Golden Serpent

CHAPTER 16

Garvs left before fi nishing the last beer, the farewells were hollow.

Looking around the Lagerhaus, Mac thought about old times, thought about mates, thought about another drink. A hand waved from the bar. Keith, pointing down at the taps. Mac gave thumbs-up, thought, What the hell: last time in Jakkers with a false passport, I may as well go out with a king-size hangover. A real Barry Crocker.

He grabbed the Nokia, fi red it up as Keith approached with two steins in one hand. Mac pegged him as similar to himself: a small-town bloke who hadn’t been quite good enough to play footy for a living, so he’d had to fi nd something useful to do with himself.

Keith plonked down, slid the Becks over. Put out a hand: ‘Keith Cavanaugh.’

They shook, keeping it soft.

‘Richard Davis.’

They chatted, Keith had some stuff to get off his chest: like how do you stop the sex-slavers with all these Aussies and Yanks arriving with their hard currency and willing to pay a thousand dollars to rape a child? How was a mere cop from Victoria supposed to tear down the police, military and politicians who were either behind the trade or protecting it?

Keith kept shaking his head, not in a good way. Some of the stuff he’d been exposed to was well beyond how they did it in the Mallee. He had a fi ancee, but working up here was putting him off having kids.

Keith wanted to talk about ‘this thing’ that had gone pear-shaped.

Mac knew about the Lombok incident, even though Keith only alluded to it. In August a combined AFP-FBI-POLRI transnational sexual servitude taskforce had fi nally cornered a gang of child slavers in an old factory. The Aussie and American cops had only got that far because of the amount of information they’d kept from their POLRI colleagues.

In the last hours before the planned raid, the slavers were tipped off. When the Aussies and Yanks got there, the place was already ablaze, destroyed, the ‘evidence’ with it. The evidence in this case was an estimated eighty-three children, both genders, ages ranging from four to twelve.

Mac only knew how distressing it had been for the cops because his friend Jenny Toohey had described fi nding a dumpster behind the factory. It was fi lled with soft toys.

Women cops had an ability to turn that sort of thing into a stronger resolve to catch the bastards. Men found it much harder for some reason; hit the piss, got depressed, didn’t see out their rotation.

Jenny had been up here for years. She was one tough girl.

‘Take it easy, champ,’ Mac said as Keith shook and left to get back to his boys. He’d bet Keith already had an application in for stress leave. This just wasn’t his go.

Mac leaned back, had another look at the Nokia. Three messages: the fi rst two from Garvs – offi ce shit.

The last had been left little more than an hour ago.

Diane!

His heart raced as he listened, fl ustered. Diane was in Jakarta, staying with her dad at the British compound. Had some big client to schmooze. Mac smiled, he could have listened to that voice for hours.

Then came the clincher. ‘Richard, I didn’t hear back from you about my, er, message. Did you get it? I’ll be back on Thursday – can we talk then? We could go for a drink, right darling?’

Relief poured through Mac and he laughed at the ceiling – he adored the way she called him ‘darling’.

Mac tried to sober up. Diane thought he was in Sydney. He’d surprise her, but not now. He had no idea who was sitting at what listening posts.

He ordered a coffee, asked for Saba. The bar manager came over, went to a phone, came back, pointed at a small CCTV camera up near where the Glenfi ddich and Grey Goose lived. Mac looked at it for four seconds. Looked away.

Sipping on the coffee, Mac waited. Saba’s bodyguard came to the entry of the toilet corridor wearing a white trop shirt that didn’t hide the gun bulge as well as his last ensemble. He looked around slowly, glanced briefl y at Mac, fl icked his head very slightly.

Mac moved to the corridor and down to the security door. Took the pat-down and scraping behind the ears. They walked into the offi ce, out through the door that Sawtell had walked through fi ve days earlier.

The room they entered looked like a store for booze and snacks.

It was cool, musty. Behind piles of cartons the bodyguard opened a security door using a key from a retractable key chain and hit the fl uorescent lights. There were a dozen black strongboxes bolted to the wall, each one the size of a mid-range TV set. The bodyguard made straight for the one marked 9, pulled out his key chain again, rattled through some keys and opened the box. Then he walked outside, standing where he could see Mac. He snarled slightly, reminding Mac of the small detail: this guy’s uglier brother was a professional cage fi ghter in Manila.

Mac slid out the drawer on its rails, lifted the lid which was hinged at the rear of the drawer. In the box was a typical assortment of passports, drivers’ licences, credit cards and guns. There was also a clear plastic seal-lock bag fi lled with cash. He grabbed the pile of Singapore dollars, and gave it a quick fan. He reckoned maybe three thousand. Trousered it. He grabbed a third of his rupiah, stashed that too.

The passports, drivers’ licences and credit cards were strapped into single units, held together lengthwise with rubber bands. He picked up one. The rubber band held a small stack of cards in the name of Brandon Collier, Vice president, Sales, Orion Forestry Consulting (Aust.). There was a passport, a NSW driver’s licence and a Visa card.

Mac had always worked under two main identities in this part of the world, but this was not one of them. He’d never used Collier as a name and the Service didn’t know it existed. Most people in his business had some sort of fail-safe identity and credit card. Some had their ‘pensions’ stashed in credit card accounts under these names, which ran out of banks in the Cook Islands or Fiji.

Mac didn’t have a ‘pension’. What he had was a valid incorporation of Orion Forestry Consulting in Singapore, with a DBS business Visa card in the name of Collier and Orion. The bank account was legit, so was the company. An old associate of his – Benny Haskell – had done the incorporation. Benny was one of the accountants who worked on the original incarnation of AUSTRAC, the Australian federal government’s money-tracking neural-net. Now he had a thriving banking-domicile practice, with an Australian solicitor, in Singapore.

Benny had spruiked the taxation benefi ts of incorporating in Singers but Mac had just wanted the banking secrecy laws. Besides, when his days with the Service were done, forestry consulting might be his fallback gig. There was certainly enough work to go around if things didn’t work out as a university lecturer.

He trousered the whole bundle, went to another bundle and pulled out a laminated ID card. It was an Australian Customs Service ID in the name of Richard Davis, allowing him access to bond stores and restricted parts of airports and container ports.

Picking a black toilet bag out of the bin, he motioned with his hand to the bodyguard. The guy swaggered over.

‘The Heckler, thanks, champ. Plus a clip,’ said Mac.

The bodyguard pulled out the Heckler amp; Koch P9S in the black nylon hip rig. Picked up one clip.

‘Can you load it?’ asked Mac.

The bodyguard sneered, handed Mac the clip. Mac loaded it himself from the box of Winchester. 45s in the bin. In Saba’s bar only one person ever touched a fi rearm, and that was Saba’s bodyguard. Mac wouldn’t get his Heckler until he was standing in the back alley.

Mac stood on the back steps, unzipped the black toilet bag. The bodyguard put the Heckler in it, looked left and right, stood back and shut the door.

Mac walked the blocks to the Aussie compound. He had a mild sense of being followed but it felt like light surveillance. Felt like Garvey doing something for Mac’s own safety.

A knock sounded at the door at 2.15 am. Mac was showered, shaved and had only a mid-sized hangover. It was Garvey’s lackey, a bloke called Matt. They piled into a red Commodore, hit the airport freeway.

Matt was about thirty, tall, Anglo, educated. He was confi dent without being full of himself – a good lad to put on Mac’s case. Mac wondered if he had someone on the plane with him, or another tail waiting at Singers. Wondered if Garvs was just testing Matt, to see if he had the ticker.

They parked in the consular annexe of Soekarno-Hatta, went through the consular security clearance and into the consular ticketing for Qantas. The girl behind the counter was a pretty local and Mac hammed it up with a back injury, trying to get an upgrade to Singers.

The federal government had an eight-hour policy for travelling business class: you fl ew under that and you fl ew in the back, unless you were SES. Jakarta-Singers was way under eight hours.

The girl didn’t smile, didn’t react. But she gave him the upgrade.

‘Wish they did that for me,’ said Matt.

They walked into the main concourse. It was 3.20 am but the place was packed. Lines for the Qantas fl ights stretched out of view.

Kids moaned, dragged on their mums’ arms. Other kids snored on top of bags on the trolleys. They passed a group of Aussies with a state hockey team emblem across their cabin luggage. Mac slipped the wink to one of the blokes. ”Zit going, champ?’

Mac walked towards the huge security clearance section that transitioned passengers from the public concourse into immigration and the airline lounges. It stretched the width of the building and looked like a tollgate for humans. POLRI stalked back and forth with the low-hanging peaks on their caps. German shepherds, beagles, metal detector wands. Colt M4 carbines hanging across their chests.

Mac made a note of the M4. The Indon government’s anti-terrorism unit, Delta 88, had been equipped by the US government with fl ash new toys such as the M4 assault rifl e and Mac was glad to see they were actually being deployed rather than sold on by a general with a Ferrari habit.

Mac turned to Matt, shook his hand. ‘Thanks, champ. Let you get back to sleep now, huh?’

Matt smiled. They both knew Matt was going straight back to a listening post where he’d give regular updates to Garvs.

Mac had replaced his wheelie bag with a small black Puma backpack that had been lying in his room. Inside was the Service Nokia and the toilet bag, minus the Heckler. That was in the mail with his ovies and Hi-Tecs, posted from the Australian diplomatic compound by the night manager, Conzo. Conzo was an Indon who Mac had helped out a few times with money after his betting sprees at the Pulo Mas track in North Jakarta had gone awry.

So when Mac gave Conzo a package at midnight and asked him to mail it to Mac’s PO box in Jakarta, Conzo was straight on it. He parcelled it and addressed it, put a franking stamp on it and put it in the mail bag, all the while telling Mac about his latest losing streak at Pulo Mas.

The 38s were too big so Mac asked the shop girl to bring him the bone-coloured chinos in the 36. The girl swung the pants over the change room door. The 36s fi tted. He left them on, along with his new navy blue polo shirt, before heading into the Ralph Lauren shop barefoot. Sitting on a fi tting seat he asked the girl to bring over a pair of dark brown boat shoes – size 10. Asked for a couple of pairs of socks and got a brown leather belt.

It all fi tted, it was all good. Mac asked the girl if she could also hook a pair of dark blue 38 chinos and an XL white cotton Oxford shirt from the racks.

She was quick. He put his backpack in front of him on the counter to shield the transaction, put his blue chinos and white shirt in the pack. His old clothes went into a shop bag. He sauntered out into the giant mall that Soekarno-Hatta had become and walked straight up to his tail, an Aussie Vietnamese girl in a red Nike T-shirt, blue jeans and runners who was pretending to read the Economist.

Mac sat down beside her. She was mid-twenties, just learning her stuff. ‘Don’t tell me – too smart for the federal cops, too good-looking for the diplomats, huh?’ he said.

She looked up from the magazine, said, ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The spying thing? Thought about the cops, thought about foreign service, but settled on this. Can make a real difference, right?’

The girl feigned confusion. She was good at it. ‘Umm, sorry – think you got the wrong person.’

She had a nice voice. Low register, good long vowels. Smart but sensitive.

‘Your mum doesn’t get it, right? You can’t tell her what you do, but you can’t get engaged to that lawyer she’s lined you up with. Holy shit! Not the lawyer.’

Mac was going for the mum connection. When he’d fi rst seen her he’d noticed a slight pronation of the left ankle. In gait psychogenics the Israelis would say she had an ongoing dispute with her mother.

Mac guessed it was to do with having some bullshit corporate cover yet a total lack of interest in suits.

The girl turned to him slightly, said, ‘Like I told you, mister, you got the wrong person.’

Mac was almost there. ‘By the way, the worst thing you can do in this business if you’re a girl? Sleep with a colleague. Doesn’t matter how profound it was, the blokes will call you a slut.’

Mac let it hang. He waited. Waited. The girl looked into the distance, she turned back. ‘Like I said…’

She trailed off. Looked away.

Mac shook his head. ‘Even if he said he loved you.’

He watched her eyes refocusing.

‘Wasn’t Matt was it?’

She kept looking away.

‘Okay,’ said Mac. ‘Gimme the mic. I’ll have a chat to the bloke.’

He pretended to be going for the ear device that Mac was guessing was hidden by her hair. The girl pulled back, put her hand to her ear.

Bingo!

‘Don’t worry,’ said Mac. ‘I’ll tell him what’s what.’

The girl was on her feet. ‘Like I said, sir, I think you have the wrong girl.’

She picked up a blue backpack and walked away. He watched her walk across the mall area, down past the Gucci and Vuitton stores, along the cafes and up to the toilets. She looked into shop window refl ections to check on him, then she disappeared into the ladies.

Mac had one minute before she fi nished her conversation with Matt, was yelled at for losing eyes, and then came back out.

Mac turned, unzipped his backpack and took out the Nokia, while heading across to a Swiss watch emporium where the hockey players were ogling the price tags. He had a look at something that cost $5200, looked closer, dropped his clothes bag, bent to pick it up and deposited his Nokia in a mesh water bottle holder that sat on the side of one of the hockey boys’ bags.

Had another look at the $5200 watch – was happy he had a G-Shock habit.

Scooting over to a garbage bin, he dumped his old clothes out of the plastic shopping bag, put his backpack in the bag, then sat back down where he’d been with the girl.

The conversation he’d had with Garvs the night before was too pat. His one-time friend had made a point of giving the Nokia back to him, which Mac took to be a decoy gesture – it meant Garvs was going to microdot Mac’s clothes. Microdots were the size of a very small bindi and they stuck to clothes just as easily. You couldn’t guarantee you’d get conversations off one but they were a great location device.

The good thing about them was you could place them on a person by touching them on the sleeve or patting them on the back.

Now Garvs was going to be tracking Mac to the local dump.

The girl came back into sight. Mac’s fl ight was called. He stood, walked past her, winked. Smiled. Stopped.

‘The worst thing about spooks?’

The girl said, ‘What?’

‘All twenty-second wonders, mate. Are they coming? Are they going? Who can tell?’

He thought he saw a smirk, made a wiggling sign with his little fi nger as he moved off.

The girl laughed, looked away.

Good-looking bird, thought Mac. Shame about the circumstances.

He reached immigration at Changi at about fi ve-thirty am. He’d made a point of changing his ticket from a transit to a stopover from the public phone at the Lagerhaus. Matt would have checked – would have known. He moved through the arrivals lounge looking for the tail and found it easily: early thirties Chinese-Aussie, white short-sleeved business shirt, black slacks, paper under his arm, pretending to talk into a mobile phone. The bloke wasn’t too bad.

Mac moved straight to the gents, the shop bag now in his backpack. Getting into the last booth, he pulled the shop bag and the toilet bag out of his pack, put them on the toilet seat. Then he stripped off his shirt and stashed it in the pack, unzipped the toilet bag and pulled out its contents: passport, driver’s licence, credit card, business cards, Customs ID. Pulled out more: three unmarked screw-top jars, a travel pack of Wet Ones, a pair of owl-eye spectacles, a rolled-up dark neck tie, a black plastic hair comb and what looked like a red plastic compass box of the type a student would have for geometry class.

He went to work rubbing the contents of the small jar around on his hands, smoothing it through his hair; forward, back and both sides. Next, he combed his hair, giving it a left parting. Opening the compass box he pulled out a dark, hairy mo and a tube of theatre make-up glue. Squeezing the glue onto the back of the mo, he rubbed it with the tip of his index fi nger and then pressed the mo down across his top lip.

He put on the specs, changed into the size 38 trousers, used the Wet Ones to wipe around his neck and hands, which were covered in black residue.

He put on the too-large shirt, buttoned up and put on the tie.

The spare clothes and Richard Davis ID went into the backpack. The jars and containers went into the toilet bag, apart from one of the unopened jars. The toilet bag went into the backpack. The backpack went into the shop bag. He took his shoes off, put a coin in each, face down. Put the shoes on again, picked up the shop bag and moved into the washroom area. There was one last thing. Pulling a dark contact lens from the jar, he put it in fi rst go. He hated the sensation. Did the other. He was lucky: his pale eyes and blond hair were such beacons in South-East Asia that changing them to dark rendered him almost invisible. He hoped.

He hadn’t been more than seventy seconds in the booth. Someone moved quickly to take his place.

He examined himself critically in the mirror, hoping he had at least two more minutes before the tail wandered in. This was the moment of truth: he pretty much matched the photo on his driver’s licence and passport. He was now Brandon Collier – a dark-haired, spectacled bloke whose baggy clothes were hiding a pudgy body.

The coins would alter his gait slightly, and gait was a more powerful identifi er to the human brain than just about anything else.

He went out the door, the coins in his shoes making him walk upright and jerky. The Collier character, Mac decided, was confi dent about his nerdiness. So he put a superior smirk on his face and walked down the concourse with his 38 pants giving him an elephant arse. He didn’t look, just walked like a man with all the time in the world.

Mac found the Singapore Airlines ticketing right beside the transit desk. People were yelling and carrying on. Mac got in line behind a Dutchman lecturing his wife. The Dutchman then took his turn lecturing the Singapore girl. He shrugged a lot about what kind of a country this was, had some long story he wanted to tell, with spittle fl ying off his lips in that guttural way the Dutchies speak. His wife nodded a lot.

The SIA girl gave customer service a good name. She smiled and nodded and sent them on their way without them getting what they wanted.

Mac stepped up, put down his passport. ‘Some morning you’re having, huh?’

She smiled. Tired, late thirties, smart. Once pretty, she was now just sexy. Her shift would have started at midnight and she’d be getting all the crazies, the ones who hadn’t slept, or who had fl own in from the West and had no idea what was happening to their circadians.

‘Bloody Austrians,’ said Mac. ‘How rude can you get?’

‘They were Dutch,’ said the girl.

‘Germans, Dutch. All look the same to me, mate,’ said Mac, winking.

She smiled as if she really shouldn’t.

‘You’re not the girl, are you? You know, with the parasol and the geese?’ asked Mac.

She looked confused, then suddenly got it. Smiled big, looked at her screen too intently, looked back. ‘No – I’m not her.’

Mac asked for a one-way to Surabaya.

She asked, ‘Economy?’

Mac nodded.

She shook her head. ‘Economy’s sold out on the 7.35 fl ight.

I can get you on the evening fl ight in economy.’

Mac shook his head. ‘How much is fi rst class?’ he asked, fanning out his Singapore dollars on the counter.

She looked back at the screen, chewed her bottom lip. Said,

‘I think we can do this.’

Mac fl ew fi rst class on an upgrade. The food was great, the leg room was even better, the brand new Airbus was out-fucking-standing. He grabbed a cold orange juice, reclined and had a think about what the hell he was doing. Five days ago he’d had a soul-weary feeling about this profession – just wanted it to be over, get into uni life. He could have walked away that morning, jumped the south-bound fl ight for Sydney, sunk a few cheeky ones, then stretched out in business class and slept all the way into Kingsford Smith. The Service apartment was valid until the end of January so he could have spent some time working out how a mortgage was going to happen. Could have booked into the Coogee Bay Hotel for a couple of nights, lain on the beach, knocked back cold beers, inspected the insides of the eyelids.

Could have spent Christmas with his mum and dad at their retirement home in Airlie; taken up some pressies for his nieces, spoiled them rotten, annoying Virginia big-time.

But Mac wasn’t going home. He was heading back into a potentially ugly situation, partially blind on info and with no Commonwealth backup. A regular boy scout running into a snake pit.

He laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. At some point every bloke turns into his father.

Mac remembered the summer of his last year at UQ. Virginia had just started uni. She came home with a bloke called Miles who she’d been seeing. Mac had seen Miles too. He wore John Lennon glasses and got around in bare feet, beret and a rat’s tail of hair down his back.

He had a ‘Meat is Murder’ T-shirt and a Mao lapel badge on his WWII great coat. Mac had fi rst seen Miles with a megaphone in his face on the vice-chancellor’s steps at the St Lucia campus, banging on about Palestine or Guatemala and saying things like ‘fascist’ and ‘pigs’.

Then Virginia turned up with the bloke, who sat there at Sunday lunch telling Frank how it was with human rights and the corrupt pigs and the brutality against protestors. Frank didn’t say a word.

Finally, Miles challenged him, said, ‘Okay – so why are you a cop?’

Frank looked around, put down his fork, said, ‘Because it needs to get done. ‘Cos most people can’t.’

If Mac was honest about why he ended up in public service when he could have done a lot of other things, it had a lot to do with what Frank had told Miles.

But it hadn’t helped Frank much. The last time Mac had been in Airlie, the federal election was on and Mac was amazed that his father had become a silent voter – a good man trying to disappear beneath the radar while the criminals who would harass him roamed free.

Frank had looked at Mac a bit sheepish after he told Mac. ‘Things sure changed, didn’t they, mate?’ said Frank.

They sure did.

And people like Mac just kept stepping up for it.

They touched down at Juanda airport mid morning. Mac hired a Honda Civic from Avis with the Orion Visa card. If anything was going to come up strange on a neural-net system, it was going to be a car rented on a Visa card that had been issued fi ve years before and never been used. But someone would have to be looking for that. They’d have to realise that the only way for Mac to slip off everyone’s radar would be that he’d assumed a new identity. And when they couldn’t fi nd any fl ags on the IDs they knew of, they’d have to backtrack and go looking for new ones. That’s what Mac would do, but a lot wouldn’t.

And he hoped that the people who were now following him were as hopeless as he used to think they were.

He pulled out of the enormous Juanda rental car parking lot, hit the air-con as the heat started to grip and took the direct feeder on to the Trans-Java Highway.

Then he headed west, for Jakarta.