Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

The girlfriend was news to them.

Kleinwitz didn’t drink, smoke or gamble and his music tastes ran to Phil Collins – the ninety-nine per cent giveaway that this boy was no bounder. His induction fi le revealed a wave of girls, women and men paid to lure Kleinwitz into bed during his fi rst posting in KL.

Standard procedure with new recruits. The accounting major hadn’t blinked. Mac recognised the name of one of the contractors paid to seduce the geeky young Australian at the embassy. If that bird couldn’t make Kleinwitz giggle, then something wasn’t right.

Mac had run a two-week tail on the bloke. Yes, there was a bird – a dancer from Angeles City. She was clean. But a bit more digging and intel from the Australian Federal Police turned up her brother, a hoodlum named Miggy Morales. Miggy ran nightclubs, Miggy ran bare-knuckle fi ghts and, most interestingly, Miggy ran brothels where the bait was prepubescent boys. Mac reckoned Kleinwitz was being blackmailed into joining Trade. And where there was blackmail there was a rival intelligence outfi t – probably the Chinese – getting an advantage it shouldn’t have.

Mac had cornered Kleinwitz in a basement room at Southern Scholastic Books. Helping out were two offi cers from the Service, Nguyen and Kritikos, along with the AFP’s intelligence liaison offi cer, Jenny Toohey.

Mac started hard, accusing bug-eyed Kleinwitz of being a rock spider. Accused him of being blackmailed by Miggy Morales and his sister. Mac told Kleinwitz that as far as he was concerned, the Mindanao Forest Products infi ltration had gone pear-shaped because he was doubling. Kleinwitz was integral – as the accountant, he had constructed the whole fi nancial scenario. And a local asset had died.

Kleinwitz stayed calm until Mac pulled out the black and whites of Kleinwitz on a bed with a couple of Miggy’s boys, who did not look to be enjoying the experience. Mac threw them on the bolted table top and watched impassively as Kleinwitz squirmed in his chair, the blood rushing into his face. Kleinwitz took another look at the pics and smirked. Jenny Toohey – standing fi ve-ten and a former Australian Universities basketballer – took a step forward and landed a straight right in his teeth.

Canberra dispatched its I-team, a shady group made up of seconded cops, soldiers and intelligence types whose job was completing

‘sensitive disengagements from Commonwealth employment’.

So Mac knew this part of the game. Didn’t like it, but he knew it.

‘When and where?’ he asked Rod Scott.

She rose as Mac walked into the Happy Dragon.

Diane.

The Chinatown lunch crowd turned as one. She was wearing a sleeveless black linen knee-length dress, her honey-blonde hair falling to her bare, tanned shoulders. Mac’s heart rate bumped up a couple of notches.

‘Hi Richard,’ she purred, quietly cross at his lateness. ‘How did it go at the university?’

‘No worries. Yeah,’ said Mac, greeting her clumsily, a bit distracted.

They leaned in and he kissed Diane’s hair rather than her cheek. Her kiss landed on his cheek, where it always did. Diane had a wet kiss – a kiss you still felt on your face two minutes later.

He sat heavily and babbled about the uni job until he ran out of puff. There wasn’t much else to say. He’d been offered the job and he was going to take it.

Diane smiled at him and raised her glass in a toast. ‘To Richard the Brainiac.’

He tried to get with the spirit, have a laugh. But wine splashed out of Mac’s glass when he tried to drink. He could feel himself losing it. All that embassy life had given Diane a knowingness about life and men, and sometimes Mac felt she was looking straight through him.

As if he would always be the small-town Queensland boy – a ton of energy but no class.

Mac knew how to track, snatch and dispatch people. He could interview, interrogate and inveigle. He could manipulate perceptions with deceptive scenarios. But he had no idea how civvie relationships actually worked. He was used to cops and customs girls, embassy staffers, assistant military attaches, trade mission offi cers – the classic embassy-colony types. All of them work-obsessed, slightly worthy and deeply embedded in the politics of bureaucracy.

In the last few weeks his professional demeanour had been falling apart as Diane came closer to the centre of his life and a new part of himself tried to emerge. She made fun of offi ce politics and jockeying for favour, and made it clear that the best thing about her job in IT was that she was largely her own boss. Diane thought men in suits were boring and the women who loved them were even worse. She was hilarious and had the vaguely piratical air of a rebellious person born to privilege. And Mac loved her for it, an indulgence he couldn’t really afford.

The situation was ridiculous: Diane thought he was a textbook sales executive called Richard who spent a lot of time in South-East Asia. How long did you keep that up when you had feelings for a girl?

In the Service they’d have said his nerves were going, that he was choking.

Mac made a joke about the heat in the restaurant, and calmed himself by acting the part of a composed person. Diane twirled the stem of her wineglass between thumb and forefi nger. She leaned on her left hand and focused on him. ‘Are you avoiding me, Mr Genius?’

Mac realised he’d sat down opposite her. Diane liked him to sit adjacent to her, so she could hold his hand under the table. The fi rst time it happened, at a restaurant in Jakarta, Mac had blushed.

Now Diane raised her hand imperceptibly at the maitre d’ and three men descended on their table. Mac never liked this sort of carry-on. Diane gave a slight wink to the maitre d’ as he bowed, and asked him to change the setting for ‘Mister Richard’.

The Chinatown lunchers smiled as Mac stood and waited for the setting to be changed. One bloke nodded at him with a silly grin, until his wife gave him The Look.

When he sat down again, Diane grabbed his hand and put it on her lap. He tried to avoid her eyes. He took a peek. She was smiling, blue eyes sparkling.

He was way, way gone on this bird.

Mac found a small park under the southern approach to the Sydney Harbour Bridge as Japanese newlyweds hammed for their photographer.

The lunch had not gone well. Mac couldn’t get his mind off what Tobin might want, and so close to his retirement. Diane had wanted to talk about something. Mac knew it was relationship stuff, an ‘us’ chat – the future. He couldn’t do it and made sure she couldn’t take things in that direction. Then he’d claimed an urgent meeting and done a runner.

He felt like he was tearing himself apart, four or fi ve ways at once.

Mac took another look at the wedding party. He couldn’t look at a camera without thinking about surveillance; couldn’t look at a groom and his bride without wondering where their backup was and thinking, Is it a snatch or a hit?

He couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t live two or three lives, operating under three names, working for bullshit companies, travelling on false passports, inducing weak people to be even weaker by betraying something they shouldn’t. Couldn’t pull missions and not even speak about them with colleagues.

He couldn’t shoot up a terrorist camp in the outback and then schmooze the Dean of History two days later. Couldn’t break up a street detail and then go to lunch with the woman he loved like nothing was wrong.

It was all wrong.

No one in his world really had the nerves for what they did. To establish trust and then suddenly become the blackmailer, the torturer or the executioner to those who believed in you was not a question of nerves. It was about shutting off a part of yourself – a part that Mac had shut down to get through the Royal Marines and SBS.