Deciding to check on Diane, he called down to the desk and booked Edwin. The car would be available at midday, which gave him thirty-nine minutes to check the contents of the yellow envelope sitting on the desk in front of him.
As he picked up the envelope, he promised himself not to do anything stupid. There were ASIS, AFP and ADF guys in Jakarta, trained and tasked to take on people like Hassan Ali and his gang of psychos.
Upending the envelope, he carefully shook its contents onto the wooden desk. He sorted through his copies of the papers that Mac, Johnny and Huck had found in the burnt building on an old airfi eld in Sumatra. Freddi had taken the originals and given Mac a bunch of photocopies. The seven sheets of paper were in Urdu and Farsi and Bahasa and they meant nothing to Mac. They were grids and tables and paragraphs broken into numbered sequences.
He leafed through to a piece of white A4 paper with some words and numbers that Toni Lucas had scribbled on it in black ink. Toni Lucas had been in the AFP’s forward command post in Kuta and he remembered how she almost threw the paper at him and told him to leave her the fuck alone. A CSIRO scientist, she’d been seconded to the AFP for the Kuta investigation – Operation Alliance – and she’d grown tired of Mac’s questions and constant prodding for more information.
She was running double-check analysis of all the swabs being run through the mobile bomb lab by the investigations teams. Toni had been overworked and distressed at the scenario – the smell of Kuta was becoming strong, and even with face masks and burning incense it was disturbing.
Mac had got back from northern Sumatra with more questions than answers about the Kuta bomb blasts and he’d clumsily used his position with Foreign Affairs to go poking into areas he really shouldn’t have. He’d lasted three days in Kuta before someone had realised that he was pursuing a parallel investigation, at which point calls were made and Joe Imbruglia was giving him the hook. He’d never confi rmed it but he always suspected that it was his old mate Garvs who decided to get Mac out of there. Garvs had become part of the program very quickly in ASIS. He didn’t have the same fi eld talents as Mac but he was excellent at sensing what higher-ups expected of him. As far as spy organisations went, Mac and Garvs were both known as ‘reliables’. It was just that they were reliable in two totally different ways.
Written on the piece of paper in an educated cursive script was: 15/10 water, Sari Crater3.53+-17
15/10 water, Denpasar roof tank‹0.13
There was nothing else on the page. But he remembered the question he had pestered Toni about, a question he only got away with because she was so busy and he kept making her laugh. The question had been, What are the tritium levels for the Legian blasts?
He’d remembered Viktor telling him how tritium was one of the few things left behind in a plutonium mini-nuke explosion; the plutonium used in a mini-nuclear device wouldn’t leave radiation of the type detected with a Geiger counter but it would leave triated water, tritium returning to its preferred water-borne state.
Mac thought back to that day and remembered how Toni would not release any of her printouts. The MOU with the Indonesians had specifi cally precluded any ‘wider linkages’ than those sanctioned, and the scientists stuck to tests for anfo, C4 and potassium chlorate, the bomb materials of choice for Asian bombers.
Toni’s analysis had revealed signifi cantly raised levels of triated water in the Sari Club crater, compared with the ‘control’ water of a house water tank in Denpasar.
He set Toni’s paper aside and looked at the last one, a partially burnt piece of A4 that he had never shown Freddi. He could still smell that airfi eld with its whiffs of ash and fi re, and he stared at it as he slugged on the Vittel. The handwritten note said N W, which could have meant anything. It might have had nothing to do with the Hassan crew or the Kuta bombings. He’d asked around about it
– asked Indons, Americans, Aussies, Malaysians – anyone who might have even a faint idea. The only thing that came back was that if you had Pakistanis involved, and N W, then it probably referred to the North-West Frontier. Which hadn’t helped Mac at all.
Mac and Edwin were fi ve minutes away from MMC Hospital when Jenny phoned back. It was good to hear her voice but when she put her Nokia down for Rachel to say her bit, his daughter went silent. All he could hear was Jen whispering, ‘ Say hi to Daddy, say hi.’
‘So Mr Macca,’ said Jenny, sounding cheerful as she got back on the line, ‘that wasn’t you in Jakkers, right?’
‘Wasn’t me what?’ asked Mac, confused.
‘You didn’t get my voicemails?’
‘No, actually, I -‘
‘There was a shooting up there yesterday, remember?’ said Jen.
Mac groaned inwardly. ‘Umm, yeah – but it’s, you know -‘ He wasn’t going to discuss it, hadn’t even had a chance to digest it properly himself.
‘Can’t talk?’
‘Umm, yeah, Jen -‘ he said, glancing at a box of chocolates and bunch of fl owers sitting in the back seat.
Jen was inquisitive and not always in a good way. ‘I’m hearing there’re two Australians dead and a British national in hospital,’ she said in a tone that made Mac cringe.
‘Yeah, mate,’ he said, going for casual. ‘I’m on my way out to MMC right now.’
‘The Brit is a female, right?’
Mac felt like one of her suspects and he was about to tell her who it was but she stole the moment. ‘It’s Diane, right? Diane Ellison?’
Mac breathed out. ‘Yeah – she took two bullets.’
‘Okay,’ said Jenny, in that way that women say okay when it’s not okay. ‘So don’t tell me, she was the wife, right?’
‘Jen, I can’t discuss -‘
‘ Fuck, Macca!’
‘Okay. Yes, she was my partner -‘
‘Oh that’s great, Macca. Partner, yeah, right!’
‘Jen, look I need -‘
‘Macca, I have a partner, okay?’ she snapped. ‘But that doesn’t involve me in the same bed, or running around pretending to be his wife.’
‘I wasn’t in the bed with -‘
‘Oh whatever!’
He tried to think of something to say but there wasn’t much point. Jenny had hung up.
CHAPTER 39
Carl wasn’t guarding Diane’s room and there was no sign of Danny Fitzgibbon, so Mac pushed at the door to Diane’s room with one arm, keeping the chocolates and the fl owers hidden behind his body.
Peeking around the door he saw an elderly Indon woman sleeping on her back. Pulling back out into the hallway Mac looked around, wondering what the hell was going on. It was a new shift and nurses and orderlies rushed past him like he wasn’t there. Down at the nursing sister’s station, the supervisor didn’t know who he was and didn’t want to give out any information about a patient to a non-family member. Tired and confused, Mac turned from the station to fi nd a younger nurse approaching him. ‘Hello mister. You Mr Richard?’ she asked.
He nodded.
‘Miss Diane give me this,’ she smiled, pulling something from the pocket of her tunic. It was a piece of folded paper of newsprint quality. Bloody Diane had torn a page out of her Gideon’s.
Written in dark blue biro was the message, Dad wants me in the compound. Sorry. Beneath were an address and phone number with the Sydney 02 prefi x and the words Sarah + Felicity.
He thanked the girl, and asked her when Diane had left.
‘Hour go, mister,’ she said.
On the way out Mac saw a young woman with a shaven head, gaunt face and sunken eyes. She was being pushed the other way in a wheelchair.
‘G’day,’ he said, smiling.
‘Well, hello,’ she gushed with a big American smile that lit up the corridor. Mac had her as northern California.
Mac presented her with the fl owers and chocolates. ‘Don’t eat them all at once. Might get fat,’ he said with a wink.