Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

He was at least engaging Mac with his eyes, which was a start. When Mac asked Ke where he was from, the boy seemed to understand.

Mac said ‘Thailand’, and Ke smiled and put a fi nger up: sign for wait a second. He walked over to a window for a travel agent where there was a big airline promotional poster for Thailand – Phuket, Koh Samui and Bangers. Mac nodded but Ke shook his head, and pointed to the country immediately to the east of northern Thailand. He was pointing at Cambodia.

Checking for tails and eyes, Mac cleared his PO box at the outdoor section of the post offi ce. This was his postal address for Richard Davis, and all of the mail came with the yellow redirect stickers on them.

The way it worked with most postal addresses for a corporate front was that you listed one PO box but had it constantly redirected. It wasn’t foolproof but it eliminated the opportunists who might hang around a post offi ce for a few weeks waiting for a show. He stashed the fi ve bits of mail in the shelf under Rachel’s pram and they all walked home.

With Rachel having her mid-morning sleep, and Ke honing his soccer skills with a baby’s ball on the back patio, Mac sorted the mail, chucking it all out except the car insurance renewal notice and the letter from the Shangri-La, which contained a bill with Paid in full printed on it. He hadn’t offi cially checked out but they’d closed the account and taken it off the Davis Visa card. Looking down the bill, he found the charge for the tennis racquet Diane had used and they’d also invoked the three-hundred-dollar security deposit. Cheeky buggers.

He put it aside – another chance to go to war with DFAT accounts.

Having mopped the fl oor, vacuumed the bedrooms and put on a load of washing, Mac kicked the soccer ball with Ke and got the little bloke laughing about the big Anglo’s clumsiness. He seemed like a nice kid, though Mac was mindful of not becoming too attached since he’d be gone in a few days. Then he made a cup of tea and, letting Ke watch TV, sat out on the rear patio and called Ted.

‘How’s it going?’ said Mac as the old brother picked up.

‘Surviving, mate,’ said Ted.

They talked about Tony and Vi. The cops had made it fairly routine and Ted had helped them with their inquiries.

‘A lot of the old boys are upset,’ said Ted, referring to the retired spies and diplomats at Noosa. ‘The old Brownings and Colts are back out of the mothballs, I can tell you. But anyway – how are you doing on the chase of our associates and their device?’

‘Mate, I’ve been taken off it. It’s in the hands of the CT guys now.’

Ted understood – if you went to a border-protection footing you couldn’t have every Commonwealth employee trying to get involved.

‘I was thinking about that,’ mused Ted. ‘Aussies know what they’re doing, but I hope they’re putting some thinking into concealment strategies.’

‘What do you mean? asked Mac, sipping his tea.

‘Well, you know what the freighting systems are like into this country now, right?’

‘Sure,’ said Mac, knowing that they were pre-cleared and scanned and sniffed and inspected and otherwise seriously worked over.

Milinda, Jen’s FBI friend in Jakarta, had once told him that Australia had a better forward-protection barrier for incoming freight than even the United States.

‘So the way to bring a device in without it being detected would be as a concealment, maybe on your person, right?’

‘I suppose it’s portable. That what you saying?’ said Mac.

‘For sure. Those Israeli-South African devices were about fi fty kilograms and fi tted in a pack.’

‘Or maybe not a concealment.’

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Ted. ‘Could even be open about it, tell them that it’s actually something else. Remember, it’s a simple alloy cylinder, a ubiquitous shape.’

‘You’d need a distraction,’ said Mac.

‘A human distraction,’ said Ted.

With Ke still in front of the telly, and Rachel sleeping, Mac thought he’d have a quick search on the internet, follow a small snippet that Ted had mentioned. Ubiquitous alloy canisters and human distractions.

It might be worth a look.

Firing up the computer in the spare room, he searched under canisters, Australia, imports. He looked through all the industrial suppliers of waterproof, dust-proof, anti-magnetic and self-sealing canisters. Some were for cigars while others were moved in semi-trailers. After twenty minutes, it was a canister world and Mac closed the internet browser before he sent himself mad.

He looked over at Ke as he emerged from the spare room and wondered why Jenny had had to duck out. Ke wasn’t Thai, as Jenny had claimed over the phone; he was Cambodian and Mac had a strange fear that his wife was poking around in places that could get her hurt.

Jenny would have misled him knowing that any connection between a homeless young boy and Cambodia would have someone like Mac thinking about the Khmer Rouge’s slavery business.

Emptying the dishwasher, Mac thought about the other point Ted had made, about the human distraction. As young recruits, spies were taught how to create distractions – or, at least, how to dilute themselves out of a person’s vision or thinking. And the best way to do that was by numbers: have a wife, travel with an assistant, blend in with a team, move with the crowd, attend a conference, move with a celebrity…

Putting the last of the cutlery in the drawer, Mac walked back into the spare room, sat at the computer screen and opened the internet browser again. If it was too hard to bring a mini-nuke in by air or sea, could it be done by walking a ubiquitous canister through Customs with a human distraction? A sports team? Someone well-known?

The search under ‘sports team December 2008’ wasn’t encouraging. Swim teams from California, a schoolboy cricket squad from Bangladesh. No chance of camoufl age there. He tried a search under ‘conferences December 2008’, but it was a fl ood of junk, mostly sites advertising logistics and catering and venues.

About to shut the browser down again, Mac tried one more thing and put ‘international’ in front of the conference search and made it an Australian search.

The third entry was headlined as Darwin 2008 – Water and Rights: New approaches to public water supply. Darwin, Australia’s gateway to Asia and the fi rst place in Australia Freddi Gardjito had thought of when they were surmising where a long-range King Air 200 could get to from northern Sumatra. Clicking on the search link, Mac was taken into the Asia Development Bank website; the Asian Development Fund division of the organisation was running the water conference.

He scrolled down through the site, reading it as a future controller of an economic team might, looking for matters of interest, names that made a pattern, companies that broke a pattern. It was all water, power, hospitals, swamp drainage, roads. He ran his eyes down the line-up and saw that Darwin’s conference was starting tomorrow, a one-dayer.

He felt his breath quickening. The keynote speaker was a Canadian engineering academic named Dr Hamish Gough, whom Mac had read about in Time and the East Asia Economic Review. A lecturer at the University of Malaya, Gough was well-known in Asia for his brilliant and practical public infrastructure solutions and he was the subject of a breakout box in the conference program.

Mac read the caption: apparently Dr Gough had designed and manufactured reverse-osmosis scrubbing canisters that created potable water from sea water. The break-through with his design was that the membranes in his canisters worked under natural water pressure so a village could store sea water in a tank and drop it into a canister which would slowly turn the sea water to drinking water and would do so without the massive power usage associated with typical desalination plants. The story said Gough had developed hand-winched tanks that dropped down slipways into the sea; when they were fi lled with sea water, they were then winched up to a stand and hooked up to the hoses that fell straight into the canisters. If you wanted more potable water and faster, you just used more canisters, more hoses. Now Dr Gough wanted the world’s corporations to contribute to a fund that would manufacture these things and give them away to rural villages in the developing world. He didn’t want to make a profi t, he said, but multinationals had to accept that if their enormous water consumption took the precious resource from subsistence villagers – which was still one-half of the world’s population – then they should furnish them with a way of getting potable water from the sea and other brackish water supplies.