The Marmalade Files (23 page)

George Papadakis didn't like surprises. And he really didn't like Bruce Paxton. For him, Paxton was another piece of garbage left over from the Bailey Government that he didn't dare pick over in case something nasty crawled out.

And something very nasty had just crawled out.

The PM's chief of staff had taken the call after midnight, just as he was drifting off after another day of tragicomedy on the Hill.

‘George … it's Bruce … Bruce Paxton …'

The Defence Minister was slurring his words, enough to confirm he'd been drinking most of the night. ‘Something's come up, I need to meet with the PM, tomorrow … today, I mean …'

‘When you say “something”, do you mean the Yanks have decided to give us the stealth bombers for free? Or do you mean something bad?'

‘Ah, the second one, mate … something bad … and not pretty.'

‘How “not pretty” Bruce?'

‘That fucker Dunkley from the
Oz
is out to get me,' Paxton whimpered.

Papadakis's blood ran cold. He knew and despised most of the press gallery but he had a grudging admiration for Harry Dunkley. If he had something on Paxton, chances were it was real and dangerous.

Over a torturous hour-long call, through a haze of booze and self-pity, Papadakis managed to wheedle all of the details out of Paxton. And they were horrifying.

The meeting was scheduled for eight.

 

‘Prime Minister, the Defence Minister is here to see you.'

Martin Toohey didn't bother rising to greet Paxton, whose complexion suggested he'd endured a long and rugged night of drinking. The PM was sitting with his back to the courtyard, George Papadakis to his immediate left.

Paxton sat without being asked, his back to the door. He wore the crumpled look of a man facing his own mortality.

And Toohey and Papadakis weren't about to make it any easier. For ten drawn-out seconds, they said nothing, until the Prime Minister broke the silence, uttering just the one word.

‘Well?'

For several hours, Paxton had been rehearsing the lines that he hoped would save his Ministerial career and steer him through this crisis. At 4 a.m., the arguments had sounded convincing and he had even allowed himself to imagine that he, Papadakis and Toohey would emerge to fight this battle together.

But as he began to speak the dream evaporated, and all he could muster for the two most powerful men in the country was a barely audible, ‘I'm fucked.'

‘The Prime Minister and I have already established that. What we need to ensure, Bruce, is that we are not all as fucked as you.'

Papadakis's voice was as cold as the morning frost. But he could not completely abandon Paxton; after all the Toohey Government was hanging by a thread – the Foreign Minister remained in a coma, and now a Ministerial resignation loomed. Papadakis knew the resignation would have the media baying for blood, the blood of this hapless Toohey Government.

The Prime Minister finally spoke. ‘Bruce, this is what you're going to do. You will write a letter of resignation and say nothing to anyone until this story breaks. You will then retire to the backbench, but not from Parliament. You will be looked after. If any legal expenses are incurred, the party will pay. It irks me to say this but we cannot afford the loss of even fools like you before the next general election.'

With that, Paxton rose and walked from the room, receiving not even a cursory goodbye. The Minister knew that he had no choice. He would draft the resignation letter as instructed, without telling a soul. But even as he drifted from sight, past the security guard's cubicle, he was plotting. Plotting redemption and revenge. And not necessarily in that order.

‘SHAME MURDOCH, SHAME.' A small group of sloganeering protestors greeted Harry Dunkley as he arrived at News Limited's head office in the inner Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. The phone-hacking scandal had filtered Down Under, providing a platform for these professional agitators to ply their trade.

It was a shade after 10 a.m. The drive from the national capital had taken nearly four hours, the last thirty kilometres a slow crawl along the M5. It had given Dunkley a chance to go through his strategy for explaining the import of the Paxton story to his editor and the company's fastidious inhouse lawyer. He had gone over its factual accuracy and, most importantly, the legal protection conferred by Doug Turner's statement, which backed up every piece of evidence Dunkley had gathered. In his mind, it was watertight.

But he knew there would still be a battle to get the go-ahead to publish.

He'd just ordered a coffee from the ground-floor cafe when his BlackBerry rang. It was Ben Gordon. Harry felt guilty – he'd noticed several missed calls from Gordon last night and this morning and still hadn't replied.

‘Hey Ben … sorry. I meant to call you back, but the last twenty-four hours have been busy as all get out.'

‘Harry, where are you?'

‘I'm in Sydney, mate, going to see the boss to discuss you know what.'

‘We need to talk.' There was a hard edge to Gordon's voice, an urgency that snapped Dunkley out of his self-obsession.

‘What's up?'

‘We need to talk, not over the phone.'

‘I'll be in Sydney all of today, maybe tomorrow as well. I'm sorry, Ben, I should have been in touch earlier but things have moved very quickly.'

‘Harry, we need to talk, asap. There's a whole other side to this …'

Dunkley saw Deb Snowdon, his editor, enter the cafe and head his way. ‘Ben, mate, I've got to —'

‘There's something else —'

‘Harry!' For once Snowdon looked happy as she sat down beside him.

‘Gotta go,' Dunkley said into the phone, his tunnel vision for the big scoop relegating his friend's plea for the moment.

He could just hear Ben on the other end, still talking. ‘— something about Bailey, Harry. Something unbelievable.'

Brendan Ryan was alone, as usual. The Labor power-broker liked to work late into the night, in the dark, with only the light from his computer screen illuminating his apartment on State Circle, the road that rings the Parliament.

He had shared the odd relationship in his thirty-eight years, but women usually found his introspection, intensity and complete lack of interest in anything but politics a turn-off. Coupled with an inability to tolerate people he considered dim – and that was most people – it didn't make him an engaging date.

From the time he was a teenager he had gone to bed well after midnight and risen late, but recently he'd found it hard to sleep at all. He was constantly anxious and his already poor health was worsening.

Everywhere the news was bad. It seemed as if the pillars on which he had built his life were all crumbling at once. The global
financial crisis had accelerated the power shift from the West to the East and Ryan feared for the future.

The West had been on a suicide mission for a couple of hundred years, with its most influential thinkers endlessly chipping away at its foundations, weakening its political structures. They'd killed off the Christian God, taken an axe to the hierarchy of ideas, demonised the past and opposed development. They were the vandals in Rome. And Rome was burning.

Never a fan of the European Union, Ryan feared its splintering monetary system would bring the entire enterprise undone. He could have taken a sadistic pleasure in seeing Europe, the source of many of the worst ideas in Western thought, go belly up. Except it would probably drag the United States down too. And for Ryan that was an unalloyed catastrophe.

Ryan understood the flaws in the United States better than most, but believed, on balance, that the post World War II settlement guaranteed by US military might had delivered more good than evil. America had established and maintained the power structures that ensured prosperity.

So the shift in power from West to East disturbed Ryan. He hoped conflict could be averted, but deep in his soul he feared it couldn't. War was coming. In some ways it was already raging as, daily, China launched internet attacks. But it was only the beginning. War was coming and the West was weak.

At some stage in any life a man has to choose his friends. Ryan's were the US and Israel. Everyone else could go hang.

And Ryan had also chosen his great love: the Australian Labor Party. For Ryan, Labor was the supreme innovator in Australian
political life, driving the projects that had delivered a just society: a living wage, public education, the pension, superannuation and universal medical care.

Now Labor was adrift. The same shallow ideas from the Left that had killed the West had infected and corroded his party. It had lost touch with its largely conservative blue-collar base as white-collar, inner-city lefties reinterpreted the party of Chifley and Curtin into some kind of endless gay Mardi Gras.

‘If Chifley were alive today, the Left would have banned his fucking pipe,' Ryan muttered to no one.

His party was broken and, for the first time in his life, Ryan didn't know how to fix it.

The night was deathly still as a light mist crept round a row of poplars laid bare by Canberra's long winter. It was just after 9 p.m. and Telopea Park was empty and dark.

Ben Gordon liked it this way. He would often walk this lonely strip of green, finding its bracing cold and silence a perfect antidote to a frenetic day. The park was just a few minutes from his apartment, and after reaching its pathways he set his course towards the lake.

He could just pick out the distant chimes of the National Carillon, its bells ringing out a mournful tune from long ago. Schubert's
Serenade
, he decided.

The music of the Carillon usually worked as a balm, but not tonight. Instead its mix of metal and melody only added to a growing sense of alarm and trouble.

Gordon had stepped out into the cold to try and make sense of
what he knew – how a hundred jagged pieces now pointed to an extraordinary conclusion.

The ring of his mobile, from inside his coat pocket, interrupted his thoughts. He ferreted the phone out but the number was unfamiliar and he didn't need the distraction anyway. What he needed was clear air and headspace.

Another thought had been nagging him, a fear that he had left his fingerprints as he pursued the key to this terrible secret.

He mentally marked out a series of possible missteps, privately chastising himself for being so stupid, so bloody amateur. First, he had used a work computer to download information – information locked in DSD's electronic vaults. He knew every keystroke would be logged, but had thought the risk worth taking. Then he had fired off a series of emails to Charles Dancer outlining his concerns about this deepening conspiracy.

He recalled how his home computer had slowed one night. And how he had heard two distinct clicks on the line during one of the dreaded phone calls to his mother. He'd been sloppy. Was he paying the price; was he being tracked through cyberspace? Were his phone calls being tapped? Had he, the hunter, become the hunted?

He shivered and pulled his cashmere coat tighter, hoping to ward off the cold and a growing sense of panic. He desperately wanted to share the intel with Dunkley, and looked forward to meeting with his friend.

He turned and quickened his pace, keen to put the park's darkness behind him.

A frightened possum scurried across his path and up a tree, its rasping cry piercing the quiet. His heart missed a beat as he came to a sudden halt.

There was something else. An echo. A scuffle of shoes on the footpath nearby.

He was not alone.