Mac saw the woman in front of him fl inch. He got up, sat beside her, started talking. Her name was Minnie and she was fl ying to London to see her daughter, who’d married a Scottish lawyer and was eight months pregnant. The Poms saw Mac’s move and calmed down. Mac smiled to himself. In about twelve hours’ time they’d just be coming in to land at Changi, wishing to God they’d got some sleep the night before.
Mac got off the train at the domestic airport terminal in Brisbane and paused at the head of the stairs that went down to the terminal entrance. He pretended to check his phone, wanting everyone on that train to be in front of him. When they’d fi led past, he lowered the phone and used the elevation to recce his approach to the airport building. The action was just starting to warm up at the set-down area, with all the business and government types being dropped off for the morning shuttle to Sydney, Canberra and Cairns. Everything looked okay and he strolled down from the raised station and went into the concourse.
Tony Davidson was exactly where he’d said he’d be: in the Qantas Club lounge on the fi rst fl oor of the building. Mac fl ashed his Qantas membership card to the concierge, grabbed a cup of coffee and a crois sant and moved over to where the windows looked out on the tarmac.
When Mac sat down, Davidson barely looked up. ‘Macca,’ he said through a mouthful of bacon and eggs.
‘Tony. Good fl ight?’
Davidson sat back, wiped his mouth and lifted his cup of tea for a sip. ‘Can’t complain – slept most of the time.’
Davidson had semi-retired to the Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane, but coming back to ASIS had meant reconnecting with his old corporate cover in Perth, on the other side of the continent. His four-and-a-half-hour morning fl ight from Perth to Brissie left Perth at half past midnight and got in to Brisbane just before six am. And now Davidson was going to be on a fl ight to Canberra in forty minutes.
You needed a sense of humour when you travelled around Australia.
They made small talk for a couple of minutes, most of which Mac had gathered from their phone calls. Davidson was back in – he’d never really left – and was building an economic operations team. Mac clocked the charcoal suit, the plain blue tie and white shirt – nothing to catch the eye or set him apart. His late-fi fties face had jowls and the full head of salt ‘n’ pepper hair was cut like you’d expect from a former representative cricketer and career spy. Again, nothing to make anyone look twice. Mac’s dark chinos, pale blue polo shirt and boat shoes completed a pattern of anonymity. There was no reason to look at either of them: no tats, no piercings, no jewellery, no hairdo, no iPod, no message T-shirt, no need to differentiate.
If you became a banker, a lawyer or a political adviser – as most of Mac’s university peers had – you spent your early career as a young man attempting to build a projection of self-importance. You had to be noticed, even if people thought you were a wanker. But in the spy trade, you took smart blokes with good degrees and showed them how to fade into a crowd, to have people forget what they looked like, to be the man who wasn’t there. Which was why Mac sat still, his hands on his lap, as he spoke with Davidson. Anyone trying to observe them wouldn’t even have body language or mannerisms to decipher.
‘Happy with the terms?’ asked Davidson.
‘Sure, Tony – ten a week and expenses is fair,’ said Mac, who liked that his former boss was straight-up about money and expenses.
‘Not bad, really,’ mused Davidson.
‘And no wet work – I can live with that,’ said Mac, happy that he wouldn’t have to be pulling the Heckler out of mothballs. ‘So what’s up?’
‘EFIC has a situation.’
Mac nodded. EFIC was the Commonwealth’s Export Finance and Insurance Corporation, essentially a government instrumentality for ensuring that large exports of Australian goods and services to volatile countries would have payment guaranteed. Most developed nations had their version of EFIC. The US one was called Ex-Im Bank and had funded Saddam’s military program in the late 1980s, before George Bush launched Desert Storm in 1991 and destroyed all the hardware.
When Saddam had started his post-war rebuilding he relied once again on the loan guarantees of the American taxpayer to rebuild the weapons of mass destruction that the Americans would later claim was their reason for going back in and destroying it all again.
‘What’s the problem?’ asked Mac.
Davidson poured more tea. ‘Bennelong Systems – heard of them?’
‘Vaguely,’ said Mac. ‘They do power station control systems.
That them?’
‘And?’
Mac looked out on the tarmac where three Qantas 767s were being loaded and refuelled in the early morning light. ‘Let’s see, didn’t they emerge out of an earlier company that made C and C systems for the navy? They had something to do with over-the-horizon, right?’
‘That’s them,’ said Davidson, looking up at a businessman walking past and allowing the bloke fi ve steps before he continued. ‘Bennelong is on the verge of signing on to a very large project with a private power-generation consortium in Indonesia.’
‘How big?’
‘Consortium’s talking about total construction of five billion US.
Could be a drink of between three hundred and fi ve hundred million for Bennelong.’
‘How nice for them,’ said Mac.
‘Yes, but there’s some issues in there.’
Mac waited, sipped his coffee.
‘The EFIC guys turned this down as a loan guarantee,’ continued Davidson. ‘In fact, they sent it back three times. They don’t want to write it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Initially, they didn’t like the end-user certifi cation. And when the deal boomeranged the fi rst time, they made an inquiry with the Organisation,’ said Davidson, referring to ASIO. ‘And it got handed around the community, and what with one thing and another, the chaps saw it and asked EFIC not to write the guarantee.’
Mac raised an eyebrow. The ‘chaps’ referred to people like Mac and Davidson who worked at ASIS. If they’d asked EFIC not to do the guarantee, there was probably a good reason.
‘It was a lucky catch,’ said Davidson. ‘Someone in Jakkers saw Bennelong mentioned as part of a power-generation trade show, realised that the consortium was about to announce Bennelong as a full technology partner – on an equity basis – and they got on to the Tech Desk in Canberra.’
Australia’s SIS head offi ce had a Technology Desk that tracked harmful and helpful technology and the various incarnations of the companies it existed in as they were merged, acquired and moved offshore. The idea was to track the technologies, not the corporate packaging they moved around in.
‘And what was there?’ asked Mac, interest triggered. This was what he was trained for.
‘Well the guys threw it around and it turned out that Bennelong was called Thomas Technology back in the early 1990s. Before that, they’d been subject to a management buy-out of a specialist division of a small outfi t called Betnell Corporation. Heard of them?’
Mac had. Betnell was to the eighties and early nineties what Halliburton was to the 2000s: a massive contractor to the US
Department of Defense and a global builder of large-scale public infrastructure projects.
‘What did Betnell’s specialist division do?’ asked Mac, his antennae now fully alert.
‘They built the control software for hydro power stations and coal-fi red power stations -‘
‘Yes.’