The Marmalade Files (12 page)

It was a small obituary, tucked away on page 22 of
The Age
, a quarter-page of copy that most readers would ignore on their way to the crossword or TV guide.

Lifted from the
New York Times
, it was a perfunctory 350-word opus on Walter Chang, known to his Communist mates as ‘Wally'. The reclusive industrialist had survived the brutal crackdown against capitalists at the height of the Cultural Revolution, later emerging as a central player in China's economic awakening from the late 1970s.

Dunkley pulled up suddenly, mid-sentence, doing his best not to spill coffee on a just-ironed business shirt. He reread the lines before reaching into his shoulder bag for the file he had already compiled on Paxton, a collection of notes and photocopies of documents and old press clippings.

And there it was. An article from the early 1980s taken from the business pages of the
West Australian
. Paxton and his UMF mates were running riot on building sites in what was then the very wild West. But a single line had struck Dunkley as odd the first time he'd read it.

And underneath it said:

And now here, next to the obituary, was a photograph of the Red Capitalist and his son, Wang – the very same man from the black-and-white photo.

‘Jesus, the third man is the son of the Red Capitalist … where is this going?' Dunkley said to himself.

He recalled the lines that Mr DFAT, his anonymous Deep Throat, had uttered during their most recent phone conversation: ‘The past always points to the future.'

Now, after weeks of often fruitless searching, another piece of the jigsaw had fallen into place.

Dunkley knew that he needed to do a heap more digging, but it wasn't iron ore, gold or nickel he was mining for. It was something much more valuable. Something, he knew, that could not be found on the east coast.

Catriona Bailey lay stricken on her hospital bed, her life measured by a battery of medical machinery. To the untrained eye she was beyond resurrection. But Amy McCallum's eye saw things that escaped everyone else.

Regarded as one of the nation's best neurologists, she had been called in from Melbourne to examine the Foreign Minister. Bailey had been unresponsive for weeks now and the Canberra medical team had exhausted all possibilities. It seemed Bailey would never recover. But McCallum knew from long experience never to take appearances for granted.

She sat on Bailey's bed and began the ritual. She always assumed her patient could hear her.

‘Hi, Ms Bailey, I'm Amy, a neurologist,' she started. ‘You are in intensive care in Canberra Hospital. You have been here for a month after suffering a serious stroke. You are on life support. You were unconscious on arrival and showed no response to any
stimulus. Your eyes have been closed the whole time and recently they have been taped down. I am just going to open your eyes now. It shouldn't hurt.'

McCallum gently removed the tape, wiped the outside of Bailey's eyes and opened them.

‘Okay, I want you to do something for me. Look left.'

And Bailey's eyes moved left. The nurse standing next to the bed gasped.

‘Look right,' said McCallum.

Bailey's eyes moved right.

‘Jesus,' whispered the nurse.

‘Blink if you can hear me clearly and understand what I am saying.'

Bailey blinked.

‘That's excellent, Ms Bailey. Let's try something else. I am going to get the nurse to hold your feet. Can you move your toes?'

Nothing. The nurse shook her head.

‘All right. I am going to put my finger in your hand. Can you squeeze it?'

Nothing.

‘Okay, I am going to touch your arm. I want you to blink once if you can feel it or twice if you cannot.'

Bailey blinked once.

‘I'm going to touch your leg now; can you feel it?'

Bailey confirmed she could.

‘Ms Bailey, I think I know what's happened. You have suffered a rare kind of stroke. The lower part of your brain has been damaged and that means you have no control over any part of
your body, save your eyes. In fact your eye movement is very good. And because your pathways have not been damaged you can still feel your body, which is one of the many aspects of this condition which makes it so distressing.

‘It might be a long time before you can move.'

Here McCallum wasn't entirely forthcoming; she knew it was highly unlikely Bailey would ever move again. She knew that people with locked-in syndrome usually died within four months. But she saw no need to dwell on that now as there were things that could be done, miraculous things. And some patients lived for years.

‘Your upper brain has not been damaged and that means you have had no loss of brain function. That's a start. And since you can move your eyes you can talk to us and give us instructions. We just need you to learn a new language. Here's what I want you to do.'

The two men sat in the darkened corner of the cafe, quietly talking. The orders had come through from DC; the risk of doing nothing was too great. The operation had begun.

Preparations had been completed, as instructed. It was time now to flick the executioner's switch.

It would be the usual modus operandi: a strategic leak to the
New York Times
or the
Washington Post
. It wouldn't be front-page stuff, but a skilled mention in the world news pages was just as valuable. After all, the intended audience was very select.

The leak would come from ‘senior Pentagon sources' and would point to the target's public statements that suggested a retreat from the commitment to buy stealth bombers. The quote would include a direct criticism of the Minister, something that was rare. The intelligence-sharing agreement would be raised. Those in the know in Canberra would be left in no doubt that Washington was not pleased.

They had tried to warn him, several times in fact. Don't meddle with the Alliance. But he'd ignored them, another cocky Minister who thought he could play God and to hell with the consequences.

He'd set his course, ordering the Department to begin the process of winding back the Joint Strike Fighter program, as if it was his decision alone to destroy what had taken years to construct. All those billions invested in the Alliance, strengthening the common bonds that had withstood so much over the years. And it was never more important than now, in the endless fight against global terror, against the spread of militant Islam, and the rise of the Asian superpower.

He was putting it all at risk, goddamn him. Didn't he know, didn't he care, about this war? It was no longer defined in the old paradigm of armies rolling across countries and invading neighbours. It was no longer a fight over territory alone. This war wasn't being fought so much with guns and bombs as with ideology; it was about the struggle to establish a dominant culture. It was about the existential threat posed by an inscrutable enemy targeting a weakening West.

And he wanted to put the Alliance at risk? Now?

Who did he think he was playing with here? Fucking amateurs?

They would teach him what it meant to question the value of shared beliefs, to be unpatriotic. The target would not know what had hit him; the pincer movement would be deadly and, they hoped, swift. They didn't like to see their victims squirm for any longer than necessary.

They were human, after all. Most of the time, anyway.

BAILEY'S AWAKE!

The headline screamed from the front of Melbourne's
Herald Sun,
the country's biggest selling paper. The 100-point font was usually reserved for the declaration of war – or an AFL drug scandal.

Typically, it had a red ‘Exclusive' tag splashed above the byline. And this time, the scoop really was a game changer.

Brendan Ryan stared dumbly at the page. Even his huge intellect struggled to deal with the story.

It told the remarkable tale of a Foreign Minister trapped inside a broken body, but whose mind was as sharp as a tack.

Given its parochial nature, the
Herald Sun
had devoted an almost absurd amount of space to the brilliant Carlton-based neurologist who had diagnosed Bailey. And, as a bonus, her husband had once trialled for St Kilda.

Amy McCallum was teaching Bailey to blink out words one letter at a time. It was a technique first developed by the doctors who'd treated a French journalist suffering the same condition, with the almost tabloid name of ‘locked-in syndrome'.

Ryan read that paragraph over and over to let it sink in. Bailey was aware. She could communicate. That meant they would need her permission to get her out of Parliament. Ryan didn't need words blinked out a letter at a time to tell him what the bitch would do.

‘This woman is like the fucking Terminator,' he said out loud. ‘Blow her fucking arms and legs off and her fucking eyes keep blinking.'