Bongo came out of the Chinese general store with a pack of smokes and a small paper bag. Flicking his rupiah change to the kids in the shade of the awning, he got into the Camry. They drove south-east for a few blocks before Mac looked into the paper bag and found several strings of large red firecrackers, the ones called ‘Thunder Bangers’ when Mac was a kid.

‘Diversion, huh?’ said Mac, nervous.

‘Keep it simple, McQueen – what I tell the Yankees.’

Passing the Dili Stadium, they turned left into the boulevard fronting the main gates to the Santa Cruz cemetery. Forty metres on, Bongo stopped the car and left it running to keep the air-con blasting.

‘Meet you at the north wall,’ said Bongo, lighting a Marlboro and checking the rear-view mirror. ‘Reckon you got five minutes, seven at the outside. And remember, brother – wait for my signal.’

Nodding, Mac slipped out of the car and onto the footpath, then Bongo did a U-turn, and headed back to downtown. Mac tried to cross the road casually, resisting the urge to run. There were slow-moving locals in the shade, a few mini-horses pulling their little carts and a handful of Timorese on pushbikes. Making it to the trees against the cemetery wall, Mac hid in the shade, feeling ragged from nerves and the intense heat. He’d dehydrated and exhausted himself in West Papua, and he should have taken a week off to recharge. But here he was again, talking to himself and losing track of time while he tried to work.

Two minutes later, Mac heard shouts and saw smoke rising over the houses from two blocks away. He waited, and waited, and then they started: a few bangs at the start, and then multiple noises, like a gunfight. One minute later a Brimob troop of four ran out the main gates, babbling excitedly as they cocked their M16s. Mac wanted to get running, find the gravesite and retrieve the message but the call didn’t come. As he made to key his phone and call Bongo, the phone rang.

‘Give it thirty seconds, brother,’ said Bongo.

‘Really?’ panted Mac.

‘Yep…’

As Mac waited, another troop of four Brimob stormed out of the cemetery.

‘Didn’t want to run into them, right, Mr Davis?’

‘See you in five,’ answered Mac, and set off.

Scaling the wall he landed in the shelter of the trees. The locals in the graveyard – mostly women, children and grandparents – mobbed together like sheep waiting for the wolf to show itself. In the massacre at the Santa Cruz cemetery in 1991, more than two hundred Timorese mourners had died after Indonesian soldiers and their irregular ‘teams’ had opened fire.

So the locals didn’t feel safe in the cemetery anymore, and Mac was with them on that. He watched as they flocked towards the south of the cemetery, which put them further from the site Mac was focused on. When the ground in front of him looked clear, he broke his cover and stealthed through the plots. Making good time, he reached the twentieth path and paused behind a white crypt with a gold-painted crucifix over the door. Panting, he cased the area while the firecracker bangs continued.

Crossing the path Mac walked in a crouch between the plots, irritated that the cemetery was so spotless that there wasn’t even any long grass or wild shrubs to hide in. The twenty-first path looked different by day, but Mac was alone and the locals had moved a hundred metres away. Mac crept towards the Salazar grave, trying to stay lower than the surrounding headstones.

Crawling the last few metres, he got into the lee of the casement and lay flat on the brown grass around the plot, listening for vehicles or footfalls. Raising his head slightly, he realised the bangs had stopped but the smoke was now high in the sky. Taking a deep breath, he pushed himself to his elbows and slid the casement sideways, opening it easily to reveal the cavity.

Which was empty.

Mac paused for a second, the ramifications pounding in his head.

‘It says,’ came a voice very close by as Mac started in surprise, ‘She’s not here. In case you’re wondering.’

Very slowly, Mac turned his head away towards the neighbouring gravestone, and found himself facing a small Colt handgun that was gripped firmly in a beautifully manicured hand. Rahmid Ali’s other hand screwed up a small piece of paper and threw it at Mac. It bounced off his damp forehead as he lifted his hands in surrender.

‘This is a little dramatic for me, Mr McQueen,’ said his captor. ‘Can we talk now?’

Staying as still as he could, Mac let Ali talk. Since being let loose on his first work-alone assignment six years earlier, Mac had dreaded the moment a Chinese or Indonesian agent got hold of him and demanded answers. He’d trained for it, thought about it and done all the mock exercises, and for good measure, he’d never tried to establish the identity of other field guys. He’d cultivated his own ignorance so if someone really wanted to pull his teeth and get intimate with the crocodile clips, they’d get a few corporate front addresses and nothing more. Now, sitting in Santa Cruz cemetery, a bit zonked from dehydration and the heat, he wasn’t sure he had the fortitude for an interrogation.

‘Things aren’t what they seem,’ smiled Ali, gesturing Mac up with the Colt.

Standing slowly, Mac let Ali expertly frisk him, taking the Beretta from his waistband and the Nokia from his breast pocket. Then, feeling a small push, he moved out onto the path and waited for instructions.

‘Get your hands down,’ said Ali. ‘Go right.’

Mac did as he was told, his brain racing for the options. Either Ali was going to torture him and get one or two basic answers, or he was going to take him into the trees by the wall and execute him. Either way, Ali was heading to the wall where Mac was meeting Bongo. Would Bongo come looking for him? Probably not, mused Mac. Having created the diversion, Bongo would want to be heading away from the fire. He wouldn’t even get out of the car.

Entering the shade of the trees, Ali kept his distance and gestured for Mac to sit down against the wall.

‘Please listen,’ said Ali, voice controlled. ‘You must hear something.’

Pulling a folded sheaf of white A4 paper from his back pocket, Ali tossed it at Mac and shook a cigarette from a soft pack.

‘Read it,’ he said, as he lit up and inhaled.

There were three pieces of paper, stapled at the top left corner. The first page bore the Indonesian Army crest of a large eagle, wingtips touching over its head, a red and white shield on its chest. At the head of the document was the heading OPERATION EXTERMINATION, with the injunction in large bold type: GENERAL STAFF – EYES ONLY.

Scanning it, Mac picked up the gist from the intro and the headings. It seemed the Indonesian military intended to intimidate the Timorese population out of voting for independence; they were going to kill, imprison and deport pro-independence figures and their families, and if the ballot still favoured independence rather than integration into the Republic, the military and its militias were going to destroy public infrastructure, destroy crops and livestock, burn villages and…

Mac had to shake his head, get his eyes focused. The heat and fear were killing him.

Having wasted the villages and their farms, the military would engage in mass deportations of East Timorese to West Timor – the Indonesian side of the island – and Irian Jaya. The document was chilling; East Timor was a subsistence economy. If you wiped out the villages, the livestock and the crops, you’d be looking at a famine. The Indonesians had already killed a third of the East Timorese population since their invasion in 1975. Adding famine and mass deportations was a blueprint for genocide.

Throwing the paper on the soil beside him, Mac shrugged.

‘Proud of yourselves?’