Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

Mac put his hand out to pull Sonny back, said, ‘Boo, why were you tailing Garrison?’

Boo shrugged. He was into territory that was now confusing him too. ‘We came in from Tokyo couple of nights ago. Jakarta put us on you; briefed us on Garrison.’

Mac still didn’t get it. ‘Yeah?’

‘The theory was since you were associated with Garrison, if we could fi nd him then you’d be around the shop somewhere.’

Mac was incredulous. ‘ What? I’m not associated with Garrison.

They sent me out here to kill him fi ve days ago! Jesus Christ!’

Boo shrugged. Sorry.

Mac pulled his temper back a notch. ‘Who briefed you, Boo?

Garvey? Urquhart?’

‘Nah. Internal, APS.’

‘Who?’

‘Steinhardt and that sheila with the bloke’s haircut.’

‘No one from the Service?’

Boo shook his head. ‘They met us as at the airport, wanted us into Makassar quick-smart.’

Mac breathed out. He’d been set up. Getting briefed at the airport or a bar was how it worked when someone didn’t want the order taped and logged. It was like a briefi ng that had never happened, a

‘tasking’ that never existed. He’d bet the Australian Protective Service had no record of Boo’s assignment and no paper trail linking it to ASIS. All that would remain was a verbal connection between Mac and Garrison. It was as good as saying that Alan McQueen was rogue.

Mac rubbed his temples with his left hand. He had to think, had to think.

Sonny stepped in, menacing, gave Boo that look, said, ‘Where’s Garrison? Where is he right now?’

Boo shrugged.

Sonny prepped a straight right and Mac leapt in.

‘Mate, give me a chance,’ said Boo, holding his good hand in front of his face. ‘Last I saw of Garrison, he was getting on a speedboat down at Hatta.’

‘When?’ said Sonny.

‘This morning, ‘bout ten to eight.’

‘Yeah?’ said Sonny, his nostrils fl aring.

Mac saw fear in Boo’s eyes. ‘Listen, Boo, you and I – we’ve been set up against each other. Right? Me and Sonny, we’ve been chasing Garrison. We’re not with him, right? Had a gunfi ght with his boys three nights ago,’ said Mac.

Boo nodded.

‘So Sonny isn’t going to kill you, right?’ said Mac, turning to Sonny for assurance.

Sonny said, ‘Not if someone tells me what the fuck’s goin’ on,’ said Sonny.

‘Okay, we watched them load up the speedboat – about a forty footer – with six large gear bags. An Asian bloke seemed to be running the show. There was a girl…’

Mac was getting impatient. ‘What happened then?’

‘They got in the boat, three of them, and took off west.’

‘Out to sea?’

‘Like there was no tomorrow.’

Mac could feel Sonny getting restless. Cookie didn’t pay him to try hard, he paid him for results. The way it sounded, Garrison – the walking payday for Cookie – had just sailed off into nowhere. Mac thought about the missing piece of it all. ‘Boo, what puts Garrison together with me? Where did that come from?’ he said.

‘He’s been porking your missus – didn’t you know?’

Mac’s jaw dropped.

‘She was the one on the boat,’ continued Boo. ‘I was coming to that. On the boat with Garrison. Tall, blonde. Big sheila.’

Mac had only been gulled by a female once in his career and that was early days, in China. Part of his early training with ASIS had seen him infi ltrating the Chinese Cultural Exchange Program, which was still a big tool for the People’s Republic into the 1990s.

The cultural exchanges and scholarships had become a joke. The Commies would announce that some academic, teacher, political researcher or journalist from a Western country had won one of their friendship junkets and then bring them over to China for a couple of weeks of offi cial wining and dining. They would tour them around the countryside, get them drinking at all opportunities, and wear them down with isolation, fatigue and fl attery. Then they’d lure them into compromising situations and record the whole thing, and when those people were settled back in Melbourne or San Francisco or Auckland, contact them and have a quiet word. The Chinese liked it best when their leftie was closet gay, liked children or had a money problem, gambling debts or a secret heroin habit. Strangely, a sense of being underappreciated was often the best lever for creating an agent.

The cultural exchange program was an old Soviet trick that had already been overdone by the KGB in the 1960s and 1970s, producing a stream of Marxists in culturally infl uential positions. But the MSS was still having fun with it when Mac joined up.

In the fi rst couple of years in an intelligence organisation, the brass would let the recruits have a shot at different things, to see where their aptitude lay, and also detect weaknesses. When Mac asked if he could infi ltrate the MSS exchange programs, his regional director said, ‘Go for your life.’

He posed as a freelance journalist, writing socially important articles for the Courier-Mail and the Age under the name of Andrew Stevens. He picked on subjects that the Commies loved: wealth distribution being appalling in the West; the education system not working for those with no money; women living in Melbourne’s suburb of Broadmeadows having fewer rights than females living in northern Pakistan; Australians and Americans were richer, but Cubans and Vietnamese were happier. All the classics.

Mac was amazed how easy the stories were to write. Academics spouted forth to him, statistics could be pulled out and twisted to mean what he wanted and social workers would say anything to get in print. He even won an award from a Sydney ‘peace institute’ that had been set up as a KGB front in the 1960s and had somehow become self-perpetuating after the Soviet Union imploded.

One day the letter from the People’s Republic of China arrived, containing the kind of fl attery and enlisting techniques that Mac knew well. It even quoted lines of his stories back at him. Mac got into character with a shabby suit and a bad haircut, developing a dreamy yet self-righteous manner that he remembered from the socialists at UQ. The Chinese interviewers saw a bloke who started every second sentence with, ‘I feel it’s so important that…’ and appended anti-capitalist remarks with ‘not that I’m really an average Australian’. The panel were impressed, looking at each other and nodding at each other as if to say, He’ll do.

In hindsight, the MSS probably knew who he really worked for before he landed. And wouldn’t you know it, Mac was bedridden with gastro four days into the junket and was assigned a woman to keep him company while the main junket pack moved on into the interior to look at hydro dams and tyre factories. So Mac lived in Beijing’s Palace Hotel for a week with a woman whose fi rst name contained a jumble of x s and vowels, but who was known in intel circles as Daisy Dau.

Daisy’s basic approach was to have lots of sex, drink lots of wine and fl atter a man or woman into incriminating confessions. The Palace was part-owned by the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, and it was wired like a recording studio.

When Mac got back to Canberra and debriefed, the older guys got a laugh out of that for a while. Every young Westerner got pounced on by Daisy Dau. She was beautiful, smart and sexy and renowned for comparing her male companions to Kevin Costner. Ooo, you such strong man, you so handsome, like Krevin Cottner.

Those had been early days. The Service wasn’t trying to trip him up. He was allowed to call it a learning experience. He didn’t know much and wasn’t a great pillow-talker anyway. He joked with the guys that the MSS listening post had a stack of tapes of an Aussie bloke growling energetically for about thirty seconds, followed by hours of snoring.