Counter Attack

Chapter 5

Feeling better after the second beer went down, and having managed to blow out forty candles in one breath, Mac put the girls to bed.

‘I hope your skin feels better, Dad,’ said Sarah in a serious tone as he tucked her in and gave her a goodnight kiss.

‘I think it’s his bones, Sassa,’ said Rachel, fourteen months older than her three-year-old sister, and clearly confident that she had a lifetime more wisdom about facial injuries.

‘Don’t you girls worry about old Dad,’ said Mac, winking as he switched off the light. ‘I’m doing fine.’

Pausing outside as the girls yelled goodnight, he leaned his forehead on the bedroom door. Making himself breathe, Mac felt the spasms in his facial muscles that always came with fear and worry. The journey from the murder at the Pan Pac to his daughters in their sun frocks giving him their presents had been too short. He’d needed another day, perhaps a big bout of drinking or some lone surfing. When Jen’s work got too close to her family, she lashed out, got angry, got in someone’s face. But Mac internalised it, tried to swallow it down, where it festered and came back as facial twitches and nocturnal teeth-grinding.

‘Okay, love?’

Looking to his right, Mac faced his mother, Pat McQueen. The party raged down the hall, his friend Anton Garvey shouting for Mac to rejoin the drinkers.

‘I’m fine, Mum,’ he said, cracking a smile.

‘This doesn’t look fine,’ she said, grabbing him by the chin and poking at his injury. ‘Been fighting?’

‘Walked into a door,’ said Mac, twisting out of her grip.

‘That book company has a lot of doors,’ said Pat.

‘Yeah, well,’ said Mac, heading off in search of a beer.

Mac shared a cab with Garvs to Brisbane airport to catch the 5.10 am Qantas flight to Canberra.

‘Shit, mate,’ said Garvs, his bull-like body awkward as he read the Australian Financial Review in the back of the cab. ‘How’re we gonna do on the assessment with three hours’ sleep?’

‘You too?’ said Mac, as they slid over Southport Bridge in darkness.

‘I’m forty just before Christmas, mate — they’re still checking for cocaine and ecstasy.’

‘As long as they don’t breathalyse me,’ said Mac, regretting that the party had finished with rum shots and dirty limericks.

Handing the Fin to Mac, Garvs shook out the Courier-Mail and scanned the front page. Good intelligence operators were supposed to read at least one newspaper a day, cover to cover.

‘Shit,’ said Garvs, as Mac started reading about the Chinese using intermediaries to buy into Australian iron-ore miners.

‘What?’ asked Mac.

‘Oh, interest rates,’ said Garvs, distracted.

‘When they’re low, you’re supposed to borrow; when they’re high, you’re a fool for having borrowed so much,’ said Mac. ‘Prime Minister wrote a whole essay about it.’

‘Yeah, mate,’ said Garvs, slapping his leg with the paper and staring out the window as they got out of the suburbs and onto the freeway north.

Mac and Garvey had entered the Firm in the same intake and quickly become friends. They’d both gone to big St Joseph’s boarding schools — Mac at Brisbane’s Nudgee, and Garvs at Joey’s in Sydney. They’d played First XV and shared a sense of humour and a love of beer. But on entering ASIS Mac had been singled out to undergo training with the Royal Marines in the United Kingdom while Garvs had moved into Karl Berquist’s office clique — Berquist was the director of assessments who’d recently taken John Gleeson’s old position as deputy director-general.

As their careers advanced, Mac had moved further from the Firm’s centres of power in Canberra and Jakarta, and found himself spending time alone in the field. Some of those deep-cover stints in South-East Asia had made Mac thin-skinned and cranky, prone to accusing his higher-ups of motives that they didn’t always hold. At the same time, Garvs had moved seamlessly up the ASIS tree, always remaining loyal and sensible around the right people. Garvs was now the deputy to Jakarta station chief Martin Atkins, while Mac found himself with a roving commission — technically a ‘manager’, but in reality an officer assigned the tough gigs.

The friendship had shifted and Mac had felt the twinge of disloyalty on a couple of occasions. They could still drink a few beers and watch rugby league, but professionally they were at the point where Garvs would read about Ray Hu’s murder and not say a word about it to Mac. Even when they were sitting together in a cab.

The box of Tic Tacs took the edge off his breath, but Mac was pretty sure the doctor was reading road maps when he shone the flashlight in his eyes. In a medical consulting room at HMAS Harman — the naval comms and intel base on the outskirts of Canberra — they worked through the list, from flexibility and chest sounds to the eye chart and a probing gloved finger.

‘Any medical treatments since your last assessment?’ said the doctor when he’d cleaned up and seated himself.

Mac’s last full medical check-up had taken place ten years earlier at Larrakeyah Base in Darwin, shortly after his operation in East Timor.

‘Yeah, just the usual. Bullet grazes, concussions, broken nose, cracked cheekbone, broken bone in my wrist — all declared,’ said Mac.

Flipping through Mac’s medical file, the doctor nodded amiably at the sheaf of emergency-room discharge sheets, medical-clinic slips and ship-doctor reports that Mac had collected during the past decade. There was even a medical report on US Department of Defense letterhead, which Mac assumed was from an afternoon in Denpasar many years ago.

‘You’ve been in the field for most of your career, Alan — any other visits to a doctor? Any minor treatments you may have overlooked?’

‘I went to the dentist in ’04,’ said Mac. ‘Had all my amalgams removed.’

‘Why?’

‘I wanted white ones,’ said Mac.

Mac had heard about an Israeli technology where they took a snapshot of a person’s dental work which was locked into their databases. Having a dental map allowed intelligence services to track people from satellites, the unique spacing of metal in the mouth apparently creating a traceable electronic signature. Mac had decided a mouthful of non-metallic fillings might be better for him.

‘Let’s have a look,’ said the doctor, pushing Mac’s lower jaw down with his pen and peering in. ‘Where was this done?’

‘Singapore,’ said Mac. ‘At the time I didn’t think about it as medical, but if we’re including —’

‘That’s okay,’ said the doctor. ‘Nothing else? Treatment for substance abuse?’

‘No, doc.’

‘No men’s clinic visits?’

‘Shit,’ said Mac, laughing. ‘The finger in the bum was intimate enough, don’t you think?’

‘You’re forty, Alan — if you’re having problems with your ejaculations…’

Mac held up his hand. ‘No problems with the plumbing, okay?’

‘Good,’ said the doctor, scribbling a note. ‘And nothing else? No psychological services? No psychiatry or other forms of mental-health therapy? Prescriptions, perhaps? Sedatives, anti-anxieties, anti-psychotics?’

The memories flooded back: it was Sumatra 2002, he’d pursued a bunch of Pakistanis suspected of the Kuta bombings, and as the bombers had made their escape they’d kidnapped a young boy and shot his sister, left her for dead in the jungle. That incident had made him feel incompetent, useless and culpable. He had hidden those kids in the jungle when he knew the bombers were about, and they’d done what he’d asked. They were good kids and they were punished for it.

Mac’s voice dropped. ‘I saw a shrink for eight weeks in 2002.’

‘Where?’ said the doctor.

‘Manila — Dr Lydia Weiss, a Canadian. I didn’t declare it.’

‘Why did you see her?’

Mac looked at the eye chart and the plastic skeleton for inspiration but found his gaze returning to the doctor’s face. ‘Some children were hurt during an operation — I felt I hadn’t done enough to protect them.’

‘You blamed yourself?’

‘At a point where I could have covered their interests,’ said Mac, thinking it through, ‘I looked after my own interests. I couldn’t really… well, I couldn’t talk to anyone. You know, I started self-medicating and —’

‘Alcohol?’ said the doctor.

‘Yep.’

‘And once that became a problem, you saw Dr Weiss?’

‘Yep,’ said Mac. ‘I used a false identity.’

‘And you improved?’

‘Yeah. It was good, actually.’

‘Good for you — that all sounds healthy,’ the doctor said, making a quick squiggle and shutting Mac’s file.

Mac sensed a trick. ‘That’s it?’

‘Sure,’ said the doctor, emotionless. It was a joke in the armed forces that to be a naval ship’s doctor, you were first checked to ensure you had no pulse. When everything went to crap on a ship, the doctor had to be as calm as a lizard sunning itself.

‘Okay,’ said Mac.

The doc gave him a sudden smile. ‘You felt terrible about those children, which is a healthy reaction. And when you realised you were drowning those feelings in booze, you found a professional. I have no problem with that, Alan.’

‘But I didn’t declare it,’ said Mac.

‘You have now,’ said the doctor with a wink as he stood. ‘We clear?’

‘Crystal,’ said Mac.