Double Back (32 page)

Halfway across the grassed courtyard area of the hotel, Mac’s Nokia trilled once.

‘Just getting to my room, Leena,’ said Mac, answering before it rang again. ‘Gimme a second.’

Checking the area around his bungalow, Mac let himself in, hitched a chair under the door handle and, sitting at the desk, put the Nokia on speaker phone.

‘The calls into those three numbers, in the time period specified, are as follows,’ said Leena, then read a list of just five numbers.

Mac thought back to Da Silva hurrying past him at the cafe in Dili and asked Leena to narrow the search to calls between seven and eight in the morning.

‘There’s one, at 7.41, to the office number in Dili,’ said Leena.

‘What’s the number?’ asked Mac, poised with his pen.

Mac jotted down a ‘361’ number – from Denpasar, on a landline.

‘Can we get an address on that number?’ asked Mac.

‘Already have it, Albion,’ said Leena. ‘It’s the Puputan Bakehouse, at -’

‘Thanks,’ Mac interrupted. ‘I know where it is.’

The Puputan Bakehouse was a coffee shop and deli just off Puputan Square, in the heart of Denpasar. It was a favourite for Anglos working in the area because of its superior coffee – and it was the main hangout of Martin Atkins.

‘Thanks, Leena,’ said Mac, feeling cornered.

‘There’s other activity on that line, close to the time of the Denpasar call,’ said Leena.

‘Yeah?’ he said, preoccupied.

‘Yes, Albion – an incoming call that lasted seventy-three seconds, six minutes after the one from the Puputan Bakehouse.’

‘Okay,’ murmured Mac, doodling on his pad. ‘What’s the number?’

As Leena read it out, Mac noticed something immediately. ‘Can you please check that prefix?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Albion – it’s an inactive satellite designation.’

‘Inactive?’ asked Mac.

‘It’s registered with the ITU, but unused. No other information,’ she said.

‘Thanks, mate,’ said Mac. ‘Great job, much appreciated.’

Hanging up, Mac checked his G-Shock – 11.12 pm, time for some fun with Harry Song, his contact at the International Telecommunications Union in Santa Clara.

‘Harry!’ yelled Mac, as his call was answered. ‘It’s Alan McQueen – how ya been?’

After a brief pause, Harry Song’s perfect diction chimed down the line. ‘I am well, thank you, Mr Mac. How are you today, sir?’

‘Any better and they’d have to lock me up,’ said Mac.

‘Glad to hear it, sir,’ said Harry.

Harry Song had gone to the United States to do a master’s degree at CalTech but he was still trapped in the Chinese system of manners and deportment. Mac liked to get him boozed and wind him up about what he should say into the listening devices the MSS kept planting in his house.

‘I need something, Harry,’ said Mac, pleasantries over.

‘Such a surprise,’ said Harry.

‘If I’m calling an 883 115 code, what am I calling?’

‘The first three numbers are a satellite phone designation, but that second series…’ Harry trailed off.

Mac listened to him walk across a room.

‘Okay, that 115 is inactive,’ said Harry.

‘Yeah, but it still works.’

‘Sure,’ said Harry.

‘Sure?’

‘Yeah, I’ve just looked it up, and that’s a calling code for Delta Telecoms Group, registered in Singapore,’ said Harry.

‘Delta? What is it?’ asked Mac.

‘It’s supposed to be confidential, Mr Mac,’ said Harry.

‘So, confide in me,’ said Mac.

‘Now you are taking a piss,’ said Harry.

‘The piss, Harry. The piss – and no, I’m not. It’s serious.’

‘I could lose my job, Mr Mac.’

‘Hey, mate – one door closes and another opens, right?’ said Mac, trying to keep him on the line. ‘Just like what I told you about that mother-in-law of yours, remember?’

‘What was it you said?’ asked Harry.

‘I said, Don’t let fear and inaction be the same thing.’

Harry laughed. ‘Yeah, and I said, You never met my mother-in-law, or you’d know that fear and inaction are the exact same thing.’

Mac changed tack. ‘Harry, I need this, okay?’

‘Okay,’ he sighed. ‘Delta Telecom Group is on an inactive code because it’s government, military -’

‘Intelligence,’ said Mac.

‘Precisely,’ said Harry Song.

Mac ran the sat-phone number through his phone book and couldn’t find any matches. Most executive government, diplomatic, military and intelligence operatives used sat phones, and in Mac’s experience they were more widely used in South-East Asia than anywhere else. That number could have been Singaporean government, Korean military, Indonesian intelligence or any number of quasi-government bodies operating through corporate fronts with shady telecoms providers.

The Delta Telecoms Group did not come up with anything meaningful on Leena’s radar – it was a privately held corporation, operating in Singapore with Delaware trustees and British Virgin Islands bankers. Its postal address was the Singapore office of a global law firm. What cops called a cold trail.

Looking at his watch, Mac realised he had almost enough time to walk to the Puputan Bakehouse and have a quick chat with Dewi, the owner, before she shut at midnight.

Staying forty metres back, in the shadows, Mac felt the tail as soon as he left the Natour.

Having left his room without a firearm, Mac didn’t feel impregnable, but he didn’t feel threatened either. There was only one of them, and if his tasking was to shoot Mac, he would have done it in the grounds of the Natour, giving the shooter multiple exit routes. He wouldn’t be doing it out on the well-lit streets.

Turning left before his scheduled turn for the Bakehouse, Mac darted across the road and ducked behind a car. The tail followed around the corner without hesitation, so he obviously wasn’t a pro. He also wasn’t a he, judging by the female shape and gait under the loose jacket and jeans.

Watching the woman react to losing eyes on Mac, he stood slowly, not wanting to panic her.

‘Nice night,’ he said calmly, standing and walking between parked cars into the empty street.

The woman turned and froze, like a deer caught in the full beams.

‘It’s okay,’ said Mac, still approaching but holding his hands open. ‘But next time you want to ask me for a drink, there might be an easier way.’

Mid to late thirties, Javanese, her hair was pulled up in a chignon.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, genuinely embarrassed. ‘I’ve never done this before.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Mac. ‘It’s just that I prefer to meet people face to face rather than trying to speak through the back of my head.’

Now she laughed, and Mac could see a smart, beautiful, well-educated woman.

‘So, what’s up?’ asked Mac, looking to make sure there was no backup, no unmarked vans with mobile dental surgeries in the back.

‘My name is Chloe,’ she said. ‘I need to speak to you.’

‘Yes?’ said Mac, starting slightly as an engine revved down the road.

‘I work for the President, and -’

The revving engine screamed to a climax and Mac swivelled around to see a red Toyota Camry charging at forty-five degrees across the street.

As he dragged the woman to the ground behind a parked car, there was a loud screeching of metal as the car stopped twenty metres away. Mac peeked over the parked car and saw two men emerge from the Corolla with small machine-guns.

‘What’s happening?’ screamed Chloe, as Mac dragged her away by the hand. The sound of windows shattering and car alarms going off was punctuated by the hammering of two machine pistols blasting at full auto, as they sprinted.

Feeling a sharp knock in his left bicep, Mac increased their speed along the pavement as bullets ripped into cars, lamp-posts, trees and storefronts. About forty metres in front of them, Mac could see a side alley at ninety degrees to the street.

‘Let’s make it to the alley, okay, Chloe?’ he yelled over the gunfire.

Chloe whimpered as they turned into the alley and were plunged into the darkness of a no-nonsense Denpasar laneway. Stopping for a second, Mac tried to get his bearings. Then a bullet took a brick edge beside his shoulder and Mac raced forward, pulling the woman along through stinking puddles, slimy muck and boxes of garbage.

‘Shit,’ said Mac, drawing to a halt where the alley ended at a brick wall.

They ducked behind a garbage bin as a powerful torch beam reached out from the other end of the alley and filled the confined space with light. Whatever their pursuers had was not a torch in the hardware-store sense of the word, but a SWAT-team halogen system found in helicopters for search-and-rescue work.

‘Over there,’ whispered Chloe, squinting at the reflected light. ‘There’s a door.’

Following Chloe’s lead, Mac found the wooden doors behind a large garbage box. The doors stood at hip-height, with a padlock in the middle of them. After backing up two paces, Mac lunged forward and kicked at the middle with all his weight.

The doors didn’t budge.

‘Here,’ hissed Chloe, picking up a steel bar.

Grabbing it, Mac levered it under the padlock, opening the doors in one attempt. Chloe gasped as the searchlight beam swept closer and several rounds of gunfire whacked into the wall above them.

There was a brief lull in gunfire as the male voices chattered at each other. The light was aimed over Mac and Chloe’s heads as they crawled from the alley through the open doors. As Mac went to stand, he found himself falling down a chute, landing in a stinking puddle of slime at the bottom. Chloe joined him half a second later, and as they searched for an escape route in the inky darkness, a volley of machine-gun fire ricocheted into the delivery chute.

Walking along the cellar floor, hands stretched out in front of him, Mac tripped in the blackness, falling forward and hitting his head on concrete steps.

‘Are you okay?’ whispered Chloe, voice panicked.

‘Good as gold,’ said Mac, pushing himself onto his knees then leading Chloe up the steps.

They emerged in the ground floor of what looked like an old warehouse space. Moving to the most obvious exit, Mac cursed as he found it bolted. Creeping along the wall with Chloe in front of him, they slipped behind a pile of wooden crates.

Mac pulled out his Nokia as they heard their pursuers sliding down the delivery chute.

‘Bongo, I need a hand, mate,’ rasped Mac. Describing their location as clearly as he could, Mac asked him to hurry.

‘There yesterday, brother,’ said Bongo, whose apartment was two blocks away.

The rays of searchlight beams winked from the cellar entry. Mac considered ambushing the shooters as they came up the stairs, but decided against it. Clearly pros, they’d stagger the ascent of those stairs, precisely to catch an ambusher in the support fire. Besides, he couldn’t leave Chloe, who was shaking like a leaf and looked as if she might collapse at any moment.

Moving further around the wall, Mac found a place where he could see the top of the cellar stairs. Torches now off, the first shooter emerged and cased the warehouse in distinct quartiles: east-west, high-low.

The second shooter joined him and they split, the taller of the two moving towards the crate they were hiding behind.

‘Okay,’ whispered Mac. ‘We’re going to move along this wall, see if we can stay one step ahead, okay?’

There was no reply and then Mac felt her slump against him.

‘You okay?’ asked Mac.

Looking down he saw her back was a shiny black mess of blood – she’d taken a bullet on the street.

‘Fuck!’ said Mac.

Looking up Mac saw a mezzanine about ten metres above the floor. Doorways and skylights led out of the area and he realised that this was their best escape route. As he plotted his course to get up to the mezzanine, he saw the short gunman racing at the stairs and charge up them three at a time. Reaching the mezzanine level, the shooter hit the power on his halogen searchlight and strobed the ground-floor area with the intense illumination.

‘Hang in there,’ said Mac as Chloe clung to him. ‘I’m going to get us out of here.’

Up ahead was a partially unloaded crate with a panel missing. Steering Chloe into it, Mac whispered for her to stay put until he gave the okay. Though scared and injured, she looked him in the eye and nodded.

Moving back along the wall, Mac saw a pile of sacks on a filing cabinet. Picking one up, he undid his boat shoes, put them in a sack and waited for the tall shooter to come down the corridor of crates. Mac ducked back from the sweeping glare of the halogen and waited for ten seconds. The tall shooter turned right, and waved a hand over his head, his searchlight exposing a scuttling rat. Mac pulled back behind the crate as the shooter kept coming.

Taking two steps to his right, away from the corridor, Mac swung the sack into the darkness. The tall shooter swivelled around to face the sound and Mac lunged at him, kicking the shooter’s groin, whipping a right elbow across his nose, and ripping the A4 counter clockwise from the shooter’s right hand, breaking the fingers so that the machine pistol dropped into Mac’s hand.

Getting his finger on the trigger, Mac swung the gun at the shooter who was lying in the foetal position, clutching at his wrist. Suddenly Mac was bathed in light as he squinted into the harshness of another searchlight, virtually paralysing in its intensity.

‘Drop the weapon,’ came the mechanical English of an Indonesian. ‘You’re in my sights.’

Heaving for breath and blinded, Mac felt the beam of light move off him. Then there were two shots and a weight hit Mac from the side.

Turning, he found Chloe sagged against his leg.

‘Ask for George,’ she whispered. ‘In Singapore, okay?’

‘What?’ asked Mac, barely able to see.

‘George – find the traitor,’ said Chloe, then the air was torn with the hellish racket of gunfire. Mac fell and scrambled back to his hide between the crates.

Full-auto fire bellowed as Mac lay in his alcove, scared shitless and effectively blind.

The gunfire raged for ten seconds and Mac lay there, panting in the dark, the acrid smell of cordite and gunpowder wafting into his hide. Feeling for the breech slide and the safety of the A4, Mac pushed himself around on his elbows so he was sitting up against the crate, and looking down the narrow confines of his hide, gun pointing to where the attack would come from.

Mumbling his Hail Marys, thinking about the good things in his life, and trying to reassure himself that he’d tried his hardest with the whole Operasi Boa snafu, Mac listened to the floorboards creak with approaching footfalls.

Pulling the A4 up, Mac tried to control his breathing as the footsteps came closer, stopping short of Mac’s hide.

‘McQueen!’ came the Filipino-English. ‘It’s me!’

‘Bongo, in here, mate,’ said Mac, fading fast.

As Bongo peered around the corner, Mac felt the warmth under his armpit from the bullet he’d taken in the arm.

‘You okay, McQueen?’ asked Bongo.

‘No,’ said Mac as his chin sagged to his chest.