‘You think Carl can’t tell the difference?’ demanded Atkins, as furious as Mac. ‘He’s a director, Macca! He was spooking when you were in primary school.’
‘So they say, but Tony’s the relevant director,’ said Mac.
‘Relevant?!’ growled Atkins. ‘Try some relevant manners.’
‘Me?!’ snorted Mac, breathing shallow. ‘That’s rich.’
‘Yes, manners! You’re not going to come into my office and speak to the director of analysis like that, mate. Not how it works,’ said Atkins, his face red.
Taking a breather, Mac and Atkins put their hands on their hips.
‘You could have told me, mate,’ said Mac, taking the edge off his voice. ‘Frankly, I would have liked some warning that I was going to be discussing Masquerade in front of someone like Carl Berquist.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Atkins.
‘Come on,’ said Mac, trying to push Atkins back to the meeting room.
‘No,’ said Atkins, shrugging off the hand. ‘What did you mean by that comment?’
‘Come on, Marty – Berquist is pure Jakarta Lobby.’
‘What lobby?’ snapped Atkins.
‘You know, the ones who say there are no militias in East Timor, and if there are, they’re not connected to the military, and even if they are connected it’s a rogue element, but even if they’re not, they’re a calming influence on the violence, et cetera, et cetera…’
‘Oh, that lobby! You mean the people who want some kind of evidence of homicidal militias controlled and funded from Jakarta before we write reports that the Prime Minister is supposed to rely on? Is that the conspiracy we’re talking about?’
‘Marty – it’s a mess over there, mate. I wanted to debrief, just a couple of field guys talking it through.’
‘Fuck’s sake, McQueen! Berquist was a field guy.’
‘Oh, really?’ Mac goaded. ‘He had a few lunches in Beijing or Tokyo?’
Sighing, Atkins shook his head. ‘I know you get stressed, okay? You get the worst gigs and it must be mentally tiring…’
Mac nodded, needing air. Atkins was playing the stress leave card.
‘But not everyone’s out to get you, Macca,’ said Atkins. ‘So let’s go and do the debrief and show me what you’ve got.’
Nodding again, Mac bit his bottom lip and turned towards the meeting room.
‘And Macca?’ said Atkins, lowering his voice. ‘Just so you know – he’s here on authority of the DG, okay?’
‘The DG?’ asked Mac, confused. ‘What, our DG?’
‘Yeah, mate – I think they want to retrieve you.’
As he turned away, Mac managed a snigger at the intel-speak. But it didn’t matter what pseudo-American terminology they used, Atkins was saying the Director-General of the firm wanted him back in Canberra.
CHAPTER 34
By the time Mac was five minutes into his run-through, the meeting had become Berquist’s debrief, and every point Mac tried to make became an exercise in Canberra’s scepticism.
‘No, Carl, I have no evidence linking the death camp to Jakarta, except the bulldozer on the army truck,’ sighed Mac for the umpteenth time and sick of the questions framed for the listening posts. ‘It’s corroborated by third-party intel from a Falintil commander.’
‘The terrorists?’ said Berquist, his wandering eye starting to annoy Mac. ‘You had good reason to trust these terrorists? Their bona fides check out?’
‘Let’s just call them Falintil, okay, Carl?’ said Mac, refusing to be baited. ‘They got word of a refugee camp for the villagers moved out of the south coast – a camp that no one seemed to return from.’
‘We confirmed this?’
‘They took me to the camp,’ said Mac. ‘I sighted as many as a hundred and thirty bodies.’
‘But we didn’t confirm that this was the camp?’
‘Falintil identified it.’
‘What about the identity of this Antoine, Ant -’
‘Antonio? No, I didn’t confirm his ID but I sighted the camp and the bodies and the bulldozer was on an army truck and the intel spooks escorting it were -’
‘We know who ran the camp?’ interrupted Berquist.
‘Antonio was a soldier in the local regiment, the 1635, and he was ordered -’
‘But we didn’t confirm who Antonio was, or if he even exists?’ asked Berquist.
Mac felt physically exhausted and overwhelmed by Berquist’s relentless style. Worst of all, Berquist may have been right: all Mac had was a visit to what he thought was a death camp, a run-in with some Kopassus spooks and a bulldozer driver. The only evidence for Antonio’s identity was the say-so of a guerrilla commander.
‘You’re right, Carl,’ said Mac, beaten.
‘You obviously saw a lot of corpses at that camp,’ said Berquist. ‘And it’s affected you. But that doesn’t mean foul play, does it? Perhaps they were sick?’ He turned to Atkins, who nodded.
‘Here’s another scenario,’ said Berquist. ‘The militias clear some villages on the south coast, the refugees are walking west and they catch, say, typhoid, and the Indonesians try to quarantine them in a remote camp.’
Remembering Davidson’s warning to do the debrief in a friendly manner, Mac shifted the focus of the conversation.
‘I’ve told you about the Lombok AgriCorp facility, Carl. What do you make of that?’ said Mac.
‘Could be legitimate, yet confidential,’ said the director of analysis. ‘Most armies have R &D programs. The Australian Army spent years trying to develop counter-malaria medicines, all of it hush-hush.’
‘So why is Lombok such a secret?’ asked Mac, genuinely interested.
‘Maybe they don’t want nosey Aussie spies finding out what they’re doing. Our own CSIRO is all security-vetted now,’ said Berquist, referring to Australia’s scientific research agency. ‘You have to go through ASIO to work there.’
‘Something’s going on up there,’ said Mac. ‘Yarrow was procuring for Lombok AgriCorp and he was associated with the bag-man for the North Korean Army’s heroin business.’
‘But you didn’t bring the procurement list?’ asked Berquist, already aware that Mac had lost it when he was caught.
‘No, Carl,’ said Mac.
‘No Blackbird? No Canadian?’ asked Berquist, his voice clear and neutral.
‘No, Carl – and no fingerprints, no confessions, no smoking gun,’ said Mac, before a sudden insight made him sit up straight. Mac remembered the vial he’d grabbed from Damajat’s office. It had gone in a consular pouch from Darwin to the US Defense Department’s lab contractors in Denpasar, and the return address was the building they were sitting in.
‘The vial,’ said Mac, clicking his fingers. ‘I grabbed a vial from Lombok AgriCorp – from Damajat’s office. It should be here.’
‘It is,’ said Atkins, producing a bubble-wrapped courier bag and sliding the vial onto the table.
‘Well?’ asked Mac.
‘Trial vaccine,’ said Atkins, pulling a letter from the bag and flipping pages over. ‘The lab says it’s a vaccine for something like a, what’s it called? Here it is – a community-acquired MRSA. A powerful pneumonia, apparently.’
‘Vaccine?’ said Mac, reaching for the letter.
‘It gets better,’ said Atkins, pointing at the pages in Mac’s hands. ‘All of these vaccine programs – if they’re legitimate – have their own ID number, a sort of registration with the World Health Organization. It’s all on a database, mate, and Lombok AgriCorp has one.’
‘Shit, Marty,’ said Mac, heart not in it. ‘We’ve got North Korean drug dealers and people like the Sudarto brothers connected with this, and we’re supposed to believe it’s a vaccine?’
‘We?’ asked Atkins, deadpan.
Mac glared at Atkins for a solid seven seconds, then broke it and looked down at the letter and spectral analysis from the American lab. Berquist and Atkins had played him perfectly. He was so tired, so upset by what he’d seen in East Timor, that he wasn’t entirely sure where the facts stopped and supposition took over.