Kasper knows Americans well. His father’s a half-American Tuscan born in Memphis, Tennessee. Half of Kasper’s family lives in St. Louis; most of his military and pilot training took place in the States. He loves everything about America, or almost everything. Therefore his old friend Clancy’s optimism really pisses him off.
Suppose they’re in real trouble—the worst kind of trouble, the definitive kind?
They sit for a few hours in the stifling little room with its barred windows and its reek of smoke and frontier. It’s a hole, this post on the Thai border. The Cambodian guards keeping an eye on them chat among themselves. And wait.
Three in the afternoon. The door of the room swings open and five men in civilian clothes come in. They’re Cambodians, and they’re armed. They know perfectly well who they’re dealing with. Kasper’s immobilized at once. No martial arts or any of the rest of his repertoire. With Clancy, things are easier.
They sit Kasper and Clancy down and bind them. Chains around ankles and arms, wrists tied tightly behind their backs.
These five are professionals.
Kasper recognizes a couple of them from the Marksmen Club, the Phnom Penh shooting range where he habitually spends a lot of his time. Now he realizes that he and Clancy are not in deep shit.
It’s worse than that.
The five men are from the Combat Intelligence Division, or CID, a very special task force that takes on some very special assignments. These are people who don’t waste time. Five sons of bitches ready for anything. There are probably five more of them outside this room.
The unit’s veterans are all former Khmer Rouge. The younger guys live on myths of the past, of a ferocious competence that’s earned the CID a pretty grim reputation over the years. In many cases, they operate in close collaboration with the American embassy, which is to say the CIA’s Indochinese field office.
Leave town now.
Too late, dear Senator Bun Sareun.
—
There are ten of them altogether. Kasper called it right.
Dark suits, dark glasses: they look like the Blues Brothers, Cambodian version. Their weapons are Smith & Wessons, Colt .45s, AK-74s, and AK-47s. Their vehicles are two black SUVs, already loaded with the prisoners’ “personal effects.” The bags have been overturned, their contents scattered about, the $70,000 removed without trace. In this situation, that’s just a detail.
The detail that will save his life.
“You’re under arrest for tax crimes,” the unit commander announces. He’s Lieutenant Darrha, a thirtyish mixed-race Cambodian whose aspect is both martial and diabolical. Tall, sturdy, dark-featured, with something European about him, and those eyes: like deep wells, full of threatening promises.
“Tax crimes against the Cambodian state,” Darrha specifies.
“Let me see that in writing,” Kasper says.
The response is immediate: a kick to the pit of his stomach. He leans forward, bent in half, trying to breathe.
“Could you read that all right?” says the leader of the Blues Brothers.
They fling Kasper and Clancy into different SUVs and drive off.
Before he loses sight of Clancy, Kasper manages to exchange a glance with him. The American looks very frightened. He knows as well as Kasper, even better than Kasper, who’s taking them for a ride. And Clancy too is probably thinking that this ride could be his last.
They don’t remove Kasper’s chains. They don’t allow him to sit more comfortably. They offer no water, not even a little. It’s been hours since Kasper had anything to drink, and that room the border guards kept them in was an oven. By contrast, the vehicle he’s traveling in now is an icebox. The air-conditioning’s cranked all the way up. The two-way radio coughs and hacks. His five captors chat in Cambodian and look at him.
They look at him and snicker.
The SUV zooms along like an arrow. No one’s going to stop them for exceeding the speed limit, that’s for sure. Kasper thinks he could try something if he had on a pair of simple handcuffs and his feet were free. But the men escorting him think so too. His chains make any movement impossible. The pain they’re causing is already torture.
After two hours of travel, he can’t feel his joints anymore. His condition has moved well beyond pain.
Lieutenant Darrha’s cell phone rings. He answers and speaks in English, nervously stroking his Kalashnikov. His tone is that of a man who’s receiving orders, a man obliged to give explanations. The prisoner’s still alive, yes. They’re taking him to Phnom Penh, he explains, relaying where they are and how far they have to go. Then he stops talking. He listens. He signals to the driver to slow down a little. Every now and then he emits sounds but doesn’t say a word.
When the call is over, Darrha murmurs something in Cambodian. His words scratch the silence like scraped glass. He turns off the radio and points to some indeterminate spot ahead of them. The driver slows, turns on his hazard lights, comes to a stop on the shoulder of the road. Kasper can sense, a short distance behind them, the glimmer of headlights: the other SUV, still tagging along.
Kasper hopes Clancy’s better off than he is.
Some of the guards ask Darrha questions and obtain answers that don’t seem to meet with general approval. The nervousness is obvious now. Kasper tries to guess the meaning of the discussion, but the Cambodian language is a mystery to him, even in its intonations and cadences. What sounds like friendly mewing can be a curse. Or a death sentence.
In any case, what he thinks he’s understood from the conversation is that the telephone call has altered the program. The Cambodians exchange a few clipped sentences and then fall silent. Nobody’s laughing anymore.
Darrha grabs the assault rifle he’s holding between his knees. In “full auto” mode, the AK-47 will fire 750 rounds per minute. But only one would be enough to do the job on me, Kasper thinks. Darrha says something to the two men sitting on either side of the prisoner and the left door opens. “Out,” they order him.
Kasper gives it a try, but his legs are like hardened plaster. They push him out. He rolls around on the roadside. Grass and mud. The evening has the scent of rural Cambodia; the transition from conditioned air to tropical heat closes his windpipe. Or maybe what takes his breath away is his awareness that this isn’t a courtesy stop at some service area. They tell him to get up. On his feet, right away. Kasper complies slowly.
“Walk straight ahead,” Lieutenant Darrha orders him.
Now it’s not so hard to guess the significance of Darrha’s English telephone conversation. Kasper takes a few steps, the lieutenant right behind him.
“That money. Whose is it?”
“It’s mine.”
“You have more?”
Kasper sees a ray of hope. He recognizes it in Darrha’s question, in those few words of common, utterly normal greed.
More money.
He decides to bet everything on that slim possibility.
“I have much more money, yes. But not here.”
“So you’re rich? Where’s your money?”
“My family is rich. Very rich.”
“Can they pay for you?”
“Yes, they can pay. They can pay a lot.”
“Okay, on your knees.”
The source of the sound Kasper hears is indisputably the cocking handle on Darrha’s AK-47. It’s ready to fire. What the fuck, Kasper thinks, all those questions and now he’s going to waste