Second Strike

CHAPTER 49

The Toyota Aurion was new and the air-con worked well. Mac headed north on Highway 1, his backpack next to him on the seat as he slugged water and thought about his next moves. The Tony Davidson puzzle had now turned into a serious headache. With all the other things on his mind, getting hold of the guy hadn’t been his biggest concern. But a controller of Davidson’s experience didn’t simply go off the air, even if he was travelling in Europe or North America, getting more operators on board. Davidson was a believer, and once the wheels started turning he wouldn’t just switch his phone off for three days and he wouldn’t duck a voicemail from an operator who was active, as Mac had been in Jakkers. There was also the voicemail locking out. Mac couldn’t believe it would have stayed that way for three days, not if all Davidson had done was forget his PIN. If he was having phone dramas, his corporate front in Perth would have known and they would have been briefed to deal with Mac.

Having checked the Perth corporate front and Davidson’s mobile when he’d landed in Brisbane, Mac was now going to check out something for himself before he went home. Not a lot of people knew that Davidson had bought a place with his wife, Violet, in Noosa.

For some reason, old spooks from all over the world bought their retirement homes in Noosa, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, about two hours’ drive north of Brisbane. There were blokes from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, United States, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore. Not to mention a lot of Poms. Mac had no idea of the Davidsons’ address, so he would have to extemporise.

The second task was to catch Hassan on his way into Australia, or, if Hassan was already in Australia, fi nd him. He needed more than he had, which was nothing. If his own colleagues in Jakkers wouldn’t come across, then the chances of getting the AFP or Queensland cops interested were very low. Perhaps nil. In fact, Atkins’ decision to fl ick-pass the Hassan project to the Feds seemed strange given there were lots of trails you might follow as an intel guy that would not look at all promising to a cop. It wasn’t a refl ection on policing, it was just that cops had to have a case, and a person to prosecute. Cops had to appeal to lawyers. For an intelligence offi cer, it was more likely to be a situation that was developing, a set of conditions reaching a critical point. Passing intelligence to the AFP or the military was quite normal, mused Mac, what was strange was that Mac hadn’t been asked to write a report that would go to either of those organisations, and he had been excised from the loop, so he wouldn’t be briefi ng anyone.

Which meant it would fall between the cracks. Probably had already.

The turn-off sign for Mooloolaba loomed in green and Mac kept to the left lane. He had an idea for getting more info on Hassan, but it was his third task that was troubling him: telling Jenny about Sarah and integrating her into their lives.

Mac’s pie was hot and greasy and went down nicely as he monitored the shop across the street, a phone dealership specialising in several mobile carriers. Through the shopfront Mac watched the manager, a porky Australian who looked nosey, maybe even familiar.

Just along from Porky’s shop was a Vodafone outlet. Mac could see a blonde beach girl mucking around on the store computer and chewing gum. It was only 10.41 am and this clearly wasn’t rush hour.

Pushing into the Vodafone store, Mac smiled. ‘Hi… Melanie,’ he read off the name-tag, ‘just need a pre-paid starter pack, thanks.’

Waving her hand over her shoulder, Melanie rattled off the cap plans for the phones that were on the wall behind her.

‘That hundred-and-twenty-nine-dollar one, thanks,’ he said, with a wink and a smile.

Melanie rolled her eyes ever so slightly and bent down to the cupboard behind her, slid the door back and came up with a red box.

‘Know how to start it up?’ she asked, chewing furiously.

‘Yeah, sure. Thanks.’

‘That’s a hundred and twenty-nine dollars.’

Mac fi shed out a slab of notes and put down three fi fties and three twenties.

Melanie turned to the laptop on the counter, switched from Solitaire to the customer-ware, looked out on the street and said,

‘Name.’

‘Thorn – Bruce Thorn, no e. ‘

She typed it in and without looking up said, ‘ID?’

Slapping his pockets, he looked behind him, and turned back.

‘Shit, sorry, I think my wife grabbed my wallet to go and get some things…’

He slapped again. ‘Actually, we’ve just got off a fl ight from Singapore and I have a boarding pass with my passport number.’

He put down the boarding pass and pointed to the name and the passport number beside it. ‘That should do it. They just need a register of who I am, right?’

Unfortunately, Melanie wasn’t thick. ‘That’s not ID. You could have picked that up off any plane,’ she said. ‘People leave their boarding passes in those seat pockets all the time.’

The other phone shop was run by Spiro, who was sweating and smiling when Mac walked in from the heat. Mac selected the same pre-paid phone, pulled out the same amount of cash and did the same spiel with his boarding pass. Spiro didn’t fl inch, writing him up and getting him on the phone to the activation call centre right there in his shop. Mac had a new phone within three minutes, a receipt in his new name and, as a reward for good service, Mac also bought two-hundred-dollars worth of pre-paid credit and a car charger for the Nokia.

Capitalism worked best in the owner-operator model.

He took the Marcoola road, amazing views of the South Pacifi c on his right, the sprawl of new housing cutting into the rainforest on his left. These days holiday houses had three toilets, three-car garages and things called media rooms, where people watched third-rate television in fi ve-star luxury.

In the old days, Frank and Pat would take the kids up the coast to Five Rocks at Byfi eld National Park, with a tent and a surfboard, snorkelling masks, fi shing gear, a crate of beer and a few casks of wine.

They’d stay for ten days and never hear a phone or a television. The adults around the camping site would get on the drink and the kids would stay out in the vast sand-dune systems that lined the coast.

Jenny often told Mac to grow up and get with the modern world, but when he saw the look-alike suburban houses they were building on the Queensland coast he wondered how it had become so expensive to enjoy the sea.

Mac took it easy along the coast road, keeping his water intake up and letting the Nokia charge beside him on the passenger seat.

He drove through Coolum, Marcus and then Sunshine Beach, fi nally coming around the point and descending into Noosa. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and Noosa was a beautiful sight: beach on the right, lagoon over on the far left and national park to the north.

He drove down the main drag of Hastings Street and found a park. Crossing the road, he walked into a luxury apartment building at the south end of Hastings and booked a room as Brandon Collier.

The manager, Janice, took his passport and photocopied it but didn’t check the photo. She left him to fi ll in his own details on the register, so he changed his passport number to a 1800 booking number he could see on the desk blotter. Janice wished him a happy stay as she passed the key and told him where he could park the car.

Inside he cracked a VB from the mini-bar, put on some shorts and sat on the patio overlooking Noosa Beach. In a few days the Christmas holidays rush would be on and there’d be no rooms in Noosa for any kind of money. Grabbing a pad from the courtesy writing desk, he wrote a list of names, and then put his old SIM into the new Nokia, transferred the numbers to ‘phone’, before inserting his new Vodafone SIM. Then he went down the list, ringing one number after the other. There was Lloyd at Trade, Jonesy at EFIC, Pete Dury at DFAT and another call to Albany Trading Asia, Davidson’s corporate identity in Perth. No one knew where Davidson was, none had heard from him. Mac made his last two calls to ASIS head offi ce in Canberra and Southern Scholastic Books in Sydney, impersonating Martin Atkins to the receptionists. Nothing. Tony Davidson – ASIS’s former head of operations for the Asia-Pacifi c region – had fallen off the map.

Looking at his G-Shock, Mac decided to call Freddi. Mac had a new, clean phone so if there was any surveillance it would be at Freddi’s end, where BAIS had pretty good security. Freddi answered on the second ring.

‘Hey Freddi – Mac.’

‘What up?’

‘What I wanted to know. How did yesterday pan out in your fi rm?’

‘Just hear back from Australian side – saying no to in-country cooperation on Hassan. So I cleaning up the untidy ends up here, yeah, but no pursuing into Australia.’

‘Any ends you can tell me about Fred? I’m still on this.’

‘Nothing to interest you. I showed you the latents, from Galaxy Hotel pad, yeah?’

‘Um, there was more than one?’

‘Yeah, there was other one, but it bad quality. Techs say only sixty per cent. I’ll send it if you want.’

Reading the apartment company’s fax number from the footer on the writing pad, Mac asked him to address it to Brandon Collier and spelled it for him. ‘Can you let me know when it’s coming, Freddi?’

‘I’ll do it now.’

‘Thanks, Fred. By the way,’ he said as an afterthought, ‘any updates on the plane they were using?’

‘Yeah, POLRI talk to local in Idi and they say white plane with two engine come in from Peninsula at daybreak.’

‘What size?’

‘Five or six circle window down side.’

‘Sounds like a King Air 200.’

‘Think you’re right, McQueen. The local say plane then went back same way twenty minute later.’

‘Back to Malaysia?’ asked Mac.

‘Sure.’

‘What did Malaysian intel or police have to say?’

‘Still waiting to hear. Asked them to check KL and Penang airports too. Especially freight interchanges.’

Mac tried to understand Freddi’s thinking. ‘Airports?’

‘Well it airplane, McQueen. And it got cargo. So it has to land sometime. And if it going onto a truck or into a van or into shipping container, then it go into the freight interchange.’

‘Confi dent?’

‘Yeah, the Malaysians are good. May take a day, but they should tell us something. They know it a device, so they motivated.’

Breathing out, Mac reached for his beer, looked out over the gentle waves hissing on the beach. Whenever Jenny got upset about some of the human-traffi cking intercepts she was trying to effect, it was always the myriad transport options that the traffi ckers and the slavers could use that drove her nuts. Mac had known her to work three days with a total of four hours’ sleep. It was maddening and he was getting a headache just thinking about how many different ways a device the size of a backpack could be brought into Australia, if Australia was even where it was coming.

‘Freddi,’ said Mac, watching a woman with a bathing cap try to bodysurf, ‘looking forward to that latent, and you’ve got my number now, mate, so please keep me in the loop?’

‘Always do, mite, always do.’

The air went quiet between them and Mac broke the awkwardness.

‘Mate, about what you said?’

‘Yeah?’

‘You’re right, it’s not for me to judge you. I’m sorry.’

‘Thanks, Mac,’ said Freddi, putting the harsh Javanese vowel sound into it.

‘Thanks, mate.’

Mac’s last call rang-out and he was about to hang up when a male voice picked up. ‘Yes?’

‘Ari! Fancy a quick polka, you old tart?’

‘McQueen – such nice surprise!’ said Ari.

They talked and Mac fi lled him in as much as he could. Over the past twenty-four hours Mac’s natural reluctance to spill to rival fi rms had ebbed away as his own mob indicated they didn’t want to know.

If the Israelis and Indons were the only ones interested, then Mac wasn’t going to cut them out just to boost his ego. Besides, he needed to stay close to them and that meant showing he had information they needed.

‘Ari, all those years ago I showed you those papers I rescued from the burning building, remember?’

‘Sure,’ said Ari.

‘Well I held one piece of paper back – it had some handwritten scrawls on it. Yesterday I realised the scrawl was shorthand for Mantiqi Four, which is -‘

‘The JI cell for Australia, yes, McQueen? This Fourth Brigade?’

‘That’s it, mate. We think they lifted the device yesterday morning from Idi in Sumatra and fl ew it into Malaysia. If you have any lines into -‘

‘We do, yes. Let me -‘ said Ari, and Mac heard him ask for a pen.

Mac told Ari all he could.

‘You got my number now, Ari, so please let me know what’s going on. I’m down here in Australia and if you hear anything, let me know so I can catch this end, huh?’

‘Sure, and you do same for us, yes?’

Mac agreed and they signed off. Mac fi nished the VB in one slug.

It was time to fi nd Davidson.