Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

‘Sure,’ said Chester. ‘Pick anyone… except Julie.’

Mac smiled. ‘I’ll take Julie.’

Chester stopped chewing and they stared at one another.

‘Perhaps we could get Canberra to decide?’ asked Mac.

‘That won’t be necessary, McQueen. She’s yours. For now.’

Mac checked his voicemail as he made for the hotel’s side exit. Most were from Julie or Chester. The one from Jenny said she wouldn’t be able to catch up with him before he left for New York because she was being rotated into Kuta immediately for the bombing. He wondered what his relationship with the cops would turn into once Jenny started stirring things up.

Outside, Mac found John Morris with another cop in the side garden area.

‘Well, look what the cat dragged in,’ Morris sneered, his dark cop moustache rising up like a living thing.

‘Boys,’ said Mac, offering his hand to the bloke he didn’t know – a tall, athletic Anglo with a tanned, shaved head. ‘Alan McQueen, DFAT.’

‘Jason Cutler, Federal Police.’

John Morris cut into the pleasantries. ‘Jase, if you wouldn’t mind giving us a second,’ he snapped, impatient.

Jason fl icked his butt into the shrubs and left without saying another word.

Six foot tall, short dark hair, squarish face and built like a front-rower, John Morris was about ten years older than Mac. His pale blue business shirts were always perfectly pressed and he wore a tie regardless of the temperature. Even in fi eld operations, Morris never wore overalls like most other AFP cops did.

‘Came to gloat, did ya, Macca?’

‘Mate, I’m supposed to be getting packed for the UN gig in New York. I didn’t want this,’ sighed Mac.

‘An outside agency running the media side? That’s bad enough.

But shit, Macca – DFAT is coordinating the whole show? I don’t even know where to start with that.’ Morris fl icked his butt, fi shed immediately for another smoke. ‘These incidents are what we train for. Since when did the Australian Federal Police need babysitting?’

Mac didn’t want to get into it. He had a girlfriend who had laid it all out for him on many occasions with a great deal more force than Morris was giving it.

‘John, I don’t think it’s like that.’

‘Oh, really, Macca? So why’d they bring in a spook from Manila to run the media side? Afraid we might tell the truth?’

‘Mate, do you mind?’ said Mac, eyes darting around the garden.

‘I got no problem with intel, you’ve got a job to do. But that, out there,’ said Morris, pointing with his slightly shaking cigarette hand,

‘that is a fucking mess, right? My guys are telling me a hundred and fi fty, maybe two hundred dead. We’ve got hospitals where the burns victims are lying in storage rooms, screaming their lungs out ‘cos there’s no morphine! We’ve got two blast sites fi lled with burnt body parts, Macca.’

‘Look, John -‘

‘Don’t fucking look me, McQueen!’ Morris cut in, his voice starting to tremble. ‘Our fi rst job is to build a comms centre and victim database that can handle the incoming. Those are real families with real pain, mate, and most of them are Aussies. Okay?!’

Morris’s eyes were wet now and Mac did the Aussie male thing, looked away for a few seconds. Morris was right: it was a fucking mess out there. As Mac looked back, Morris was dabbing his left eye with the back of his hand.

‘Fucking pollen,’ said Mac, shoving his hands in the pockets of his overalls and waiting as Morris collected himself.

‘Macca, I don’t care how much spooky, high-level shit you’re trying to juggle here – in fact, I don’t want to know. But here’s the deal: if you know anything that has any bearing on this investigation, then I want to know, okay? You hold out and you and me, mate, we’ll be going at it like cat and dog. Okay?’

Mac thought that sounded fair enough, nodded, and then said,

‘The Russians are in town. GRU, I think.’

‘That intel?’

Mac nodded. ‘Military. Answers to the general staff. I spoke with one of them this morning.’

‘And?’

‘And he wanted to know if we were checking passports,’ said Mac after looking around. Another group had huddled for a smoke but they were fi fteen metres away.

Morris shook his head slowly and looked into the sky. The job had just got larger.

‘And BAIS thinks there were two crews,’ continued Mac. ‘The pros did Sari and the patsies did Paddy’s.’

‘Great. So we have the world’s most porous borders and a foreign outfi t responsible for the big blast,’ snarled Morris, fl icking his butt.

‘But they’re long gone, right, so we arrest the patsies, fi t them up for the whole thing, and then it’s “the Muslims did it”. That the DFAT script, eh Macca?’

Mac shrugged. ‘Your investigation, John.’

Morris’s eyes fl ashed with anger. ‘Fuck the pricks,’ he said as he left.

Mac stayed in the garden for a while, thinking about cops and spies. There’d been one afternoon in Jakarta when Jenny and her transnational sexual slavery crew had been on the tail of a container load of kids. They’d been working on it for two days, no sleep, and had cornered a bunch of businessmen. They had them cold: emails, bank records, trucking documentation and, the clincher, a purchase order for hundreds of kids’ pyjamas, clothes and soft toys.

The plan was to arrest and heavy the business guys, fi nd where the children were being kept, save the kids and bust the slaving racket.

They were on the verge of doing just that – had the forensic guys from Scotland Yard and a Kopassus unit to do the storming. Then someone in the POLRI team snitched, and the word quickly went higher and higher. It soon reached way up into the shitosphere of the political zone and at six minutes before ‘go’ they were stood down. Just like that. It’s how the slave trade worked – more often than not it was protected from above.

By the time Jenny got to the embassy after the op was cancelled, the men who’d stood her down had sensibly vacated. She tracked down the counsellor-political at the Jakarta Golf Club where he was drinking with other Foreign Affairs brass. According to a mate of Mac’s who’d been there, Jenny had stomped up to the table, yelled something about how if it was white, middle-aged men who were being raped for money, the slavers would be shut down immediately.

When the boozed-up Foreign Affairs bloke stood to put a conciliatory hand on her shoulders, she’d pushed him in the chest so hard he’d fallen across the table and into the arms of another Foreign Affairs luncher.

That was Jenny and that was the tension between cops and the apparatus Mac was a part of. So Mac knew where Morris was coming from. He was leading a crew that had to sift through body parts and dental records; ask victims’ relatives the hard questions about whether there was ever a broken bone in their loved one’s right-hand femur; reconstruct and deconstruct and then catch the bastards who did it.

And they had to do it with grieving rellies and an angry public baying for answers. The last thing they needed was a bunch of diplomats over the top of them. Every cop at every level knew where that would lead: you get a bunch of smarties like Chester and Mac in to massage the message and inevitably the tail starts wagging the dog.

Mac headed back to the hotel wondering if that was really Abu Samir on the ship. There was all that and something much bigger weighing on his mind. Freddi’s idea about the pros and the patsies was gnawing away at him. It wasn’t such a far-fetched theory for the pros to operate in the shadow of the more obvious amateurs.

In fact, it was standard operating procedure for most intelligence outfi ts.