An Australian spy, Johnnie Walker by name, stands out as one of the first key characters to appear in my supernatural suspense novel, The Mark of the Spider.

Johnnie, who describes himself as an economic attache in the Australian consulate in Borneo, sidles up to nature photographer Sebastian Arnett in a bar in Tenom and offers to buy him a drink.

Ever skeptical,  Sebastian susses out that more lies behind this offer than a simple act of friendliness.

That drink leads Sebastian to near catastrophes, visions of the mythical black orchid and an encounter with headhunters. And the story is just getting underway.

Australia in the 1850s. Borneo is off to the northwest. Photo: National Library of Australia

As Johnnie and his colleagues in the Australian Intelligence Service pop up from time to time throughout the book, it’s fair to ask how much of their story is fact and how much is fabricated. The short answer is, neither Johnnie nor AIS is real, but the intelligence interests I write about are.

Borneo lies more than 3,400 miles (5,480 km) northwest of Australia. That’s a seven and a half hour flight, but in the vastness of the Southwest Pacific, the two countries rank as relatively close neighbors.

So, it stands to reason that Australia would want to keep track of events in Borneo, and who better to do the job than a fictional guy like Johnnie Walker of the Australian Intelligence Service.

And, like most countries, Australia employs a long list of secretive groups devoted to gathering and analyzing information about the world around it and the dangers that world might pose.

Just for fun, I did a little research into the real Australian spies after making up my own. I learned that the real Australian intelligence community is organized around six umbrella agencies:

• Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
• Australian Secret Intelligence Service
• Australian Signals Directorate
• Defence Intelligence Organisation
• Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation
• Office of National Assessments

Johnnie would probably find a job in the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, which is not to be confused with the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (real) or the Australian Intelligence Service (fabricated).

Yum, alphabet soup from Down Under.

You can get an overview of the Australian intelligence community in the 2011 Independent Review of the Intelligence Community Report, which can be found online here.

The Mark of the Spider is available in ebook and trade paperback editions from Amazon.