Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike (23 page)

As Davidson’s fl ight was called, and Mac stood to go, his old boss had made one fi nal point. ‘Oh, and Macca - this Vitogiannis is a ladies’

man, right?’

Mac shrugged. ‘Sure.’

‘So I thought we’d put a soft edge on it, okay?’

Mac had waited. A soft edge was an informal or social prop that an intelligence operative used to make a target more relaxed, to get their guard down and make the intel guy seem more human, more empathetic. Humanising yourself with a family or by using a humanitarian cover were the common ones.

‘Yeah,’ said Davidson, ‘so I want you to do this Fred-and-Wilma, right? It’s a conference, and blokes take their wives to conferences, fair enough?’

The AirTrain slowed as it approached Robina station. It had been a long time since Mac had worked in a husband-and-wife intel team, but he seemed to remember that when it worked, it worked very well.

He had no problem with it, but he knew someone who might.

***

Mac wiped the knives and forks before he put them in the cutlery drawer, humming to ‘Let it Be’ on the radio. Afternoon sun was streaming into the kitchen and the house had an eerie quiet to it now that Rachel was sleeping.

Jenny walked in and switched off the radio, put her weight onto her right hip and crossed her arms. Never a good sign.

‘So, Macca, what did he say?’

‘Gig up north, routine stuff,’ said Mac, trying to keep the tension out of his voice. Jen had never asked him for the full rundown on what he did for money and he’d repaid her by never mentioning it. There was no reason to tell anyone, let alone a cop, what Davidson had been talking about. Cops gossiped worse than any other profession Mac could think of.

Jenny pushed her hip up against the kitchen bench, fi xed him with a steady look. ‘Anything I should know?’

Mac kept wiping and stowing cutlery, sensing that this might not end well. ‘Nah, mate, no worries.’

‘How long?’

‘Two weeks, max.’

‘Anyone have an excuse to shoot at you?’

‘
Jen!
‘ he spluttered, dropping the handful of knives in the drawer, and reaching out to touch the wooden chopping board three times.

‘Just asking,’ said Jen.

He looked out the window, exhaling through his teeth, thinking about that job at the University of Sydney and whether the travelling had really been so bad. He could have stuck it out, eased himself into the civvie world and disappeared from his former life. He was thirty-eight, he loved Jen and Rachel, but he couldn’t retire from his profession any more than Davidson could. Now he was going back into the fi eld. He was strangely emotional about the whole thing, and he didn’t like feeling that way before a job - he liked to be cold, focused.

‘Look,’ said Mac. ‘Say the word and I’ll pull out.’

‘No, I’m sweet, if you are. And we could do with the money,’ she said, raising an eyebrow and cocking her head.

‘Ten thousand a week and expenses,’ said Mac.

‘Happy with that?’

‘It’s a start.’

Jenny smiled, moved to him, put her forearms around his neck.

‘Happy with the crew?’

Mac shrugged.

‘Know them?’ asked Jenny.

‘There’s one, and no, I don’t.’

‘Trust him?’

The old Macca could have batted that one away in his sleep. But he didn’t. ‘Actually, she’s a she,’ he said, looking into Jenny’s dark eyes.

Mac had spent all of his career trying to read voices, bodies, clothes and faces. He noticed how people answered the phone, how they said ‘thank you’ and how quickly the sides of their mouths dropped after they’d stopped smiling. It all helped. He’d even found that taking a few minutes to have a nosey-poke through a person’s bookshelf or iPod was a nice access point to who a person really was. If you found JJ Cale, they smoked pot; if you found Marilyn French, they had a disappointment problem; anything by Marcel Proust signifi ed someone who wanted to be seen as ten times smarter than they actually were.

But eyes and women went together like guns and ammo. Even the most poker-faced women found it hard to stop the primal responses being projected through their eyes. Things like suspicion and desire and anger.

Mac watched as Jenny’s eyes fl ashed to super-dark, like an iron curtain had dropped behind the pupils. He tried to rescue it. ‘Listen, Jen -‘

‘Oh, I’m listening, Macca. Don’t worry yourself about that,’ she said, giving him a basic cop stare of the type Mac remembered from his father.

‘Look - it’s nothing,’ said Mac. ‘Just the way they want to run it.’

Jen’s forearms tensed at the sides of Mac’s neck and she nodded facetiously, breath streaming out of her nostrils. ‘Of course it’s not as if it’s the old husband-and-wife cover, right?’

‘Jen -‘

‘So it’s not as if you thought you could slip out and spend two weeks in a hotel room with another bird, and not tell me, right? That wasn’t how it was?’

‘
Jen
-‘

‘She married?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Mac.

‘How old?’

‘
Jen!
‘

‘She better looking than me?’

‘Look, I don’t even know who she is -‘

‘Is. She. Better. Looking. Than. Me?’

‘No,’ smiled Mac. ‘She’ll be a dog.’

‘Really?’

‘Totally. She won’t be in the hotel - got a kennel lined up.’

Jenny smiled, softened a bit. Mac put his hands down to her hips.

‘This is what I like, right here,’ he said, grabbing her arse.

Jenny moved in to him and, looking into his eyes, said, ‘You’re a worry, know that, Macca?’

She put her hands behind his head and kissed him. Jenny may have been hard in many respects but she was a nice soft kisser.

‘You’re a beautiful girl,’ murmured Mac as Jenny pressed in closer, kissed him again. It had been a while, what with Rachel and the broken sleep, and Mac felt himself reacting to Jenny’s body. She felt him reacting too, and reached down, squeezed him gently.

Mac moved his hips. Jenny looked into his eyes and said, ‘It’s not as if I don’t trust you.’

‘No,’ mumbled Mac, his mind elsewhere.

‘So just keep thinking with the big head, huh Macca?’

‘Sure,’ said Mac, chuckling.

And then Jen squeezed him way too hard. Mac gasped, doubled over in pain and watched his wife walk away, ponytail swishing.

CHAPTER 27

Mac pulled up his pants slightly too fast and gasped as they hit the head he wasn’t supposed to think with. He tried again, more gingerly, and padded awkwardly back to his reclined seat, which in the Emirates A340 business class were the generous twenty-four-inch models. The eight pm fl ight would get into Singers around fi ve am and then he’d connect with a fl ight into Jakarta that would land shortly after eight am local time.

The lights were down and it was a chance to rest. Tucking back under the blanket, he dozed, thought about Jen and whether she’d been justifi ed in pinching him like that. She had a diffi cult personality at times and could get a bit cranky when she was hungover. Mac suspected she had cabin fever - wanted to get back into cop work, do what she loved.

Like many tough women there was a vulnerable side to her too.

When Mac had fi rst started seeing Jen, he’d been surprised at the fact that she often cried in bed at night, which was completely at odds with her daytime persona as the ice queen of the AFP. Initially he’d wanted to do a runner; criers, generally speaking, gave a bloke the excuse to make like the coyote and do what you had to do. But with Jenny it didn’t scare him and he hung around. They
liked
each other, but they also liked each other. In those early days, she didn’t want the tears discussed:
I don’t cry, understand?

Jenny’s job was technically as intelligence liaison between the Australian Federal Police and other law enforcement, intelligence and military organisations in the countries to Australia’s near north, but the real impact of intelligence liaison was in her specialist detail, transnational sexual servitude - the enslavement of children and young women for the sexual enjoyment of blokes. It was a confronting detail and, like all of the women working in that area, Jenny went off sex from time to time and had had to get counselling when things got too much.

The hostess wandered by and Mac asked for a bottle of water. She brought him a Vittel and he sipped on it.

He’d often wondered how Jenny maintained her strength and good humour. Growing up on an orchard in western Victoria, her father had been a violent drunk, and while Jenny’s mother and younger sister went along with the program, Jenny couldn’t bow to it. From a young age, Jen made herself the target of her father’s violence, and she’d get the beatings and spend nights out in the barn, keeping out of harm’s way.

‘When he drank, he wanted respect,’ shrugged Jenny the fi rst time she told Mac about it, ‘but there was no way I could give him that.’

‘You couldn’t just play along?’ Mac had asked.

‘That’s what Mum wanted, but I’d say, “Why - to stop my own father punching me? Threatening me? Calling me a piece of shit?”’

That’s how Jenny had learned to see the world and the men who wandered around in it. Respect wasn’t a default setting for Jen. She’d spent long hours at the local swim club and water polo squad, staying away from the Old Man. Then one night, when she got home from swimming, her younger sister, Petra, came running out of the house in tears, her father close behind yelling something about his dinner.

Jenny had always been tall and willowy but in her fi rst year of high school, and with all the swimming, she’d become stronger in the shoulders, arms and legs. Something made her stand in front of Petra as her father charged after her.

‘Leave her alone,’ Jenny had yelled at him. ‘Pick on someone your own size!’

He’d walked up and punched Jenny fl ush on the jaw, sent her sprawling. When she told Mac this story, Jenny’s eyes took on a faraway look, as if she couldn’t quite explain how things went from bad to worse that night.

‘I was on my knees, shaking my head, probably concussed - he wasn’t a small guy - and I put my hands down to steady myself and my right hand went straight around a wrecking bar, nice big one too.’

The Old Man had come over to go on with it and Jenny swung the wrecking bar with two hands, like a baseball bat, and hit her father on the left kneecap. She’d recalled, ‘There was total silence for two seconds. He opened his mouth but no sound came out and he fell over like a tree going down.’

Jenny had cracked his patella.

‘He was moaning and groaning, and I stood up, threw the bar away and started walking down the driveway to the barn. I had a sleeping bag down there and everything.’

As she was walking, her sister screamed out, ‘Jenny!’ and when she turned she saw the fi rst fl ash from her Old Man’s rifl e and heard the slug pinging off the Massey-Ferguson. She ran across the home paddock and into the cherry orchards and kept running as the shots came out of the darkness.

The court acquitted her father and Jenny was sent to boarding school as an offi cial problem child. She’d barely talked to her family again and when her father died of cancer while she was studying at Monash University, she didn’t attend the funeral. One day Jenny had bumped into Petra in Brisbane, when they were both adults, and Petra still seemed to think that if Jen had kept her mouth shut and played along with their dad, everything would have been fi ne.

Jenny had grown through all that and Mac didn’t get much of the fallout from her childhood - with one exception: she was the only woman other than his mother ever to hit him. It was just after he’d fi nished a gig with Garvs in Jakarta back in ‘02. He’d had a few drinks after an operation, and then turned up to see Jen. But he’d forgotten to remove his Heckler from his belt and Jenny hit him on the head for that.

She put up with a lot from Mac but she wouldn’t tolerate a drunk with a fi rearm. And now she’d made it clear that she also had no tolerance for Mac having a second wife, even if it was in the line of duty.

***

The small whiteboard sign above the arrivals crowds simply said DAVIS and Mac made for it with his double suit bag and wheelie cabin luggage.

‘Edwin, how you doing, champ?’ said Mac, handing the suit bag to the Shangri-La driver, a well-groomed Filipino in a black chauffeur’s uniform and an Errol Flynn mo.

‘Good, thanks, Mr Richard - and how are you?’

‘Fit as a fox, thanks, mate.’

They made small talk as Edwin - something of an institution at the Shangri-La - navigated the black Mercedes-Benz S-class through the morning traffi c crush and fi lled him in on Indonesian politics.

‘SBY is good for country, but poor person don’t understand why it good,’ admitted Edwin. ‘Easy for, how you say,
popular
politician to promise anything to poor people.’

Mac gave a wry chuckle. Indonesia was in its fi rst full cycle of democratic government and they were realising that a reforming leader like Susilo Bambang Yudhuyono might be good in the medium term, but such a president made himself vulnerable to populist demagogues. ‘Sounds like Australia, mate. No difference.’

They took over an hour to get to the Lar, where Edwin took them around the back, into the hotel garage, allowing Mac to enter from the porter’s entrance.

The vast lobby and lounge area was busy with Malaysian businessmen, American oil guys and Aussie miners. Phones trilled, front desk people slapped thirteen-page bills on the counter, and Hong Kong bankers’ wives wandered behind porters’ trolleys laden with pink alligator-hide luggage sets.

Edwin hooked the Cutler suit bag on a porter’s trolley and Mac fl icked him some greenbacks, smiled and said, ‘Take it easy, mate.’

Edwin had once been a cop in Manila and was very useful to have on your side in a place like Jakkers.

‘Cheers,’ replied Edwin, trying to get his best Strine accent into the delivery.

Mac cased the lobby, looking for eyes, clothes and gaits that didn’t belong. There was a large easel alongside the massive front desk advertising the Powering Asia conference and welcoming delegates.

He waited for the senior manager guy and moved forward, clocked the name-tag and gave him a wink.