The Unknown Terrorist (20 page)

“Of course,” said Ray Ettslinger. “It all fits.”

And indeed it did.

Much as his fellow academics derided the commercial media, Ray Ettslinger knew it counted far more than any of them dared admit. And here was
Undercurrent
offering him a small but significant and, Ettslinger suspected, ongoing part in a national drama. It was irresistible.

“Predictable,” said Ray Ettslinger, his tone now as bright as a new LCD monitor. “Who can really say what makes anyone want to blow themselves up other than some terrible emotional trauma?”

“How so, Ray?” asked Richard Cody. “She just seems, well … ordinary.”

“Family?” asked Ray Ettslinger.

“Divorced. Also ordinary. Mother dead, car crash. No criminal records.”

“Interview the father,” commanded Ray Ettslinger. “And
then film me viewing the tape of the interview, commenting. Either he hates her, or is estranged from her—what better explanation for her terrorist sympathies?”

“A fuckup at the edges,” said Richard Cody, beginning to tune in to Ray Ettslinger’s thinking, which wasn’t so difficult, given that he was merely developing an idea Richard Cody had suggested in the first place.

“Islamist ideology is irresistible for such a profile,” continued Ray Ettslinger, who knew almost nothing about Islam. “It offers both a secure identity and the mechanism for revenge. Alternatively, her father loves her and dotes on her and she’s spoilt—the Patty Hearst syndrome.” Ray Ettslinger knew almost nothing about Patty Hearst either.

“An angry fuckup at the edges,” said Richard Cody.

“Right,” said Ettslinger. “Either way, she’s a fuckup. Either way, I can make it work for us.”

Richard Cody loved the “us”. Ray was such a team player. And on and on Ray Ettslinger went, giving Richard Cody all he needed. And because nothing excites people more than sharing an aim, no matter what that aim may be, both were now far more animated. They agreed a time for the interview the following day.

“It’s like Sudoku,” said Ray Ettslinger before hanging up. “You just have to make the numbers fit.”

Todd Birchall returned with a six-pack of Tooheys New. His cap was off.

“It’s still so fucken hot out there,” he sighed, offering Richard Cody a stubby.

Uncharacteristically, Richard Cody accepted, though he still wondered who else might have touched that bottle and
what bacteria lurked on its seemingly clean surface. But he felt he now had cause to celebrate—a story, a program, a comeback. He would wash his hands later.

54

The red Perspex sign, partly shattered, revealed the neon tube that illuminated the wording:

THE
RE RO
HOTEL

The Doll followed a small monsoon of Asian tourists pouring into the hotel’s lobby, the eye of their storm a woman with a long stick topped with a plastic sunflower. When the Doll finally reached the desk and handed over Wilder’s credit card, the receptionist never even looked up at her face.

“Have a nice day,” she said to the desk, handing back the card and with it the room key.

The Doll squeezed into an old lift jammed with more Asians. As it shuddered upwards, their heads rolled below her like industrial ball bearings.

In her tiny room the Doll undressed and took two steps across the fire retardant carpet—so brittle and dry it felt like shreds of melted plastic—to the bathroom. She stepped into the acrylic bath, its anti-skid dots black with grime, and with the miserly biscuit of hotel soap only partly succeeded in washing off the stench of the evening.

After, she lay down on the bed. She tried to ignore the
sharp odour of dry-cleaning chemicals; the cheap pilled nylon sheets that made her feel as if she were lying on hot glasspaper; the taut foam pillow on which her head rolled back and forth, up and down like a karaoke ball; she tried to calm herself by breathing deeply and slowly, but the air in the stuffy hotel room was sticky despite the air con and it was hard to breathe.

Above all else the Doll tried to pretend that what had happened hadn’t happened, that here she was safe. She tried to imagine she still lived in the Australia where such things didn’t happen. But as she lay in that wretched hotel room in the lucky country, the Doll was finding it ever harder to breathe.

She thought about Moretti’s story of the Dutch soldiers who betrayed the soon-to-be-dead of Srebrenica. And it seemed to the Doll that the Dutch soldiers meekly handing over their weapons were the same people as the politicians and the security forces and the journalists, who, instead of protecting people, also betrayed them.

And then she was gasping for air. She stood up and went over to the window, but it could not be opened. As she stood there, trying to calm her breathing, she saw herself reflected in the window glass and experienced a terrible revelation. Wasn’t she, after all, the same? Hadn’t she that very morning ignored the beggar with the raw face? And only a few hours ago had she not rushed past an old woman being tormented by kids?

To her horror she saw that, as she had never cared or wondered or questioned, nor now would anyone care or wonder or question the stories they heard about her. As she had helped no one, how could she now expect anyone to help
her? And as she had in a chorus condemned others, how could she be surprised that others in a chorus were now condemning her?

And she saw that all the people following the story of “the pole dancing terrorist” were simply behaving as she had. When they were frightened by her story, had not she felt similarly frightened? And as countless others would now fall asleep in their lounge rooms after watching her fate unravel on tv thinking little other than that it was about something vaguely bad and opposing it was something vaguely good—national values, national lifestyle, national security—hadn’t she also dozed off at the end of a hundred other news stories thinking nothing?—nothing!

The Doll dropped two Temazepams, lay back on the glass-paper sheets and tried to imagine that she was not there and that it was all good. But it was not all good. As the drug took hold, she felt an immense weight build up behind her eyes as if sleep were imminent, but no sleep came.

Around her was gathering the most terrifying blackness through which she knew she must now travel alone, but it was not possible to move, it was ever more difficult to breathe, and in her heart a voice she had hoped to forget once more sounded.
You killed Fung!
it said.
You killed Fung! You killed Fung!
And in this way the night bore on, and even her truest friend, Temazepam, could no longer help.

55

Frank Moretti wanted to be part of life, to be part of Sydney, the two things being indistinguishable for him. With money,
with lies, with grovelling, with threats, with bribes, with cheating, with charm, with determination and with spirit he would succeed; he had, and he would.

But he felt nauseous and the room suddenly seemed terribly overheated. He could feel sweat breaking out all over him. And accompanying these physical feelings was a sudden sense of shame and regret that only made him angrier, and his anger only made him sicker. Yet why did he now feel so fearful, so guilty?

Though he had tried all day, he could not stop looking at the newspaper. The photographs had not changed. It was him, Tariq al-Hakim, the programmer whom he had lately been using, twice to bring heroin out of Pakistan, once, more profitably, carrying coke from Kuala Lumpur; and with him, amazingly, that woman, the stripper Krystal. It was ludicrous, of course, or perhaps it wasn’t. It was hard to say. What was clear to him, though, was that it was only a matter of time now before the authorities came to him, only a short time before they went through him, looking at his accounts, delving deeper, and then it would all be over. They would work it out soon enough, he knew they would, find out who he really was and what he really did.

After all, it was Tariq al-Hakim, with ideas far above his lowly station, who had set up his meeting with Lee Moon, for whom, presumably, he had also done some mule work. And it was Lee Moon’s idea that Frank Moretti deal with the Sydney port part of his new operation, smuggling men into Australia in shipping containers, for Frank Moretti’s contacts there, who had helped him in the past with his other imports, were of the first order: reliable and trustworthy.

“Women we do other way,” Lee Moon had smiled. Frank Moretti knew well enough that meant bringing them in on educational visas to work in his chicken coops, which Lee Moon graciously invited Frank Moretti to make use of as his guest.

The deal was done, and Tariq al-Hakim had been meant to collect the cargo that morning, but all day had passed and most of the evening and Moretti had heard nothing. Worried, he once more tried to call him.

56

Nick Loukakis did not recognise the ring tone pulsing out from the car boot as Tupac Shakur’s “Thugs Get Lonely Too”. But even in the dim torchlight, clothes stretched taut by the body beginning to bloat and slow-moving maggots covering the temple in a twisting Turk’s-head knot, he knew who the putrid corpse had once been. He looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty at night and everything felt too late.

Earlier in the evening, after talking to his sons, he had gone out for a drive. Every station on the car radio seemed full of the terrorist scare. There were other recurrent items—some deaths of old people blamed on the heatwave; a fresh outbreak of race rioting in the southwest suburbs between white supremacists and Lebanese gangs. But mostly it was about the terrorist threat: where they might strike—the airport, train stations, beaches, the Bridge or the centre of the city—and how they were going to do it. There was a strong sentiment playing out over several stations that it would be a dirty nuclear bomb that would cover the centre of Sydney in
radioactive fallout. He switched to a music channel and pondered the tv news report he had seen a few hours before.

It was only then that he had seen the faces of the terrorists—until then he hadn’t really taken much notice of the terrorist scare. But he knew straight away who they were. He was Tariq al-Hakim, a mule Nick Loukakis had tracked for a few weeks the year before, hoping he might lead them to Lee Moon’s syndicate. Instead, all they came up with was a small-time dealer called Frank Moretti, who seemed to run a few different rackets, but none so stupidly that there was ever enough to nail him.

She, on the other hand, he knew as one of Wilder’s friends, Gina Davies, a pole dancer. He had even once given her a lift back from Wilder’s to her home.

At first he had been shocked—not that both a suspect and a friend of a friend might be terrorists, but that he hadn’t twigged to it. He felt dumb as shit. How the hell hadn’t he worked it out himself? He knew Tariq al-Hakim had been to both Pakistan and Malaysia several times, but he had always thought it was simply in order to bring back drugs. No doubt ASIO and the Feds and everyone else knew a whole lot more than a lowly drug squad detective sergeant could be expected to know, but he was amazed he hadn’t picked up on any of it, and pissed off that no one had told him.

Nick Loukakis drove a long way away from Panania, but the night traffic was light and he made it to Darlinghurst in half an hour. He was retreating, as he always retreated, into his work.

He parked half a block away from the Doll’s apartment building, then sat in his car for a while, engine idling, air con running, mind racing.

“Interface with the cosmos,” said the car radio. “Nokia. Not a phone. A revolution.”

Nick Loukakis switched the engine off, and got out of his Ford Territory. He wandered around the building in which the Doll lived. He was remembering when he’d first met her, how ordinary she had seemed to him, when walking past an alley he caught the odour of something very bad. His instinct in this, as it was whenever anything stank, was to seek to discover the cause of the stench.

But now, staring at Tariq al-Hakim’s corpse, thinking back on what he knew about Gina Davies and all that he knew about Tariq al-Hakim, it didn’t add up. It just didn’t add up.

He would need to call homicide. But he wouldn’t tell them everything. Not yet. First, he would drop in on Frank Moretti, about whom he knew one other odd fact that now seemed strangely significant: once a week Gina Davies used to go to his home and strip for him.

57

It was no mystery to Frank Moretti why he had taken up his small part as a subcontractor in people-smuggling. It wasn’t “My humanitarian hobby”, as he privately joked to himself, and sometimes even tried to believe, if only a little.

No; it was because his part was profitable. Easy and highly profitable: a few phone calls, some kickbacks, a hired people-mover and a man—Tariq al-Hakim—to let them out and take them away and deliver them.

With the exception of the women he paid for, Moretti rarely found human beings beautiful, but he was pleasantly
surprised how trading in them could be so lucrative. Today another container had arrived, this time all the way from Shanghai, with its load of canned Albanian tomato paste—and twelve men. Why Albanian tomato paste would be coming out of Shanghai was a mystery to Moretti; it had been explained to him as old trading ties.

No wonder he felt unwell. What a night! First the stripper crazily calling, wanting God knows what, then after his dinner guests had thankfully gone and he was about to ring Tariq al-Hakim for the hundredth time, the doorbell rang.

A wave of fear and guilt broke over Moretti when he answered the door to a cop asking too many questions about the stripper. ‘And my crime?’ Moretti suddenly thought, ‘what is it, and how is it different from what so many of my neighbours do for their money? After all,’ he argued with himself, ‘how is what I do poles apart from what we are all told to do every day?’

Then he remembered how Lee Moon had smiled over his tumbler of Johnnie Walker Blue Label the day they had met, and told him how free trade agreements lied, how in truth some things weren’t exactly permitted, and some products were even officially disapproved of, but it was tacitly understood they too were part of the deal. Lee Moon was a pleasant-looking man who was always beaming, and reminded Frank Moretti of the Dalai Lama in an expensive dark suit.