Authors: Mark Abernethy
Chapter 12
The phone rang just as Mac got under the shower. Capping the water, he walked into the living area of the suite and answered.
‘You called?’ came the snippy voice of Chester Delaney, the Aussie consul-general, whose offices were around the corner from the Grand.
‘Nice to hear from you too, mate,’ said Mac, water dripping off him in the sticky heat of late afternoon. ‘Thought we could catch up for that beer.’
Delaney sighed. ‘Where?’
‘Majestic roof, seventeen hundred?’
‘I think we can dispense with the army affectations, can’t we?’
‘Just testing, Chezza,’ said Mac.
‘And why the Majestic?’ said Delaney. ‘Can’t you come up for a coffee?’
‘I don’t approach consular property when I’m in the field,’ said Mac. ‘Protects me, protects you.’
‘Okay,’ said the diplomat. ‘Five it is.’
Throwing a towel on the parquet floor, Mac started with fifty push-ups, followed by a hundred crunches and then forty lunges with each leg, finishing with five minutes of basic ballet exercises.
Letting the warm shower water run off him, Mac decided on minimal involvement from the consul-general. It was courtesy for someone in Mac’s position to touch base and announce to the chief what he was doing, but in embassies and consulates the community was more like a colony – people didn’t always like a blow-in from Australia spying on one of their own. Instead, he was going to pump Delaney for background, and then have little to do with him. There was a building behind the Hotel Rex where the Australian government kept serviced offices, one of which featured the shingle
Southern Scholastic Books Pty Ltd
. It had secure computers and data connections, and a phone line that was virtually impossible to hack. That would be Mac’s base in Saigon, and would double as a crib should the Grand prove too open to the Cong An. The Black Stork would be the fallback.
Drying off, Mac placed his new clothes in a paper bag and screwed it up before dressing in his chinos and polo shirt. The new clothes might trigger someone’s memory, so they’d be in a dumpster before he ventured out.
Dialling a Singapore number, Mac walked onto the balcony, hoping that by talking outside the room he’d defeat the political police’s listening devices. His bag had been expertly looked through and his diary and book sales catalogues had been read – just as he’d wanted. But you never really knew about bugs.
‘Benny,’ said Mac, as Haskell came on the line. ‘How we looking?’
Benny didn’t waste time. ‘Can you talk?’
‘Listening is better.’
‘Okay, mate – it’s good news and bad. She’s fine.’
‘But?’
‘But she’s left the house and fucked off.’
‘Where to?’ asked Mac.
‘Our friends say she’s jumped a plane to Melbourne.’
‘Screw them,’ said Mac, who’d tell a lie like that to rival spooks as a knee-jerk reaction. ‘What do you think?’
‘She’s done the Harold,’ said Benny. ‘But if she’s worried about Aussie intel then I agree. Why would she be flying to Melbourne?’
Mac rubbed his face.
‘There’s something we should talk about,’ said Benny, ‘and not over the phone.’
‘What?’ asked Mac.
‘Our friends’ involvement,’ said Benny.
‘What about it?’ said Mac, thinking the ISD had circled back after Ray’s death and kept an eye on Liesl.
Benny’s voice lowered. ‘You’re assuming our friends became curious
after
a certain incident.’
‘What?’ said Mac.
‘I can’t stay on this line – I’ll call later,’ said Benny, and hung up.
Looking at the handset as if for an answer, Mac was astonished. Singapore’s ISD had been watching Ray Hu? Had he been made as an Aussie SIS agent? That would explain why Liesl had been asked to open Ray’s safe, been taken for a long ride, had the facts of life explained before being put on a plane. It was standard procedure for intelligence services when they were clearing up a spy network: give all associates the no-tears option before moving to interrogations and lengthy trials for espionage. If that was the scenario Benny had been talking about, then Liesl would have spilled her guts and taken the fast way out. But if she was really worried about Canberra, she would have stayed in South-East Asia.
‘You’re not going to get me drunk, you know, McQueen,’ said Chester Delaney as the waiter deposited two more ice-cold Tigers on the table.
They were sitting on the rooftop of the Majestic as the sun set on the Saigon River, the lush green of Vietnam’s former battlefields evident in the distance.
‘Don’t worry, Chezza,’ said Mac. ‘Just a couple of looseners.’
‘Okay, but can we drop the Chezza? It’s Chester, actually.’
Mac raised his glass. ‘Okay, Chester.’
Slumping slightly, Delaney removed his wire-framed glasses and massaged his eyeballs, his long fingers reaching around his bony nose.
‘I’m sorry, Alan,’ he said, cleaning his glasses and replacing them over piercing grey eyes. ‘I seem to get on the wrong foot with you, without ever intending to.’
‘Wouldn’t worry about it,’ said Mac.
‘I wanted to debrief, after Kuta,’ Delaney said, referring to the night of the Bali bombings, when he had been flown down from Jakarta to run the DFAT response and Mac had been sent in to control the media output. ‘I said some things that I regretted.’
‘Like what? Jenny Toohey has a great arse?’
‘No!’ said Delaney, blushing. ‘No, when you were running around trying to find – what was it? – Pakistani terrorists, when you were supposed to be running the media side for us. I needed you, Alan, and you’d palmed it off onto those kids.’
‘Yeah, I did.’
‘I was cranky with you but, as it turned out, you were probably chasing something far more important.’
‘They weren’t really kids, mate,’ said Mac, remembering the young DFAT and AFP staffers who’d run the media operation under Mac’s aegis. ‘I thought they were up for it – that bird Julie was basically running the show when I got there.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said Delaney, relaxing some more. ‘She jumped a couple of grades pretty quickly after that. Made director, last I heard.’
‘Let’s talk about Jim,’ said Mac.
‘Let’s.’
‘Like, what’s not in the brief?’
‘Okay,’ said Delaney, taking a swig of the beer. ‘The absences from his desk, the rather loose diary, and something I didn’t want to put in writing.’
‘Okay.’
‘The Saigon chamber of commerce put on a big mining expo ten days ago, in the convention centre.’
‘Yes?’ said Mac.
‘And Jim wasn’t there.’
‘Not there? I thought he was the trade guy for us in Saigon?’
‘So did we,’ said Delaney. ‘I covered for him but it was embarrassing. We had some big companies come up here and we like to have a few beers, do a barbie and invite other nationalities over – it’s a big networking event, and Jim Quirk was AWOL.’
‘You must have an idea,’ said Mac, trying to work out what wasn’t being said. ‘I’m not exactly the soft option.’
Delaney laughed. ‘No, you’re not. That wasn’t my call, but I’ve come to agree that we should keep it in-house, hence the Firm.’
‘So, what’s the theory?’
‘Well, people have seen him in Cholon – Chinatown,’ said Delaney. ‘It’s not damning but he’s been looking terrible and there’re fears about who he’s hanging around with, I suppose.’
‘Think he’s spying?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Delaney.
‘Any top-secret access?’
‘He’s TS-PV,’ said Delaney, meaning Jim Quirk had Australia’s highest non-codeword security clearance, with a PV or personal vetting. ‘But he’s no longer seeing anything sensitive.’
‘What’s this about the divorce?’ said Mac. ‘He on the sauce?’
‘Definitely,’ nodded Delaney. ‘He split with Geraldine recently and it went downhill from there.’
‘The drinking followed the divorce, or the other way around?’ said Mac, trying to set the scene.
‘Can’t remember,’ said Delaney. ‘I wouldn’t want to get that part wrong. What I do know is that I’ve been waiting two weeks to get someone up here. We kept being told to let Jim run, that we’d have a team soon.’
‘Is he stealing anything?’ said Mac. ‘I mean, illegal downloads or files tucked down his shirt?’
‘Our dip-security guy’s been keeping an eye on him – hasn’t caught him doing anything.’
‘Where does Quirk live?’ said Mac, wondering if he should be having this chat with the first assistant secretary, diplomatic security – also known as the dip-sec.
‘At An Puh,’ said Delaney. An Puh was the expat compound across the river in District 2. ‘The BP compound. He’s got an apartment near the supermarket, I’m told.’
‘He drives?’
‘A red Corolla.’
‘What time does he get in to work?’
‘Eight-thirty.’
‘Okay,’ said Mac, slugging at the beer. ‘But tell me – why am I up here? What happened to the resident in Hanoi?’
Delaney smiled. ‘Can’t use any of the Firm’s people down here if they’ve been in Hanoi, Hong Kong, Shangers, Beijing or Seoul.’
‘No?’
‘No, Alan,’ said Delaney. ‘The Chinese know exactly who they are. If we used them on Jim, the Chinese would have an insight we don’t particularly want to share.’
Chapter 13
Emerging from the double doors of the Grand at 7.28 am, Mac turned sharp right and walked up Dong Khoi Street. The one-way traffic came towards him in the first trickles of what would be a deluge in half an hour; Mac was hoping to make any vehicle tails show themselves by having to turn against the traffic or make a box-loop to catch him at an intersection.
Before he could get to the next intersection, Mac crossed the street to the cover of trees on the other side, and ducked up the side street to a cafe where he ordered coffee and an omelette and watched for unwanted interest.
The coffee was dark and strong and he picked up a day-old
Jakarta Post
from a pile of newspapers by the cutlery and flipped it as he surveyed the street. The anchor story along the bottom of the
Post
’s front page carried the headline missile tests provocative: clinton, and was followed by the regular Asian media obsession with the North Korean missile tests, predicting whether they would fly over Japan and their boosters fall in Japanese waters. While few countries in the western Pacific were friendly with North Korea, the region held its breath for the day Japan had an excuse to abandon its self-defence force and start rebuilding its military. Mac chuckled grimly as he read the US Secretary of State’s careful words: they reflected the delicate situation America found itself in whenever it stood between the two Koreas, Japan and China. If diplomacy in the Middle East took place over a gunpowder factory, North Asian rapport was built on a thermonuclear trigger.
Across the road two youths tried to strap a large sofa onto the roof of a tiny Suzuki van as all around them people came out of doorways and started motorbikes or clipped their trousers before they got on bicycles. Pretty soon the flow of motorbikes, carts and vans would hit full force as the locals went in search of a living.
Even though he considered himself an experienced traveller, Mac was always confused by Saigon. How did Ho Chi Minh ever think he was going to make the people of the Mekong Delta adopt communism? Or even aggressive socialism? Like most Aussies of his generation, Mac had been raised on post-1975 Vietnam as a story of ‘reunification’ in the face of imperialist France and the United States. Yet most people living in the south of Vietnam saw 1975 as a Communist invasion and subsequent occupation.
Convinced he wasn’t being tailed, Mac keyed the phone and gave Tranh the okay to pick him up.
Climbing into the silver van four minutes later, Mac kept looking through the back window until they’d turned right and accelerated for Le Loi.
‘Where to, boss?’ asked Tranh, who Mac noticed was now wearing a small silver crucifix.
‘BP compound, An Puh,’ said Mac, grabbing the water that Tranh had left for him on the floor. ‘I think it’s called APSC now.’
Crossing the Saigon Bridge heading north, they stuck with the flow of the traffic on Hanoi Highway for a few minutes and took a left turn into Tao Dhien Road, a quiet residential street that looked more like a suburb in Brisbane than Saigon.
On their right loomed a supermarket, indicating the beginning of the huge expat residential compound that extended to the river. Mac asked Tranh to keep driving as if going to the end of the street.
Doing a u-turn and pulling in at the kerbside a hundred metres short of the compound entrance gate, they stopped the van and rolled down the windows as the heat rose.
Tranh lit a cigarette. ‘We going to follow?’
‘Just establish his route,’ said Mac, pulling field-glasses from the glove box and getting eyes on the gate. ‘I want to get a feel for his day.’
At 8.08 am, a red Corolla stuck its nose out of the compound’s gate and Mac lifted the glasses. It was Jim Quirk.
‘Okay, Mr Tranh,’ said Mac, ‘let’s see your field craft.’
Following Quirk at between three and ten car lengths, Tranh was an excellent tail, sometimes letting the Corolla get a long way ahead, and at other times pulling up near to it but in another lane. The best tailers broke the pattern that people like Mac looked for.
Crossing to the west side of Saigon Bridge, Quirk went into the massive roundabout and made a looping left turn onto Nguyen Huru and drove south past the water treatment plant, following the river. As they drew parallel with the shipyards on their left, Mac lost interest in Quirk and turned in his seat to see who was behind them.
‘Shit,’ said Mac. ‘See that white Toyota?’
‘Cong An,’ said Tranh with a shrug. ‘They found us after we crossed the bridge.’
Mac saw a coffee cart ahead, just past the Buddhist pagoda. ‘Pull in here,’ he said.
Watching the white Camry sail past, Mac lifted his field-glasses and focused on the registration plate. It was the same car that had followed him to the market.
Mac pointed. ‘Okay, let’s find Apricot again.’
They wound southwards, through the heavy traffic, but Mac and Tranh had to stop at the lights where Nguyen turned left into the riverside drive, and they lost the red Corolla.
‘Okay,’ said Mac, slugging on the water, ‘let’s do a box, come around to the Landmark building the wrong way.’
Tranh took a secondary street running parallel to Quirk. Then they turned and went with the traffic down Dong Khoi Street, hooked left and drove north up the riverside road towards the consulate.
‘All okay, boss?’ said Tranh as they drove clear of the Landmark.
‘Depends what you mean by okay,’ said Mac as they passed the white Camry, parked and waiting beyond the consulate. ‘If we need the Cong An to help us follow Quirk, then we’re great.’
* * *
Shortly before midday, James Quirk walked out of the consulate and headed for the bus stop. Keeping a good distance behind the Cong An, Mac and Tranh followed Quirk’s bus into Cholon – the world’s largest Chinatown. Situated about a ten-minute drive from Mac’s hotel in downtown, Cholon had a reputation for harbouring some of the hardest criminals and canniest entrepreneurs in South-East Asia. Whether you wanted your husband murdered or to shift massive amounts of cash to another country, you could get it done in Cholon. Mac’s overwhelming memory of Cholon was of a place with a million bookmakers. Fancy a bet on a cockfight in a storeroom, a bare-knuckle fight on a local gangster’s rooftop, a girl fight in a warehouse, or a horse race at the Puh To track? Cholon was where you found the odds. Cholon was an exporter of its culture: after the arrival of the Communists in 1975, it was harder for the Cholon tongs – the crime families – to make a living, and the South Vietnamese diaspora included a lot of Cholon criminals. By the 1980s, the kidnap gangs of Hong Kong, the casinos of Macao and the cage fighting in Bangkok and Manila were all run and protected by the spitting patriarchs of Cholon – old men who lived humbly above shoe-repair shops and controlled rivers of cash around the South China Sea.
Jumping off at a bus stop, Quirk – in a light charcoal suit and no tie – hit the pavement and kept walking, scything through the milling locals, around a corner and into a side street.
‘Quick,’ said Mac, as the watcher Mac had met on the motorbike got out of the Camry and followed Quirk. ‘Right here, and head him off at the pass.’
Accelerating down a parallel side street, Tranh slowed at the mangle of cyclos and motorbikes at the next intersection and turned left. As the streetscape opened up, Mac watched Quirk dart across the street and disappear into a club called Mekong Saloon. But it was the action around the club that Mac noticed. Frantically, Mac looked around him: one man sat at a bus stop bench; he folded his paper as Quirk entered the building, turned and walked away.
‘Keep moving,’ snapped Mac, his breath coming shallow and fast. ‘Don’t look around.’
Tranh sped north, down Hau Giang and out of Cholon.
‘You get that third item Paragon would have mentioned?’ said Mac, when they were almost back at the riverfront.
‘Yes, Mr Richard.’
‘Good. Show me.’
Parking in an alley north of the Landmark building, Tranh led Mac down to a series of small private jetties on the river.
‘What happened back there?’ said Tranh.
‘I’m trying to work it out,’ said Mac, thinking about the men around that nightclub: not Cong An and not Aussie intel.
At the end of the jetty, Tranh stopped at a powerboat with a large black outboard motor on the back. Climbing into the cockpit after Tranh, Mac watched him unlock the small hatchway to the space under the bow deck. Climbing down, Tranh grabbed a steel box off the small mattress and slid it across the cockpit. Picking up a stainless-steel Ruger handgun from the box, Mac weighed one of the two 9mm clips that came with it and then slipped it into the handgrip and slammed it home.
Mac looked around the small marina. ‘No Hecklers, eh?’ He usually used a Heckler & Koch P9s.
‘No, boss – but Ruger is okay, right?’
‘Ruger is great,’ said Mac, stashing the handgun in its box.
Having established his regular meeting places with Tranh – a rotation of four cafes around Dong Khoi Street at nine each morning – Mac asked Tranh to time Quirk’s return to the consulate. If his trips were regular, it made things easier and faster.
Walking along the riverside boulevard, Mac tried to recall everything about the man he’d seen waiting outside the Mekong Saloon. Euro in looks, but not in dress: 1980s sunnies, the Sansabelt trousers and the shoes just short of nerdy. As if someone had tried too hard to dress down, or had never lived with a woman.
And it wasn’t just that man: Mac had seen another two, just the same, acting casual around the Mekong. They weren’t cops and they weren’t Asian.
Mac wandered into the shade of the Cyclo Cafe and slumped in a wicker armchair. He needed a cold beer, and then he needed to work out why another team was tailing Jim Quirk.