At 3.30 the following morning, Al Sharp and his team were outside a Canberra house where the Melbourne housepainter Ivan Pavlovic and his family were sleeping. Pavlovic had been fool enough to boast of his intention to assassinate Prime Minister Bijedic. Now he was subject to targeted harassment. The previous day his Pontiac had been stopped and searched en route to Canberra, his family forced to sit on the roadside for two hours while police pulled the vehicle apart and riffled through their belongings.
‘This is the police, open up!’ shouted Sharp.
He bashed on the front door with his fist until he woke the house. When the sleepy-eyed owner, one Franjo Till, cracked open the door, Sharp demanded to know if Ivan Pavlovic was inside. Pavlovic, his family and their hosts were soon ushered out on to the driveway while the house was searched. The suspect’s wife, Barbara, repeatedly shouted at Sharp: ‘It is only in communist countries you can expect something like this.’
Nothing was found in the Till house, nor in any of the other residences raided that night.
By 8 am on Sunday, the day of the planned Croat demonstration in Canberra, the Bijedic team had reconvened at police headquarters. On his desk the exhausted Al Sharp found a telex that jolted him like a shot of adrenalin. It was from the NSW Police Electronics Unit, the same team he had worked with after the Sydney Town Hall bombing: Nigel Daltrey and Bob McCafferty.
The Unit had been engaged to tap the home phone of Ivo Katich, the secretive leader of the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood. None of the intercepted calls to and from the house had produced anything useful. It was obvious that both Katich and his callers assumed that the phone was tapped. Nonetheless, McCafferty had noticed a series of unanswered phone calls to the house, during which Katich’s phone had been left to ring, on different days at different times. On the first occasion it had rung once and stopped; then twice on the second occasion; then three times on the third. On the fourth occasion the phone rang once again.
McCafferty suspected there was a pattern to the calls. His assumption was that someone was contacting Ivo Katich with a prearranged signal at prearranged times. He assumed that the caller was using public phones and that Ivo Katich, alerted by the message, would go to a public phone himself to call one of a sequence of numbers in his possession.
McCafferty had not been able to establish the phone box numbers of the incoming calls—they did not register if left unanswered. But he recommended, on the basis of his theory, that Commonwealth Police urgently re-establish 24-hour physical surveillance of Ivo Katich. If they could at least track him to a public phone, they could check the outgoing logs on that phone and find the location of the public phone at the other end.
After months without a single breakthrough, Sharp felt a surge of excitement. His lower back gave an alarming twinge as he leapt to his feet and ran to Harper’s office.
‘Boss, we may have something!’ he yelled.
Harper looked up from the reports he’d received on the overnight raids and saw his rotund colleague, leaning against the doorframe, a hand pressed to his lower back, as if to support its crumbling superstructure.
‘I’m not working you too hard, am I, mate?’ asked Harper.
Sharp winced as he sat down opposite the inspector.
‘These raids are just for show,’ he said. ‘But they take time and effort, and stretch us thin. I’ve got something here from the Electronics Unit that looks like real intelligence.’ He handed Harper the telex from McCafferty. ‘But we’re going to have to act fast.’
Within thirty minutes Harper had pulled every string he had at his disposal and dispatched a surveillance team to the Katich house in the Sydney suburb of Leichhardt. Safe in the knowledge that they were securely in place at 9.30 am, Sharp went back to his office. Alongside the intelligence reports on his desk, he found a series of written phone messages sent in from the switchboard operators. There were four of them, each with the same message: ‘Urgent, please call Anna Rosen’. The messages included a number in Sydney he didn’t recognise.
Sharp picked up his phone and dialled. Anna answered after two rings. Wherever she was, she was clearly sitting next to the phone, waiting for him to call back. He soon found out why.
For the next twenty minutes he took notes, stopping from time to time to clarify some puzzling point. Tom Moriarty, you say? With a gun? And who were these armed men?
Anna’s story about the murder of Petar Katich was shocking, but he was inclined to believe it since it fitted with his own knowledge of the young man’s unexplained disappearance and the dried blood on his mattress. The information that young Marin Katich had returned to Australia as the only survivor of the Bosnian incursion, and that he very likely had competence in the use of weapons, sent a chill all the way down his aching spine.
When Anna had finished, Sharp double-checked a few facts, told her that she had done the right thing, and hung up. The story was improbable but also totally believable. It fitted McCafferty’s theory about Ivo Katich’s coded communications. Perhaps they had got lucky—or perhaps they were too late.
Al Sharp rose gingerly from his desk and hurried to tell Harper that, despite all the false trails they had been forced to follow, he now believed he knew the identity of codename Cicada.
At 10 am, as thousands of Croats began arriving for the demonstration at Parliament House, a call was placed from the capital to the Sydney home of Ivo Katich. Not far from the Katich house, sitting in the smoke-filled rear cabin of a surveillance van disguised as a PMG maintenance vehicle, Nigel Daltrey pressed the record buttons on two tape recorders.
‘Incoming call,’ he said to his elegantly dressed companion, and she extinguished a cigarette whose harsh-flavoured Bosnian tobacco made her yearn for Sarajevo. Dusanka Andric, the Serbo–Croat translator attached to the police Electronics Unit, slipped on her headphones and wrinkled her brow as she listened. As always, the sound of Ivo Katich’s voice—so intimate, so close in her head—triggered a wave of revulsion.
‘His caller, a Croat man, is talk about raids last night on houses of Croat peoples in Canberra,’ she said to Daltrey as she scribbled shorthand in her notepad. ‘Many raids, he says, in middle of night. Is like back in Yugoslavia, like the communists. They hit homes in which are staying one Pavlovic, Ivan; one Kavran, Blaz; and others, too. Katich says these are bastards who do this, ones who fuck their own mothers; he is very angry. He is worried, too, I think. I have not heard this in his voice before. He has hung up now. He has cut call short and hung up.’
Daltrey picked up a walkie-talkie and spoke into it urgently. ‘Mad Dog One to Mad Dog Two.’
The thing screeched in his hand like a cockatoo.
‘Mad Dog Two receiving. Over.’
‘Something’s happening,’ said Daltrey, clearly enunciating the words into the mouthpiece. ‘Be alert. He just got some bad news. He may be on the move soon. Over.’
‘Roger … Roger. We’re ready. Over.’
Five minutes later the Mad Dog Two surveillance team watched Ivo Katich leave his house in a hurry. He locked the front door, pulled on a coat and strode to the big sedan in the driveway. He backed out fast, almost side-swiping a telephone pole at the edge of his drive, then accelerated down the street. The rear end slipped and slid as the wheels fought for traction.
Two cars tailed him, leaving from different locations. A third car was circling the neighbourhood ready to join the pursuit.
Katich drove only a few kilometres, stopping next to a phone box close to a public school. The nearest team pulled over to watch him from a discreet distance. The other cars took up positions out of sight at either end of the street.
Through binoculars, Katich was observed entering the phone box. He was seen to place a call and then hang up, holding down the disconnect button while keeping the receiver to his ear.
‘Mad Dog Two to Mad Dog One. Over.’
In the surveillance van, Daltrey grabbed the handset again. ‘Mad Dog One, receiving.’
Daltrey quickly jotted down the address of the Katich phone box as it was relayed to him. Then, crouching, he manoeuvred around Dusanka and out the back door. ‘Hold the fort!’ he called to her. ‘Won’t be long.’
Next to the van was a PMG tent, and Daltrey stepped quickly inside it and took up the phone set he’d rigged to the maintenance box. He dialled a number, which was quickly answered by Bob McCafferty, who had been waiting at the PMG main exchange.
‘You were right, Bob,’ said Daltrey. ‘You’re a dead-set fucken genius.’
‘The address, Nigel, quickly!’ said McCafferty.
Daltrey gave it to him.
‘Got to go,’ said McCafferty. He hung up and turned to the PMG technician waiting next to him. ‘Mate, here’s the address of the phone box,’ he told the man. ‘We need to find that number and put a tap on it as soon as possible. Lives are at stake, so no fiddle-arsing about.’
The man said nothing. He just looked at the address and began leafing through the directory of public phones. He’d soon found it and led McCafferty through the maze of alleys in the exchange. Each one had vast banks of wires and connections, incomprehensible to anyone except the small priesthood of techs for whom the whole system, mapped and laid out in precise order, could be interpreted by numbers such as the one in his hand.
It took time—an excruciatingly long time—for McCafferty, who could imagine Ivo Katich in the phone box, gazing out on to the empty playground of the public school next to him. Then the tap was in and McCafferty had the headphones on, and heard two men talking down the line.
‘… there’s no time, you must go,’ said the first voice.
‘I know. I’m going. You may not hear from me again.’
‘Marin.’
‘Don’t say it.’
‘God will guide your hand.’
‘You know that’s bullshit, don’t you?’
‘Put faith in him.’
‘I don’t have faith in anyone or anything. I’m gone.’
The phone hung up.
McCafferty slammed his fist on a box of wires. ‘Fuck! Fuck!’ he yelled. ‘So close.’
‘Did they say anything at all?’ asked the curious technician.
‘Something,’ said McCafferty. ‘We got something. But only if we can find the bloke he was talking to.’ He pulled off the headphones and turned to the man. ‘Can you get the last outgoing numbers dialled from that phone?’
‘I can do it,’ the man said. ‘But it’ll take some time.’
‘How long?’ said McCafferty. ‘Time is what we’re running out of.’
‘Half an hour, maybe less if we get lucky.’
McCafferty clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Get going then,’ he said. ‘God will guide your hand.’
Marin Katich moved swiftly through the house, gathering up his belongings. There weren’t many of them—he had been ready to move, even before his father rang using the emergency code.
The rifle, cleaned and oiled, required the most attention. He took time to wrap it and pack it in its case. Then he stowed it in the boot of the car.
The woman over the road looked up at him as she watered the garden. He gave her a wave and stepped back inside for the remainder of his gear. The biggest danger was that she would be able to give a description of the car, but he was prepared for that. Another vehicle was parked four blocks away on a quiet street. He would have to get there quickly.
He went from room to room, looking for anything he might have left behind, anything that might betray his intention. The last thing he took was the plastic bag full of rubbish. The place was clean. He threw the rubbish into the back seat, nodded to the woman still watering her garden, and climbed into the car.
He drove away sedately, past two men further down the street in adjacent houses, both mowing their lawns. He slowed down, lest he leave the impression of flight, even if he did have to fight down that sensation in his body.
A short distance away he parked under a tree and swapped cars. Again, he took everything with him and left the first vehicle as clean as he could. His fingerprints were everywhere, of course; he wiped down the obvious surfaces in the car, just as he had in the house, but he knew he would miss some.
As he drove the new car slowly along the street, Marin heard a posse of vehicles moving fast through the quiet suburb, their highly tuned engines roaring, their wheels squealing as they took corners too fast. He hoped there were no children playing on the road.
As he reached the stop sign, the posse—four large, black sedans, moving at high speed and packed with men—passed in front of him in a blur. When they had gone, he turned his car in the opposite direction and drove fast from the neighbourhood. As he did so, he imagined the woman with her garden hose and the men crouched over their lawnmowers looking up in shock as their quiet Sunday morning was interrupted by the fast-moving motorcade, the sudden screech of brakes, and the armed men leaping out even before they had rolled to a stop.
*
Harper and Sharp walked through the empty house.
‘Turns out it’s owned by a local Croat,’ said Sharp. ‘His wife’s Australian and the property is in her name, so it never turned up on any of our lists. We’re trying to locate the owners, but it seems they’re on an overseas holiday. The woman over the road has given us a description of the man who stayed here for the past week. Tall, athletic, olive complexion. Dark hair, she thinks, but he was wearing sunglasses and a floppy hat each time she saw him. She saw him coming and going a few times. He drove a green Toyota sedan—no idea of the numberplate. She never spoke to him.’
‘Now he’s in the wind he’ll probably ditch the car,’ said Harper, shaking his head. ‘Anything at all from Forensics?’
‘A few partial fingerprints so far,’ said Sharp. ‘Looks like the place has been wiped clean. One weird thing, though: the dressing table in the bedroom is really untidy. There are open make-up bottles and powder compacts and used sponges all over the place. Maybe he’s been disguising himself.’
‘What as? A very tall, athletic woman?’
‘I’m just saying that it’s weird.’
‘It also looks like a dead end,’ said Harper. ‘We’ve put out an alert for the green Toyota. I agree that Katich the younger is now a serious suspect, but the last picture we have of him was when he was fifteen years old. Of the thousands of Croat demonstrators outside Parliament House right now, maybe half of them match the neighbour’s description. Meanwhile he’s not our only worry. During the night, someone broke into a sporting goods store in Queanbeyan and stole three rifles and five hundred rounds of ammunition. This morning the NSW Police picked up another bloke in Goulburn. In his car, they found a rifle they say was set up to take a silencer, along with 150 rounds of ammo. He was on his way to the demo which, thank Christ, sounds like it’s peaceful and well organised.’
‘I still think Marin is the one we’re after,’ said Sharp. ‘McCafferty says old man Katich was telling him to get the hell out of here. Told him God would guide his hand.’
‘We’re pulling Ivo Katich in, for what it’s worth,’ said Harper. ‘He’ll say nothing.’
‘I told you Anna Rosen’s story,’ said Sharp. ‘It all points to Marin Katich.’
Harper frowned. ‘Anna Rosen is a journalist, Al,’ he said. ‘I’ve also got Malcolm Brown from the Sydney Morning Herald passing on info about plans to kill the attorney-general. Some fellow told him Murphy is as good as dead, that he’ll be killed before the next sitting of parliament. Channel 9 has passed on info that someone’s planning to hijack a light aircraft in Melbourne and use it to make a kamikaze attack on Bijedic.’
‘I know Rosen,’ said Sharp. ‘She’s been investigating the Katich family for a long time.’
‘Look, I’m not saying she’s leading us on a wild goose chase. There’s something very odd about the set-up here. Bring her in for questioning, if you really think she’s got more to tell us.’
Sharp nodded. He intended to keep Anna close. At least she would be able to recognise Marin Katich in a crowd. There was another wild card, of course—Tom Moriarty—but so far he’d been unable to locate the elusive spy.
Marin Katich’s back-up vehicle was a well-maintained, hardy-looking Holden sedan. He was pleased with its ruggedness since he intended to go bush until the eve of Bijedic’s arrival. There was a remote place he knew well, forty miles away, in the Brindabella Ranges. He had planned to go there anyway to test fire the rifle.
An hour’s drive took him past the Cotter Dam before he wound up on the narrow road into an alpine region. Tall stands of ghost gums hugging tight to the roadside gave way to wide vistas of low, folded ranges one after the other in humped lines of drab green and khaki. Nothing, he thought, could be more different to the alpine mountains around Radusa where so many had died.
He left the sealed road, turning on to a rough dirt track ironically known as Gentle Annie’s Trail. It led deep into the mountains and then down to the valley floor where he nursed the car across the shallows of the Goodradigbee River at several crossing points before following Flea Creek, one of its thin tributaries, to the flat place on its banks that he remembered. There he found two other cars and the families who had driven there to picnic by the creek. He wasn’t concerned: it was Sunday afternoon and they would head off with plenty of time before dark. They paid no heed to him as he set up his small tent and crawled inside to rest.
Despite the noise of the children playing, Marin was exhausted and soon fell asleep. He had erected the tent under a tree in the shade, but as the sun moved beyond its apex it beat down on the western side, and it became hotter and hotter inside. In its stifling confines he sweated like a man who had fallen asleep in a sauna. The relentless sun cast his dreams in a red glow and he entered a kind of delirium in which he heard the sound of a boy playing alone by the creek, muttering to himself as children do, and then crying out with delight as he threw rocks into the water.
‘Daddy! Daddy, where are you?’
The tent flap flew open and there was the boy staring in at him. A face he knew in his soul. Marin woke and sat up gasping for air. His clothes were drenched, his heart beat savagely, and he was overcome by a profound sadness.
*
Marin hauled himself out of the tent and found the families had gone. He knelt at the edge of the creek and splashed water on to his face and the back of his neck. Faint echoes of the boy’s voice were still inside his head. The child’s face was imprinted on his memory.
He rose and fetched the rifle, hoisting it over his shoulder, and headed off deeper into the bush. Soon he found an open space, wide enough for him to pace out nine hundred yards and place a target and a red flag on a ridgeline.
For nearly two hours, until the light began to dwindle, he made his calculations, calibrated the fine instruments on the rifle and shot at the target until he had satisfied himself that he was as well prepared as he could be.