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face to face with the bloke from Raoul’s bus, the one with the Malaysia Airlines tags all over his bags.
    ‘But, you know, I have fax in my room. Just need to ask, okay?’ said the bloke, smiling conspiratorially and extending his hand.
    ‘Rahmid Ali,’ he said, the big Malay face creasing at the sides and bursting with the brightness of a lot of white teeth. ‘I saw you this morning, yes?’
    ‘Sure,’ smiled Mac, standing and accepting the shake. ‘Richard Davis.’
    ‘You tell off the American, right?’
    ‘You never really tell off an American, Rahmid,’ said Mac. ‘You just get ignored rather than bombed.’
    Rahmid Ali laughed so heartily that Mac could see his pink tonsils. Gesturing to the spare seat beside him, Mac watched as the Malay sat with a small bottle of Perrier and a glass. He was impeccably dressed in cream linens, glowing with fresh grooming and still smelling of Polo. He was also Indonesian intelligence – BAKIN, probably, decided Mac. Since Anglo visitors had a reputation for thinking all Asians looked alike, Indonesian spooks often posed as Malaysians to get closer to their targets, hence Rahmid Ali’s display of Malaysia Air paraphernalia. In KL, the Malaysian spooks pretended to be Thai, in Manila the Filipinos masqueraded as Indonesian and in Phnom Penh the Cambodians acted Thai or Vietnamese.
    ‘You really got a fax in your room?’ asked Mac.
    ‘Sure,’ winked his new friend. ‘I got sat phone, right, and it plugs into mini-fax. If you need to receive fax, just give them my number – I won’t tell.’
    Nodding, Mac took the Andromeda IT Services business card from Ali, on which the satellite phone and fax numbers had helpfully been underlined.
    Above them, on the first-floor interior balcony of the hotel, a man was shouting. Looking up, Mac and Ali saw a short, badly dressed Korean yell into a mobile phone while remonstrating with his cigarette hand.
    ‘I no care – I no care ’bout that!’ the bloke yelled, punctuated by awkward and frequent drags on his smoke. ‘Why you think I care? That your probrem, okay? I no care.’
    Hearing the tone, Mac’s hackles went up. All over Asia, Korean businesspeople spoke to their associates and customers as if they were the lowest form of life, and every time Mac had to infiltrate a business and charm people like the one yelling on the balcony, he’d sworn it’d be his last.
    Turning back to Rahmid Ali, Mac shared a quick laugh with him. The Koreans were something else.
    ‘I don’t know about the fax,’ said Mac. ‘Where did you say you were from?’
    ‘Kuala Lumpur,’ smiled Ali.
    ‘Well, in KL it may be okay to break the law, but you know something?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘The Indonesians have the fairest laws in South-East Asia and I’m happy to support them in their efforts to maintain a civil society.’
    Rahmid Ali’s face slowly sank from its top-marketing smile to a contemptuous curiosity. ‘Yes, Mr Davis,’ he finally managed. ‘I think I see your point.’
    Draining the Bintang, Mac stood to go. ‘Nice meeting you, Rahmid,’ he said, shaking the spy’s hand.
    ‘I’m sure we’ll meet again,’ said Ali, already recovering his professional demeanour.
    Rahmid Ali was going to stand off for a while, thought Mac, but as he walked out of the garden he could feel the other man’s eyes burning into his back.

CHAPTER 10
    The offices of PT Watu Selatan were two blocks from the Turismo, so Mac decided to walk it. He noticed that the locals shrank back into the darkness of shops and alleys as he moved through the dusty colonial streets, probably scared off by the rising violence from the pro-Indonesian militias. In many of the poorer parts of South-East Asia, visiting Westerners were the ones fearing violence or crime. In Dili, the fear was something endured by the citizens – a dull acceptance of terror, the likes of which Mac had experienced in Phnom Penh at the start of his career.
    Mac hadn’t been in Dili for a