Second Strike

CHAPTER 36

Exhaustion had crept up on Mac and was taking hold. His vision blurred at the sides and he had that buzzing in his temples, usually a sign for him to call it quits for a few hours. Diane was safe. Carl knew what he was doing and he’d have no problem dropping a bad guy when the time came.

It was more his own safety Mac needed to worry about. Someone on the inside had employed Lempo and his sidekick, got them rostered on to the conference and let them do their surveillance and the hit.

There was also Hassan’s core of actual businesspeople and lawyers present at the signing over of the enrichment codes and navy C and C systems. That’s why Grant and Vitogiannis were so edgy at the evening function and then in their morning meeting: they had the physical CDs or USB plugs, a part of the deal that Mac had seen as a letter in Alex Grant’s iDisk. As soon as Hassan signalled he had everything from the Bennelong transaction, Lempo came in and did the chop.

Diane probably wasn’t supposed to be part of it. But they knew about Mac – they’d sent someone up to look after him and they knew he was in his room.

Before he went to sleep Mac needed to know about the hotel. ‘Fred, can we get any footage on the shooter who went to my room?’

Freddi asked Fanshaw, who shook his head. ‘Waiter wore a black cap and walked backwards down to your room,’ said Freddi, tired too.

‘He knocks on door, no one answer and he give up. Nothing there.’

Mac looked into Freddi’s eyes. They had shared a lot in Sumatra but they were still members of rival intelligence outfi ts. Mac wanted more. ‘Fred, someone in this hotel was working for Hassan on the inside.’

‘You get some sleep, McQueen – leave that to us.’

‘Mate, my colleague is in a hospital bed under guard. And I can’t stay at this hotel until I know there’s no one coming for me.’

Freddi chewed his gum slowly.

‘Besides, Fred,’ said Mac, lowering his voice, ‘I’m not going to hang around getting in your way – I’m going out to fi nd these pricks, understand?’

Freddi sighed, resigned. ‘Okay, McQueen. But I do all the talking, okay?’

The elevator opened at B2 and Mac walked behind Freddi down a green lino-clad corridor with bad fl uorescent lighting. From somewhere they could hear yells and thumps, as if there was a volleyball game in progress. They pushed through a swing door and walked into a smoky room with three BAIS guys in it, all staring through glass at an unconscious man in another room, tied to a bolted-down chair, his shirt missing and layers of dried and wet blood down his face and chest.

Mac recognised one of the BAIS guys: Ishi Yusgiantoro, one of the top domestic operations people in Indonesian intelligence and a former commander in Kopassus’s Group 4. Ishi had done some nasty work in East Timor in ‘99. Now in his mid-fi fties, he looked as tired as Mac felt. Ishi listened to Freddi explain what Mac was doing down in the heart of BAIS, then slowly turned to Mac, eyes sceptical.

‘McQueen?’ he asked.

‘Alan McQueen,’ Mac answered, hand extended. ‘ Apa kabar? ‘

There was a two-second silence, then Ishi shook Mac’s hand, smiled and they all started laughing, even Mac. It wasn’t every day that an Anglo working in Indonesia bothered to say g’day in the local tongue.

As the laughter died, a BAIS guy sitting on the bench table said something to Freddi, and they laughed again.

Mac gave Freddi a look.

‘He say, It true – he crazy,’ said Freddi.

Ishi pulled a pack of smokes from his pants pocket and pointed through the glass. ‘He work at Lar – okay?’

‘The inside guy?’ asked Mac, staring at the man in the interrogation room.

Ishi nodded as he lit up and took his fi rst drag. ‘He say he only feed information for money. Don’t know who they are. We check phone log – pre-pay phone.’

‘How did he get paid?’ asked Mac.

‘Cash, US dollar,’ said Ishi, dragging on his smoke. ‘He met at river three time; fi rst two, just young businessman.’

Ishi clicked his fi ngers and the man on the table brought a fi le over.

‘This is Lempo,’ said Ishi, handing over the black and white surveillance photo. ‘Taken in Cairo fi ve month ago.’

Lempo was a good-looking citizen of the world, sitting in a cafe in his white shirt and aviator sunnies. A middle-class hit man.

‘He in ISI, then he not. Then he in Pakistan army, then he not. Then he working for Khan, then Khan is stopped,’ said Ishi and shrugged.

‘What’s he doing now?’ asked Mac, the fatigue pulsing behind his eyeballs.

‘Khan been stopped,’ speculated Ishi, sucking on the smoke, ‘and Lempo and Hassan building own nuclear market now, yeah? Master retire, student now boss.’

Mac nodded. ‘What about the third meeting?’

Ishi pulled out another surveillance pic: a computer-enhanced black and white still from a security video. It showed a thick-set Pakistani man standing at a counter, his enormous shoulders and neck crowned by a big helmet of black hair. Mac’s skin crawled.

‘Mohammad Ali Shareef,’ said Ishi.

‘Gorilla,’ Mac mumbled.

‘ Benar,’ said Ishi, before adjusting back to English. ‘Yes, you’re right. Our man in there say he got Lempo and the other one their waiter jobs, but he don’t want to feed desk information. So they send Gorilla, and our man change mind.’

‘Where were they staying?’

Ishi looked at him, then yelled something at his crew. A man with his feet on the table leapt up and walked out a door on the left side of the room. Through the glass Mac saw the BAIS operative approach the unconscious hotel worker and kick him hard in the right kneecap.

The hotel guy woke up screaming, his voice squawking out through the speaker system. The sounds bounced back and forth, the hotel guy crying and begging while the BAIS guy hectored, slapped and threatened to punch.

After two minutes the sounds died away and Freddi turned to Mac. ‘Good call, McQueen.’

‘Why?’

‘One of Lempo’s gang dropped a matchbox when he lighting cigarette,’ said Freddi. ‘Our man pick it up – they were staying at the Galaxy Hotel.’

It took a little less than an hour for the Indonesian counter-terrorist police – D-88 – to clear the Galaxy Hotel for booby traps, trip lines and pressure pads. Mac stood with Freddi and Ishi behind the BAIS

LandCruiser while the guests milled around on the street, a side-feeder to the boulevard of Diponegoro. It was 3.06 am and Mac yawned as the D-88 captain approached Ishi, the visor on his black helmet pushed up. They swapped words and Ishi moved towards the Galaxy, Freddi and Mac following in his wake.

The D-88 captain, who smelled of stress and Old Spice, said nothing on their ride to the seventh fl oor. Getting out, they moved down a narrow corridor with walls that needed new wallpaper before stopping at a room with the door open. Inside were two single beds, a door to the toilet/shower area and a window looking over the night lights of Jakkers. Some of the carpet had been pulled up and inexpertly put back; there were gouges in the plasterboard under the light switches where the D-88 debuggers had checked for any nasties that might be lurking. The intensity of the IED-driven confl icts in Afghanistan and Iraq had bred paranoia in the Americans. And given that D-88 was American-trained and equipped, Mac wasn’t surprised that this was how they treated a terrorist lair.

They wandered around the room, which looked clean. Mac did the fi rst thing he always did and went straight for the rubbish bin, picking up and checking the dark green metal container. They stripped the beds, fl ipped over the mattresses, went through every drawer, lifted the cistern lid on the lav and had a nosey-poke behind the TV.

They looked at one another, shrugged.

They had similar luck in the next three rooms. They’d already been cleaned out, by people who knew to hide the same things that Mac and Freddi were looking for.

Mac was close to calling it a night. The shooting was now a police matter. Hassan’s gang had their pictures all over the POLRI, customs and port authority systems – and Mac couldn’t do much more. If tomorrow brought more information, then people like Freddi and Mac were more likely to be anticipating Hassan’s next move than catching him. Mac also had the feeling that Davidson was about to pull him out – Mac’s assignment was economic and contracted and the ASIS hard-heads in Jakkers would probably take over.

In the last room they checked, Mac noticed one of the beds – it didn’t look right. He slid it away from the wall, sending a cockroach scurrying up the wall. Searching around the bedhead Mac found a small white notepad from the Danau Toba International hotel. Freddi snapped on a latex glove and picked it up by the corner. There was nothing written on it but Freddi turned it into the light and it seemed likely the BAIS techies would fi nd latent writing on the pages.

‘I’ll get this down to the guys,’ said Freddi. ‘Might be useful.’

Mac nodded, but his mind was spinning back into the past, into a place of terror. The Danau Toba was in Medan, northern Sumatra.