He considers the guards on this hot morning. There are four of them at the moment, engaged in the usual distracted chattering while the zombie-prisoners are taking the air and smoking. Near the guards, a single Kalashnikov stands propped against the wall.
Thomas is worried. Very worried. But he’s just guaranteed Kasper that he won’t back out. “It shouldn’t be hard for me to act like I feel sick. I feel sick already. Seriously.”
Kasper looks at him. His greenish complexion confirms what he said. His liver’s working overtime. Luckily, there are still Americans like this, Kasper thinks. Americans like Thomas Rolfe and Brady Fielding. Men who help others. Who, when their country has committed an injustice, can admit it.
At his signal, Thomas will walk toward the guards and collapse to the ground in convulsions. That will be the moment.
The difficult part will be the jump. One single jump. Once he’s over the gate, he’ll simply have to make a dash for the street.
Simply.
The street’s where Brady, astride his Yamaha, will be waiting. They’ll take a carefully planned route, down side roads and over terrain inaccessible to automobiles, a route that will be difficult for their pursuers to follow.
“Are you ready?”
“I’m ready,” Thomas whispers.
“Okay, let’s get started. . . .”
“Listen, pilot,” says Thomas with a wink and a daredevil smile. “If something goes wrong, we’ll meet in the next life.”
“Everything’s going to be all right. All you have to do is feel sick.”
Thomas staggers off in the direction of the guards. Nobody notices him. In Preah Monivong, everyone staggers, more or less. It’s a scene that Kasper has imagined dozens of times. The American will crumple and fall, the guards will surround him, so will the other prisoners. No one will pay any attention to Kasper, and he’ll do what he has to do.
That’s exactly how the scene will play out.
But at that precise moment, Kasper sees him.
The man in the blue shirt.
Kasper recognizes him at once. He’s one of the political prisoners, one of the most respected. He can’t be forty yet, skinny as a rail, his face so hollow it looks like a skull, his expression that of a man possessed. He emerges from a small group of Cambodians that opens like the corolla of a flower when it lets the insect inside fly away. And this insect flies. A blue blur, he heads straight for the gate, throws himself on it, and starts to climb.
But slowly. Too slowly, Kasper thinks. He wonders if he would have been as slow as that.
The prisoner hauls himself up to the top of the gate and swings one leg over it.
Now he’s got a chance. All he needs to do is jump.
The burst of rifle fire sends everyone sprawling. Everyone except the fugitive. He remains where he is, straddling the gate as though nailed to it. Then, slowly bending from the waist, he falls forward onto the top rail. His hands clutch the metal, and then the strength seems to drain from his arms. They dangle in the wind. But he’s not dead. Not yet. His body jerks; he tries to move, barely raises his chest off the gate, leans to one side. He holds that position for a few seconds before plummeting back into the prisoners’ courtyard.
The guard with the Kalashnikov walks over to him and turns him over with his foot. He points his rifle at the fallen man’s head and fires a single shot, blowing out his brains.
—
Thomas has been vomiting for a long time. Kasper watches him and at the same time observes the other prisoners as they writhe in their beds.
The escape attempt seems to have driven the guards mad. They ordered everyone back inside. They kicked and punched the Cambodians, singling out the political prisoners for blows with sticks and rifle butts. They restored order.
Kasper and the American have been spared. The officer who inspects the prisoners goes over to Thomas and says, “They come for fetch you. You free to go.”
Then he goes over to Kasper and reveals his future: “Prey Sar.”
10
The Prophecy
On the Way to Prey Sar, near Phnom Penh, CambodiaSeptember 2008
The Toyota SUV taking him away from Preah Monivong Hospital has left the last suburbs of Phnom Penh behind. Now the big 4X4 is driving through a rural landscape composed of rice paddies and a few green areas not yet destroyed by uncontrolled deforestation. They pass somnolent villages united by the torpor of poverty, and then more paddy fields.
Kasper’s chained hand and foot. The smells of earth and suffocating heat mingle with the reek of sweat. The three soldiers escorting him will unload their prisoner at Prey Sar and drive away.
Prey Sar is the place of no return. It’s the place that’s spoken of as little as possible, and always very softly. Even the Westerners who live in Cambodia have learned that.
Prey Sar is hell. Kasper knows what’s waiting for him there.
He’s done a lot to deserve it.
He’s committed at least three mortal sins.
First sin: he trusted the wrong people. Second sin: he underestimated the risk. But the most grievous of his sins, the one that’s worse than everything else, is that he overestimated himself.
Not for the first time.
Now he realizes there’s something more serious than irresponsibility and cockiness behind his tendency to tempt fate. Something seriously pathological. Crazy, like he said. Also kind of stupid, the way he persists in behavior that endangers his health. Such as landing airplanes in extremely adverse conditions. Such as opening his parachute only four hundred meters from the ground. Such as handling explosives.
He’s spent thirty years like that, in a constant bath of foaming adrenaline.
These months in prison have given him time to think about his capture. Again and again he’s asked himself: if he and Clancy hadn’t been alone, if Patty had still been in Phnom Penh, what would have happened to her?
The answer is obvious.
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