The Mandarin Code by Steve Lewis Read Free Book Online Page B

the Chinese, Lin was a construction worker sent to Australia to help build the fortress-like embassy that was taking shape on the lake’s edge, four hundred metres from the existing buildings. The story didn’t fit though; his pallid body displayed none of the brawn or weathering you’d expect of a labourer exposed to Canberra’s punishing climate.
    Someone wasn’t telling the truth.
    Dancer fired up his MacBook Pro as the voice of Angelique Kidjo flowed from Bang and Olufsen speakers. Her blend of home-grown activism and sultry French vocals always relaxed him.
    The file was encrypted. That reinforced the notion that Lin was not a labourer. Clicking through the unreadable documents, Dancer surmised it would take quite some time before they could be cracked.
    And if Lin had locked it with keys that only he possessed?
    That might take weeks.
    Once opened, the file would have to be translated, although that would pose little trouble for Dancer who’d been stationed for several years in Beijing. Prior to his posting, he’d studied Mandarin at the RAAF School of Languages at Point Cook and graduated R4S4, the highest levels of reading and speaking.
    Dancer had a particular passion for China and its rich and painful history. It was something he’d shared with Kimberley Gordon, a former security analyst with the Defence Signals Directorate whose death eighteen months ago had left a searing wound.
    Kimberley had been DSD’s shining light, a gifted agent who had risen to the top of a naturally paranoid organisation, despite the fact that she, in her early forties, had transformed from a man to a woman. Ben Gordon had become Kimberley without missing a beat in his/her career.
    Dancer had envied her courage in resolving her sexual confusion because it had been very different for him. As a teenager in a strict Baptist home, Charles had fought the attraction that he felt for men. Denied it and himself. He could never admit it to his parents and his father’s words still haunted him.
    All mankind is depraved, sinful and lost.
    He had quit his family’s stern religion as soon as he left home. But it clung like a cancer on his soul. Dancer loathed himself and his homosexuality. He had grasped at relationships with women, but they ranged from the awkward to the embarrassing.
    Eventually he had given in to his desires but only when he was far from home. Even in his late forties, he had never had a long-term love.
    Until he met Kimberley. Then he was besotted. She seemed to offer an answer. Outwardly female, bodily male. For a while, they revelled in each other, liberating each other’s lustful yearnings. But, in time, Dancer’s doubts and his loathing returned. Kimberley had fought to maintain their special bond, to try to get him to find peace with himself. But the relationship was doomed.
    I pushed her away.
    They avoided each other for more than a year before Kimberley had sought his help with a difficult job. He had been thrilled to hear from her. Tried to help her. To point her in the right direction.
    And then she was killed.
    More than once, Dancer had caught himself muttering ‘For you, Kimberley . . .’ as he set about some onerous task, trying not to douse himself in self-pity and blame.
    Now, on a summer’s day promising to soar into the high thirties, Dancer began to run the first pass of a decryption program over the USB. A nervous twinge whisked down his left arm, the anticipation of stumbling onto something big.
    An hour later Dancer had extracted a few shards of information from one of the hundreds of files on the memory stick. The lines of the decrypted code did not disappoint, confirming that Wade was right to be suspicious of the Chinese claim that the dead man, Lin An, was a labourer.
    The first file was a dossier on Lin.
    My my my . . .
    Dancer had seen enough secrets in his time that he could usually cover his excitement with a studied