The Marmalade Files Read online

  Toohey’s path to power had been more politics than policy. He had followed the well-worn track from university politics to union organiser and then swiftly risen through the ranks to lead the oldest right-wing union in the country: the Australian Workers’ Union.

  Pre-selection for a safe Labor seat followed, but as he neared the top he was forced to make a dreadful choice: continue to support a good mate as Labor leader, and undoubtedly be led to defeat again; or throw in his lot with Catriona Bailey and possibly win office.

  Bailey did not have the Caucus base to take the leadership on her own and neither did Toohey. What galled Toohey was that he had more support than Bailey, but she was far more popular where it counted – in the electorate.

  There is an old saying in Australian politics: the very worst day in government is better than the very best in opposition. So Toohey backed Bailey, destroyed his old friend, and won government.

  For a while, despite Bailey’s astonishing personal weirdness, Toohey actually believed she might just be a political genius and that they could be a formidable tag team, making the kind of changes that would lift them into the same Labor pantheon as Hawke and Keating. But after just a few months in power, he began to see how bad his judgement had been.

  Bailey was chaos. She could not focus on one idea at a time and, with every finger-snap announcement, entire tracts of the public service would have to scramble to try and make policy sense of it. As PM, she tended to make grand pronouncements in public which then had to be retro-fitted behind closed doors. Her advisers were too young and too green to corral her and to correct her mistakes. And her determination to micro-manage meant she got buried in the weeds and lost sight of the big picture. ‘She is like a lighthouse and a microscope,’ one Minister complained. ‘Endlessly sweeping the horizon and then focusing for a millisecond on some trivial detail.’

  Bailey’s language was absolute, allowing no easy path for retreat when things went pear-shaped.

  The bureaucracy – which initially hailed a Labor Prime Minister after what many saw as the dark years of the Howard era – quickly grew to despise her and dubbed her TB, which, handily, stood for both a virulent disease and ‘The Bitch’.

  But the bureaucratic disdain was trumped by the hatred she engendered in her Cabinet and Caucus. They were sidelined and routinely subjected to the sharp edge of Bailey’s tongue. She abused and ridiculed those who dared question her, and her colleagues began to dream of her demise. But while her poll numbers remained sky-high that day seemed a long way off.

  For two years, the public had remained her best friend, despite increasing whispers of Napoleonic behaviour. Like the time a departmental head had been ordered to return from a summer holiday in the US because the PM had demanded a brief on her desk ‘within a week’, only for it to sit, untouched, in Bailey’s in-tray for a month. Or when a senior Bailey adviser spent a frustrating day chasing the PM around Australia seeking a meeting, eventually ending up in Darwin, close to midnight, without even a toothbrush, and the PM still refusing to speak with her.

  For a time, Bailey’s constant stream of reviews and announcements gave the impression of a dynamic government, but the smokescreen would eventually blow away to reveal an empress without clothes.

  Six months before the election, Bailey’s poll numbers collapsed and Labor hardheads feared they would become the first government in eighty years to be turfed out after just one term.

  Martin Toohey, the loyal deputy, began to contemplate the unthinkable – capping the PM.

  When the execution came, it was over in a heartbeat. Once the possibility of knifing Bailey became a reality, almost the entire Labor Caucus wanted to get its hands on the blade – she was gone in less than twenty-four hours.

  But she wasn’t really gone, winning her western Sydney seat of Lindsay comfortably and demanding the Foreign Affairs portfolio as her compensation.

  Oh, and hadn’t she enjoyed giving the ‘up yours’ to the colleagues who had torn her down.

  Toohey despised Bailey. But he was trapped. He knew it and Papadakis knew it.

  He finally broke the silence.

  ‘Okay, I’ll go,’ he seethed. ‘But I’m not taking flowers.’

  ‘That’s fine, I will,’ said Papadakis.

  And he swept out of the room, victorious.

  February 16, 2011

  In the dim glow of a Beijing night, scented candles dancing light across her silhouette, Weng Meihui brushed back her long black hair and glanced at her delicate features in the mirror, wondering, ‘Will he remember me? Remember us?’

  The distant hum of traffic was a constant reminder of the restlessness of Beijing, a city always on the move, in thrall to the dictates of its masters.

  She pulled her silk robe tighter and wondered what he was like now and whether she would have the same old feelings. Or had too much changed?

  She used to tease him when they were locked in each other’s embrace, whispering in his ear, ‘Dà Xióng Mao.’ My giant panda. He had loved it. She recalled how it would titillate him and spur him to greater heights of passion.

  They used to joke about how they were bridging the East–West divide, forging closer diplomatic ties, working together for global peace.

  He had trusted her – he was so foolish and naive.

  When had they first met? Was it 1979 or 1980? Perhaps as he strolled through the Forbidden City as she relayed facts to tourists about the history of the Imperial Palace, or on a walk around Tiananmen Square. Those years had blurred into one, back when the People’s Republic was emerging from decades of darkness, from the bloodied cloak the Gang of Four had bound tightly around its citizens. The first flush of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms was just taking hold, giving hope to a nation that had endured the iron-fist rule of its Communist dictators for thirty years.

  For the first time since the Kuomintang had been swept from power, China had been open to foreign investment, eager for hard currency, and the West had responded with lust, sending delegations to size up the business opportunities in a land of almost one billion people. Diplomatic relations were being restored with Western powers – the United States and Britain – with Australia, too, coming along for the ride.

  Those first delegations experienced a country that preached socialist equality but in reality had stagnated economically, many of its people too hungry and too scared to protest against the ruling clique. But these intrepid Western explorers also sniffed the huge opportunities that lay ahead, as an emerging middle class grew in a marketplace the likes of which the world had never known.

  And they were introduced to razor-sharp young Chinese officials like Weng Meihui. Tibetan by birth, Weng’s parents had turned their backs on their country and cast their lot with the Chinese after the 1950 ‘liberation’. Her father rose to become assistant governor, earning the wrath of the global ‘Free Tibet’ movement which dubbed him the ‘Puppet of Beijing’. He was rewarded with a plum job in the Communist capital and broke the final link with his homeland by changing his family name.

  Weng Meihui was recruited as soon as she’d graduated from Peking University with a double major in international relations and classic Chinese literature. Her handlers would joke among themselves that she was perfectly suited to the tasks they had in mind for her, because ‘betrayal ran in the blood’ of her family.

  She was sent straight to the Ministry of Culture – a prized posting – as one of a small group of multilingual officers who would act as unofficial escorts for the growing numbers of Westerners eager to sample the delights of the East.

  She was clever and confident, recruited as much for her sexy good looks as for her brains – not to mention her willingness to do whatever was required by her superiors to satisfy their convictions of loose Western morals and loose Western lips.

  It was in this crucible of capitalism, communism, opportunism and sin that their sweet, sexy, impossible relationship had been forged. A meeting of minds as much as of bodies – an implic
it understanding by both parties that each could only give so much; no more. Now, reminiscing in the soft candlelight as she dressed for dinner, Weng Meihui wondered just how mutual that understanding had really been.

  A little while later, still tangled in reverie, she stepped delicately from the car, the door held open for her by the restaurant’s attentive concierge. Almost absentmindedly, she entered the fashionable establishment – and pulled up short. There he was. A little older, a little more padding, but he still took her breath away. A giddy cocktail of lust, affection and regret surged to her head and heart, forcing her to stare at the floor for a long moment while she regained her composure. By the time she steeled herself to raise her eyes, he had discovered her. Pretending a cool she did not possess, Weng Meihui took her seat across the table from him, and so began a long, slow, painfully erotic dinner flirtation, destined to end only one way.

  The black limo pulled up outside the St Regis, still Beijing’s best hotel, he believed. It was a little after 11.30 p.m., the Chinese capital slowly emerging from its deep winter, the heaving smog of so many millions wrapping around him like a thin layer of clothing. He stretched and stifled a yawn as he wandered through the lobby towards his fifth-floor room, glad to be alone and rid of the minders who usually accompanied him.

  It had been a wonderful evening, the formal dinner giving way to a few hours of honest intimacy, just the two of them, alone, again.

  He had surprised himself over dinner with a steady seduction, using his toes to first stroke, then part, her slim legs, then to tease her to distraction, all the while carrying on a diplomatic discussion with a level head. He had learned a thing or two since those young, impetuous days. But, as the seemingly interminable formalities had finally plodded to their unhurried conclusion, he’d felt the old habits of subterfuge stir. Negotiating wordlessly, they’d arrived separately at her room.

  She had changed into her silk robe, opening the door to him silently. He quietly closed it behind him, then pressed her against the wall, holding her hands above her head as he leaned in and kissed her – at first gently, then, as his blood rose, with increasing passion. She submitted to his touch, met his flicking tongue with her own and arched forward to press her breasts against him as he teased her by holding himself back just a little.

  Her robe fell open and he gently slid his hand inside, sweeping her still-taut torso from hip to breast. She gasped as he squeezed her nipple. ‘Dà Xióng Mao,’ she groaned – and that undid him. With urgency now, he pulled the robe from her shoulders, leaving her small hairless body completely exposed, her nipples straining towards him. Still dressed in his expensive suit, he felt a surge of power as he drove her towards the king-sized bed. She lay on the covers and smiled, pointing her delicate feet towards him and slowly stroking the inside of his thighs in a teasing echo of his dinner-time antics. He wrenched off his jacket and tie, throwing them in a heap on the floor, and fumbled with his shirt buttons. Finally freed of his clothing, he dipped his head and hands to the bed, sliding slowly up the length of her body, tasting the familiar tang of her. He used his tongue and fingers in the way she had always loved, teasing her until her body bucked and arched so hard in ecstasy that, panting, she begged him to stop.

  She had kept some of her old habits too, straddling his prone body and moving oh-so-slowly as she drew him into her, raising and lowering herself in the way she knew would drive him crazy, leading him ever so delicately to that delicious, shuddering conclusion.

  Three times over two-and-a-half hours she had brought him to climax – not bad for a bloke of my vintage, he had thought. It reminded him of the restless energy of his teen years: running on the beach, swimming until he could barely move then backing up for a hard game the same afternoon, coming in off the bench to throw all he had at the last half of a match. She made him feel so alive, so vital.

  Lying alone now on his anonymous hotel bed, he allowed his eyes to shut, weariness overtaking his body as he mentally flicked through his marathon twenty-four hours – a long flight and a day full of meetings, then that dinner that would have been deadly dull but for the fact that she was there, seated across the table and looking like heaven. He drifted off with a slight, unconscious grin – she really had made it all worthwhile, every moment of it.

  June 17, 2011

  Draped in a lush fur stole that hung theatrically over a clinging black evening gown, Ben Gordon was impossible to miss.

  An imposing six feet and two inches, he perched at the bar of the Atlantic, sipping a messy-looking cocktail and flicking through a glossy magazine peddling real estate dreams off the plan. Gordon had retained the Nordic good looks of his youth and his body had not yet succumbed to the middle-aged spread of so many his age. But he resembled nothing so much as a character from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Dunkley thought, and was perhaps the least convincing transvestite in Australia. Although, given Dunkley’s experience with transvestites was limited, it was possible there was a cross-dressing man in a bar somewhere who looked less like a woman than Ben.

  But he doubted it.

  As Dunkley approached, Gordon looked up and smiled through several layers of carefully applied hooker-red lipstick. The rest of his face was buried behind a thick layer of make-up, a crimson rouge giving extra texture to his angled features.

  ‘Dunkie!’ he squealed, a tad too loudly, as he rose to meet his friend. Every eye in the darkened room locked on the pair.

  Dunkley stood uncomfortably, not sure whether to respond to the greeting with a hug, or a kiss, or a simple manly handshake.

  Gordon tottered across to him, his size eleven feet crammed into black Jimmy Choos that added several inches to his frame. A Gucci handbag the size of a rucksack was slung over his right forearm.

  He planted a kiss, and about a centimetre of lipstick, on Dunkley’s cheek.

  ‘Hi, Ben.’

  ‘Dunkie, you know better, it’s Kimberley,’ Gordon chided before launching into a monologue that Dunkley knew would have to be endured for ten or so minutes before sensible conversation could begin.

  ‘You never call. It’s been what, two months? And don’t tell me you’re busy because you can always make time for your very best friends …’

  The drone gave Dunkley time to reflect on their friendship. They had first met thirty years ago at Sydney University’s rugby club, Dunkley a handy fly-half and Gordon the kind of hard-hitting line-out-jumping lock that coaches dream of. Both could have played in the top grades but they instead plumped for the more leisurely status of fourth grade, where serious training gave way to serious drinking.

  While Dunkley was enrolled in the soft-ply humanities – majoring in politics and English – Gordon was immersed in pure mathematics and linguistics. He passed with honours. But work was scarce and he’d racked up thirty job applications before he finally landed a position as an analyst with the nation’s domestic spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. After several years compiling files on mostly harmless citizens who had strayed into ASIO’s orbit, he’d transferred into the bowels of the most secretive building in Canberra: the Defence Signals Directorate.

  Nestled on the western end of the Defence precinct at Russell Hill, DSD stands out from the rest of the Lego blocks dumped on the hillside by virtue of its menacing hi-tech perimeter fence. Inside, it is Australia’s listening post. The nation’s electronic eavesdropping is deposited there. And it is where senior bureaucrats and Ministers go when they want to have secure video-link conversations with their counterparts in the US and UK.

  Gordon was the best analyst in the DSD. He made sense of raw data and had specialised first in Indonesia and later engaged with the emerging giant of China. He was fascinated by the mega-nation of 1.3 billion people, millions of them in rural ghettos, thousands in prisons for not much more than the crime of questioning Beijing’s iron-fisted rule. He was particularly interested in China’s push into the Asia–Pacific neighbourhood, where it was buying favour with nations
small and large.

  Outsiders might wonder how Ben managed to hold one of the highest level security clearances – AUSTEO: Australian Eyes Only – given his unusual lifestyle choices.

  For Ben the answer was easy.

  ‘The security clearance tries to uncover areas where you might be compromised, some weakness that might leave you exposed to being blackmailed,’ he said. ‘How can someone blackmail me for being a trannie if I dress like this in the cafeteria every day?’ It was a compelling argument.

  ‘So, what do you really want?’ The change of tone shook Dunkley out of his mental meandering.

  ‘I’ve got a photo we need to talk about. I don’t know what it means.’

  Gordon’s eyes narrowed. ‘Well, we’re not discussing it here. You have a look that tells me this is serious. I do my best serious business at Caph’s in Manuka. Table at the back facing the entrance. Meet me in twenty minutes … I’ll leave first.’

  And with that, Gordon finished his cocktail and strode out, all purpose and intent, albeit in a pair of killer high heels.

  Caph’s, a downbeat joint in the cafe district of nearby Manuka, was unusually empty for this time of night, with just a few lonely souls scattered among its numerous tables. Ben Gordon, though, was taking no chances.

  ‘Take the battery out of your BlackBerry.’

  Dunkley followed the command, knowing that Gordon’s knowledge of electronics and espionage left little room for argument. Ben had told him that an everyday mobile phone could be turned into a listening and tracking device, without much effort. And in Canberra, with its endless conspiracies and political intrigues, it paid to be ultra-cautious. Besides, Dunkley needed the advice of his long-time friend. The black-and-white photo was starting to trouble him. Bruce Paxton was easy, but who were the two Asian men?