Retreating from the kitchen as slowly as he could, SIG raised, Mac glanced over the NSA email system and saw the subject field of the email Grimshaw had been reading. It said Op Lampoon — Critical.
The email featured the word HARPAC.
Moving carefully back to the hallway fronting the bathroom and two bedrooms, Mac listened to footfalls clipping on the other side of the internal walclass="underline" Grimshaw striding to the kitchen.
Wondering how he was going to do this without shooting his way out, Mac listened as the footfalls reversed and strode back to the suite’s door, which then opened and closed.
Putting his head around the corner into the living area, Mac found the place deserted. The footfalls echoed down the main hallway, and then stopped; a door was opened, the door was shut and Mac could hear two men talking. Moving back to Sammy’s room, Mac put his ear to the thin wall and heard the conversation; muffled, but urgent. One of the voices was Grimshaw.
‘Blue Dog, Blue Dog — where the fuck are you?’ came Scotty’s voice over the radio.
‘Standing by, Red Rover,’ mumbled Mac, straining to hear Grimshaw.
‘Get out now!’
Mac made for the kitchen to have another look: what was Operation Lampoon? The laptop was gone, and Mac walked to the door and eased into the hallway.
‘Red Rover — time for a ride,’ said Mac into his radio as he waved to the manager and skipped down the front steps.
The car pulled up and Mac got in, barely shutting the door as Scotty accelerated away.
‘Stop here,’ said Mac when they were fifty metres away. ‘I want to check something. Anyone got binos?’
‘You got the chip?’ said Scotty.
Pulling out the red Nokia, Mac peeled off the back cover, removed the battery and saw the white SD card gleaming right where Dozsa had said it would be.
Handing it to Sandy Beech, Mac received in exchange a battered set of folding Swarovskis. Opening the door, he pulled on his black cap and slipped out of the car.
‘Give me five, boys.’
Walking through the shadows back to the guest house, Mac smiled as a bunch of teenagers went past on their pushbikes, chattering at each other. It didn’t matter the language, you could always tell when teenagers were cracking on to one another.
Pausing by the entrance to the guest house, Mac looked up to the first floor where Grimshaw’s and the neighbouring room faced the parking lot. The shutters over Grimshaw’s room had been closed, but the hook for the shutters over the neighbouring windows wasn’t fully closed and Mac reckoned if he got the right angle he’d be able to have a nosey-poke into that room, see who Grimshaw was speaking to.
Tucking the binos in the back pocket of his chinos, he noticed a car parked on the other side of a large banyan tree. Climbing onto the roof of the car, Mac reached up and hauled himself up onto a branch, staying close to the trunk.
A monkey mumbled in its sleep and put its arm back over its forehead as Mac found a vantage point level with the room. Peering through the Swarovskis, he adjusted for range and focus and could see movement through the shutter opening. It looked like a slashing movement and as Mac got the field-glasses on a better depth of focus, he could see an arm swinging, and then a man walking. Holding the binos on the best angle, Mac watched the man go back and forth across the narrow window of view, before he finally stopped and turned into the light: Charles Grimshaw, bending over, snarling at someone.
Why couldn’t he see the other person? Above him, the foliage was thicker — not a good vantage point for a recce, but Mac wanted to see the person in the chair.
Scrabbling and slipping to another level, his calf muscle burning with pain, he disturbed two fruit bats that whacked their wings against the tropical night air, leaving the top of the tree shaking. Holding his breath, Mac waited to see if the noise brought Grimshaw to the window, but he looked to be making too much noise of his own and Mac could hear the odd word drifting into the still night air.
Clearing a bunch of twigs in front of his face, Mac raised the field-glasses and found his field of focus, the magnification of the keyhole scene a strange effect that threatened to make him lose balance.
Grimshaw slapped the object of his wrath and Mac could see there was a black pistol in his hand.
‘Get out of the way, Charles,’ said Mac to himself.
Grimshaw’s bulk swayed back and forth menacingly. Then the American moved out of the line of vision and Mac gasped slightly.
‘Holy crap,’ he said, breath rasping in his throat.
Charles Grimshaw was interrogating Sammy Chan, and there was blood everywhere.
‘There’s two hundred billion dollars worth of bad currency sitting somewhere in the Mekong Delta tonight,’ said Mac, brooding in the back seat of the Nissan. ‘And Grimshaw is in Kratie, interrogating his senior operator. What’s that about?’
‘Sammy’s gone rogue, I guess,’ said Scotty, sucking on a smoke and looking over Sandy Beech’s shoulder at the mini notebook that was running the SD memory card.
‘I don’t understand.’ Mac opened a water bottle. ‘These guys were total believers — you should have seen their set-up outside Phnom Penh, the way they approached this gig. Something’s wrong with what I saw back there — something’s wrong with Grimshaw being in Kratie when so much US currency is about to be dumped around this region.’
‘Shit,’ said Beech as his screen opened hundreds of lines of code.
‘I’m serious,’ said Mac.
‘So am I, Macca,’ said Beech, turning to face him. ‘There’s no way we can give this to Dozsa.’
Chapter 54
The Nokia buzzed in Mac’s breast pocket as he maintained eye contact with Sandy Beech.
‘Wanna get that?’ said the military spook.
‘I want the card back,’ said Mac. ‘It’s buying two Aussies.’
Turning to Scotty, Beech gave him a look that Mac didn’t like.
‘Yep,’ said Mac, answering the phone before looking at Scotty and mouthing, ‘Dozsa.’
‘Listen, my Aussie friend,’ came the monotone straight out of Budapest via Tel Aviv. ‘You be at the main wharf in Stung Treng, at midnight.’
‘I haven’t got it yet,’ said Mac.
‘That’s why you have till midnight,’ said Dozsa. ‘And no eyes in the sky.’
The line went dead and Mac looked up from the phone. ‘Stung Treng — main wharf, midnight. No UAVs.’
The discomfort was obvious and Scotty cleared his throat.
‘What?’ said Mac.
‘Mate, we’re standing down on this one, okay?’ said Mac’s mentor.
‘This one?’ said Mac.
‘It’s not ours anymore,’ said Scotty. ‘It’s with Defence now.’
Mac couldn’t grasp it. ‘Hang on, Scotty — what’s now with Defence? The card? The wellbeing of Lance and Dave?’
Scotty’s throat bobbed. ‘Whole bit.’
‘Fuck that,’ said Mac, reaching for his waistband as Scotty’s hand slapped down on his wrist. Pulling back from Scotty, Mac heard the tapping of steel on the window beside his head. Freezing, he raised his hands — he knew that sound. Turning, he saw a set of eyes looking down the barrel of a Browning Hi-Power pistol. On the other side of the car, a blond soldier was also aiming at Mac.
‘I didn’t want it to be like this,’ said Beech, eyes flicking to the soldiers who simultaneously opened the rear doors of the Nissan and relieved Mac of the SIG Sauer. ‘I wish there was another way of doing this.’
Emerging from the car, Mac looked around and saw four soldiers dressed in the kind of civvies CIA paramilitaries wore: fatigue pants tailored like chinos, military shirts that passed for adventure travel wear and military boots made to look like yuppie hikers’ shoes.