The Mandarin Code (5 page)

She returned to her office, preparing to make detailed notes of the visit by the Chinese, the sort of rote police work she wouldn't miss. What she had not told them – and had not yet documented anywhere – was that the body had yielded one fascinating clue: a small USB had been secreted in the man's intestine. It had showed up on the MT scan and Vince Duffield had retrieved it with a deft cut.

Wade opened a locked desk drawer and held a small plastic bag up to the late afternoon light. The USB carried a single word, UNIS. It had 10GB of memory – and heaven knows what it contained on its digital circuit board.

Earlier, she'd plugged it into her PC. It was encrypted and that alone was fascinating. Now the visit by the two Chinese diplomats had deepened her suspicions that there was a far more intriguing story behind this death.

That meant Wade needed to push matters up a very different chain of command from the routine coronial hierarchy. She picked up her mobile and flicked through its address book, locating a man she'd first met in Afghanistan in 2008. He had been attached to a contingent sent in to track the faint footprints of Osama bin Laden. Ware had forged a bond with him in the ancient war-torn wasteland, often sharing a non-alcoholic beer as an antidote to the daily assassinations and bombings. She punched the dial button.

After four rings, a cultivated voice answered.

‘Hello?'

‘Charlie, it's Amanda. How are you?'

‘Amanda, what a nice surprise. I haven't seen you for months.'

‘Yes Charlie, it's been a while. I'm counting down to retirement but I'm not ringing to discuss how best to spend my super. I do have something for you, though. Something intriguing.'

Canberra

He paced the bare room, illuminated by a single fluorescent light that buzzed softly. His schoolboy error had left the knuckles on his right hand badly bruised and he counted himself lucky that no bones had broken. But he knew from long experience that his fingers would ache for days. He cursed.

Never, never lose your temper
.

That it was imperative to stay in control had been drilled into him. His instructors had been determined to instil discipline in their promising disciple, to harness the unquenchable rage that coursed through him. That needed to be managed. Directed. But never extinguished.

If he was honest, he would admit that he enjoyed these rare moments of letting go a little too much. The tools of his trade, strewn across the floor, were useful. But he always liked to get ‘hands on' once the groundwork had been laid. And rage, too, could be a useful tool.

The bunker where he was working had not yet been completed; it would one day be an embassy storeroom. It required none of the artistry that would grace the rest of the mansion. Below ground level, it was a windowless concrete box with minimal ventilation.

The air had grown fetid as he'd worked. Others would have found it oppressive, but he felt exhilarated. He took a deep breath. The smell. It was one of the things he loved. The mud-like tone of fresh concrete mixed with stale sweat and the acidic tinge of urine. And the top note: the sweet, familiar tang of blood.

And fear.

Others scoffed but he had always known that fear had a smell. He had been close to it all his life. His own fear, as a child, when his father's rages made the taste of his own blood routine.

Then the smell of his father's terror as he lay helpless before the blade as the rage that had been brewing exploded for the first time. That moment of sweet revenge had made him feel powerful, alive. Both his crude savagery and calm demeanour had shaken the police when they'd found him by the brutalised corpse.

It led the State to save him from execution. Instead they would train him, still a teenager, to be a special breed of footsoldier. Because the State knew that such men were valuable. That terror had its place.

The interrogator stopped rubbing his hand and returned his focus to the centre of the room where a shattered body was bound to an office chair. Builder's wire bit deeply into wrists with the subject's every agonised wrench. His white shirt was covered in blood and sick. His head flopped unconscious to the right, exposing the ragged flesh and cartilage that had once been his left ear.

A thread of spittle dribbled from split lips. The little fingers from both hands were missing: tossed on the floor near a kitchen cleaver, some pliers and several teeth. A hammer had crushed toes, smashed a kneecap and broken several ribs.

A welt just under the subject's left eye was beginning to swell. The interrogator knew his last, ferocious blow had broken a cheekbone. And the subject had passed out, again.

Yet he had learned nothing of the incident that had so enraged his masters. The subject had shared a room with the traitor and seen and heard nothing on the night of the escape. It had been the same with the other one.

Both, it seems, were innocents.

So what remained of his day's work was simply for pleasure.

‘Wake up!' he barked, as he poured water over the battered head. Slowly a mind muddied by pain and terrorised by what a fellow human was capable of cleared enough to rouse from one nightmare to another.

His mouth tried to form a plea. A futile effort to evoke some pity.

‘Please . . .' His single word came out a guttural sob.

The interrogator felt the tingle of excitement that always came with the last desperate entreaty for life.

‘I now understand you know nothing about the escape.' His voice was low, measured. ‘But you need to know this. He betrayed his nation. And you. You are suffering because of him. Believe me, I will make it end. Soon.'

He dangled a blade before swollen eyes.

‘Now, let's get rid of those pants.'

He emerged as early evening shadows were turning to night. It was warm, the air was clear, and birds chattered in the trees that surrounded the compound. In the nearby suburbs the mundane dinner-time rituals were well under way.

If anyone had been paying attention, they would have noticed that the lights that usually lit the building site had been extinguished.

The interrogator paused for a moment.

So quiet. Like the moment when death comes.

He was still astounded by the silence of this place, its proximity to nature, so different to the relentless noise of the city that he knew.

He motioned to the two men behind him who were labouring with the body. Another carried a plastic shopping bag, its contents heavy. They shuffled fifty metres to a trench that would form part of the foundations of the embassy's administrative wing.

The body was dumped next to another and the plastic bag thrown in alongside. The interrogator rubbed the aching knuckles of his right hand as he nodded to the men. Concrete flowed down the slipway of the mixer as a worker expertly guided the grey liquid over the small pile of human remains.

The half-dozen men looked at the interrogator only for instructions. Otherwise they steadfastly avoided his jet-black gaze and busied themselves with their appointed tasks.

He smiled as he lit a cigarette. Fear. He could not smell it mixed with this sweet night air or see it in the shadows that shrouded the faces of his peons.

But he knew it was there because they knew what he had done.

Canberra

Martin Toohey took a break from the mountain of paperwork piled on his desk, looked up and shook his head. Again.

Burnt orange.

Which genius in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet had chosen this catastrophe in ‘contemporary furniture' to grace the most important office in the land? The four leather armchairs and one long lounge looked like they had been retrieved from the set of a tacky '70s sitcom.

The decor was another symbol of the hung parliament. If Labor had a clear majority, Toohey could have banished the monstrosities. But with his government under constant surveillance, the cost of a replacement suite would be splashed across the Murdoch tabloids. So he was snookered. Even the green leather chesterfield chosen by John and Janette Howard would have been preferable.

Maybe not.

It was close to midday and the first pangs of hunger prompted thoughts of lunch. But the poached salmon would have to wait. Toohey was expecting a VIP visitor.

A quiet knock signalled his arrival. His long-serving PA opened the door.

‘The Ambassador to see you, Prime Minister.'

‘Thanks, Barb. Please show Brent in.'

Brent Moreton had landed in Australia several years earlier and had quickly forged a reputation for telling it as it was. Or as the Americans wanted it to be. A charmer nonetheless, his Savile Row suits marked him as one of the sharpest dressers in Canberra's competitive diplomatic community. Moreton was highly regarded on the social circuit and his dinner invitations stretched out almost a year.

‘PM, nice to see you. The President sends his regards.'

‘Thanks, Brent. How's the family? You were taking the boys up to Sydney for a weekend the last time I saw you.'

‘Yeah, and man, didn't we have some fun? Not sure that Luna Park is used to seeing a bunch of security guys talking into their wrists, though.'

The two men had forged a solid relationship despite their different world views. Both were professional advocates for their respective causes and when from time to time conflict between the Toohey Government and the US arose, they were mature and sensible enough to work through it.

But the challenges were growing. China and America were amping up the rhetoric to a level not seen since the end of the Cold War. The Republicans had won the White House and President Jackson seemed to be taking his cue from the Tea Party loonies who believed in guns, God and slashing government. His foreign policy was an extension of his domestic tub-thumping – his decision to declare China a currency manipulator was just the most significant of several early blunders.

And China was increasingly combative, pushing out its elbows. Testing its growing power and the will of the United States to confront it. Some think tanks had begun to speculate that conflict between the two powers was inevitable, and might occur sooner rather than later.

Toohey was trying to chart a middle course: needing Chinese dollars
and
the security of the US alliance.

‘The Switzerland of the Pacific,' one Canberra-based analyst had sneered.

Above all, the PM wanted to avoid being pushed into making an impossible choice between two rival powers. That made talks with the two nations' envoys a delicate dance between raindrops.

While Moreton had been appointed by Barack Obama, and expected to be replaced in time, he was first and foremost a loyal servant of the Stars and Stripes. He was a former marine and had effortlessly fallen into step with the new administration and its determination to adopt a tougher stance in relations with China.

Moreton had rung Toohey to lock in this meeting. The two men had blocked out forty minutes from their busy schedules. Moreton opened, smoothly shifting to a business-like tone.

‘Prime Minister, thanks for making the time so quickly. I wanted to bring you up to speed on events. The President has been ringing several world leaders – David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe – and he would like to speak with you this evening.'

The Ambassador paused as if searching for the right tone.

‘We are concerned about the direction Beijing is heading. The new Chinese leadership seems determined to test its power. It's as if we have gone back to the bad old days before Deng got his hands on the political and economic levers.'

Toohey began his practised tightrope walk.

‘I'm not sure I share your pessimism, Brent. We've had two ministers – senior ministers – visit China in the past month. Their feedback has been quite positive. The Trade Minister actually believes we are closer than ever to a free-trade deal, and that would be terrific not just for us but for this part of the world more generally.'