Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

Mac sat down beside her. She was mid-twenties, just learning her stuff. ‘Don’t tell me – too smart for the federal cops, too good-looking for the diplomats, huh?’ he said.

She looked up from the magazine, said, ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The spying thing? Thought about the cops, thought about foreign service, but settled on this. Can make a real difference, right?’

The girl feigned confusion. She was good at it. ‘Umm, sorry – think you got the wrong person.’

She had a nice voice. Low register, good long vowels. Smart but sensitive.

‘Your mum doesn’t get it, right? You can’t tell her what you do, but you can’t get engaged to that lawyer she’s lined you up with. Holy shit! Not the lawyer.’

Mac was going for the mum connection. When he’d fi rst seen her he’d noticed a slight pronation of the left ankle. In gait psychogenics the Israelis would say she had an ongoing dispute with her mother.

Mac guessed it was to do with having some bullshit corporate cover yet a total lack of interest in suits.

The girl turned to him slightly, said, ‘Like I told you, mister, you got the wrong person.’

Mac was almost there. ‘By the way, the worst thing you can do in this business if you’re a girl? Sleep with a colleague. Doesn’t matter how profound it was, the blokes will call you a slut.’

Mac let it hang. He waited. Waited. The girl looked into the distance, she turned back. ‘Like I said…’

She trailed off. Looked away.

Mac shook his head. ‘Even if he said he loved you.’

He watched her eyes refocusing.

‘Wasn’t Matt was it?’

She kept looking away.

‘Okay,’ said Mac. ‘Gimme the mic. I’ll have a chat to the bloke.’

He pretended to be going for the ear device that Mac was guessing was hidden by her hair. The girl pulled back, put her hand to her ear.

Bingo!

‘Don’t worry,’ said Mac. ‘I’ll tell him what’s what.’

The girl was on her feet. ‘Like I said, sir, I think you have the wrong girl.’

She picked up a blue backpack and walked away. He watched her walk across the mall area, down past the Gucci and Vuitton stores, along the cafes and up to the toilets. She looked into shop window refl ections to check on him, then she disappeared into the ladies.

Mac had one minute before she fi nished her conversation with Matt, was yelled at for losing eyes, and then came back out.

Mac turned, unzipped his backpack and took out the Nokia, while heading across to a Swiss watch emporium where the hockey players were ogling the price tags. He had a look at something that cost $5200, looked closer, dropped his clothes bag, bent to pick it up and deposited his Nokia in a mesh water bottle holder that sat on the side of one of the hockey boys’ bags.

Had another look at the $5200 watch – was happy he had a G-Shock habit.

Scooting over to a garbage bin, he dumped his old clothes out of the plastic shopping bag, put his backpack in the bag, then sat back down where he’d been with the girl.

The conversation he’d had with Garvs the night before was too pat. His one-time friend had made a point of giving the Nokia back to him, which Mac took to be a decoy gesture – it meant Garvs was going to microdot Mac’s clothes. Microdots were the size of a very small bindi and they stuck to clothes just as easily. You couldn’t guarantee you’d get conversations off one but they were a great location device.

The good thing about them was you could place them on a person by touching them on the sleeve or patting them on the back.

Now Garvs was going to be tracking Mac to the local dump.

The girl came back into sight. Mac’s fl ight was called. He stood, walked past her, winked. Smiled. Stopped.

‘The worst thing about spooks?’

The girl said, ‘What?’

‘All twenty-second wonders, mate. Are they coming? Are they going? Who can tell?’

He thought he saw a smirk, made a wiggling sign with his little fi nger as he moved off.

The girl laughed, looked away.

Good-looking bird, thought Mac. Shame about the circumstances.

He reached immigration at Changi at about fi ve-thirty am. He’d made a point of changing his ticket from a transit to a stopover from the public phone at the Lagerhaus. Matt would have checked – would have known. He moved through the arrivals lounge looking for the tail and found it easily: early thirties Chinese-Aussie, white short-sleeved business shirt, black slacks, paper under his arm, pretending to talk into a mobile phone. The bloke wasn’t too bad.

Mac moved straight to the gents, the shop bag now in his backpack. Getting into the last booth, he pulled the shop bag and the toilet bag out of his pack, put them on the toilet seat. Then he stripped off his shirt and stashed it in the pack, unzipped the toilet bag and pulled out its contents: passport, driver’s licence, credit card, business cards, Customs ID. Pulled out more: three unmarked screw-top jars, a travel pack of Wet Ones, a pair of owl-eye spectacles, a rolled-up dark neck tie, a black plastic hair comb and what looked like a red plastic compass box of the type a student would have for geometry class.

He went to work rubbing the contents of the small jar around on his hands, smoothing it through his hair; forward, back and both sides. Next, he combed his hair, giving it a left parting. Opening the compass box he pulled out a dark, hairy mo and a tube of theatre make-up glue. Squeezing the glue onto the back of the mo, he rubbed it with the tip of his index fi nger and then pressed the mo down across his top lip.

He put on the specs, changed into the size 38 trousers, used the Wet Ones to wipe around his neck and hands, which were covered in black residue.

He put on the too-large shirt, buttoned up and put on the tie.

The spare clothes and Richard Davis ID went into the backpack. The jars and containers went into the toilet bag, apart from one of the unopened jars. The toilet bag went into the backpack. The backpack went into the shop bag. He took his shoes off, put a coin in each, face down. Put the shoes on again, picked up the shop bag and moved into the washroom area. There was one last thing. Pulling a dark contact lens from the jar, he put it in fi rst go. He hated the sensation. Did the other. He was lucky: his pale eyes and blond hair were such beacons in South-East Asia that changing them to dark rendered him almost invisible. He hoped.

He hadn’t been more than seventy seconds in the booth. Someone moved quickly to take his place.

He examined himself critically in the mirror, hoping he had at least two more minutes before the tail wandered in. This was the moment of truth: he pretty much matched the photo on his driver’s licence and passport. He was now Brandon Collier – a dark-haired, spectacled bloke whose baggy clothes were hiding a pudgy body.

The coins would alter his gait slightly, and gait was a more powerful identifi er to the human brain than just about anything else.

He went out the door, the coins in his shoes making him walk upright and jerky. The Collier character, Mac decided, was confi dent about his nerdiness. So he put a superior smirk on his face and walked down the concourse with his 38 pants giving him an elephant arse. He didn’t look, just walked like a man with all the time in the world.

Mac found the Singapore Airlines ticketing right beside the transit desk. People were yelling and carrying on. Mac got in line behind a Dutchman lecturing his wife. The Dutchman then took his turn lecturing the Singapore girl. He shrugged a lot about what kind of a country this was, had some long story he wanted to tell, with spittle fl ying off his lips in that guttural way the Dutchies speak. His wife nodded a lot.

The SIA girl gave customer service a good name. She smiled and nodded and sent them on their way without them getting what they wanted.