Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent by Mark Abernethy Page A

as he exited. It didn’t come. He walked straight into tourist crowds. Malaysian lawyers and dentists with their kids all kitted out in genuine Sulawesi tribal headdresses.
    He fl owed with them, adrenaline bursting like fi reworks behind his eyes. His vision darted everywhere at once, breathing shallow and raspy. His brain was working so fast he could barely think of anything else except silver Honda, black polo shirt; silver Honda, black polo shirt. Silver. Black. Black. Silver …
    He walked for fi ve minutes like that before he took his hand entirely off his right hip. There didn’t seem to be a tail. Not from the silver Accord, at least. The two Western-style Javanese hit men probably hadn’t wanted to take their business into the street.
    Mac had got lucky.
    He lurched to a stand of hibiscus behind a bus stop shelter. Vomited.
    For all his reputation as a tough customer, he hated shooting, hated guns and loathed seeing someone die. But no amount of training or experience could stop a trapped and scared animal behaving like a trapped and scared animal. Mac hadn’t shot Minky because he was tough; he’d shot him because he was scared and wanted to control the situation by making the other guy more scared than him. It was a mistake. He’d known that as soon as he pulled the trigger.
    He walked and walked. He backtracked, overlapped and did the oldest trick in the game: turned on his heel suddenly and walked straight back from where he came. It looked natural if you pretended you’d forgotten something. He walked past the markets, down to the waterfront, a thriving fi shing town for a thousand years and now concentrating on netting South-East Asia’s holidaying middle classes.
    The local jihadists were trying to reverse that with the aid of their old friend, potassium chlorate.
    Midday turned into two-thirty real fast.
    He dipped into a series of dime stores of the type that blanket Asia: the ones that sell cigarettes, incense and cigarette lighters where the girl’s bikini drops when you turn it upside down. They sell the local rags as well as Tempo , the Straits Times and the Jakarta Post . Mac bought plain Nokias and pre-paid cellular network cards for a Philippines telco called EastCall. He ducked in, he ducked out. He bought phones from different shops and bought a packet of wet-wipes. He ate goreng at a street stand, sitting back in the shadows where Grandma wrapped spring rolls. He didn’t let his eyes leave the street or his hand leave his right hip, and he cleaned Minky’s vomit off his pants.
    He did numbers: six shots left in the Heckler, but it would have to be dumped. He didn’t want to go back to the Pantai for the Walther - too risky now. He should have taken the goon’s Glock with him, but now he’d have to pick up a gun when he RV’d with Sawtell.
    Would they have a spare? How many more did Garrison have coming for him? And who or what was Minky talking about when he said
    ‘Eighty’?
    He walked some more, looking for a car hire place that wasn’t a big American brand - the CIA data-tapped those franchises quick-smart. And the Americans were starting to look like being part of the problem rather than the solution. Minky was an Agency contractor and the hit squad was probably the same. But whether the ambush was American or Australian, Mac felt relieved that he’d changed the RV with Sawtell from Makassar to Ralla, up the coast. Mac hadn’t been thinking about double-crossings when he’d done that at the last minute. He’d just wanted to keep a posse of highly conspicuous special forces soldiers out of town until he needed them. Now it might give him a day’s head start on whoever was after him.
    He asked around and headed inland to a place called Paradise Holiday Hire Cars. A couple of locals had said it was cheap and reliable.
    And they took cash.
    He passed by the Golden Hotel on the waterfront and watched a bunch of Anglo and Asian junketeers milling around, waiting to get on a tour