The Marmalade Files (2 page)

Catriona Bailey peered into the dark barrel of the television camera and felt a trickle of sweat forming on her upper lip. She was beginning to feel the strain and hated herself for it.

The Foreign Minister had slept fitfully, catching not much more than an hour's rest between two and three, which wasn't enough, even for her. She usually lived on four hours a night, finding it sufficient to keep up her inhuman work pace.

But two days ago a magnitude-eight earthquake had struck north-west China, killing hundreds and injuring thousands. That alone was enough to spark media interest, but the fact that a small number of Australians were missing – including a child – meant the domestic media was in hyper-drive.

And that was a great opportunity.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade had set up a crisis centre and a hotline, and the Minister was where she felt most comfortable: feeding the 24/7 news cycle. But keeping pace
with the news had eaten into the few hours a day she normally set aside for rest.

In truth, DFAT wouldn't usually establish a crisis centre when so few Australians were at risk, but Bailey, typically, had demanded it. She also demanded half-hourly updates on any progress local consular officials were making, hourly briefings on the Chinese and international reaction, telephone calls with every Chinese official imaginable, and regular contact with her former academic colleagues to practise tricky local pronunciations.

She then regurgitated this information in dozens of interviews on every radio and TV program in the land. No audience was too small; no request went unanswered.

Bailey had parked herself in Canberra for one very good reason: every network has a studio in the press gallery. She could talk to Australia from 6 a.m. until midnight and only have to walk a dozen metres of carpet between interviews. Most of the real work fell to the staff updating the blizzard of briefing papers that she demanded, queried, annotated, recited – and then discarded.

In an earlier life Bailey had been a gifted Chinese scholar, fluent in Mandarin, and one of the youngest people ever appointed a professor at the Australian National University. She had a work ethic that bordered on the demented, burning through staff and earning the sobriquet ‘Attila the Hen' from one office refugee.

She was also utterly awkward – ‘socially autistic', her colleagues would say – and seemed unable to settle on a private or public persona. So she approached life as a chameleon, trying to tailor her language to the temper of her audience. And that was a problem because she had absolutely no empathy and often
misjudged her cues, leading to some spectacularly awful public performances.

Worst of all, she felt most comfortable speaking ‘academese' and loved parading her intellect. So the simplest question to her would be met with a wall of sound littered with incomprehensible words.

Recognising this as a problem, she had worked hard at contriving a common touch. ‘Call me Cate,' she implored everyone she met. In casual conversation she would deploy words she imagined were in routine public use; unfortunately, since everything she learned came from books, much of her information was dated and she fell into a unique argot that one wit dubbed ‘wonk-strine'.

It led to famously weird constructions like, ‘Come on, cobber, that's a bodgie piece of analysis. I am fully seized of the need for China to engage with the councils of the world and, in due season, it will.'

One colleague mocked her as a ‘human metaphor for the chasm between knowledge and wisdom'.

A long-time member of the Labor Party, Bailey had ditched academia in the '90s to have a tilt at a seat in Sydney's west. Once elected, her relentless work ethic and fixation with being in the media every single day saw her rise further and faster than anyone had imagined possible, especially given few in Labor's ranks liked her.

‘She is in the party but not of it,' critics would say.

But the public loved her, every card seemed to fall her way and, eleven years after entering Parliament, she became the country's first female Prime Minister.

As PM, she was Australia's equivalent of Princess Di, feted like a rock star, every women's glossy clamouring to dress her for their cover, a one-woman political phenomenon whose approval ratings soared into the stratosphere. For a while, at least.

The descent was just as swift. A little over two years later her party abandoned her. She suffered the indignity of being the first Prime Minister to be dumped without being given the opportunity of recontesting an election. And that burned still, deep within. She became driven by revenge.

Now she was Foreign Minister and believed she could climb back to the top … eventually. She would do it the way she did it the first time: bypassing the party and talking directly to the people – her people – every hour of every day. And she would not stop, no matter who stood in her way.

 

It was 10.30 p.m. and, though she would have denied it, all the tiredness was catching up with Catriona Bailey. She had known it would be a gruelling media round and, the night before, had escaped the Midwinter Ball early, mercifully avoiding the Prime Minister's attempts at humour.

Her day had begun with a 6.30 a.m. interview on Sydney radio station 2GB, moving on to News Radio and a quick ABC News 24 spot, back to commercial TV, then an appearance on Sky. And now, a dozen interviews later, she was fronting up to
Lateline
.

Curiously, she wasn't feeling her usual level of total control, and that was upsetting. She had found the last interview on
PM
a trial and had rare trouble concentrating. She'd spilled a glass of
water while being made up and had a headache from hell. This made it difficult to concentrate and write notes on her briefing papers. Naturally, she pressed on, and now was being beamed live across Australia.

Bailey began to feel light-headed and her left arm was weirdly heavy. Maybe she should have had lunch, or dinner. She had to work hard to stay focused, and she feared tripping over some of the regional details.

Bailey hated to admit that she didn't – and wasn't about to.

As soon as the words left her tongue, which now felt thick in her mouth, Bailey realised her mistake.

The television lights started to swirl before Bailey's eyes and then everything went black. She fell face-down on the gleaming white oval-shaped desk.

Brendan Ryan's plump figure lay propped up in bed with the remnants of a light snack scattered across his blanket – an empty Coke bottle, a packet of chips and three chocolate bar wrappers. The dietary habits of the Labor power-broker were as slothful as his brain was sharp.

While most of Canberra's population was relaxing in front of the television or reading steamy novels, Ryan had spent the last hour studying a photograph of the familiar hole in the Pentagon wall. It was there, according to the mainstream media, that American Airlines Flight 77 crashed on September 11, 2001. But Ryan was not convinced.

‘How does a plane 125 feet wide and 155 feet long fit into a hole that is only 60 feet across,' he muttered aloud, echoing the words of one of his favourite books,
9/11: The Big Lie
. ‘What were our friends thinking?'

Ryan possessed one of the finest minds in politics and was
considered the best Labor strategist in a generation. At thirty-eight he was already the party's most powerful factional warlord and a grateful new Prime Minister had appointed him a junior Minister with some Defence responsibilities. But his immersion in the darkest arts of politics had triggered a strong fascination with conspiracies – JFK, the moon landing, the death of Elvis …

Unlike most conspiracy theorists, attracted to the fringes of politics, Ryan was a Centre-Left patriot. The only place he loved as much as Australia was the United States. So the Americans must have had a good reason for allowing, or causing, the carnage of 9/11. But what was it? The only logical conclusion was an excuse to wage war in Afghanistan and then Iraq. But that jarred with his strategist's brain.

‘Afghanistan, sure, but Iraq, for fuck's sake … the enemy is Iran.'

Ryan had always opposed the invasion of Iraq. First, because he predicted it would distract the West from the job in Afghanistan, but also because it would provide an opening for Iran to spread its malign influence through the region. Whatever you thought of Iraq, it acted as a brake on Iranian power. He didn't much care how many Iraqis Saddam Hussein had killed because he'd killed a whole lot more Iranians. Not enough, mind, but more.

The phone broke his train of thought.

‘Freak Show's had a heart attack.'

‘What?'

‘Freak Show … Bailey … The bitch just seized up on
Lateline
, halfway through an interview … it was brilliant. Turn on the television.'

It was the familiar voice of Sam Buharia, the Don of the New South Wales Right, a fellow Senator who played politics with all the sublety of a Somalian warlord.

Ryan reached for the remote, and flicked on the ABC.

Tony Jones was scarlet-faced, reliving the moments before the Foreign Minister's collapse. And then the ABC replayed her seizure.

‘Jesus,' Ryan muttered as he watched the Minister slump forward. ‘I'll call you back,' he told Buharia, not waiting for a response. He dropped the phone onto the bed.

Would Catriona Bailey die and finish the work that Ryan had started more than a year ago when he'd decided to kill her off as Prime Minister?

‘Please, God, be merciful, let the bitch die quickly,' he entreated. He had long since lost any respect for the former leader who had all but destroyed the party he loved through her self-centred and anarchic use of power.

Ryan had been instrumental in her downfall, just months before a general election. And she had not had the decency to go quietly, instead making a public show of recontesting and winning her seat.

Thanks to Bailey's shenanigans, their election campaign had been a debacle. In the end, the major parties had been locked on the same number of seats and Labor only clawed its way back into office by stitching together a shaky alliance of independents and Greens. With Parliament so finely balanced every vote was vital and Bailey had forced the Prime Minister to give her Foreign Affairs, threatening to sit as an independent if he refused.

Ever since, she had used Australian foreign policy as a vehicle to promote herself, looking for high-profile crises to exploit, parading on the world stage and making statements without consultation – some as baffling as they were damaging to Australia's international standing. She was a lone wolf, only interested in her own status; a publicity-seeking missile despised by her colleagues but still liked by the public.

‘I call it the Bailey paradox,' Ryan would say. ‘The further you get from the cow the more you like her.' Ryan's capacity for hate was legendary, and Bailey rated top of the pops on his list of foes.

Well, hopefully it would all be over soon. He began to ponder possible candidates to fill the inevitable Foreign Ministry vacancy. ‘Me, maybe.'

Then his blood ran cold as a single word ricocheted through his brain: by-election!