Golden Serpent

CHAPTER 18

Mac drove north, dropped the Civic at Avis’s downtown depot and took out the plastic mail centre bag with the ovies. He put the hip rig on, letting his white shirt out a little to cover the weapon. Putting the cheapo phone in his pocket he grabbed a cab to the fi nance district.

Got out. Walked both sides of the street. Looked for eyes, swapped taxis and made for the trendy port area of Jakarta.

Jenny had lived on and off in the Aussie residential compound.

But a couple of years ago she’d moved to a private residence. It kept her from having to reject advances from workmates but also increased her risk of dying from misadventure.

Mac had the taxi drop him three blocks from Jenny’s address.

He walked one side of the street, then the other, counter-surveilling, looking for eyes. Satisfi ed, he walked up a frangipani-lined path to a modern block of apartments in a fi ve-storey building.

He smelled cayenne pepper and coriander – dinner time in Jakkers. Walking up the stairs to the second level, he rang the bell. The door opened slightly and Jenny Toohey’s pretty face peeked out. She smiled, opened the door, looked over both his shoulders. Mac stepped in, hugged her. She hugged him back, but with one arm – the other held a Glock 9 mm pointed at the fl oor. They kicked at the door at the same time. It slammed.

Jenny stood back, fl ashed a smile. She was looking good – tall, athletic, fresh-faced, dark hair back in a ponytail. She fi lled out a pair of Levis and a T-shirt like God had poured her in. Mac would have done the business if he didn’t have his mind on another woman.

‘Ooh, aah – the hair. Decided being brunette makes you sexier and smarter, huh?’ she said, squeezing his bicep playfully.

”Zit going?’ asked Mac.

‘Not bad for an old girl.’

‘Thirty-fi ve’s not old,’ he smiled. ‘It’s fucking ancient.’

She laughed in mock rage. ‘Need a beer? I got some cold ones.’

‘Sure, Jen.’

‘So,’ she pointed at his crook right wrist. ‘You got a girlfriend for that?’

Mac slapped her arse with his good hand. What was it with Australian humour and the subject of self-service?

They walked into the kitchen-breakfast area. It was clean, nice, but not a home.

She cracked two VBs, handed one over. They clinked bottles. Drank.

‘Aah,’ said Mac, looking at the stubbie like he was appraising a fi ne wine. ‘Nothing quite like the taste of Mexican bat piss.’

Jenny rolled her eyes. ‘Queenslanders! The day you lot can explain the appeal of rum, then you can slag off our beer.’

‘Simple, mate,’ said Mac. ‘Makes everyone look the goods, and we need all the help we can get.’

Mac had a strange bond with Jen. They’d met six years before at a Boxing Day embassy barbecue in Manila. The Ashes was on the telly and a bunch of Aussie, Kiwi and Pommie diplomats, law enforcement and intel types were sitting around in the residential compound getting completely shit-faced on Aussie booze.

Mac was introduced to Jenny via a Pommie bloke who was trying to crack on to her. Jenny was the going-somewhere golden girl of the Australian Federal Police. She was all ironed-out and buttoned-down.

Beautiful, and a former university basketball star.

But an ice queen.

The Pom spoke down to him, with a plum stuffed somewhere.

He wore a tie on Boxing Day – a wanker.

Mac and Jenny had done the polite Aussie thing, smiled and nodded, tried to make the best of it. Then the Pom told the Aussies how ‘privileged one felt to be part of the world’s oldest diplomatic legation’. Mac had told the nonplussed Pom, ‘Mate, you’d wanna get your hand off it at some point, wouldn’t you?’

Jenny had ejected her mouthful of chardonnay through her nostrils. It took her fi ve minutes to compose herself.

The ice queen had a sense of humour.

Soon after they became on-and-off lovers – drank a bit, laughed a lot and joined forces on their loneliness. They liked each other’s company.

She cried after sex.

Jenny had gone into the Feds straight out of uni. After doing the usual ambitious-girl rotations she’d ended up working narcotics details out of Darwin, Perth and Brisbane. She was going places.

Groomed for management and the SES structure of the Australian Public Service. A place where you fl ew business class, stayed at the Marriott and no one told you in advance what your expenses claim was going to be.

Jenny was twenty-six when her life changed. During an ongoing investigation into a Vietnamese heroin importation ring the call had come through once again from Australian Customs in Vietnam. A husband, wife and kids were on the same route out of Saigon into Brisbane via Singers. All over again. The personnel changed regularly, but they were always a family unit and the intelligence placed them with the same drug gang.

Jenny was in the Feds’ tail car, riding passenger and working the radio. She told the lead car where to go and let the backup car know where they might have to cut in. It was late January, the stinking Brisbane heat making a mockery of the Falcon’s air-con.

Everyone was over it. They’d been tailing this mob and others from the same syndicate for almost two years and the heroin was still hitting the streets. The one bust they’d pulled seven months before was a roadside swoop in Logan City as the suspects had driven south to their Southport unit. It yielded nothing, except the gang complained about the racist treatment given that the mother had a young baby with her at the time.

The complaint stuck. Offi cial reprimand. The whole suits versus cops bit.

On the day her world changed, Jenny’s mind was elsewhere. Six days earlier she’d had a termination at the behest of her fi ance – an ambitious lawyer who wanted ‘a life’. She’d wanted the baby.

Jenny was still bleeding and eating Nurofens, pale as death, as she tailed the Vietnamese family south-bound out of Brisbane. Suddenly, she’d had a fl ash. It went like this: ‘The baby!’ It was like she was sleepwalking.

She turned to her superior, a guy called Steve Hornby who, in spite of his clumsy attempts at charm, was a good operator with the kind of arrest and conviction record that cops love.

‘Steve – the baby. The fucking baby!’ Jenny screeched.

Hornby had recoiled. ‘What?’

‘Steve listen to me – pull them over. Do it!’

‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers,’ Hornby had replied, his left eyelid twitching, nervous about the vibe and uncomfortable with angry women.

Jenny reached forward for the lights and siren switch.

‘Don’t you fucking do that, Toohey. That’s an order.’

Jenny had never used her looks with her male colleagues – she didn’t want the reputation. But she leaned over, pushed her breasts onto his arm, slid her hand up Steve Hornby’s thigh.

‘Steve, it’s the baby. Trust me.’

She sounded crazy and far away, even to her own ears.

Steve broke a forehead sweat, his eyelid going crazy. ‘There goes my super.’

Jenny hit the lights and they swooped on the Vietnamese.

Which was how Jenny Toohey came to be standing on the side of the M1 at Rochedale in the early afternoon heat, holding the cadaver of a baby that was stuffed with the highest-grade Laotian heroin.

Jenny’s mouth open, but no scream, looking down on the baby’s dead eyes staring out of heavy make-up.

Packets of brown heroin fell out of the baby’s hollowed-out back as Jenny unwound the swaddling.

Steve Hornby on his knees vomiting in the grass, begging for mercy. Please God, no!

Feds from the lead car chased the ‘mother’ and ‘father’ down the nature strip, the mother’s right sandal fl ying off as she veered towards a wire fence.

Panicked, out-of-breath yells came over the radio system.

Jenny Toohey made no sound, heard only the roar of emptiness in her ears.

She took stress leave and dumped the fi ance. She ducked counsell-ing, didn’t cry. She retrained, redeployed as AFP intelli gence liaison in an area that hooked from Saigon to Jakarta and up to Manila. Mac happened to know she was very good at what she did, which was busting the slave rackets – what they called transnational sexual servitude.

Mac suspected she was in love with him, but she didn’t say it.

She let him come and go. Mostly he went. She didn’t ask him about Southern Scholastic, she didn’t seem to need the details of what he did. In Mac’s experience, this was an almost super-human effort for a female cop.

In return, he ignored the salt-crust she left on his chest when he slept over.

She had only one stipulation: ‘I don’t cry, understand?’

Mac said, ‘Good as gold.’

They sat on her dark green canvas sofa, her giving him the look. Like she knew something was up.

‘Jen, it’s over – I’m out.’

‘What? The ASIS thing?’

‘Book company, yeah,’ he said, winking.

They smiled at each other.

‘When?’ asked Jenny.

‘My offi cial last day is January thirty.’

Jen narrowed her eyes, thoughtful.

‘But there’s one last thing I have to do,’ said Mac. ‘And they don’t want me doing it.’

Jen shifted forward on the sofa, looked at him with big dark eyes and said, ‘I know.’

Mac cocked an eye.

‘That bloke – what’s his name? – Matthew, sidled up to me today.

Asked me if I was in contact with you. Said something addressed for you had turned up in his pigeon hole, you know, and it was the kind of thing he had to give to you personally.’ She was being facetious, had that same cop disrespect for casual deception that his father had.

They laughed. Sometimes spooks made it way too complicated.

‘And you told him?’

‘I said, “Matthew, wherever McQueen is hiding I’m sure it’s not down the front of my blouse.” ‘

Mac laughed. Jenny could do that to him. Take all the stress and chuck it out the window.

‘Holy shit! You’re a piece of work, you are.’

‘Me?! It’s that bloke who’s the boob-talker – ask any of the girls.’

Mac ran the options. Either she was part of the program and was carrying a wire, or she had dismissed Matt cold. The third option was that Matt had heard some talk round the traps and had Jenny’s apartment under surveillance. Mac would have done it.

‘Any tails?’

She shook her head.

Mac trusted Jen. She was highly tail-sensitive. A foreign female cop, living alone in Jakarta, spending her life tracking the kind of crime gangs that would steal children and sell them to paedophile brothels. If Jenny said there was no tail, there was no tail.

A pause opened up. She stared at him, stared at the beer, gave him the hard eye. ‘Okay, Mr Macca – you can ask away, but if I say no, then it’s no. That fair?’

Mac nodded. He couldn’t ask more than that.

He started with the Sulawesi adventure and the Hannah snatch, ending with the Jakarta return and the instruction to get on a plane to Sydney. Only, he kept it vague. If she was a journalist, she wouldn’t have been able to write a story on what he told her. No names to follow through on.

She stared at him.

‘Something’s a bit dodgy about the whole thing,’ he said, fl ustered.

They had never really spoken like this. ‘I’m – I want to cover-off. I have to… I’m looking for maritime activity around Sulawesi in the last week. Not necessarily terrorism,’ he shrugged. ‘Could be something else. Something out of the ordinary.’

Jenny made a face. That was nothing she had heard of.

‘No chatter?’

Chatter was what people in the intelligence community picked up in their rounds but perhaps wasn’t the stuff of reports and memos.

It was the daily gossip gleaned from being around people, making small talk.

Jen shook her head. ‘I’ve heard that Chinese naval base thing – you know, in Singapore? I’ve heard that a couple of times in the last ten days or so. It’s getting talked up again. But you know how the Chinese are.’

Mac knew how the Chinese were. But he’d been out of South-East Asia for long enough that he wasn’t hearing this stuff. If Mac was Garvey, he’d want him the hell out of it too, before he started connecting back into his networks. He’d want him in Sydney, cut off, thinking about his new life.

‘No piracy or terrorist alerts in the Java Sea?’

Jen shook her head.

‘Malacca? Macassar Strait?’

Jen stared blankly.

‘What about Maluku?’

He was grasping. If anyone would know, or had access to the knowledge, it was Jenny Toohey. Her role was to coordinate intelligence from organisations as diverse as POLRI and FBI to the Jakarta Container Port and TNI, the Indonesian armed forces. And her main briefs – narcotics, people smuggling and sex-slavers – were all connected with shipping. She was also one of the few people Mac had ever heard of who had good relations with both BIN and BAIS. Even in the Indonesian bureaucracy and government, you were aligned with one or the other intelligence organisation. You were either the President’s people or you were TNI’s people.

Mac slumped back, sipped the beer, thought about what he had.

Not much. Tomorrow he’d fi nd out what was in the MPS warehouse in Makassar, hopefully. Right now he was fl ailing. He was also tired.

Rooted.

The phone rang. Jen got up, took the call, and by the sound of it the caller was in southern Thailand. Mac could hear the voice: high-pitched, male, hysterical. Jen talked him down, stayed calm. She was a natural leader. Mac had no doubt she’d make it to the upper echelons of the AFP. Maybe take a right turn and end up in PMC.

Suddenly something clicked.

The phone logs!

The phone logs Sawtell had brought out of the hotel in Palopo.

Mac had read them, got on the blower to his contact in TI and most of the numbers had pointed to Tenteno. But one had been in the Philippines, in an area of Metro Manila called Intramuros: trendy, expensive, latte-sipping, intellectual. Most important, it was coastal right on Manila Bay, with views of the container terminals if you were in the right building.

Jen said something gentle to the bloke on the other end, hung up, paused, big sigh. Made a quick call to someone else. This time her tone was less conciliatory. She was remonstrating.

She rang off, walked to the fridge, grabbed two more VBs. ‘Thai water police.’ She shook her head. ‘A bloody worry.’

When she sat down again Mac said, ‘What about the Philippines?

Manila? Anything out of there?’

Jen looked at the ceiling. ‘There was something I read today in a circular. Didn’t look like my go.’

‘What was it?’

‘Heist. Container. Whole shipment lost, unaccounted for.’

‘Any ideas?’

‘Containers go missing all the time. They’re not supposed to. Not after the Yanks went and spent all that money on the tracking protocols.

But stuff goes missing. They’re ports, and people work at ports.’

Mac looked at her. ‘So why was it circularised?’

Jenny shrugged.

‘I mean, what was in it? Where was it going?’

Jen stood, walked to the phone.

Mac piped up, ‘Umm, not a good idea.’

She clocked his embarrassed tone, did a double take. ‘Fuck, Mac. You people are too much! I’m a fucking federal cop! A senior federal cop!’

Mac looked away. It’d be good to be civvie again – weird, but good.

Jenny walked to the kitchen area, shaking her head. Pulled a Nokia out of a charger, made to turn it on. ‘I’m one of the good guys

– remember that part?’

Mac looked over, scratched the back of his head. ‘Uh, yeah… You got a personal one?’

Jenny shook her head, rolled her eyes like Are you people for real?

‘I’m serious,’ said Mac. ‘You got a non-Commonwealth phone?’

Now Jen had her hand on her hip, giving him the evils. Giving him the ice queen. Slight tooth-grinding motion in the mouth, she slowly shook her head.

Mac pulled out the cheapo pre-paid. ‘This should do.’

Jen stayed where she was. Mac had to get off the sofa, walk to her, pick up her hand and put the phone in it. Close the hand around it. She didn’t take her eyes off his face. Not hate – another thing, like his sister Virginia used to give him. Like the time he had to deal with the bloke who’d been grabbing her on the dance fl oor of a footy club bash, lifting her dress up and that sort of carry-on. Had asked the bloke to stop it which turned into Mac having to give the bloke a little something to go on with. Didn’t help that the drunken groper was Ginny’s boyfriend.

Mac and Jen stared at each other for thirty seconds. Mac needed this. Jenny didn’t.

‘Please,’ he said.

Jen looked down at the phone, mumbled something, shook her head and dialled AFP, Manila.

Mac had once vowed he wasn’t going to foul his own nest. That whatever he was asked to do, it wouldn’t involve mixing his personal life with his professional. The Service encouraged people to observe those limits. It was why you didn’t tell friends and family where you worked. When he started out Mac had imagined that the issue would be more to do with something that Frank was investigating that Mac would be asked to whitewash. But it had come down to another cop in his life: Jen. He’d just stepped over his line and he felt sick about it.

Jen came back to the sofa, sat down and put a white pad on her lap. ‘My guy says it was an unmarked ro-ro container ship, shipping for San Francisco.’

‘Ro what?’

Jen shrugged, used to the lingo. ‘You know – roll-on/roll-off.’

‘Unmarked? You mean no name?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Believe that?’

‘Just telling you what he said.’

Mac thought about it: unmarked or non-commercial ships were usually military, government.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Not much else. When the alarm went out the whole place was swarming with US Army. A section’s been shut down. Media blackout.

Local cops on the outer. There was a bunch of blokes with bio-hazards on – not that unusual.’

‘Serious?’

‘Yeah, but there are spills all the time at container terminals and you never quite know what’s leaking. They send them out in the suits and breathers just to be sure.’

‘US Army is normal?’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Does your guy know what’s in it?’

‘Nah – it’s hush-hush.’

‘Hushed up?’

‘Well…’

‘Come on, Jen.’

She looked at him like she might be going too far.

‘Okay. Gary was in Bangkok a couple of years ago, at a maritime security symposium – one of those events that the British put on.

Turns out one of the guys who gave a paper at the symposium is running the show at the Manila thing.’

‘Know who he is?’

‘Gary couldn’t be sure, but he was ninety per cent certain the guy was DIA.’ Jenny shrugged. Threw the pad aside.

The evening was over. Mac made a promise to himself; that he would make it up to Jen. She’d recovered from her annoyance, but Mac knew there were other things she wanted to discuss, possibly even the future and commitment. It might have been. Before Diane.

‘By the way, Jen,’ he said, stepping to the front door, ‘you don’t think I’m racist, do you?’

Jenny thought about that, and said, ‘No. No I don’t.’

They stared at one another, Jen imploring him with her beautiful dark eyes. Mac knew what she wanted. She wanted him to unload, talk about stuff like fear and regret. But he couldn’t. He felt blocked up, like he had a piece of concrete in his throat. As her eyes softened, his were getting harder – she reached out, he defended. He wanted to tell her he had another bird but he didn’t know how to say it.

So he said, ‘Thanks, mate,’ and did the Harold.

Jen shifted her weight. Both hands in the back pockets of her Levis.

He saw her staring at the ceiling as he slipped out. A proud girl.

I don’t cry, understand?

Mac took the third cab that stopped. He trusted too-easy cabs like he trusted fi sh and chips in Alice Springs. He went north to the retail district in downtown.

The DIA connection was odd. The Defense Intelligence Agency was a super-group connecting all the military intelligence outfi ts of the Pentagon into one collection and counterintelligence bureau. It was extremely powerful and operated in a far less publicly accountable way than the CIA. Globally connected, it had at its heart one of the most powerful networks of any intel organisation, with 1.4 million defence personnel who could become agents, co-optees and sources at any time. It could use more than seven hundred bases and facilities in forty countries. What was a DIA guy doing shutting down a section of Manila’s container terminal? What was in the missing container?

It spelled ‘United States military’ and Mac knew only one person under that heading who he could call right now: John Sawtell.

Mac got on the cheapo phone, called DC and got a listing for Camp Enduring Freedom in Zam. He mumbled the number to himself as he dialled, wondering if one of these days his knack for short-term recall of numbers and names was going to evaporate. You only got it with practice.

The switch came on the line. Mac asked for Captain John Sawtell -

US Army Special Forces. After Mac didn’t settle for ‘not available’, the bloke said Sawtell was in the mess. The bloke asked for a contact number and Mac said he’d try back soon.

They got to downtown in twenty-one minutes. It was eight-thirty pm and still somehow the rush hour. Mac got out of the cab with the mail centre bag, walked fast through a large shopping mall and came out the other side, on a whole new block. There was a big cab rank out the front of the mall – lots of Vientas lined up waiting for shoppers, lots of drivers in white trop shirts, black chinos and plastic sandals, leaning on hoods, smoking, talking on mobiles, shooting the shit.

Mac walked the line, the bag under his arm. He was looking for someone in his mid thirties, someone with overheads and middle-class aspirations. Someone with kids.

Someone with shoes.

He focused on one guy, about fi ve-eight, oval face, sensitive expression and a full head of black hair. He was groomed, no sandals and there was a dark blazer hanging against the inside right door. The guy had pride and his cab looked clean.

Mac stopped, gave the bloke a wink. ”Zit going, champ?’

The driver was all smiles.

Mac sat up front, had a natter with him. His name was Rami, which in Indonesia could have been his fi rst name, a contraction of his surname, a family nickname from childhood or a name given to him by his local religious teacher when he came of age. You never quite knew in Indonesia. The bloke could have gone his entire life being known simply as Rami and that would not have been considered strange or unhelpful in the archipelago.

Rami was trying to fi nish an IT qualifi cation at a local technology college, but he had to drive a cab to fi nd the money and that meant studying part-time. Which slowed the whole middle-class dream to a crawl. Rami shrugged. What could you do? Couldn’t ask your wife to work when she had two kids.

‘Maybe we can help each other out,’ said Mac.

Rami dropped Mac in an area four blocks south of the British Embassy residential compound. Mac got out, looked around, walked to the rear of the Vienta. Rami joined him. He opened the boot. Mac put his plastic bag with the ovies, MPS key and Heckler in the trunk, jamming it behind the back seat so it didn’t slide around.

Rami shut the boot lid. Mac put a hundred-dollar greenback in the breast pocket of Rami’s white trop shirt, held two more US hundred-dollar notes up in front of the cabbie’s disbelieving face.

‘Here’s the deal, champ. Six o’clock, on this corner, tomorrow morning. You get the rest of the money. Sound fair?’ Mac winked.

‘And no one touch the bag,’ said Rami, underlining it with a stern Javanese shake of the head.

Mac had no choice but to trust him. He didn’t feel entirely safe without the Heckler but he was close to making something happen with Diane and he wasn’t about to blow it by trying to smuggle a handgun into the British Embassy compound.

He walked the remaining blocks, crossed the street, stopped and looked in window refl ections. Stalked the few cars allowed to park around the embassies, looking for eyes. Around this area of south Jakarta your average punter couldn’t just park and have a nosey-poke.

Anyone on the streets would be diplomatic, intelligence, cops.

He doubled back and presented himself at one of the glass-cage gatehouses that had sprung up all over South-East Asia in the past fi ve years.

‘Richard Davis. For Diane Ellison. Thanks, champion.’