Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

After seven minutes in the taxi queue, Mac got a cab and asked the driver, a guy called Ravi, to take him to the Riau Hotel, a private colonial joint tucked away in Little India.

They got talking and it turned out Ravi was a Tamil. ‘Where you coming from, sah?’ he asked, in a singsong voice.

‘Sydney,’ said Mac.

Ravi wanted to know if Mac knew any of his family, many of whom lived in Sydney. ‘You might be knowing them,’ he insisted, rattling off fi fteen or twenty names.

Mac laughed and went for a soft spot. ‘So, that’s a lot of family to have in another country, mate.’

‘Yes, I am knowing this. It is why for this,’ said Ravi, widening his eyes at the steering wheel. ‘But working, working, and then we can afford.’

‘We?’ asked Mac, interested.

‘Yes, sah. My wife and our two sons and her mother. Working, working -‘

They pulled into a Shell service station and Mac laid it out for Ravi. ‘Champion, would you mind getting me a SingTel pre-paid SIM card?’

‘Hmm,’ said Ravi. ‘But you are needing to register for card, yes sah?’

Flicking him a Singaporean hundred-dollar note, Mac asked nice.

‘You know how it is with foreigners trying to get pre-paid cards these days, Ravi?’

Ravi nodded.

‘I’m only here for two days and I don’t need the hassle.’

It was clear Ravi just wanted to get it done, get driving, get his fare, go do another one. So Mac pulled out his wad of US dollars, peeled off a few and gave them to Ravi. ‘How much is there, mate?’

Wide-eyed, the cabbie counted the notes. ‘There is being fi ve hundred dollars here, sah.’

Mac was using an old spy trick for turning a person, known as

‘white-grey-black’. It entailed starting at white by leading someone in with a legitimate transaction – such as getting a pre-paid. You then introduced them to something semi-legitimate or clandestine, such as getting the pre-paid under a false name, which moved them into the grey zone. And then you tried to move them to black, in this case with a wad of cash for doing something clandestinely. If you’ve committed them to white and grey, they’re likely to go to black.

‘Tell you what, Ravi. Get me a hundred-dollar SingTel pre-paid and we’ll go to the Riau, huh?’

There was a trick to offering money: never promise or suggest an inducement, just put it in their hand or on their desk or in their pocket and allow them to make the decision.

Ravi had a slender, thoughtful face and after briefl y considering what Mac was saying, he lit up like a fl uorescent tube. The money had already found a pocket before he got out of the cab.

Miss Rasmi personally supervised Mac’s welcome at the Riau, taking him to his room on the third fl oor, overlooking the rear tropical garden. Once the porter had done all the work, Miss Rasmi dismissed him and stood there waiting for her tip. A short, wide middle-aged Indian woman, Miss Rasmi ruled the Riau with loud commands that erupted from her lips in a manner reminiscent of a boy pretending to shoot a machine gun.

She got US$300 out of Mac, which had nothing to do with the luggage and everything to do with the fact that he’d checked in as Bruce Thorn and listed his passport number straight off the Canadian’s boarding pass – one of the joys of modern international travel. Miss Rasmi preferred cash payments and she was prepared to log passport numbers rather than make a copy of the actual document. That part was worth two hundred. The other tonne was for Miss Rasmi pretending not to notice Mac’s disguise.

Waiting for her to leave, Mac wandered onto the small stone balcony overlooking the gardens. He input a number on his new SingTel service, pressed the green button, then waited and waited.

Davidson’s phone was ringing out and Mac was very uncomfortable with what that might mean.

He tried another number and after the third ring a man with a smoker’s throat said, ‘Yeah?’

‘Benny!’ said Mac, looking out over Singapore as the sunset dimmed and crickets raised the roof. ‘Are you okay? I’ve been checking hospitals, phoning railway stations -‘

A cackle came from the other end. ‘Christ – fucking McQueen!’

‘I’m in town and I’m thirsty.’

‘Oh man,’ laughed Benny Haskell, ‘you’re still a mad bastard.’

Sipping on a bottle of Carlsberg, Mac surveyed the offi ce – a restored colonial building now housing Benny’s fi rm of accountants and solicitors. It was an enormous space – about the size of fi ve or six standard corporate offi ces – with four ceiling fans high up, old silk rugs on the polished teak fl oors and a desk that looked like something J.P. Morgan would have owned.

Benny peered at his laptop screen over half glasses, his mane of grey hair pushed back like a mad professor’s. Making notes on a legal pad, he alternated between a square terminal to his right and the laptop, into which he’d downloaded Mac’s hard drive of the Alex Grant iDisk.

Now in his mid-fi fties, Benny Haskell was a legend of fi nancial espionage and countering. He was former ASIO, former ASIS and the former head of the Treasury’s special investigations unit. Mac had met Benny in Canberra in the early 1990s, when a bunch of ASIS, ASIO and AFP newbies were being shown the basics of how money laundering worked. It was a fascinating two weeks and Benny quickly became a sort of hero to them. A chartered accountant by trade, he was one of the architects of the AUSTRAC neural net that could track funds transfers between Australia and pretty much anywhere in the world. Now he had a lucrative offshore banking practice in Singapore, creating the kind of banking and fi nancial reporting trails that passed the smell-test with the Australian Taxation Offi ce.

Getting up, Benny wandered over to the French doors and looked out on the Port of Singapore. ‘Can we talk about this, mate?’

Mac tweaked to his tone and sat up in the leather armchair. ‘Ah, yeah. Sure.’

‘So, what’s the background?’ said Benny, sipping on his beer.

Sitting back, Mac went through what he knew: the Bennelong enrichment code, the approach from NIME, the knock-back from EFIC and the fact that the Bennelong deal might have been resurrected under the NIA.

‘That’s where I came in,’ said Mac, thinking about it as he spoke.

‘It was a bit of due diligence, checking end-users – covert but soft.’

‘Okay,’ said Benny. ‘But let’s agree to something, all right?’

Mac nodded.

‘Anything I tell you – anything – stays in this room unless you clear it with me fi rst, okay?’

Mac was silent. That was a big promise.

‘I’m serious, Macca. I don’t need some heavy-breather from the AFP thinking there’s any glory in pinging this little black duck.’

‘Okay – you got it,’ said Mac.

Benny paused, collecting himself. ‘You’re on the right track with Naveed and these companies, Ocean, Desert and Gulf. This is big Paki money and it basically owns NIME. Now it owns the material that these people -‘ He waved his hand around.

‘Bennelong.’

‘Yeah – Bennelong – have sold them. Looking at some of the connections and transfers, it’s Naveed’s old fronts and banks – we see this all the time. Naveed is putting up the money, same as he used to with Khan.’

‘A.Q. Khan?’

‘Any other?’ said Benny, reaching into his pants pocket for his smokes. ‘Naveed has been the banker to the Paki military and ISI for fi fteen, twenty years. Khan’s people used him to fi nance all the nuclear equipment they were on-selling to the North Koreans and Libyans.’

‘Makes sense,’ said Mac.

‘You’d always read about Khan’s hundred-million-dollar deals with Libya or Iraq, but it was Naveed making most of the dough. It’s always the bankers,’ said Benny, lighting the cigarette.