Kicking him hard on the point of the chin, Mac watched a tooth fly as the lawyer’s face snapped back, laying him flat on his back.
‘No, Augie – fuck you.’
Moving to the desk, but keeping his eyes on Da Silva, Mac checked the drawers of the desk. There were calculators, cell phones, dictaphones and statements from the Bank of Singapore, a Darwin branch of the ANZ Bank and a weird-looking bank statement from the Phnom Penh branch of Koryo Bank – the Koryo had been established by North Korea’s general staff, for what was officially called ‘joint ventures with foreign countries’.
‘Thing I love about you lawyers,’ snarled Mac, waving the statement at Da Silva as he tried to sit up, ‘you want to get paid by everyone – coming and going.’
‘Fuck you, Skippy,’ mumbled the lawyer through his hand.
‘Am I going to find Operasi Boa in this desk?’ asked Mac.
Da Silva laughed, and Mac stood over him, looking him in the eye.
‘I won the fight, Augusto – without the big ape. So now I’m asking and you’re telling, okay?’
‘Gotta go, buddy,’ said Jim.
‘Okay,’ said Mac, still panting. ‘Let’s take them with us.’
‘I don’t like it,’ said Jim.
‘These guys are all we’ve got – besides, I think I’ve worked out what was happening,’ said Mac.
Amir suddenly rushed at Mac, Jim swinging his gun to take a shot. Gunfire resounded in the office and then a window was breaking. Shards of glass exploded as Jim and Mac swung their guns and fired, but Amir was horizontal through the space where the window had recently been.
Moving to the jagged hole, Mac looked down and saw Amir Sudarto climbing out of a hedgerow. Jim fired and shots hit the concrete car park as Amir sprinted out of view.
‘Shit,’ said Jim. ‘Was that Amir Sudarto?’
‘That’s him,’ said Mac, heaving for breath.
‘Then we’ve got about five seconds before Kopassus arrives,’ said Jim.
Mac grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on the desk and stemmed his nose. ‘We can’t leave him,’ he said, nodding at Da Silva.
‘Okay, we take him. But if he causes trouble, I’m gonna whack him, okay?’ asked Jim, loud enough for Da Silva to hear. ‘No one – especially not some failed lawyer – is going to hold me for one second longer than I have to be in this hellhole.’
‘That’s the choice, Augusto,’ said Mac, ‘and you have one second to decide.’
‘I liked you better as a blond,’ said Da Silva, spitting a chunk of flesh from his mouth as he stood. ‘But you must do me favour.’
‘What?’ asked Mac, checking the Colt.
‘Hold the gun to my head when we leave – these malai have no sense of humour.’
CHAPTER 55
Jim’s driver pulled the Mitsubishi into the shade of some trees after a twenty-minute drive east of Dili along the coast road. Any further east and they’d start running into army and militia roadblocks.
The support staff at the law office, and Señor Carvalho, were locked in a storage room and now Mac pulled Da Silva out of the back of the car by his hair.
Moving down to the beach, they found a secluded place behind a stand of trees, and sat Da Silva down on the grass while Jim’s driver stood guard by the road.
‘You wrote Operasi Boa, didn’t you?’ said Mac, his nosebleed having finally set.
‘No comment,’ said Da Silva, not so brave now.
‘That’s a nice lawyerism, isn’t it?’ said Mac quietly. ‘But it wasn’t always Augusto the lawyer, was it?’
Looking down at the sand, arms tied behind his back, Da Silva didn’t answer.
‘Let me see – Augusto goes to university on a military scholarship, he gets a law degree, starts his five years in the army, does his officer training, and then the boys from Kopassus get hold of him, right?’
Da Silva said nothing.
‘You were never really special forces material – you were always going to be head-shed with that big brain and fancy degree, right? But you complete Kopassus basic, and then suddenly you work out what they want you for. Intelligence section, right?’
‘No comment,’ said Da Silva.
‘Oh yeah, the good old boys from Kopassus intel – trained you to be a spook, then set you up with a law firm so you could always cover their tracks. Making every torture, detention and execution legal, right, Da Silva? Maybe even some property confiscations, right?’
‘What do you want, McQueen?’ flashed Da Silva. ‘You can’t get me off the island, so you have to kill me or torture me.’
‘I want to know what’s in Operasi Boa,’ said Mac, slow and calm. ‘I want to know who’s running it and what the goals are.’
‘Or?’ asked Da Silva, squinting up at Mac.
‘Or I tell Benni Sudarto you ratted him out, turned on your Kopassus brothers. I’ll tell him we pulled that ambush in Memo based on you squealing.’
‘He wouldn’t believe you,’ croaked Da Silva.
‘Perhaps. But I’m gonna have fun trying.’
‘What’s my guarantee?’ asked Da Silva. ‘What about my family?’
‘That depends on the quality of the information,’ said Mac, face stony.
‘The first stage of Operasi Boa was to get executive orders signed by the minister for health,’ said Da Silva. ‘It was a military operation to immunise the East Timorese against certain strains of pneumonia which start as a virus, incubate in humans and become bacterial diseases.’
‘They become contagious?’ asked Jim.
‘That’s my understanding,’ said Da Silva. ‘I’m a lawyer, not a doctor. The scientists were working on a mass-vaccination project.’
‘Of whom?’ asked Jim.
‘Well, it was originally called BOACL, so it covered the populations of Bobonaro, Oecussi, Ainaro and Cova Lima.’
‘Why those places?’ asked Mac.
‘I don’t know,’ said de Silva, looking up. ‘I suppose they’re rural communities, native enclaves?’
‘Where did Lombok come in?’ asked Jim.
‘Lombok is a joint venture between a Kopassus company and a North Korean consortium. It makes the vaccine.’
‘Wasn’t Lombok also making the Boa virus?’ asked Mac.
‘I don’t know,’ said Da Silva. ‘I told you – I’m a lawyer.’
‘Okay,’ said Mac.
‘My job was to tidy up the orders so they’d be signed off in Jakarta and Kopassus could make all this money from the fees they’d charge – apparently the World Health Organisation pays organisations to do this and the Asia Development Bank makes interest-free loans. Then, two months before Soeharto was gone, a high-powered major-general came into my offices.’
‘Haryono?’ asked Jim.
‘Let’s call him Major-General, okay?’ asked Da Silva, noticeably scared. ‘He was with my intel controller -’
‘Amir?’ asked Mac.
Nodding, Da Silva continued. ‘The general wanted it shortened to Boa and incorporated in a military operation.’
‘Hidden?’ asked Mac, thinking back to Rahmid Ali’s final words.
‘Disguised is a better word for it,’ said Da Silva. ‘I had to rework some clauses of a battle order called Operation Extermination so they alluded to Operasi Boa without spelling it out. You’d really have to be looking for Boa in that document.’
‘The purpose of this?’ asked Jim.
‘They wanted a signed battle order that covered them legally. They were using the power vacuum of Soeharto’s fall to get away with it, I suppose.’
‘So what was Operasi Boa?’ asked Jim.
‘It was the same vaccine program,’ said Da Silva. ‘But it changed the delivery slightly.’
‘Yeah?’ asked Mac.
‘Yeah, rather than vaccinations delivered by needles, into the skin, they shifted it to what in English is called a line-source delivery system.’
‘Which is?’ said Mac.
‘It means you spray the agent – but when it’s written in Bahasa Indonesia, it looks like you’ll vaccinate villagers by lining up the patients.’