Making their way across Gateway Bridge as the sun rose, Mac made small talk while his mind scrambled to understand why such a senior person had waited outside Brisbane International for him. It had to be bad — Operation Kava was a disaster and Mac had been running it.
‘So, Greg,’ he said, after they’d discussed why the Brisbane Broncos had missed out on a berth in the rugby league grand final, ‘you giving me a lift to Broadie?’
‘Afraid not, old stick,’ said Tobin, leaning in to indicate most-favoured status. ‘That Colmslie taskforce is reconvening.’
‘Great,’ said Mac, grabbing the handle above his door, wishing he’d slapped on some Old Spice. Taskforce Colmslie was the interagency group that had authorised Operation Kava and Mac dreaded having to face them — it would start as a debrief but inevitably would disintegrate into an exercise in blame-shifting between agencies.
‘When?’ said Mac.
‘Tapes start rolling at eleven, right, Kendall?’
Kendall kept his eyes on the Gateway traffic. ‘Correct.’
The Qantas flight from Singapore had taken off the previous night and Mac hadn’t slept. He’d had no respite since regaining consciousness in the operations suite at the Pan Pac and ordering the escape and evade phase of the operation, where the players scattered. Mac’s team all had their own rat-runs, right down to cars rented in certain identities and hotels ready to book into. Mac’s run had been the 9.25 flight out of Changi as Richard Davis, sales executive at Southern Scholastic Books; he could have taken earlier flights via Cairns or Darwin, but the basic rule in the spy game was that when travelling under an assumed identity, you took the direct flight when you could. You removed as many variables as possible — you rigged the game.
Tobin fixed him with a look of concern. ‘You must be shattered, Macca.’
‘Rolled up wet, put away dry,’ said Mac, as the car veered left off the freeway, swung right and headed west into Fortitude Valley. They drove in silence for eight minutes, before Mac recognised the area — west Valley, up against the Victoria Golf Course.
‘We’ll make it brief, I promise,’ said Tobin with a caring smile.
‘We?’ said Mac, wondering if Tobin had invited himself into the taskforce.
‘Just an informal chinwag, eh, Macca? Before we throw you back to the wolves?’
Kendall steered the car into the driveway of a three-and-a-half-star hotel.
‘You don’t mind if Kendall has the Davis collateral?’
‘No, Greg,’ said Mac, resenting it but staying professional. Handing over his Richard Davis phone, wallet and passport, Mac pulled out his chinos pockets to show they were empty then held open his sports jacket for inspection.
‘Perhaps let Kendall have the jacket?’
‘Ray was a friend of mine, Greg,’ said Mac, struggling out of the dark blue blazer. ‘You think I’m happy about this?’
‘Of course not, old man,’ said Tobin, passing the collateral forwards to Kendall. ‘That’s why I need some horse’s-mouth before you get cornered by ASIO and Defence.’
‘Okay, Greg,’ said Mac, fuming.
‘That’s yours,’ said Tobin, passing over a cardboard-wrapped room card. ‘There’s a change of clothes in your room — but let’s not use the phone just yet, right, Macca?’
‘Sure,’ said Mac, opening the door and getting out.
‘Meeting at eight-fifteen in room 403?’ said Tobin. ‘You might like a quick shower. There’s a good sport.’
Recounting the order of events at the Pan Pac, Mac noticed Tobin’s restlessness a few minutes into the debrief.
‘You didn’t enter 1502?’ said Tobin, reaching for the teapot and pouring.
‘No,’ said Mac. ‘When Lao started gasbagging about Raytheon’s AESA-defeat testing coming to Queensland, I decided to shut him down.’
‘Not —’ started Tobin.
‘No, no,’ said Mac, annoyed that his colleagues had characterised him as violent. ‘I was going to relieve Ray and let Lao know that the meet had been a set-up.’
‘Tell him he’d been caught out,’ said Tobin, ‘and have the AFP arrest him?’
‘Exactly,’ said Mac. ‘It was too risky to double him. This was the first time he’d blabbed about the AESA-defeat testing being carried out in Queensland and I decided to wrap him up with an extradition —’
‘Rather than let him talk to the Chinese?’
‘Yes,’ said Mac. ‘If we could get him on the terrorism charges, we could lock him away for a while. Remember, this Lao guy is an Aussie citizen and the Chinese embassy would have no excuse to go visit him.’
‘So you didn’t see Lao and Hu executed?’ said Tobin.
‘No. I saw the shooter open the door of 1502 and fire four suppressed rounds into the suite. I’m pretty sure it was a nine-mil — the one in my mouth was a SIG.’
‘The shooters?’ said Tobin, sipping the tea.
‘Brown eyes, SingTel overalls, ski masks — about my height and build. Perhaps shorter.’
‘No voice?’
‘None,’ said Mac, putting himself back in that corridor, feeling the suppressor jammed against the back of his throat. ‘They were totally pro.’
‘Hence, this,’ said Tobin, tapping a piece of notepad paper covered in ballpoint scrawls. ‘Federal Police liaison with Singapore Police got the initial crime scene report from the Pan Pac. It’s a double murder; victims are two men, Sino-Asian appearance. One they’re calling Chan and the other Lao. There were four shots — nine-mil soft-noses. No casings.’
‘Figures,’ said Mac. ‘The shooter came out with the casings and put them in his pocket.’
‘The deceased had single shots to the forehead and heart.’
‘It all fits,’ said Mac. You had to be highly trained to walk into a room, make four shots like that and still have the ticker to pick up your casings.
Tobin enmeshed his fingers. ‘The local detectives won’t hush this up.’
‘I think the Firm’s clean, if that’s what you’re asking,’ said Mac.
Tobin’s real job was to be able to tell the deputy DG that there were no comebacks to the Firm, so the deputy DG could assure the DG that Aussie SIS couldn’t be implicated, meaning any annoying interview requests from China or Singapore could be dismissed at the political level as well as the departmental. There was only one rule in spying: don’t get caught. And Mac was confident the E and E had worked.
‘Okay,’ said Tobin to Kendall, and his typing stopped — redundant given that when opening an ASIS debrief template, the MS Word document recorded audio.
‘How should I handle the taskforce?’ said Mac, aware that interagency manoeuvring was a key aspect of the debrief.
‘Tell them everything. I’ll talk with the deputy, recommend we hand this back to Defence. We’ll never hear the end of it if the Firm’s to blame for bungling those tests.’
Mac nodded. The Australian Defence Force relied heavily on being the respected junior partner in a very one-sided military alliance with the Americans. The entire culture of the ADF’s intelligence apparatus was to never give the Yanks an excuse to roll their eyes and mutter about ‘leaky Australians’.
Kendall shut down the laptop as Tobin slipped his hand onto Mac’s forearm and walked him to the door.
‘One thing,’ said Tobin, lowering his voice as they eased into the hallway. ‘I suppose you’ve had time to wonder… why those two…’
‘And not me?’ said Mac.
‘Well, yes.’
‘Maybe the shooters didn’t know who I was,’ said Mac.
‘Or maybe,’ said Tobin, ‘they did.’
Chapter 4