Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

Mac caught Sawtell raising an eyebrow. Maybe a black American reacting to the racial bit, or maybe just a special forces hard-head with no fuse for this crap.

Mac wasn’t up for this shit either. His mind was in overdrive: why was Sawtell here? Why was Hannah so important? And why was an Agency guy in the meeting?

Mac eyeballed Charles Dunphy. The intel lifer’s face was expressionless.

Looking at Garvey, Mac said, ‘Okay, mate, spell it out.’

Garvey’s face hardened as he adjusted himself forward and rested his forearms on the Australian hardwood table. ‘Mac, we have a problem with this Hannah bird. She’s missing but the word we’re getting is that she’s on the lam with an American.’

Mac shrugged.

‘Ah, yep,’ continued Garvey. ‘It’s not so much an American, but which one…’

Mason pitched in. ‘One of ours, I’m afraid, Mr McQueen. Peter Garrison – he’s Agency.’

No one said anything for what seemed like ten seconds.

Garrison was a problem.

And so was the fact that Dave Urquhart had briefed Garvey on the missing girl. Urquhart was intel liaison with the Prime Minister’s offi ce. He wasn’t operations.

It had turned political. A snake picnic.

In Mac’s Royal Marines days, the handful of intel people who got through the initial training found themselves in a world of revelation.

The Royal Marines were probably the foremost trainers of intelligence people required to do paramilitary work. And foremost among them was Banger Jordan, an NCO who was not technically running the section but was the person who had a lasting impact on the candidates.

On their fi nal day of training, Jordan took the candidates out to a pub and told them how it really was. ‘The most dangerous animal you’ll ever face,’ said Banger, ‘is an offi ce guy who wants a bigger offi ce.’

Mac had never forgotten that. Not a week of his career had gone by when Banger’s words weren’t vindicated in either small ways or large.

The crap that had just gone down in the embassy was a classic offi ce-guy shit-blizzard where ambitious pen-pushers jacked up some mad adventure to please the political masters. An adventure where the bad guy gets nailed and the girl is saved. Always so clean on a whiteboard but incredibly dangerous for the people who carry it out.

Mac seethed about it as he walked along the largely deserted streets of the expat district of south Jakarta. Police 4x4s and military escort cars cruised the oversized boulevard. There were no sidewalk vendors or hawkers in this part of town. No local lads on Honda scooters crawling the kerbs offering foreigners special deals at the local whorehouse. If those guys showed up they’d be treated as if they had a bagful of C4 over their shoulder. The only locals on the street around here wore their embassy photo ID around their necks on lanyards – an international sign in the brown and black world that said ‘don’t shoot’.

In a strip of Western-style shops not far from the Aussie compound, Mac found a red and white illuminated sign that said BAVARIA LAGERHAUS. He walked past it to the corner. Turned left and kept walking. He stopped after twenty paces, turned and waited. Nothing.

No cars, no people.

He walked back to the corner, paused. Head out, head in. Looked around. Walked to the Lagerhaus, pushed through the swinging doors into the air-con darkness. A polka band played in a corner and European backpackers dressed like dairy maids carried large glass beer steins to tables. Germanic tack hung low.

Mac went to the end of the bar nearest the wall, leaned on it, ordered a Becks and made himself inconspicuous. He had showered and was wearing jeans and a polo shirt. His suit was back in the compound motel room, along with his dodgy phone. He felt tired yet jacked-up on adrenaline, his mind racing in an exhausted body. He wanted out, he wanted respectable, he wanted Diane. He wanted to fl y into a foreign city once in his life and not have to remember if he was Richard Davis or Thomas Winton, depending on whether he was coming into Jakarta via KL or Singers.

The drink arrived, the bierfrau gave him a smile. He gave her the wink, then positioned himself so that a corridor in the corner that led to the toilets was in his peripheral vision.

The clientele were expat. It was after eleven pm and most of them were bombed drunk. Lonely, overworked, overpaid whiteys stuck in a part of the world that was never going to accept them. Somehow the zero-taxation and cheap servants just didn’t cut it. He saw himself as lucky – a bloke with a woman. Then he checked that. He had had a woman. Now he had some running to do to get her back.

Halfway through his beer, Mac saw a Javanese man emerge from the lavatory corridor. He was early forties, full head of hair and very thickly built through the neck, chest and arms. An orange tropical shirt hung loose, covering what Mac knew to be a chromed Desert Eagle . 45. Saba’s bodyguard.

The man cocked his head slightly at Mac and turned away, scanning the room with casual menace.

Mac left his beer at the bar, walked to the corridor. The bodyguard let him go past and followed him down the hallway. They stopped in front of a door at the end. The bodyguard moved in front of Mac, unlocked the door from a key chain, pushed through and waited for Mac to enter.

The room was an offi ce, large and cool. There was a wide oak desk at one end, a bank of screens along the wall and a white leather sofa suite set up around a low coffee table in the middle of the room. The place belonged to a man called Saba. He was ex-BAKIN, Indonesian intelligence from the Suharto days. Now he ran a bar which doubled as a safehouse. All spies had safehouses where they kept spare guns, unoffi cial mobile phones, contraband passports and emergency Amex cards in bogus names. It was no refl ection on the Service, it was just that spies needed to work untriangulated at times.

Mac never paid Saba. He owed him ‘favours’, and so far, the ex-BAKIN man had only wanted the occasional fi le and some telecom logs. But that would change.

The bodyguard patted Mac for weapons. Felt him for wires.

Scraped his fi ngernails over the area just behind the ears and under the hair, looking for the tick-sized fl esh-coloured transmitters that were now being used.

Mac put his arms down. The bodyguard moved to a door on the opposite wall. Opened it, gestured.

John Sawtell walked in, still in grey sweats. He was built like a brick, yet athletic. Mac remembered a detail from the fi le: Sawtell had played for Army as a running back. Mac wasn’t sure how that translated to the rugby codes but it was probably a position requiring high correlations of speed and power. Sawtell was built. And he moved smooth.

The bodyguard saw himself out.

The two men looked at one another. Sawtell broke the silence.

‘The fuck was that shit?’

Mac chuckled, took a seat on the sofa. Sawtell sat opposite in an armchair. ‘That was a mutual secondment,’ said Mac. ‘That’s what that shit was.’

‘Can we speak English, McQueen?’

Mac spelled it out: the Australian intelligence apparatus had statutory sanctions on performing paramilitary work. The US intelligence community had similar laws making it illegal for them to conduct assassinations. It suited both DC and Canberra to ‘mutually second’ agents from one another’s intelligence operations to do certain things for one another that the politicians back home would crucify their own nationals for. Certain things that you may not want the military implicated in. Politicians and intel people called it

‘deniability’.

‘So you get to tap this Garrison dude?’ snarled Sawtell, not convinced. ‘And some Agency dickhead gets to do a job for the Australians? That it?’