Counter Attack

Chapter 3

The Qantas 747’s engines changed tone as the plane banked for the final approach to Brisbane. It was a little after 6.40 am and to Mac’s left the Pacific Ocean wore a pink and purple halo, waiting for the sun to peek over the edge and turn up the heat.

He’d spent the last twelve hours reliving the scene in the hallway of the Pan Pac and berating himself. He’d seen the SingTel van on Raffles Boulevard, he’d noticed something wrong about one of the technicians, and he hadn’t acted. The old Mac would have gone into counter-measures, regardless of how unnecessary it seemed to those around him. But he’d let it slide and the price to pay was Ray Hu slumped in a hotel chair with bullet holes in the forehead and heart. Ray, who’d taught him the intricacies of banking and funds transfers in Asia; Ray, who knew exactly which corporate tax scams were being pulled by which accountants and bankers; flat-footed, desk-jockey Ray, who’d once held a gun to a bunch of thugs who’d cornered Mac in an apartment in Pandang — the chubby banker had stood tough even when he was shitting himself.

Catching his own eye in the reflection of the window, Mac turned away. His return to the Firm had been as a manager in Operations, a step up from his previous career as a field agent embedded in companies that operated across South-East Asia. As a vice-president of sales for Southern Scholastic Books, or as an executive with Gondwanda Consulting, Mac had been under constant stress, knowing that at any moment the Indonesians or Chinese might discover his real identity and whack him. But in that role he hadn’t been responsible for others. Now he was running operations and managing teams, and his first assignment had ended in a double murder.

The ice he held in a plastic bag against his left eye socket was melting and the second round of Nurofens he’d gulped down an hour earlier wasn’t doing much for the vein that throbbed against his cheekbone or the egg that was still growing above his left ear. Mac had never had a headache quite as bad as waking up in a hot tent with a rum hangover, but this was running a close second.

‘Can I take that, Mr Davis?’ asked the hostie, and Mac handed over the ice bag, which he’d wrapped in a business-class face cloth. He wasn’t just embarrassed about the shiner; people with concussion weren’t supposed to fly long distances, and he hadn’t wanted a bright-eyed hostie trying to throw the medical rule book at him. He’d have plenty of that waiting for him at home when Jen lectured him about how a father of two young daughters shouldn’t be playing dice with aneurisms.

Emerging from the customs hall with his black wheelie bag, he spotted a small ‘Davis’ sign above the crowd and headed for the casually dressed man who held it aloft.

‘Mr Davis!’ said the man. ‘Welcome back, sir — the name’s Kendall, the car’s this way.’

Mac let himself into the back seat of the white Holden Statesman standing at the apron.

Waiting in the back seat was Greg Tobin, the Firm’s immaculately groomed director of operations for Asia-Pacific. ‘Macca! Been in the wars, old man?’

‘Something like that, Greg,’ said Mac, shaking Tobin’s strong, soft hand. ‘How are things?’

Greg Tobin was only a year or two older than Mac but he’d succeeded the former director of operations, Tony Davidson, in the year he turned forty — an unprecedented elevation to run what was Australia’s most important espionage territory. Mac remembered Tobin from the University of Queensland, where he was studying law and dabbling in conservative politics. Even then there’d been something of the born-to-rule about the tall, athletic form of Greg Tobin. He was the sort of person who compelled smarter people to listen to him, then do as he said, and he did it with a combination of charm and authority. Even on the greasy pole of Canberra, Tobin had a reputation for never losing his temper.

Making their way across Gateway Bridge as the sun rose, Mac made small talk while his mind scrambled to understand why such a senior person had waited outside Brisbane International for him. It had to be bad — Operation Kava was a disaster and Mac had been running it.

‘So, Greg,’ he said, after they’d discussed why the Brisbane Broncos had missed out on a berth in the rugby league grand final, ‘you giving me a lift to Broadie?’

‘Afraid not, old stick,’ said Tobin, leaning in to indicate most-favoured status. ‘That Colmslie taskforce is reconvening.’

‘Great,’ said Mac, grabbing the handle above his door, wishing he’d slapped on some Old Spice. Taskforce Colmslie was the interagency group that had authorised Operation Kava and Mac dreaded having to face them — it would start as a debrief but inevitably would disintegrate into an exercise in blame-shifting between agencies.

‘When?’ said Mac.

‘Tapes start rolling at eleven, right, Kendall?’

Kendall kept his eyes on the Gateway traffic. ‘Correct.’

The Qantas flight from Singapore had taken off the previous night and Mac hadn’t slept. He’d had no respite since regaining consciousness in the operations suite at the Pan Pac and ordering the escape and evade phase of the operation, where the players scattered. Mac’s team all had their own rat-runs, right down to cars rented in certain identities and hotels ready to book into. Mac’s run had been the 9.25 flight out of Changi as Richard Davis, sales executive at Southern Scholastic Books; he could have taken earlier flights via Cairns or Darwin, but the basic rule in the spy game was that when travelling under an assumed identity, you took the direct flight when you could. You removed as many variables as possible — you rigged the game.

Tobin fixed him with a look of concern. ‘You must be shattered, Macca.’

‘Rolled up wet, put away dry,’ said Mac, as the car veered left off the freeway, swung right and headed west into Fortitude Valley. They drove in silence for eight minutes, before Mac recognised the area — west Valley, up against the Victoria Golf Course.

‘We’ll make it brief, I promise,’ said Tobin with a caring smile.

‘We?’ said Mac, wondering if Tobin had invited himself into the taskforce.

‘Just an informal chinwag, eh, Macca? Before we throw you back to the wolves?’

Kendall steered the car into the driveway of a three-and-a-half-star hotel.

‘You don’t mind if Kendall has the Davis collateral?’

‘No, Greg,’ said Mac, resenting it but staying professional. Handing over his Richard Davis phone, wallet and passport, Mac pulled out his chinos pockets to show they were empty then held open his sports jacket for inspection.

‘Perhaps let Kendall have the jacket?’

‘Ray was a friend of mine, Greg,’ said Mac, struggling out of the dark blue blazer. ‘You think I’m happy about this?’

‘Of course not, old man,’ said Tobin, passing the collateral forwards to Kendall. ‘That’s why I need some horse’s-mouth before you get cornered by ASIO and Defence.’

‘Okay, Greg,’ said Mac, fuming.

‘That’s yours,’ said Tobin, passing over a cardboard-wrapped room card. ‘There’s a change of clothes in your room — but let’s not use the phone just yet, right, Macca?’

‘Sure,’ said Mac, opening the door and getting out.

‘Meeting at eight-fifteen in room 403?’ said Tobin. ‘You might like a quick shower. There’s a good sport.’

Recounting the order of events at the Pan Pac, Mac noticed Tobin’s restlessness a few minutes into the debrief.

‘You didn’t enter 1502?’ said Tobin, reaching for the teapot and pouring.

‘No,’ said Mac. ‘When Lao started gasbagging about Raytheon’s AESA-defeat testing coming to Queensland, I decided to shut him down.’

‘Not —’ started Tobin.

‘No, no,’ said Mac, annoyed that his colleagues had characterised him as violent. ‘I was going to relieve Ray and let Lao know that the meet had been a set-up.’

‘Tell him he’d been caught out,’ said Tobin, ‘and have the AFP arrest him?’

‘Exactly,’ said Mac. ‘It was too risky to double him. This was the first time he’d blabbed about the AESA-defeat testing being carried out in Queensland and I decided to wrap him up with an extradition —’

‘Rather than let him talk to the Chinese?’

‘Yes,’ said Mac. ‘If we could get him on the terrorism charges, we could lock him away for a while. Remember, this Lao guy is an Aussie citizen and the Chinese embassy would have no excuse to go visit him.’

‘So you didn’t see Lao and Hu executed?’ said Tobin.

‘No. I saw the shooter open the door of 1502 and fire four suppressed rounds into the suite. I’m pretty sure it was a nine-mil — the one in my mouth was a SIG.’

‘The shooters?’ said Tobin, sipping the tea.

‘Brown eyes, SingTel overalls, ski masks — about my height and build. Perhaps shorter.’

‘No voice?’

‘None,’ said Mac, putting himself back in that corridor, feeling the suppressor jammed against the back of his throat. ‘They were totally pro.’

‘Hence, this,’ said Tobin, tapping a piece of notepad paper covered in ballpoint scrawls. ‘Federal Police liaison with Singapore Police got the initial crime scene report from the Pan Pac. It’s a double murder; victims are two men, Sino-Asian appearance. One they’re calling Chan and the other Lao. There were four shots — nine-mil soft-noses. No casings.’

‘Figures,’ said Mac. ‘The shooter came out with the casings and put them in his pocket.’

‘The deceased had single shots to the forehead and heart.’

‘It all fits,’ said Mac. You had to be highly trained to walk into a room, make four shots like that and still have the ticker to pick up your casings.

Tobin enmeshed his fingers. ‘The local detectives won’t hush this up.’

‘I think the Firm’s clean, if that’s what you’re asking,’ said Mac.

Tobin’s real job was to be able to tell the deputy DG that there were no comebacks to the Firm, so the deputy DG could assure the DG that Aussie SIS couldn’t be implicated, meaning any annoying interview requests from China or Singapore could be dismissed at the political level as well as the departmental. There was only one rule in spying: don’t get caught. And Mac was confident the E and E had worked.

‘Okay,’ said Tobin to Kendall, and his typing stopped — redundant given that when opening an ASIS debrief template, the MS Word document recorded audio.

‘How should I handle the taskforce?’ said Mac, aware that interagency manoeuvring was a key aspect of the debrief.

‘Tell them everything. I’ll talk with the deputy, recommend we hand this back to Defence. We’ll never hear the end of it if the Firm’s to blame for bungling those tests.’

Mac nodded. The Australian Defence Force relied heavily on being the respected junior partner in a very one-sided military alliance with the Americans. The entire culture of the ADF’s intelligence apparatus was to never give the Yanks an excuse to roll their eyes and mutter about ‘leaky Australians’.

Kendall shut down the laptop as Tobin slipped his hand onto Mac’s forearm and walked him to the door.

‘One thing,’ said Tobin, lowering his voice as they eased into the hallway. ‘I suppose you’ve had time to wonder… why those two…’

‘And not me?’ said Mac.

‘Well, yes.’

‘Maybe the shooters didn’t know who I was,’ said Mac.

‘Or maybe,’ said Tobin, ‘they did.’