6.

A persistent ringing woke Anna Rosen on Monday morning. She rolled off the office couch on to her knees and picked up the receiver.

‘At the third stroke it will be 7.45 precisely. Beep, beep, beep.’

She yawned, lay back down again and closed her eyes, trying to reconnect with the lingering images of her dream.

Marin Katich again. He was still there, deep in her subconscious. She didn’t need an analyst to tell her that she hadn’t shaken him off. But this dream had been the strangest yet. Marin had worn a black uniform as he walked across a field through long grass. And there had been something in his hand. A gun? A knife? The image had slipped away before she could recall the detail—something definitely bad there.

She rubbed her face hard. The image had left her disturbed because it was so anachronistic. Marin had never worn the black uniform. That was his father, Ivo, the murderous old Nazi, and it had been way back in 1942.

Thoughts of Marin Katich raised the same questions she’d been asking herself for two years. Why had he disappeared? Where the hell was he? She had strong suspicions. If they were right, he was most likely dead. Perhaps his ghost was haunting her dreams.

Anna had decided early on not to tell her boss that she had a personal motive behind her interest in the Ustasha. Even before her indiscretion with him, she’d known Peter McHugh well enough to know he’d distrust her for it and might even pull her off the story.

She looked over at her desk. The edit master was still there in its box. No gremlins or spies had run off with it in the night. At 4 am she had gone to the trouble of making a copy and had locked it away in a filing cabinet just in case. She wasn’t paranoid—no, ASIO really could be utterly ruthless. Anna and her whole family had ample evidence of that. They’d been targets of the security agencies her entire life, and ASIO came out of her story very badly.

She held the box in her lap, her painstakingly gathered evidence. How harmless it looked—just a cardboard container holding a tape full of recorded words. Maybe Pandora had had the same thought.

Sunken-eyed and bedraggled, Anna made her way back through the lower corridors. Shoals of dayshift workers were coming the other way. Some of them glanced at the dark apparition weaving through them like the last survivor of a rock concert.

As daylight glimmered at the end of the final corridor, Anna put on her sunglasses. The morning sun lit her up like a spotlight as she stepped outside and met the unflappable old guard at the door to the car park.

‘Reginald.’

‘Up all night, love?’

‘Pretty much. Going for coffee. Want one?’

‘I’d kill for one, love.’

‘No need for that,’ she said, flicking him a peace sign.

He had probably killed a few people in his time, old Reg. He was a veteran, like most of the guards and front-desk boys, all of them recruited by the same tough old bastard, a retired sergeant major who ran the Commission’s security. Reg once gave her the drum on his war in the minimalist way of real veterans: New Guinea. Lost some good mates. Fucking nightmare.

She liked him.

The car park sat above Darlinghurst, surrounded by a high chain-link fence. If the broadcaster were a hilltop fortress, these would be its ramparts.

Anna descended a steep stairway to the lane below, where she stepped warily into a carpet of syringes. The smack freaks had scuttled off to dark places before the sun caught them out in the open. Now the bright light picked up swirls of red in the discarded fits, the counter flow of their life’s blood sucked back into the hypodermics.

In her early days as a trainee Anna used to come in by cab at 5 am for the morning shift, lounging in the back seat and marvelling at her unfamiliar entitlement to a taxi docket. The hookers had still been around at that hour, shivering in the pre-dawn chill beneath the stone steps down to William Street. They’d stir listlessly at the cab’s arrival, hoping it might deliver them one final john. Simultaneously relieved and disappointed, they’d peer at her through pinned eyes and veils of smoke, then they’d cast their gazes downwards again, tapping ash into empty Tango cans. One might offer a desultory greeting: ‘G’day, love. Spare us ten bucks?’

Anna always smiled and shook her head, climbing the stairs between them, as if part of the sisterhood. Their miniskirts were hiked over bruised legs, mascara melted on their anaemic faces, and she clocked their blank looks, their purple lips and their shuttered hearts. She hated that this life had fucked them up so badly.

This morning, as she stepped over the evidence of last night’s misdeeds, Anna rehearsed, as she always did, the obvious questions. Who fed their habits? Where were the cops? The corrupt bastards were all on the take—most of them, anyway. So many stories, so little time.

She walked up the laneway to the junction of William Street and Darlinghurst Road, gateway to the closed-down carnival of Kings Cross. Exposed to daylight, the Cross had a squalid beauty. The vast wall of neon, so diverting at night, now revealed as nothing more than vacuum tubes and scaffolding, tacked on to conceal the crumbling buildings. The upper floors were left to peel and rot above rusty awnings that shaded stinking chicken shops and milk bars and padlocked strip joints. A few US servicemen still lurched about these establishments, looking for sustenance at the butt end of their shore leave. Morning traffic rolled slowly through the newly washed streets. Kerb-crawling cabs scooped up the remnants of the night.

Anna made her way through back lanes to the Piccolo on Roslyn Street, where Vittorio gave her a nod from behind the ancient Gaggia.

‘Ciao, Anna.’ He produced an espresso in a little white cup. ‘Se non fossi cosi snella saresti una bella ragazza.’

‘Too early, Vittorio. I need subtitles.’

‘If you weren’t so skinny you’d be beautiful.’

‘Una bella rag-azza?’

‘Si, buono.’

‘Mille grazie, I guess.’

‘Prego. But I need to feed you up.’

‘An omelette, a small orange juice, and another one of these in a moment,’ she said, holding up the coffee.

‘Go sit. I make you breakfast.’

There was a copy of the Herald on the bar. Anna unfolded the paper and scanned the front page: ‘Yugoslavia to Protest on Bombings.’

This was about Belgrade’s anger that so little had been done to stop Ustasha extremists. Ambassador Vidovic would meet senior government ministers today and deliver that message to his host country.

Anna knew Vidovic well. He was a useful contact. The Yugoslavs ran their own network of agents and kept detailed intelligence files. Not exactly untainted information, but their knowledge of the Croat extremists was sophisticated. They considered them an existential threat.

The Herald confirmed that detectives on the bombing investigation were convinced it was the work of right-wing Croats. Anna sipped the espresso. Well, that was blindingly obvious, unless you were the prime minister or the attorney-general. Sure enough, further down, she found the stock denials from Ivor Greenwood, the same old lines he had peddled in his interview with her: there was no evidence of a Croat terrorist organisation; the police had investigated every allegation of terrorist training camps and found no evidence of those either; if Labor had additional information they should just pass it on to the police …

Anna was relieved. The paper had nothing new. Nothing that undermined her story and none of the fresh evidence she would air tonight.

She flicked through to the inside coverage: ‘Croat Leaders Deny Bomb Plot.’ Again, the standard reaction from community leaders: if Croats were responsible for Saturday’s blasts, they could only be ‘sick individuals’.

‘Jesus-fucking-Christ,’ she muttered, shaking the paper so angrily that she spilt coffee on it. If you included the indoctrination of children in special schools, the widespread fundraising for Ustasha operations in the community, the secret training camps, the bomb-making classes, the men recruited here to join armed guerrilla incursions inside Yugoslavia and the covert backing of Ustasha priests in the Catholic Church, that was one hell of a lot of sick individuals.

Then she discovered something she had missed. While she was travelling between Melbourne and Canberra, four hundred marchers had taken to the streets in Sydney for ‘Captive Nations Week’. Reading the account of it, Anna let out another cry of outrage.

Vittorio arrived with her breakfast. ‘What is it?’ he asked, placing the orange juice and the steaming omelette on her table and handing her the cutlery. ‘Nothing to make you lose your appetite?’

‘No, no, I’m starving. This looks great.’ She smiled at him and pointed to the paper. ‘It’s a story about the Town Hall bombs. Two federal ministers are saying the whole thing’s a communist plot, that’s all.’

‘That’s what they do, Anna.’ Vittorio leaned in, sotto voce, a Renaissance conspirator. ‘Remember the Reichstag fire? That was a Jewish plot, right? Nothing changes.’

‘If you leave out the Holocaust.’

‘That’s why we got to stop the Nazis before they get going.’

‘Good point,’ she conceded.

Vittorio raised a theatrical eyebrow to confirm the great significance of his comment and returned to the bar to serve a new customer. Anna drained her orange juice and started in on the omelette. Vittorio had never let her down and today was no exception. She felt her strength returning as she ate, enough to go back to the newspaper article.

Accompanying the story was a picture of the marchers’ spokesman, the minister for Social Services, William ‘Billy’ Wentworth. Anna snorted. True to form, the crazy old bastard had emerged as the leading proponent of the conspiracy theory on the bombings: simply blame the evil communists, Yugoslav agent provocateurs who’d bombed their own country’s travel offices to blacken the name of the poor benighted Croats.

‘We recall that the communist terror had its origins in individual acts of civil violence,’ Wentworth had told the crowd. Anna effortlessly conjured up his maniacal, lisping delivery. ‘There is likely to be a parallel here with the Australia First Movement in the 1940s. That was a communist plot, but was presented as a right-wing group.’

Then there was fellow marcher Dr Malcolm MacKay, minister for the Navy and another senior member of the government peddling the same conspiracy theory. MacKay claimed that people were ‘sitting ducks’ for the communists. By ‘people’ he meant good anti-communist Croats.

‘I am far from convinced,’ MacKay opined, ‘that the causes are solely or mainly on the area most obvious of blame.’ He demanded the police turn their investigation in the direction of the communists.

Anna sighed. Captive Nations Week had once again flushed out the lunatic fringe. She was all for demonstrating solidarity with those people trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Even she, the daughter of a leading communist, could sympathise with that.

Her father had led the push inside the Party to reject Moscow’s leadership after the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest way back in 1956. It wasn’t until new squadrons of tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring in 1968 that Frank Rosen won that argument. It was one outrage too many, and most of the comrades finally sided with Frank. The Party severed its ties with Moscow, but it was irretrievably split as a result.

Anna despised the pro-Soviet nutters who’d torn the Party apart as much as she hated the right-wing nutters who’d hijacked Captive Nations Week. There were fascists at either end of the spectrum. But this was too much!

She threw the paper down. Less than twenty-four hours after the worst terrorist attack in the city’s history, and despite the irrefutable logic of who was responsible for it, the hard right was already looking into the wrong end of the telescope.

Anna was still fuming when Vittorio returned with her second espresso. She asked him for another coffee in a paper cup for Reg. Time to get back and knock this nonsense on the head once and for all.

Detective Sergeant Jim Kelly, the head of the Special Breaking Squad, was a wily old coot. That was Al Sharp’s assessment of the man running the investigation into the Sydney bombings. Kelly was tall with a long, lugubrious face, like Chips Rafferty. He looked as if the sun had burned all the fat off him, like he was made out of wood and leather.

Sharp had shaved and climbed back into the rumpled suit he’d worn on the surveillance op earlier that morning. He still felt shabby when he knocked on Kelly’s door to give him a quick briefing before the meeting at CIB Headquarters.

‘Morning, boss.’

Kelly looked up from the pile of reports on his desk. He wore a crisp white shirt with braces, metal sleeve garters and a two-tone tie with a silver clip. His hair was slicked back. Sharp caught whiffs of Brylcreem and Old Spice.

‘Nothing here from you, Mr Sharp,’ said Kelly.

‘We finished at 3 am. I thought it best to brief you personally.’

‘Convenient, you mean?’

‘Expedient, I’d say.’

Kelly produced a thin smile. ‘At risk of being a smart-arse?’ When Sharp didn’t respond Kelly continued: ‘So, brief me.’

Sharp explained that the restaurant was now live for surveillance, with a listening device in place and a tap on its only phone.

‘How’d you go with the two eggheads?’ Kelly asked.

‘They’re pros,’ Sharp said. ‘As good as I’ve worked with. But their equipment’s old. If we’re going to be doing more of this, someone needs to spend some money fast to update their gear.’

‘They put you up to this?’ Kelly stared at him for a moment, considering the request. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘Get me a budget in writing as soon as possible. It’ll be approved. The top brass is ready to throw everything at this.’

Kelly stood up and grabbed a well-pressed grey jacket from a hanger on the back of his door. On its hook he left the black pork-pie hat with its colourful feather. Hanging below it, Sharp could now see, was an empty shoulder holster. He assumed the revolver was locked away somewhere in the office.

Kelly shrugged into the jacket and turned to Sharp. ‘I’d like you to join me at the briefing and meet the whole squad. How soon can you organise your own briefing for the detectives?’

‘On the Croats?’

‘Obviously.’ Kelly looked at him as if he were an idiot.

‘Sorry,’ said Sharp. ‘I thought you might have been talking about the surveillance op, but I imagine that’ll be on a need-to-know basis.’

‘Why?’

‘We didn’t have a warrant.’

Kelly flashed a sly smile. ‘Don’t you worry about that, Al … What I want you to do is to brief the detectives on the targets, the main suspects and their organisational links.’

‘I’ve asked for a projector. I’ll be ready as soon as it arrives.’

‘Good,’ said Kelly, pleased. ‘Make that a priority. Let’s go—they’re waiting.’

The hubbub from the squad room went instantly quiet the moment Jim Kelly’s wide shoulders cleared the doorway. Several dozen men were positioned around the room, sitting on chairs and tables, or standing with tea mugs and cigarettes in each hand. Smoke hung in the air.

Typewriters, telephones and notebooks littered the tables, along with ashtrays, dirty mugs and takeaway-food wrappers. A man with a napkin tucked into his collar was munching on a Chiko Roll. In the open space in front of the desks large noticeboards were pinned with photographs of the bombsites and charred parts of the devices. Enlarged street maps indicated the targets and the distances between them. Mugshots of suspects, some of whom Sharp recognised, were also stuck up in neat rows.

He scrutinised the front ranks of the Special Breaking Squad and implacable faces stared back at him. They wore the habitual expressions of detectives: uncompromising and cynical, or else blank and unreadable. He sniffed at the air. The collective odour was not sweet, like Kelly’s Old Spice—it was something chemical that leeched from their pores, the hormonal stench of latent violence. They’d been recruited from the toughest and best investigators in the homicide and armed hold-up squads. Some of the younger ones had been brought over from 21 Division, the training ground for hard men.

At the back of the room, separate from the detectives, he saw his team from the Electronics Unit, Daltrey and McCafferty. They looked tired and pissed off, but neither of them had the intimidating aura of the detectives. Sharp caught Bob McCafferty’s eye and nodded to him, receiving only the smallest jerk of the head in response. Around them was a small collection of other men who, either by their manner of dress, their hairstyle or their demeanour, faintly radiated eccentricity. These, Sharp reasoned, were perhaps from forensics.

Jim Kelly took up a central place in front of the noticeboards and addressed the room in a booming voice.

‘On Saturday morning, some cunt walked right into our patch, waltzed down George Street with two huge fucking bombs and set them off without any regard for human life,’ he roared with a real anger. ‘It’s a miracle no one was killed. There’s a ballet school above one of the targets. It’s a miracle none of those little girls was blown apart. Any of you have daughters?’

A few of the men mumbled assent.

‘When this murderous cunt blasted those people and those buildings, he also blew a huge hole in our credibility. We didn’t see it coming. We don’t know who did it. The lunatic is still at large. If we don’t catch him, he could do it again tomorrow. As far as the public is concerned, and as far as the press is concerned, we were caught with our pants around our ankles, our dicks in our hand and our thumb in our mouths. Does anyone disagree with that?’

Kelly stared around the room belligerently. No one said a word.

‘I didn’t think so …’

He picked up the cudgels again, effortlessly shifting into the blistering anger of a coach whose team has let him down badly.

‘We are all in fucking shame. All of us. And we will be in fucking shame until we catch this cunt. That’s why you’re all here now. You’re supposed to be the best of the best in whatever squads you belong to. From now on, until we lock these bastards away, you are all members of the Special Breaking Squad. Whatever else you’ve been working on, drop it! Put it aside or hand it over to someone else, because this is your only job from now on. We will find this cunt and we will break him, and we will find the cunts who ordered this cunt to do it and we’ll break them too, and then we’re going to break the cunts who donated money to run their murderous fucking organisations and we’re going to break those organisations. They have no right to bring their evil to our country. No fucking right. It’s un-Australian! Any questions?’

One of the younger detectives spoke up. ‘We’re assuming this is political, are we? All other motives ruled out?’

Kelly peered down at him, not unkindly. ‘I’m not ruling anything out, son. If you come to me with evidence of another motive, I’ll take it seriously. But this fits a pattern. There’ve been sixteen politically motivated bombings against Yugoslavian government targets in the past few years. That’s got to be our starting point. I’ll have more to say about that shortly.’

Now one of the front rankers piped up. Sharp recognised him from press coverage of his antics as Bill Lonergan, a notorious homicide detective.

‘I’ve dealt with some of these Yugos before,’ said Lonergan. ‘They’re hard nuts. Fucken tribes that stick together. Never come across a reliable informer among ’em. You accuse ’em of something, they act like they don’t understand the language, or they say some other wog in a different tribe done it.’

‘Well, Bill, first thing’s first. It’s obvious that no one will talk to you at all if you call them wogs.’

‘Wog’s a wog, isn’t it?’ Lonergan called back insolently. ‘Like a spade’s a spade.’

That drew a few laughs from the front rank until Kelly cut them off. ‘Carry on like that, Bill, and you’ll be out of this squad on your ear. Want a neutral term? Call them cunts!’

That brought more laughter, and even Sharp found himself chuckling.

‘On your other point: it’s true, they are hard nuts to crack, so we have our own operating instructions, right from the top. Not to be repeated outside this room. From the commissioner himself, the instruction is to do Whatever It Takes. We are going to get these cunts under the Whatever It Takes rule.’

Sharp stared at Kelly. A chill went through him. What the hell was he talking about?

Lonergan, who seemed to be the unofficial spokesman for the older detectives, piped up again. ‘Short of murder, right?’ he cried out. ‘Some of us are paid to investigate those.’

Kelly reined him in again. ‘Yes, Bill, short of murder. And short of fitting up some poor bastard … You, of all people, know what I’m talking about.’ He stared pointedly at Lonergan, whose reputation in that regard was legendary. ‘The last thing I want is to turn some dumb migrant into a patsy, like the bloke they pinned for Kennedy.’

‘Oswald!’ someone called out.

‘That’s right,’ said Kelly. ‘So what do I mean by Whatever It Takes?’

Sharp leaned forward. His future in the squad now hung on Kelly’s answer to his own rhetorical question.

‘I mean that we will not wait for warrants before questioning a suspect. I mean that with these hard cases the normal rules of engagement do not apply. We need to rattle their fucking cages. On my orders we will pick people off the street or take them out of their homes, and we will interrogate them under my rules. We will tap their phones and we will bug their homes and their meeting places, and we won’t wait for warrants to do it. Our authority to do this comes from the commissioner and, beyond him, from the minister. You should know that surveillance is already under way—operations began last night.’

Sharp caught his breath. That was his operation or, more precisely, his unauthorised operation—the one he thought was meant to be top secret.

‘We’re not alone in this investigation,’ Kelly continued. ‘Mr Sharp, will you come forward?’

He beckoned and, with no option, Sharp walked over and stood next to him, facing the whole squad, focusing his eyes on a point high at the back of the room.

‘Al Sharp has been seconded to the Breaking Squad from the Commonwealth Police—’

An audible groan came from the front rank.

‘He’s their leading expert on Croatian terrorists and I’ve asked him to give you all a briefing later today on the organisations, their links to criminal violence and the individuals who give the orders.’

Bill Lonergan could not restrain himself. ‘You’re fucken kidding,’ he called out. ‘We’ll be doing Whatever It Takes and the Feds will be here watching us from the inside? I don’t know about the rest of you blokes, but I haven’t got a suicide wish.’

‘As always, Bill, I can rely on you to be the naysayer.’ Kelly addressed the detective with undisguised condescension. ‘So let me put your mind at rest. Yesterday Mr Sharp came to me with information about a key premises where leaders from the most suspect Croat organisations conduct regular secret meetings. On my authorisation, he led a bugging op last night. It was our first action under the Whatever It Takes rule. So, Bill, Mr Sharp here is not an outsider in this squad. He’s well and truly one of us.’

Sharp looked down at Lonergan and met an expression of undisguised contempt. He glanced at the head of the Special Breaking Squad, who beamed back at him. All’s well with the world, Kelly seemed to imply.

Sharp was left to reflect on the prophetic accuracy of his initial assessment. Jim Kelly was a wily old coot, that was for sure. And now he had Sharp by the short and curlies.

Anna Rosen raced back from the Cross to Forbes Street, careful not to spill Reg’s coffee. The commissionaire took the paper cup gratefully, holding it in two hands as if the receptacle itself was designed to warm him.

‘Bewdy,’ he said. ‘Nuthin’ better. This from the eye-tie?’

Anna narrowed her eyes. ‘Si, Regiano,’ she said. ‘Uno espresso Italiano.’

‘All right, love. No need to go all continental.’

‘Eye-ties, Reg? Really?’

‘It’s what we called ’em in the desert war. They were the enemy.’

‘And now they make the best coffee.’

‘Can’t argue with that, love.’

Anna left the old soldier contemplating national migration policy and made her way back to her office. The plan was to meet Peter McHugh at 9 am to review the final cut of her program. She hadn’t seen him since she’d left his apartment on Saturday morning and she wasn’t looking forward to it. She had put the whole messy business out of her head while she had been engrossed in the edit, but it came back to her now and made her tense about the meeting.

As head of Talks, McHugh had commissioned the Ustasha project and mentored her through the two months of investigation. He was a risk-taker, one of the few editors who would even consider commissioning an untried reporter to do a major investigation. His decision to pull the program forward for broadcast tonight had compounded the risk.

Perhaps it had all been about getting into her pants, but Anna also knew that McHugh was prepared to back obsessive pursuits when their goals lined up with his own political philosophy. He seemed impressed with the body of evidence Anna had assembled to show that Croatian extremists had thrived for decades under the secret protection of ASIO. McHugh had long believed the organisation was an illicit branch of conservative politics.

Anna looked up at the wall clock in the common room. 9.20. Peter McHugh was late. She recalled his comment about the charming Murphy. I know he’ll like you. You know what we call that, Peter? Pots and black kettles come to mind.

‘Anna!’ A boisterous call broke her reverie. ‘How did you go?’

She looked up to see McHugh bounce into the room like an excited labrador. She was surprised to find she was pleased to see him; the tension dissipated.

‘Very well, especially with Murphy,’ she said. ‘But I am a bit concerned about that.’

‘How so?’

‘He gave me a document which completely undermines the attorney-general. It makes Greenwood look like a liar or a fool, or both. The question is, can I use it?’

‘What’s the document?’

‘It’s a memo to Greenwood from the Commonwealth Police Bureau of Criminal Intelligence. It’s dated July last year and details more than fifty serious incidents in the last ten years—bombings, murders and assassinations. The BCI concludes that all of them were planned and carried out by Ustasha-controlled organisations.’

‘Well, you have to use it.’

‘This has come from the Labor Party.’

‘It could also have come from your police sources.’

‘But it didn’t.’

‘So what, then? You left it out?’

‘No, Peter, I put it in. But I feel like I’ve been used.’

‘Get used to it, Anna. He’ll only give it to someone else if you don’t run it,’ said McHugh, and then he grinned. ‘I told you he’d like you.’

‘I’m not too comfortable you keep saying that,’ she snapped back.

‘You’re a sexy girl, get used to it …’

‘Stop calling me a girl or we’re really going to have a problem.’

McHugh put up both hands, a gesture of surrender. ‘Is this about Friday night?’

‘Of course it is, you idiot.’

‘I didn’t mean anything by it—’

‘Then stop talking about me like I’ve become an in-joke.’

‘You mean Murphy?’

‘You make me sound like a whore to be passed around middle-aged men!’

‘For Christ’s sake, Anna, that’s the last thing I meant!’

‘I’ve told you what I think. Let’s forget about it.’

‘I think we need to talk.’

‘No, we don’t. We really don’t. Let’s go listen to the edit.’

Anna watched him walk off. He was offended. Well, he’d get over it soon enough. There were plenty of women who seemed to hang on his every word, though not so many of them close to his own age. Perhaps they knew where his predilections lay.

She felt a wave of sadness again. At the core of it was this deep, unfathomably deep, sense that she had betrayed something—the invisible something with the invisible man.

But there was sadness too for what she knew was going to be a lost friendship with McHugh. She should never have fucked him. And she knew she’d gone too far in what she’d said just now and probably screwed up her working relationship with him as well, but it had had to be said.

That thought bothered her because she had plenty of reasons to be grateful to McHugh. He had helped her out of the doldrums after two excruciating years.