Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

Jenny was in the Feds’ tail car, riding passenger and working the radio. She told the lead car where to go and let the backup car know where they might have to cut in. It was late January, the stinking Brisbane heat making a mockery of the Falcon’s air-con.

Everyone was over it. They’d been tailing this mob and others from the same syndicate for almost two years and the heroin was still hitting the streets. The one bust they’d pulled seven months before was a roadside swoop in Logan City as the suspects had driven south to their Southport unit. It yielded nothing, except the gang complained about the racist treatment given that the mother had a young baby with her at the time.

The complaint stuck. Offi cial reprimand. The whole suits versus cops bit.

On the day her world changed, Jenny’s mind was elsewhere. Six days earlier she’d had a termination at the behest of her fi ance – an ambitious lawyer who wanted ‘a life’. She’d wanted the baby.

Jenny was still bleeding and eating Nurofens, pale as death, as she tailed the Vietnamese family south-bound out of Brisbane. Suddenly, she’d had a fl ash. It went like this: ‘The baby!’ It was like she was sleepwalking.

She turned to her superior, a guy called Steve Hornby who, in spite of his clumsy attempts at charm, was a good operator with the kind of arrest and conviction record that cops love.

‘Steve – the baby. The fucking baby!’ Jenny screeched.

Hornby had recoiled. ‘What?’

‘Steve listen to me – pull them over. Do it!’

‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers,’ Hornby had replied, his left eyelid twitching, nervous about the vibe and uncomfortable with angry women.

Jenny reached forward for the lights and siren switch.

‘Don’t you fucking do that, Toohey. That’s an order.’

Jenny had never used her looks with her male colleagues – she didn’t want the reputation. But she leaned over, pushed her breasts onto his arm, slid her hand up Steve Hornby’s thigh.

‘Steve, it’s the baby. Trust me.’

She sounded crazy and far away, even to her own ears.

Steve broke a forehead sweat, his eyelid going crazy. ‘There goes my super.’

Jenny hit the lights and they swooped on the Vietnamese.

Which was how Jenny Toohey came to be standing on the side of the M1 at Rochedale in the early afternoon heat, holding the cadaver of a baby that was stuffed with the highest-grade Laotian heroin.

Jenny’s mouth open, but no scream, looking down on the baby’s dead eyes staring out of heavy make-up.

Packets of brown heroin fell out of the baby’s hollowed-out back as Jenny unwound the swaddling.

Steve Hornby on his knees vomiting in the grass, begging for mercy. Please God, no!

Feds from the lead car chased the ‘mother’ and ‘father’ down the nature strip, the mother’s right sandal fl ying off as she veered towards a wire fence.

Panicked, out-of-breath yells came over the radio system.

Jenny Toohey made no sound, heard only the roar of emptiness in her ears.

She took stress leave and dumped the fi ance. She ducked counsell-ing, didn’t cry. She retrained, redeployed as AFP intelli gence liaison in an area that hooked from Saigon to Jakarta and up to Manila. Mac happened to know she was very good at what she did, which was busting the slave rackets – what they called transnational sexual servitude.

Mac suspected she was in love with him, but she didn’t say it.

She let him come and go. Mostly he went. She didn’t ask him about Southern Scholastic, she didn’t seem to need the details of what he did. In Mac’s experience, this was an almost super-human effort for a female cop.

In return, he ignored the salt-crust she left on his chest when he slept over.

She had only one stipulation: ‘I don’t cry, understand?’

Mac said, ‘Good as gold.’

They sat on her dark green canvas sofa, her giving him the look. Like she knew something was up.

‘Jen, it’s over – I’m out.’

‘What? The ASIS thing?’

‘Book company, yeah,’ he said, winking.

They smiled at each other.

‘When?’ asked Jenny.

‘My offi cial last day is January thirty.’

Jen narrowed her eyes, thoughtful.

‘But there’s one last thing I have to do,’ said Mac. ‘And they don’t want me doing it.’

Jen shifted forward on the sofa, looked at him with big dark eyes and said, ‘I know.’

Mac cocked an eye.

‘That bloke – what’s his name? – Matthew, sidled up to me today.

Asked me if I was in contact with you. Said something addressed for you had turned up in his pigeon hole, you know, and it was the kind of thing he had to give to you personally.’ She was being facetious, had that same cop disrespect for casual deception that his father had.

They laughed. Sometimes spooks made it way too complicated.

‘And you told him?’

‘I said, “Matthew, wherever McQueen is hiding I’m sure it’s not down the front of my blouse.” ‘

Mac laughed. Jenny could do that to him. Take all the stress and chuck it out the window.

‘Holy shit! You’re a piece of work, you are.’

‘Me?! It’s that bloke who’s the boob-talker – ask any of the girls.’

Mac ran the options. Either she was part of the program and was carrying a wire, or she had dismissed Matt cold. The third option was that Matt had heard some talk round the traps and had Jenny’s apartment under surveillance. Mac would have done it.

‘Any tails?’

She shook her head.

Mac trusted Jen. She was highly tail-sensitive. A foreign female cop, living alone in Jakarta, spending her life tracking the kind of crime gangs that would steal children and sell them to paedophile brothels. If Jenny said there was no tail, there was no tail.

A pause opened up. She stared at him, stared at the beer, gave him the hard eye. ‘Okay, Mr Macca – you can ask away, but if I say no, then it’s no. That fair?’

Mac nodded. He couldn’t ask more than that.

He started with the Sulawesi adventure and the Hannah snatch, ending with the Jakarta return and the instruction to get on a plane to Sydney. Only, he kept it vague. If she was a journalist, she wouldn’t have been able to write a story on what he told her. No names to follow through on.

She stared at him.

‘Something’s a bit dodgy about the whole thing,’ he said, fl ustered.

They had never really spoken like this. ‘I’m – I want to cover-off. I have to… I’m looking for maritime activity around Sulawesi in the last week. Not necessarily terrorism,’ he shrugged. ‘Could be something else. Something out of the ordinary.’

Jenny made a face. That was nothing she had heard of.

‘No chatter?’

Chatter was what people in the intelligence community picked up in their rounds but perhaps wasn’t the stuff of reports and memos.

It was the daily gossip gleaned from being around people, making small talk.

Jen shook her head. ‘I’ve heard that Chinese naval base thing – you know, in Singapore? I’ve heard that a couple of times in the last ten days or so. It’s getting talked up again. But you know how the Chinese are.’

Mac knew how the Chinese were. But he’d been out of South-East Asia for long enough that he wasn’t hearing this stuff. If Mac was Garvey, he’d want him the hell out of it too, before he started connecting back into his networks. He’d want him in Sydney, cut off, thinking about his new life.

‘No piracy or terrorist alerts in the Java Sea?’

Jen shook her head.

‘Malacca? Macassar Strait?’

Jen stared blankly.

‘What about Maluku?’

He was grasping. If anyone would know, or had access to the knowledge, it was Jenny Toohey. Her role was to coordinate intelligence from organisations as diverse as POLRI and FBI to the Jakarta Container Port and TNI, the Indonesian armed forces. And her main briefs – narcotics, people smuggling and sex-slavers – were all connected with shipping. She was also one of the few people Mac had ever heard of who had good relations with both BIN and BAIS. Even in the Indonesian bureaucracy and government, you were aligned with one or the other intelligence organisation. You were either the President’s people or you were TNI’s people.