Mark Abernethy - Double back

Standing back at the LandCruiser, Mac started getting edgy. He wanted a ride back to the Turismo, to a hot shower and a cold beer, without being stopped at roadblocks or shot at by militias. He was going to reconnect with the cut-out – the lawyer he’d cut loose – and find another way to get to Blackbird. There was always another way, and in the process he might be able to do something for Bongo and Jessica. But for now, he was more concerned about his own safety. The Bobonaro district was malevolent, and Mac wanted a firearm.

Damajat walked towards Mac, deep in conversation with Amir Sudarto. Stopping, they looked at Mac, then Amir peeled away so that he and his henchman stood at his nine and three o’clock as Damajat walked straight at Mac. Keeping his shoulders soft and his breathing deep, Mac waited for it, but being unarmed he did not like his chances.

‘Perhaps we should drop the pretence, Mr Davis,’ smiled Damajat, smarmy but dangerous.

‘Pretence?’ said Mac, his heart pounding in his tonsils as he saw Amir push up his trop shirt to expose the SIG Sauer on his right hip.

‘Yeah – see, we know who you are, Mr Davis,’ said Damajat, putting an arm over Mac’s shoulders and steering him towards another, larger building. ‘And I think it’s time we talked about some real business, okay?’

The cool of the warehouse calmed Mac’s heart rate slightly as they strolled through stockpiles of chemicals, alkaloids, peptides and enzyme reagents from all parts of the world.

‘You see, Mr Davis,’ smiled Damajat. ‘I know about your procurement work at Surabaya in ’97, right?’

Joking along, Mac tried to keep tabs on the spooks behind him – if he could get them at the correct angles, he might be able to kick one and grab a gun. He wasn’t game to meet Amir in a fist-fight.

‘After you come to the office in Dili, I run the checks, right?’ said Damajat.

‘Well, Major-General, I suppose I do have some abilities beyond sandalwood -’

‘And contacts,’ snapped Damajat, squeezing on Mac’s arm.

‘Well, those too. Sure,’ said Mac. As Richard Davis, Mac had made a successful infiltration in Surabaya, where Canberra thought there might be an illegal drug facility being developed. It turned out to be a bunch of Thais trying to counterfeit paracetamol. Mac had inveigled himself into a role as the go-to guy on the feedstock procurement side – a man with the ability to source chemicals from all parts of the world, camouflaging them in paperwork so confusing that no one would ever be able to put the jigsaw together.

Stopping to let a forklift go past, Damajat guided Mac further down the stockpiles of supplies.

‘You see, we are on the verge of a big breakthrough in terms of – how you say it? – life sciences, biotech. You know this term?’

‘Yeah, I’ve heard about it,’ said Mac, thinking of it as messing with genetics to get a rice crop that grows faster; or messing with a prospectus and get a stock that mutates on the NASDAQ. ‘So, Major-General, where’s all this come from if you need a procurement program?’ Mac added, pointing at the barrels and canisters.

Signalling for Amir and his sidekick to move on, Damajat strengthened his grip on Mac’s arm and said in a conspiratorial tone, ‘We had somebody looking after it for us – but he no longer with us.’

‘Really,’ said Mac, now understanding who the Canadian had been working for while spying for ASIS. ‘Looks like he knew what he was doing.’

Pausing, Damajat looked deep into Mac’s face. ‘Time to show you something, yeah?’

‘Okay,’ shrugged Mac, knowing that Damajat had revealed knowledge of his criminality in Surabaya as a threat of exposure.

‘But from this point, no talk about this place, this people, okay?’

‘Sure,’ said Mac, feeling the man’s gaze.

‘I must trust you on this, Mr Davis, for your own safety, right?’

‘Sure, Major-General.’

‘Because you start talking and some people not like it, right?’ whispered Damajat. ‘They think you a spy.’

They looked at each other until Damajat winked. ‘Call me Anwar,’ said the Indonesian, before turning and gesturing for Mac to follow him out of the warehouse.

‘I’m impressed,’ said Mac, looking out from Damajat’s mezzanine office through triple-glazed glass. Below them was a white-tiled laboratory where people in biohazard suits moved about like actors in a 1950s space movie.

‘Twelve million US!’ said Damajat as the secretary put the coffee tray on the desk and poured. ‘German engineer, Israel scientist – it a bio-safety level-three facility, the best outside of Singapore.’

‘And built by Anak-Poco Group, right?’ said Mac.

‘Of course,’ said Damajat. ‘On time, on the budget – the Timors not try the lazy native with us!’

Sipping at his coffee, Mac tried to make sense of it. The place was filled with centrifuges, computers, glass-sided sealed boxes, banks of switches and lights. He’d just been offered a retainer of $30,000 a month to procure the supplies, with a $200,000 bonus when the job was completed. The whole thing reeked of a ‘black books’ program, using foreign nationals as procurement agents to hide an Indonesian military project. The question was, why?

‘So, what are we making here?’ Mac asked casually, intent on not seeming too curious.

‘Let’s say it a medical breakthrough,’ said Damajat, putting three spoons of brown sugar in his coffee.

‘What’s the disease?’ asked Mac.

‘You don’t need to know that, Mr Davis,’ said Damajat, hardening. ‘Let’s say that there’s a virus that is fatal, but if you have good scientist, you can re-engineer virus so it don’t kill no more.’

‘Sounds brilliant,’ said Mac, losing interest. His real focus was how to use Damajat to find Blackbird.

The intercom buzzer sounded suddenly and Damajat spoke into it. Rising from his seat he whisked a file off his desk. ‘I’m back in five minutes. Look at this, tell me what you think, right?’ he said, handing Mac two pieces of paper. ‘Let’s talk about what is easy and what is not, okay?’

As Damajat’s shouts echoed along the corridor, Mac looked down at the procurement lists on the A4 pages and saw the kinds of words he’d memorised in high school chemistry. There were huge volumes of the stuff – this wasn’t a small operation.

Standing, he walked to the glass and had another look down on the facility. The people in biohazard suits walked about slowly and one person seemed to be running the show. Mac had no interest or expertise in what he was looking at – he wanted to find Blackbird, establish the meaning of Boa and then get out of East Timor before the place imploded. The scene with the militia rapists was not Mac’s idea of a job well done. His job was to collect information covertly and pass it on, and stopping to deal with a bunch of drunken militiamen on the side of the road had been a total screw-up.

Moving to the door, he listened but heard no voices. He started with a quick search of the ceiling for a security camera and, not finding one, moved to the walls; there was a large day-planner with letters in red texta marked on some of the days, and a portrait of Rudi Habibie, President of the Republic – but no safe behind either.

Doubling back to check the day-planner, Mac scanned the dates. They were mostly acronyms but he fixed on the box for 7 September: he couldn’t think of any date it corresponded to except it was the day after the results of the independence ballot would be announced by the UN. The box contained a simple diagonal cross in red texta.

Pausing beside the day-planner for a moment, Mac scanned the rest of the wall, which featured regimental bunting and photos of Damajat in his Kopassus beret, one with Norman Schwarzkopf and another with a big group that included Damajat and an Australian Minister for Defence, which looked like it was taken at the Jakarta Golf Club, and definitely after lunch.