Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike (7 page)

Mac hesitated, and then put his hand out. They shook and swapped mobile phone numbers before Mac got up to leave.

‘If you’re working with the Indonesian police,’ said Ari, ‘perhaps you can tell me: are they checking passports?’

Mac was about to say,
Why the hell would they be checking passports?
But he just shrugged, said he’d fi nd out.

Walking into the heat, Mac buzzed with what he’d just found out.

The Russians didn’t believe the bombers were locals either.

After changing into clean civvies, Mac headed downstairs and Julie grabbed him as he walked into the hotel lobby. For someone who never seemed to rest, she had a clean, fresh look. Her dark drill skirt was pressed and her white short-sleeved blouse was free of the dust that everyone else picked up in Kuta.

‘Chester needs you, Mr McQueen,’ said Julie as Mac stopped, ‘for signing the Memorandum of Understanding with the Indon National Police.’

She didn’t wait for an answer, just turned and walked.

Mac followed. ‘By the way, Julie …’

She looked over her shoulder.

‘Call me Mac, huh? All this “Mister” stuff will just get everyone confused.’

She smiled, got to a dark door and leaned on it. ‘Okay, Mac. The big one in the suit is from the Indonesian President’s offi ce and the one with the fruit salad is Indonesian National Police. It’s now a joint op and DFAT has carriage from the Aussie side.’

‘And the MOU?’ asked Mac.

‘Joint AFP and INP. We’re doing forensics and DVI; the Indons are doing the investigation.’

Mac smiled. ‘Good thinking. That Chester’s not just a pretty face, huh?’

She laughed. ‘It gets better. The MOU precludes any foreign investigations and the INP will write the fi nal report. Non-negotiable, no dissenting opinions.’

One of Julie’s phones rang and she stepped away from the door, motioning for Mac to go through. There were fi fteen people in a small business centre. The ones with any clout sat around the oval wooden treaty table while the lawyers leaned down and pointed at documents with silver Parkers and black Montblancs.

Chester rose and introduced Mac and the Indonesians at the table all smiled and did their little bows at him. Despite being a bit of a dick, Chester was in his element in a diplomatic forum.

‘Alan, just to bring you up to speed,’ he said, with genial authority,

‘we now have an MOU with the Republic of Indonesia to run the investigation and associated logistics as a joint operation.’

Mac saw that one group at the table, the AFP representatives, were conspicuously not smiling and wondered what kind of arguments had erupted in the back rooms before the cops conceded it was now a DFAT show.

‘Mr McQueen will have overall sign-off on the public affairs side,’ said Chester, smiling like he was ingratiating a boyfriend with someone’s father. ‘I think we’re all in agreement on the need for a single interaction point with the media, yes?’

Afterwards Mac lunched with Chester in the main restaurant. They ate quickly and moved across the basics. The AFP would do all the heavy lifting, with the support of the Australian Defence Force. The cops would build the forward command post, and Defence would organise the chow tents, sleeping quarters, toilets and showers for the two hundred Aussies expected to descend on Bali in the next few days.

Of most signifi cance to Mac was the fact that the Indonesian National Police would write the only report. If Mac knew Indonesia even half as well as he thought he did that report would never be released to the Indonesian media and perhaps not even to their parliament. The INP answered directly to the Indonesian President’s offi ce, and that’s where the report would disappear.

‘Doesn’t leave much for us, mate,’ quipped Mac.

Chester smiled with the superiority of the diplomat as he chewed on his tuna. ‘I see our role as more the project manager - thought-leadership, if you will.’

Mac gagged slightly on his veal. If Jenny was here she’d be in the bloke’s face for that sort of comment. She had no time for men and their endless extra layers of management.

‘You okay, McQueen?’ asked Chester as Mac drank iced water and thumped himself in his still-tender sternum.

‘Good as gold, thanks,’ Mac spluttered.

As he put his glass down Mac saw John Morris, the AFP’s senior counter-terrorism bloke, patting his chest pocket like he was going for a ciggie as he ducked out of the restaurant. Mac got up to go, but turned back to Chester. ‘By the way, mate, I’ll need an assistant.’

‘Sure,’ said Chester. ‘Pick anyone … except Julie.’

Mac smiled. ‘I’ll take Julie.’

Chester stopped chewing and they stared at one another.

‘Perhaps we could get Canberra to decide?’ asked Mac.

‘That won’t be necessary, McQueen. She’s yours. For now.’

Mac checked his voicemail as he made for the hotel’s side exit. Most were from Julie or Chester. The one from Jenny said she wouldn’t be able to catch up with him before he left for New York because she was being rotated into Kuta immediately for the bombing. He wondered what his relationship with the cops would turn into once Jenny started stirring things up.

Outside, Mac found John Morris with another cop in the side garden area.

‘Well, look what the cat dragged in,’ Morris sneered, his dark cop moustache rising up like a living thing.

‘Boys,’ said Mac, offering his hand to the bloke he didn’t know - a tall, athletic Anglo with a tanned, shaved head. ‘Alan McQueen, DFAT.’

‘Jason Cutler, Federal Police.’

John Morris cut into the pleasantries. ‘Jase, if you wouldn’t mind giving us a second,’ he snapped, impatient.

Jason fl icked his butt into the shrubs and left without saying another word.

Six foot tall, short dark hair, squarish face and built like a front-rower, John Morris was about ten years older than Mac. His pale blue business shirts were always perfectly pressed and he wore a tie regardless of the temperature. Even in fi eld operations, Morris never wore overalls like most other AFP cops did.

‘Came to gloat, did ya, Macca?’

‘Mate, I’m supposed to be getting packed for the UN gig in New York. I didn’t want this,’ sighed Mac.

‘An outside agency running the media side? That’s bad enough.

But shit, Macca - DFAT is
coordinating
the whole show? I don’t even know where to start with that.’ Morris fl icked his butt, fi shed immediately for another smoke. ‘These incidents are what we train for. Since when did the Australian Federal Police need babysitting?’

Mac didn’t want to get into it. He had a girlfriend who had laid it all out for him on many occasions with a great deal more force than Morris was giving it.

‘John, I don’t think it’s like that.’

‘Oh, really, Macca? So why’d they bring in a spook from Manila to run the media side? Afraid we might tell the truth?’

‘Mate, do you mind?’ said Mac, eyes darting around the garden.

‘I got no problem with intel, you’ve got a job to do. But that, out there,’ said Morris, pointing with his slightly shaking cigarette hand,

‘that is a fucking mess, right? My guys are telling me a hundred and fi fty, maybe two hundred dead. We’ve got hospitals where the burns victims are lying in storage rooms, screaming their lungs out ‘cos there’s no morphine! We’ve got two blast sites fi lled with burnt body parts, Macca.’

‘Look, John -‘

‘Don’t fucking
look
me, McQueen!’ Morris cut in, his voice starting to tremble. ‘Our fi rst job is to build a comms centre and victim database that can handle the incoming. Those are real families with real pain, mate, and most of them are Aussies. Okay?!’

Morris’s eyes were wet now and Mac did the Aussie male thing, looked away for a few seconds. Morris was right: it was a fucking mess out there. As Mac looked back, Morris was dabbing his left eye with the back of his hand.

‘Fucking pollen,’ said Mac, shoving his hands in the pockets of his overalls and waiting as Morris collected himself.

‘Macca, I don’t care how much spooky, high-level shit you’re trying to juggle here - in fact, I don’t want to know. But here’s the deal: if you know anything that has any bearing on this investigation, then I want to know, okay? You hold out and you and me, mate, we’ll be going at it like cat and dog. Okay?’

Mac thought that sounded fair enough, nodded, and then said,

‘The Russians are in town. GRU, I think.’

‘That intel?’

Mac nodded. ‘Military. Answers to the general staff. I spoke with one of them this morning.’

‘And?’

‘And he wanted to know if we were checking passports,’ said Mac after looking around. Another group had huddled for a smoke but they were fi fteen metres away.

Morris shook his head slowly and looked into the sky. The job had just got larger.

‘And BAIS thinks there were two crews,’ continued Mac. ‘The pros did Sari and the patsies did Paddy’s.’

‘Great. So we have the world’s most porous borders and a foreign outfi t responsible for the big blast,’ snarled Morris, fl icking his butt.

‘But they’re long gone, right, so we arrest the patsies, fi t them up for the whole thing, and then it’s “the Muslims did it”. That the DFAT

script, eh Macca?’

Mac shrugged. ‘Your investigation, John.’

Morris’s eyes fl ashed with anger. ‘Fuck the pricks,’ he said as he left.

Mac stayed in the garden for a while, thinking about cops and spies. There’d been one afternoon in Jakarta when Jenny and her transnational sexual slavery crew had been on the tail of a container load of kids. They’d been working on it for two days, no sleep, and had cornered a bunch of businessmen. They had them cold: emails, bank records, trucking documentation and, the clincher, a purchase order for hundreds of kids’ pyjamas, clothes and soft toys.

The plan was to arrest and heavy the business guys, fi nd where the children were being kept, save the kids and bust the slaving racket.

They were on the verge of doing just that - had the forensic guys from Scotland Yard and a Kopassus unit to do the storming. Then someone in the POLRI team snitched, and the word quickly went higher and higher. It soon reached way up into the shitosphere of the political zone and at six minutes before ‘go’ they were stood down. Just like that. It’s how the slave trade worked - more often than not it was protected from above.

By the time Jenny got to the embassy after the op was cancelled, the men who’d stood her down had sensibly vacated. She tracked down the counsellor-political at the Jakarta Golf Club where he was drinking with other Foreign Affairs brass. According to a mate of Mac’s who’d been there, Jenny had stomped up to the table, yelled something about how if it was white, middle-aged men who were being raped for money, the slavers would be shut down immediately.

When the boozed-up Foreign Affairs bloke stood to put a conciliatory hand on her shoulders, she’d pushed him in the chest so hard he’d fallen across the table and into the arms of another Foreign Affairs luncher.

That was Jenny and that was the tension between cops and the apparatus Mac was a part of. So Mac knew where Morris was coming from. He was leading a crew that had to sift through body parts and dental records; ask victims’ relatives the hard questions about whether there was ever a broken bone in their loved one’s right-hand femur; reconstruct and deconstruct and then catch the bastards who did it.

And they had to do it with grieving rellies and an angry public baying for answers. The last thing they needed was a bunch of diplomats over the top of them. Every cop at every level knew where that would lead: you get a bunch of smarties like Chester and Mac in to massage the message and inevitably the tail starts wagging the dog.

Mac headed back to the hotel wondering if that was really Abu Samir on the ship. There was all that and something much bigger weighing on his mind. Freddi’s idea about the pros and the patsies was gnawing away at him. It wasn’t such a far-fetched theory for the pros to operate in the shadow of the more obvious amateurs.

In fact, it was standard operating procedure for most intelligence outfi ts.

Garvs brought two Tigers back from the bar, boogying slightly to Powderfi nger’s ‘My Happiness’, and went straight back into his theories about why the Roosters had got over the Warriors in the rugby league grand fi nal.

Early in their careers Garvs and Mac had become a sort of Laurel and Hardy of the Australian intelligence community: Anton Garvey, the bull-like corporate guy who was lairish on the booze yet very much a man with an offi cial career path; Alan McQueen, more of a solo act and the buddy who made the peace when Garvs got into a blue. Which was often. They’d both been boarders at St Joseph’s schools - Garvs in Sydney and Mac at Nudgee in Brisbane - and talking footy was a highly clinical exercise, like politics or religion was to others.

‘Just goes to show you, Macca,’ said Garvs, his big tanned face serious, ‘that an organised defence beats enthusiastic attack every time.’ Relaxing a bit, he looked around the virtually empty room of an Aussie bar called Tubes, and pondered on where all the sorts had gone.

‘They heard you were coming, Garvs,’ said Mac.

Garvs
yeah, yeah
ed and wandered over to the bar, looking for nuts.

They’d already had their debrief chat: Mac had told Garvs about Ari and Freddi, the Indon and the Russian viewpoints. Garvs had been more circumspect about what he was working on. The declared ASIS crew down from Jakkers had an image problem: they should have caught the chatter about a bombing and they’d even staged a simulated terror attack in Kuta a year earlier - with AFP and Australian Defence Force involvement - such was the likelihood of an attack on Bali. Mac had been in Afghanistan at the time of the Bali simulation, so Garvs was indoctrinated to the defensiveness and Mac wasn’t.

Garvs shared Mac’s discomfort with the Sari Club’s crater. ‘When I was doing my IED rotation at Holsworthy, we could make a crater with anfo but Christ, we needed a shitload of the stuff,’ said Garvs, shaking his head at the thought of how much of the terrorists’ favoured bomb fuel would be required. ‘And mate, we’d tamp it - it was fl ush with the ground. So these bombers needed, what, a container of anfo and it had to be sitting fl at on Legian Street? Without anyone noticing?’