Mac finally breathed out. He now had a name and bio. Joel Dozsa was smart and organised, and he’d almost embedded himself in Australia’s military establishment. RMC Duntroon trained the elite of Australia’s and the Pacific’s military leaders, and a powerful position such as lecturer would have given Mossad some interesting leverage in the Asia-Pacific region.
Logging out of the ASIS portal, Mac stared at the bare-bones Mozilla screen, still operating off a parts department hard drive in Wisconsin. Bringing up Google, he typed in the words: light bulb bomb Thailand 1993.
The first item was an old Associated Press report from July 1993 — Thai criminal investigators were resiling from their initial statement that the Indonesian businessman Ibrahim Sarno had been killed at his golf-resort bungalow at Phuket because of a freak gas explosion. The police investigation had been joined by a team from Thailand’s military intelligence agency and the possibility had been raised that Sarno had been blasted to pieces while turning on the bathroom light…
Mac looked around, his skin crawling. He’d seen first-hand how the light-bulb bomb worked, and he felt nauseous having to read those words.
Police, according to the AP report, were now accepting the possibility that Sarno had been assassinated by some form of IED triggered by the light switch. The journalist had obviously got wind of foul play once the military spooks had entered the investigation, because the writer concluded with the sentence: Police refused to confirm that Ibrahim Sarno was a conduit for South-East Asian funding of the PLO, or that his suspicious death was an assassination by Israeli intelligence agents.
Mac had his man. The light-bulb-in-the-bathroom MO confirmed it. But what now played on his mind was Dozsa’s possible success during his time in Canberra.
Mac wanted to believe that the people Dozsa had approached would have told him to rack off, but experience told him otherwise…
Chapter 35
The clouds had lowered and darkened by the time Mac paused at the threshold of the internet cafe and pushed out into the street, making for a cyclo rider waiting at the kerb. He wanted to get back to the Holiday International, make a proper search of the Americans’ bags, take what he needed and move to another location. Having tapped into the ASIS website and called Benny Haskell, now would be a good time to confuse the trail.
Giving his instructions to the rider, he pulled up the sunshade and checked his phone as they moved with the traffic. Looking up, he noticed they’d turned hard right, and there was now shadow where there should have been oppressive heat.
‘Hey!’ said Mac, turning, but it was too late.
The steel pressed into the back of his head and as he froze and lifted his hands, the Colt was lifted from his waistband.
‘Shit, McQueen,’ came an Aussie voice. ‘That was easy.’
Turning his head, he saw Lance, who pushed a Glock in his face.
‘Lance,’ said Mac, as if he’d met an old friend. ‘Thought about Tic Tacs?’
‘Watch it, McQueen,’ said Lance, climbing into the cyclo beside Mac and nodding to the rider. ‘And shit — who did the hair and the mo?’
‘A lifestyle choice.’
‘An atrocity, more like it,’ Lance sneered. ‘I liked you more as a blond. You look better as a homo than a dickhead.’
They travelled through the streets, heading east towards the river.
‘I’m back on the team, Lance,’ said Mac, trying to stay calm despite the 9mm handgun jammed in his left kidney. ‘I heard from the Firm today. You don’t want to do anything stupid.’
‘The team?’ said Lance. ‘What do you know about the team?’
‘I was doing my job,’ said Mac, trying to spin out the conversation.
‘Your job was to tail Quirk and write a report,’ said Lance, a waft of body odour suggesting he hadn’t slept much or changed his clothes in the past twenty-four hours. ‘Next thing we know, you’re on some wild-goose chase across Indochina with an item of crucial national security — and then you lose it?!’
‘I found it by mistake,’ said Mac. ‘When I asked you about it in the van you could have told me then.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Lance, revealing mossy teeth. ‘You think I was going to brief you in front of a foreign national? And I thought I was supposed to be the novice.’
‘You could have waited until the Cambodiana,’ said Mac.
‘You sent me off to be spied on by Tranh, remember? By the time I got back to the hotel, the place had been bombed. You’re a moron, McQueen.’
‘Where are we going?’ Mac asked.
‘To see Urquhart — he’s got new orders.’
‘I know,’ said Mac, as the cyclo stopped at an intersection.
‘You know much less than you think,’ Lance replied. ‘That’s why you’re chasing the chick and I still have to retrieve that memory card.’
‘Send a boy to do a man’s job.’
‘Shut it, McQueen,’ said Lance.
‘No, you shut it,’ came a harsh American voice along with a slapping sound, and Lance was suddenly sagging into his own lap.
Grabbing Lance’s gun, Sammy Chan pushed the groggy Australian back into the cyclo seat and beckoned for Mac to follow him. Jumping from the cyclo, Mac took back the Colt from Lance and followed Sammy to another Mazda sedan, this one red.
‘Think I broke his jaw,’ said Sammy, shaking out his hand.
‘He’d finished talking,’ said Mac. ‘You weren’t interrupting.’
After driving across town for twenty minutes, the American turned the car north and followed the National Highway Five up the Tonle Sap. This was the road to Bangkok. The American’s legs were heavily bandaged, a fact he couldn’t hide with the military shorts he wore.
‘How’re the legs, Sammy?’ said Mac.
‘Looks a darn sight worse than it is,’ said Sammy. ‘It’s infection I worry about, given our location and all.’
‘I’m due in Saigon tomorrow,’ said Mac as they negotiated the late-afternoon peasant traffic on the highway. ‘So I hope we’re not going too far.’
‘Our conversation this morning got me thinking,’ said Sammy.
‘So?’
‘So there’s someone I want you to meet,’ said Sammy. ‘The two of you hit it off, you can make a deal. You don’t wanna dance, I’ll take you where you want to go and this meeting never took place. Deal?’
‘Deal,’ said Mac, watching the lush Mekong countryside rush past.
Seven minutes later, Sammy turned right off the highway and drove under drooping trees until they hit a raised levee of the type common around the Mekong.
As they sped along it, Mac saw thousands of acres of rice paddies extending across the old river flats to a line of trees where the dark brown Mekong River slipped down to the South China Sea. Small hamlets were evident on raised knolls amid the paddies, and Mac could see children and goats, pigs and women going about their business as the menfolk returned from the markets or from day-labourer jobs.
Sammy drove around the corner and stopped in front of a houseboat sitting beneath some trees, on a small canal known as a klong.
A tall black American loomed at the top of the gangplank, his right hand hovering above a handgun on his hip.
‘It’s okay, Brian,’ said Sammy as he started up the gangplank. ‘Old man’s expecting us.’
Reaching the top of the gangplank, Mac was stopped by Brian and patted down. As he gave up his Colt, Mac wondered if this was the driver they called Eagle.