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  “Poor Mo! No one gave him a chance,” I said. “It’s not easy when everyone’s made up their mind that you’re a bad character.”

  Doug’s eyebrows rose. I knew what he was thinking. It was no secret that I’d taken a set against Mo at our first meeting, but in the course of what I could only describe as a harrowing battle of wits between the two of us and a psychopathic arms-dealer, we’d fallen in love. But as intoxicating as our romance was, it hadn’t lasted. I was only sixteen.

  “Do you keep in touch?”

  “No ... Doug. I haven’t heard from Mo in years.”

  His eyes lit up at my use of his first name. “Will you go back to the refugee camp now that your father has found a buyer for Katoomba?”

  I shook my head, too choked up to speak. Even now, eighteen months since Russian jets bombed Suruç, I couldn’t bring myself to speak about the atrocity which ended the lives of dozens of civilians, including that of Dr. Al-Karim Farouk. For months, I’d comforted myself with the knowledge that Karim was only presumed dead, hoping that somehow he’d survived, in the same way that I’d convinced myself Mum would beat lymphatic cancer. But I buried the last vestiges of that hope with my mother.

  I glanced up. Doug had picked up on my pain and was staring at me with concern in his faded eyes. “Actually, I’ve got a job at St. Agnes’s, my old school. Annie’s going there as a boarder, so I’ll be able to keep an eye on her.”

  “Good! Your mother would have been pleased ... Annie’s about eleven, isn’t she?”

  “Nine. She turns ten in a couple of months.”

  “Hmm!” The ‘hmm’ spoke volumes.

  “I didn’t feel up to defending my dad’s decision to pack my youngest sister off to boarding school, only two months after she’d lost her mother, so I changed the topic of conversation.

  “I’d love to fly over Katoomba, one last time. Could you take me up in the Cessna if you have time? I’ll be here for the rest of the week.”

  “How about now?” he said getting to his feet slowly. He opened the screen door, then stepped back to allow me to go through first. No matter what his neighbours said about him Doug was a gentleman. “As it happens,” he continued, “I traded the Cessna in on an Air Tractor on Mo’s recommendation.”

  “And with his history, you took his advice?”

  My voice was light and jokey, and the elderly man’s eyes twinkled.

  Two

  “Welcome to the NSA, Mo.” The nameplate on the desk denoted the speaker as Executive Secretary, Staff Sergeant Otis Kramer. The chair gave a sigh of relief as the marine got to his feet. He gripped my hand with strong calloused fingers. “Great to see you again.” I inhaled the smoky, warm musk that clung to his skin, listened to his slow Mississippi accent and remembered what it felt like to be carried to safety in his powerful arms when I was a half-dead gangly teenager.

  We shared a special bond. Ten years ago, Otis had come to my rescue when I was trapped in a flooded cave. To say I was surprised to see him now flying a desk was an understatement. The big lug was the quintessential front-line marine.

  “General Lee would normally head up the welcoming committee, but he’s in a meeting. He sends his apologies.”

  “No worries.” I hadn’t expected the red carpet to be rolled out. After all, the former helicopter pilot was now director of Five Eyes ... some going! I was surprised the odd couple was still together. “So you two are still a team?”

  “Yeah ... through seven deployments.” A grin split his polished ebony face. “Our partnership outlasted my marriage.” He looked and sounded relaxed about his divorce.

  “Serving my country hasn’t been good for my love life either,” I said, to show solidarity. A bit of an exaggeration! Truth is I do all right.

  “I thought you and that little red-headed firecracker would end up hitched.”

  “Beth! We were just kids ... I lost touch with her years ago”

  “She was some girl,” he muttered, more to himself than me.

  I didn’t want to talk about it. I mean no guy ever gets over the first girl he ever truly loved.

  It took some doing, but I managed to suppress the mixed emotions I felt. Beth and I had been through so much together, top secret stuff that I’m not allowed to talk about it. A lump came into my throat, I coughed and swallowed. Back then it had been just Beth and me against the world. But my teenage crush petered out when life went back to normal. Anyway, it would never have worked. She was out of my league. Frankly, I think it’s a bad idea to date women smarter than me.

  I didn’t say any of that to Otis. I managed a wry grin and feigned disappointment. “You can’t win ’em all, Sarge.”

  “But it’s fun trying, eh?”

  “Too right, mate.”

  A grin softened his beat-up fighter’s mug. It never fails. Yanks have a soft spot for Aussies. And not only the guys. The chicks think an Aussie accent is adorable. “I guess you must be itching to meet your new buds.”

  “Sure thing, Sarge,” I lied. I’d come straight from the airfield and an eighteen hour flight. I’d have killed for a hot shower and a kip.

  “The data room is two flights down,” he said, scooping up my kitbag in hands the size of infantrymen’s shovels and slinging it over his shoulder.

  He opened the door and I followed him along a carpeted passage that smelt strongly of air freshener to a bank of three elevators. “This floor’s reserved for top brass. You’re on the one below.” He pressed a button. I watched as he studied each display unit as if he was trying to guess which of the three would arrive first. It’s a game I play myself. If I’m standing with a mate, we’ll have a tenner on it. But not this time, although I was doing my best not to show it, I was angry about my deployment. And no wonder. I’d been shanghaied.

  According to my CO, I was off to Top Gun for three months to train with the US navy — the best fighter pilots in the world. It wasn’t until we’d taken off that a steward handed me a sealed envelope marked “Confidential”.

  I couldn’t believe what I read. Instead of going to the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School, I was on my way to Fort Meade — the headquarters of the National Security Agency. No one likes being shafted. In other circumstances I’d have kicked up a stink. But my orders had been signed by General Lee and I owed him. I wouldn’t be a fighter pilot without his help.

  Competition for places on the Australian fighter-pilot program is keen. Out of five hundred applications less than half make it to the interview stage and over fifty per cent of those don’t get through. I had Buckley’s[9]. Not only was I an average student, I was the possessor of a record and not the sporting kind. I knew I was wasting my time applying. In fact, I wouldn’t have bothered filling in the form if my old boss, Doug McLeod, hadn’t insisted.

  Ours wasn’t the normal boss/employee relationship. I’d been sent to work on his property, Wooroloo, a sheep station in the north of Western Australia for six months as an alternative to serving time in a Detention Center. I’d been pissed off back then about being forced to be somewhere I didn’t want to be.

  Funnily, my juvenile conviction didn’t come up at the air force interview. Someone high up must have put in a good word for me. The only person it could have been was General Lee.

  Originally our paths crossed when Colonel Lee, as he was back then, commanded a special operations force of highly disciplined, mission-ready troops billeted on Widgiemooltha, another station belonging to Doug, even more remote and secluded than Wooroloo. The task force was searching for the International Space Station’s crash site. Its destruction was and still is the best kept secret of the present decade, and I doubt it will ever be revealed to the public. Not by me at any rate. Especially as the interrogator in charge of my debriefing made a big deal out of the laws I’d broken in my attempt to evade capture by troops that had rounded up the entire community. I’d be locked up now if I hadn’t signed the Official Secrets Act.

  Lee wasn’t involved in my debrief. It
was conducted by a guy flown in from the States. I was never told who he reported to. Subsequently, I formed the opinion he was CIA.

  You’d have thought questioning a couple of kids would have been a cinch. Experts like him broke hundreds of detainees during the war on terror. But for all his enhanced interrogation techniques, he never found out that I’d discovered Agent H, intact and virulent inside a minus eighty degree miniature freezer. Nor did he learn that Beth, the only other person at large, helped me get rid of it — permanently — when she came up with the crazy idea of dropping the vial containing the bacterium down a hole in Skull-Creek Cave’s floor. The fissure ran down to an underground river that flowed into the vast subterranean river system under the Great Sandy Desert.

  Convincing me to go along with that hadn’t been easy. I’d wanted to hand the vial over, and be a hero. But Beth was right. We couldn’t let any nation — be it rogue or responsible, get their hands on the deadly virus.

  Trouble was Colonel Lee and the rest of the special task force continued searching. It was an expensive waste of man-power and resources. I didn’t know how I’d look him in the eye. The ping signaling the elevator’s arrival brought me back to what was going on in my life now.

  When the right-hand door opened, Otis’s lips curved up like a fleshy slice of watermelon. Definitely, it was the one he’d backed to get here first. He waited for me to enter and stood in the far corner as the doors whooshed close. A whole minute passed, and then I said casually, “How come the NSA wants my help?” From my point of view it was a fair question. Intelligence isn’t my bag. I just want to serve my country and be the best pilot in the air force.

  Otis shrugged. “I know where you’re coming from, son. But General Lee wants you on his team and an order is an order.”

  There was a pause while I thought about what he’d said. “I’ll do the job to the best of my ability,” I eventually replied, aware that although I outranked him, Staff Sergeant Otis Kramer was General Lee’s eyes and ears. “But it seems a bit odd requesting me.”

  “An Australian presence is a condition of the surveillance agreement between the US and Australia. Your government would only sanction the collection of internet data from Australian citizens suspected of terrorism if there’s an Aussie on the team”

  Talk about a ball deflator. Okay, I didn’t want the job, but to find out I was the token Aussie took some swallowing. I turned a wince into a baffled smile. The baffled smile was genuine. I’m not technophobic. I use email to share my news. I talk to people face-to-face on Skype and find answers to things that interest me on Google. But that’s about it. I don’t know how to code or use algorithms to analyse data. In fact, my knowledge of programming is nil. I said, “I’m a fighter pilot. Surely the NSA would be better off with an IT Specialist?”

  “The NSA is the biggest employer of mathematicians and internet analysts. Another geek is the last thing we need round here,” Otis said as the lift doors opened.

  “Then why not recruit someone from ASIO[10],” I said, as we walked down an over-illuminated passage, the outer wall windowless, the inner punctuated at uniform intervals with steel security doors. Otis shrugged. “The general likes to surround himself with guys he knows and trusts.”

  “He hardly knows me.”

  “You made a big impression.” His eyes met mine and the corners of his mouth lifted.

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  He came closer. “The truth is there are better qualified candidates.”

  “So why didn’t one of them get the job?”

  “Ever since Edward Snowden disclosed information about covert surveillance of US citizens, top brass has been paranoid, and General Lee is no exception.” He smiled faintly and kept his voice low. “It’s impossible to determine if someone is able to keep a secret from a personality test. You, Mo, have demonstrated that you can.”

  “Are you telling me the reason I got lumbered with this is because I kept quiet about ...”

  “Shhh! Don’t say anything about that business ... walls have ears.”

  I must have looked skeptical because he went on to tell me that electronic bugging devices had been found at buildings used by the NSA. His lips twisted in a peculiar manner which I later came to identify as an ironic smile. “Our surveillance section spends millions of dollars developing listening devices only to have them used against us.”

  I thought the idea of the spies being spied on was kind of funny. “What you need round here is a Cone of Silence, like Maxwell Smart[11] insisted on using whenever he had something hush-hush to tell the Chief,” I joked.

  Otis’s eyes danced. I couldn’t believe it when he told me NSA’s Tech Heads had developed a jamming device based on an imaginary concept that originated in a screen writer’s head. “It works by pushing waves back with other waves using a combination of anti-vibration technology and sound-bytes,” he explained. “Mo, you’d be surprised how many of the inventions developed by Q in James Bond movies were followed up by our R&D team.”

  “You’re having me on.”

  Otis smiled. He had a great smile, one that made me smile back, even now when I felt like a total dumb-ass. “Remind me to take you on a tour of our museum,” he said, coming to a stop in front of a door marked Data Center. He turned the handle and the lock disengaged. “All the doors are fitted with iris recognition. For today I’ll get you through security. We’ll get your eyes scanned tomorrow?”

  “Okay,” I said and followed him in.

  Three

  Half a dozen guys casually dressed in shorts or jeans were stretched out in a tiled exercise pit. Nearby, co-workers sipped coffee, made bets on who could hold plank the longest and heckled wobblers. Down-spots mounted below the cooling equipment, used to collect and remove heat generated by computers, lit the work zone.

  Only one guy, seated at a PC, was doing anything that looked remotely like work. But based on the general lack of industry, he was more likely making a date with a chick on a chat line.

  All my preconceptions of an organization run along military lines went down the tube. Mind you, I wasn’t even aware of the NSA’s existence until it hit the headlines when Eric Snowden broke into their classified computer files. Back then I was flying missions over Syria as part of a joint US-Australia defence alliance. I thought the assertion that Snowden’s disclosures would destroy the credibility of the joint peace-keeping force was laughable. That horse bolted when we’d bombed the shit out of civilians.

  “Not exactly what I expected,” I said

  “Johnny Jihads don’t work nine to five, which is why this place operates 24/7,” said Kramer. He’d mistaken my frustration at being shanghaied as disapproval of the staff’s casual approach. “Employees are given the autonomy to use the space for personal pursuits ... just as long as the job gets done.” He jerked a thumb at the guy seated at the computer. “When someone is wearing ear-buds it means don’t bother him.”

  “Is he ...?”

  “Eavesdropping? Hell yes! The US is the top cyber power. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Pope, or the leader of North Korea we’ve got the know-how to tap into his cell phone.”

  “As long as there’s a legit reason ...”

  Kramer didn’t let me finish. “Is combating terrorism and defending your country from foreign aggression legit enough for you?”

  The security agency had come in for a great deal of flak. From the tone of his voice I guessed he took it personally. I nodded and changed the subject to something less contentious. “Why aren’t those guys in uniform?”

  “The NSA employs a huge number of civilians. In this division it’s IT technicians ... a weird bunch and PR writers ... even weirder. It’s a relief to have a regular Joe on the team.”

  Me ... a regular Joe! Kramer’s appraisal came as a bit of a shock. I saw myself as a devil-may-care maverick.

  “Let’s go on over,” said Kramer. “The guys are looking forward to meeting their new boss.”

  “D
o all these people work for me?”

  “Yes, but not exclusively. This unit provides IT and PR support to all the countries involved in Five Eyes.” Raising a massive hand, he counted them off on his fingers, “Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the States.”

  “Sounds like there could have been a mix up ... according to my orders I’ve been assigned to some outfit called ASP.”

  “No mix up. ASP is code name for the Australian Surveillance Program, one of the divisions of Five Eyes.” He rolled his big brown peepers. “Top brass like acronyms that are symbolic and the more contentious the better. ASP delivers on both counts, Mo.”

  “How, Sergeant?” I said, stressing sergeant. Familiarity was fine in private, but not in front of the ranks.

  “An asp is a small but extremely venomous snake, Sir.” Way back in history an asp put paid to Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt. According to the PR hotshots it’s a metaphor for the Australian division ... small and deadly.”

  “How small?”

  “You’re it.” He waved an expansive hand at the IT guys, talking noisily and making bets on the last three plankers. “They’re your back-up ... you share them with the other foreign units.”

  I’d never seen a more undisciplined bunch. Trouble was they were civilians and I didn’t know the protocol. “Might it be best if speak to the general before I address them.”

  “General Lee doesn’t have the time to spoon feed you, Sir.”

  Spoon feed me ... I was livid. Ordinarily I’d have balled him out, but I owed Otis my life. “Hooah, Sarge,” I said, the standard military response to anything requiring mandatory enthusiasm, “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Four

  The alarm woke me at five am. After six weeks at St. Agnes’s, I’d learnt that getting an early start was the only way for a fledgling teacher to cope. I got to school at 7.30am and didn’t leave until 6:00pm. After dinner, I worked for hours preparing the next day’s lessons. Weekends were spent marking. I’m not complaining. In fact I was thankful for the heavy workload. It helped to numb my grief over my poor mother’s premature death and the heart-wrenching pain of losing Karim.