Mark Abernethy - Double back

‘What were you looking for in his office?’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘So what’s this?’ said Sudarto, reaching over and picking up Damajat’s Nokia.

‘It rang,’ said Mac, shrugging and stalling for time.

Sudarto bounced his thumb across the keypad of the phone. ‘No it didn’t. Last received call 11.39 this morning.’

Looking down at Sudarto’s black Hi-Tec boots, Mac concentrated on his breathing and remained silent, stony-faced.

‘Major-General Damajat keeps his phone in his desk, so what were you looking for?’

Mac shrugged it off again, trying to find a part of himself that wasn’t swamped with fear.

‘What about Dili?’ asked Sudarto, pulling a cigarette packet from his breast pocket and fishing one out with his teeth. ‘What’s happening in Dili?’

‘Looking for sandalwood opportunities, and -’

‘Come on, McQueen,’ snapped Sudarto. ‘We’re past all that.’

The accepted style of interrogation in the intelligence community was to ask a number of narrative and factual questions over and over, find the inconsistencies and work at them. While working at the inconsistencies you suddenly dropped a clanger into the dialogue to surprise and confuse the interviewee. Mac expected a clanger in the next few minutes to try and knock him off his game.

‘Do you know a man called Alphonse Morales?’

‘No,’ said Mac.

‘Known to most people as Bongo?’

‘I may have met him, I don’t -’

Sudarto gestured to his sidekick and a black-and-white eight-by-five print was suddenly thrust in front of Mac’s face. It was a telephoto shot of Bongo at the wheel of the Camry, with Mac shutting the passenger door. Mac’s mind completed the picture – it had been taken just before he’d crossed the road to the wall of the Santa Cruz cemetery.

‘Oh, you’re talking about Manny? Manny Alvarez?’ said Mac, using Bongo’s NICA cover at the Jakarta Shangri-La.

‘Don’t be clever, McQueen,’ snapped Sudarto, lunging forwards and backhanding Mac across the face so hard that it sent him sprawling sideways.

The sidekick picked him up, put him back in the kneeling position, blood again pouring from Mac’s nose onto the concrete.

‘I met Manny when he was a concierge at the Lar,’ continued Mac, ‘and he agreed to do some driving for me in Timor.’

Lunging forwards again, Sudarto hit Mac with a backhand-forehand combo, spraying blood across the room. Although he stayed upright this time, Mac wondered how many of the heavy strikes he could take.

He was in big trouble: the Bongo connection put the conversation right back in the meet that had gone wrong, where the older Sudarto brother had shot Bongo. It meant the Sudartos had connected all the dots – the Canadian, Blackbird and Operasi Boa – which had led him to Mac. But was there anything else? What else did he know? What more could Amir Sudarto want from him that he didn’t know already?

‘Let’s talk about the cemetery,’ said Sudarto, sucking on his smoke.

‘The cemetery?’

‘Yeah, McQueen. Santa Cruz.’

‘It’s a nice place.’

‘Nice?’ said Sudarto.

‘Yeah – it’s a pretty place,’ said Mac.

‘Sure, it’s pretty, McQueen,’ said Sudarto, looking straight through him. ‘But maybe you meet someone there?’

Oh fuck! thought Mac, since Amir could only be referring to Rahmid Ali and his approach in the cemetery.

Trying to control the adrenaline that hammered in his temples, Mac realised his position was much worse than he had first thought. Benni and Amir Sudarto, and Kopassus intelligence, had discovered Mac in Dili because they’d been tailing Ali. They’d been tailing Ali because he represented the new President Habibie, whom the military wanted to hobble before democracy could break out.

Mac’s pain and fear deepened as he suddenly saw his predicament: he’d gone and put himself in the middle of a turf war between the Indonesian military and their president.

The beating continued until blood ran from Mac’s face and his left inner ear throbbed.

‘I told you,’ shouted Mac through mashed lips. ‘He collared me in the cemetery while I was checking on the radio transmitter. You don’t have a telephoto of this?’

‘Tell me again, McQueen,’ said Sudarto. ‘Start from the beginning.’

‘He called himself Rahmid Ali, he walked me at gunpoint into the trees against the wall of the graveyard and interrogated me about being in Dili.’

‘Say where he from?’

‘No – I assumed BAKIN,’ lied Mac. ‘He kept on about a company called Ocean Light in Dubai and what he called the “Singapore transactions”. I told you this!’

‘Singapore transactions?’ sneered Sudarto, losing control and not happy about it. Good interrogators had their theories confirmed; they weren’t necessarily wanting new information.

‘Yeah, Amir – that’s what he kept pushing me on. I had a SIG in my face, and it was all about these Singapore transactions and Ocean Light, and -’

‘What else, McQueen?’

‘That’s it. He was angry, kept demanding why Canberra would send a Treasury investigator to Dili.’

‘You Treasury?’

‘No, mate – and I have nothing to do with this IMF shit, okay?’ said Mac, referring to the International Monetary Fund consultants helping Indonesia with the Monekris, who’d been making unpopular demands about corruption and collusion under the cover of IMF policies.

‘So?’

‘So, I didn’t get to hear the end of his story because Bongo sorted it,’ said Mac.

‘Bongo?’

‘Yeah, he, you know…’

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Sudarto.

There were sounds from outside and Amir and his sidekick exchanged glances.

‘We’ll get to the bottom of that one when Benni gets here, right?’ said Amir, glancing at his watch.

‘Benni?’ said Mac, trying to keep his neck straight so the wire didn’t dig into his Adam’s apple.

‘Yeah, McQueen, he wants to talk to you.’

Lighting a cigarette, Sudarto cocked his head to another sound outside the building and shot a look at the other spook, who left the room to investigate.

‘There’s a blonde girl, McQueen,’ said Sudarto. ‘Pretty. She your girlfriend?’

Mac smiled, his back now in spasm from his awkward kneeling position. ‘No, she’s looking for her father.’

‘Father?’ said Sudarto, facetious. ‘Can’t go losing your father.’

‘She suspects foul play – she’s in Timor to find him.’

‘She registered at the Turismo as Yarrow,’ said Sudarto, narrowing his eyes at Mac. ‘Her passport’s Canadian, address in Los Angeles.’

‘She’s at UCLA,’ said Mac.

‘Good cover, eh McQueen?’

‘Look, Amir,’ said Mac, trying to sound forceful, ‘she’s not in our world, okay?’

‘No?’

‘She’s a girl scout, a civvie whose father dropped off the map a few weeks ago and she can’t get answers from the Canadian or Indonesian governments.’

‘Why doesn’t she ask the Aussies?’ said Sudarto, smiling now, enjoying himself.

‘Mate, whack me for the Canadian, okay? It’s over, you win the back nine – whatever. But, shit!’

‘So she just good friend with Bongo, too?’

‘Bongo’s with me, bodyguarding – he’s freelance these days, right?’ said Mac, trying to breathe out his pain.

‘Really?’ said Sudarto, picking up the envelope with the photos. ‘So all these people, from Australia, United States and Philippines – they just meet at Turismo and all these coincidence happen, right?’

‘Amir, I’ve asked that girl three or four times to leave the island, swear to God, and I told her not to go into the mountains. I found her at a cafe in Aileu – she’d hitched a ride with the UN for fuck’s sake!’