The Marmalade Files Read online

  And now here, next to the obituary, was a photograph of the Red Capitalist and his son, Wang – the very same man from the black-and-white photo.

  ‘Jesus, the third man is the son of the Red Capitalist … where is this going?’ Dunkley said to himself.

  He recalled the lines that Mr DFAT, his anonymous Deep Throat, had uttered during their most recent phone conversation: ‘The past always points to the future.’

  Now, after weeks of often fruitless searching, another piece of the jigsaw had fallen into place.

  Dunkley knew that he needed to do a heap more digging, but it wasn’t iron ore, gold or nickel he was mining for. It was something much more valuable. Something, he knew, that could not be found on the east coast.

  July 15, 2011

  Catriona Bailey lay stricken on her hospital bed, her life measured by a battery of medical machinery. To the untrained eye she was beyond resurrection. But Amy McCallum’s eye saw things that escaped everyone else.

  Regarded as one of the nation’s best neurologists, she had been called in from Melbourne to examine the Foreign Minister. Bailey had been unresponsive for weeks now and the Canberra medical team had exhausted all possibilities. It seemed Bailey would never recover. But McCallum knew from long experience never to take appearances for granted.

  She sat on Bailey’s bed and began the ritual. She always assumed her patient could hear her.

  ‘Hi, Ms Bailey, I’m Amy, a neurologist,’ she started. ‘You are in intensive care in Canberra Hospital. You have been here for a month after suffering a serious stroke. You are on life support. You were unconscious on arrival and showed no response to any stimulus. Your eyes have been closed the whole time and recently they have been taped down. I am just going to open your eyes now. It shouldn’t hurt.’

  McCallum gently removed the tape, wiped the outside of Bailey’s eyes and opened them.

  ‘Okay, I want you to do something for me. Look left.’

  And Bailey’s eyes moved left. The nurse standing next to the bed gasped.

  ‘Look right,’ said McCallum.

  Bailey’s eyes moved right.

  ‘Jesus,’ whispered the nurse.

  ‘Blink if you can hear me clearly and understand what I am saying.’

  Bailey blinked.

  ‘That’s excellent, Ms Bailey. Let’s try something else. I am going to get the nurse to hold your feet. Can you move your toes?’

  Nothing. The nurse shook her head.

  ‘All right. I am going to put my finger in your hand. Can you squeeze it?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Okay, I am going to touch your arm. I want you to blink once if you can feel it or twice if you cannot.’

  Bailey blinked once.

  ‘I’m going to touch your leg now; can you feel it?’

  Bailey confirmed she could.

  ‘Ms Bailey, I think I know what’s happened. You have suffered a rare kind of stroke. The lower part of your brain has been damaged and that means you have no control over any part of your body, save your eyes. In fact your eye movement is very good. And because your pathways have not been damaged you can still feel your body, which is one of the many aspects of this condition which makes it so distressing.

  ‘It might be a long time before you can move.’

  Here McCallum wasn’t entirely forthcoming; she knew it was highly unlikely Bailey would ever move again. She knew that people with locked-in syndrome usually died within four months. But she saw no need to dwell on that now as there were things that could be done, miraculous things. And some patients lived for years.

  ‘Your upper brain has not been damaged and that means you have had no loss of brain function. That’s a start. And since you can move your eyes you can talk to us and give us instructions. We just need you to learn a new language. Here’s what I want you to do.’

  July 15, 2011

  The two men sat in the darkened corner of the cafe, quietly talking. The orders had come through from DC; the risk of doing nothing was too great. The operation had begun.

  Preparations had been completed, as instructed. It was time now to flick the executioner’s switch.

  It would be the usual modus operandi: a strategic leak to the New York Times or the Washington Post. It wouldn’t be front-page stuff, but a skilled mention in the world news pages was just as valuable. After all, the intended audience was very select.

  The leak would come from ‘senior Pentagon sources’ and would point to the target’s public statements that suggested a retreat from the commitment to buy stealth bombers. The quote would include a direct criticism of the Minister, something that was rare. The intelligence-sharing agreement would be raised. Those in the know in Canberra would be left in no doubt that Washington was not pleased.

  They had tried to warn him, several times in fact. Don’t meddle with the Alliance. But he’d ignored them, another cocky Minister who thought he could play God and to hell with the consequences.

  He’d set his course, ordering the Department to begin the process of winding back the Joint Strike Fighter program, as if it was his decision alone to destroy what had taken years to construct. All those billions invested in the Alliance, strengthening the common bonds that had withstood so much over the years. And it was never more important than now, in the endless fight against global terror, against the spread of militant Islam, and the rise of the Asian superpower.

  He was putting it all at risk, goddamn him. Didn’t he know, didn’t he care, about this war? It was no longer defined in the old paradigm of armies rolling across countries and invading neighbours. It was no longer a fight over territory alone. This war wasn’t being fought so much with guns and bombs as with ideology; it was about the struggle to establish a dominant culture. It was about the existential threat posed by an inscrutable enemy targeting a weakening West.

  And he wanted to put the Alliance at risk? Now?

  Who did he think he was playing with here? Fucking amateurs?

  They would teach him what it meant to question the value of shared beliefs, to be unpatriotic. The target would not know what had hit him; the pincer movement would be deadly and, they hoped, swift. They didn’t like to see their victims squirm for any longer than necessary.

  They were human, after all. Most of the time, anyway.

  July 18, 2011

  BAILEY’S AWAKE!

  The headline screamed from the front of Melbourne’s Herald Sun, the country’s biggest selling paper. The 100-point font was usually reserved for the declaration of war – or an AFL drug scandal.

  Typically, it had a red ‘Exclusive’ tag splashed above the byline. And this time, the scoop really was a game changer.

  Brendan Ryan stared dumbly at the page. Even his huge intellect struggled to deal with the story.

  It told the remarkable tale of a Foreign Minister trapped inside a broken body, but whose mind was as sharp as a tack.

  Given its parochial nature, the Herald Sun had devoted an almost absurd amount of space to the brilliant Carlton-based neurologist who had diagnosed Bailey. And, as a bonus, her husband had once trialled for St Kilda.

  Amy McCallum was teaching Bailey to blink out words one letter at a time. It was a technique first developed by the doctors who’d treated a French journalist suffering the same condition, with the almost tabloid name of ‘locked-in syndrome’.

  Ryan read that paragraph over and over to let it sink in. Bailey was aware. She could communicate. That meant they would need her permission to get her out of Parliament. Ryan didn’t need words blinked out a letter at a time to tell him what the bitch would do.

  ‘This woman is like the fucking Terminator,’ he said out loud. ‘Blow her fucking arms and legs off and her fucking eyes keep blinking.’

  July 19, 2011

  The gentle nod of academia greeted Ben Gordon as he arrived at the Australian National University a shade after 3 p.m. The ANU was home to some of the country’s brightest minds and the Crawford School of Economics a
nd Government was a standout among its faculties – a treasure chest of boffins, all experts in their field, and hardly a grey beard among them. Crawford had been lovingly nurtured over the years by university management, always doing well during fierce budgetary debates – even during the dreaded Howard years when the Tories had threatened to cut off funding to any university refusing to bow to their right-wing industrial mantra.

  Gordon drove his fashionably black VW Polo into the School’s car park, nestling the hatchback next to an ageing Volvo station wagon caked in a thin film of dirt and a clichéd pastiche of left-wing bumper stickers. He’d lined up a meeting with George Tiding, one of the best university historians in the country, a walking encyclopedia with an amazing capacity to delve into the ANU’s vast archives.

  Tiding could recite the Head of Faculty list for the past two decades, or detail the ANU alumni starring on the global stage. He could also deliver precious information on just about any student who had trundled through the university’s hallowed corridors. He and Gordon had been friends for close to fifteen years, since discovering a Sydney family connection and sharing the odd dark secret that each preferred to keep off the street.

  ‘Nice to see you, my friend. I have a few notes ready.’ Tiding beckoned Gordon into his compact office, cluttered with the trappings of academia and looking as if it was in need of a decent clean-up.

  ‘Thanks, George, appreciate it muchly. What can you tell me?’

  ‘Well, she was seconded to the embassy in Beijing – or Peking, as it was known then – for just a few months; it was 1982, in fact. The notes suggest it was a short-term arrangement, probably at her insistence so she could practise her Mandarin.’

  ‘Do you have the precise dates, George? That is really crucial.’

  ‘I can get those for you. You wouldn’t like to tell me why Ms Bailey’s deep dark past is so important to you all of a sudden?’

  ‘Let’s just say she’s come into my orbit. I’m chasing a hunch, as they say.’

  ‘Okay, my friend, but you should know someone else is interested in Ms Bailey’s past, someone with a distinct American accent.’

  Gordon didn’t flinch, instead displaying his best look of indifference. But his mind was ticking fast.

  Someone else was trawling the same waters.

  Bailey. Paxton. China. What was the connection?

  July 19, 2011

  Rarely had Canberra Hospital experienced such a media circus. News that Catriona Bailey had woken, like some modern-day Frankenstein, had sparked a frenzy usually reserved for Kylie or Shane or some shallow celebrity du jour.

  Every network had sent every spare journo and cameraman to stake out all entrances, in case they missed an important visitor. It was causing mayhem with the routine arrivals of the injured and the sick, not to mention the comings and goings of patients’ families and friends.

  Once more, the fourth estate was busy disgracing itself, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘a low act’. One enterprising reporter from the Ten Network had borrowed her mum’s nursing uniform in an audacious attempt to locate the stricken Bailey. A screaming match had ensued between Ten’s chief of staff and the hospital management. ‘See if I fucking care …’ had been the journalist’s delightful sign-off.

  Jill Everingham, the hospital’s exasperated CEO, had already dismissed an intensive care nurse for leaking the news of Bailey’s condition to the Herald Sun. Now she had called a press conference for 10 a.m. in a desperate bid to try and wrest back control of her hospital.

  But as she stepped in front of the television lights in one of the hospital’s conference rooms, she feared things were about to get worse.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming.’ (Everingham actually wished them all to hell.) ‘We understand there is considerable public interest in the condition of the Foreign Minister and that is why I have invited her specialist, Dr Amy McCallum, to speak with you today. But before we begin, can I implore you to treat this hospital, and its patients, with the dignity it, and they, deserve.

  ‘Now I will ask Dr McCallum to say a few words about Ms Bailey’s condition and then answer your questions.’

  A nervous McCallum stepped up to the podium and squinted through the lights at the packed room. She’d had no idea there would be so many journalists. And there seemed to be a lot more television cameras than she imagined were necessary, a phalanx of them on a riser at the back of the room and others roaming to her right and left, or squatting directly below her. There were also a half-dozen stills photographers rattling off shots.

  ‘Good morning, I’m Amy McCallum, a Melbourne neurologist,’ she said. ‘First, may I say how disappointed I am that the privacy of my patient was violated by a health professional. That is unforgivable.

  ‘Yet Ms Bailey has made it clear to me that she wants the public to understand her condition and she has only one request, which I will get to in a moment.’

  McCallum outlined Bailey’s locked-in syndrome and the blinking communication system devised by the French doctors of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who went on to dictate a book, The Butterfly and the Diving Bell.

  ‘Unfortunately, the prognosis for Ms Bailey is not good,’ she continued. ‘It is rare for people with this condition to survive for long. In 90 per cent of cases people do not live beyond four months following the trauma.’

  In Parliament House, Martin Toohey and some senior staffers were watching the press conference live. At the words ‘rare for people with this condition to survive for long’ Toohey caught Papadakis’s eye and lifted his own eyebrows hopefully. It was a brief moment of optimism.

  ‘But there are exceptions,’ McCallum continued. ‘Bauby lived fifteen months, long enough to see his book published.’

  The media waited impatiently through the description of the disease. McCallum was telling a great yarn but most saw it as background that they could get later. She had lost them early with the words ‘only has one request, which I will get to in a moment’.

  The second McCallum paused and Jill Everingham said, ‘Any questions?’ the room exploded into a cacophony of: ‘What did she say?’

  ‘It was an unusual request,’ McCallum responded. ‘I checked it with her and then she refused to say anything else.’

  ‘What was it?’ bellowed the room.

  ‘“I only want to talk to Thommo.”’

  Five kilometres away, the blasphemy of the Prime Minister reverberated through the corridors of Parliament.

  July 20, 2011

  ‘Ease up, turbo.’ Harry Dunkley pulled back on the accelerator and cursed. Loudly. He’d been warned about Perth drivers, those foot-to-the-floor hoons who practised death-roll gymnastics on the ribbons of asphalt dissecting their city, ignoring the safety of others.

  He’d arrived the night before, late, on a Qantas 737 from Canberra, the jet pitching madly in the cross-wind turbulence that turned the trip across the Nullarbor into a white-knuckle adventure. It had taken two whiskies and a small bottle of G & T to calm the nerves. Jesus, I hope this is worth it, he’d thought as the plane bucked like a frisky nag.

  It had been a decade or so since he’d last travelled to the Wild West, ten years in which Australia’s mining boom had transformed Perth into a city of millionaires. The capital’s suburban wastelands were now teeming with shift workers who regularly took the two-hour flight north to the Pilbara, enticed by the lucrative rewards. An ordinary cleaner could clear $125k working on a rig, while a barely qualified tradie could ask for more than $175,000 and expect to receive it.

  It was close to 11 a.m. and Dunkley, in a rented Corolla, compact and gutless, was trying to follow directions to Osborne Park, a semi-industrial suburb fifteen minutes out of the CBD. One wrong turn – he’d headed left instead of right – and he was shuffling along beside Kings Park, trying to read a street map while keeping a watch on the race track that passed for one of the main arterial roads.

  Twenty minutes later, he arrived at Unit 4, 321 Selby Street North
, Osborne Park. So this is where public servants come to die, he thought.

  His appointment was with Deirdre Patch, whose email signature dubbed her Processing Officer, Consumer Protection Branch, WA Department of Commerce. A brisk-looking woman greeted him then led him to a windowless room with cluttered shelves, a small table and two chairs.

  ‘Please take a seat, Mr Dunkley. We don’t often get personal visits for files, particularly ones this old …’

  Patch had already placed the file in question on the table, a dull green folder with a faded white label in the top right-hand corner. Six words stood out in clear font: ‘United Mineworkers Federation – Workplace Reform Association’. Dunkley felt a slight tremble in his stomach.

  ‘I’ll give you some time; be back in ten if that suits.’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be great. Cheers.’

  Inside he found a handful of faded papers, A4 size, several stapled together in a timeline of sorts. The association had been incorporated in Perth on 15 March 1984 by a Tom Darcey from Slater & Gordon, that well-known Labor law firm. The name meant nothing to Dunkley but he took notes, determined to track down Mr Darcey.

  He leafed through the papers until he found what he was looking for, a single sheet of white paper titled ‘Form 1 – Associations Incorporation Act 1977 (Section 5(1)). Application for Incorporation of Association’.

  To the average Joe it meant bugger all, but to Dunkley it was pure gold.

  The purpose of the association was ‘development of a framework to achieve a safe workplace’. A noble aim, he thought.

  And the two signatories to the account? The names were semi-scribbled and had faded with time, but they still stood out like the proverbial: Bruce Paxton and Doug Turner.

  Dunkley rocked back in the chair and heaved a deep sigh. The flight across Australia, that five-hour journey into the vast nothingness, had been worth it.