Mac bent down, pulled his blue Service Nokia from his wheelie and put it in the side pocket of a carry-all. The name tag on the bag said Richard Taylor, accompanied by a Melbourne address. The ASIS listening post would track the junketeers for hours, maybe days, before it sounded all wrong.
Mac walked another three blocks, found his rental car place and hired a white Toyota Vienta. He paid in cash for ten days and coughed up for an insurance policy which was worth more as emergency bog paper in Sulawesi than as something that would save him from being sued.
Driving to the outskirts of Makassar, he pulled over into an elevated tourist lookout and tried to collect himself. Rummaging in his safari suit pocket Mac gasped a little at his right wrist as it caught on the fabric. The wrist was now swelling from the kick he’d taken from the goon. He fi shed out the pink dry-cleaner label. It had a serial number under the name SUNDA LAUNDRY – PALOPO. Palopo was a mid-sized coastal town a day’s drive north. If those fl ash slacks had been recently pressed, then Mac was prepared to bet that Garrison – probably Judith Hannah and Minky’s daughter too – were somewhere in the vicinity.
It was all he had to go on. With Minky dead, it would have to do.
Mac grabbed a set of spare socks from the wheelie bag, tied them together in a knot and pulled the lever to open the gas tank fl ap. He found a stick on the ground, about three feet long, and moved to the back of the Vienta. Pushing the socks into the gas tank with the stick, he held the other end and waited for a few seconds before pulling the petrol-soaked socks out. Unclipping the entire hip rig and Heckler from his belt he knelt and wiped down the gun until the whole thing was shiny with gasoline. He dumped it in a rest area bin and went back to the Toyota, grabbed the Winchester loads and the spare mag, wiped them down with the socks and then dumped them too, along with the socks.
Then he got on the road for Ralla, where he was meeting Sawtell the following morning.
He was exhausted. Adrenaline does that to you.
As he drove he thought back to what he had done with that Service phone. It was only the second time in his career that he’d deliberately slipped Canberra’s internal bugging and tracking.
And that time he had also suspected the Service had a mole.
CHAPTER 7
Mac’s need to win was not a recent development. At Nudgee College in Brisbane, they drafted him into the fi rst XV as a fi fteen-year-old.
They put him at half-back and the theory was that if he couldn’t handle the knocks they’d pull him out.
Near the end of that year, Nudgee played Churchie in the annual grudge match: Micks vs Prods. Mac’s mum and dad and sister Virginia came down for the occasion. Mac could tell they were intimidated by the school’s Renaissance architecture and pillared buildings as they took their seats in the bleachers.
The half-back from Churchie was their captain, a senior and full of lip. The guy wasn’t tall but he was built like a brick one. He got in Mac’s face, sledged him something terrible from the start and didn’t exclude Virginia from his abuse. Mac did it the Nudgee way, with a stiff upper lip.
At half-time, Mac was in the middle of the fi eld listening to the coach when he became aware of a red-faced, pale-eyed maniac on the sidelines calling his name. In front of the high-society set of Brisbane, Frank yelled in his broadest North Queensland accent: ‘Do something about this wanker – he’s a fl amin’ ponce.’
His father was right. If the match had been played in Rockie, Mac’s opposing half-back would have copped a slapping quick-smart.
No more sledging.
Mac gave Frank the nod. His father walked back up to the bleachers where Mac’s mother whacked him on the forearm, rolled her eyes.
Virginia stared at Mac, winked.
At the second half’s fi rst scrum, Mac had the feed. The sledger got too close, trying to edge Mac off his mark. So Mac shifted his weight, lifted his right foot, drove his heel down on the bloke’s foot, putting all his weight on that heel. Wind rushed from the sledger’s lungs, the alloy studs creating agony.
The sledger screamed, stood back, eyes rolling in his head. Mac winked at him, blew a kiss. The sledger threw a haymaker, wide-eyed with rage. Mac rolled slightly and copped it above the left ear. Felt like a bowl of ice-cream. The sledger threw another that completely missed. The ref stepped in, sent the bloke off. He had to be escorted by his team-mates.
Nudgee won and Mac wore the taunts about having the Mad Dad for the rest of his schooling. Mac learned this about himself: he could play the Nudgee game, but he preferred Rockie rules. Which didn’t mean he was right to kill Minky. In golf you didn’t get to choose how your ball lay, and in the intelligence game you often had to work with what you had. Mac’s job now, simply, was to get Judith Hannah and, hopefully, Minky’s girl too.
There were no guarantees on that second one. Mac was now cut off from Canberra and pretty sure there was a mole in the organisation, either in Jakarta or Australia. Something had gone wrong in Makassar but it had gone wrong in a way that felt basically out of step. In his profession there was a structure to every type of assignment, and small but badly placed elements could make it all feel wrong. It was like hearing a pop tune on the radio thirty times and on the thirty-fi rst time you hear it, you hear the live version and someone changes a few tiny notes. Your brain still hears the song, and you can adapt, but you know instinctively that a pattern has been broken. That’s where Mac was focusing: you didn’t get a last-minute tasking to go to Jakarta from the Asia-Pacifi c director, and then a late-night briefi ng from a combined ASIS-CIA team to go into Sulawesi, and then on the fi rst and only contact you are given, the bad guys are waiting for you. It didn’t happen like that.
Someone had set it up.
It came down to a case of who: Tobin? Garvey? Urquhart? That Agency wanker with the He-Man handshake?
Mac drove all night. He wanted to beat the heat, avoid taking a rest, stay ahead of anyone chasing him.
The Vienta wheezed up the hills, dying every time Mac needed extra grunt to overtake the hundreds of overloaded freight trucks that populated Indonesian roads by night. The driver’s seat had no cushioning left and most of the asphalt on the blacktop had washed away. Every turn of the tyres was a new jolt that threatened to break the suspension and Mac was constantly throwing the Vienta onto the shoulder of the road as oncoming trucks used the ‘third lane’ to overtake straight down the middle. A nightmare, but negotiating it kept him awake.
He chewed gum, drank bottled water, plotted scenarios, babbled to himself, sang Beatles songs. The air-conditioning was rooted so he stank up the car with BO as he sweltered in the safari suit pants and shirt. Mostly, he lived in the rear-vision mirror. There was a silver Accord out there somewhere and he knew they wouldn’t stop looking.
By midnight his right wrist was puffi ng like a stonefi sh and ached something chronic. He was getting to the point where he wouldn’t be able to hold a weapon, let alone be effi cient with it, and although Mac didn’t much like guns, he disliked even more being injured in his gun hand. Especially when he was in the backblocks of Sulawesi with a hit squad on his tail.
That assumed he could get another weapon. He felt vulnerable without the Heckler, but it was lying in a rest stop garbage bin for the most practical of reasons. White men sweeping into town and killing the locals meant the police were going to be coming at you. All that rubbish about South-East Asian cops not caring was bullshit. Mac knew Indonesian detectives who would do anything to bag a pale-eye, particularly on something legit. The last thing he needed was to be picked up for questioning and have a warm gun sitting in the back seat. It would mean the local lock-up for two weeks while some fruit salad-endowed chief tried to work out how rich an Australian textbook executive might be. The dream that there was some all-knowing super-spook from Canberra who could appear in a Sulawesi police cell, fl ash a badge and get someone like Mac cut loose never came true. People like Mac were what they called an ‘undeclared’ – they had no diplomatic status and if they were caught doing something illegal, their fate was that of the criminal.