Mac rubbed his face.
‘There’s something we should talk about,’ said Benny, ‘and not over the phone.’
‘What?’ asked Mac.
‘Our friends’ involvement,’ said Benny.
‘What about it?’ said Mac, thinking the ISD had circled back after Ray’s death and kept an eye on Liesl.
Benny’s voice lowered. ‘You’re assuming our friends became curious after a certain incident.’
‘What?’ said Mac.
‘I can’t stay on this line — I’ll call later,’ said Benny, and hung up.
Looking at the handset as if for an answer, Mac was astonished. Singapore’s ISD had been watching Ray Hu? Had he been made as an Aussie SIS agent? That would explain why Liesl had been asked to open Ray’s safe, been taken for a long ride, had the facts of life explained before being put on a plane. It was standard procedure for intelligence services when they were clearing up a spy network: give all associates the no-tears option before moving to interrogations and lengthy trials for espionage. If that was the scenario Benny had been talking about, then Liesl would have spilled her guts and taken the fast way out. But if she was really worried about Canberra, she would have stayed in South-East Asia.
‘You’re not going to get me drunk, you know, McQueen,’ said Chester Delaney as the waiter deposited two more ice-cold Tigers on the table.
They were sitting on the rooftop of the Majestic as the sun set on the Saigon River, the lush green of Vietnam’s former battlefields evident in the distance.
‘Don’t worry, Chezza,’ said Mac. ‘Just a couple of looseners.’
‘Okay, but can we drop the Chezza? It’s Chester, actually.’
Mac raised his glass. ‘Okay, Chester.’
Slumping slightly, Delaney removed his wire-framed glasses and massaged his eyeballs, his long fingers reaching around his bony nose.
‘I’m sorry, Alan,’ he said, cleaning his glasses and replacing them over piercing grey eyes. ‘I seem to get on the wrong foot with you, without ever intending to.’
‘Wouldn’t worry about it,’ said Mac.
‘I wanted to debrief, after Kuta,’ Delaney said, referring to the night of the Bali bombings, when he had been flown down from Jakarta to run the DFAT response and Mac had been sent in to control the media output. ‘I said some things that I regretted.’
‘Like what? Jenny Toohey has a great arse?’
‘No!’ said Delaney, blushing. ‘No, when you were running around trying to find — what was it? — Pakistani terrorists, when you were supposed to be running the media side for us. I needed you, Alan, and you’d palmed it off onto those kids.’
‘Yeah, I did.’
‘I was cranky with you but, as it turned out, you were probably chasing something far more important.’
‘They weren’t really kids, mate,’ said Mac, remembering the young DFAT and AFP staffers who’d run the media operation under Mac’s aegis. ‘I thought they were up for it — that bird Julie was basically running the show when I got there.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said Delaney, relaxing some more. ‘She jumped a couple of grades pretty quickly after that. Made director, last I heard.’
‘Let’s talk about Jim,’ said Mac.
‘Let’s.’
‘Like, what’s not in the brief?’
‘Okay,’ said Delaney, taking a swig of the beer. ‘The absences from his desk, the rather loose diary, and something I didn’t want to put in writing.’
‘Okay.’
‘The Saigon chamber of commerce put on a big mining expo ten days ago, in the convention centre.’
‘Yes?’ said Mac.
‘And Jim wasn’t there.’
‘Not there? I thought he was the trade guy for us in Saigon?’
‘So did we,’ said Delaney. ‘I covered for him but it was embarrassing. We had some big companies come up here and we like to have a few beers, do a barbie and invite other nationalities over — it’s a big networking event, and Jim Quirk was AWOL.’
‘You must have an idea,’ said Mac, trying to work out what wasn’t being said. ‘I’m not exactly the soft option.’
Delaney laughed. ‘No, you’re not. That wasn’t my call, but I’ve come to agree that we should keep it in-house, hence the Firm.’
‘So, what’s the theory?’
‘Well, people have seen him in Cholon — Chinatown,’ said Delaney. ‘It’s not damning but he’s been looking terrible and there’re fears about who he’s hanging around with, I suppose.’
‘Think he’s spying?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Delaney.
‘Any top-secret access?’
‘He’s TS-PV,’ said Delaney, meaning Jim Quirk had Australia’s highest non-codeword security clearance, with a PV or personal vetting. ‘But he’s no longer seeing anything sensitive.’
‘What’s this about the divorce?’ said Mac. ‘He on the sauce?’
‘Definitely,’ nodded Delaney. ‘He split with Geraldine recently and it went downhill from there.’
‘The drinking followed the divorce, or the other way around?’ said Mac, trying to set the scene.
‘Can’t remember,’ said Delaney. ‘I wouldn’t want to get that part wrong. What I do know is that I’ve been waiting two weeks to get someone up here. We kept being told to let Jim run, that we’d have a team soon.’
‘Is he stealing anything?’ said Mac. ‘I mean, illegal downloads or files tucked down his shirt?’
‘Our dip-security guy’s been keeping an eye on him — hasn’t caught him doing anything.’
‘Where does Quirk live?’ said Mac, wondering if he should be having this chat with the first assistant secretary, diplomatic security — also known as the dip-sec.
‘At An Puh,’ said Delaney. An Puh was the expat compound across the river in District 2. ‘The BP compound. He’s got an apartment near the supermarket, I’m told.’
‘He drives?’
‘A red Corolla.’
‘What time does he get in to work?’
‘Eight-thirty.’
‘Okay,’ said Mac, slugging at the beer. ‘But tell me — why am I up here? What happened to the resident in Hanoi?’
Delaney smiled. ‘Can’t use any of the Firm’s people down here if they’ve been in Hanoi, Hong Kong, Shangers, Beijing or Seoul.’
‘No?’
‘No, Alan,’ said Delaney. ‘The Chinese know exactly who they are. If we used them on Jim, the Chinese would have an insight we don’t particularly want to share.’
Chapter 13
Emerging from the double doors of the Grand at 7.28 am, Mac turned sharp right and walked up Dong Khoi Street. The one-way traffic came towards him in the first trickles of what would be a deluge in half an hour; Mac was hoping to make any vehicle tails show themselves by having to turn against the traffic or make a box-loop to catch him at an intersection.
Before he could get to the next intersection, Mac crossed the street to the cover of trees on the other side, and ducked up the side street to a cafe where he ordered coffee and an omelette and watched for unwanted interest.
The coffee was dark and strong and he picked up a day-old Jakarta Post from a pile of newspapers by the cutlery and flipped it as he surveyed the street. The anchor story along the bottom of the Post’s front page carried the headline missile tests provocative: clinton, and was followed by the regular Asian media obsession with the North Korean missile tests, predicting whether they would fly over Japan and their boosters fall in Japanese waters. While few countries in the western Pacific were friendly with North Korea, the region held its breath for the day Japan had an excuse to abandon its self-defence force and start rebuilding its military. Mac chuckled grimly as he read the US Secretary of State’s careful words: they reflected the delicate situation America found itself in whenever it stood between the two Koreas, Japan and China. If diplomacy in the Middle East took place over a gunpowder factory, North Asian rapport was built on a thermonuclear trigger.