Towelling his hair and easing out of his wet shoes, Mac wondered what Bray was doing in Phnom Penh. Boo Bray was a former RAN military policeman who headed the Australian government’s I-team — a group of ex-military and law enforcement people who retrieved official Australian representatives when they went off the rails.
‘In Phnom Penh for long, Macca?’ said Boo.
‘Long enough for a beer,’ said Mac, deciding he was going to get dry clothes from the market before returning and doing the pick-up from this bar. He wasn’t going to seek out Calhoun in front of Bray.
‘I’ll join you later — where you boozing?’ said Boo, his big red face friendly enough considering Mac had once had to punch it very hard.
‘Ozzie Bar,’ said Mac. ‘So why you up here?’
‘I was in Saigon for a retrieval,’ said Boo.
‘This is Phnom Penh, Boo.’ Mac wiped off his arms.
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Boo, drinking his beer and looking at his watch. ‘Arrived in Saigon and this high-flier bird is missing.’
‘Missing?’ said Mac, wondering where Geraldine McHugh really fitted into the failed Operation Dragon.
‘Yeah, she’s AWOL, mate,’ said Boo Bray. ‘They can go bad, even the best of them.’
Chapter 22
Mac brooded on Boo Bray’s gossip as he hailed a tuc-tuc and asked for the night markets. Geraldine McHugh — if that was the high-flier in Saigon Boo was talking about — was on the Canberra radar before Quirk was murdered. Why wasn’t Mac told about it?
The tuc-tuc surged down Sisowath Quay, the bike ploughing through the monsoon water like a speedboat, before they turned left and stopped at the markets.
Gasping as he got out of the passenger trailer, Mac stood to his mid-shins in water as the driver joined him. ‘Mister want the porn? Mister want the pro’tute?’
‘No, champ,’ said Mac, as the driver opened a large black umbrella and held it over his head. ‘Mister want dry shirt and shorts.’
Leading him into the market area, where the traders had erected a shanty town of various tarpaulins and plastic sheets to keep their stalls dry, the driver seemed to know exactly where he was going in the labyrinth.
‘Okay, the clothe — for you, mister, best pry,’ said the driver as he stopped at a stall and began a machine-gun exchange of haggling with the owner. For five US dollars, Mac got two pairs of shorts, two shirts, a fold-up umbrella and a pair of sandals.
The rain had eased by the time they got back to the Taberna, and Mac asked to be dropped fifty metres past the bar.
Limping up the footpath, Mac assessed the largely empty street before walking into the Taberna and taking a seat at the south end of the bar. The tourists had cleared out with the rain and Boo Bray had also left.
‘Yes, mister?’ said the barman, a youngster.
As Mac made to answer, an American voice interrupted. ‘That’s a Bundy and dry — easy on the ice, thanks, Bourey.’
Standing, Mac took in the tanned, white-haired vision of Harley Maggins, owner of the Taberna.
‘Hey, Macca,’ said the American, shaking hands with genuine affection.
‘Maggs,’ said Mac. ‘Drove all your drinkers away — must have known I was coming.’
‘Albion?’ said Maggins.
‘Calhoun?’
Catching up with the small talk, Mac let the memories come back as he observed Maggins. The American was one of the overstayers from the UNTAC days, when the United Nations was attempting to stabilise Cambodia after its atrocious postcolonial history. There were warlords and remnants of the Khmer Rouge in the north and drug lords, arms dealers and slavers working with impunity in what was a failed state in the early 1990s. Mac had spent some time in Phnom Penh with the Australian delegation to UNAMIC, which ultimately became a wider operation as UNTAC. He’d met Harley back then, when neither of them were declaring who they were or which departments they were really answering to. UNTAC had been a transitional government in a lawless territory and Mac was going on military patrols into places where Thailand, Vietnam and Laos were securing commercial advantages they shouldn’t have had. It wasn’t helped by the presence of Bulgarian blue helmets in Kampong Speu province who were giving the Khmer Rouge the idea that they could opt out of the peace process.
While posing as a logging consultant, Mac shared a meal with a KR commander called the Duck, so-named because of his horizontal upper lip.
As they’d discussed a ten-thousand-acre forestry concession, Mac had been offered a child for sex. Refusing, Mac had kept the strongman sweet as he got more drunk; Mac eventually learned that the KR in this part of the world was kidnapping children from villages and selling them to Thai slavers.
When a skirmish broke out in a neighbouring valley, the Duck sent his men out to deal with it and kept drinking with Mac. Finally they’d gone for a walk down to a warehouse where about thirty kids were being kept in wire-mesh cages until they could be onsold to paedophiles in Europe and North America.
Mac had opened the cages, rung the UN policing unit and then driven his yellow Toyota HiLux back to town. The Duck was later found lying in a dumpster with a third eye. That was the way the news had travelled to the UNTAC heads of mission in Phnom Penh who — in order to keep the elections on track — had to be seen to do something about the murder.
At about the point when Mac was going to face charges brought by the UN’s Indonesian military police, the allegations went away as an eyewitness fingered a rival Khmer Rouge commander as the culprit.
Mac had never officially been told where his alibi came from but unofficially he’d discovered that an American intelligence operator by the name of Harley Maggins had stepped in and provided the right intelligence at the right time.
The two of them had never discussed it, but after Mac came back to Cambodia in the late 1990s and found Maggins running the Taberna, they’d forged a friendship.
‘So what’s going on, buddy?’ said Maggins, clinking drinks.
‘Just enjoying the climate of Indochina.’
‘Yeah — it’s the right time of year.’
‘So, Maggs, have the Chinese been around?’ said Mac. ‘You know, MSS, PLA — that sort of thing.’
‘This is Cambodia,’ said Maggins with a laugh. ‘The Chinese think they own the place, man.’
The street was enjoying an eerie silence, the period of grace that followed a big monsoon downpour. A cricket chirped and birds squawked.
‘I think I was followed, from Saigon,’ said Mac, enjoying the drink.
‘From Vietnam? That’s serious,’ said Maggins, pale eyes stready.
‘We lost ’em,’ said Mac. ‘But we won’t stay lost for long in Phnom Penh.’
Bourey asked for another order and Maggins raised a peace sign. The barman had been rescued from Bangkok ten years earlier, where he’d been kept in a brothel with his two younger sisters. Maggins had agreed to give him a job after he’d been brought back to Cambodia by the Sisters of Mercy. The Sisters weren’t nuns — they were an informal network of women working in law enforcement, diplomacy, intelligence, foreign aid, health care and NGOs who tried to unpick the cronyism that allowed sex slavery to thrive in South-East Asia. To do that they shared information they shouldn’t share, wrote reports they were not allowed to write and alerted newspapers and politicians to the outrages that they were being asked to whitewash. The Sisters of Mercy were almost an intelligence service unto themselves, and even though Mac was pretty sure Jenny was one of them, he’d never pushed the issue. While it was an all-female affair, Mac knew that Harley Maggins was a trusted operative for the Sisters.
‘So nothing on the MSS?’ asked Mac.
‘I’ll ask around,’ said Maggins, eyeing a German couple who had crept in from the canal-like Sisowath Quay. ‘But the Chinese are business as usual these days. It’s the privateers you have to watch, which is what that’s all about.’