Mark Abernethy: Golden Serpent

But it’ll get you on board and we can take it from there, hmm?’

Mac wanted to throw himself on the old bastard, weep with appreciation. But he stayed calm. ‘Sounds good to me, Jim.’

The dean pushed back against his desk with his right foot, put the pipe in his mouth.

‘I’ve assigned you to Derek Parmenter,’ said the dean. ‘He can brief you on curriculum before the summer break. You can sit in on a few lectures and you should be fi ne for a February start.’

Mac had met Parmenter and didn’t like him much. But he’d be lecturing and tutoring postgrad students on Australian foreign policy in South-East Asia. The gig was an ‘institute’ rather than a faculty, and that suited Mac. He couldn’t complain.

‘Just look it over, it’s all the basic guff,’ said the dean, nodding at the offer. ‘Then sign it and get it back to me by Monday, okay?’

Mac grabbed the letter and looked gratefully at the dean, who pretended to puff on his pipe as he gazed out the window. ‘Can’t even smoke a pipe these days,’ he said, smiling at something far away.

‘Times have changed, Alan – you know that, don’t you?’

Mac had been pegged for paramilitary duties almost the minute he joined the Australian Secret Intelligence Service from university. He’d played rugby in Queensland and he guessed that to a desk jockey in Canberra he’d looked the part. He couldn’t recall any huge desire for the military direction.

So they’d shipped him to the United Kingdom and into the loving arms of the Royal Marines and their infamous commando training in Devon. He was part of an intake of other British and Commonwealth intel recruits sent for a crash course in elite soldiering.

For seven months he was ‘hardened’ as only the Royal Marines believe a man can be hardened. It was brutal. Straight out of an honours degree in history, suddenly Mac was getting his head shaved in the quartermaster’s yard at Lympstone Barracks. The early days were still a blur. He remembered the fi ghts, the cold, the hunger. He remembered purple-faced men with Geordie accents screaming, ‘You silly-looking cunt.’

The Marines built you up physically and then taunted you psychologically. The airborne course was a good example. High-altitude, low-opening jumps weren’t that bad if you’d trained properly.

The killer was the three am test: getting pulled out of a warm bed

‘wakey-wakey, hands off snakey’ – to go HALO jumping in the dark.

Mac went on to the Special Boat Service course, which involved a survival route in the Borneo jungle. The course, known in British military circles simply as ‘Brunei’, entailed hunger, thirst, loneliness, confusion, trench foot, fatigue, malaria, deadly wildlife and madness.

There were swarms of mosquitoes so aggressive he’d been bitten on the inside of his throat.

There was one guy Mac particularly remembered: Lane, the Canadian. Though Mac’s height, Lane was a bulging gym bunny and a black belt in something. Lane had never missed an opportunity to behave like a wanker, bringing new meaning to the concept of self-belief.

In Brunei, Lane’s macho act fell apart in spectacular fashion. On the SBS survival section – the last test in a six-month course – the candidates were placed in four-man teams. Three days into the hike Lane lost it – dehydrated, fatigued, disoriented and completely spooked by the Borneo wildlife that included spiders the size of dinner plates. Lane’s breaking point came when the Malaysian candidate in their team caught a fat snake one afternoon and prepared it as an early dinner. They were so hungry that three of them seized on the snake meat, but not Lane. He was fi nished. The martial artist was in an advanced stage of mental collapse by the time he took a seat by the river and started babbling.

Mac couldn’t even get him to stand – all the bloke could do was cry.

Mac fi nished Brunei with a small piece of his psyche gone forever. When the successful candidates were all out of hospital, they were called out to the parade ground in searing tropical heat.

Five instructors walked the line, ritually roughing the hair of their successful candidates and muttering reluctant praise. Non-violent physical contact was too much for some of the guys.

Mac kept it tight, looked the chief instructor, Mark ‘Banger’ Jordan, in the eye. He’d completed, and he was out. But he’d be a Royal Marine forever.

Mac walked down from the university knoll and north-east towards Chinatown. Happy. Sydney in early summer was all jacaranda blossoms and the smell of frangipani buds. He had a letter of offer in his pocket and a lunch date with Diane.

Diane Ellison had lured him from his single status about six months before. They’d met at an Aussie trade function in Jakarta where he’d introduced himself as Richard Davis, a sales executive from Southern Scholastic Books. It was a lie he hadn’t yet undone.

Mac had been instantly taken with her. She was beautiful and smart, blue-eyed, blonde, tall and curvy. The daughter of a British diplomat, she worked as an IT maven for a global outfi t. She was based in Sydney but her beat covered Jakarta, Manila, KL and Singapore, and her father let her stay in the British compound when she visited Jakarta.

They’d hooked up again in Sydney, as Mac had found more reasons to fl y down from Jakkers. Things had become serious. It wasn’t just the sex, which was great, but all the close-in stuff that Mac had kept in a psychological vault for fi fteen years. She laughed hard when something was funny but was razor-sharp with men who tried to talk down to her. She was also witty, especially after a couple of wines.

Mac really liked that.

It had turned into love.

And she had no idea what Mac did for a living.

That’s where the university job came in. A chance to slip out the back way of his current life and reappear like a regular citizen with regular prospects. The kind of thing civvie women demanded.

She was worth it, thought Mac, patting the lump in his pocket. As the dean had said, Times have changed.

As Mac strode past the University of Technology he looked across the six-lane road at a Credit Union building covered in mirror glass.

He gave it a sideways glance. It was an old habit: use any refl ective surfaces to see who was following. He saw himself and reckoned he didn’t look bad for a thirty-seven-year-old with some hard miles on the clock. But as he turned back to the footpath something caught his attention.

Mac had once spent a secondment with Shin Bet – Israel’s internal intelligence service – learning the part-art, part-science of psychogenic gait analysis. For eight-hour shifts he strolled in front of one-way glass at Ben-Gurion Airport, sat in front of monitors at Haifa’s central railway station and walked the public concourses of the infamous bus interchange in Jerusalem. Between the Shin Bet offi cers, most of whom were women, and the classes at the academy, Mac learned the psychogenic truth that acting natural is more conspicuous than just being naturally nervous. Things happened to your body when you consciously tried to correct nervousness. You tensed down the front of your pelvis, for example, which resulted in a lifting of the heels as you walked.

The bloke behind him now had that overacted coolness. Mac reckoned him as twenty-fi ve, Anglo. He was dressed like a student with a red backpack, navy T-shirt and runners. He had a medium build, was six foot and professionally exercised. He looked the part, thought Mac, and the bare head was at least a start since only amateurs wore hats on a tail. They made you a walking, breathing beacon.

He checked the time: twenty minutes before lunch with Diane.

Mac looked ahead, saw the pedestrian lights across Harris Street holding on red and a bunch of people waiting for the light to go green across the busy intersection. He slowed, stopped and looked intently in the window of a big university bookstore, keeping his peripheral sight on a circle to his left. He wanted his stalker to pass.