‘You whacked the Korean, Chloe, Moerpati and then Augusto – just as he was going to spill, and then, hey presto, there’s an unmarked US gunboat to take us off the beach.’

‘They were shadowing us all morning, McQueen,’ said Jim, eyes rolling. ‘You can’t take a shit at the Pentagon anymore without three HR forms – that boat was SOP.’

‘How did you know about the Korean money coming across into Lombok?’ asked Mac, praying for Bongo’s call to come through to one of Jim’s sat phones so he could nail this shut. ‘Come to think of it,’ taunted Mac, ‘how did you guys know so much about Lombok AgriCorp?’

‘We’re DIA – we cut our teeth in UNSCOM and the Twentieth Support Command. This is what we do, mate. The Korean money? We have agents at their casinos in Poi Pet – we trace that cash from source, okay?’

‘You have to trace it?’ said Mac. ‘I thought Lee Wa Dae was your agent?’

‘Not ours, McQueen,’ said Jim. ‘Langley once used him as a banking front and a conduit for their black funding, especially around Korea. He created the money-laundering schemes for heroin money through those banks in Macao – remember?’

Mac nodded. A bunch of North Korean military accounts were found disguised in apparently legitimate banks in Macao.

‘When the CIA realised that Wa Dae was putting the North Koreans’ drug money and the Agency’s corporate fronts through the same banking scams, they cut him loose,’ said Jim. ‘So, he was a US intelligence asset, but not now and never DIA.’

The sat phone trilled on a table by the door. Mac smirked, waiting for Jim to pick it up and hear someone call him ‘Champion’. He wanted to see Jim’s reaction, the reaction of a liar.

Standing, Jim looked at the ringing sat phone and leaned out his door. ‘Simon – your phone, buddy!’

Mac watched, stunned, as Simon picked up his sat phone and turned away.

‘Uh-huh,’ said the DIA analyst, stress in his voice. ‘Um, yeah, so I think… can I just… I’ll call you… and, yeah, so…’

Looking at Jim, Mac said, ‘D20.’

Turning first to Mac, then to Jim, Simon’s face was a study in guilt as he hung up and folded the aerial.

‘Who was that?’ asked Jim, furious.

‘Umm, I don’t know -’ started the analyst.

‘So why’d you answer to Champion?’ asked Mac.

‘Look, you don’t know -’ stuttered Simon, the yuppieish know-it-all act crumbling like a sandcastle.

‘Answer the question, buddy,’ said Jim, very softly. ‘Why would you answer to Champion?’

Simon kicked at the carpet, face reddening.

‘Why wouldn’t you express surprise when a stranger tells you that another copy of Operasi Boa has turned up?’ asked Mac, feeling the anger well in him.

Lurching sideways, Simon fumbled in the coat rack and came out with a black Beretta 9mm handgun, which he waved back and forth between them while backing up for the door.

‘Don’t try anything,’ he spluttered, nervous but quite steady with the gun.

‘I don’t want to try anything,’ said Mac. ‘I came here to get you to reverse the green light on Operasi Boa. You have to stop this madness.’

‘Why?’

‘Because, buddy,’ said Jim. ‘You can’t go killing civilians just to prove a concept. Is that what you’re involved in, Simon, a clinical trial that got out of hand?’

‘Stop!’ Simon yelled at Jim. ‘You never understood, man!’

‘Understood what?’ asked Jim, trying to keep his voice calm.

‘The importance of the science! What else?!’ he yelled.

‘When the science is a disease falling from a chopper, believe me, buddy, I know the importance,’ said Jim.

‘Shit, man,’ said Simon, smiling grimly. ‘The Koreans have been hounded for decades because of their Ethno-Bomb research, but you two aren’t scientists, you have no spirit of curiosity, no purity of -’

‘Ethno?’ said Mac. ‘What’s -’

‘Look at you, Jimbo! You’re just a spook, a spy! You tear everything down to the worst human motivations, but Saddam was trying to build some -’

‘Saddam?!’ interrupted Jim, his hands lowering. ‘You little cocksucker – it was you! You got me barred from that team in Iraq!’

‘We needed a scientist, Jimbo – UNSCOM did fine without you.’

‘You little -’ snarled Jim as he moved at Simon, fists clenched.

A shot fired and a lump of plasterboard leapt out of the wall behind Jim.

‘Don’t get confused, Jimbo,’ said Simon as Jim froze. ‘You might be the tough guy, but I have the gun.’

The glass of the entry door caved in with an explosion of glass, and Bongo Morales emerged in his tradesman’s overalls, swinging the A4 from his hip. As Mac saw the gun aimed at Jim, he realised Bongo had been prepped to go for the wrong guy.

‘No, Bongo,’ yelled Mac, trying to cross in front of Jim.

In the moment of hesitation, Simon turned and shot at Bongo, the first one missing, the second one hitting him in the throat. The A4 spewed bullets as Bongo keeled over and Mac dived for cover as Jim took a bullet in the thigh from the A4 jammed on full auto. Crawling under the cordite and smoke, Mac made his way into Jim’s open office, gunshots from Simon following him.

Crawling to Jim’s desk, Mac stood and fumbled manically at the drawers till he found a hip rig hiding beneath a bunch of files.

Wrenching the Beretta from Jim’s holster, Mac turned and found Jim standing in front of him, Simon’s handgun pushed into the back of his skull.

‘Drop it, McQueen,’ said Simon.

The safe door swung shut, plunging the three of them into darkness. Around Mac, Jim and Bongo, shelves reached to the ceiling, packed with American files, photo satchels and state secrets.

‘Reckon we’ve got three or four hours of oxygen in here before it gets grim,’ said Jim, his teeth chattering from the shock of his bullet wound.

‘Got a lighter?’ asked Bongo, still holding the bleeding graze on the side of his neck. ‘Left mine in the van.’

Jim pulled a lighter from his chinos and lit it. Standing, Mac looked around the tiny room, hoping for an air vent or trapdoor in the ceiling that they could use to attract attention. The ceiling of the safe was sealed but Mac noticed a red marker pen attached by string to the shelving. Grabbing a piece of paper from a file, he wrote Help, we’re in here on it and slipped it under the door.

The lighter grew too hot for Jim’s hand and they went back into darkness, Mac and Bongo tearing up Jim’s chinos to put a bandage on his leg.

‘So,’ said Mac, as Bongo tied off the light tourniquet above Jim’s wound, ‘is someone going to tell me what that fruitcake was on about?’

‘What part?’ asked Jim.

‘Did Simon say Haryono’s program was an “Ethno-Bomb”? What is that?’

‘Shit,’ said Jim, as he moved into a better position.

‘Well?’ asked Mac in the darkness.

‘Okay,’ sighed Jim, reluctant. ‘But I was going to tell you, okay?’

‘Okay, Jim – tell.’

‘The Ethno-Bomb was probably conceived by the Israelis after the Six-Day War, back in the late sixties,’ said Jim. ‘The IDF wanted an “Ultimate Contingency” – that is, if the Arab states finally got organised and attacked Israel simultaneously, what was the contingency for being overrun?’

‘There was an answer to that?’ asked Mac.

‘The ultimate contingency is that you destroy yourself to beat your attackers – you burn down your town on top of them. The enemy dies but the price of victory is ashes in your own mouth.’

‘So, the Ethno-Bomb?’

‘Well, in those days the ultra-right wing of the Israeli military was known as the Haganah. Heard of them?’

‘They were the old tough guys from the forties, weren’t they?’ asked Mac. ‘Assassinations and bombings against the Arabs?’

‘That’s them. Known to each other as “the Guild”. They were the hard old Russian and Polish Jews who had no time for the intellectual ideas of the German and French settlers. The Haganah was formally disbanded when the IDF was formed, in ’48 or ’49.’