Mac found what he was looking for and held it up: a metal sphere the size of a ball bearing, with a dozen small wire hooks, that had been hanging from the black cotton under Lance’s collar. It was a micro-transmitter of the type that only had enough battery power to transmit for twelve to fourteen hours but which picked up most conversational speech for about five feet around it.
‘Yeah, mate,’ said Mac, careful not to touch the sphere and let its owner know it had been found. ‘I want John Roe back in a Reds jumper. He’s hell when he’s well.’
Handing the clothes back, Mac pointed to the door. When Urquhart returned, his waxy Canberra pallor was more grey than usual.
‘Shit,’ he said, sitting and rubbing a hand up over his face and hair. ‘That was a microphone? They were listening to everything Lance was saying?’
‘Within range, yeah,’ said Mac.
‘So they heard where the memory card was and beat us to it?’
‘Sure,’ said Mac. ‘That’s how it goes in this game.’
‘But how did they get close enough to plant this thing on him?’ asked Urquhart.
‘Pretty girl, alone at a bar, asks a bloke to talk about himself,’ said Mac with a wry smile. ‘If you think it’s too good to be true, you’re probably right.’
Chapter 30
Lying on his back, Mac squirted saline into each eyeball, blinking it out again. As his eyes slowly cleaned themselves, he tried to work out what parts of this gig to lie about and what to come clean on.
Lance and Urquhart had obviously tailed him after the Singapore fiasco and it would have been within Urquhart’s power in Australian intelligence to have Mac assigned to the Jim Quirk tail. Mac was inclined to believe Urquhart: he’d genuinely wanted Mac to help him weed out the potential traitor who set up Ray Hu. And Mac had genuinely turned him down, at which point Urquhart opted for having Mac assigned to Saigon.
But the routine tail-and-report of Quirk had turned nasty and suddenly Lance was in a van with Mac, seeing the memory card. Lance must have felt the ends coming together quite easily. But then Boo Bray was run over and before Lance could double back to the Cambodiana and grab the memory card, the Israelis had intercepted Lance’s ill-advised call and grabbed it, leaving Lance and Urquhart looking like a couple of dilettantes.
Mac could only surmise what was on that card. What worried him was a series of violent attacks from the Israelis, culminat- ing in a light-bulb bomb at the Cambodiana; that is, a light bulb filled with a fuel-oil accelerant such as ammonia nitrate and a small flash-detonator in place of the filament. You didn’t need a huge amount of explosive in a small area like a bathroom — there was nowhere for the blast to go except out the door, where the victim should be standing at the light switch.
Someone from Israeli intelligence would know how to make such a bomb. One of the best technical rotations Mac had ever done was with the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal spy agency. Most field operators in the Shin Bet became proficient in making IEDs, so they knew a bomb factory when they saw one, and in many cases could smell a bomb-maker if they were standing beside him.
What Mac didn’t understand was how Ray Hu came into it.
For now, Mac needed to get out of the safe house before Urquhart or Lance came back with questions about the shootout at the docks the night before. Mac had his own questions about that incident and he had two main priorities that had nothing to do with the memory card: he wanted to find Tranh, and to do that he might need Sam’s help. And then he had some payback planned for that Israeli hit man with the mad eyes.
Mac had one thing going for him: Lance had failed to find Mac’s backpack or the van. Mac reckoned the backpacks and cell phone tracker were safe in the room registered under the name of Sam Chan until Phnom Penh police reported to the Australian Embassy that they’d found the ‘lost’ van. Mac had given his vehicle rego as the Mazda’s. The van wouldn’t be found immediately, but before it was Mac needed to get out of the house.
His black baseball cap was hooked over the back of the chair near the door, and he had an idea.
Eighteen minutes later the deadlock rattled and Marlon brought Mac’s lunch into the room, dragged the stool over with his foot and put down the sandwich and a can of Tiger.
‘I’m liking your taste in food, Marlon,’ said Mac, eyeing the sandwich. ‘Ham, cheese and tomato — perfect with a cold beer.’
Smiling, Marlon turned to go. ‘By the way, I was at the embassy this morning and I bumped into Alex Beech.’
‘How’s Sandy?’ said Mac.
Marlon’s face burst into a big, toothy smile. ‘Sandy Beech — you cheeky bugger.’
‘He loves it,’ said Mac. ‘Try calling him “Bondi” and watch him come alive. What’s he in town for?’
‘Didn’t say,’ said Marlon, taking a seat on the chair and looking mischievous. ‘But I got some info on you.’
‘From Sandy?’
‘Yeah. I asked him why someone from the military would claim to have been a truck driver when they obviously weren’t.’
‘And he laughed and said the military runs on logistics,’ said Mac.
‘How’d you know that?’ said Marlon.
‘Because Sandy shovelled chow — an army marches on its stomach.’
Marlon gave Mac a suspicious look; he’d been a police detective in Brisbane before joining I-team five years earlier and still liked to get to the bottom of people. ‘Well, that’s as clear as mud.’
‘Hey, Marlon,’ said Mac, taking a swig of the beer as he swallowed his first bite of the sandwich. ‘My eyes are still hurting — can you chuck me that hat to keep the glare off my eyeballs?’
‘Sure.’ Marlon spun the cap through the air onto Mac’s lap.
‘So was Sandy with anyone?’ said Mac, sure that Beech’s appearance was not coincidental.
‘He was alone.’
‘Who was he meeting with?’ said Mac, smiling.
‘What you really want to know is if he was asking after you, right, McQueen?’
‘The thought did occur.’
‘He didn’t, but I wouldn’t tell him anything — I’m employed by DFAT, not Defence.’
Mac pushed. ‘How was he dressed?’
‘Relax, cuz,’ said Marlon, standing and stretching. ‘Your best bet is to tell this Lance fool what he wants to hear so we can all move on. I was due in Honkers yesterday.’
Gnawing at the right side of the cap where the peak met the cap proper, Mac tore a hole in the canvas and exposed the thin steel rim that ran in a semicircle around the edge of the peak.
He drew out the steel rim until he held a flat wire of the type commonly associated with a woman’s bra. The wire slipped easily into the keyhole of the cuffs and Mac twisted and needled at the tumbler until he felt it turn. Within ten seconds his wrist was free.
Standing, Mac cat-walked to the door and listened to Lance and Urquhart arguing somewhere in the house. They were classic intelligence dabblers: smart enough to ensure that people got hurt, but not experienced enough to fix their mistakes. If they followed the script used by most of Canberra’s whiteboard warriors, they were currently tearing each other apart over the memory card, but by the time they got off the flight into Sydney they’d have shifted culpability onto Mac or maybe even Boo Bray, who had the added attraction of being unable to speak up in his own defence.
Lance and Urquhart would be blameless. Not only would they write the report, but they would be protected by the truism that he who stands closest to the Prime Minister is never hit by the shit.
Moving to the window, Mac checked the latches: they were the old-fashioned horizontal-twist type, but with locked bolts in the sashes.
Slipping the flat wire from the cap into the first bolt lock, Mac worked at it until he felt the wire twisting and losing shape. He gave up on that one and moved to the second, where the wire went in more readily. He had it unlocked in six seconds.