Second Strike

CHAPTER 41

The fl ight was on time and Mac made it through immigration with no problems. Because Singers was one hour behind Surabaya, Mac was walking along the Changi concourse at much the same time as he’d left Indonesia. He felt tired but okay. Having adjusted to being back in the fi eld, he’d replaced emotions with the coldness he liked when he worked.

Emerging into the early evening heat of Singapore, he stood in line for a cab, acting casual but looking for eyes. Along the arrivals apron he saw Bruce Thorn, the friendly Canadian IT executive he’d sat next to on the fl ight, walking behind a chauffeur to a navy blue 7-series. Bruce waved as he dipped down into the BMW and Mac waved back. Mac was pleased to have the SIA computer-generated boarding pass Bruce had left in the pocket in front of his seat. Mac had taken it for later use.

After seven minutes in the taxi queue, Mac got a cab and asked the driver, a guy called Ravi, to take him to the Riau Hotel, a private colonial joint tucked away in Little India.

They got talking and it turned out Ravi was a Tamil. ‘Where you coming from, sah?’ he asked, in a singsong voice.

‘Sydney,’ said Mac.

Ravi wanted to know if Mac knew any of his family, many of whom lived in Sydney. ‘You might be knowing them,’ he insisted, rattling off fi fteen or twenty names.

Mac laughed and went for a soft spot. ‘So, that’s a lot of family to have in another country, mate.’

‘Yes, I am knowing this. It is why for this,’ said Ravi, widening his eyes at the steering wheel. ‘But working, working, and then we can afford.’

‘We?’ asked Mac, interested.

‘Yes, sah. My wife and our two sons and her mother. Working, working -‘

They pulled into a Shell service station and Mac laid it out for Ravi. ‘Champion, would you mind getting me a SingTel pre-paid SIM card?’

‘Hmm,’ said Ravi. ‘But you are needing to register for card, yes sah?’

Flicking him a Singaporean hundred-dollar note, Mac asked nice.

‘You know how it is with foreigners trying to get pre-paid cards these days, Ravi?’

Ravi nodded.

‘I’m only here for two days and I don’t need the hassle.’

It was clear Ravi just wanted to get it done, get driving, get his fare, go do another one. So Mac pulled out his wad of US dollars, peeled off a few and gave them to Ravi. ‘How much is there, mate?’

Wide-eyed, the cabbie counted the notes. ‘There is being fi ve hundred dollars here, sah.’

Mac was using an old spy trick for turning a person, known as

‘white-grey-black’. It entailed starting at white by leading someone in with a legitimate transaction – such as getting a pre-paid. You then introduced them to something semi-legitimate or clandestine, such as getting the pre-paid under a false name, which moved them into the grey zone. And then you tried to move them to black, in this case with a wad of cash for doing something clandestinely. If you’ve committed them to white and grey, they’re likely to go to black.

‘Tell you what, Ravi. Get me a hundred-dollar SingTel pre-paid and we’ll go to the Riau, huh?’

There was a trick to offering money: never promise or suggest an inducement, just put it in their hand or on their desk or in their pocket and allow them to make the decision.

Ravi had a slender, thoughtful face and after briefl y considering what Mac was saying, he lit up like a fl uorescent tube. The money had already found a pocket before he got out of the cab.

Miss Rasmi personally supervised Mac’s welcome at the Riau, taking him to his room on the third fl oor, overlooking the rear tropical garden. Once the porter had done all the work, Miss Rasmi dismissed him and stood there waiting for her tip. A short, wide middle-aged Indian woman, Miss Rasmi ruled the Riau with loud commands that erupted from her lips in a manner reminiscent of a boy pretending to shoot a machine gun.

She got US$300 out of Mac, which had nothing to do with the luggage and everything to do with the fact that he’d checked in as Bruce Thorn and listed his passport number straight off the Canadian’s boarding pass – one of the joys of modern international travel. Miss Rasmi preferred cash payments and she was prepared to log passport numbers rather than make a copy of the actual document. That part was worth two hundred. The other tonne was for Miss Rasmi pretending not to notice Mac’s disguise.

Waiting for her to leave, Mac wandered onto the small stone balcony overlooking the gardens. He input a number on his new SingTel service, pressed the green button, then waited and waited.

Davidson’s phone was ringing out and Mac was very uncomfortable with what that might mean.

He tried another number and after the third ring a man with a smoker’s throat said, ‘Yeah?’

‘Benny!’ said Mac, looking out over Singapore as the sunset dimmed and crickets raised the roof. ‘Are you okay? I’ve been checking hospitals, phoning railway stations -‘

A cackle came from the other end. ‘Christ – fucking McQueen!’

‘I’m in town and I’m thirsty.’

‘Oh man,’ laughed Benny Haskell, ‘you’re still a mad bastard.’

Sipping on a bottle of Carlsberg, Mac surveyed the offi ce – a restored colonial building now housing Benny’s fi rm of accountants and solicitors. It was an enormous space – about the size of fi ve or six standard corporate offi ces – with four ceiling fans high up, old silk rugs on the polished teak fl oors and a desk that looked like something J.P. Morgan would have owned.

Benny peered at his laptop screen over half glasses, his mane of grey hair pushed back like a mad professor’s. Making notes on a legal pad, he alternated between a square terminal to his right and the laptop, into which he’d downloaded Mac’s hard drive of the Alex Grant iDisk.

Now in his mid-fi fties, Benny Haskell was a legend of fi nancial espionage and countering. He was former ASIO, former ASIS and the former head of the Treasury’s special investigations unit. Mac had met Benny in Canberra in the early 1990s, when a bunch of ASIS, ASIO and AFP newbies were being shown the basics of how money laundering worked. It was a fascinating two weeks and Benny quickly became a sort of hero to them. A chartered accountant by trade, he was one of the architects of the AUSTRAC neural net that could track funds transfers between Australia and pretty much anywhere in the world. Now he had a lucrative offshore banking practice in Singapore, creating the kind of banking and fi nancial reporting trails that passed the smell-test with the Australian Taxation Offi ce.

Getting up, Benny wandered over to the French doors and looked out on the Port of Singapore. ‘Can we talk about this, mate?’

Mac tweaked to his tone and sat up in the leather armchair. ‘Ah, yeah. Sure.’

‘So, what’s the background?’ said Benny, sipping on his beer.

Sitting back, Mac went through what he knew: the Bennelong enrichment code, the approach from NIME, the knock-back from EFIC and the fact that the Bennelong deal might have been resurrected under the NIA.

‘That’s where I came in,’ said Mac, thinking about it as he spoke.

‘It was a bit of due diligence, checking end-users – covert but soft.’

‘Okay,’ said Benny. ‘But let’s agree to something, all right?’

Mac nodded.

‘Anything I tell you – anything – stays in this room unless you clear it with me fi rst, okay?’

Mac was silent. That was a big promise.

‘I’m serious, Macca. I don’t need some heavy-breather from the AFP thinking there’s any glory in pinging this little black duck.’

‘Okay – you got it,’ said Mac.

Benny paused, collecting himself. ‘You’re on the right track with Naveed and these companies, Ocean, Desert and Gulf. This is big Paki money and it basically owns NIME. Now it owns the material that these people -‘ He waved his hand around.

‘Bennelong.’

‘Yeah – Bennelong – have sold them. Looking at some of the connections and transfers, it’s Naveed’s old fronts and banks – we see this all the time. Naveed is putting up the money, same as he used to with Khan.’

‘A.Q. Khan?’

‘Any other?’ said Benny, reaching into his pants pocket for his smokes. ‘Naveed has been the banker to the Paki military and ISI for fi fteen, twenty years. Khan’s people used him to fi nance all the nuclear equipment they were on-selling to the North Koreans and Libyans.’

‘Makes sense,’ said Mac.

‘You’d always read about Khan’s hundred-million-dollar deals with Libya or Iraq, but it was Naveed making most of the dough. It’s always the bankers,’ said Benny, lighting the cigarette.

‘So where do I connect Naveed?’ asked Mac.

‘Hmm,’ said Benny, clearly reluctant to get into it. ‘You heard of a bloke called Hassan Ali?’

Mac almost choked on his beer. ‘Yeah, mate – um, that’s why I’m here,’ he spluttered, the acrid suds going up the back of his nose.

‘Really?’ asked Benny, eyes narrowing. ‘Might have told me that, mate.’

‘Sorry, Ben,’ said Mac, shifting his weight. ‘Maybe I didn’t explain properly. My due-diligence partner was shot by the Hassan crew. That’s why I’m a little beyond my initial brief. I’m, um, this is not -‘

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, mate. Soon as I saw the hair and the mo I fi gured you’d gone off-road,’ said Benny, blowing out smoke and moving towards the balcony. There was an ashtray on an outside table but he hesitated before he put his head out, casing the buildings beside the colonial building. ‘Weren’t followed, were you, Macca?’

‘Nah, mate.’

‘I’m serious,’ snapped Benny, stubbing his smoke. ‘Were you followed?”

Mac shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Because we got a little problem here, mate,’ said Benny, grabbing at another smoke and lighting it. ‘Not wired?’

Mac shook his head, took a shallow sip of the Carlsberg. ‘What’s up, Benny?’

‘Mate, six years ago I was asked to do some basic fi nancial sleuthing for Malaysian military intelligence, right?’

Mac nodded.

‘They’re on top of this JI wanker, Abu Samir, and there’s been some chatter – one of their informers is saying that something’s up.

Something big is about to happen.’

‘Six years ago?’ asked Mac. ‘You mean October ‘02?’

‘That’s the one. We did a few searches, found some medium-sized but regular transfers coming from an al-Qaeda front company in Dubai called Headlight Industry and going into a couple of JI accounts at the Dominion.’

Mac thought it through: in the early 2000s, the major Jemaah Islamiyah bombers – Samir, Top and Hambali – were living in Malaysia, lying low after Suharto’s people declared war on Islamic extremists. But they were still on the drip-feed from OBL via accounts at Dominion Bank of Singapore.

‘Anyway,’ said Benny, ‘I told the Malaysians this and we managed to trace back the JI company accounts and fi nd some of the bankers and businessmen who were the fronts for Samir, Top and Hambali.’

Benny paused. ‘But I was nosey. A lot of people trying to move money around the world – you remember I told you this in Canberra?

– will create several company names that are almost, but not exactly, the same and with sequential account ID numbers. They create shadows.’

‘So that,’ Mac picked up the thread, ‘when investigators run searches looking for a match on an account number or account name, the computer might list the shadows, but when a human eye is looking down thousands of lines of names or numbers, it subconsciously discards the ones that aren’t quite right. I remember you said that as far as computers go, the human brain is almost too good.’

‘Correct,’ said Benny. ‘So I went back over my lists and looked for shadow Headlight accounts and numbers.’

‘And?’ Mac fi nished his beer.

‘I found a Headlight Industrie – with an ie, not a y – and the same account number but one digit changed.’

‘So, this was al-Qaeda?’

‘Sure was, except they were paying a lot more money than the Samir transactions.’

‘How much?’

‘Ten million US.’

Mac whistled.

‘Yeah,’ said Benny, ‘and it was landing in a Cook Islands bank account for a mob called Desert Enterprises.’

‘Naveed?’

‘Well, from what you brought me tonight, I think we can say that Desert is a joint venture between Naveed and Hassan.’

‘The money guy and the ops guy.’

‘That’s it. The thing about that ten million back in ‘02? It landed exactly ten days before the Sari and Paddy’s were bombed.’

‘Shit,’ said Mac, his pulse starting to race.

‘Yeah – I’ll never forget it. We had – the Malaysians had – the information but didn’t know what to do with it. Too much of that Konfrontasi bullshit, if you ask me.’

Mac nodded, aware of the enmity between the Malaysian and Indonesian intelligence services. ‘So, NIME?’

‘Oh, sorry,’ said Benny fl icking his cigarette out the window. ‘That channel between Headlight Industrie and Desert was only ever used once. For the ten mill.’

‘Okay.’

‘Until last night.’

Mac stared at him, a hammer knocking in his temples.

‘How much?’ asked Mac.

‘Thirteen million US. I’d call that an infl ation dividend,’ mused Benny.

‘Which means?’

‘Which means whatever Hassan sold the rag-heads last time, he’s probably done it again.’