Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

‘Forgotten, unloved,’ said Davidson. ‘But quite usable.’

‘The code?’

‘Yeah – had a chat to the Tech Desk and it seems that these sequence codes for enrichment reactors are so complex that the code written twenty years ago is still being used. There was no point in reinventing the wheel at every upgrade in reactor types, so the original sequence code still works on modern enrichment reactors.’

Mac was now totally enlisted.

‘So, fi fteen or twenty years later,’ said Davidson, ‘we have a private power consortium in Indonesia bringing in Bennelong not simply as a contractor but as an equity participant, and there is a difference.’

‘You think this consortium is after the uranium-enrichment code?’

‘I’d like to cross it off my list.’

‘So, the fi rm had a word in the shell-like with EFIC, and they spiked it?’ asked Mac, slightly confused.

‘Yep, EFIC understood.’

‘So?’

‘We got overruled,’ said Davidson, shaking his head.

‘Politicians?’

‘Who else? It was sent back to EFIC four days later as NIA.’

If the accountants, bankers and lawyers at EFIC didn’t want to write a loan guarantee, the National Interest Account was an override device from the Prime Minister’s offi ce, which held that the deal in question was in the national interest.

‘So someone’s got a friend in cabinet?’ asked Mac.

‘Damned right. But anyway,’ said Davidson, leaning back and visibly relaxing, ‘before the chaps could grab hold of Urquhart and kick up a stink at PMC I mentioned that we might let the horse run, see where it leads us, eh? Have a peek into who these people are and what they want. With me, Macca?’

Mac nodded. ‘With you.’

‘How’re Jen and Rachel, by the way?’ asked Davidson with an avuncular smile as the Qantas Club steward took his plates away.

Mac warmed to the new conversation. Tony Davidson and his wife, Violet, had never had children and they doted on the kids of the younger intel offi cers. ‘They’re great, thanks, Tony,’ said Mac.

‘Jen’s okay about all this?’

‘Yeah, good as gold,’ said Mac, avoiding the point that he was the one who wasn’t necessarily okay with going back in the fi eld and being away from his girls for extended periods.

‘She’s okay about a bit of travel?’

‘Yeah,’ croaked Mac, not liking where this was going.

‘Good,’ said Davidson. ‘Because this power consortium is meeting with Bennelong in Jakkers, Friday arvo.’

Mac winced. It was Thursday morning.

Finding himself a rear bulkhead seat on the southbound AirTrain, Mac pulled out the fi le that Davidson had slipped into his document satchel in the Qantas lounge. The operation was called Mainstreet and his cover would be Richard Davis, his old textbook salesman identity, only this time he’d be spruiking himself as a former EFIC operative who could make things happen in Canberra.

Mac fl ipped through the business cards. His fi rm was Davis Associates and the landline routed to the ASIS front of Southern Scholastic Books in Sydney, while the mobile number went directly to the Commonwealth secure SIM that Davidson had included in his starter pack. There was a new Commonwealth Bank Visa credit card issued in Richard Davis’s name, a printout confi rming his booking at the Shangri-La and a folder of business-class tickets for Emirates, the eight pm fl ight that night. The tickets suggested Davidson had intended to apply time pressure, not give him time to equivocate, and, more importantly, not allow Jen to kick up a fuss.

There were people at the end of his carriage but no one was interested in him, so Mac pulled out the dossiers and had a quick look. The Bennelong folder had a brief history of the fi rm. As Davidson had said, it had grown out of Melbourne defence contractor Thomas Technology, changing its name to Bennelong Systems in 1999 when it shifted to Sydney.

The two principals of Bennelong were Alex Grant, a former engineer in the RAAF who had done business studies at MIT Sloan, gone to work for Betnell’s Australian arm and then been part of the management buy-out in 1992. Partnering him was Michael Vitogiannis, a former head of sales and marketing at IBM Australia and the owner of a venture capital fi rm called Vitogiannis Partners.

Vitogiannis had bought into Grant’s fi rm, they’d renamed it Bennelong and marketed it as a builder and manager of industrial control systems, especially for the power-generation industry. They had been successful in Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Malaysia as one of the technology partners in various consortia.

It looked like a classic technology company: one guy the genius with the nuts and bolts, the other partner is the schmoozer, door-opener and fi nance guy. The pics confi rmed the story. Alex Grant was in his early sixties, conservative, looked like a Presbyterian elder and had an open, intelligent smile. About fi fteen years younger, Vitogiannis was sleek, tanned, with the eyes of a rule-breaker.

Clipped to the dossier was a glossy colour brochure for the Powering Asia trade fair and conference in Jakarta. On page four it listed Michael Vitogiannis from Bennelong Systems as one of the panel on ‘Technology and Power Generation’. Mac noticed a small ballpoint mark next to the Vitogiannis listing. He’d have to have a word with Davidson about that; intelligence professionals should never mark a document – it made the workload for people like Mac that much easier. At the back of the brochure Mac found the ‘pick your package’ section for delegates wanting to stay at the offi cial conference hotel, the Jakarta Shangri-La.

Another dossier named the power-station builders as NIME

Energy and listed the three principals: the managing director, the company secretary and chief engineer. The names meant nothing to Mac. They looked like a bunch of Jakarta lawyers recruited to pose for a meaningless corporate photo. NIME hadn’t actually built a power station, didn’t own one and seemed to have few credentials.

Clippings from Tempo and AsiaWeek quoted the managing director, Ramsi Numberi, as claiming that NIME had options on seven power-station sites in Indonesia and Malaysia, but Mac saw there were no solid commitments to build and no timelines. A decent-sized coal-burning, base-load power station took up to seven years to build from scratch, and you wouldn’t get much change out of AUD$1 billion.

It wasn’t an enterprise for amateurs. The reporter from Tempo surmised that NIME was a front for Golkar’s way of doing business and that the President’s fi ght against KKN – corruption, collusion, nepotism

– was being scuttled by consortia backed by banks and private-equity funds.

Davidson had left it to Mac to do it his way, though in his basic outline he’d suggested that Mac not try to infi ltrate NIME directly.

Instead, he’d recommended getting close to Bennelong to see what they were hoping to achieve and what they knew about NIME. Use Bennelong as the Trojan Horse for NIME.

In order to make the arrival of Richard Davis a serendipitous event, Mac had suggested to Davidson that word be passed informally to Bennelong’s people that the NIA application was not going to be straightforward and would probably need some massaging. Davidson had smiled at that, since it was a ploy he’d already instigated.

As Davidson’s fl ight was called, and Mac stood to go, his old boss had made one fi nal point. ‘Oh, and Macca – this Vitogiannis is a ladies’ man, right?’

Mac shrugged. ‘Sure.’

‘So I thought we’d put a soft edge on it, okay?’

Mac had waited. A soft edge was an informal or social prop that an intelligence operative used to make a target more relaxed, to get their guard down and make the intel guy seem more human, more empathetic. Humanising yourself with a family or by using a humanitarian cover were the common ones.