The Marmalade Files (20 page)

The narrow streets were humming with madness. Sheer fucking madness. Sunburned tourists in white Bintang singlets; the flip-flop of a thousand marching thongs; street-stall hawkers seeking out the fat wallets of their prey; the din of a cheap loudspeaker – Hendrix in all his distorted glory.

Harry Dunkley gave a deft flick of the wrist and his Suzuki scooter immediately darted into the traffic.

The reporter had left Cucukan and Doug Turner behind, arriving in touristy Kuta earlier in the day, restless to get back to Australia. He'd hired a scooter for the ridiculously low sum of five dollars and set off, determined to follow the coast road as it snaked through Seminyak and the small coastal villages further north that still offered some remnants of the magic and beauty that had first enticed travellers to the island, back in the days before Mercure and Best Western had laid their foundation stones.

For several glorious hours he had sailed through small villages and past temples offering up their souls to their gods, with petite women guarding the sacrificial goods – fruits and nuts and other foods that Dunkley suspected would be better served lining some child's stomach rather than the footpaths of the city.

The first stain of the night sky was taking hold across Kuta, eager tourists drifting down bustling streets, the Hard Rock Cafe and other Western icons cheek by jowl with local shacks. He was close to the Sari Club site where Islamic terrorists had torn apart so many lives on that fateful night in 2002. Since then, Bali had managed to recover some of its former glory, the strong Aussie dollar and the cheap flights promoted by discount airlines proving an irresistible cocktail.

It was nearing 5.30 p.m. Legian Street was chockers as Dunkley navigated his way back to the Tanaya B&B, a mid-market hotel that offered a clean, pleasant functionality and was an easy walk to the main beach. He was choking on the smog of the city and loving every minute of it.

Pulling into the driveway of the Tanaya, Dunkley pressed the off button on his scooter, and dragged his helmet from his head before lifting his seat to take out a small rucksack. It contained several notepads and two voice recorders, one digital and one of those old-fashioned analog machines that used a cassette.

Their collective value, in hard currency, was not much more than a hundred dollars – but right now, alone in this thumping city, Dunkley thought they were the most valuable possessions imaginable.

The photo was postcard perfect, the couple was unmistakable. Ben Gordon exhaled, too loudly for his own liking, but this … well, this was a remarkable sight. Bruce Paxton and his Chinese Mata Hari enjoying a quiet dinner at the Green Tea House in Beijing. The Defence Minister and his illicit maiden. What had he been thinking?

Gordon worked methodically through the pages Dancer had lifted from the Marmalade Files but their theme was clear after a few sentences. The man with one of the most sensitive portfolios in the Australian Government had revisited a dalliance with a woman as dangerous as a fresh drift of snow on a steep mountain cliff.

‘Christ …' No wonder Paxton was setting off alarm bells in Defence and beyond; the man had succumbed to the lures of one of China's best, a deadly assassin practised in the fine art of seduction. Weng Meihui was a real piece of work, a magnificent
asset for her Communist masters. She had used her nubile charms, the intel suggested, to secure all sorts of secrets for the state.

She was programmed to lure men of power and dubious moral fibre to her lair, where they would fall for her beauty and charm, seduced by the prospect of an affair with an Asian princess. If only they knew.

Paxton and Weng had been first ‘identified' as a couple in 1982, but the relationship caused few concerns for the Australian embassy – Paxton was just a union bovver boy with a healthy libido. Any nuggets of pillow-talk he was feeding Weng would be of little consequence.

It was only after he was elected to Parliament that his continued interest in Ms Weng became more significant. The file notes suggested the two had sought each other's company whenever Paxton visited China – in 1997, 2000 and 2002. It was not clear if, or when, he had been compromised by Weng, but the file noted that his increased interest in a number of Pacific islands – Nauru and Tuvalu, especially – coincided with China's growing financial links with these tiny nations.

China was using its financial clout to try and broaden its political power base across the Pacific Rim as a counterweight to the might of the United States. Superpower against superpower. The Cold War might have ended, but the world was continuing to feel the wrath of hostile states playing a high stakes game of brinkmanship.

Had Paxton become a willing envoy for the Chinese? Gordon wondered. Men betrayed their country either for money or for sex. Looking at the intelligence gathered on Paxton, it appeared he may have succumbed to both.

‘You've been a bad, bad boy,' Gordon quietly muttered, as a disturbing pattern was laid out in front of him.

The file then noted that Paxton appeared to have backed off and kept Ms Weng at a distance as his political career took off, with appointments to the Shadow Ministry and then as Minister for Defence. ‘An eight-year hiatus has been observed by officers. Despite twice visiting Beijing over this period – in 2005 and then in 2008, as a guest of the Chinese Government for the Beijing Olympics – BP did not meet with Weng.'

However, there was no doubting the relationship had been rekindled during Paxton's most recent visit to China at the beginning of the year. The photographs did not lie. There they were at the Green Tea House, with its beautiful minimalism and wonderful high-backed chairs, both looking relaxed and enjoying the formal occasion, along with the Chinese Junior Minister for Defence, several of his attachés and the Australian Foreign Minister.

The Australian Ambassador was present too, along with several of her staff. No doubt one of them was assigned the task of keeping mental notes that would later be fed into the file, a dossier that could be deployed like a deadly missile if its masters so desired.

Bruce Paxton had walked straight back into a honey trap. And it all seemed so convenient – a Defence Minister with a known weakness for women seated so close to a former consort … Who'd arranged this liaison? Was it a set-up, a deliberate ploy to compromise the Minister?

Ben Gordon's mind was racing; he needed answers. Most of all, he needed to find out just who was aware of this dirty little secret.

There were days, long thankless days, when George Papadakis felt like Winston Wolfe, the Harvey Keitel character from
Pulp Fiction
, always cleaning up after someone else's mess.

The unbridled joy of helping run the nation gave way to the rank thought that being chief of staff to the Prime Minister was a lowly descent into the gutter minds of those MPs bent on a suicide mission.

Xavier Quinn, the gaffe-prone Education Minister, was one of the worst. But foot-in-mouth wasn't his only problem – his biggest liability was an inability to keep his penis in his trousers.

Why was it always the Catholics? Papadakis again gave quiet thanks for the Great Schism. The best thing his Greek Orthodox Church ever did was ditch those weirdo Latins in 1054. A thousand years on, it still looked like a good policy.

What bemused him with Australian Catholics was that a disproportionate number of them had sexual hang-ups. He traced
some of the problem to the Western Church's idiot innovation of clerical celibacy. But that couldn't explain the particular Australian problem because he knew from experience the French and Spanish Catholics had a much more relaxed attitude to sex. So he blamed the Irish. Irish Catholicism was infected with the heresy of Jansenism, which saw humanity as depraved.

‘
Odium corpus
,' he muttered to himself. ‘Hatred of the body.'

He had found Australian Catholic men who had been endlessly fed messages during childhood that bodily things were bad reacted in one of two ways: they felt guilty all the time; or they simply rebelled and rooted like the world was about to end.

Xavier Quinn was the worst kind: he paraded his faith in public and in private banged like a dunny door in a cyclone.

Papadakis's theological musings were interrupted by a knock on his door.

‘You wanted to see me, George?' It was Quinn.

‘Yes. Sit down.' Papadakis wasn't about to waste time on niceties. ‘Minister, do you recall a meeting we had in this very office the day before you were sworn in?'

‘Yes.' Quinn shifted in his seat.

‘Then you will recall one key message I had you repeat before I agreed that you would be included in the Ministry?'

‘Yes.'

‘What was it?'

‘Don't screw the crew.'

Papadakis leaned forward. ‘Well done, Minister. Yes, rule number one: don't screw the crew. Why? Because it causes more grief, more often, than you can possibly imagine. I don't care that
you are serially unfaithful to your wife as long as you're careful, but Minister, screwing your chief of staff is a bad idea. It's a bad idea at any time, but it's a worse idea when she's married to the Assistant National Secretary.'

‘Bullshit, all bullshit. I won't sit here and be talked to like this by you. It's simply not true. I know there are rumours about Connie and me but there always are when men and women work closely together. It's … it's … a kind of sexism.'

‘Please, Minister, you of all people can't mount a feminist argument. I'm not surprised you just tried to mount it because, frankly, you would mount a knothole in a tree. That's the problem. So save the denials for your wife. Your chief of staff is leaving your office today. I'm doing a straight swap with the Industry Minister's COS.'

‘What – Clare Jones? No way. She's a muff-diver and she hates me.'

‘I know, she was even less keen than you … Until I told her that part of her job was to persecute you, with my blessing. That's all, thanks.'

Papadakis began making some notes as Quinn stood and shrank towards the door.

‘Oh, and Minister.'

‘What?'

‘About the blow job from the prostitute in the back seat of that cab in Darwin …'

Quinn went white. ‘Who knows about that!' he squeaked.

‘Well, it turns out the cab driver is a party member. And, happily, rather than posting the security camera footage on
YouTube he sent it to me. It might come in handy one day. Now get the hell out of my office.'

Papadakis felt his spirit sink. That had been the easy meeting. He had always found it simple to punish people he had no regard for. A much harder task was asking good people to do difficult things. And David Joyce, the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, was salt of the earth and a fine public servant.

Joyce had been transferred from leading ASIO to try and keep Cate Bailey under some kind of control. He'd done an outstanding job, single-handedly keeping Australia's precious foreign relations in some kind of order while his mad Minister galloped from one country to the next in an endless quest to promote herself and her absurdly expensive ambition to win a seat on the United Nation's Security Council.

‘George?'

Papadakis stood to meet his old friend. ‘David, good to see you, mate. Would you like a coffee?'

‘No, mate, thanks.'

‘Have a seat. Look … I won't beat around the bush about your Minister.'

‘Yes, very sad. The department's, er, well … they didn't wish that on her. But I guess I'm here to hear about a replacement.'

‘Yes, er … well, not exactly.'

‘Come on, George, you're not going to give it to the Trade Minister who's acting in the job. The guy couldn't find Tasmania on a map.'

‘No, that didn't cross my mind. Of course not.'

‘Thank Christ. Who then?'

‘It's, well … the PM thought … and you know things are … difficult … for us politically, what with the hung Parliament and the loss of a vote in the chamber.'

‘Yes.' Papadakis could tell Joyce's finely tuned spook instincts had begun to tingle. The man knew something bad was about to happen.

‘Well, Cate Bailey can communicate, she's remarkably popular and there is a big push from the disability lobby to let her keep her job.'

‘You are fucking joking, George!' Joyce leapt to his feet. ‘You can't be serious! You can't do this to me! I had to babysit that hideous bitch for a year as she ran amok around the globe. Do you know how many disasters I averted? I'm surprised Mossad hasn't taken her out after she sold out Israel to woo Security Council votes from the Arab states. We threw a fucking party in my office the night she was taken to hospital and invited half the Canberra diplomatic corps. The French bought Bollinger. We didn't leave till dawn.'

‘David, it's only until we can think our way through this. You'll be running the show. How much damage can she do from a hospital bed?'

‘Heaps!' Joyce's face was going red. ‘She's learned to text. She sends me about a hundred messages a day. And because she's borderline Asperger's she's memorised the mobile numbers of half the world's foreign ministers. She's bombarding them with her hare-brained ideas. She has to be stopped. I don't have the strength for this shit anymore. I'm fifty-six, I can take my super and run.'

‘David, David … please. I will fix it, just give me a couple of weeks. I don't know how but I will fix it.'

‘You'd better fucking fix it or this country's rooted and I'm moving to New Zealand.'

‘Just for a few more weeks.'

‘One month. Tops. After that find another idiot to do your bidding.'

‘Thank you.'

Joyce slouched towards the door, opened it and stopped. ‘What happened?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘What happened to Labor, George? You used to be a serious party. Now you're some kind of sad, faded circus act.'