Mac took a closer look at Simon – he had steady eyes and an unmoving face. A period of silence followed, which suggested to Mac he was probably already under surveillance by DIA. He’d kicked up a fuss with Atkins, he’d proven himself a loose cannon with his Bongo partnership, and someone was bound to have made a comment about Mac’s personal interest in Jessica Yarrow, possibly Gillian Baddely.
The rest of the meeting was perfunctory: Mac took the participants through his journey, the airfield, the booms, the tanks on the helos and Haryono’s appearance. The underground partition of Lombok AgriCorp, the inhalation chambers filled with people, one side dead, the other looking sick but still alive. He mentioned the Falintil engagement at Lombok, the fire at the facility and the fact he’d asked the guerrillas to disrupt the mule lines of US dollars that were being walked across the border from West Timor to the airfield.
Jim responded with an analysis of the samples taken from Lombok: they were an advanced type of pneumonia, or SARS.
‘Nothing new,’ said Jim with a shrug, slightly too casual.
‘It’s the SARS vaccine?’ said Mac.
‘It’s the same disease they’re cultivating,’ corrected Jim.
‘Have a look at the pics,’ said Mac, taking the Nikon from his satchel and handing it to Jim. ‘Like to know what you think.’
‘Sure,’ said Jim, taking the camera. ‘So let’s talk about Blackbird.’
‘Let’s,’ said Mac, grabbing at coffee.
‘Snatch went okay?’ asked Davidson, leaning forward.
‘Yep,’ said Mac. ‘The 63 grabbed her from the Kopassus compound in Maliana, we took her across the island and she was cooperative and moved with the rest of us.’
‘She talk?’ asked Davidson, focusing.
‘Sort of,’ said Mac.
‘What happened?’
‘I overstepped with the questions, I think,’ said Mac, trying to remember the point at which he’d lost her. ‘I caught her in a lie – she claimed that no one at Kopassus had asked her if she’d ever copied a file at army HQ.’
‘Unlikely they’d leave that off their list,’ said Jim.
‘What I said,’ said Mac. ‘She got testy so I asked her why she was seen with Benni Sudarto. She said that wasn’t true and I said her sister had told me.’
‘Nice,’ approved Jim.
‘From there she admitted to being a double agent: recruited by the Indonesian Army to work at HQ in Dili, then recruited by us on the promise of sending her to an Aussie university, and then turned by Benni Sudarto to work for Kopassus.’
‘What was Benni’s deal?’ asked Davidson.
‘Do what we ask or your family suffers – in front of you.’
‘Love that Kopassus approach,’ said Davidson.
‘She said she’d never heard of Operasi Boa and had never copied a file on Boa,’ said Mac.
‘You believe her?’ asked Davidson.
Thinking back to the conversation again, Mac took his time. ‘No, I don’t, Tony. I think she knows what Boa is.’
‘Any evidence?’ asked Simon.
‘No,’ said Mac.
‘So she did copy it?’ asked Jim.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Mac. ‘But if she did, it’s not worth her while to let us know about it. They got to her, mate – they got to her bad.’
CHAPTER 51
Walking in the sunshine, Mac wrestled with a few aspects of the DIA operation that were not adding up for him. He wondered why Jim had pulled that too-casual deflection of the samples from the underground rooms of Lombok. It perhaps wasn’t a complete fabrication, but Jim hadn’t wanted to dwell on the samples Mac and Didge had risked their lives for. Jim was also surprisingly calm about what Mac and Didge had seen down there – not a drug factory but a human-testing lab. Even given DIA’s famous intelligence-exclusion policy when dealing with allies, Mac had expected more. An explanation perhaps. There was a disconnect between the drug lord, Lee Wa Dae, and the vaccine program at Lombok: the two didn’t marry. Yet, the airfield where Pik Berger’s helicopters visited Ishy Haryono did seem to be joined to the Koreans by the bags of money arriving there. It looked like a drug network, not something that the Pentagon would pursue with such vigour.
Moving east on Hasanudin, Mac walked a conservative hundred metres behind Jim. Mac had bought a dark jacket, was wearing sunglasses, and he hadn’t been made as they moved towards the park at the river.
Mac’s biggest concern was with the underground facility at Lombok. He now replayed in his mind the conversation he’d had with Joao. The Falintil commander had told him the village clearances on the south coast had been traced to both the death camp near Memo and the Lombok facility. They were the same program, run by the same people, according to Falintil, who Mac recognised as the most authoritative intelligence source in East Timor. Testing Falintil’s intel and motives, Mac couldn’t see how they were deceiving or provoking Aussie intelligence. Joao had had no idea who Mac really was on the visit to the death camp and he’d seemed prepared to shoot Mac at the Lombok site.
If the people at the death camp and the people in the inhalation chambers were part of the same program of vaccine-testing, thought Mac, why didn’t any of the corpses at the death camp have evidence of an inoculation? Bongo had checked a cross-section of the bodies, which were naked. He’d said they were clear of any marking or punctures – unlikely for a bunch of people being forcibly injected with a SARS vaccine.
Jim turned right off Hasanudin Street and onto the paths that snaked alongside the river through the city’s parklands. Following, Mac stayed behind an entwined couple.
So if the people cleared from the villages of the south coast weren’t being tested with a vaccine for SARS, what were they dying from? The conclusions chased him around in circles about as fast as the questions, and as Jim stopped at a park bench and sat down, Mac edged behind a family group and keyed his phone. The narrow point of all the information he’d seen so far – on Lombok, Sudarto, Lee Wa Dae and Haryono – was Jim himself. Jim had apparently been at Fort Detrick at some point in his career, which didn’t necessarily mean anything. Detrick was certainly the American headquarters of research into bio-weapons, but intelligence people were regularly trained in specific disciplines before being sent into the field. Mac had been trained in economic and financial sabotage, he’d done a rotation at the US Army’s Aberdeen testing grounds and also with Israel’s domestic intelligence service. It didn’t mean much.
Mac just wanted to chat with Jim, see what was really going on. Waiting for the phone to answer, Mac sidled behind a tree and kept an eye on the American.
‘Yep,’ came the gruff reply after the phone had rung several times.
‘Scotty,’ said Mac. ‘It’s Albion.’
‘Macca!’ said Mac’s first mentor in the Aussie SIS, Rod Scott. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Good, mate,’ said Mac, glad to hear Scotty’s voice again, even as he sucked on his ever-present cigarettes. ‘How’s Canberra? Cold enough for you?’
‘Fuck, mate,’ said Scotty. ‘Jack Ormiston took me out sailing on the lake last weekend. Never been so cold, mate – had to get the barman to liberate that bottle of Glayva, didn’t I, Macca? Warm a bloke up.’
‘Doctor’s orders,’ said Mac, laughing.
‘So what can I do you for?’ said Scotty.
‘I needed a quick reminder on someone I’m dealing with up here.’
‘Yeah?’ said Scotty.
‘Yeah, bloke called Jim – DIA,’ said Mac, hoping that Scotty wasn’t going to stonewall him, pull any cellular bullshit.
‘About your size, five years older? Sandy hair, Annapolis ring?’ said Scotty, who had spent most of his career with the firm in the Middle East, ensuring Canadian and Russian wheat growers never gained an advantage over Australian exporters.