Second Strike

CHAPTER 26

Finding himself a rear bulkhead seat on the southbound AirTrain, Mac pulled out the fi le that Davidson had slipped into his document satchel in the Qantas lounge. The operation was called Mainstreet and his cover would be Richard Davis, his old textbook salesman identity, only this time he’d be spruiking himself as a former EFIC operative who could make things happen in Canberra.

Mac fl ipped through the business cards. His fi rm was Davis Associates and the landline routed to the ASIS front of Southern Scholastic Books in Sydney, while the mobile number went directly to the Commonwealth secure SIM that Davidson had included in his starter pack. There was a new Commonwealth Bank Visa credit card issued in Richard Davis’s name, a printout confi rming his booking at the Shangri-La and a folder of business-class tickets for Emirates, the eight pm fl ight that night. The tickets suggested Davidson had intended to apply time pressure, not give him time to equivocate, and, more importantly, not allow Jen to kick up a fuss.

There were people at the end of his carriage but no one was interested in him, so Mac pulled out the dossiers and had a quick look. The Bennelong folder had a brief history of the fi rm. As Davidson had said, it had grown out of Melbourne defence contractor Thomas Technology, changing its name to Bennelong Systems in 1999 when it shifted to Sydney.

The two principals of Bennelong were Alex Grant, a former engineer in the RAAF who had done business studies at MIT Sloan, gone to work for Betnell’s Australian arm and then been part of the management buy-out in 1992. Partnering him was Michael Vitogiannis, a former head of sales and marketing at IBM Australia and the owner of a venture capital fi rm called Vitogiannis Partners.

Vitogiannis had bought into Grant’s fi rm, they’d renamed it Bennelong and marketed it as a builder and manager of industrial control systems, especially for the power-generation industry. They had been successful in Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Malaysia as one of the technology partners in various consortia.

It looked like a classic technology company: one guy the genius with the nuts and bolts, the other partner is the schmoozer, door-opener and fi nance guy. The pics confi rmed the story. Alex Grant was in his early sixties, conservative, looked like a Presbyterian elder and had an open, intelligent smile. About fi fteen years younger, Vitogiannis was sleek, tanned, with the eyes of a rule-breaker.

Clipped to the dossier was a glossy colour brochure for the Powering Asia trade fair and conference in Jakarta. On page four it listed Michael Vitogiannis from Bennelong Systems as one of the panel on ‘Technology and Power Generation’. Mac noticed a small ballpoint mark next to the Vitogiannis listing. He’d have to have a word with Davidson about that; intelligence professionals should never mark a document – it made the workload for people like Mac that much easier. At the back of the brochure Mac found the ‘pick your package’ section for delegates wanting to stay at the offi cial conference hotel, the Jakarta Shangri-La.

Another dossier named the power-station builders as NIME

Energy and listed the three principals: the managing director, the company secretary and chief engineer. The names meant nothing to Mac. They looked like a bunch of Jakarta lawyers recruited to pose for a meaningless corporate photo. NIME hadn’t actually built a power station, didn’t own one and seemed to have few credentials.

Clippings from Tempo and AsiaWeek quoted the managing director, Ramsi Numberi, as claiming that NIME had options on seven power-station sites in Indonesia and Malaysia, but Mac saw there were no solid commitments to build and no timelines. A decent-sized coal-burning, base-load power station took up to seven years to build from scratch, and you wouldn’t get much change out of AUD$1 billion.

It wasn’t an enterprise for amateurs. The reporter from Tempo surmised that NIME was a front for Golkar’s way of doing business and that the President’s fi ght against KKN – corruption, collusion, nepotism

– was being scuttled by consortia backed by banks and private-equity funds.

Davidson had left it to Mac to do it his way, though in his basic outline he’d suggested that Mac not try to infi ltrate NIME directly.

Instead, he’d recommended getting close to Bennelong to see what they were hoping to achieve and what they knew about NIME. Use Bennelong as the Trojan Horse for NIME.

In order to make the arrival of Richard Davis a serendipitous event, Mac had suggested to Davidson that word be passed informally to Bennelong’s people that the NIA application was not going to be straightforward and would probably need some massaging. Davidson had smiled at that, since it was a ploy he’d already instigated.

As Davidson’s fl ight was called, and Mac stood to go, his old boss had made one fi nal point. ‘Oh, and Macca – this Vitogiannis is a ladies’ man, right?’

Mac shrugged. ‘Sure.’

‘So I thought we’d put a soft edge on it, okay?’

Mac had waited. A soft edge was an informal or social prop that an intelligence operative used to make a target more relaxed, to get their guard down and make the intel guy seem more human, more empathetic. Humanising yourself with a family or by using a humanitarian cover were the common ones.

‘Yeah,’ said Davidson, ‘so I want you to do this Fred-and-Wilma, right? It’s a conference, and blokes take their wives to conferences, fair enough?’

The AirTrain slowed as it approached Robina station. It had been a long time since Mac had worked in a husband-and-wife intel team, but he seemed to remember that when it worked, it worked very well.

He had no problem with it, but he knew someone who might.

Mac wiped the knives and forks before he put them in the cutlery drawer, humming to ‘Let it Be’ on the radio. Afternoon sun was streaming into the kitchen and the house had an eerie quiet to it now that Rachel was sleeping.

Jenny walked in and switched off the radio, put her weight onto her right hip and crossed her arms. Never a good sign.

‘So, Macca, what did he say?’

‘Gig up north, routine stuff,’ said Mac, trying to keep the tension out of his voice. Jen had never asked him for the full rundown on what he did for money and he’d repaid her by never mentioning it. There was no reason to tell anyone, let alone a cop, what Davidson had been talking about. Cops gossiped worse than any other profession Mac could think of.

Jenny pushed her hip up against the kitchen bench, fi xed him with a steady look. ‘Anything I should know?’

Mac kept wiping and stowing cutlery, sensing that this might not end well. ‘Nah, mate, no worries.’

‘How long?’

‘Two weeks, max.’

‘Anyone have an excuse to shoot at you?’

‘ Jen! ‘ he spluttered, dropping the handful of knives in the drawer, and reaching out to touch the wooden chopping board three times.

‘Just asking,’ said Jen.

He looked out the window, exhaling through his teeth, thinking about that job at the University of Sydney and whether the travelling had really been so bad. He could have stuck it out, eased himself into the civvie world and disappeared from his former life. He was thirty-eight, he loved Jen and Rachel, but he couldn’t retire from his profession any more than Davidson could. Now he was going back into the fi eld. He was strangely emotional about the whole thing, and he didn’t like feeling that way before a job – he liked to be cold, focused.

‘Look,’ said Mac. ‘Say the word and I’ll pull out.’

‘No, I’m sweet, if you are. And we could do with the money,’ she said, raising an eyebrow and cocking her head.

‘Ten thousand a week and expenses,’ said Mac.

‘Happy with that?’

‘It’s a start.’

Jenny smiled, moved to him, put her forearms around his neck.

‘Happy with the crew?’

Mac shrugged.

‘Know them?’ asked Jenny.

‘There’s one, and no, I don’t.’

‘Trust him?’

The old Macca could have batted that one away in his sleep. But he didn’t. ‘Actually, she’s a she,’ he said, looking into Jenny’s dark eyes.

Mac had spent all of his career trying to read voices, bodies, clothes and faces. He noticed how people answered the phone, how they said ‘thank you’ and how quickly the sides of their mouths dropped after they’d stopped smiling. It all helped. He’d even found that taking a few minutes to have a nosey-poke through a person’s bookshelf or iPod was a nice access point to who a person really was. If you found JJ Cale, they smoked pot; if you found Marilyn French, they had a disappointment problem; anything by Marcel Proust signifi ed someone who wanted to be seen as ten times smarter than they actually were.

But eyes and women went together like guns and ammo. Even the most poker-faced women found it hard to stop the primal responses being projected through their eyes. Things like suspicion and desire and anger.

Mac watched as Jenny’s eyes fl ashed to super-dark, like an iron curtain had dropped behind the pupils. He tried to rescue it. ‘Listen, Jen -‘

‘Oh, I’m listening, Macca. Don’t worry yourself about that,’ she said, giving him a basic cop stare of the type Mac remembered from his father.

‘Look – it’s nothing,’ said Mac. ‘Just the way they want to run it.’

Jen’s forearms tensed at the sides of Mac’s neck and she nodded facetiously, breath streaming out of her nostrils. ‘Of course it’s not as if it’s the old husband-and-wife cover, right?’

‘Jen -‘

‘So it’s not as if you thought you could slip out and spend two weeks in a hotel room with another bird, and not tell me, right? That wasn’t how it was?’

‘ Jen -‘

‘She married?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Mac.

‘How old?’

‘ Jen! ‘

‘She better looking than me?’

‘Look, I don’t even know who she is -‘

‘Is. She. Better. Looking. Than. Me?’

‘No,’ smiled Mac. ‘She’ll be a dog.’

‘Really?’

‘Totally. She won’t be in the hotel – got a kennel lined up.’

Jenny smiled, softened a bit. Mac put his hands down to her hips.

‘This is what I like, right here,’ he said, grabbing her arse.

Jenny moved in to him and, looking into his eyes, said, ‘You’re a worry, know that, Macca?’

She put her hands behind his head and kissed him. Jenny may have been hard in many respects but she was a nice soft kisser.

‘You’re a beautiful girl,’ murmured Mac as Jenny pressed in closer, kissed him again. It had been a while, what with Rachel and the broken sleep, and Mac felt himself reacting to Jenny’s body. She felt him reacting too, and reached down, squeezed him gently.

Mac moved his hips. Jenny looked into his eyes and said, ‘It’s not as if I don’t trust you.’

‘No,’ mumbled Mac, his mind elsewhere.

‘So just keep thinking with the big head, huh Macca?’

‘Sure,’ said Mac, chuckling.

And then Jen squeezed him way too hard. Mac gasped, doubled over in pain and watched his wife walk away, ponytail swishing.