‘Stay cool, brother,’ said Kaui as Mac made to go.

Despite his irritation, Mac reluctantly accepted a hug from his old rugby team-mate.

‘One hell of a performance in that pipe,’ smiled Kaui. ‘Was that a scream or a yodel?’

‘You’ll get a slap one of these days, mate,’ said Mac, shaking his head. ‘Swear to God.’

After thanking Albert, Mac padded down the steps of the Hino onto the weed-infested wharf apron. Then he walked under the conveyorbelt loader towards the rear of the Java Princess in his fresh chinos and shirt. The first officer, a Singaporean Chinese, was expecting him and showed him to a small stateroom.

‘We sail at o-one hundred,’ said the officer. ‘You eaten?’

‘Yeah, thanks,’ said Mac.

‘Need someone to look at that?’ said the officer, gesturing towards Mac’s facial burn.

‘Nah, I’m sweet,’ Mac replied. ‘But a cold beer might help.’

Smiling and pointing to the fridge, the officer left the room.

Kicking off his shoes, Mac grabbed a can of Tiger, turned down the lights and fiddled with the TV remote as he eased back on the bed. CNN was running footage of chaos in and around Dili – the capital of East Timor – as the Indonesia-backed militias attempted to bully the locals out of voting for independence from Jakarta in the ballot scheduled to start in two weeks. Increasingly, the militias were intimidating the United Nations ballot scrutineers, most of whom were Australians. There was an Australian military operation called Spitfire, which was an emergency extraction of Australian and UN personnel from the troubled island at the southern tip of Indonesia. But commanders in the Australian Defence Force would tell you that they weren’t allowed to know the operational planning behind Spitfire – it was being kept a secret in Canberra – so the individual commands were having to plan their own logistics based on rumour.

As sleep crept up on him the chaotic images flashed across the screen and Mac felt for the poor bastard from the firm who was working in East Timor. Then his eyelids dropped and sleep finally took him.

They were steaming north for the Davao Gulf underneath the Philippines when the Australian Royal Navy Seahawk helo came into sight and asked permission to land on the Java Princess’s helipad. Finishing his breakfast, Mac thanked the officers in the wardroom and headed down the rear companionways to the stern decks.

Inside the helo Mac was given a flight suit and left alone. They made it to HMAS Adelaide in fourteen minutes and Mac spoke with the ship’s intelligence officer while the rest of the officers wiped egg yolk off their plates with their toast. They were going to steam north for another two hours and then fly Mac into Zamboanga City in Mindanao.

‘And then?’ asked Mac, sipping on a mug of coffee.

‘Beats me – we’re just the delivery boys, right?’ shrugged the intel officer, though Mac sensed he knew more than he was saying.

The navy landed Mac at the air base in Zamboanga just before eleven in the morning, where he was met by a local asset known to Western intelligence as Cubby. The friendly thirty-five-year-old shook Mac’s hand on the tarmac.

‘Got a charter for you, Mr Jeffries,’ said Cubby, whose ability to make things happen with minimum fuss was valuable to foreign intelligence services.

‘Nice,’ said Mac. He didn’t like to give too much away to people whose loyalty was based on a cheque.

‘Yes, Mr Jeffries,’ said the Filipino. ‘Two and quarter hour to Jakarta with government charter flight. Everything good for you, sir.’

Jakarta was the wrong direction and Mac mulled on it all the way into Halim air base on the outskirts of the vast capital of Indonesia. For the past eight months he’d been working covertly out of Lombok as Don Jeffries, consultant to foreign logging and mining companies, making sure they were greasing the right palms. One of the big problems with trying to exploit the natural resources of places like Borneo, West Papua and Sulawesi was inadvertently channelling your kickback to the wrong person, the other governor, the chief of police rather than the minister for policing.

Mac’s mission had been to infiltrate the companies, the provincial governments and Jakarta’s military and political structures, and gather intelligence of the type that could never be gained from cocktail parties and Red Cross receptions. He could only do that from a genuine business position, embedded somewhere away from the Aussie Embassy, and his recall to Jakarta meant a big change of some sort. It might even mean a reassignment, and he fantasised that it was a northern hemisphere posting, perhaps even as a ‘declared’ SIS officer in a big embassy. Such postings could be thunderously boring and highly PC – especially in contrast to South-East Asia – but they were where you had to go to earn your management credits and move upwards.

As Mac followed the other passengers into the air-con of Halim’s military-consular terminal he spotted a woman in her late twenties waiting on the other side of the immigration gate. Using his Alan McQueen passport, Mac eyed the woman while the perfunctory check was made, and concluded she must be there for him: the white blouse, blonde ponytail and blue pencil skirt basically spelled Employee of the Australian Commonwealth.

‘G’day,’ said Mac to the woman as he walked through.

‘Mr McQueen?’ she asked, putting her hand out to shake and clutching a clipboard with the other. ‘Kate Innes – DFAT.’

They made small talk as she led him to a red Holden Commodore at the rear of the terminal. ‘So, what’ve you got for me?’ he smiled, buckling up. ‘London? Tokyo?’

‘Actually,’ she said, pulling out of the park, ‘further south, I believe.’

Warming to the mystery, Mac took the envelope she offered and opened it. The Qantas tickets had him flying into Brisbane with a connection to Canberra.

‘Must be promotion time, eh Kate?’ he joked as they headed for the freeway.

‘Umm,’ she muttered, and Mac saw a blush under her sunnies.

‘Not so good?’ said Mac.

‘I’m sorry, Mr McQueen – my job was to give you the tickets and drive you to Hatta,’ she said, referring to Jakarta’s international airport, Soekarno-Hatta. ‘I don’t really know anything.’

‘Be careful with that kind of talk,’ said Mac, trying to make the girl feel better. ‘They’ll make you director-general.’

She started chuckling and then blushed at the career-limiting nature of the humour. ‘You trying to get me into trouble?’

‘I won’t tell a soul,’ said Mac, relaxing into the seat with a sigh, yearning for an armchair in the Qantas Club lounge and three or four very cold beers.

Grabbing the cooked breakfast and a glass of orange juice, Mac found a table for two against the wall of the Canberra Hyatt’s dining room and ordered coffee from the waitress. The front page of the Australian had a story about the Prime Minister rejecting an Australian Republic but also rejecting the Queen opening the Olympic Games in Sydney. Flipping through the pages he kept an eye on the Hyatt’s breakfast crowd. Politicians, lawyers, consultants, IT salesmen and all the associated political classes that swarmed around Canberra were mumbling at each other or into mobile phones. It was 7.41 and the daily hunt for taxpayer dollars was about to start.

Mac bought an overcoat from the men’s store in the Hyatt concourse, then walked across Commonwealth Avenue and through the stands of trees towards old Parliament House, the clear winter air hurting his lungs; they had become acclimatised to the sooty humidity of South-East Asia. The recall to Canberra played on him – it was obviously something to do with the Lok Kok mine, and folded in his pocket, were two pages of plain A4 paper with a field report he’d typed the previous night at the Hyatt’s business centre. Intelligence was a game of information and timing and he wanted his version of events on the record before the 8.30 meeting in the RG Casey building, which housed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, along with the Aussie SIS.