‘Sorry?!’ she said, the door opening with a flourish. ‘You take me to dinner, and take me to bed, and then as an afterthought you tell me you’re flying out tonight?’
‘Can we keep it down?’ asked Mac, looking around. ‘People are trying to sleep.’
‘It’s ten past nine,’ said Jessica, and Mac could see her eyes were puffy. ‘I wanted to spend time with you, Richard – I can’t do this on my own.’
‘I know,’ said Mac, putting his arms around her.
‘I’m scared,’ she sobbed into his neck. ‘Really scared.’
Over Jessica’s shoulder, Mac saw Gillian Baddely emerge from an apartment, give him a nasty look and shake her head.
‘I have a plane to catch,’ mumbled Mac, and pushing himself away he headed for the cab, trying to put Jessica’s sobs out of his mind.
The one thing he could have told her was that her father was last seen in the Kota Baru barracks in Baucau. But Mac had decided not to, and he didn’t want Jessica looking into his eyes.
CHAPTER 32
Mac’s new Nokia buzzed while he was standing with other travellers at Bali International Airport, waiting for the stragglers to assemble in front of the minivan driver with the Natour Bali sign. Looking at the phone, Mac dialled into the secure voicemail servers in Canberra and got a message from Marty Atkins: the late-night debrief meeting was postponed, new time eleven o’clock the following morning.
After running some basic security checks on his bungalow at the Natour, Mac jammed a chair under the door handle, stripped and made for the bathroom. The shower felt good and Mac sensed his energy making a comeback as he padded through the spacious bungalow at the Natour, keeping the lights down and checking the windows from the side of the curtains. Grabbing a cold Bintang from the mini-bar, he sat at the writing desk and opened his wheelie bag, taking the seven pages of logs from Rahmid Ali’s phone.
The account had only been opened three weeks earlier and Mac ran his eyes down the list of dialled numbers, looking for the patterns. There was one number that recurred – Mac noticed it because it had a ‘61’ prefix, followed by a variety of mobile numbers, meaning Australia.
Another cluster of numbers showed eighteen calls to a number with a ‘6221’ prefix on the day Mac flew into Dili. The times for the calls went from the morning of Mac’s arrival to the morning of the next day. So Rahmid Ali had been feverishly calling someone in Jakarta, even as he watched Mac at Dili’s airport.
The numbers, dates and durations started from the left side of the pages, and on the right were the work-ups on each number. They were notated as if in stylised speech bubbles for a cartoon. Most of them were to the Presidential Building in Jakarta, where Ali probably had his office, or at least someone to answer to. There were calls to the Dominion Bank of Singapore in Singapore – not surprising, since most educated elites in Indonesia had their doctors, banks and dentists on the island republic, even as they spruiked Indonesia’s place in the world.
These weren’t what Mac was looking for. He wanted something that looked like a front or a cut-out – a number either unlisted or burdened with a nondescript name. As Mac leaned back, rubbing his eyes, he suddenly remembered the business card Rahmid Ali had given him in the garden of the Turismo.
Mac rummaged through the side pockets of his wheelie bag and pulled out the card. In dark blue printing were the words Andromeda IT Services and then the sat-phone number which Ali had underlined in fine black ballpoint. It also listed a corporate address in KL, a landline and a fax number. Comparing the numbers with the phone logs, Mac ran his finger down the list but didn’t come up with a match. The Andromeda numbers were fronts, and when Rahmid Ali really wanted to speak with his organisation, he probably did it direct with Jakarta.
Keying his Nokia, Mac waited for the pick-up and the challenge. He gave his code and the operation name, and even though it was one o’clock in the morning in Canberra, he still had a research assistant on the end of the line. The Telstra mobile service he used wasn’t the kind you could buy retail – it ran on the government-consular security network, and when he worked in South-East Asia it was diverted through Singapore’s security cellular system.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked the woman, who had a faint subcontinent accent.
‘Leena, sir,’ she said.
‘Okay, Leena, I need a reverse-listing on a Kuala Lumpur number, and then we’re going extension hunting, okay?’
Leena was fast and good – in twenty seconds she had the physical address for the KL numbers which Mac wrote down on the Natour Bali letterhead.
‘Okay, Leena, can you get the phone book for the Presidential Building in Jakarta, please?’
Leena said she’d call back when she had the book, and Mac rang off.
Grabbing another beer, Mac thought about his debrief with Atkins. Operation Masquerade was still active as far as Mac was concerned. Blackbird remained missing and Boa unexplained. Mac’s problems with Atkins would come with the revelations about the death camp in Memo and the increasingly out-of-control environment in Bobonaro. Mac would argue that matters were sufficiently serious in East Timor that Masquerade continue, without getting so carried away that Atkins would worry that the operation was going to result in a damning report about the behaviour of the Indonesian Army.
Operasi Boa was worth investigating, thought Mac. It was serious enough that the Indonesian President’s spies were trying to contact ASIS directly. And besides, a false flag was not as outlandish as it sounded. Military intelligence operatives routinely swapped operations, created ‘ghost’ documents, inserted false information in the more openly available files and held deliberately inaccurate briefings, all in order to misinform the spies, the media and their own leaders – many of whom couldn’t be trusted with sensitive military information. When Mac first rotated into Iraq at the end of the Gulf War, Rod Scott’s abiding lesson in intel gathering was to treat everything as a lie – especially the ‘hidden’ documents covered in EYES ONLY stamps, the ones in the military files that pointed a finger at the politicians, the ones in the intel files that blamed everything on Saddam’s secret police, and the coincidental files ‘found’ by the fleeing Sunni elites that fingered their Shia underlings for every criminal decision. So the idea of Operation Extermination veiling something more serious wasn’t troubling Mac; the puzzle was Operasi Boa itself.
Remembering himself back at Santa Cruz that day, Mac recreated the scene and tried to evoke Ali’s voice in his mind. As he played the scene over and over, Mac was sure that when he’d looked up from reading Operation Extermination, he’d summed it up as a ‘deportation’ project. Ali had agreed with Mac’s interpretation but had later rephrased deportation as ‘depopulation’.
Was there a difference? One meant shipping people out of a territory, the other translated as?
Mac’s mobile rang and he grabbed at it.
‘Leena,’ he said, sitting back at the desk. ‘Got it?’
‘Yes, sir,’ she trilled in that uniquely musical Indian way. ‘And we’re in luck; its last update was ten days ago.’
They worked through the numbers in the Presidential Building and one by one Mac put a cross beside them. There was a number in accounts, a number for the main switchboard and two for the chief of staff’s office.
Mac was looking for more, something a little out of the ordinary, something that connected Rahmid Ali to another name. Before he stomped into a potential diplomatic snafu in Jakarta, he needed to know exactly who Ali was aligned with. Jotting the notes down as he went, he flipped through the pages again and picked up a mobile number with a Singapore prefix – the notes to this number had a user ID of Penang Trading Co. with a postal box address in Singapore.