walked towards one another from opposite ends of T1. Matt was wearing a pair of dark chinos and a pale blue polo shirt. No gun - ASIS offi cers weren’t allowed them unless they were S-2. The bird was in her Levis and an Aussie surfer T-shirt.

Mac was waiting for them. As they got within twenty metres of one another, Mac broke out of the group he was camoufl aged in and walked straight up to Matt. Into his face. Pretended to be surprised and scared. He turned, ran.

Matt hadn’t been sent out to physically restrain Mac. He’d been sent to do words in shell-likes and escort him to a Sydney-bound fl ight. But he reacted like anyone would. He gave chase. Mac pretended to run for three strides and saw the ASIS bird start to react towards him. Mac suddenly stopped and turned. Matt was caught unawares, couldn’t stop his momentum. Mac grabbed him by the front of the polo shirt and the forearm, pulled the young bloke down on him.

They went to the white lino. Matt struggled, but he was on top of Mac and couldn’t get off.

Mac smiled in the youngster’s face. Said, ‘Steady there, fella. Steady!’

To Samo it would look like Matt was attacking.

‘Fuck you, McQueen. Fuck you!’ said Matt as he grimaced with the effort of the struggle.

Mac made sure he couldn’t move. The ASIS bird made it to the two men and didn’t know what to do, so Mac grabbed her ankle with his free hand. Made it look like she was stomping him as she struggled for balance.

‘Help!’ yelled Mac, and Samo’s team moved in.

The fi rst one to hit was a female called Suzi. She had a ten-inch snout and a set of teeth like a wolf. She had something personal against Matt’s rib cage, thought Mac. The boob-talking thing must have done the rounds.

Mac sat at the front of the 737, which he didn’t like. But he did his breathing exercises and attempted to relax, analyse everything, see if there was something about his life he hadn’t completely screwed up in the past fi ve days. The Soekarno-Hatta madness had worked out but in the excitement he didn’t have enough rupiah to buy the ticket so he’d paid with the DBS Visa card.

The Service and the CIA and anyone else who had been taking an interest in Mac over the last few days would now have a known alias and an electronic funds trail. Which meant he was probably travelling into a welcoming committee in Makassar without a weapon - he’d dumped the Heckler rig in a concourse bin at Soekarno-Hatta after the kerfuffl e made the security bulls move in.

Sometime during the next twenty-four hours he’d be going back to the Pantai. An option with its own problems.

Mac munched on fresh fruit, drank bad coffee. Thought about where Sabaya might fi t.

Mac had started with the Service at the end of the Cold War, and in those days the emphasis had been on trade, fi nance, technology and political infl uence. It was clever, intricate espionage, and it was what Mac was really trained for: infi ltration, surveillance, covert ops, snatches, provocations, bribes and blackmail. Mac’s mentors were Cold Warriors

- people like Rod Scott - and their craft was the subtle stuff. Finding key infl uencers in South-East Asia and turning them, fi nding the bad guys and making them doubles, manipulating the media as much as possible

- pretty simple when you could ‘leak’ the inside story to journalists at the Jakarta Marriott, see it turn up in print the next day.

The Service would fi nd where the illegal technology transfers were taking place, and why a rival nation might want a certain microprocessor or titanium self-sealing O-ring. In those days, discovering why the Chinese or Koreans were trying to infl uence a certain Indonesian political or bureaucratic fi gure was almost as informative as if you had one of your people inside their organisation.

The main mission was to secure South-East Asia against Chinese political, military and economic hegemony.

That was during the 1990s. The Chinese economy was in double-digit growth and their MSS people were stealing as much mid-level technology as they could from the US, Germany, Japan, the UK and France. The Chinese became brazen but they were stealing ‘secrets’ that were well behind the cutting edge - sometimes three or four years out of date. Mac remembered the time a group of Chinese posing as scientists had followed a photographic and imaging trade show around the South-East Asian circuit, stealing as much as they could.

The scientists were going down to the Agfa booth, pretending to be looking at something and dipping their ties in an improved fi xing solution. The Service lost interest in technology transfers when Mac and others realised that the technology companies were employing Indonesian and Malaysian go-betweens to fence illegal technology transfers. The companies were making money from the Chinese by selling them old rope. It took the fun out of it.

Mac had two main identities during this era: textbooks executive and forestry consultant. Textbooks allowed you cover for just about any trade show or discussion with a government offi cial. And forestry gave you access to the interior of countries like Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines while creating an excuse to be around ports, rail yards and trucking depots. In the embassy, he was Alan McQueen, second assistant trade attache. He was plain old Macca with a face that blended in the crowd.

But when September 11 happened, ASIS hit a snag. The Prime Minister’s offi ce needed a ton of intel and analysis, and they needed it yesterday. They needed counter-terrorism intelligence, what was known as CT. Australia was camped on the doorstep of the world’s largest Muslim nation, which meant some fast re-aligning of regional interaction. It meant knowing what the hell was going on. And the people with the CT answers weren’t the spy agencies of ASIS or ASIO or the military intel operations. The organisation with both the intelligence and operations reach into Muslim South-East Asia was the Australian Federal Police. Which is why Mac had found himself hunting Abu Sabaya. The Service needed to win back some infl uence and favour in Canberra by proving it could partake in America’s ‘War on Terror’. And the Service dreamed up an adventure.

Mac was in the middle of a dangerous infi ltration of a Chinese front company called Mindanao Forest Products when he was called into a meeting at the embassy in Manila one afternoon. Sitting in the embassy intel section meeting room when Mac walked in was Tony Davidson, director of the Asia-Pacifi c region. A large grey-haired bloke with jowls who had once opened the bowling for Western Australia, Davidson was the spook who controlled the spooks across India, China and South-East Asia - Australia’s most important region. The ASIS station chief for the Philippines, Joe Imbruglia, leapt up to greet Mac, who was dusty, sweaty. Imbruglia had one of those smiles Mac’s mother used to give him when friends popped over unannounced. It said, ‘Please be nice?’