Marin Katich followed strict procedure and rang his father at the agreed time from the designated phone box in the rotation. He knew the home phone was intermittently tapped—Ivo was usually tipped off when that was the case—but the practice in recent years was to assume that the tap was always in. Secure communication was critical, so Marin had a schedule of times and phone boxes that his father had the numbers for. The first call in the rotation was at 8 am from the designated box, the second at 11 am from a different phone, the third at 1 pm. This was the third time he had rung, so his father would be waiting by his phone for fifteen minutes every day from 1 pm. It was shortly after that time now. Marin let the line ring three times and hung up.
He stood in the phone box with the receiver to his ear and his finger on the disconnect button. Anyone wishing to use the phone would assume he was on a long call. It would take some time for his father to get to one of his designated boxes. Marin’s jaw was clenched hard and he felt the familiar griping, nervous tension in his stomach that reminded him of sitting in the changing room moments before running out on to the football pitch.
He had no desire to speak to his father and, if it were not for the fact that he needed the Brotherhood’s network, he would not be doing this. If anything, his feelings about Ivo had hardened. They had festered in his solitude as he dwelled on his father’s past lies and manipulations, slowly working back through time. In Bosnia, his mother had finally been able to give him, one by one, the missing pieces of the jigsaw. But none of this altered his determination to avenge Petar’s death. His brother’s murderers must pay in blood and he intended to ensure they paid dearly. Bijedic would have to satisfy the butchers’ bill.
This was now Marin Katich’s single obsession. Fate had led him to an inflection point: the hawk was above him.
The phone rang and he lifted his finger to take the call.
‘Marin?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it?’
‘I need the locksmith here tonight.’
‘I can make it happen. What is mission?’
‘I need to break into a house and find a set of keys, and he will need to make copies of those keys so that I can return them.’
‘What are keys for?’
‘You don’t need to know that. Send the locksmith to the meeting place. I will be waiting for him from 11 pm.’
‘He will be there.’
‘One other thing.’
‘Tell me.’
‘The newspapers are saying there will be a big demonstration against Bijedic outside Parliament House on Tuesday. If that is so the police will take him around to the Senate entrance on the other side and all this will be for nothing.’
‘I thought of this already. I was about to tell you we are moving demonstration, bringing forward to Sunday. This, the police have requested. So we are being good citizen.’
‘Good,’ said Marin. ‘You must make sure that any stray demonstrators who come on Tuesday morning go to the Senate entrance. Then they will be forced to bring Bijedic to the front door.’
‘I will organise small protest outside Senate.’
‘Good. Unless there’s an emergency the next contact will be an 8 am call.’
‘Yes … Marin?’
‘What?’
‘My son …’
‘I have nothing more to say to you.’
Marin Katich hung up. He left the phone box, put his hands on his knees and threw up on the nature strip.
Anna Rosen got to Tullamarine Airport well ahead of her flight. During the long wait in St Kilda Road she had roughed out a story narrative from what she knew, along with the little she learned from her call to Arthur Gietzelt. The senator had been cagey at first, but he finally gave her some strong quotes, backing Murphy’s ministerial authority to visit ASIO and holding the Organisation to account for withholding from him—or distorting—vital intelligence.
Shortly before 1 pm Murphy and his team had left ASIO Headquarters, departing from the underground car park in two vehicles. They didn’t stop to make a statement of any kind, nor did anyone from ASIO.
Anna picked up her boarding pass and headed to the bar, where she found Bruce McKillop nursing a beer. The prime minister, he explained, had gone on to an event at Geelong, where he intended to stay the night. Like her, McKillop had been called back to Canberra to work on tomorrow’s coverage of the Murphy raid.
He was annoyed at the decision. ‘I’ve got fuck-all to add to this,’ he said morosely. ‘Maybe I could have got something out of Whitlam tonight.’
‘What happened at the Press Club?’
‘Gough made a perfectly boring stump speech. Labor had a mandate to change the country. This is what they’d done, this is what they planned to do. Blah, blah, blah. He must have thought it was a receptive audience because the place was absolutely packed. Then he asked for questions and ninety people jumped up. “What was Murphy doing in St Kilda Road?” Whitlam said, “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.” I saw him look across at Eric Walsh, and Walsh just shrugged his shoulders.’
‘Christ,’ said Anna. ‘So, it’s true, Murphy did this without warning the PM.’
McKillop threw up two hands in a gesture of amazement. ‘Gough’s a good actor, but no one’s that good. He didn’t have a clue. After the event I overheard Walsh saying that he was being sent back to Canberra to shut this down.’
‘I spoke to Arthur Gietzelt this morning,’ said Anna. ‘He didn’t tell me much, but one thing’s for sure: he certainly knew about this in advance.’
‘So Murphy told his mates in the left, but he didn’t bother telling Whitlam. That’s a fucking joke.’
‘What’s Whitlam doing in Geelong?’
McKillop laughed. ‘That’s another joke. He’s got a dinner at the Geelong footy club. They’re making him the Number One ticket holder.’
‘He’s got a political crisis breaking and he’s doing that?’
‘No crisis is bigger than footy.’
‘That won’t be true by tomorrow.’
‘I did get one quote from Eric Walsh, but I think it was off the record. He said: “Gough wouldn’t even know what sort of racquet to hit a football with.”’
Anna was still laughing when she saw Al Sharp enter the bar with the three plain-clothes policemen she recognised from this morning’s raiding party. Sharp saw her at once and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Not now, we don’t know each other, it said. They found a table away from the bar, and the straight-backed, hard-faced fellow she took to be their senior officer went to the bar and bought a round of drinks.
Inspector Harper carried four beers back on a tray. He plonked the tray on the table, spilling the overfilled glasses.
‘Most ungracious waiter I’ve ever seen,’ said Sharp.
‘That’s what beer mats are for,’ Harper replied, flipping one over to Sharp.
‘And that’s exactly what we are,’ grumbled Price cryptically.
‘The hell you on about, Bob?’ said Ray Sullivan.
‘Murphy’s beer mats, we are,’ said Price. ‘Soaking up his fucken mess.’
Sharp laughed and raised his glass. ‘To the mighty beer mats!’ he said, and they clinked glasses.
‘You keep that notebook of yours safe, Wally,’ Sharp continued. ‘That’s contemporaneous history, that is.’
‘Yep,’ said Sullivan. ‘None of the ASIO blokes were taking notes.’
‘That conference room was probably miked up to the yin yang,’ said Price. ‘They’ll be transcribing it right now, to send on to Langley.’
‘Shut it down, boys,’ said Harper. ‘That’s enough loose talk. We’re going to be carrying this day around like an albatross for the rest of our lives. Every crazy thing we say will end up as part of the mythology. Al’s right about those notes, Wal. That’s the true history of this. But first we worry about Bijedic. Then we write up a full report for the higher-ups. And then we shut up about this.’
Price couldn’t suppress a derisive laugh. ‘Try that in front of a Senate Committee,’ he said.
‘We write it up and it’ll be the commissioner who fronts any committee,’ said Harper. ‘That’s how it works. You got more to say about this? Say it to me. Because, if we all start telling tales about what happened in there today, we’ll never hear the end of it. You got me?’
Price blinked, took a drink of beer and started rolling a cigarette. He turned to Ray Sullivan. ‘Who do you like in the pre-season?’
‘Manly and Saints, I reckon.’
Anna watched the policemen do their toast. She would have given her right arm for a seat at that table—or even for a place within earshot.
She tuned out when McKillop moved on to his usual list of grievances against Paul Barton. The bureau chief, he was certain, had no respect for him. She decided to go for a walk and wandered along the line of storefronts until she found a chemist, where she was buying a packet of Disprin when a familiar voice came from over her shoulder: ‘The b-b-boyfriend giving you a headache?’
She spun around to face Tom Moriarty.
‘You really need to get some squeaky shoes or something,’ she said. ‘You’ll give me a heart attack.’
‘Come over here a m-minute, will you? I n-n-need some advice on hair products.’
Moriarty led her to the back of the chemist, behind the high shelves.
‘What the hell happened in there today?’ Anna demanded. ‘I can’t get anyone to talk.’
‘Our flight’s b-boarding in a few m-minutes,’ said Moriarty, handing her a slip of paper. ‘Call me on this n-number later. I’ve joined M-M-Murphy’s staff.’
‘What? Has ASIO sacked you?’
‘No, n-nothing like that. It’s a k-kind of s-s-secondment.’
‘What was that thing with your briefcase this morning? Handing it over to Murphy?’
‘Look, that’s why I c-c-came to f-find you now. You c-can’t write about that. Okay?’
‘That was one of the strangest things I’ve seen—why wouldn’t I write about it?’
Moriarty’s eyes narrowed; he took her by the shoulders and leaned in close. ‘Because it’ll f-f-fuck everything up if you d-do, and I’ll n-never talk to you again.’
‘Hands off,’ she said, and he dropped them to his sides.
‘C-Call me and I’ll give you p-p-plenty to write about tonight,’ he said. ‘Just not that.’
George Negus stood beside the white Commonwealth car on the tarmac at Sydney Airport, waiting for Lionel Murphy’s flight to land. He was pissed off with Murphy for leaving him out of this. That is to say he was publicly ropeable, but privately relieved he wouldn’t have to wear the consequences. At least he was off the hook with the media.
He could honestly say he didn’t know what had gone on at St Kilda Road. Had he been asked for his advice ahead of the event, he would have told Lionel: Don’t do it, you mad bastard! Sure, that was 20/20 hindsight, but you didn’t have to be a political brain surgeon to see there was no proverbial light at the end of this tunnel.
Negus had been in Sydney for a long weekend, but there were plenty of journos who had his Balmain number, and calls had started coming through by mid-morning. That was how he’d first heard of the ASIO escapade.
Then came a call from Daphne Newman at the office. She sounded uncharacteristically rattled. ‘George, I can’t find the attorney-general,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where he is.’
‘Can’t help you there, Daphne. But when you find him, tell him to give me a call.’
A few hours later the phone had rung and it was Lionel, all breezy and ironic. ‘Where were you, George? You missed all the fun.’
That’s rich, thought Negus. ‘Well, you might have warned me.’
‘Things got their own momentum last night,’ said Murphy. ‘I don’t have much time. I’m flying up to Sydney, on the TAA flight at 3 pm. Can you be there? There’ll be a Comcar and a police escort to take me to Ingrid.’
Negus had been surprised. He’d thought Ingrid was bunkered down in Canberra for the last weeks of her pregnancy.
‘I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘Ingrid got herself to Sydney, did she?’
‘Protective services brought her to Darling Point. She’s under police protection …’
‘What?’
‘We’ve had some death threats, George. I’ll explain when I get there. Maureen’s coordinating transport; you should give her a call.’
Negus had sat in his kitchen and made a series of calls. First to the office, where Maureen gave him the news that Murphy had taken her along on a midnight visit to ASIO’s Canberra offices in the West Portal. By her account Lionel had cross-examined the local ASIO boss, Colin Brown, as if he were a defendant on criminal charges. That meant that first, the gloves were off, and second, there’d been two ASIO raids. At least the press hadn’t got on to the first one yet.
A few more calls and he’d learned that the prime minister was down in Melbourne too. That Whitlam was there on the same day as the raid meant he’d obviously known nothing about it. Not good. Apparently Gough had sent Eric Walsh back to Canberra to staunch the blood. Walsh was still en route, so who on Whitlam’s staff was doing damage control in the meantime? Negus soon found out it was the PM’s political advisor, Jim Spigelman, but it wasn’t until the afternoon that he’d been able to get a call through to Speegers and the news wasn’t good.
The public servants had their knickers in a knot. Murphy’s own department head, Clarrie Harders, had first heard of the raid when journalists started calling him in the morning. A meeting of police and security men was split down the middle as to whether to cancel the Bijedic tour, with the pessimists arguing Murphy had damaged security for the visit.
To top it off, Bob Ellicott, the solicitor-general, was now looking into whether the raid was illegal and what offences Murphy might have committed. Bloody Ellicott! The man was a diehard Liberal and the cousin of another diehard Liberal, the chief justice of the High Court, Garfield Frigging Barwick. That was all they needed—entrenched conservatives destabilising them from the inside.
When he saw the plane touch down, Negus climbed out of the car. He was anxious about the meeting, worried about the bond of trust between himself and Murphy. He still couldn’t get over the fact that both the boss and Milte had kept him in the dark. He was going to have to deal with that sooner rather than later.
A single policeman held back a large jostling media pack, bristling with cameras and microphones behind the terminal gates. They were anxious because there was still time to feed footage into the evening news bulletins. Negus knew this was just a taste of what was to come.
The raid on ASIO had been the most radical move so far by the new government and there was no question there’d be political damage. Murphy had overturned the chessboard when the government was in a dominant position. He’d scattered pieces all over the place and now it was time to put them back. The trouble was that no one would ever agree on how the board was set before he’d done it. All the careful plays they’d made had been lost. They’d have to go back and start the game again.
When the plane finally came to a stop, stairs were rolled up to it. Lionel Murphy was out first. The two cars moved to the foot of the stairs. Negus looked over to the media pack and saw two photographers push through the barrier.
‘We’ve got to move, Senator!’ he called.
With the first two snappers already sprinting across the tarmac, there was a mass breakout of TV crews and reporters. Murphy was quickly hustled into the back of the car as the first of them arrived but Negus was caught outside the vehicle.
‘The attorney-general will not be making a statement at this time,’ he said to the phalanx of cameras. As he climbed into the car he noticed Ian Leslie from Channel 0 News.
‘Senator Murphy, why’d you raid ASIO?’ the reporter called.
Negus slammed the door shut, but he realised he’d forgotten to wind up the window.
When Leslie stuck a microphone through the opening as the car began to move, Negus yelled at him: ‘Ian, I’ll wind the window up on your hand if you do that!’
As he withdrew his hand from the rapidly closing window, Leslie let go of the microphone and left it dangling inside, tapping on the glass. Ahead of them the police driver hit his siren and the pack scattered. As the Comcar accelerated into the gap, Negus saw that the microphone was still attached by a long cord to a cameraman who was now running alongside, screaming at them.
‘Stop!’ called Negus as the cameraman fell back. The fellow was either going to have to let go of his precious equipment or get dragged along like a man tied behind a horse in an old Western. At the last second the driver hit the brakes. Negus unwound the window and threw out the microphone, and the car took off, illuminated by the multiple camera flashes.
Lionel Murphy watched through the back window as the media pack receded into the distance, before turning back to Negus. ‘I thought that went very well,’ he said, pushing his ruffled hair behind his ears. ‘It’s good to have you back, George.’
It was 11 pm when the locksmith parked his van, as directed by Marin Katich, across the road from a plain house in a quiet street in Yarralumla. Marin had followed Barbara Dunning here to her home one afternoon after she had shown a group through the carillon. She lived in a modest three-bedroom cottage with a well-tended garden in one of the suburb’s less fashionable streets.
Over three days he had followed her from a distance. At the island, he’d observed her through his binoculars as she locked up the carillon’s entrances and then dropped the bunch of keys into her handbag. While watching her house he had gauged her habits and got a read on her life. He stole some of her mail, steamed it open and discovered that she was a widow. Her husband had worked in the Treasury Department. She had no mortgage and lived modestly on the spousal pension she inherited when he died. It appeared that Barbara was childless. She had a Persian cat she lavished affection on, but mercifully no dogs or lovers. She got four pints of milk delivered each week and he assumed the cat drank most of that. There had been no visitors to her home over those three nights, and Marin had watched all the lights go out in the half-hour period between 9.45 and 10.15 pm. Each morning at 6.30 am she took a walk to the lake.
Her social life revolved around St John’s Church in the nearby parish, and she seemed to be close to the vicar and his wife. She played the organ there on Sunday and practised twice a week. And, of course, there was her volunteer work at the carillon two days a week, which must have seemed wildly exotic when she first began learning to play the bells.
He had no reason to think that she would change her habits on a Friday night, and so he had met the locksmith at the agreed location and driven to Yarralumla in the man’s covered van. The locksmith’s name was Ante Jurjevic. He was no relation to the merchant seaman Marjan Jurjevic in Melbourne, the devoted enemy of Marin’s father.
‘I have everything we need to make a new set of keys,’ Jurjevic told him. ‘I only need the originals for a short time to make duplicates.’
When they arrived, Marin saw that he had been wrong to make assumptions about Barbara Dunning. A car was parked in her driveway. The lights were still on in her living room and he heard faint music through the closed windows. He told the locksmith to stay put, pulled on a balaclava and crept into the front yard. He crawled through the garden bed to a large hibiscus below the window and peered inside.
The blinds were drawn, but through a gap at the bottom he saw two figures gently writhing on the couch. Barbara’s skirt was hiked up to her waist. A pair of hands moved inside her knickers, gripping her arse. There was a bottle of whisky and two glasses on the coffee table. The cat was stretched out on the back of the red couch, licking its paws. A soprano sang in German. A Bach cantata, he wasn’t sure which one. As the two figures shifted position, pulling apart for a moment to look at each other, Marin recognised the vicar’s wife.
Some time elapsed before the music stopped and he heard the arm on the turntable retract. Barbara stood up from the couch, bending to kiss her lover. She went to the sideboard, flipped the record and set it going again. Marin noticed her black handbag on the sideboard.
Barbara pulled the vicar’s wife gently to her feet and embraced her. Pulling apart to murmur something in her lover’s ear, she took her by the hand and led her from the room. The cat followed them a moment later.
Marin moved in the shadows to the back of the house, where he found the door unlocked. Once inside, he heard the sounds of lovemaking and moved quickly to the living room. The carillon keys were in the black handbag.
He left the house swiftly, pulled off the balaclava and found the locksmith dozing in the van. He opened the door and shook the man’s shoulder.
‘I have them,’ he said.
They climbed into the back of the van and Jurjevic tugged a dark curtain across the driver’s compartment before switching on a small working light. He worked fast, carefully matching each key to one of his large stock of brass blanks and applying his skill to filing perfect duplicates.
‘The lights are still on,’ Jurjevic said as he worked. ‘Can you get these back safely?’
‘They will be busy for some time.’
Jurjevic paused, a sly expression distorting his plain face.
‘I should have brought the camera,’ he said. ‘We could make a little money on the side.’
Marin stared at the man but gave nothing away. Of course it made sense that the locksmith would have a side business in blackmail. He suppressed the impulse to throttle the rodent.
Jurjevic bent to his work without another word; it took him twenty minutes. He threaded the duplicates on to a ring and handed them over.
‘Wait here,’ said Marin.
He was back in the kitchen when he heard the bedroom door open and bare feet pad into it. He moved silently into the living room as the kitchen light went on. The vicar’s wife, her back to him, naked and vulnerable, poured a glass of water at the sink.
‘Bring the whisky, darling!’ Barbara called from the bedroom.
Marin heard the light get switched off in the kitchen. He crept ahead of the woman, sliding past the partly open door to the main bedroom and into the kitchen where he heard the woman padding down the corridor behind him, the bottle and glasses clinking in her hands.
‘Come back to bed,’ said Barbara, as the woman entered the bedroom and pushed the door shut with her foot.
Marin’s heart was thumping. He moved fast, replaced the keys and left the house.
Anna filed her story on the raid for the first edition well ahead of the 11 pm deadline. Barton read the copy and congratulated her. It was a first-hand account, crisply written and full of material he hadn’t seen anywhere else.
Tom Moriarty had come through for her in the end, with vivid detail of the events inside ASIO Headquarters. She was still upset at the compromise she’d been forced to make, though, which meant she left out the story of how he had handed over his briefcase to Murphy. She would definitely come back to that. There were secrets within this story that she was determined to get to the bottom of.
‘Great work, Anna. This will be front page for sure,’ said Barton. ‘Did you see those late pictures of Murphy dodging the press at Sydney Airport?’
‘I did. George Negus was with him, but he wasn’t in Melbourne.’
‘I know, that’s really strange,’ said Barton. ‘Why did Murphy go to Sydney?’
‘His wife Ingrid was moved down there this morning and put under police protection.’
‘That’s not in your story.’
‘She’s heavily pregnant. Due to give birth any time now. I thought it was enough to say they’d received death threats. Why tell the enemy where she is?’
‘Just put in a par near the end saying that his pregnant wife is under police protection at an undisclosed location.’
‘If you insist, Paul, but—’
‘It’s part of the story, Anna. Nothing like this has ever happened before.’
She went back to her desk, rolled a cigarette and smoked it as she added the extra par.
Olney had already gone on to Friday drinks. McKillop and Tennant were finishing a joint story on the political fallout from the raid.
‘You coming for a beer?’ McKillop asked her.
‘I’m pretty buggered, Bruce,’ she said. ‘I was up at 5.30. I’ve got to get some sleep.’
Anna headed back to her room at The Wellington. As she climbed between the fresh sheets and pulled up the covers, she recalled the saying about falling asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow. It was her last conscious thought before it happened to her.