Mark Abernethy - Double back

‘What’s your name?’ he asked the woman, who had a faint subcontinent accent.

‘Leena, sir,’ she said.

‘Okay, Leena, I need a reverse-listing on a Kuala Lumpur number, and then we’re going extension hunting, okay?’

Leena was fast and good – in twenty seconds she had the physical address for the KL numbers which Mac wrote down on the Natour Bali letterhead.

‘Okay, Leena, can you get the phone book for the Presidential Building in Jakarta, please?’

Leena said she’d call back when she had the book, and Mac rang off.

Grabbing another beer, Mac thought about his debrief with Atkins. Operation Masquerade was still active as far as Mac was concerned. Blackbird remained missing and Boa unexplained. Mac’s problems with Atkins would come with the revelations about the death camp in Memo and the increasingly out-of-control environment in Bobonaro. Mac would argue that matters were sufficiently serious in East Timor that Masquerade continue, without getting so carried away that Atkins would worry that the operation was going to result in a damning report about the behaviour of the Indonesian Army.

Operasi Boa was worth investigating, thought Mac. It was serious enough that the Indonesian President’s spies were trying to contact ASIS directly. And besides, a false flag was not as outlandish as it sounded. Military intelligence operatives routinely swapped operations, created ‘ghost’ documents, inserted false information in the more openly available files and held deliberately inaccurate briefings, all in order to misinform the spies, the media and their own leaders – many of whom couldn’t be trusted with sensitive military information. When Mac first rotated into Iraq at the end of the Gulf War, Rod Scott’s abiding lesson in intel gathering was to treat everything as a lie – especially the ‘hidden’ documents covered in EYES ONLY stamps, the ones in the military files that pointed a finger at the politicians, the ones in the intel files that blamed everything on Saddam’s secret police, and the coincidental files ‘found’ by the fleeing Sunni elites that fingered their Shia underlings for every criminal decision. So the idea of Operation Extermination veiling something more serious wasn’t troubling Mac; the puzzle was Operasi Boa itself.

Remembering himself back at Santa Cruz that day, Mac recreated the scene and tried to evoke Ali’s voice in his mind. As he played the scene over and over, Mac was sure that when he’d looked up from reading Operation Extermination, he’d summed it up as a ‘deportation’ project. Ali had agreed with Mac’s interpretation but had later rephrased deportation as ‘depopulation’.

Was there a difference? One meant shipping people out of a territory, the other translated as?

Mac’s mobile rang and he grabbed at it.

‘Leena,’ he said, sitting back at the desk. ‘Got it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she trilled in that uniquely musical Indian way. ‘And we’re in luck; its last update was ten days ago.’

They worked through the numbers in the Presidential Building and one by one Mac put a cross beside them. There was a number in accounts, a number for the main switchboard and two for the chief of staff’s office.

Mac was looking for more, something a little out of the ordinary, something that connected Rahmid Ali to another name. Before he stomped into a potential diplomatic snafu in Jakarta, he needed to know exactly who Ali was aligned with. Jotting the notes down as he went, he flipped through the pages again and picked up a mobile number with a Singapore prefix – the notes to this number had a user ID of Penang Trading Co. with a postal box address in Singapore.

‘Leena, can you get me our person in SingTel, get me a street address for a Singapore mobile number? I’ll hold.’

Waiting for Leena to complete the inquiry, Mac wondered about Operasi Boa, the mere mention of which had resulted in Blackbird and Bill Yarrow being snatched and Bongo shot. Weren’t the Indonesian military now beyond embarrassment? This was an organisation that had systematically terrorised and repressed East Timor for twenty-four years, in which time they’d already wiped out a quarter of the province’s local population.

‘SingTel confirms a physical address at that mobile number,’ came Leena’s voice over the phone.

Writing the address on his pad, Mac wasn’t overly hopeful about what it would yield. Commercial front organisations were set up the same way all over the world and the goal was to avoid being surprised.

As he went to sign off, a small column of letters grabbed Mac’s attention. Looking down the column of the logs, most of the spaces in the column had a dash, which was why he hadn’t noticed it, but at the end of the document a few lines of the column held a simple letter ‘S’.

‘Leena, what does the S mean on these sat-phone logs?’ asked Mac.

‘Which bill is it?’ she asked.

Looking around the header, Mac found the TI logo. ‘It’s Telkom Indonesi, and underneath it says Powered by InMarSat.’

‘Okay,’ said Leena, the sound of a pencil clicking against her teeth as she flipped through her telecom manuals. ‘The S on the TI sat phone means setempat.’

‘Remind me…’ mumbled Mac, embarrassed that he had such basic Bahasa Indonesia after working for so long in South-East Asia.

‘Setempat means local – a local call.’

‘Okay,’ said Mac, his adrenaline pumping in his temples. Running his finger down the last page to Rahmid Ali’s final activity on the sat phone, he found a cluster of calls made to an ‘S’ number during the two days that Ali had been in Dili. Maybe Rahmid’s connections weren’t in Jakarta or KL. Perhaps they were in Dili the whole time.

Reading out the number, Mac asked for a reverse-listing. He wanted a street address.

‘Nothing on that one, Albion,’ said Leena.

Looking back at it, Mac saw the last numerals were 4216.

‘Leena, try it again, but the last digits are four, two, zero, zero.’

Tapping rang out from a cheap keyboard. ‘No luck there.’

‘Okay, try four, zero, zero, zero, as the last four digits,’ said Mac, massaging the side of his face.

The keyboard rattled again and Leena – warming to the chase – chuckled. ‘That’s pretty good, Albion.’

As he listened to Leena read the street address, it immediately registered and Mac could see it as if he was standing there. He didn’t need her to give the listing’s name; it was PT Watu Selatan.

‘Thanks, Leena,’ he said, signing off and walking around the room. Watu Selatan was a large organisation, and the next challenge was to find out who sat behind the extension that Rahmid Ali had called. Mac had been in there, sat with Adam Moerpati, and Moerpati had tried to butter him up, get him into the Resende.

Staring at the phone logs from the other side of the room, Mac told himself it couldn’t be – Habibie’s personal intel operators surely wouldn’t be that brazen… would they?

Sitting at the desk again, Mac picked up Adam Moerpati’s business card and looked down the list of phone numbers. The first was for the switchboard, the second was his direct number: it ended in 4216.

‘Well, fuck me,’ whispered Mac in the gloom. The President’s men weren’t simply brazen, they were near suicidal: they had a spy across the road from army headquarters.

After walking each side of the street for six minutes, Mac moved to the entrance of a three-storey building tucked between Denpasar city centre and the suburbs. Having been identified by the receptionist, who pushed a button on her desk to unlock the glass entrance door, Mac walked into the nondescript offices of Triangle Associates, a once-thriving Perth construction consulting firm. Aussie SIS had bought out Triangle’s partners in 1991 and slowly let the best people go. Now it was operating in Denpasar and headed by Martin Atkins, which – Mac used to joke – was where you landed when you got rid of your best people.