The friendship had shifted and Mac had felt the twinge of disloyalty on a couple of occasions. They could still drink a few beers and watch rugby league, but professionally they were at the point where Garvs would read about Ray Hu’s murder and not say a word about it to Mac. Even when they were sitting together in a cab.
The box of Tic Tacs took the edge off his breath, but Mac was pretty sure the doctor was reading road maps when he shone the flashlight in his eyes. In a medical consulting room at HMAS Harman — the naval comms and intel base on the outskirts of Canberra — they worked through the list, from flexibility and chest sounds to the eye chart and a probing gloved finger.
‘Any medical treatments since your last assessment?’ said the doctor when he’d cleaned up and seated himself.
Mac’s last full medical check-up had taken place ten years earlier at Larrakeyah Base in Darwin, shortly after his operation in East Timor.
‘Yeah, just the usual. Bullet grazes, concussions, broken nose, cracked cheekbone, broken bone in my wrist — all declared,’ said Mac.
Flipping through Mac’s medical file, the doctor nodded amiably at the sheaf of emergency-room discharge sheets, medical-clinic slips and ship-doctor reports that Mac had collected during the past decade. There was even a medical report on US Department of Defense letterhead, which Mac assumed was from an afternoon in Denpasar many years ago.
‘You’ve been in the field for most of your career, Alan — any other visits to a doctor? Any minor treatments you may have overlooked?’
‘I went to the dentist in ’04,’ said Mac. ‘Had all my amalgams removed.’
‘Why?’
‘I wanted white ones,’ said Mac.
Mac had heard about an Israeli technology where they took a snapshot of a person’s dental work which was locked into their databases. Having a dental map allowed intelligence services to track people from satellites, the unique spacing of metal in the mouth apparently creating a traceable electronic signature. Mac had decided a mouthful of non-metallic fillings might be better for him.
‘Let’s have a look,’ said the doctor, pushing Mac’s lower jaw down with his pen and peering in. ‘Where was this done?’
‘Singapore,’ said Mac. ‘At the time I didn’t think about it as medical, but if we’re including —’
‘That’s okay,’ said the doctor. ‘Nothing else? Treatment for substance abuse?’
‘No, doc.’
‘No men’s clinic visits?’
‘Shit,’ said Mac, laughing. ‘The finger in the bum was intimate enough, don’t you think?’
‘You’re forty, Alan — if you’re having problems with your ejaculations…’
Mac held up his hand. ‘No problems with the plumbing, okay?’
‘Good,’ said the doctor, scribbling a note. ‘And nothing else? No psychological services? No psychiatry or other forms of mental-health therapy? Prescriptions, perhaps? Sedatives, anti-anxieties, anti-psychotics?’
The memories flooded back: it was Sumatra 2002, he’d pursued a bunch of Pakistanis suspected of the Kuta bombings, and as the bombers had made their escape they’d kidnapped a young boy and shot his sister, left her for dead in the jungle. That incident had made him feel incompetent, useless and culpable. He had hidden those kids in the jungle when he knew the bombers were about, and they’d done what he’d asked. They were good kids and they were punished for it.
Mac’s voice dropped. ‘I saw a shrink for eight weeks in 2002.’
‘Where?’ said the doctor.
‘Manila — Dr Lydia Weiss, a Canadian. I didn’t declare it.’
‘Why did you see her?’
Mac looked at the eye chart and the plastic skeleton for inspiration but found his gaze returning to the doctor’s face. ‘Some children were hurt during an operation — I felt I hadn’t done enough to protect them.’
‘You blamed yourself?’
‘At a point where I could have covered their interests,’ said Mac, thinking it through, ‘I looked after my own interests. I couldn’t really… well, I couldn’t talk to anyone. You know, I started self-medicating and —’
‘Alcohol?’ said the doctor.
‘Yep.’
‘And once that became a problem, you saw Dr Weiss?’
‘Yep,’ said Mac. ‘I used a false identity.’
‘And you improved?’
‘Yeah. It was good, actually.’
‘Good for you — that all sounds healthy,’ the doctor said, making a quick squiggle and shutting Mac’s file.
Mac sensed a trick. ‘That’s it?’
‘Sure,’ said the doctor, emotionless. It was a joke in the armed forces that to be a naval ship’s doctor, you were first checked to ensure you had no pulse. When everything went to crap on a ship, the doctor had to be as calm as a lizard sunning itself.
‘Okay,’ said Mac.
The doc gave him a sudden smile. ‘You felt terrible about those children, which is a healthy reaction. And when you realised you were drowning those feelings in booze, you found a professional. I have no problem with that, Alan.’
‘But I didn’t declare it,’ said Mac.
‘You have now,’ said the doctor with a wink as he stood. ‘We clear?’
‘Crystal,’ said Mac.
Chapter 6
Mac was halfway to Canberra in a navy car when the Nokia buzzed — a text from Rod Scott, Mac’s original mentor in ASIS.
It said, Nosebag fgc 1pm?
Getting the driver to drop him in the suburb of Garran, Mac ambled three blocks to the entry gates of Federal Golf Club, sweating in the late spring heat and deafened by the roar of cicadas. Checking for surveillance as he walked to the clubhouse he scrolled through messages on his phone: several voicemails and two missed calls — numbers he didn’t recognise. Dialling into voicemail, he heard Jenny reminding him to pick up a smoked ham from the German butcher, and then a second message from Jen, upset after reading the news about Ray Hu. Jenny didn’t know Ray Hu and his wife Liesl as well as Mac did, but the four of them had enjoyed some big nights on the grog and Jenny adored Ray’s sense of humour.
He tried to filter out the emotion as he walked through the sunshine. The assessment had turned out okay, if you took the hangover out of the equation. The full medical had been followed by a short psych interview and a session that used to be called ‘the polygraph’ but now included a voice-stress analyser — a lie detector that identified variations when interviewees were asked about drugs, child porn and undeclared holidays with their Chinese lover. There’d been a twenty-minute debrief, where an office guy from the Firm grabbed the file of an old operation in the Philippines and quickly quizzed Mac on the basics, looking for any discrepancies between the official record and Mac’s recollections — the same debrief Mac had done with many operatives from the Firm.
Strolling past the practice tees, Mac watched a man in pressed golf shorts stare impassively as a woman swung, topped a ball, and then threatened to hit the ground with her club. The bloke reset a new ball without meeting her eyes, and Mac marvelled at how quickly a married man got himself trained.
Moving up the steps and into the dining room, he found Scotty sitting at the bar, reading the Australian and nursing a glass of beer.
‘Man’s not a camel,’ said Mac as Scotty stood. ‘There a beer round here for a bloke?’
‘Shit, mate,’ said Scotty, his round face ripped with a smile as he shook hands. ‘Forty years old and still in shape — what’s your secret?’
‘Lots and lots of bullshitting,’ said Mac, as Scotty motioned with two fingers to the barman.
‘Yeah, well, how come I ended up looking like Buddha?’ said Scotty, leading Mac out into the dining room.