‘That depends on both of us,’ said Mac.
Mac had developed paranoid ideas about Ray-Bans for the last couple of days. It wasn’t just that the bloke was put together and looked like he knew what he was doing. It wasn’t just that from Minky’s place and all the way up Sulawesi and into the highlands the two had been playing cat and mouse. It wasn’t even that Mac had fi nally clicked and realised that the bloke was part of the Sabaya retinue during the Mindanao Forest Products infi ltration. The big thing Mac had been overlooking, and which hadn’t occurred to him during this totally out-of-control mission, was that Ray-Bans might be a lot more like him than he was comfortable with. He had the same aura Mac drew around himself in the fi eld: the unknown quantity, the person who could be from anywhere, doing anything. About the only people who noticed the kind of blandness Mac affected were other spooks.
‘Smoke?’ asked Mac.
Ray-Bans nodded.
‘Bad luck, I don’t,’ said Mac.
They both laughed, Ray-Bans through a busted-up mouth. He stopped himself quick.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Mac.
‘Call me Paul. Yours?’
‘Then I’d have to kill ya,’ said Mac.
Paul snorted, looked out the HiAce window, still casing his surrounds. He was a good-looking man up close, even with the facial he’d got from Hemi. He could have starred in General Hospital, sort of an Asian Rick Springfi eld.
‘You knew during the Mindanao Forest thing that I wasn’t a forestry consultant,’ said Mac.
Paul looked at the fl oor. ‘Didn’t know what the fuck you were, tell the truth. You were a pretty good deal-maker for an impostor.’
‘You liked that?’
Paul looked at him with one eye, nodded. ‘Chinese liked it too.’
‘And Sabaya?’
Paul grinned, looked away. ‘Embarrassed him, getting a pale-eye to broker something between a Filipino and the Chinese. Didn’t really live up to some of his ethnic ideas…’
‘But you let it go.’
Paul shrugged, slugged at the water, winced slightly.
‘You NICA, one of Garcia’s boys?’ asked Mac, referring to Philippines intel.
Paul shrugged.
Mac waved the Browning. ‘I’m the one with the gun. In the movies, that’s good for me, bad for you.’
Paul smiled, looked Mac in the eye. ‘I’m not NICA.’
‘Agency?’
Paul shook his head.
The van was getting stuffy and Mac got up, pulled the sliding side window back. Let some air in, sat down.
‘Paul, there’s something worth knowing. I’m really tired, really stressed. I’m even a bit emotional,’ he said, looking down at the Browning on his lap. ‘I’m not going to sit here all day asking questions like I’m on a date with a diffi cult bird. I’m sure you’d like to get on your bike too, huh?’
Paul nodded, said, ‘Mate, I’m Old School.’
Mac looked at him. Old School was intel-speak for MI6 – the oldest intelligence organisation in the Western world and the one that most others were in some way modelled on. ASIS, the CIA, Mossad and the Canadian SIS had all turned to MI6 for guidance during their set-up phase.
‘SAS, paras?’ asked Mac.
‘You’re quick.’
‘The looks and the accent…’
Paul shrugged. ‘Mexican father, Filipina mother. Grew up in Manila, high school in London. Usual shit.’
‘Spanish, Tagalog, good Yankee accent?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Useful guy.’
‘The expendable ones usually are.’
‘Tell me about Garrison,’ asked Mac.
‘The American?’
Mac nodded.
‘Don’t know much. He’s apparently Agency but a bit unortho dox.
Likes money.’
‘Weren’t briefed on Garrison?’
‘Basic fi le. I know he was in Burma doing stuff with the junta and the Chinese. But my entry point was Sabaya. He’d been off the map since you fi nished him.’
‘Wasn’t me.’
‘That’s not what they say.’
‘What do they say?’ said Mac.
‘Then I’d have to kill you.’
They looked at each other for two seconds.
‘Sabaya came back on the map again in ‘05,’ said Paul. ‘He’d been lying low down in Sulu for a couple of years. Been into Burma, somehow hooked up with Garrison. But Garrison was never my end.
Sabaya was my end.’
‘Where does the girl, Judith Hannah, fi t in?’
‘We met them at the airport ten days ago,’ said Paul, pointing out the window. ‘Garrison was shooting her up with something, so I hear.
He wanted something from her.’
‘What were they using?’
‘Don’t know – scopolamine, I guess. That’s the Agency thing, isn’t it? But I wasn’t around. I was chasing you round the manor, remember that?’
‘What did they want from her?’
‘Don’t know. I never got to Sabaya’s inner circle. He thought I was a mercenary, hired muscle.’
Mac suspected the guy was stonewalling, but he pushed on. ‘What about the other girl?’
‘I tried to stop that, believe me. I’m Army, mate – got a policy about kids.’
‘No, not Minky’s girl. Adult, blonde, English. Calls herself Diane.’
Paul shrugged. ‘Who’s she with?’
‘Garrison, as far as I know.’
Paul made a face. ‘Just ‘cos she sounds English, mate, doesn’t mean she works for the English. Know what I mean?’
‘It’s important.’
‘Sorry, mate. Don’t know about an English girl.’
Mac thought about it. ‘So what are these blokes up to?’
‘You can’t ask that in the Sabaya camp,’ said Paul. ‘They’ll drop you for that.’
‘What’s in that old mine?’
‘Nothing. Fucking beats me.’
‘Nothing?’
‘I had a quick look a week ago – empty. They’ve laid track in there, but there’s nothing in it.’
Mac was exhausted, close to passing out. He stood to a crouch, pulled the sliding side door back, got out backwards and gestured for Paul to follow.
They walked to the hangar door. Mac reached into his chino pockets, came out with about four hundred US dollars. Handed it over.
Paul took it, turned to go, said, ‘I owe ya.’
‘No worries, champ.’
Paul looked down at Mac’s wrist and nodded. ‘Got a girlfriend for that?’
‘Go on,’ said Mac, gesturing with the Browning. ‘Fuck off.’
Defi nitely paras.
Mac headed through the military checkpoint of Hasanuddin in the HiAce and drove into the hinterlands behind the airport thinking back to his conversation with Cookie. Cookie had called VX nasty shit. But it was way beyond nasty. A substance that attacked the central nervous system, VX was something the most depraved scientists had concocted and yet even the most psycho generals and politicians could never fi nd an excuse to deploy. Death started with a runny nose and a headache. Before you knew it, your bladder and bowels were doing their own thing. Then your lungs wouldn’t work. If you inhaled it, you died in about fi fteen minutes. If it landed on your skin in very small doses, you’d die in four to ten hours. If you ingested it by way of drinking or eating, you might have two or three days up your sleeve.
The scientists had a measurement called a Threshold Limit Value for how much an average adult man could be in contact with the agent for an eight-hour day in a forty-hour week. The TLV of VX nerve agent was 0.00001 milligrams per cubic metre of water, an infi nitesimal amount – essentially a bit of vapour in the air. It was odourless and colourless.
VX had been developed to do one thing: wipe out entire urban populations while leaving the buildings and other infrastructure in place.
The big weakness of VX was the way it had to be used. If Mac remembered correctly, the optimum usage of VX entailed it being turned into trillions of microbe-sized droplets so it was suspended in the air which then had to drift with air currents over the unlucky populations. To make VX as deadly as it could be, you needed it to be sprayed like fertiliser. The technical term for this state was an aerosol.
Aerosol was easy to say, diffi cult to achieve. Perhaps not so hard with a container of VX wrapped in CL-20.