‘Field services, thanks,’ said Mac, and waited while he was transferred.
‘Henry, here. How can I help you, Albion?’
‘Henry, I need an immediate residential phone number reassign- ment,’ said Mac, sipping at his beer as he watched a TV reporter pointing down from a helicopter at Queensland’s bushfires.
‘Certainly, sir,’ said Henry.
They both waited until Telstra’s government and consular system shut down Mac’s old number and reissued a new one. As Henry read out the new home number, a key rattled in the door. Jenny pushed through, Sarah on her hip.
‘Hey, darling,’ said Mac, going over to them and giving Jen a kiss as she handed him their daughter.
‘Do the honours, Macca?’
‘Sure,’ said Mac, walking his sleepy daughter through to her bedroom.
When he’d put her to bed and shut the door, Mac padded back to the sofa where Jen was curled up under a blanket, the TV switched off.
‘So, I guess you weren’t really in Perth, right?’ she said, her eyes boring into him.
‘This week?’ said Mac.
‘Don’t do this, Macca,’ said Jen, pushing dark hair out of her face. ‘You were with Ray. You were in Singapore.’
‘Would it make a difference?’
One of the benefits of having a wife in the federal police was that the Firm’s vetting job had been made easy when he married her, but it was still difficult being a spy with a nosey cop in the middle of his life.
‘Don’t do the weasel words with me, mister,’ she said, raising her voice. ‘I can get a ton of that shit all day, in any interview room.’
‘Ray was a top bloke, and I’m very sad about this,’ said Mac, holding out his arm and letting Jen snuggle into his chest.
‘He was such a nice man. And what about Liesl? I should call her.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Mac, alarm bells ringing. ‘She’s a very private person.’
‘I guess you’re right,’ said Jen, pushing her athletic, shapely body into Mac. ‘Might give it a couple of days.’
Mac stroked her hair and wondered what he was going to do. The two voicemails he’d deleted were addressed to Jenny Toohey; calls from Liesl Hu, asking Jen to become personally involved in her husband’s shooting.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. What made him change the phone number were Liesl’s final words, gasped out through her tears: ‘I think the Australian government is involved.’
Chapter 8
Packing his suitcase, Mac tried to focus only on the job ahead and the corporate cover he had worn for most of his working life. He had a routine for packing his wheelie bag and readying himself for the Richard Davis collateral that would be waiting at Brisbane International Airport.
‘Think we’ll be okay with Sarah,’ said Jenny, sitting on the bed with a towel wrapped around her chest, tied off in her cleavage. It was just past eight am but she’d already done her laps at Southport pool and would be starting work at the federal police building in Robina at ten o’clock.
‘Yeah?’ said Mac, distracted.
‘I’m sharing a nanny with Sian,’ said Jenny. ‘She’s flexible. Basically, I call her when I need the help.’
Mac felt excluded. ‘Oh, when you need it?’
‘Yes, when I need it, Macca,’ she said. ‘Like this week. I don’t see you juggling when Sarah needs to be minded.’
‘Yeah, well…’ said Mac, taking his own Brut 33 deodorant from the toilet bag and replacing it with Richard Davis’s Old Spice. The SPF 30 sunscreen actually contained a gel that would turn his hair dark brown, and the tube of men’s face scrub was the Schwarzkopf N10 blonding agent that would take his hair back to its natural colour when required.
‘I mean, you only told me about this Auckland trip on Friday,’ said Jenny. ‘And you say you’re going for two weeks, but that’s not set in stone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mac, reluctant to snap out of his focused state. ‘I told you as soon as I knew.’
It was a marriage where both of them trod carefully around the subject of their work. Jenny didn’t like to feel guilty or distracted in her job any more than Mac did in his. It was made more difficult by the fact that when the juggling had to be done, it was Jen hitting the phones and calling in favours. Mac knew that, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it.
‘You can make it up to me,’ said Jen.
‘Sure,’ said Mac, preoccupied with getting his boat shoes into exactly the placement he liked. He travelled only with cabin luggage to minimise officials touching his belongings.
‘I mean, you know,’ said Jen, lying back on the bed, the towel falling off her hips. ‘Sarah’s watching the Wiggles, and…’
Mac’s wife had been a high school swimming star and an Austra- lian Universities rep in basketball. She worried that her stomach was loose and her bum was sagging after having Sarah, but Mac reckoned that she looked better in a tank top and a pair of Levis than most women looked in hundreds of dollars worth of lingerie.
‘The Wiggles, eh?’ said Mac, moving to her.
Putting her hand into his thin blond hair, she gave him the smile and Mac bent down to her, smelling the apple-scented shampoo that she used to get the chlorine out of her hair.
Kissing her, Mac let his hand slide up under Jenny’s towel, feeling the muscles and curves. Jen hooked a thumb over the band of Mac’s undies, but then suddenly pulled away.
‘Door,’ she said, pushing his chest.
Leaning into the hallway, Mac heard a famous song from the kids’ TV show, and a thumping sound that indicated Sarah was trying to dance to it.
Shutting the door quietly, Mac crossed the floor to the bed, where Jen had shoved the suitcase to the floor.
‘Thank God for the Wiggles,’ she said, grabbing him by the thigh.
‘Choo choo, chugga chugga,’ said Mac, and Jen giggled as she pulled him onto her.
The Airtrain between the Gold Coast and Brisbane airport was crowded with backpackers and retirees. Summer was starting to kick in for real and the hiss of the air-conditioning in the carriage was almost louder than the rattle of the tracks as they headed north.
Sitting at the back, Mac read the Financial Review and avoided eye contact. Something was niggling him about the Pan Pac shootings, and he couldn’t quite get it straight. The approach from Urquhart in Canberra had been a shock. Taskforces were put together to secure outcomes that were jointly agreed; even Grant Shannon from the AFP would not dispute the consensus. So why was Urquhart flitting about, looking for a traitor in ASIS?
The scenery flashed past, made dark by the heavily tinted windows. Also annoying him were the phone calls from Liesl Hu — the tone of fear that rose above her grief. Mac didn’t feel good about his lack of contact, but it wasn’t in a spy’s DNA to soothe wives when the aim was to get out of Dodge before the crocodile clips got warmed up.
Mac was worried about how much Liesl actually knew — or had guessed — about Operation Kava. Ray Hu’s cover in Singapore was genuine: he was a fund manager who took equity positions in small defence-oriented technology companies, even if many of his leads came from Aussie intelligence. He was the real thing and he was the embodiment of the espionage cliché of hiding in plain sight. He’d been written about in the Far Eastern Economic Review and was a regular in the Asian Wall Street Journal’s tips for hot investments in the new year. He was even on a Singapore government think tank for identifying future niche industries and getting universities to support them. But aside from this public profile, Ray was a stickler for secrecy and his double life with ASIS was walled off, even from his wife.