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Authors: Mark Abernethy
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were checking passports,’ said Mac after looking around. Another group had huddled for a smoke but they were fi fteen metres away.
Morris shook his head slowly and looked into the sky. The job had just got larger.
‘And BAIS thinks there were two crews,’ continued Mac. ‘The pros did Sari and the patsies did Paddy’s.’
‘Great. So we have the world’s most porous borders and a foreign outfi t responsible for the big blast,’ snarled Morris, fl icking his butt.
‘But they’re long gone, right, so we arrest the patsies, fi t them up for the whole thing, and then it’s “the Muslims did it”. That the DFAT
script, eh Macca?’
Mac shrugged. ‘Your investigation, John.’
Morris’s eyes fl ashed with anger. ‘Fuck the pricks,’ he said as he left.
Mac stayed in the garden for a while, thinking about cops and spies. There’d been one afternoon in Jakarta when Jenny and her transnational sexual slavery crew had been on the tail of a container load of kids. They’d been working on it for two days, no sleep, and had cornered a bunch of businessmen. They had them cold: emails, bank records, trucking documentation and, the clincher, a purchase order for hundreds of kids’ pyjamas, clothes and soft toys.
The plan was to arrest and heavy the business guys, fi nd where the children were being kept, save the kids and bust the slaving racket.
They were on the verge of doing just that - had the forensic guys from Scotland Yard and a Kopassus unit to do the storming. Then someone in the POLRI team snitched, and the word quickly went higher and higher. It soon reached way up into the shitosphere of the political zone and at six minutes before ‘go’ they were stood down. Just like that. It’s how the slave trade worked - more often than not it was protected from above.
By the time Jenny got to the embassy after the op was cancelled, the men who’d stood her down had sensibly vacated. She tracked down the counsellor-political at the Jakarta Golf Club where he was drinking with other Foreign Affairs brass. According to a mate of Mac’s who’d been there, Jenny had stomped up to the table, yelled something about how if it was white, middle-aged men who were being raped for money, the slavers would be shut down immediately.
When the boozed-up Foreign Affairs bloke stood to put a conciliatory hand on her shoulders, she’d pushed him in the chest so hard he’d fallen across the table and into the arms of another Foreign Affairs luncher.
That was Jenny and that was the tension between cops and the apparatus Mac was a part of. So Mac knew where Morris was coming from. He was leading a crew that had to sift through body parts and dental records; ask victims’ relatives the hard questions about whether there was ever a broken bone in their loved one’s right-hand femur; reconstruct and deconstruct and then catch the bastards who did it.
And they had to do it with grieving rellies and an angry public baying for answers. The last thing they needed was a bunch of diplomats over the top of them. Every cop at every level knew where that would lead: you get a bunch of smarties like Chester and Mac in to massage the message and inevitably the tail starts wagging the dog.
Mac headed back to the hotel wondering if that was really Abu Samir on the ship. There was all that and something much bigger weighing on his mind. Freddi’s idea about the pros and the patsies was gnawing away at him. It wasn’t such a far-fetched theory for the pros to operate in the shadow of the more obvious amateurs.
In fact, it was standard operating procedure for most intelligence outfi ts.
CHAPTER 8
Garvs brought two Tigers back from the bar, boogying slightly to Powderfi nger’s ‘My Happiness’, and went straight back into his theories about why the Roosters had got over the Warriors in the rugby league grand fi nal.
Early in their careers Garvs and Mac had become a sort of Laurel and Hardy of the Australian intelligence
Morris shook his head slowly and looked into the sky. The job had just got larger.
‘And BAIS thinks there were two crews,’ continued Mac. ‘The pros did Sari and the patsies did Paddy’s.’
‘Great. So we have the world’s most porous borders and a foreign outfi t responsible for the big blast,’ snarled Morris, fl icking his butt.
‘But they’re long gone, right, so we arrest the patsies, fi t them up for the whole thing, and then it’s “the Muslims did it”. That the DFAT
script, eh Macca?’
Mac shrugged. ‘Your investigation, John.’
Morris’s eyes fl ashed with anger. ‘Fuck the pricks,’ he said as he left.
Mac stayed in the garden for a while, thinking about cops and spies. There’d been one afternoon in Jakarta when Jenny and her transnational sexual slavery crew had been on the tail of a container load of kids. They’d been working on it for two days, no sleep, and had cornered a bunch of businessmen. They had them cold: emails, bank records, trucking documentation and, the clincher, a purchase order for hundreds of kids’ pyjamas, clothes and soft toys.
The plan was to arrest and heavy the business guys, fi nd where the children were being kept, save the kids and bust the slaving racket.
They were on the verge of doing just that - had the forensic guys from Scotland Yard and a Kopassus unit to do the storming. Then someone in the POLRI team snitched, and the word quickly went higher and higher. It soon reached way up into the shitosphere of the political zone and at six minutes before ‘go’ they were stood down. Just like that. It’s how the slave trade worked - more often than not it was protected from above.
By the time Jenny got to the embassy after the op was cancelled, the men who’d stood her down had sensibly vacated. She tracked down the counsellor-political at the Jakarta Golf Club where he was drinking with other Foreign Affairs brass. According to a mate of Mac’s who’d been there, Jenny had stomped up to the table, yelled something about how if it was white, middle-aged men who were being raped for money, the slavers would be shut down immediately.
When the boozed-up Foreign Affairs bloke stood to put a conciliatory hand on her shoulders, she’d pushed him in the chest so hard he’d fallen across the table and into the arms of another Foreign Affairs luncher.
That was Jenny and that was the tension between cops and the apparatus Mac was a part of. So Mac knew where Morris was coming from. He was leading a crew that had to sift through body parts and dental records; ask victims’ relatives the hard questions about whether there was ever a broken bone in their loved one’s right-hand femur; reconstruct and deconstruct and then catch the bastards who did it.
And they had to do it with grieving rellies and an angry public baying for answers. The last thing they needed was a bunch of diplomats over the top of them. Every cop at every level knew where that would lead: you get a bunch of smarties like Chester and Mac in to massage the message and inevitably the tail starts wagging the dog.
Mac headed back to the hotel wondering if that was really Abu Samir on the ship. There was all that and something much bigger weighing on his mind. Freddi’s idea about the pros and the patsies was gnawing away at him. It wasn’t such a far-fetched theory for the pros to operate in the shadow of the more obvious amateurs.
In fact, it was standard operating procedure for most intelligence outfi ts.
CHAPTER 8
Garvs brought two Tigers back from the bar, boogying slightly to Powderfi nger’s ‘My Happiness’, and went straight back into his theories about why the Roosters had got over the Warriors in the rugby league grand fi nal.
Early in their careers Garvs and Mac had become a sort of Laurel and Hardy of the Australian intelligence
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