Instead, he’d recommended getting close to Bennelong to see what they were hoping to achieve and what they knew about NIME. Use Bennelong as the Trojan Horse for NIME.
In order to make the arrival of Richard Davis a serendipitous event, Mac had suggested to Davidson that word be passed informally to Bennelong’s people that the NIA application was not going to be straightforward and would probably need some massaging. Davidson had smiled at that, since it was a ploy he’d already instigated.
As Davidson’s fl ight was called, and Mac stood to go, his old boss had made one fi nal point. ‘Oh, and Macca – this Vitogiannis is a ladies’ man, right?’
Mac shrugged. ‘Sure.’
‘So I thought we’d put a soft edge on it, okay?’
Mac had waited. A soft edge was an informal or social prop that an intelligence operative used to make a target more relaxed, to get their guard down and make the intel guy seem more human, more empathetic. Humanising yourself with a family or by using a humanitarian cover were the common ones.
‘Yeah,’ said Davidson, ‘so I want you to do this Fred-and-Wilma, right? It’s a conference, and blokes take their wives to conferences, fair enough?’
The AirTrain slowed as it approached Robina station. It had been a long time since Mac had worked in a husband-and-wife intel team, but he seemed to remember that when it worked, it worked very well.
He had no problem with it, but he knew someone who might.
Mac wiped the knives and forks before he put them in the cutlery drawer, humming to ‘Let it Be’ on the radio. Afternoon sun was streaming into the kitchen and the house had an eerie quiet to it now that Rachel was sleeping.
Jenny walked in and switched off the radio, put her weight onto her right hip and crossed her arms. Never a good sign.
‘So, Macca, what did he say?’
‘Gig up north, routine stuff,’ said Mac, trying to keep the tension out of his voice. Jen had never asked him for the full rundown on what he did for money and he’d repaid her by never mentioning it. There was no reason to tell anyone, let alone a cop, what Davidson had been talking about. Cops gossiped worse than any other profession Mac could think of.
Jenny pushed her hip up against the kitchen bench, fi xed him with a steady look. ‘Anything I should know?’
Mac kept wiping and stowing cutlery, sensing that this might not end well. ‘Nah, mate, no worries.’
‘How long?’
‘Two weeks, max.’
‘Anyone have an excuse to shoot at you?’
‘ Jen! ‘ he spluttered, dropping the handful of knives in the drawer, and reaching out to touch the wooden chopping board three times.
‘Just asking,’ said Jen.
He looked out the window, exhaling through his teeth, thinking about that job at the University of Sydney and whether the travelling had really been so bad. He could have stuck it out, eased himself into the civvie world and disappeared from his former life. He was thirty-eight, he loved Jen and Rachel, but he couldn’t retire from his profession any more than Davidson could. Now he was going back into the fi eld. He was strangely emotional about the whole thing, and he didn’t like feeling that way before a job – he liked to be cold, focused.
‘Look,’ said Mac. ‘Say the word and I’ll pull out.’
‘No, I’m sweet, if you are. And we could do with the money,’ she said, raising an eyebrow and cocking her head.
‘Ten thousand a week and expenses,’ said Mac.
‘Happy with that?’
‘It’s a start.’
Jenny smiled, moved to him, put her forearms around his neck.
‘Happy with the crew?’
Mac shrugged.
‘Know them?’ asked Jenny.
‘There’s one, and no, I don’t.’
‘Trust him?’
The old Macca could have batted that one away in his sleep. But he didn’t. ‘Actually, she’s a she,’ he said, looking into Jenny’s dark eyes.
Mac had spent all of his career trying to read voices, bodies, clothes and faces. He noticed how people answered the phone, how they said ‘thank you’ and how quickly the sides of their mouths dropped after they’d stopped smiling. It all helped. He’d even found that taking a few minutes to have a nosey-poke through a person’s bookshelf or iPod was a nice access point to who a person really was. If you found JJ Cale, they smoked pot; if you found Marilyn French, they had a disappointment problem; anything by Marcel Proust signifi ed someone who wanted to be seen as ten times smarter than they actually were.
But eyes and women went together like guns and ammo. Even the most poker-faced women found it hard to stop the primal responses being projected through their eyes. Things like suspicion and desire and anger.
Mac watched as Jenny’s eyes fl ashed to super-dark, like an iron curtain had dropped behind the pupils. He tried to rescue it. ‘Listen, Jen -‘
‘Oh, I’m listening, Macca. Don’t worry yourself about that,’ she said, giving him a basic cop stare of the type Mac remembered from his father.
‘Look – it’s nothing,’ said Mac. ‘Just the way they want to run it.’
Jen’s forearms tensed at the sides of Mac’s neck and she nodded facetiously, breath streaming out of her nostrils. ‘Of course it’s not as if it’s the old husband-and-wife cover, right?’
‘Jen -‘
‘So it’s not as if you thought you could slip out and spend two weeks in a hotel room with another bird, and not tell me, right? That wasn’t how it was?’
‘ Jen -‘
‘She married?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Mac.
‘How old?’
‘ Jen! ‘
‘She better looking than me?’
‘Look, I don’t even know who she is -‘
‘Is. She. Better. Looking. Than. Me?’
‘No,’ smiled Mac. ‘She’ll be a dog.’
‘Really?’
‘Totally. She won’t be in the hotel – got a kennel lined up.’
Jenny smiled, softened a bit. Mac put his hands down to her hips.
‘This is what I like, right here,’ he said, grabbing her arse.
Jenny moved in to him and, looking into his eyes, said, ‘You’re a worry, know that, Macca?’
She put her hands behind his head and kissed him. Jenny may have been hard in many respects but she was a nice soft kisser.
‘You’re a beautiful girl,’ murmured Mac as Jenny pressed in closer, kissed him again. It had been a while, what with Rachel and the broken sleep, and Mac felt himself reacting to Jenny’s body. She felt him reacting too, and reached down, squeezed him gently.
Mac moved his hips. Jenny looked into his eyes and said, ‘It’s not as if I don’t trust you.’
‘No,’ mumbled Mac, his mind elsewhere.
‘So just keep thinking with the big head, huh Macca?’
‘Sure,’ said Mac, chuckling.
And then Jen squeezed him way too hard. Mac gasped, doubled over in pain and watched his wife walk away, ponytail swishing.
CHAPTER 27
Mac pulled up his pants slightly too fast and gasped as they hit the head he wasn’t supposed to think with. He tried again, more gingerly, and padded awkwardly back to his reclined seat, which in the Emirates A340 business class were the generous twenty-four-inch models. The eight pm fl ight would get into Singers around fi ve am and then he’d connect with a fl ight into Jakarta that would land shortly after eight am local time.
The lights were down and it was a chance to rest. Tucking back under the blanket, he dozed, thought about Jen and whether she’d been justifi ed in pinching him like that. She had a diffi cult personality at times and could get a bit cranky when she was hungover. Mac suspected she had cabin fever – wanted to get back into cop work, do what she loved.
Like many tough women there was a vulnerable side to her too.
When Mac had fi rst started seeing Jen, he’d been surprised at the fact that she often cried in bed at night, which was completely at odds with her daytime persona as the ice queen of the AFP. Initially he’d wanted to do a runner; criers, generally speaking, gave a bloke the excuse to make like the coyote and do what you had to do. But with Jenny it didn’t scare him and he hung around. They liked each other, but they also liked each other. In those early days, she didn’t want the tears discussed: I don’t cry, understand?