Sensitive New Age Spy (14 page)

‘For fuck’s sake, Alby. What is it with you men?’ She reached around to unzip her wetsuit. ‘Two women just have to look like they’re having a good time together and instantly you see girl-on-girl action. One bloody night in Canberra with Gudrun and you think everyone’s gay.’

‘We are strange and mysterious creatures.’

‘You can say that again. Anyway, I think the Cristobel–Artemesia relationship is more of a mother–daughter thing. They met when Priday was in prison, and when he was paroled and started his ministry, Artemesia was an early supporter. She signed the deeds of Jindivik, her family home, over to his church.’

‘That’s right, Cristobel said they had a benefactor.’

‘I’ll see what else I can dig up. But don’t get your hopes up for a lesbian love nest.’

She turned her back to me. ‘My zipper’s stuck, can you get it for me?’

I was happy to oblige, and as I freed the zip and ran it down the curve of her back, revealing her smooth tanned skin, a lesbian love nest was the furthest thing from my mind.

‘I’m going to hit the shower,’ she said, heading for the bathroom.

I could do with a cold one myself, I decided.

‘Find anything on Operation Chester yet?’ I called after her.

‘Zilch. Absolutely nothing. Everyone just clams up as soon as I mention the name.’

‘That’s exactly what Gudrun said. She sends her regards, by the way. She thinks I have exquisite taste in choosing people to choose my gifts for me.’

I heard the water running in the shower.

‘She also wanted to know if you were still straight.’

‘Well,’ Julie said, popping her head round the bathroom door, ‘if I have to keep hanging round with blokes like you and the rest of the Dedheads, I might be tempted to reconsider.’

That was a very low blow.

‘A cappuccino would be nice,’ she called out as she closed the door.

While the espresso machine warmed up I logged onto the Bondi Beach SurfCam. With a click of the mouse you can pan right along the beach to check the surf. You can also check out the people on the beach, walking along the promenade or loitering in the park. I zoomed in on a
black Astra nose-in to the curb, facing Campbell Parade. The passenger was using binoculars and they were pointed at the front of my building.

Julie came out of the bathroom in a tight white T-shirt and lean hipster jeans. She was fresh-faced and glowing, her wet hair slicked back in a ponytail.

I handed her a cappuccino. ‘Have a look at this,’ I said, showing her the webcam. ‘Recognise either of them?’

Julie shook her head. ‘Gwenda’s people?’

‘I reckon they might be. They’re about as subtle as she is.’

‘You worried about them?’

‘No, I’ll lose them on the way to dinner. But I don’t think they’re dangerous. It’s the ones you can’t see that you have to keep an eye on.’

I shook off the bozos in the Astra after doubling back through a couple of one-way streets in Tamarama, and by 7.15 I was in a private room at Tetsuya’s, waiting for my date.

Tetsuya Wakuda is a lovely Japanese bloke who got off a plane from Tokyo one day in the early 1980s, took a bus to Darlinghurst, and using the few words of English he knew, got himself a job washing dishes in a fish restaurant. Twenty-five years on, Tetsuya’s is consistently rated one of the top five restaurants in the world, and people fly in from all sorts of places to marvel at a twelve-course degustation
menu that changes subtly from visit to visit but which is always sublime.

The private rooms looking out over the immaculately groomed traditional Japanese garden are always great for impressing women. But not tonight. My dinner companion arrived sporting a walking stick, a nice new titanium hip replacement, and a pensioner discount card. He smiled and stuck out his hand.

‘Fell off the fucking massage table, Alby, can you believe it?’

Charlie Somersby was a former World War II bomber pilot who now enjoyed a very pleasant retirement in Byron Bay, thanks to an inheritance. The last time I’d seen him he’d been naked on his living-room floor, getting a rubdown from three beautiful young ladies wearing frangipani leis and nothing else. They traded, according to the sign on their Kombi van, as Lovely Hula Hands and provided holistic massage involving coconut oil, incense and ukulele music. They offered a pensioner discount to boot, which put Byron Bay well up on my list of retirement possibilities.

‘Been meaning to try this place for years,’ Charlie said, looking around the room approvingly. He patted his new hip. ‘I was a bit worried I’d have to sit on the floor, though, and then we’d be buggered.’

Charlie had been piloting RAF Halifax bombers on secret missions over occupied Europe before he turned twenty, and he’d survived more than thirty missions without
a scratch. On his eighty-fifth birthday, the hula girls had thoughtfully suggested using the massage table rather than the floor and the poor bastard had fallen less than a metre and fractured his hip.

‘Didn’t have my bloody parachute on, did I Alby? Didn’t have any bloody thing on. When the ambulance arrived they took one look at the girls and sent out a radio call, and ten minutes later I had every emergency vehicle from Ballina to Southport parked in my driveway. Fire engines, police cars, State Emergency Services, the lot.’

He ordered champagne. ‘Seeing I’m on the government’s expense account down here, Alby, I reckon we should go the whole hog.’

‘No argument from me there, mate,’ I said.

We drank a toast to absent friends, which of course meant Harry. I’d first met Charlie through my mate Harry Wardell, a fellow Dedhead who’d stuck his nose in someplace it wasn’t welcome and paid the ultimate price. I missed Harry and I know Charlie did too.

As we worked our way through the snow egg and caviar sandwich, the tartare of tuna on sushi rice and avocado, and the Spring Bay scallops with wakame and lemon, Charlie described his adventures in orthopaedic surgery in gruesome detail. When we got to the confit of Tasmanian ocean trout with konbu, daikon and fennel, I figured it was time to get down to tin tacks and find out what he’d been able to come up with on Operation Chester.

‘You called at just the right time, old chap. I was in the bowels of one of the Defence Department servers so I had a quick poke about using the Minister’s access code.’

‘You can do that?’ I asked.

‘Piece of piss, as my great-grandson likes to say.’

Charlie was an early adopter of computers in the 1970s and he was an expert in IT before anyone knew what IT was. He set up the first systems used by the Defence Department and still did occasional consulting work for them, so he had retained his high-level security clearance.

‘This trout is spectacular, Alby. Are you going to finish yours?’

‘You better believe it, mate. But getting back to Operation Chester, Charlie, what did you find?’

‘In a nutshell, old chap, in late 1991, post-Gulf War One, the US Defense Department proposed that Australia be secretly provided with a couple of tactical nuclear warheads. The weapons would be a last-resort option should our region become unstable at a time when the US military might be overstretched – say, in the Middle East – and unable to provide support to Australia as required under the ANZUS treaty. The plan was codenamed Operation Chester.’

‘Fuck me drunk,’ I said.

‘Exactly. But the plan was shelved,’ he continued, ‘on the grounds that the revelation of an Australian nuclear capability would of itself destabilise the region and have unforseeable political, economic and social consequences
in our sphere of influence.’

‘They had that right.’

He nodded. ‘However, it seems that when Iraq went wobbly, and with this business with Iran, some bright spark in the Pentagon turned up the Chester plan and figured it might be time to reactivate it. Canberra agreed, and now it looks like Defence is about to sign for a couple of special-delivery nukes. Bloody idiots. All very hush-hush of course, Alby. And you didn’t hear it from me. If word of this arrangement gets out, the shit will hit the fan.’ He turned his attention back to his plate and that delicious fish.

I didn’t want to put an old digger off his dinner, but the shit had already well and truly hit the fan, and it was worse than Charlie could imagine. No wonder Hall-Smith was apopletic – they were our nukes that had been nicked. Just how far would they be prepared to go to keep something like this quiet? My mind flashed back to the rented Toyota with the bulging roof and I had a pretty fair idea.

Julie turned up at Bondi just after nine the next morning. I was on my second coffee and she’d brought a large orange, apple and carrot Goodie, and we headed up to the roof for some sea air, a bit of vitamin D and a debrief. I filled her in on Charlie Somersby’s revelation.

‘Two tactical nukes?’ she said. ‘They must be out of their minds. That’s taking the deputy-sheriff business way too far. The whole region would go apeshit if word of that got out.’

‘Just imagine what will happen if word gets out they’ve been nicked.’

‘Holy shit, Alby, no wonder people want to shut you down. Everyone in Canberra must be running for cover.’

Back downstairs in my apartment, Julie got out a big sheet of paper and coloured markers and we sat down and tried to figure out what we knew so far.

After fifteen minutes we sat back and looked at what
we had. Which wasn’t all that much: in a top secret operation, the USS
Altoona
was delivering a couple of nukes to the Australian government, and the ship’s choir had done a runner with them. But why? There had been no ransom demands, no links to terror organisations, no threats about setting them off. They’d just vanished.

The only local link to the choir was the Reverend Priday and the soiree at Jindivik. Young Max Gallagher had photographed the occasion and then turned up dead at a vantage point overlooking the scene of the heist. And someone had pulled the memory card out of his camera. Plus Priday’s daughter Cristobel knew I was a spy – if she’d overheard her dad, who had told him?

And what had Chapman Pergo been arguing with Carter Lonergan about on the decoy tanker? Lonergan would have known about the delivery of the nukes, which would explain why he’d been on deck at sparrow’s fart on Monday. And why, when Pergo came to the D.E.D. office, had they acted like they’d never met?

In the end, we had more questions than answers.

‘By the way, I got some info on the Gaarg family,’ Julie said, tossing a folder on the table. ‘That Artemesia’s a pretty amazing woman – no wonder Cristobel’s a disciple.’ She held up the half-empty Goodie she was drinking. ‘She owns the Wake Up to Goodness company that makes these – fresh-squeezed juice every day. I couldn’t live without them.’

I flicked through the pages. It was quite a family saga.
Artemesia’s father, Sir Linus Gaarg, had made the family fortune from his inventions and a chain of tearooms. Post-World War II, he had gone into the aerospace industry and made an absolute motza. Artemesia was an only child who at age ten had seen her mother taken by a shark while swimming off the Jindivik jetty. Her hair turned white overnight. Later, while studying arts at Melbourne University, she developed an interest in sailing and went on to represent Australia twice at the Olympics, crewing on 5.5 metre yachts.

In 1994, Gaarg Aerospace Group International took over Genki Heavy Industries of Japan to become one of the world’s largest companies, but Sir Linus died unexpectedly from fugu poisoning in a top Tokyo restaurant where the merger was being celebrated. As his sole heir, Artemesia became the major shareholder in Gaarg/Genki International and appointed herself chairwoman and CEO. Within six months, she had sold off almost all of the Gaarg empire’s companies and assets. Her only business interest now was the wildly successful Goodie line, whose profits, along with the rest of her wealth, were consolidated into the Gaarg Foundation.

The foundation’s stated aim was ‘to do good works’, and Artemesia had certainly achieved that in the past ten years. Gaarg Mobile Clinics had been established in remote areas to improve the health and living standards of indigenous Australians; every large city in Australia now had a Gaarg Fresh Start Centre, which provided meals, accommodation and a helping hand for the homeless to get back on their
feet; the children’s hospitals in Sydney, Melbourne and Darwin had a Gaarg Wing, with more planned for Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide; and there was the Gaarg Oceanic Institute, working to preserve the marine environment and improve the wellbeing of the world’s sea creatures, most specifically the whale. Why anyone who had lost both parents to sharks and toxic fish liver was so dedicated to our finned friends was a mystery.

I tossed the file back on the desk. Julie was right. Artemesia did sound like an amazing woman and I could understand why Cristobel was taken with her. Plus she was a great shot with a four-litre can of Dulux Federation Crimson.

Around eleven, I picked up my mobile and announced I was going to lunch. Julie was all in favour of joining me but I explained there was a little job I needed her to do.

The bozos from the Astra were easy to lose in the confusion of Chinatown, but I doubled back through Paddy’s Markets and used the rear elevators in Market City just to make sure.

The Dragon Star was buzzing. All of its eight hundred seats were filled, with another hundred or so hungry customers lined up outside, waiting for their number to be called by a cheongsam-clad hostess.

I spotted Carter wearing one of his appalling Hawaiian shirts and steered him inside, past the display of giant dried shark’s fin and glass tanks full of live fish, crabs and
abalone. Diners at the packed tables were waving and shouting to waitresses pushing trolleys stacked high with bamboo baskets of steamed dumplings, or laden with plates of spring rolls and noodles, or bunches of shiny green bok choy waiting to be plunged into steaming vats of boiling water before being chopped up and doused with oyster sauce.

I waved to Sam, one of the managers, and smiled at the elegant hostess. She spoke into a walkie-talkie and scrawled a number on a ticket before pointing towards a table at the back of the room.