Second Strike

CHAPTER 28

Silence strained between them. It felt like forever.

She was still beautiful, blonde, lightly tanned, with amazing sapphire eyes and a classic oval face.

Diane broke the stand-off, diving into character with a Daaarling, how are you? as she moved forward into a hug and a kiss. She smelled of expensive body wash and German toothpaste and when she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him into the suite she looked at him in a way that spelled trouble.

Mac kept walking while Diane checked the hallway and then shut the door. He threw his suit bag across the sofa, put the wheelie against the wall and turned as Diane approached him with a smile, her white tank top accentuating her pale eyes. As ever, there was hardly any make-up on Diane’s face and she could still look at him as if she clocked every rude thought he’d ever had and some he hadn’t even thought of yet.

She pointed at the plasma screen TV on the wall and they moved into the bedroom, which had already been female-colonised with a large overnight bag, its contents sprawled across the bed.

‘Hi, darling, gee it’s so good to see you,’ he said with enthusiasm as he looked up at the ceiling.

‘God, Richard, don’t leave me alone again, you hear?’ she said in that plummy, spoiled English-rose accent that Mac had once fallen for.

He pointed to the bed, made a face. Diane smirked, nodded. Then she gave a little squeal. ‘Ouch! Shit, what is wrong with this fucking bed?! Oh my God! It’s a fucking cockroach!’

‘How dare they?’ said Mac, then made a fuss of going into the bathroom. He got the shower running and then made silently for the main door, holding up three fi ngers at Diane. He whisked down the fi re stairs two at a time and came out around the corner from the elevator banks in the retail sub-level of the hotel. Walking to the end of the bars and restaurants, he moved quickly up the guests’ stairs and into the large lobby lounge from the end opposite to the front desk. There was a stack of Asian Wall Street Journal s and, grabbing one, he sat in a club chair that gave him a narrow view through a couple of square marble pillars to the front desk.

Mac checked his civvie watch. He’d given Diane three minutes before she started her prima donna dramatics, and he watched as Steve took a call and winced, nodded a lot and fi nally crooked his fi nger at a junior manager. Diane could be highly persuasive when she wanted something, like a new room.

Mac waited, looking for signs of surveillance. That sign came after Steve was close to putting the phone down. A local man in a suit, about forty, leaned out of the back office and asked Steve something, probably along the lines of, ‘You didn’t give them a new room did you?’

Steve shrugged and the guy in the suit moved out into full view and nodded reluctantly before Steve and the junior manager moved to the elevators with a couple of porter trolleys. Solidly built, the bloke in the suit was Freddi Gardjito. He put his hands on his hips, pissed off, and when his eyes landed on Mac, he smiled thinly, shook his head and headed over to where Mac was sitting.

‘Freddi! How are things, old horse?’ said Mac, standing and shaking hands with Freddi, his old sparring partner from Indonesian intelligence.

‘Shit, McQueen – I thought you were out?’

‘I am.’

Freddi snorted. ‘You’re lending yourself, mite.’

‘Honest, Freddi,’ smiled Mac. ‘Just up for some R amp;R.’

‘In Jakarta?’

‘It’s the clean air, the unhurried atmosphere -‘

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Freddi. ‘Just promise me – no cop and robber, yeah? We’re too old for that now.’

‘Well,’ said Mac, looking around at some of the Powering Asia delegates networking in the lounge, ‘we could start with a room with a bit of privacy, huh Fred?’

‘Not what we got at APEC, McQueen.’

‘Oh, come on, Freddi,’ laughed Mac, knowing what ASIO and ASIS had got up to at the Sydney summit a year earlier. ‘That’s the whole point of APEC, isn’t it?’

Freddi gave him the ‘Don’t bullshit me ‘ look, with the same slow Javanese blink his President couldn’t help but give to condescending foreign leaders. ‘You got a clean room now, okay mite?’

‘Thanks, Fred,’ he said, slapping the other man’s bicep. ‘So what’s the gig for you guys?’

Freddi shrugged, non-committal. ‘You know – UN shit.’

Mac vaguely recalled something in the brochure about the UN.

‘Which one?’

‘UN DESA, the infrastructure guys. They’re funding this conference.’

‘DESA’s a problem?’

‘Well, someone comes in with UN credentials and our government people start talking because they think it’s okay.’ Freddi gave a big shrug, opened his hands at Mac. ‘But maybe not UN. Maybe they our friends, yeah?’

In spy circles, our friends referred to other professionals in the fi eld.

‘At least you’ll have fun following them, eh Fred?’

‘Don’t remind me,’ he said, looking pained. ‘A tour of Jakarta brothels – Meena gonna love that one.’

Mac laughed at the reference to Freddi’s wife. It had been six years since their failed operation in Sumatra and in a strange way he had wanted to debrief with Freddi about the whole affair, get a few things off his chest. Freddi might want to do that too, but it probably wouldn’t happen. The rule amongst male spooks was simple: you erected a wall around your true feelings and you kept it there with smart-alec humour, gee-ups and mind games. Intelligence agencies didn’t recruit people with confessional personalities.

‘Thanks for the room, mate,’ said Mac. ‘Couldn’t send up a comp bottle of wine or something could you? Keep the little lady happy?’

Freddi shook his head and started to walk away. ‘Later, brother.’

‘Thanks, Fred.’

Freddi suddenly stopped and turned. ‘And by the way, McQueen?’

‘Yep?’

‘If you want a clean room, don’t check into the Lar with MI6 agent. Not how it working,’ he said, then stalked off, mumbling into his suit lapel as he moved across the lobby.

They walked along the Ciliwung River, under palms and in front of some of the restaurants that lined Jakarta’s artery in the south and central districts of the city. The further north you walked, the more the Ciliwung turned into a sewer lined with kampungs – the scavenger communities – rather than the nice boardwalks and greenery of the wealthy south. By the time the Ciliwung disgorged into the Java Sea it was black.

Diane was more comfortable with the silences that opened up between them than Mac was. They had been very close two years earlier and Mac had even bought a ring. He had planned to propose to her and everything, in spite of the social gulf between them. Mac was a Rockhampton Catholic boy with a cop dad and a nurse mother.

Diane grew up in British diplomatic residences and had a walk-up entry into Cambridge. The fact that she was an MI6 spy hadn’t been the big revelation; it was the fact she’d been sleeping with a rogue CIA operative called Peter Garrison while she was supposed to be in love with Mac. Garrison had been trying to kill Mac during this overlap, a detail that had gutted Mac at the time. He wondered if Davidson knew about Diane and him.

They found a park bench overlooking the river and under the shade of a palm. Diane crossed her legs and wiggled the red toenails poking out of her dark blue Birkenstock health sandals.

‘Shall we get the crap out of the way fi rst, darling?’ she asked, her eyes hidden behind tortoiseshell Ray-Ban Wayfarers. ‘The conference starts in a few hours.’

Mac sighed. He wanted to recriminate, tell her off, make her feel terrible. But the truth was he was very happy with Jenny, loved Rachel.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘what happened, happened, right?’

‘Right.’

‘But I don’t hate you. In fact I think we can both count ourselves lucky to have got out from under that wacko boyfriend of yours without getting killed,’ he said, smiling.

Diane laughed. ‘Christ, he was wacko, wasn’t he!’

‘Lunatic.’

‘A complete nutter,’ she giggled. ‘Thought he was the world’s greatest lover.’

‘Just ask him – he’ll tell you.’

‘He did enough of that,’ she smiled, then turned to him, getting serious. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t have to be.’

‘I know, but I am sorry,’ she said, looking him in the eye.

They were close enough to kiss and for a split second Mac thought she was going to try it on.

‘Accepted, Wilma, now let’s -‘

‘ Wilma? ‘

‘Yeah – Fred and Wilma.’

Diane was blank.

‘You know, The Flintstones? On TV? Fred and Wilma Flintstone?’

Diane shrugged.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Mac. ‘Let’s work up an approach.’

They went through the basics: Vitogiannis was the pants man and Grant the techie bloke. Mac saw it as a double action. Diane would appeal to Vitogiannis’s vanity, especially his narcissistic vision of himself as a man who could take a wife off a husband. If Mac’s knowledge of that personality type was accurate, Diane could get him big-noting himself without even having to get him into bed.

‘We’re looking for an escalation with this guy. The more you’re impressed by the small shit – like the fact he has a company doing business with NIME – the more he’ll tell you.’

‘What are we looking for?’ asked Diane.

Mac thought about that. ‘Either Vitogiannis has engineered this as a way to legitimately sell that enrichment code to a foreign consortium or he’s being gulled by NIME. I just want to know how much he knows, okay?’

‘Sounds fair,’ said Diane. ‘What about Grant? What’s his key?’

‘He’s an engineer, trained in the RAAF, did his MBA at MIT Sloan,’ said Mac. ‘He’s really thorough and I reckon he’s done some probity work on these NIME guys.’

‘Got a lure?’

‘Canberra has held up the loan guarantee,’ said Mac. ‘And by now the two of them should have got word that the NIA needs some tweaking.’

‘NIA?’

‘National Interest Account. It’s when the politicians override our bureaucrats because they have a businessman they want to look after.’

‘Okay.’

‘Well, yeah. My cover can get them that tweaking.’

‘A lobbyist, right?’

‘That’s it. I think I might persuade Mr Grant to write a bullshit end-user description, so the certifi cate on the eventual loan guarantee looks really strong.’

‘Not a real end-user?’

‘Funny thing about telling lies to governments,’ said Mac. ‘You have to establish where the truth is before you navigate around it.’

Diane smiled, put her chin in her hand. ‘That’s very manipulative for a Rockhampton footballer.’

‘I do my best.’