Authors: Mark Abernethy
Chapter 34
Finding a small internet cafe in the locals-only part of Phnom Penh, Mac bought a pot of coffee and took the computer in the far corner. Using the protocols Charlie had given him, he went through a series of pop-up windows until a tag-line in the bottom right-hand corner informed him he was operating from the remote computer network Charlie had stipulated; by the jumble of letters, it looked like a tractor parts distributor based in Wisconsin.
Activating the graphics-free Mozilla browser, Mac found the ASIS website, logged in with his passwords and held his breath, almost expecting Urquhart, Lance and Marlon to burst in the door as soon as he was in the ASIS system.
He searched in the ASIS databases for mentions of Israeli, IDF or Mossad activity in Indochina. There were fifteen files, and Mac opened them one by one. The oldest, from the 1970s, were scanned files in PDF format. He grinned as he scrolled through the old typewritten and telex-printed reports and memos, some sent over the wire from consular communications offices in Hanoi and Bangers, others typed and pouched out of Saigon, Nha Trang and Phnom Penh. One looked like it had started life in Vientiane – an Aussie SIS asset, a coffee importer from Melbourne, had run across a couple of interlopers in the Laotian capital who were talking about big coffee contracts and trying to talk down the Aussie and North American coffee buyers. The report noted that they looked Lebanese but used names like ‘John Baker’. One claimed to be from San Francisco, but he hesitated when talking about the view from Russia Hill: a view he should have known. The local asset decided they were Israeli when he saw their appalling driving.
Chuckling, Mac cycled through the files. They were in a report format – there was no desk analysis on Israeli intelligence in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Peninsular Malaysia or Thailand, and there were no assessments generated in Canberra based on field intelligence of Israeli activity.
The reports rattled off the basics: Mossad and IDF special forces had trained units in the Philippines, Taiwan and Singapore; Israel, according to one report, had paid informers in northern Burma, but that didn’t mean much – a paid informer in South-East Asia was someone who’d been shown a stack of greenbacks, and didn’t see the harm. Mac didn’t take it too seriously because many European intelligence agents in South-East Asia allowed the locals to think they were Mossad, as a way of covering where they really came from. It evened out since Mossad agents liked to intimate that they were from the CIA or British SIS when dealing with informers. There were entire cadres of Mossad agents trained to pass for Syrians, Iraqis and Jordanians.
What he was looking for was mention of a bunch of hairy-chested Mossad operators, not hiding behind a film production company or a photography bureau. The kind of pros who would push Quirk for access to a computer network and then drop him when it suited them; a bunch of tough guys who would put a light-bulb bomb in Mac’s hotel room. People like that – no matter how far they’d drifted off as privateers – always gained attention during their official careers.
Pouring his coffee as the traffic outside went about its theatrics, Mac looked at the last file in the ASIS search result. It was stamped April, a year ago. He clicked it open.
It started with a basic intelligence bio card, which was a file containing a passport picture and all the information that defines a person. It was titled
RADOFF, Bernard Levi
and proceeded to list details of Mr (Bernie) Radoff’s social persona: a French businessman, former banker, now an import-exporter with textile and printing interests in Thailand, Burma and Cambodia.
The second part of the file told the real story: Bernie Radoff was born Marcel Beyer, French-Israeli, former IDF air force, graduated with a law degree from the University of Haifa in 1991, post-grad economics at the Sorbonne in 1992, trained at Mossad in the early 1990s (while still in Paris), joined Banque Nationale in 1993 as a management trainee in its institutional division and spent the rest of his career drawing two cheques: one from the French bank as a bond writer, and the other from King Saul, the Tel Aviv street where Israel’s famous security service was located.
The file noted that Beyer had risen to a senior position with BNP and run the bank’s bond desk out of Hong Kong and then Singapore. Australian intelligence estimated that Beyer ceased being an active Mossad agent in 2005.
Mac was about to log out when he realised there were two attachments to the Marcel Beyer file. The first was a story from Associated Press, tagged
Bangkok, Thailand
, from eight months ago.
Reading quickly, Mac grew impatient with the lack of clear information.
The Thai Ministry of Finance has confirmed that French national Mr Bernard Radoff has been handed a suspended sentence in exchange for a guilty plea in a four-month legal action that has been shrouded in secrecy.
The Ministry continued its suppression of proceedings in the Supreme Court today, claiming the charges against Mr Radoff – a French financier with many business interests in South-East Asia – were ‘classified’ under national security laws and would not be disclosed.
‘Mr Radoff has pleaded guilty to the charges brought by the government and the court has passed sentence,’ said a brief written statement from the Ministry. ‘The Ministry of Finance has no further comment.’
Mr Radoff was arrested five months ago following a series of spectacular raids in Surin province. His suspended sentence means he is free to go – foreign nationals given suspended sentences in Thailand are usually allowed 48 hours in which to leave the country.
Mr Radoff’s lawyer, Mr Mati Sutramat, scoffed at questions about his client’s possible ties to the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok.
‘I can be arrested for talking about the facts of this case,’ he said. ‘The matter is closed.’
The other attachment was a black and white photograph. It showed Radoff in what looked like the forecourt of the Sheraton Saigon on Dong Du Street, just around the corner from the Grand. He was sleek, tanned and arrogant, and grinning at the camera, which was being wielded by a photographer from the
Saigon Times
. The caption read:
French financier Bernard Radoff has been touring some of Vietnam’s pulp and paper operations in the Mekong region as he looks for suitable investments to augment his holdings in Thailand and Cambodia.
Mac was about to close the photograph when something caught his eye. Radoff was standing in front of a white 4x4. Mac looked closer – it looked like a Ford Explorer SUV, although he couldn’t be certain. The photographer had cropped the picture so only the front portion of the Explorer stuck into the picture – it stopped at the windscreen pillar. The window of the vehicle had a faint glare bouncing off it but Mac could see that a driver sat behind the wheel, a baseball cap pulled over his eyes.
His pulse quickening, Mac used the Photoshop software in the ASIS system to draw a box around the driver’s face and magnify it.
Saving the magnified image to a notepad, Mac selected the ‘repixelate’ option in the menu and waited for the processors in Canberra to take the blown-up, blurry pixels of that driver and make their estimations about how it should look as a reconstituted image.
The result stunned Mac as it finally clarified like a fog lifting. Despite the glare of the glass and the shadow-forming peak of the cap, he knew he was looking at the Israeli with the scary eyes – the man in the red shirt who’d killed Quirk.
Cutting and pasting the repixelated image into the ‘search’ field of the ASIS databases, Mac clicked on the ‘match to identity’ option and hit search.
The search tumbled for more than six minutes as the digital information was thrown at every facial image in the Australian intel database – a database which had been compiled over eighty years.
Finally, a bio card popped up. The man’s name was Joel Dozsa, born 20 March 1970 in – as Mac had surmised – Hungary.
Dozsa had emigrated to Israel as a teenager, and it was suspected he’d been recruited by Mossad in his first months of university at Haifa, Bernie Radoff’s alma mater.
Joel Dozsa had done his doctoral work in military history at the Australian National University in Canberra, and had augmented his research with a junior lectureship at the Royal Military College Duntroon, teaching Australian Army officer cadets.
Having finished his thesis, Dozsa was offered a lecturer’s position at Duntroon but the offer was suddenly withdrawn after an unfavourable report from the Defence Security Authority, the military’s internal intelligence and vetting agency. The reason for the retraction was not in the report, but Mac assumed the Mossad connection had filtered back to DSA.
The last paragraph of the Joel Dozsa bio was both vague and clear:
Mr Dozsa did not dispute the retraction of the job offer and departed Canberra airport for Melbourne two hours after being informed of the retraction. DSA officers XXX and YYY followed Mr Dozsa to Melbourne, where he disappeared in what appeared to be ‘aided’ counter-surveillance. Defence Security officers PPP and QQQ attended Mr Dozsa’s apartment in the Duntroon residential halls and found a stripped apartment. Fellow residents said two men in grey coveralls had loaded a small van with the contents of Mr Dozsa’s apartment. Surveillance tape of RMC Duntroon showed a Toyota HiAce van with false registration plates. Subsequent interagency discussions revealed Australian Federal Police had opened a file on Mr Dozsa following an ANU exchange week in Bangkok, June 1993. Mr Dozsa was observed by an off-duty AFP officer at the Siam City Hotel in Phayathai, Bangkok – a known RV of French national Bernie RADOFF. Radoff is an institutional banker with BNP and a private investor across the Mekong Delta region; he is also understood to be a senior Mossad ‘agent-runner’ responsible for many deniable operations on behalf of the Israeli government. DSA made a pro forma request to the Israeli Embassy for explanations as to Mr Dozsa’s sudden and ‘aided’ disappearance at Melbourne airport. No explanation was forthcoming.
Mac finally breathed out. He now had a name and bio. Joel Dozsa was smart and organised, and he’d almost embedded himself in Australia’s military establishment. RMC Duntroon trained the elite of Australia’s and the Pacific’s military leaders, and a powerful position such as lecturer would have given Mossad some interesting leverage in the Asia-Pacific region.
Logging out of the ASIS portal, Mac stared at the bare-bones Mozilla screen, still operating off a parts department hard drive in Wisconsin. Bringing up Google, he typed in the words:
light bulb bomb Thailand 1993
.
The first item was an old Associated Press report from July 1993 – Thai criminal investigators were resiling from their initial statement that the Indonesian businessman Ibrahim Sarno had been killed at his golf-resort bungalow at Phuket because of a freak gas explosion. The police investigation had been joined by a team from Thailand’s military intelligence agency and the possibility had been raised that Sarno had been blasted to pieces while turning on the bathroom light . . .
Mac looked around, his skin crawling. He’d seen first-hand how the light-bulb bomb worked, and he felt nauseous having to read those words.
Police, according to the AP report, were now accepting the possibility that Sarno had been assassinated by some form of IED triggered by the light switch. The journalist had obviously got wind of foul play once the military spooks had entered the investigation, because the writer concluded with the sentence:
Police refused to confirm that Ibrahim Sarno was a conduit for South-East Asian funding of the PLO, or that his suspicious death was an assassination by Israeli intelligence agents.
Mac had his man. The light-bulb-in-the-bathroom MO confirmed it. But what now played on his mind was Dozsa’s possible success during his time in Canberra.
Mac wanted to believe that the people Dozsa had approached would have told him to rack off, but experience told him otherwise . . .
Chapter 35
The clouds had lowered and darkened by the time Mac paused at the threshold of the internet cafe and pushed out into the street, making for a cyclo rider waiting at the kerb. He wanted to get back to the Holiday International, make a proper search of the Americans’ bags, take what he needed and move to another location. Having tapped into the ASIS website and called Benny Haskell, now would be a good time to confuse the trail.
Giving his instructions to the rider, he pulled up the sunshade and checked his phone as they moved with the traffic. Looking up, he noticed they’d turned hard right, and there was now shadow where there should have been oppressive heat.
‘Hey!’ said Mac, turning, but it was too late.
The steel pressed into the back of his head and as he froze and lifted his hands, the Colt was lifted from his waistband.
‘Shit, McQueen,’ came an Aussie voice. ‘That was easy.’
Turning his head, he saw Lance, who pushed a Glock in his face.
‘Lance,’ said Mac, as if he’d met an old friend. ‘Thought about Tic Tacs?’
‘Watch it, McQueen,’ said Lance, climbing into the cyclo beside Mac and nodding to the rider. ‘And shit – who did the hair and the mo?’
‘A lifestyle choice.’
‘An atrocity, more like it,’ Lance sneered. ‘I liked you more as a blond. You look better as a homo than a dickhead.’
They travelled through the streets, heading east towards the river.
‘I’m back on the team, Lance,’ said Mac, trying to stay calm despite the 9mm handgun jammed in his left kidney. ‘I heard from the Firm today. You don’t want to do anything stupid.’
‘The team?’ said Lance. ‘What do you know about the team?’
‘I was doing my job,’ said Mac, trying to spin out the conversation.
‘Your job was to tail Quirk and write a report,’ said Lance, a waft of body odour suggesting he hadn’t slept much or changed his clothes in the past twenty-four hours. ‘Next thing we know, you’re on some wild-goose chase across Indochina with an item of crucial national security – and then you
lose
it?!’
‘I found it by mistake,’ said Mac. ‘When I asked you about it in the van you could have told me then.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Lance, revealing mossy teeth. ‘You think I was going to brief you in front of a foreign national? And I thought I was supposed to be the novice.’
‘You could have waited until the Cambodiana,’ said Mac.
‘You sent me off to be spied on by Tranh, remember? By the time I got back to the hotel, the place had been bombed. You’re a moron, McQueen.’
‘Where are we going?’ Mac asked.
‘To see Urquhart – he’s got new orders.’
‘I know,’ said Mac, as the cyclo stopped at an intersection.
‘You know much less than you think,’ Lance replied. ‘That’s why you’re chasing the chick and I still have to retrieve that memory card.’
‘Send a boy to do a man’s job.’
‘Shut it, McQueen,’ said Lance.
‘No, you shut it,’ came a harsh American voice along with a slapping sound, and Lance was suddenly sagging into his own lap.
Grabbing Lance’s gun, Sammy Chan pushed the groggy Australian back into the cyclo seat and beckoned for Mac to follow him. Jumping from the cyclo, Mac took back the Colt from Lance and followed Sammy to another Mazda sedan, this one red.
‘Think I broke his jaw,’ said Sammy, shaking out his hand.
‘He’d finished talking,’ said Mac. ‘You weren’t interrupting.’
After driving across town for twenty minutes, the American turned the car north and followed the National Highway Five up the Tonle Sap. This was the road to Bangkok. The American’s legs were heavily bandaged, a fact he couldn’t hide with the military shorts he wore.
‘How’re the legs, Sammy?’ said Mac.
‘Looks a darn sight worse than it is,’ said Sammy. ‘It’s infection I worry about, given our location and all.’
‘I’m due in Saigon tomorrow,’ said Mac as they negotiated the late-afternoon peasant traffic on the highway. ‘So I hope we’re not going too far.’
‘Our conversation this morning got me thinking,’ said Sammy.
‘So?’
‘So there’s someone I want you to meet,’ said Sammy. ‘The two of you hit it off, you can make a deal. You don’t wanna dance, I’ll take you where you want to go and this meeting never took place. Deal?’
‘Deal,’ said Mac, watching the lush Mekong countryside rush past.
Seven minutes later, Sammy turned right off the highway and drove under drooping trees until they hit a raised levee of the type common around the Mekong.
As they sped along it, Mac saw thousands of acres of rice paddies extending across the old river flats to a line of trees where the dark brown Mekong River slipped down to the South China Sea. Small hamlets were evident on raised knolls amid the paddies, and Mac could see children and goats, pigs and women going about their business as the menfolk returned from the markets or from day-labourer jobs.
Sammy drove around the corner and stopped in front of a houseboat sitting beneath some trees, on a small canal known as a klong.
A tall black American loomed at the top of the gangplank, his right hand hovering above a handgun on his hip.
‘It’s okay, Brian,’ said Sammy as he started up the gangplank. ‘Old man’s expecting us.’
Reaching the top of the gangplank, Mac was stopped by Brian and patted down. As he gave up his Colt, Mac wondered if this was the driver they called Eagle.
Ducking his head as he descended from the deck into the houseboat, Mac saw the interior of the boat bore no relation to its rustic facade. Sammy used a swipe card to move through the security doors which closed with a whoosh behind Mac as they moved past another two guards, who patted Mac again and ran an explosives detector over his body.
Mac and Sammy entered a room filled with comms and IT equipment; there were video monitors showing real-time footage of what looked like a UAV circling over Asian jungle; one operator was glued to a monitor, reading out locations to someone over his headset. The monitor seemed to be showing cell zones for a phone connection.
‘Nothing here for you, McQueen,’ said Sammy, and Mac followed him into a smoky low-ceilinged office. Against the far wall, on the other side of a dark wooden desk, a middle-aged man leaned back in a chair beneath a line of portholes, blowing cigarette smoke at the ceiling.
‘I didn’t say you were fucking me, Darryl,’ said the American in a superior east-coast drawl. ‘I said you were
trying
to fuck me. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.’
Looking up, the man – a tanned, silver-haired sixty-year-old who could pass for late forties – smiled and sucked on his smoke as he turned an expensive lighter end over end on the desk.
‘Yeah, yeah, sweetheart,’ he purred menacingly into the phone. ‘Retract that sentence from your report and we’re all buddies, right?’
As he was about to put the phone down, he laughed suddenly. ‘You know me better than that, Darryl,’ he chuckled. ‘I don’t threaten people – I bury them.’
Hanging up, the man stubbed out his cigarette and moved around the desk, not taking his eyes off Mac.
‘Alan?’
‘That’s me,’ said Mac.
‘The name’s Charles. How do you do?’ Charles held out his hand. ‘Hope you don’t mind first names – it keeps things simple, okay?’
Mac took the strong, dry hand and looked into pale eyes hooded by a high, intelligent forehead. First names didn’t worry Mac and he was accustomed to the way the American intelligence community reverted to them.
‘Sun’s over the yardarm,’ said Charles, moving like a cat towards a large refrigerator. ‘Beer, Alan? Bud, Millers, Tiger?’
‘Cold and wet is good,’ said Mac. ‘Thanks.’
Taking a seat in a leather easy chair, Mac sipped at his ice-cold Budweiser as Charles slugged at his beer and lit another smoke. For an older bloke he had a hard stomach and powerful arms.
‘I’m sure you have things to do,’ said Charles, in a voice that was friendly yet authoritative. ‘So I’d like to push this along.’
‘Sure,’ said Mac.
‘Some of our investigations have fallen flat in the past couple of weeks and the problem seems to come back to the Aussies,’ said Charles, smiling. ‘Sam mentioned the possibility of a joint operation, which might give both of our teams the chance to open up, to share the wealth as it were.’
‘That was the idea,’ said Mac. ‘It seems we have a mutual enemy.’
‘It seems so,’ said Charles. ‘By the way, thank you for your efforts on the docks the other night – Sam owes you his life.’
‘No worries,’ said Mac. ‘I’m just sorry I couldn’t have stopped Phil catching one.’
‘Rocket-propelled grenade,’ said Charles, shaking his head softly. ‘What kind of maniac carries
that
around in his car?’
‘What I said,’ said Mac.
‘I suppose it’s obvious we are highly motivated about interview- ing this woman, Geraldine McHugh?’ said Charles, who seemed both old-money and diamond-hard. A strange combination.
‘I got that idea,’ said Mac. ‘There’s also the matter of a memory card – I had it until two days ago.’
‘I’m interested in that,’ said Charles.
‘I didn’t know what it was.’
‘So you weren’t briefed on the card?’ said Charles, in a way that made Mac realise it was important.
‘No,’ said Mac. ‘Not until it was stolen from my hotel room, and then I was accused of being a traitor.’
Charles squinted. ‘I guess there’re different Australian organisa- tions working on this, right?’
‘I’d rather not comment,’ said Mac.
‘Just like we had no Aussie comment on the Dr Lao episode?’
Mac stayed silent. It wasn’t his place to discuss Lao’s treason, but the Americans certainly had a right to know if their testing was compromised.
‘Just so we understand one another,’ said Charles, keeping it relaxed. ‘The ability to stop a Chinese ballistic missile mid-flight is something the Aussie Navy might thank us for one of these days.’
Clearing his throat, Mac maintained steady eye contact.
‘Anyway,’ said Charles. ‘Sammy tells me you have a head start on us with McHugh.’
‘I know Captain Loan, from the Cong An in Saigon,’ said Mac, watching Charles’ eyes for a sign of recognition.
Charles gave nothing. ‘And?’
‘And she’s investigating me for the murder of Jim Quirk at the Mekong Saloon.’
‘So?’ said Charles.
‘So Loan connected the death of Jim Quirk with the disappearance of Geraldine McHugh on the same night, from Cholon.’
‘Cholon?’ said Charles. ‘Who told you Cholon?’
‘Loan – she wants to work with me,’ said Mac. ‘I was going to look her up back in Saigon.’
Charles’ left eyebrow rose and he exchanged a look with Sam.
‘Well, Alan,’ he said, ‘that sounds promising.’
‘That’s where I come in,’ said Mac. ‘What’s your end?’
Leaning back, Charles levelled a look at Mac. They held the stare for several seconds, then Charles looked away.
‘My end is this,’ said Charles carefully. ‘There’s a plot by a powerful faction of the People’s Liberation Army to hurt the Chinese and American economies and throw the world’s financial system into disarray.’
‘The PLA?’ said Mac, wondering how the world’s largest military organisation became involved. ‘What happened to the Israelis?’
‘Forget all you know – this is about a power struggle in Beijing, using contractors in Cambodia and Vietnam,’ said Charles. ‘You interested?’
‘Shit, yeah,’ said Mac.
‘Good,’ said Charles. ‘So let’s talk.’