‘Yep, Macca,’ said Scotty. ‘Let’s do this once and do it right.’
‘Okay,’ said Mac.
Down on the first tee, the woman stamped her foot as the husband teed her up with a new ball. Her second shot was a flier. As she got in the cart she was smiling again.
Chapter 7
Grabbing a BRW and making for a corner armchair in Canberra airport’s business lounge, Mac thought about Jim Quirk, a young trade secretary at the Aussie embassy in Manila when Mac had his first diplomatic placement as a second-secretary. They hadn’t been enormously close, but they’d had a few laughs and Mac remembered Quirk had been a schoolboy star at cricket or footy, something like that. He could catch up on the details later; for now he wanted to get a good look at who had followed him up the ramp. Holding the magazine in front of his chest, he eased back and watched a fortyish Anglo male with dark hair saunter into the lounge, a black computer bag over his shoulder. The man poured a mug of coffee and walked directly towards Mac, a smile on his face.
‘G’day, mate,’ said Dave Urquhart, an old school friend of Mac’s who had been around the intelligence traps for years.
‘Davo,’ said Mac, standing and shaking hands. ‘It’s Alan.’
‘Of course,’ said Urquhart, observing the etiquette that you let a spy who might be using a cover tell you the name he was using.
Mac’s mind spun as he looked around for a backup man or a partner. Was this an approach? They made small talk, but Mac was nervous — the woman sitting on the other side of the coffee table was within earshot.
Dave Urquhart had been at Nudgee College with Mac but then he’d gone to the University of Sydney to do law and economics and Mac hadn’t reconnected with him until he’d started turning up in briefings. Mac knew that Urquhart had started at the Firm, but as his career took off he was used as a political liaison guy, between ASIS and the Prime Minister’s office for a start, and then later between the Office of National Assessments and the government. There’d recently been a new oversight office established called the National Intelligence Coordination Committee, with a new national intelligence adviser appointed to assist the Prime Minister. Mac had heard that Urquhart was working for that adviser while apparently still trying to stay close with ASIS.
‘So, where are you off to, Davo?’ said Mac, searching his old mate’s eyes.
‘Darwin,’ said Urquhart, looking upwards to his left; a lie.
‘Nice up there right now,’ said Mac.
The woman opposite them closed her laptop, put it in her carry case and left.
‘One of yours?’ said Mac, nodding after the woman as she left the business lounge.
‘Shit, Macca,’ said Urquhart.
‘Well?’ said Mac.
‘How did you know that?’
‘She only typed when we weren’t talking,’ he said. ‘Gotta learn to listen over your own key strokes.’
‘Okay,’ said Urquhart.
‘And she dressed professional, but with secretary make-up.’
Urquhart sighed. ‘All right, all right.’
Mac was enjoying himself. ‘She one of those ASIO idiots?’
‘You’ve made your point,’ said Urquhart, turning and looking him in the eye.
‘So make yours,’ said Mac, checking his watch.
Urquhart sipped his coffee. ‘We had a look at the Colmslie report. Bad business.’
‘I wasn’t thrilled,’ said Mac.
‘Sad about Ray, huh?’ said Urquhart.
‘He knew the risks,’ Mac replied. ‘Listen, who do you work for now?’
‘The government, mate,’ said Urquhart, in a tone Mac didn’t like.
‘Government?’
‘Executive arm. So I guess there’re some questions in your mind, right?’
‘About Colmslie?’ said Mac, annoyed that his old friend had turned the tables, made him chase the subject.
‘Yeah — everything’s going gangbusters and then, boom, the trail goes cold.’
‘The trail goes cold?’ said Mac. ‘Shit, mate, you’ve been watching too much TV.’
‘Come on, Macca — I know you.’
Mac sneered. ‘Oh really? So tell me what I’m thinking.’
‘You’re wondering if you can hit me and get away with it.’
‘Ha!’ said Mac.
‘Look, you put together an operation that was supposed to turn a Chinese spy, and then right at the point you get him in the hotel room and talking, he’s assassinated. A little too convenient, right?’
Mac controlled himself. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Enlighten me,’ said Mac, amazed that the slippery machinations a sixteen-year-old had used at boarding school had been honed into the weaponry of a first-class political shit.
‘Okay,’ said Urquhart. ‘It was a joint taskforce, but Operation Kava was the Firm’s gig, right?’
‘So?’
‘It was a closed shop — no one else knew the plan, the venue, the timing…’ He tailed off, numbering them on his fingers.
‘Of course it was closed,’ said Mac. ‘What was I going to do? Take an ad in the Straits Times?’
‘So you’re okay with how it happened?’
‘No, I’m the opposite of okay — what are you getting at?’
Urquhart leaned towards Mac, his eyes goldfish-like. ‘If there’re any rotten apples in the barrel, then the political will exists to move on that right now, understand?’
‘The political will?’ said Mac, deflated. He was tired, he was hungover, he was forty, and his head still ached from being pistol-whipped. Now someone from the Prime Minister’s office was asking him to work against Aussie SIS. The Firm wasn’t perfect, but the day Mac honestly felt endangered by a colleague, he’d leave. Until then, he’d keep the family fights in-house and he’d hold the line, like everyone who worked around him.
‘Of course, you know none of this reflects on you, right, Macca?’ said Urquhart, like a man who lied because he could. ‘There’ll be no blow-back on your career; in fact, it might work the other way.’
The departure board clicked up two notches and the top bars started flashing, one of them the five pm flight to Brisbane.
‘My career blew back a long time ago, mate,’ said Mac, standing and looking down on a person he’d once protected in the Nudgee dorms. ‘But I’ve learned to live with my anguish.’
‘Think about it,’ said Urquhart, holding out a card.
‘What’s this?’
‘My numbers,’ said Urquhart. ‘In case you want to talk.’
‘You wanna talk?’ said Mac, as he turned to leave. ‘Get a one-three-hundred number.’
The house at Broadbeach was empty when Mac let himself in. A note on the kitchen bench from Jen said she’d taken the girls for dinner at Hungry Jack’s with Frank and Pat — she’d drop Rachel home to her mother afterwards.
Stowing his case in the bedroom, Mac kicked off his shoes, grabbed a beer and clicked on the TV. Making his usual rounds, he shut the curtains from the side of the windows, checked every room in the house, ran his fingers around the TV screen to see if it had been pried open and then checked the wall-mounted phone socket and the phone itself. Finally, Mac picked up the handset and listened for the dial tone. The tone beeped back at him, signifying voicemail. Dialling in, he listened. He deleted the message and went to the second. He deleted the second message and hung up.
An ABC current affairs show blared on television. Mac hit the mute button and thought about what he was going to do about Dave Urquhart and his ridiculous approach. As much as he loved telling Dave to go screw himself, there was only so long an intelligence officer could defy the Prime Minister’s office.
He also had to act on the two messages. His heart beating in his temples, he grabbed his Nokia and made a secure call to ASIS head office in Canberra. Giving his code name of Albion, he was challenged for the week’s security code, and he gave the one that told the woman at the other end he was safe.