Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

Australia’s interest in this development was compounded by Khan’s use of a Malaysian hi-tech engineering company called SCOPE to build the gas centrifuges, magnet baffl es, vacuum devices and centrifuge casings that were being shipped to Libya and Iraq as drilling parts for the oil and gas industries.

Khan’s network pursued enormous, brazen contracts during the 1990s. In one deal to supply more than ten thousand enrichment centrifuges to Libya, Indian intelligence – which had been onto Khan from day one – estimated the transaction to be worth in excess of US$100 million.

In the early 2000s, when Mac was largely posted in Indonesia and the Philippines, the attitude of spooks from Japan and India had hardened towards the Americans because of their protection of the Khan networks. It reached an all-time low in 2003, when the Indian government took their complaints to the US State Department and the Americans refused to pull the plug on Khan, citing ‘insuffi cient evidence’ of illegal nuclear transactions.

Mac looked around the large breakfast area and wondered how the Israelis and Indonesians had picked up on Hassan’s connection to Khan while the Aussies and Yanks had missed it. He thought back to those fi rst awful hours after the bombings in Kuta. Both Ari Scharansky and Freddi Gardjito had known there was a pro crew who’d done the Sari Club, and both Mossad and BAIS had the Hassan gang under surveillance at the Kuta Puri hotel. Hassan was to South-East Asia what Tahir was to the Middle East – Khan’s operations manager. Trouble was, after A.Q. Khan had confessed to his dealings live on Pakistani TV in 2004, Tahir was questioned and Gulf Technical Industries was exposed, none of that attention had fallen on Hassan Ali. He was still operating and in the business of building uranium-enrichment capacity for his clients, possibly Burma, Taiwan and Yemen. Maybe a disgruntled former Soviet republic in central Asia.

There was one fi nal problem that Mac was trying to get his fi nger on. In the early months of 2004, the Americans had told Khan to shut down his network. At the same time they’d got Khan’s biggest client – Libya – to swear off its nuclear weapons program in exchange for a massive injection of cash from the US taxpayer into Gaddafi ‘s conventional military. Those two events had crystallised in February

‘04, but in March a ship called China entered Tripoli. When the CIA and Atomic Energy Agency inspectors boarded the ship, they found only one container of centrifuges – which was very bad news for the world’s intelligence agencies, since Libya had paid for more than fi fty containers of the enrichment machines.

Mac’s breathing caught slightly. If you had forty-nine containers of centrifuges, they’d be useless without the algorithms and control systems that ran them. Mac breathed out. He wasn’t looking for a few shooters, he was looking for an illegal nuclear weapons program, and it seemed it was right on Australia’s doorstep.

Mac fumed as he pocketed his phone. Davidson still wasn’t answering and, while it wasn’t totally unusual to have a controller off the air for a day, it was annoying. Davidson was in start-up mode for his new economic operation team and he might be touring the world, thought Mac, trying to get new assets in place and contracts organised. Mac had probably been the easy tasking, but other agents wouldn’t be so easy to bring back from civvie life.

Mac left another message on Davidson’s voicemail – no details, but a request to get back to him. Mac didn’t trust even the ‘secure’ voicemail used by ASIS. It was just a piece of digital code sitting on a server somewhere.

Next, Mac called Joe Imbruglia, now ASIS station chief in Kuala Lumpur and as cranky as always.

‘Yep,’ he answered.

‘It’s me,’ said Mac.

‘Shit, McQueen – how are you?’

‘Not bad for an old bloke.’

‘Not too old to be back in the fi eld.’

‘You heard?’ asked Mac.

‘Spies, mate – we’re a nosey bunch.’

They chatted briefl y. Word of Diane’s shooting had made the rounds very quickly – the Western intelligence circuit in South-East Asia was actually quite small – and Mac assured him he was staying out of trouble, that it was a freak thing.

As the banter died away Mac decided to give it a shot.

‘Joe, remember Handmaiden?’ He tried to make it casual. ‘I fi led that report from ‘02? We got Akbar but then his own people shot him, and we had him pegged as part of the Hassan gang?’

‘Sure, I remember,’ said Joe.

‘So, was Hassan ever put on an active watch?’

Joe met the query with silence.

‘I mean, have we got people on him?’ Mac pushed. ‘Our friends?’

‘Mate!’ laughed Joe. ‘Then I’d have to kill ya.’

‘Look,’ said Mac, ‘I just need to know where he was last seen, known residences, corporate fronts, regular travel routes – usual shit.’

Joe let out a breath, perhaps expecting this call. ‘Shit, mate, this isn’t the OK Corral.’

‘It’s not like that -‘

‘Sounds like it to me, mate.’ Joe didn’t sound angry, just sad.

‘I’m back in, mate,’ said Mac, unsure of his exact status if he wasn’t dealing through Davidson.

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Joe. ‘Let me -‘

Mac could hear Joe mumbling his encouragement for the right fi les to come up.

‘Well holy shit,’ said Joe. ‘McQueen, Alan Francis. They’ve got you as an IO, a mid-rank.’

‘And they are never wrong, eh Joe?’ It was a long-held joke between Joe and Mac that whoever they were, they were mighty smart to be, at the same time, Jewish-Zionists, illuminati WASPs and Vatican bankers.

‘Okay, mate,’ said Joe, sounding conciliatory. ‘Gimme half an hour to get this stuff off my desk and I’ll get back to you on Hassan, okay?’

‘You’re a champion, Joe.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Joe Imbruglia, and he hung up.

Mac grabbed a bottle of Vittel from the mini-bar fridge and sat back at the table, looking out over the city. He was stuck in Jakarta and couldn’t even contact his station chief at the embassy. He thought about the last time he’d seen Martin Atkins, Joe’s counterpart in Jakkers.

Blue-blood, protestant Atkins – the Glory Boy from Geelong Grammar

– who had called Mac a ‘cowboy’, and Mac had responded that at least he rode the horse, not the other way around. The argument had erupted at the nineteenth hole after an inter-embassy golf day with the Americans, and Atkins had to be restrained after Mac’s comment.

The thing that had stunned Mac that afternoon was Garvs taking Atkins’ side, even suggesting Mac should call it a night. Garvs had become the ASIS deputy to Atkins shortly after the incident and Mac knew that Jakarta station was no longer his people. It worked like that in intelligence, and Mac knew cops and soldiers who claimed that it worked exactly that way in their professions too.

The process had worked in reverse for Joe and Mac. Joe had come in from the fi eld at a time when Mac was bristling at bureaucracy and had decided to cop an attitude with his new controller in Manila.

Having worked corporate and embassy covers in Beijing, Taipei, Seoul and Tokyo, Joe wasn’t about to be cowed by some smartarse from Queensland, and they’d clashed on a daily basis. That had changed on Christmas Eve ‘06. The embassy crowd in that city had become sneeringly atheist, and when Joe’s wife had gone back to Sydney with the kids for Christmas, Joe didn’t want to be the only God Botherer going off to mass. So Mac had asked Joe if he wanted to share a jeepny to the service. They’d gone out for dinner and then gone drinking in Angeles after the mass, telling each other far too much about themselves – so much that they couldn’t be anything but friends afterwards.