‘I am in this,’ said Tranh, drawing on his cigarette.
Mac smiled at the enthusiasm. ‘No, mate. You drive me, you handle messages, you give me a local’s lay of the land. You’re not paid to do what you did tonight.’
‘I drove you,’ said Tranh.
‘Sure, but —’
‘I gave you message when Apricot was coming.’
Mac wanted to head this off. ‘Nice work.’
‘And I do lay of land with that ape,’ he said, with no hint of machismo.
Looking away, Mac felt strangely emotional. All his life, he’d been the one looked to for the rough stuff, the one to escalate a situation and get in the blue. He was feeling quite touched that a skinny contractor he’d only known for twenty-four hours was prepared to walk up to a bigger man and start kicking him in the teeth. And that was only the physical side of it — Mac hated riding pillion on a motorbike, thanks largely to his mother being a senior nurse at Rockie Base Hospital who’d seen too many young men brought into the emergency ward in meat buckets. But he liked Tranh’s driving. And when he’d dropped the comment about collaborating with Captain Loan, Tranh’s instant response had been openness. Mac trusted this guy.
‘Yep,’ said Mac, trying to stand. ‘You gave that ape a decent slap. So I have one last job for the night, then it’s beddy-byes, all right?’
‘What it is?’ said Tranh, confused, as Mac limped back to the motorbike. ‘You want better bike?’
‘No,’ said Mac. ‘Beddy-byes — you know, a kip?’
‘Umm,’ said Tranh as he flipped up the bike stand, not getting it. ‘So we going to find Mr Apricot?’
Looking at Tranh, Mac realised the local didn’t know about the murder.
‘No, mate,’ said Mac. ‘We’re gonna find the pricks who did.’
Seventeen minutes later, dressed in new clothes from a market by the river, they glided with the light traffic past the garage where Red Shirt had dumped the LandCruiser. Mac was in pain and he was scared. He had no idea how he was going to tell Scotty about Jim Quirk, but he wasn’t going to walk away from a search of that LandCruiser.
Walking into a side entrance of the garage building, they jogged up four flights of dimly lit stairs until they stood in front of the door with the ‘hai’ sign on it. Pushing through into level two, they waited for signs of security and looked at the ceiling for cameras. It looked clean.
The LandCruiser was parked in the area where Mac thought the Explorer had been started — pointing over the street. After waiting for a Tamil family to get in their car and leave, Tranh got to work on the LandCruiser and found an entry through the rear hatch, then unlocked the doors. They sat in the vehicle; Mac in the front, Tranh in the back.
‘What am I looking for?’ asked Tranh.
‘Anything,’ said Mac, his hopes fading as he said it. The interior had been cleaned out.
The glove box was empty — not even a manual or a map. The door pockets were wiped, as was the centre console and the clips behind the sunshades. There was a faint smell of tobacco, and pulling out the ashtray Mac found a single butt, scrunched up against the end of the tray, a cardboard match jammed beneath it.
Peering closer, Mac saw why he’d smelled strong tobacco: the butt was a Camel.
Pushing the tray back just as he’d found it, he released the driver’s door and stepped onto the concrete, leaning back into the vehicle to search under the seats.
‘How you going back there?’ he asked.
‘Nothing, Mr Richard.’
Running his hand across black nylon carpet under the driver’s seat, Mac came up with a small plastic envelope.
‘Know what that is?’ said Mac, passing it to Tranh.
Pulling his hand from under the driver’s seat, Mac’s hand hit something else. Undoing a wire twist tie, he pulled out the spare Toyota LandCruiser keys — by the look of them, they’d never been touched.
‘Well, well,’ said Mac.
The red plastic tag had the rego and the colour written in ballpoint on a card slipped into a clear window on one side; flipping it over, the red tag advertised in silver letters: Cameron Toyota — Kuala Lumpur.
‘That’s a sheath for an SD memory card,’ said Tranh, returning the plastic envelope.
‘For a computer?’ said Mac, losing interest as he walked around and lifted the bonnet to record the VIN on the engine bulkhead.
‘Yep,’ said Tranh. ‘You have something?’
‘At the very least,’ said Mac, jiggling the keys, ‘we now have a backup car.’
Having sent his second update on Operation Dragon, Mac checked that Tranh was focused on the satellite TV service in the next office: a Fox News reporter screaming a piece-to-camera as his helo flew over the Japan Sea, telling viewers how this storied sea lane that separated Japan, Korea and China was about to become the most tracked and satellite-surveilled patch on Earth as North Korea announced its missile-testing schedule for next week.
Mac snorted; the news media had to do its location reporting early for the missile tests because for the seventy-two hours while North Korea fired its Taepodong rockets over Japan, the most powerful electronic eavesdropping devices attempted to vacuum every piece of telemetry out of the sky and out of North Korea’s computers and comms links. The wall of electronic measures and counter-measures — some coming from US satellites in space and others from Chinese listening posts mounted on the sea floor — were so intense that shipping and commercial airlines stayed out of the area during the tests as communications became virtually impossible in the wall of white noise.
Easing his office door shut, Mac dialled Canberra. After establish- ing his bona fides, he was patched through to Scotty on a secure line. By Mac’s estimation, it was about one-thirty in the morning in Australia’s capital.
‘Macca,’ said Scotty, croaking himself awake. ‘How we doing?’
‘I filed one minute ago,’ said Mac. ‘It’s in the system.’
Like a lot of military and intel people, Scotty could become alert in a hurry. ‘You okay?’
‘Look,’ said Mac, grabbing a water bottle, his hand unsteady. ‘Umm… Jim Quirk’s dead.’
‘What?!’
‘Yeah — haven’t told Chester yet. Looks like the Cong An’s working on it as we speak.’
‘Dead?’ said Scotty. ‘What did you…? I mean, how?’
‘It wasn’t me,’ said Mac.
‘So, suicide? Run over by a bus? What the hell’s going on?’
Stress was settling in Mac’s clenched jaw. ‘He was shot.’
The trademark sound of Scotty’s cigarette lighter flashed in the background. ‘Where?’
‘At the nightclub,’ said Mac.
‘The Saloon?’ said Scotty.
‘Quirk was being roughed up by these thugs, Eastern European, I think…’
‘You were there? This was a surveillance gig, mate.’
‘We already knew about the Mekong Saloon,’ said Mac. ‘I needed to see what was in there. I was having a quick look around, and suddenly Quirk’s there, being forced into a computer room by these standover blokes.’
‘And?’
‘And I followed them in, saw Quirk at this computer terminal, being made to do something.’
‘Yeah?’ said Scotty, sucking on the cigarette.
‘Yeah — looked like a bunch of code.’
Scotty paused. ‘But Jim died?’
‘I tried to help and this bloke shot Jim in the head.’
‘Like that?’
‘Five metres from where I was standing,’ said Mac. ‘I couldn’t do anything.’
‘Fuck, mate,’ said Scotty. ‘I told you — passive surveillance, get me a report and then we’ll decide. Remember?’
‘Yeah. Sorry, Scotty,’ said Mac.