The Unknown Terrorist

  73

  “Gina, listen. I had to call.”

  On hearing Wilder’s voice the Doll felt relieved. ‘A friend,’ she thought, ‘thank God, a friend!’

  “After I rang earlier there’s a knock on the door. I open it,” Wilder continued, “shitting myself, but it’s bloody Athens Loukakis.

  “Look, you know how he’s not a Fed or ASIO, he’s a drug squad cop. He knew nothing about the raids. He told me he thinks ASIO and the Feds have got it all wrong. He thinks it’s a terrible mix-up. He’s not even sure Tariq was a terrorist.”

  The Doll did not know what to say. It seemed the cruellest of jokes.

  “Who was he, then?” she asked.

  “He was a man called Tariq,” continued Wilder. “He was a computer programmer. He worked on the side as a mule bringing in heroin and coke.”

  The Doll could feel her upper lip smarting from the salty sweat beading there. It now seemed too stupid to be true—that who someone said they were, was, more or less, who they were. She wiped the sweat away with the back of her hand.

  “He’s dead,” she said. “Does he know that?”

  “Everyone knows it now, Gina,” Wilder said. “The news hasn’t stopped running it. Athens thinks a drug ring had him killed because he was getting too much publicity and they didn’t want the police catching him and working out the real story.”

  The Doll had now reached the boundary of the cemetery, and made her way across a busy highway.

  “What’s all that noise?” said Wilder.

  The Doll looked up and about, and almost told her where she was, but instead just said, “Cars.”

  “He thinks you’re innocent, but he needs you to turn yourself in so he can prove it. He wants to meet you, and you can hand yourself in to him. Peacefully. No SWAT squads. He’ll help you get your story listened to. No men in black with machine guns. He wants to avoid the possibility of anything bad happening.”

  The Doll walked past headstone shops. Behind their high Weldmesh fences were displayed glistening new marble headstones—black and red and charcoal—on which the names of the dead were inscribed in Cyrillic, Chinese and Thai.

  “He tells me they think you’re armed and he can’t guarantee your safety. I told him not to be stupid, that you don’t have a gun.”

  The Doll felt her hair with her hand.

  “Then he told me you’d stolen one from that sleaze Moretti.”

  The wavy locks that Wilder had with such care straightened, which the Doll had avoided getting wet in the shower to keep flat, were, in the heat, resuming their natural kink.

  “Christ, Gina,” said Wilder. “What were you thinking …”

  And the Doll listened to Wilder saying it would be best to turn herself in and agreed with her, agreed with her too that in Australia things always get sorted out in the end and the mistake would be rectified.

  But the Doll thought no such thing. ‘Have I become such a fool?’ she was thinking while she talked. ‘The mistake can never be rectified—I can only make sure I’m not caught.’

  How not to get caught was something about which the Doll had no idea other than those gleaned from movies. And so she continued telling Wilder how it made sense to sort this out, to clear her name and put the mess behind her, while all the time thinking she would run—but to where? To leave Australia struck the Doll as impossible—she would need a fake passport and how on earth were such things to be got? What would she use for money to escape?

  And the thought of money threw the Doll into fresh despair—here she was dreaming of escaping and she only had Wilder’s mother’s credit card and a little over two hundred dollars left in her wallet, enough money, if she was very careful, to survive another two or three days. And then what?

  The Doll’s mind pitched and swayed with the impossibility and hopelessness of her situation. To give herself up was madness, for they wanted her as a terrorist, no matter what Wilder or Nick Loukakis said, they wanted their victim. Nick Loukakis could be lying, he could be telling the truth. It didn’t matter. The Doll sensed that no one would tell the truth about her once she was in their power. Too much had been said, too much done, too many powerful people were now mixed up in it. And anyway, who would listen to her, a pole dancer, a nobody, a westie, when they had taken the little truths of her life to make up a big lie?

  With her hand the Doll flattened her hair against her scalp, a futile action, and, knowing it to be so, felt something close to panic as she continued to pat her hand as hard as she could against her head. She abruptly stopped, feeling more foolish than ever, fearing people were looking at her, wondering why on earth she was slapping her head.

  “I’m frightened,” Wilder said. She paused, as if waiting for the Doll to reach some conclusion that to Wilder seemed so obvious. “They’ll kill you.”

  The Doll tried to stay in the shadows of buildings as she made her way toward the Lidcombe train station.

  “I told him, Gina. I told him about the hotel. I told him about Mum’s credit card. I told him everything. I told him because I believed in him, Gina, and if you won’t give yourself up, it’s better he finds you than they do.” But the Doll was no longer listening, she was walking quickly, walking to God knew where, while Wilder kept talking, talking. “It’s not betrayal, Gina, it’s friendship. He wants to help you. ‘This is Australia, not Nazi Germany,’ I told him—”

  ‘They cut you up, eh, Wilder?’ the Doll wanted to interrupt her friend. ‘They make you into what you’re not and then they condemn you for being who they say you are, then it’s like, “Do what we say or we’ll kill you”, and then …’ But her thoughts petered out, and she said nothing of the sort. In any case, the Doll knew such ideas made no sense to Wilder, while the cop’s story, whether it was true or not, explained everything neatly, like the Sydney Morning Herald, like the ALP, like all her opinions: a mistake with the world that Wilder knew how to set right.

  “Gina,” Wilder said, “listen to me …”

  But the Doll was remembering the bonsai garden Wilder treated so carelessly, where the only thing that ever seemed to grow was the mound of dope ash in the Bakelite ashtray and where the beautiful plants she had bought only to laugh about withered in the terrible heat and then died.

  “Are they listening, my friend?”

  Before Wilder had even replied, the Doll knew the terrible truth.

  “Of course,” said Wilder. “Why do you think that nicked phone hasn’t been disabled?”

  “Tell Max happy birthday,” the Doll said, and hung up.

  74

  The Doll now found her opinion of the world once more in flux. Whatever had seemed true yesterday no longer seemed true today. Everything was constantly altering. It was not the first time: as a child everything she’d held dear and true was revealed to her to be rotten and false, without foundation. And so she started again, on another basis, with the belief that she could make her own family and that family would embody all that was good, and through and with her family she would find love. But then the screw on which life depends snapped once more; with Liam, it died before it was born.

  Once more she rebuilt herself, her life, her world, believing less and hoping only for small things. She did not ask for large things, and she did not dare hope for happiness, or ease, or luck. She would make her money, no matter how hard the making. She would buy an apartment, no matter how many years in the paying. And she would make a home, no matter how little and insignificant. She would put herself through university, train herself, and have a job that was secure and from which she might derive some small pride. And always she would hold her soul close and precious, allow no one to take it from her and trash it. These seemed neither large nor foolish things, but something solid, a rock, on which to build a life.

  For a long time, all that time since Liam’s death, this had been the Doll’s sole vanity—to believe she had reckoned with the harshness and unpredictability of the world, building her life on foundations that seemed u
nshakeable. If not harmony, wasn’t there at least a deal she had made with this world—how could it not endure?

  But still these things had happened to her, and it appeared to her that her rock had been shattered into a million pieces of gravel, that her life had been ruthlessly broken, and her soul was somehow being taken from her, and all she could feel, in spite of her innocence, was the most consuming shame.

  Wilder, thought the Doll, Wilder, my best friend. Wilder, who believed in goodness. Far better, thought the Doll, to believe in only the bad things: people let you down, people lie, people are cowards. Such beliefs never let you down.

  And then the Doll felt hot tears in her eyes. She angrily rubbed them away with her knuckles. Whatever did she expect? That in the end she wouldn’t be betrayed? After all, hadn’t she betrayed Fung? She now saw that she had been deluded, that all were deluded, both the strong and the weak, for all hurt and exploit one another. All that differs is the degree of success—Moretti less successful, her best friend, Wilder, it had turned out, more so.

  She dropped the phone in a garbage bin, and after it threw the plastic bag with its dead flowers and scrubbing brush and detergent and Brasso. When it hit the cans and takeaway containers, the phone made a noise like crap hitting crap, a soft, forgettable nothing of a sound.

  75

  Richard Cody’s head hurt more than ever. He stood out in the Six studios backlot, in the short shadow thrown by the large building, because he had needed to think, and to think he needed to get out of the cutting room and the office. But the bitumen only radiated more heat and there drifted up from a group of smokers standing a short distance away an acrid aroma that only added to his sense of something about to explode into flames. He hoped it wasn’t his reputation. He was a cautious man, he had built his success out of careful positioning and careful words and careful friendships, and he began to fear he had staked much too much on the gamble of this story.

  Getting a half-hour special up in two days was no mean feat even with the best of stories, but it was already past noon, and with less than seven hours to go before they went to air, he still didn’t have anything like the best of stories, and what he had didn’t work.

  Worse, he had been told by Jerry Mendes that Mr Frith’s lunch the previous day with the prime minister’s secretary had gone very well, so very well that Mr Frith had declared “our feeling” was that the special now ought to run for an hour. But the material had not proved as juicy as Richard Cody had hoped and, worse, promised, and the longer format was only going to highlight its weaknesses.

  And at that moment when Richard Cody felt utterly weary and dejected, when the whole project seemed impossible, when he felt his career was once more about to go down the dunny, his phone rang.

  It was Siv Harmsen.

  He told Richard Cody that “an anonymous package” would be left at Six’s front desk in five minutes’ time. It had footage, said Siv Harmsen, that “had fallen off the back of a truck” showing a pro-Islamist rally in Cairo in 1989. Siv Harmsen apologised for the quality, and then gave him the number of “Bill”, who would be willing to be filmed as an anonymous security source. He would identify one of the figures in the footage as an Islamic fundamentalist who happened to be Tariq al-Hakim’s uncle.

  “And get this,” Siv Harmsen continued, “there’s ten seconds of Uncle Tea Towel protesting outside a New York court in support of the 1993 Twin Towers bomber.” The package would also contain photocopies of travel records showing that Tariq al-Hakim had travelled to Pakistan four times in the last two years, and twice to Malaysia.

  “So he was in a terrorist cell?” asked Richard Cody.

  “Well, mate,” said Siv Harmsen, “that’s where they’re so clever. You see, you don’t have to be in a cell to be part of a cell. Once you start thinking that way the rest is inevitable.”

  Richard Cody liked this way of thinking, whereby the fact of something missing could be used to prove the idea of it actually existing. It would help enormously.

  “And look—here we have bombs, a Muslim whose close family has demonstrated dangerous Islamist tendencies; a Muslim, moreover, who travels regularly, mysteriously, to al-Qa’ida hot spots—well, it’s a lay down misere.”

  Then he gave Richard Cody two other names: one of a former US Special Forces colonel, and one of a retired senior intelligence analyst who just happened to be in Sydney that afternoon in a hotel close to Six’s studios. Both would say these very things to a camera, promised Siv Harmsen, but far more persuasively. Now he had to run, or he would be late for a lunch appointment. The phone went dead.

  Richard Cody blinked once, twice, and his eyes filled with water. Though this could have been confused with tears of joy or relief, it was his blue-tinted contact lenses, irritated by the hot, abrasive smog.

  Todd Birchall, on viewing the new footage half an hour later, was delighted.

  Richard Cody’s eyes were once more clear and focused.

  “Now take me,” he said, “from a fuck to a flame thrower.”

  76

  When he got back to the station in the city, Nick Loukakis rang Tony Buchanan, who was riding high as operational manager at the Counter Terrorism Unit. He and Tony had started out together, pounding the beat out among the slopes in Cabramatta, and when Tony’s second wife kicked him out, it had been Nick Loukakis who had taken him in.

  None of this meant much to Tony Buchanan when Nick Loukakis explained why he believed Gina Davies was innocent. Tony Buchanan thought how some stories are good to hear, and some aren’t. This wasn’t good, not good at all.

  “You know how these things are always in the details, Athens,” Tony Buchanan said when he finished, “and you don’t know those details.”

  Nick Loukakis had run enough interviews to know when he should be talking and when he should be listening.

  “Do you, Athens?”

  Nick Loukakis’s feet felt so wet with sweat in his shoes it was as if he had stepped in a bath. He wiped the back of his neck.

  “How can I know them?” Nick Loukakis said.

  “That’s right, Athens,” Tony Buchanan said, “you can’t. Even I don’t. But the security boys know what they’re doing. There’s the Feds and ASIO and—”

  “What if it’s not the truth?”

  “Yeah, well, fuck me, there is that. Is that the same truth you worried about, Athens, when you fixed Harry Tait up with the planted coke to get the initial conviction?”

  “He was a killer.”

  “Sure. But the coke wasn’t the truth. And these people are killers. Look, Athens, I gotta go. I’ve got a meeting in Parramatta in half an hour.” He was about to hang up, but he felt bad. “You know, we have to get back out on the water soon. On that beautiful harbour of ours. You’d love the boat I’ve got now. Thirty-five-footer. Magnificent.”

  Nick Loukakis rang Jenny Rhodes in the Feds, but she was out. He left a message. He rang George Sziporski, who was working as liaison between the New South Wales force and ASIO. George Sziporski seemed to be taking it on board, until he said there was an interview going live on Joe Cosuk with the minister. George Sziporski said he would ring back.

  Nick Loukakis searched through his desk until he found the small portable radio he had bought when he used to jog at lunchtime, before his wife confronted him about Sally Wilder and he still cared how he looked.

  By the time he had the earphones in, the radio on, the station found, the interview was nearly finished, but he still heard enough to know what it meant.

  “It’s like a wild pig hunt,” the minister was saying. “It’s frightening and we don’t know where the pig is. But we’re trained, we’re ready, and the pig won’t escape.”

  The shock jock laughed. The shock jock said,

  “It’s good to hear a politician speak in a language all we Australians can understand. Thank you, Minister.”

  “Well, thank you, Joe,” the minister replied, relief palpable in his now deeper, easier voice, as if he had been
the hunted and not the hunter. “The Australian people need to know we are going to get this suicide bomber before she gets Australians.”

  “Fucking fuck them,” said Nick Loukakis loudly because he was wearing earphones, and when a young woman cop walking by raised her eyes, he flashed her a smile and tried not to feel foolish.

  The radio babbled with ads until the news came on telling of how, in the wake of the failed Homebush bombing and revelations of terrorist cells containing native-born Australians, the government’s previously sagging approval ratings had risen to record highs. Frustrated by his own inability to change anything and not knowing what else to do, Nick Loukakis continued listening.

  His phone rang. With some relief he pulled out his earphones and answered. It was Jenny Rhodes, but he had barely started on his story when she told him to forget about it.

  “Dopey Sydney cops should stick to being dopey Sydney cops,” she said, reprising a private joke they once shared, “and leave security to the people who know what they’re doing.”

  George Sziporski didn’t ring back. Why would he?

  77

  The lights of the train carriage went off for a minute then flickered back on just after the train had been sucked back into the tunnel and its darkness, heading into the city. Then the train stopped and the air con with it, and the Doll sat in the increasingly sweltering carriage, waiting.

  After several minutes armed cops moved through the train with sniffer dogs and mirrors on poles and along with them came word that there had been a bomb threat. To hide her face, the Doll picked up a newspaper that was lying on the seat next to her. Its front page had a new photo of her topless, breasts pixelated, with the caption:

  DANCER OF DEATH

  From her haircut it looked like it had been taken a year or so ago, and the setting suggested some private show she had difficulty recalling.