The Shadow Game by Steve Lewis Read Free Book Online

her role, but it made no difference to either of them. What mattered was that they were young and together. Their euphoria was not to last; given the divide between East and West, theirs was an impossible love, and time and circumstance drove them apart.
    Then, after half a lifetime, she came back. Weng had been listed as ‘wife’ of the newly arrived Chinese ambassador to Australia, but her true role was to once more ensnare Paxton. They’d genuinely rekindled their affair, trying to outsmart Weng’s controllers, but from the outset it was clear that she was frightened and desperate.
    They’d hatched an escape plan, Paxton leveraging his defence contacts to strike a bargain with the Americans. She would give them the information they craved in return for asylum in the US. Paxton would then join her.
    But Weng had vanished on the night of their planned escape. The agony of that wait at Canberra Airport was like an open wound in Paxton’s chest that never stopped aching.
    He’d searched, but never found her. No one would say if she was in Australia or had returned to her homeland, or whether she was alive or dead. It was as if she had never existed and he was the only thing keeping her memory alive.
    He shuddered as a sudden chill descended from a crystal sky of a million stars.
    These visits were a balm, the park his only connection to the past, to her. Here, he could imagine Weng emerging from the moonshadow, smiling, laughing, reaching out to touch him.
    His mind shifted to another painful memory.
    Paxton had used the only weapons he’d had to try to pressure the Chinese to hand over Weng, or reveal her fate. He had teamed up with the journalist Harry Dunkley and used parliament to level an extraordinary series of charges.
    He’d railed against a shadowy organisation calling itself the Alliance, naming senior military and intelligence figures as agents acting against the democratically elected government. He’d linked the former prime minister Catriona Bailey to the Chinese, declaring her a spy. And he’d accused the Chinese of kidnap, even murder, on Australian soil.
    Paxton managed a grim smile when he recalled what should have been his moment of triumph. He had picked his mark well. The acting deputy speaker had been half tanked and nearly asleep when Paxton got to his feet to address an almost empty chamber. He was three minutes into the damning allegations before the presiding officer was roused by the frantic calls of a duty MP. The deputy called on Paxton to resume his seat, but he ploughed on through his long list of allegations, even as his microphone was switched off.
    The Serjeant-at-Arms was called. Paxton was dragged from the chamber.
    Then the unthinkable happened. For the first time in ninety-five years, the House expelled a sitting member.
    Paxton was hauled before the bar of parliament on substantially the same motion that had been used against Labor’s Hugh Mahon on 12 November 1920: ‘having by seditious and disloyal utterances . . . been guilty of conduct unfitting for him to remain a Member . . . and inconsistent with the oath of allegiance which he had taken’.
    Paxton was banished by a vote of one hundred and forty-eight to one. His Western Australian seat was declared vacant and he was briefly charged with treason before the case was dropped.
    The retribution went deeper. His speech was expunged from Hansard, the entry now merely reading as ‘a disturbance’. The tapes from the House monitoring system were erased. The media, on deadline as the speech was made, hadn’t clicked to it until Paxton was being evicted. They were told the speech was covered by a Special Intelligence Operation order and they risked five years’ jail if they mentioned it.
    Only one reporter even tried: Dunkley. He had posted a transcript online before his website was shut down. Then he was arrested secretly by the Australian Security Intelligence