‘Is this a father thing?’ said Mac.
The gunshot rang at his feet and Mac did his best not to flinch.
‘Where is it?’ said Lance.
Mac’s reservoirs of concrete dust and gasoline soot were igniting under the strength of the vehicle’s headlamps. ‘What?’
‘The memory card, dumb-shit — what do you think this is about?’ said Lance.
‘I should ask you,’ said Mac as the car doors opened behind Lance and shapes moved up to him.
‘I’m asking you, McQueen,’ said Lance. ‘Last seen in your backpack. I would have grabbed it myself but your room at the Cambodiana no longer exists.’
‘The memory card? I don’t have it.’ Mac’s mind was spinning.
‘Yes you do.’
‘Mind reader as well as anilinguist — I’m impressed.’
Lance breathed out as he sneered, controlling his urge to shoot. ‘Let’s go to your hotel and discuss it like pros, eh, champ?’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Mac.
‘I think we’re way beyond that, don’t you, Macca?’ came the voice from beside the fullbeams.
A figure stepped forwards, and Mac raised his hand against the glare, deflating slightly as he saw who it was.
‘Fuck — Davo?’
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Dave Urquhart, standing beside Lance. ‘I hate this field stuff. So let’s grab that memory card, mate, and push on like nothing ever happened.’
‘Nothing happened?’ said Mac. ‘You’ve pulled a gun on a senior guy from the Firm.’
Urquhart smirked. ‘Like I said in Canberra, there doesn’t need to be any blow-back on this — play it smart and your career might be the winner.’
Chapter 29
The smell of coffee was strong as Mac opened his eyes and took in the surrounds: a high-ceilinged bedroom in a French-colonial house.
Trying to stretch and yawn, Mac was constrained by the chromed handcuffs that held his right arm to the iron bedhead. Wiggling his fingers and toes, he confirmed he was in one piece and, judging by his cognition, he hadn’t been drugged — it was old-fashioned fatigue that had triggered the deep sleep. His only worry was his left eye, which seemed to have become glued shut with mucus. He needed another saline wash.
The smell of coffee was joined by grilled bacon and he felt his stomach grumble with anticipation as he sat up and scoped the overgrown back garden evident through the large sash windows beside his bed. He was most interested in finding a feature that could tell him where he was. In the British military they trained recruits to be able to pinpoint their whereabouts at all times. Whether by compass, sun, stars, landmarks, water flow, bird life or simply asking a civilian, your first job was to be able to state your position. The Royal Marines had no use for a commando who didn’t know where he was, and candidates who couldn’t get the hang of it were called ‘tits’ by the non-coms — as in ‘tits on a bull’.
During Mac’s military days in the early 1990s, he’d been team leader on a recon tab across Scotland, one of those exercises where you learned to cover ground by night and keep a proper reconnaissance log of what you’d seen: the height of the rivers, livestock movements, electricity workers, telecom trucks, loggers, surveyors, hunter camps and so on. One of the team tore an ankle ligament and in the kerfuffle Mac forgot to take his trigs and match them with the map; by the time they struck camp and he’d made his six am radio call to the instructors, he couldn’t state his team’s exact position.
The chief instructor, a legendary warrant officer named Banger Jordan, had told him, ‘Then you’d better pull your head out of your arse and take a look around, you fucking tit.’
Mac looked around now, peering beyond the tree line at the back of the garden and trying to catch glimpses of what lay beyond. The early rays of sunlight seemed to be coming from the left of the garden, meaning that was the west and he was facing north. Something glinted behind the trees but he couldn’t quite make it out.
The door jangled as the big German deadlock shifted, and a large Samoan-Australian walked through the door with a tray of tucker.
‘Marlon,’ said Mac, surprised.
‘Who’d you expect?’ Marlon dragged a stool to the bed with his foot and put the tray on it. ‘Elvis Presley?’
‘John Rowles would have been a start,’ said Mac, eyeing the two bacon and egg sandwiches and the plunger of coffee. Mac had busted Marlon’s shoulder a few years ago in Makassar, when the I-team had tried to retrieve him; he wondered if there was any personal enmity between them.
Marlon smiled. ‘So, in the shit again, McQueen?’
‘Nah, mate,’ said Mac, hooking into the sandwich. ‘Just laying up.’
‘Not what I hear.’
‘What’d you hear?’ said Mac, always enlisting for information.
‘You’ve got something secret that belongs to the government,’ said Marlon. ‘And Boo’s in hospital because of it.’
‘Geez.’ Mac shook his head as yolk ran down his chin. ‘You believe that, Marlon?’
‘Don’t know what to believe with you spooks, frankly. You’re all bloody liars.’
Mac let that one go. ‘How’s Boo?’
‘He’s alive, broken pelvis and collarbone — those hit-and-run boys got him good.’
The door squeaked and Lance shoved his head into the room. His earring had made a conspicuous return.
‘Well?’ he said to Marlon. ‘You gonna chat him up all morning or are you gonna kiss him?’
‘Sorry, boss,’ said Marlon, sighing.
‘I need you, T’avai — now,’ Lance said, and disappeared from the door.
Mac could see Marlon wasn’t enjoying answering to Lance, but that he wouldn’t buck the chain of command.
Pausing at the door, Marlon smiled. ‘It’s not personal, right, McQueen?’
‘I forgive you, my son,’ said Mac. ‘But before I do anything else I need an eye-bath, okay? A few bottles of saline solution — the good stuff — or I won’t be talking to anyone.’
‘Okay, I’ll sort it,’ said Marlon, still not leaving. He cleared his throat. ‘Some of the boys said you were in the SBS — that true?’
‘Nah, mate,’ said Mac, which was technically the truth, since although he’d passed selection for the Special Boat Service, he’d never served in the unit. ‘Those guys are pros — I couldn’t run with them.’
‘But you were with the paras or marines or something?’
‘I drove a truck.’
Marlon left the room, muttering to himself.
With a full stomach, Mac now tried to get tears running in his eyes. He couldn’t open his left eye without it feeling like a Velcro strip and he wanted that saline. His reasons weren’t just medicaclass="underline" Mac knew that Urquhart and Lance wouldn’t have prepared the safe house like a field guy would. Experienced operators would always include a comprehensive first-aid kit, given that people had accidents and they preferred to avoid doctors and hospitals. Even toothaches could be salved with a good dentist-strength analgesic gel until the gig was finished. Office guys never thought of such mundane things.
Mac wanted his captors to go out and buy a few bottles of saline solution, which might mean going to a drugstore or an optometrist. But it could just as easily be the public dispensary of a hospital — Mac would be able to look closely at the brand and make an assessment of his position.
Marlon was back with the saline in what Mac estimated was between eleven and twelve minutes, and he hadn’t heard a car being started. The three bottles Marlon placed on the tallboy in Mac’s room were from a high-quality French medical supplies company, and in the two-litre size dispensed at hospitals.
Allowing for five minutes at the dispensary to select and purchase the correct products, Mac decided there was a walk of four and a half minutes each way, which translated to about two hundred and eighty metres at a casual pace. Allowing for traffic lights, they could be as close as two hundred metres to a hospital — a major hospital, with a public dispensary issuing hospital-grade saline.