Lance sat on a reversed chair beside Mac’s bed, Urquhart behind him on another chair.
‘Okay,’ said Lance. ‘Let’s start at the beginning.’
‘Your daddy forgot to pull out,’ said Mac.
‘Macca!’ said Urquhart. ‘Let’s get this done and we can be on our way, okay?’
‘Done? I don’t see a tape recorder, I don’t see anyone taking notes,’ said Mac, ‘so I’m not exactly sure what this is.’
‘This is an interview, McQueen,’ said Lance, who seemed to have some product in his cropped black hair and was now dressed in Levis, cowboy boots and a loose-fitting white shirt that in Rockhampton would have been called a blouse.
‘Well, Lance, in an interview we record what is said or we take notes — it’s how we do it in the Firm.’ Mac tried to stay composed. ‘It avoids a small matter of ambitious little shits making political gain from a delicate situation.’
‘I don’t need to make political gain from you, McQueen,’ said Lance, tensing. ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’
‘Thanks — I’ll be my guest,’ said Mac. ‘Why don’t we start with you identifying yourself and telling me who you work for?’
‘Why don’t we start with you fucking yourself?’ said Lance, face darkening.
Mac smiled. ‘Sure, mate. Uncuff me and I’ll show you how that works.’
‘Fellers, fellers!’ Urquhart stood up. ‘I don’t have all day for this.’
‘Then get this silly runt out of my face, Davo, and we’ll talk,’ said Mac.
‘That’s not your call!’ Lance was standing now. ‘This is my gig.’
Mac almost had the situation turned the way he wanted it.
‘It may be your gig, Lance, but it’s my room. And that gigolo aftershave you’re swimming in? It’s not working for you, champ.’
Lance bunched his fists and moved towards Mac. ‘You’re a fucking —’
‘Lance!’ said Urquhart, leaping in front of his protégé, holding him by the arm.
Walking Lance towards the door, Urquhart gave him a small push.
‘Get a haircut!’ said Mac as Lance left, raising a middle finger.
‘Fuck you, McQueen,’ came Lance’s voice from the corridor.
‘I catch you again, I’ll put a number two across your head, mate!’ said Mac as loud as he could. ‘Swear to God, sunshine — I’ll hold you down and shear you like a bloody Merino.’
Taking Lance’s chair as a door slammed on the far side of the house, Urquhart gave Mac a look. ‘All done? Can we talk now?’
‘Sure,’ said Mac, as somewhere in the neighbourhood the morning prayers started. Another landmark: a mosque. That was the golden glint he’d seen through the trees. Close to a mosque and close to a hospital with a dispensary. That probably meant he was in a leafy enclave of colonial homes on Boeng Kak Lake, over the road from the mosque and alongside the sprawling compound of Calmette Hospital.
‘Mate,’ said Urquhart, ‘I need that memory card and I need it now.’
‘I don’t have it,’ said Mac, pushing a second pillow against the bedhead to get comfortable. ‘What’s on it?’
‘I can’t disclose that,’ said Urquhart, not looking smug for once. ‘I’m not messing with you — I just can’t tell you.’
‘I could be of more help if I was trying to get it back.’ Mac held up his cuffed wrist.
‘I know,’ said Urquhart. ‘But this is eyes-only — PM’s office.’
Raising his eyebrows, Mac wondered if he’d ever encountered such a level of secrecy while in the field. ‘The air gets thin up there, mate.’
‘I know,’ said Urquhart. ‘As soon as Lance told me you had the card, we had to retrieve it and we had to put you in a security bubble.’
‘You hired Lance to do this?’
‘You were the first person I thought of, Macca, and the only person who would just get it done. But you told me to fuck off.’
‘Where’d you find him?’ said Mac, needing more.
‘AG’s.’ That meant ASIO. ‘But he’s a favourite of the PM — he’s done a lot of sensitive burrowing, if you know what I mean.’
Sensitive burrowing for the Prime Minister’s office usually meant ferreting the real story out of an ongoing gig and bringing the snippets back to the PM’s desk. Sometimes the burrower was also a provocateur, twisting and influencing a report to create a more convenient outcome. Some of the most potentially damaging ASIS and military intelligence reports on Beijing and Jakarta had felt the guiding hand of the burrower over the years — burrowers were a hazard of spooking, but they usually didn’t look as out of place as Lance.
‘Well, I don’t have the memory card now,’ said Mac.
‘Where did you find it?’ said Urquhart, looking a bit like a tortoise sticking his head out of its shell after a long sleep. He was a very different man when out of the snake pits of Canberra.
‘It fell off Jim Quirk’s computer,’ said Mac, thinking back. ‘In the Mekong Saloon.’
‘How did you get it?’
‘You’re not cleared for this, Dave,’ said Mac. ‘I answer to Scotty and Tobin.’
‘I’ve seen the report — you were present at Jim Quirk’s murder. I just want to know about the SD card.’
Mac didn’t have much more to add. ‘The shooter was trying to fiddle with the computer keyboard before he shot Jim. There was a lot of action around that machine before Jim died and I saw this card fall to the floor — I picked it up out of habit as I left.’
‘These killers —’
‘Probably Israeli.’
Urquhart squinted. ‘So you have the memory card and you carry it into Phnom Penh, and then what?’
‘Someone steals it from my bag,’ said Mac.
‘When?’
‘Last night, before I went to fallback with Lance.’
‘This was at the Cambodiana?’ said Urquhart.
‘How do you know?’ said Mac, alert.
‘Made a hell of an exit,’ said Urquhart.
‘Christ’s sake! You were there?’
Urquhart shrugged. ‘Only once the place was on fire and the ambulance guys were scraping a security guard off the car park.’
‘What were you doing there?’ said Mac, trying to assess how much Urquhart knew.
‘Lance said the memory card was in your backpack — we were going up to the room to grab it.’
Mac thought about the timelines. ‘So you were at the hospital together, with Boo?’ asked Mac.
‘Nope,’ said Urquhart, shaking his head. ‘Lance called me from a bar after he’d left Calmette — said you were AWOL and the SD card was in a pocket of your backpack. So we met at the Cambodiana.’
‘Shit,’ said Mac, getting an insight into how the Israelis had intercepted that information.
‘What?’
‘I think you blokes should stick to your whiteboards and political lunches,’ said Mac, trying to control his fury.
‘Why?’
‘Because there’s a young Cambodian who’s dead because your buddy Lance doesn’t know his craft.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Urquhart.
‘Lance has changed his clothes, right?’
‘Yeah,’ said Urquhart. ‘He brought them with him.’
‘Bring them here, but let’s talk about Super 14 for the next three minutes.’
Urquhart came back into the room with two handfuls of clothes and threw them on Mac’s lap. ‘But anyway, Berrick Barnes seems to be thriving with the Waratahs.’
‘Yeah,’ said Mac, running his hands over the chinos and the trop shirt. ‘flaming traitor.’
‘Be great to see the Reds put some form on the field this year,’ said Urquhart, peering closer at the clothes.