Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

Joe’s stories were hilarious: Japanese watchers putting eight guys on a detail just to follow you to the toilet; the Koreans couldn’t be got with fl attery, but paranoia worked wonders; how the Chinese MSS always softened up a bloke with a pretty girl and a lot of booze. I swear to God, mate – if she’s really sexy and wants to drink whisky all night, you’ve been made!

Mac’s abiding memory of that night was standing in the stinking hot cathedral, everyone in white trop shirts, fans going in front of faces like a fl ock of birds, and the congregation singing ‘Silent Night’ in Tagalog. That night Mac had become aware of how Italians could cry, but with a smile on their face.

Mac slugged on the cold fl uid and composed himself, then called Jenny. Her mobile went straight to voicemail and he breathed out. He had promised himself that if he took Davidson’s offer and went back into the game, he’d do everything he could to shield Jenny and Rachel from any fear or danger that he might be feeling. The unwritten rule of marrying cops was that you became their safety zone, the calm centre of the maelstrom. That was Mac’s role and he knew Jenny would have problems going back into her job if she felt her husband couldn’t do a simple bit of due diligence on a loan guarantee without people getting shot.

There was also Sarah. He was going to acknowledge his daughter, be a dad to her. And he was going to tell Jen. It wasn’t the conversation that husbands wanted to have with their wives, but Sarah wasn’t going to be swept under a rug – she was entitled to be a proud member of the McQueen family. Mac just didn’t know if he could do it now, in Jakkers, while Diane was lying in a hospital bed and he was trying to work out what to do about it.

Deciding to check on Diane, he called down to the desk and booked Edwin. The car would be available at midday, which gave him thirty-nine minutes to check the contents of the yellow envelope sitting on the desk in front of him.

As he picked up the envelope, he promised himself not to do anything stupid. There were ASIS, AFP and ADF guys in Jakarta, trained and tasked to take on people like Hassan Ali and his gang of psychos.

Upending the envelope, he carefully shook its contents onto the wooden desk. He sorted through his copies of the papers that Mac, Johnny and Huck had found in the burnt building on an old airfi eld in Sumatra. Freddi had taken the originals and given Mac a bunch of photocopies. The seven sheets of paper were in Urdu and Farsi and Bahasa and they meant nothing to Mac. They were grids and tables and paragraphs broken into numbered sequences.

He leafed through to a piece of white A4 paper with some words and numbers that Toni Lucas had scribbled on it in black ink. Toni Lucas had been in the AFP’s forward command post in Kuta and he remembered how she almost threw the paper at him and told him to leave her the fuck alone. A CSIRO scientist, she’d been seconded to the AFP for the Kuta investigation – Operation Alliance – and she’d grown tired of Mac’s questions and constant prodding for more information.

She was running double-check analysis of all the swabs being run through the mobile bomb lab by the investigations teams. Toni had been overworked and distressed at the scenario – the smell of Kuta was becoming strong, and even with face masks and burning incense it was disturbing.

Mac had got back from northern Sumatra with more questions than answers about the Kuta bomb blasts and he’d clumsily used his position with Foreign Affairs to go poking into areas he really shouldn’t have. He’d lasted three days in Kuta before someone had realised that he was pursuing a parallel investigation, at which point calls were made and Joe Imbruglia was giving him the hook. He’d never confi rmed it but he always suspected that it was his old mate Garvs who decided to get Mac out of there. Garvs had become part of the program very quickly in ASIS. He didn’t have the same fi eld talents as Mac but he was excellent at sensing what higher-ups expected of him. As far as spy organisations went, Mac and Garvs were both known as ‘reliables’. It was just that they were reliable in two totally different ways.

Written on the piece of paper in an educated cursive script was: 15/10 water, Sari Crater3.53+-17

15/10 water, Denpasar roof tank‹0.13

There was nothing else on the page. But he remembered the question he had pestered Toni about, a question he only got away with because she was so busy and he kept making her laugh. The question had been, What are the tritium levels for the Legian blasts?

He’d remembered Viktor telling him how tritium was one of the few things left behind in a plutonium mini-nuke explosion; the plutonium used in a mini-nuclear device wouldn’t leave radiation of the type detected with a Geiger counter but it would leave triated water, tritium returning to its preferred water-borne state.

Mac thought back to that day and remembered how Toni would not release any of her printouts. The MOU with the Indonesians had specifi cally precluded any ‘wider linkages’ than those sanctioned, and the scientists stuck to tests for anfo, C4 and potassium chlorate, the bomb materials of choice for Asian bombers.

Toni’s analysis had revealed signifi cantly raised levels of triated water in the Sari Club crater, compared with the ‘control’ water of a house water tank in Denpasar.

He set Toni’s paper aside and looked at the last one, a partially burnt piece of A4 that he had never shown Freddi. He could still smell that airfi eld with its whiffs of ash and fi re, and he stared at it as he slugged on the Vittel. The handwritten note said N W, which could have meant anything. It might have had nothing to do with the Hassan crew or the Kuta bombings. He’d asked around about it

– asked Indons, Americans, Aussies, Malaysians – anyone who might have even a faint idea. The only thing that came back was that if you had Pakistanis involved, and N W, then it probably referred to the North-West Frontier. Which hadn’t helped Mac at all.

Mac and Edwin were fi ve minutes away from MMC Hospital when Jenny phoned back. It was good to hear her voice but when she put her Nokia down for Rachel to say her bit, his daughter went silent. All he could hear was Jen whispering, ‘ Say hi to Daddy, say hi.’

‘So Mr Macca,’ said Jenny, sounding cheerful as she got back on the line, ‘that wasn’t you in Jakkers, right?’

‘Wasn’t me what?’ asked Mac, confused.

‘You didn’t get my voicemails?’

‘No, actually, I -‘

‘There was a shooting up there yesterday, remember?’ said Jen.

Mac groaned inwardly. ‘Umm, yeah – but it’s, you know -‘ He wasn’t going to discuss it, hadn’t even had a chance to digest it properly himself.

‘Can’t talk?’

‘Umm, yeah, Jen -‘ he said, glancing at a box of chocolates and bunch of fl owers sitting in the back seat.

Jen was inquisitive and not always in a good way. ‘I’m hearing there’re two Australians dead and a British national in hospital,’ she said in a tone that made Mac cringe.

‘Yeah, mate,’ he said, going for casual. ‘I’m on my way out to MMC right now.’

‘The Brit is a female, right?’

Mac felt like one of her suspects and he was about to tell her who it was but she stole the moment. ‘It’s Diane, right? Diane Ellison?’

Mac breathed out. ‘Yeah – she took two bullets.’

‘Okay,’ said Jenny, in that way that women say okay when it’s not okay. ‘So don’t tell me, she was the wife, right?’

‘Jen, I can’t discuss -‘

‘ Fuck, Macca!’

‘Okay. Yes, she was my partner -‘

‘Oh that’s great, Macca. Partner, yeah, right!’

‘Jen, look I need -‘