Slipping through the tropical darkness, Mac stayed in the shadows of the trees that lined most of the avenues in Dili. It was 3.58 am according to his G-Shock and he was making good time, slipping along one of the minor streets behind the Dili Stadium, heading inland from the harbour.

Dressed in a black sweatshirt, dark baseball cap and Levis, he blended with the background and the moonless night as he alternated between running across open ground and waiting behind cover, heading quietly southwards.

A light flashed down the street from two blocks away, and Mac ducked behind a frangipani tree. Waiting, all his senses on high alert, he watched the Brimob SWAT van turn into the deserted street and move slowly towards him. A Brimob officer’s head and shoulders stuck out the top of the roof and swivelled a searchlight through the darkness as it approached. Ducking for cover, Mac used the lee of the frangipani to crawl into a stormwater culvert that ran the length of the avenue. Lying in the dog shit and rotting leaves he held his breath as the diesel growl of the Brimob truck came alongside his position. He exhaled, relieved, as it kept moving, ‘I Will Always Love You’ echoing out of the vehicle’s radio, sung rather painfully by an Indonesian male. One of the eternal wonders of the universe was why Indonesian men felt the need to record songs associated with Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Olivia Newton-John.

Dusting himself off, Mac got in behind the frangipani tree and watched the Brimob truck fade into the distance and then turn right – probably scouting for kids around the stadium.

Feeling naked without his gun, Mac kept a steady pace from one hide to another as he continued on. Heading left into a larger avenue, he became exposed to streetlights and crossing the dusty street to the sanctuary of the darkness on the other side, his panting and footfalls seemed to echo down the empty avenue. Suddenly a light went on in a mansion somewhere behind the trees he was hiding in. Mac froze as an Indonesian woman in a housecoat stepped out onto her veranda, not six metres away, and made a high-pitched musical call. Two cats darted out of the shrubbery and shot past the woman’s calves into the house like a couple of lightning bolts.

Pulling back into the house and shutting the door, the woman killed the lights. Mac gulped down the stress and moved on.

Using a small banyan to get himself to the top of the cemetery wall, Mac lay along the top of it for ten minutes, assessing the ground. There was no movement, no whispers and he couldn’t smell cigarettes or aftershave. Sliding down the opposite side of the wall, he found one of the walkways and moved swiftly to the main road of the cemetery. Staying twenty metres off the main track, he dodged and weaved through the tombstones and fenced plots until he located the twenty-first path. Finding it, he counted seven gravesites until he was looking at the drop: a modest plot, squashed between two larger ones.

Holding back for a few minutes, Mac waited for movement, wishing he hadn’t drunk so much beer the night before. Pretty girls with a ton of charm sure did make the world go around, but they didn’t help with work the next day.

Satisfied that he wasn’t walking into an ambush, Mac found a decent-sized tree and created a hide with a sight line to the drop box and also a view of the cemetery’s main road. Placing the water bottle on his ‘chair’, Mac left the hide and moved at a crouched jog to the main road, scuttled across it, wanting to check on how observable the water bottle was to those approaching it.

Moving to the other side of the cemetery, he numbered off the side paths until he was on the thirty-fifth on the right, and then numbered the plots back to the seventh on the left. Breathing deeply, he stayed still, waiting for movement or sound. The only action came from the trees where a bat was feuding with a bird. Fumbling in the dark, he ran his hands over a white marble gravesite and headstone. It was immaculately maintained, just like all the plots at Santa Cruz. The crypts were whitewashed, headstones were scrubbed and polished, there were no weeds and the edges were all trimmed. Mac marvelled at how the world’s poorest and most oppressed people so often had the most beautiful graveyards. He’d seen the same in Phnom Penh and Rangoon. Was it stupidity or defiance?

There were no moving parts on the grave cover or the headstone, and for a second Mac wondered if he was at the wrong site. Counting it back again, he confirmed he was at the right grave; then he lay down and got his face closer. Behind the headstone was a steel box with a lid and as Mac moved closer in the dark he saw the lid was padlocked.

‘Fuck!’ he mumbled.

Hitting it with his fist in frustration, he was about to move on when he realised the whole box had rocked. Pulling the box back on its hinge, Mac saw a dark canvas bag and, opening it, he found the radio and the plastic-covered frequencies. He rummaged under the machine until his fingers wrapped around a solid object. Pulling it out, and holding it in front of his face, Mac smiled at his find: a Beretta 9mm handgun with a replacement mag secured to the grip with a rubber band.

The drop box proved simpler. The marble casement slid sideways, revealing a cavity about the size of a shoe box. Mac dropped his note in it and slid the casement back to its original position. Then he grabbed one of the red flowers from a neighbouring grave and put it into the stainless-steel cup that was bolted into the headstone just above the engraving of SALAZAR, EUGENIO CLAUDIO.

Back at his hide, Mac took a seat, lay back and wondered where the assignment was going. He’d kept the note in the drop box quite vague; he didn’t like drop boxes at the best of times. The note asked for a Blackbird meet, and was signed ‘Albion’.

It made him feel vulnerable so he was going to even things up a little. How long he could wait was another thing entirely.

His mind was on other things, too. Jessica Yarrow had walked into that hotel like a flash flood. It had totally floored him – he’d been so ready to sidestep the whole Canadian issue that he’d simply reduced Bill Yarrow to the Canadian, trying to convince himself that the man didn’t matter. But he did. You couldn’t use someone like Yarrow as a local asset, have them risk their life for intelligence, and then walk away because he’d been caught by the bad guys. It wasn’t the Australian way.

Now the sun was fully up and the searing heat of South-East Asia was gathering intensity. Mac finished his water and was happy for some shade, although he could’ve done without the centipede crisis. They were everywhere in the undergrowth and he had to shift his hide twice to escape the little bastards.

Visitors came and went from the cemetery as the morning progressed. They painted, they cleaned and they socialised; they brought flowers, they strummed guitars and sang songs. Meanwhile, Mac hid among the trees, sweating profusely as the humidity raced to keep up with the temperature. At 10.03 am Mac took a quick pee-break and turned back to see a Timorese man moving towards the drop box. His heart rate rising, Mac got down into a crouch, slipping the Beretta into his waistband at the small of his back. The man – white baseball cap, tallish and middle-aged – walked past the drop and continued for another ten plots. Then, looking around, seemingly casual but doing a full sweep, he moved back the way he’d come and stopped at the Salazar grave.

His pulse pounding in his temples, Mac tried to stay composed. Dropping to his knees, the man looked around again, moved the casement lid sideways, trying to hide the manoeuvre with his body. His hand came back, went into the right pocket of his chinos, pulled something out and then the lid was back in place and the man was on his feet.