Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike (22 page)

Davidson had semi-retired to the Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane, but coming back to ASIS had meant reconnecting with his old corporate cover in Perth, on the other side of the continent. His four-and-a-half-hour morning fl ight from Perth to Brissie left Perth at half past midnight and got in to Brisbane just before six am. And now Davidson was going to be on a fl ight to Canberra in forty minutes.

You needed a sense of humour when you travelled around Australia.

They made small talk for a couple of minutes, most of which Mac had gathered from their phone calls. Davidson was back in - he’d never really left - and was building an economic operations team. Mac clocked the charcoal suit, the plain blue tie and white shirt - nothing to catch the eye or set him apart. His late-fi fties face had jowls and the full head of salt ‘n’ pepper hair was cut like you’d expect from a former representative cricketer and career spy. Again, nothing to make anyone look twice. Mac’s dark chinos, pale blue polo shirt and boat shoes completed a pattern of anonymity. There was no reason to look at either of them: no tats, no piercings, no jewellery, no hairdo, no iPod, no message T-shirt, no need to differentiate.

If you became a banker, a lawyer or a political adviser - as most of Mac’s university peers had - you spent your early career as a young man attempting to build a projection of self-importance. You had to be noticed, even if people thought you were a wanker. But in the spy trade, you took smart blokes with good degrees and showed them how to fade into a crowd, to have people forget what they looked like, to be the man who wasn’t there. Which was why Mac sat still, his hands on his lap, as he spoke with Davidson. Anyone trying to observe them wouldn’t even have body language or mannerisms to decipher.

‘Happy with the terms?’ asked Davidson.

‘Sure, Tony - ten a week and expenses is fair,’ said Mac, who liked that his former boss was straight-up about money and expenses.

‘Not bad, really,’ mused Davidson.

‘And no wet work - I can live with that,’ said Mac, happy that he wouldn’t have to be pulling the Heckler out of mothballs. ‘So what’s up?’

‘EFIC has a situation.’

Mac nodded. EFIC was the Commonwealth’s Export Finance and Insurance Corporation, essentially a government instrumentality for ensuring that large exports of Australian goods and services to volatile countries would have payment guaranteed. Most developed nations had their version of EFIC. The US one was called Ex-Im Bank and had funded Saddam’s military program in the late 1980s, before George Bush launched Desert Storm in 1991 and destroyed all the hardware.

When Saddam had started his post-war rebuilding he relied once again on the loan guarantees of the American taxpayer to rebuild the weapons of mass destruction that the Americans would later claim was their reason for going back in and destroying it all again.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Mac.

Davidson poured more tea. ‘Bennelong Systems - heard of them?’

‘Vaguely,’ said Mac. ‘They do power station control systems.

That them?’

‘And?’

Mac looked out on the tarmac where three Qantas 767s were being loaded and refuelled in the early morning light. ‘Let’s see, didn’t they emerge out of an earlier company that made C and C systems for the navy? They had something to do with over-the-horizon, right?’

‘That’s them,’ said Davidson, looking up at a businessman walking past and allowing the bloke fi ve steps before he continued. ‘Bennelong is on the verge of signing on to a very large project with a private power-generation consortium in Indonesia.’

‘How big?’

‘Consortium’s talking about total construction of fi ve billion US.

Could be a drink of between three hundred and fi ve hundred million for Bennelong.’

‘How nice for them,’ said Mac.

‘Yes, but there’s some issues in there.’

Mac waited, sipped his coffee.

‘The EFIC guys turned this down as a loan guarantee,’ continued Davidson. ‘In fact, they sent it back three times. They don’t want to write it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Initially, they didn’t like the end-user certifi cation. And when the deal boomeranged the fi rst time, they made an inquiry with the Organisation,’ said Davidson, referring to ASIO. ‘And it got handed around the community, and what with one thing and another, the chaps saw it and asked EFIC not to write the guarantee.’

Mac raised an eyebrow. The ‘chaps’ referred to people like Mac and Davidson who worked at ASIS. If they’d asked EFIC not to do the guarantee, there was probably a good reason.

‘It was a lucky catch,’ said Davidson. ‘Someone in Jakkers saw Bennelong mentioned as part of a power-generation trade show, realised that the consortium was about to announce Bennelong as a full technology partner - on an equity basis - and they got on to the Tech Desk in Canberra.’

Australia’s SIS head offi ce had a Technology Desk that tracked harmful and helpful technology and the various incarnations of the companies it existed in as they were merged, acquired and moved offshore. The idea was to track the technologies, not the corporate packaging they moved around in.

‘And what was there?’ asked Mac, interest triggered. This was what he was trained for.

‘Well the guys threw it around and it turned out that Bennelong was called Thomas Technology back in the early 1990s. Before that, they’d been subject to a management buy-out of a specialist division of a small outfi t called Betnell Corporation. Heard of them?’

Mac had. Betnell was to the eighties and early nineties what Halliburton was to the 2000s: a massive contractor to the US

Department of Defense and a global builder of large-scale public infrastructure projects.

‘What did Betnell’s specialist division do?’ asked Mac, his antennae now fully alert.

‘They built the control software for hydro power stations and coal-fi red power stations -‘

‘Yes.’

‘- and nuclear power stations.’

Mac sipped on his coffee. ‘Okay.’

‘Yes, okay. But what we think Thomas Technology ended up with as a legacy item after the MBO was all the sequence code for a reactor called the Type-3.’

‘And what was that, Tony?’

‘The Type-3 was Betnell’s reactor that enabled uranium enrichment.’

A pause opened between them and Mac let his eyes drift to a man reading the
Australian Financial Review
three tables away. ‘That’s a serious reactor.’

‘Yeah, but at the time, Betnell was being investigated by the audit offi ce in Washington for some commercial irregularities.’

Mac chuckled; commercial irregularities in the Washington context were when you defrauded the United States government.

‘And besides,’ said Davidson, ‘GE Corporation apparently had a cheaper, better enrichment reactor and it could be built in half the time. So Ex-Im Bank were writing loan guarantees for the GE reactors like they were going out of fashion. And don’t forget that the French and Russians were building these reactors for clients too.’

‘So the Type-3 withers on the vine, GE steals the market, but the code is still there?’ said Mac.

‘Forgotten, unloved,’ said Davidson. ‘But quite usable.’

‘The code?’

‘Yeah - had a chat to the Tech Desk and it seems that these sequence codes for enrichment reactors are so complex that the code written twenty years ago is still being used. There was no point in reinventing the wheel at every upgrade in reactor types, so the original sequence code still works on modern enrichment reactors.’

Mac was now totally enlisted.

‘So, fi fteen or twenty years later,’ said Davidson, ‘we have a private power consortium in Indonesia bringing in Bennelong not simply as a contractor but as an equity participant, and there is a difference.’

‘You think this consortium is after the uranium-enrichment code?’

‘I’d like to cross it off my list.’

‘So, the fi rm had a word in the shell-like with EFIC, and they spiked it?’ asked Mac, slightly confused.

‘Yep, EFIC understood.’

‘So?’

‘We got overruled,’ said Davidson, shaking his head.

‘Politicians?’

‘Who else? It was sent back to EFIC four days later as NIA.’

If the accountants, bankers and lawyers at EFIC didn’t want to write a loan guarantee, the National Interest Account was an override device from the Prime Minister’s offi ce, which held that the deal in question was in the national interest.

‘So someone’s got a friend in cabinet?’ asked Mac.

‘Damned right. But anyway,’ said Davidson, leaning back and visibly relaxing, ‘before the chaps could grab hold of Urquhart and kick up a stink at PMC I mentioned that we might let the horse run, see where it leads us, eh? Have a peek into who these people are and what they want. With me, Macca?’

Mac nodded. ‘With you.’

‘How’re Jen and Rachel, by the way?’ asked Davidson with an avuncular smile as the Qantas Club steward took his plates away.

Mac warmed to the new conversation. Tony Davidson and his wife, Violet, had never had children and they doted on the kids of the younger intel offi cers. ‘They’re great, thanks, Tony,’ said Mac.

‘Jen’s okay about all this?’

‘Yeah, good as gold,’ said Mac, avoiding the point that he was the one who wasn’t necessarily okay with going back in the fi eld and being away from his girls for extended periods.

‘She’s okay about a bit of travel?’

‘Yeah,’ croaked Mac, not liking where this was going.

‘Good,’ said Davidson. ‘Because this power consortium is meeting with Bennelong in Jakkers, Friday arvo.’

Mac winced. It was Thursday morning.

Finding himself a rear bulkhead seat on the southbound AirTrain, Mac pulled out the fi le that Davidson had slipped into his document satchel in the Qantas lounge. The operation was called Mainstreet and his cover would be Richard Davis, his old textbook salesman identity, only this time he’d be spruiking himself as a former EFIC operative who could make things happen in Canberra.

Mac fl ipped through the business cards. His fi rm was Davis Associates and the landline routed to the ASIS front of Southern Scholastic Books in Sydney, while the mobile number went directly to the Commonwealth secure SIM that Davidson had included in his starter pack. There was a new Commonwealth Bank Visa credit card issued in Richard Davis’s name, a printout confi rming his booking at the Shangri-La and a folder of business-class tickets for Emirates, the eight pm fl ight that night. The tickets suggested Davidson had intended to apply time pressure, not give him time to equivocate, and, more importantly, not allow Jen to kick up a fuss.

There were people at the end of his carriage but no one was interested in him, so Mac pulled out the dossiers and had a quick look. The Bennelong folder had a brief history of the fi rm. As Davidson had said, it had grown out of Melbourne defence contractor Thomas Technology, changing its name to Bennelong Systems in 1999 when it shifted to Sydney.

The two principals of Bennelong were Alex Grant, a former engineer in the RAAF who had done business studies at MIT Sloan, gone to work for Betnell’s Australian arm and then been part of the management buy-out in 1992. Partnering him was Michael Vitogiannis, a former head of sales and marketing at IBM Australia and the owner of a venture capital fi rm called Vitogiannis Partners.

Vitogiannis had bought into Grant’s fi rm, they’d renamed it Bennelong and marketed it as a builder and manager of industrial control systems, especially for the power-generation industry. They had been successful in Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Malaysia as one of the technology partners in various consortia.

It looked like a classic technology company: one guy the genius with the nuts and bolts, the other partner is the schmoozer, door-opener and fi nance guy. The pics confi rmed the story. Alex Grant was in his early sixties, conservative, looked like a Presbyterian elder and had an open, intelligent smile. About fi fteen years younger, Vitogiannis was sleek, tanned, with the eyes of a rule-breaker.

Clipped to the dossier was a glossy colour brochure for the Powering Asia trade fair and conference in Jakarta. On page four it listed Michael Vitogiannis from Bennelong Systems as one of the panel on ‘Technology and Power Generation’. Mac noticed a small ballpoint mark next to the Vitogiannis listing. He’d have to have a word with Davidson about that; intelligence professionals should never mark a document - it made the workload for people like Mac that much easier. At the back of the brochure Mac found the ‘pick your package’

section for delegates wanting to stay at the offi cial conference hotel, the Jakarta Shangri-La.

Another dossier named the power-station builders as NIME

Energy and listed the three principals: the managing director, the company secretary and chief engineer. The names meant nothing to Mac. They looked like a bunch of Jakarta lawyers recruited to pose for a meaningless corporate photo. NIME hadn’t actually built a power station, didn’t own one and seemed to have few credentials.

Clippings from
Tempo
and
AsiaWeek
quoted the managing director, Ramsi Numberi, as claiming that NIME had options on seven power-station sites in Indonesia and Malaysia, but Mac saw there were no solid commitments to build and no timelines. A decent-sized coal-burning, base-load power station took up to seven years to build from scratch, and you wouldn’t get much change out of AUD$1 billion.

It wasn’t an enterprise for amateurs. The reporter from
Tempo
surmised that NIME was a front for Golkar’s way of doing business and that the President’s fi ght against KKN - corruption, collusion, nepotism

- was being scuttled by consortia backed by banks and private-equity funds.

Davidson had left it to Mac to do it his way, though in his basic outline he’d suggested that Mac not try to infi ltrate NIME directly.

Instead, he’d recommended getting close to Bennelong to see what they were hoping to achieve and what they knew about NIME. Use Bennelong as the Trojan Horse for NIME.

In order to make the arrival of Richard Davis a serendipitous event, Mac had suggested to Davidson that word be passed informally to Bennelong’s people that the NIA application was not going to be straightforward and would probably need some massaging. Davidson had smiled at that, since it was a ploy he’d already instigated.