‘Don’t take it personally, Macca,’ said Urquhart, looking sincere. ‘Most of Canberra is out of the loop on this.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Mac spat. ‘We don’t know if China’s going to democracy or military dictatorship, so the Prime Minister’s office just makes sure we’re buddies with all of them?’
‘What can I say?’ Urquhart smirked. ‘I’m just a poor Queensland boy who loves his cheap plasma screens.’
‘What was the point of withholding this from me?’
‘It wasn’t supposed to be you,’ said Urquhart. ‘I came up here on instruction from the Prime Minister — no one from the intel community was to be indoctrinated.’
‘So how did I end up here?’
‘You mentioned working with the Cong An… on the McHugh issue.’
‘What’s so secret about that?’
‘Because it’s about currency — vast amounts of US currency in our neighbourhood — and the less people who know about it the better,’ said Urquhart. ‘Currency responds to sentiment, you know that.’
‘I could have been more use if I’d been brought into it.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Urquhart. ‘But there was an embarrassment factor…’
‘Embarrassment?’ asked Mac.
‘Catching up, I see,’ said Dozsa, approaching the two Australians as he peeled an orange. ‘But we might have to cut it short — we have a plane to catch.’
‘To where?’ said Mac.
‘Not so fast,’ said Dozsa, popping a piece of the fruit in his mouth.
Two Chinese soldiers uncuffed Mac and Urquhart and lifted them to their feet. Tottering slightly on his shot leg, Mac was steadied by the soldier’s grip on his shirt.
‘I think we might talk alone,’ said Dozsa, guiding Mac by the arm.
‘I want to check on Lance first,’ said Mac. ‘Let me give him something to eat at least?’
Dozsa paused for two seconds. Mac’s request was cheeky, but Dozsa knew it was a professional courtesy to allow a bleeding man to get some sustenance.
Handing over the peeled orange to Mac, Dozsa turned to Urquhart. ‘The only reason you’re alive is that you followed his instructions, you know that?’
Gulping, Urquhart nodded. ‘Yep — I know that.’
‘Good, because I’ll kill you if you disappoint me. Understand?’
Urquhart stammered as Dozsa turned away.
The medic had a drip into Lance, who’d been stripped to his waist. Bandaged dressings seemed to hold his arm to his body and there was a thick pad bandaged to his neck, the dried blood caked on the scalp beneath his dark hair.
‘You know, Dozsa,’ said Mac, as Lance’s eyes opened, ‘the thing to do would be to get him out of here, fly him into Phnom or even Saigon.’
‘That’s not going to happen, McQueen. I’ll keep him alive, that’s my best offer.’
Mac looked at Lance. ‘Bad news is that you lost a lot of blood, mate. Good news? There’s nothing left to bleed out.’
A small smile creased Lance’s pale face and he nodded very slightly.
‘I want you to have something to eat, mate. You’re going on a plane ride and in your state you need something in your belly, okay? Your body needs all the help it can get right now to replenish the blood.’
Mac offered a segment of orange to the young Aussie. ‘Your mind will play tricks on you, telling you you’re not hungry, but that’s just the metabolism wanting to shut down. Instead, you must eat and the easiest thing to digest is fruit, okay?’
Nodding again, Lance opened his white lips as Mac put the segment in his mouth.
‘Don’t waste your strength chewing — just swallow it,’ said Mac.
Lance swallowed it down.
Responding to another radio call, Dozsa squeezed the button on his headset and wandered to the other end of the office.
‘So?’ said Mac, feeding Lance the orange but looking at Urquhart, who had wandered over. ‘Embarrassment?’
‘Yeah,’ said Urquhart, squirming.
‘McHugh’s a spy, so the Yanks decide to drop her?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Urquhart, returning to his slippery Canberra persona.
‘You want me to issue a CX saying David Urquhart pissed himself when the bullets flew?’
‘Fuck off, McQueen.’
‘Then talk.’
Looking at a place on the nylon-carpeted floor, Urquhart took a breath. ‘McHugh was part of a sting — a joint operation between US Treasury and the Australian Prime Minister’s office.’
‘Sting? Who was being lured?’
‘The Chinese. The Yanks had logged a number of highly sophisticated firewall and VPN attacks on their Treasury servers. The attacks were coming out of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region where the MSS have their cyber teams.’
An attack from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region was bad news — those MSS teams rarely failed.
Mac thought about it. ‘Are the US Treasury’s servers linked to any other system?’
‘No, but the Chinks didn’t need to enter through a connection to the outside world,’ said Urquhart. ‘They were trying to listen to signatures created by data going through the Treasury’s internal routers.’
Mac had more questions but Urquhart glanced over his shoulder then continued.
‘McHugh was supposed to masquerade as a visiting Aussie Treasury wonk with vaguely left-wing views… a full US Treasury visiting fellowship, access to the US Eyes Only stuff. You know — the Yanks letting the junior partner into the liquor cabinet. Grimshaw called it a honey pot.’
‘Grimshaw designed this?’
‘Yes,’ said Urquhart. ‘He called McHugh the “bait”.’
‘Hoping the MSS would try to turn her?’
‘That was the plan,’ said Urquhart. ‘Then we’d be inside their camp and, right when we can do most political damage, we brief the Journal, the FT and the Shimbun in Tokyo, and expose the Chinks for the rogues they are.’
‘But?’
‘But,’ said Urquhart, lightly fingering his split face, ‘Joel Dozsa turned up in Washington.’
‘And?’
‘And turned her for real,’ said Urquhart, avoiding Mac’s eyes.
Blood roared through Mac’s temples; if he’d previously been equivocal about Bongo retrieving McHugh, he was now entirely focused on getting her to Canberra and doing a very long debriefing. Once someone had crossed the line, you either had to forcibly retrieve them, or drop them. The Aussie intel community was small — small enough that when one person went bad, the effect on many covers, assets and networks could be fatal.
‘That’s not good,’ said Mac, grinding it out like he was chewing rocks. Urquhart recoiled slightly.
‘Look, it was supposed to be run by Grimshaw and —’
‘I know, I know,’ said Mac, holding his hand parallel to the floor to indicate he’d like less volume. ‘So why Dozsa — why did he turn up?’
‘Oh, sorry,’ said Urquhart, his eyes refocusing. ‘You don’t know, of course.’
‘Know what?’ said Mac.
‘Dozsa was refused a tenured position at Duntroon, almost twenty years ago.’
‘Actually, I did know that,’ said Mac, glad he knew at least one part of the McHugh screw-up. ‘Just don’t know why.’
‘Not why,’ said Urquhart, happy to have the information upper hand again. ‘But who.’
‘Who what?’ said Mac.
‘Who he was grooming.’
‘Who?’
‘Officer candidate GB McHugh,’ said Urquhart, enjoying him- self now.
‘Fuck me,’ said Mac, his mind spinning.
‘Oh, there was that too,’ said Urquhart. ‘Lots and lots of that.’
Chapter 51
Mac squinted in the mid-morning sun, limping behind the soldier through the compound. There were no signs of the Chinese mown down by Bongo’s firing practice in the Little Bird and the place had a feeling of calm. It was being shut down.