Free The Mandarin Code by Steve Lewis

Award, among a pile of other ill-treated honours on a cluttered shelf. The chaos of the Bailey–Toohey years had been the most successful of Dunkley’s long career covering politics. Labor had been good for journalism and he’d led the pack.
    So what.
    No award could mask the pain that followed the death of his only real friend, Kimberley Gordon. It was only after she was gone that he realised how alone he really was.
    He’d met Kimberley at university when she was a he: Ben Gordon, a hard-running rugby forward. The two were both instinctively loners, destined to find one great friendship in each other. They clicked instantly and shared every high and low for over two decades. They’d grown even closer through the years of Ben’s torment over his sexual identity. He’d finally decided to make his way as a woman. Dunkley wasn’t good at life advice but he was the one thing his friend had needed: someone to talk to.
    When Kimberley died Dunkley had no one to talk to. His marriage was over and his daughter distant. Kimberley had always been there, and her loss was a constant raw welt.
    Only now, in his budding relationship with Celia, had some of the pain begun to fade. But Dunkley knew he would always be tormented until he unravelled the mystery of Kimberley’s death. And avenged it.
    The official line, that she had been the victim of a gay-hate crime while cruising in a public toilet, infuriated Dunkley. It was a lie, a lazy bureaucratic dismissal of a rich and beautiful life. The police had cast Kimberley as a freak who’d invited her own death.
    But he was convinced her murder was linked to former Defence Minister Bruce Paxton and his murky ties to China.
    I pushed the rock that started the landslide.
    Dunkley had asked for Kimberley’s help with a photo that eventually implicated Paxton in electoral fraud. But she had turned up a more astonishing story: that Paxton and former prime minister, Catriona Bailey, had been courted by Chinese spies.
    The allegation was unprovable, the evidence circumstantial at best. And he was well aware that spooks were naturally paranoid and prone to conspiracy theories. But Dunkley could not reconcile one undeniable fact: within hours of Kimberley stumbling onto the links between Bailey and Chinese intelligence, she was dead. If she wasn’t the victim of a senseless crime there was only one logical conclusion.
    Someone knew what she knew and wanted it to die with her.
    Every day he felt the weight of guilt. She had died helping him. Dunkley had used his considerable investigative skills to try to track down the killer. All roads led to China, and he believed a third secretary, who had abruptly left the Chinese embassy in Canberra following Kimberley’s death, was the key. Dunkley had taken long-service leave to follow the trail to Beijing, but turned up nothing.
    So he’d come home and thrown himself back into his job with vigour. But the experience had hardened him against China. He’d written opinion pieces warning of the strategic risks that came with the opportunities of its rise, reminding Australia to remember who its real friends were. Since the Second World War, the United States had provided the security environment that had allowed China to flower peacefully. Dunkley doubted that China would be as benevolent when it was fully grown. Everything he saw confirmed his prejudice against a nation that seemed to be ever more aggressive in its dealings with neighbours.
    Dunkley’s opinions were at odds with the prevailing view and drew much criticism. But he’d found some in Cabinet, Defence and Canberra’s diplomatic community who were deeply grateful. The Japanese Ambassador was particularly helpful.
    Later this morning, he had an appointment with an old contact. He’d received the call a day earlier, out of the blue, from someone who kept more secrets than a Catholic priest.
    He licked his lips at the prospect of