Mark Abernethy - Double back

‘Something else?’

‘By the way, the Canadian girl is after you.’

‘Coulda told you that,’ smiled Mac.

‘I’m serious – she’s trying to find you,’ said Bongo.

‘Send her up – and what’s this something else?’

‘Well, actually,’ said Bongo inspecting his thumbnail. ‘It’s more like someone else, but I didn’t have a choice, okay?’

The visitors car park behind the Turismo was shrouded in darkness except for one weak floodlight. Mac felt the still-warm dirt on his bare feet as Bongo opened the boot of the Camry. A pair of panicked brown eyes looked back out of a man’s face, his mouth gagged with shiny grey duct tape, dried blood caked around his ears and eyebrows.

Looking around again for Brimob or soldiers through the vine-covered wire fence, Mac looked back at the man. ‘So this is the cut-out? You sure, mate?’

‘He admitted it.’

‘If you bashed me for long enough, mate, I’d admit to having a thing for Elton John, okay?’

Raising his eyebrows, Bongo nodded towards the man’s face. ‘That wasn’t for his identity,’ said Bongo. ‘That was for Blackbird and Sudarto.’

Mac had almost forgotten that Bongo’s main plan was to drop Benni Sudarto, but for obvious reasons he didn’t want to do it in the Kopassus headquarters in Dili.

‘And?’

‘And he don’t know where Sudarto’s living, but he says the rumour is that Blackbird is alive and in the mountains somewhere.’

‘A prisoner?’

Shrugging, Bongo pulled out his cigarettes, shaking one straight into his mouth.

The cut-out squirmed and Mac saw he’d wet his pants.

‘Let him out,’ said Mac, standing back.

‘You kidding? Why don’t we just walk into Damajat’s office, ask him to start breaking our fingers? You’re still not right,’ said Bongo, twirling his index finger around his temple in the international gesture for insanity.

‘He’s not going to Damajat, and he’s not going to Brimob,’ said Mac, looking back into the boot. ‘He’s told us too much, which means he’d die too if he ratted us out, and his family with him.’

The cut-out’s throat bobbed at the mention of his family and Mac reached down, tore the duct tape off the bloke’s face, bringing some black hairs with it. Gasping and spluttering, it took the cut-out a few minutes to regain his composure. Gesturing for Bongo’s pocket knife, Mac cut the wrist and ankle ties and helped the man out of the boot.

Leading him towards the shadows, Mac grabbed the cut-out by the elbow. ‘I’m not going to hurt you, okay?’

The bloke nodded, fear still etched into his face.

‘I don’t want to know your name, and believe me, mate, you don’t want to know mine,’ said Mac. ‘What I need is everything you have on Blackbird, okay?’

The bloke, early forties and intelligent-looking, started with dignity but quickly fell into a sobbing mess. ‘She’s beautiful young girl, from good family, just trying to help her people,’ he cried, tears streaming down his face. ‘Why do these Malai take her? What right have they?’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Maria. Maria Gersao.’

‘You think she’s still alive?’

‘I have heard,’ sniffed the cut-out, pulling himself together.

‘Heard what?’

‘That she in the mountains, being interrogated.’

‘Lots of mountains round here, mate,’ said Mac. ‘Can we narrow it down?’

‘People say Maliana, in Bobonaro, which is -’

‘Yeah, I know. You said interrogated – about what?’ asked Mac, trying to test the rumours. ‘What would she know?’

‘I don’t know – I just organise the meetings,’ he stuttered. ‘I was never there. But she worked for the army in Dili and someone tell me she working on the intelligence floor – maybe she seeing things, hearing things, yes?’

Envisioning the first-floor admin section he’d seen on his trip to Damajat’s office, Mac realised Blackbird would probably see all sorts of documents and security pouches in the course of a week. If she was young and cute, the Indonesian officers might have assumed she was stupid and gradually treated her as if she wasn’t there.

‘Was she hearing things about Bobonaro?’ pushed Mac.

‘I don’t know, I -’

‘Did you hear things about Maliana?’

‘Yes, yes I did,’ he sparked up. ‘They say Sudarto is now based up there, and Damajat take a trip there three weeks ago.’

‘What about the Canadian?’ said Mac.

‘I didn’t know he was Canadian till he was beating me,’ said the cut-out, pointing briefly at Bongo. ‘He had a code name, I was the cut-out – you know?’

‘The code name?’

‘I’m not supposed to say that,’ said the cut-out, flinching as Bongo shifted his weight.

‘Starts with “centre”,’ said Mac.

‘Okay – “stage”. It’s Centre Stage.’

‘So you heard nothing about the Canadian?’ asked Mac.

‘Nothing.’

‘I told you – I won’t hurt you, mate,’ said Mac, increasing his grip on the bloke’s elbow. ‘But this is important. So think – a successful white man disappears in Dili, and no one knows anything?’

‘Nothing,’ said the cut-out, looking at the ground.

Mac was momentarily overcome by dizziness and he shook it off before continuing. ‘What do you do? For a living?’

‘I don’t know, that’s not part -’ he started, before Bongo fronted him, looked him in the eyes.

‘Well? Not a state secret is it?’ asked Mac.

‘I’m a lawyer.’

‘Really?’ asked Mac. ‘Anything we should know about?’

‘That’s a breech of my security,’ said the cut-out, trying to look at Mac instead of Bongo’s menacing face. ‘I’m not to be indentified!’

‘Then I guess you won’t be needing that retainer from us any longer?’ Mac needled.

‘That’s not fair – I did my job!’

‘You doing any legal work for the generals?’ asked Mac.

The cut-out kicked at the dirt, his face changing from defiance to shame. ‘These people have made us slaves and whores, Mr Skippy. And like everyone else around here, I have to act like one of those things to make a living. What would you know about having to live like that, huh?’

Mac was about to say something clever about life in Rockhampton but then he saw tears in the man’s eyes.

‘You ask the Brimob and army,’ said the lawyer, crying now. ‘They say I make the paperwork – I make it legally clean – for their courts; you ask the Falintil, and they call me a whore who sleeps in the murderer’s bed.’

‘Okay -’ said Mac.

‘You ask my children, Mr Skippy, and they say their father alive and can buy them shoes.’

‘Look -’ said Mac.

‘So do not come into my world and be the judge of me!’ yelled the cut-out, whipping his elbow out of Mac’s hand.

‘Okay then,’ soothed Mac, shaking his head slightly at Bongo, whose hand was going for his Desert Eagle. ‘On your way.’

Rubbing his wrists, the cut-out sniffed back tears, wiped his eyes with his forearm and looked from Mac to Bongo and back again, sensing a trick.

‘I mean it,’ said Mac. ‘On your bike.’

As the cut-out exited the car park, Bongo turned to Mac. ‘That stuff about the Canadian – he was lying.’

‘I know,’ said Mac, ‘but now he’s a liar who might feel he owes me something.’

Finishing his breakfast mango, Mac reached for the coffee pot and refilled his cup.

‘So where’s Jessica?’ he asked Bongo, who was eating toast opposite him in the Turismo dining room.

‘Don’t know,’ said Bongo, making a show of checking his G-Shock. ‘Told me she was starting early – thought we were meeting here.’