“Give me a b—”
“I represent the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Right. I’m with the Vatican, myself.”
“And I’m with the FBI,” the grouch adds. “We arrived in Phnom Penh today. We’re here specifically for you and your friend.” He opens a sort of gray credit card wallet and shows it to Kasper.
FBI. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
That’s what it says, in big letters. But it doesn’t mean a thing. As far as Kasper’s concerned, it’s just another trap. He shakes his head. “Go fuck yourself,” he repeats.
“You’re not ever getting out of here. You know that, don’t you?” says the blond one.
“If you say so.”
“The prisons here aren’t like the ones in Italy, where you drop in every so often, stay for a few days, and then come out again and go right back to fucking up. Here they’re serious. There’s a reeducation program already in place for you. And if you stay here, we can’t help you.”
Kasper’s familiar with such a program. He’s already been given a few classes during his first days in prison. And now he realizes that the whole thing has a “Made in USA” stamp on it.
In the week Kasper has been detained they’ve hooded him, beaten him, tortured him.
They’ve crammed him into a cement niche a very thin person could barely fit into. It’s the live burial technique, used to make you grasp what it feels like to be flung into a grave. They close you up and leave you in there for hours. If Kasper wasn’t driven mad, it’s only because, as a well-trained agent, he was able to control his claustrophobic panic.
They’ve waterboarded him in the Cambodian style: tied to a kind of rocking chair, a towel on his face, and water poured on the towel, choking him.
Kasper recognized the methods. They’re the same ones used in Guantánamo. The same ones that the CIA, in the name of national security, has employed in many parts of the world. They amount to unremitting torment. When a prisoner begs his captors to kill him, he’s not acting like a hero. He’s asking for a favor.
And now these two Americans come in, passing themselves off as representatives of two domestic agencies.
It’s an old trick. If they think he’s going to fall for it, they must really consider him an idiot. Good cop, bad cop. Pathetic bastards, Kasper thinks.
They want to know everything he knows.
They want to be clear about what he’s uncovered. Names. Places. Every detail.
He already told Darrha what he knew, or thought he knew. He swore there was nothing to add to what he’d already reported to the person who commissioned the North Korean investigation.
“I haven’t hidden anything from you, not a fucking thing.” He shouted with all his might: “I’ve told you everything!” He defended Clancy: “He’s got nothing to do with this. He doesn’t know anything about that mission.”
But it was no good. It wasn’t enough. He saw that right away. Because evidently there’s something he doesn’t know but might have found out. Or maybe guessed.
It’s the reason they won’t let him go.
It’s the reason he’s supposed to die.
4
The Prisoner
Attorney Barbara Belli’s Office, Quartiere Prati, RomeFriday, May 9, 2008
Barbara stretches out her legs under the desk. She’d like to take a goddamned cigarette break, like in the good old days when she was a law student and spent nights poring over legal textbooks. A thousand pages in her head, and in her lungs a nicotine level that the Institute for Health and Preventive Care would have assessed as “interesting.” She dutifully reminds herself that she quit smoking ten years ago, when she got pregnant with the first of her two sons.
She’s quit doing a lot of things over the past ten years. And her passion for her work is also becoming a thing of the past.
She examines the two women in front of her. They dropped in unannounced, no call, no appointment of any kind. “An urgent matter,” they explained.
She made them sit in the waiting room for a good half hour before having them shown in.
Then she listened to them. She didn’t interrupt them with many questions, and the ones she asked were those strictly necessary to her understanding of the situation. But she hasn’t yet figured out whether the case that’s just landed on her desk sounds like something of great significance, something vastly more important than what she usually gets, or an enormous pain in the ass.
She’s leaning toward the latter assessment.
The two women study her in silence, clearly tired but still combative. In the brief introductions that preceded getting down to business, they—the elderly Florentine lady and the young woman with the Roman accent—identified themselves as a retired mathematics teacher and a working veterinarian. Two normal women, involved against their will in something not even remotely normal. They’re the mother and girlfriend of a man who’s gone missing, who disappeared about a month ago. In Cambodia.
The prisoner, they say.
Her cell phone rings. Barbara looks at the screen and snorts: Marta again. The babysitter. Her third call, and it’s not yet noon. Barbara murmurs, “Excuse me,” and answers the phone. “No, they’re not allowed to watch television in the morning. I said no. Play a game with them, help them draw. Invent something, for Christ’s sake!”
The elderly Florentine lady doesn’t bat an eye; the younger woman shows a slight smile of measured sympathy. She clears her throat and says, “Signora Belli, we’d like to know if you think you can do anything.”
“But of course!” Barbara replies automatically, obeying the first commandment of such enterprises as hers: a client is a client; don’t send anyone away. “Of course we must do something,” she says to clarify. “It’s just that I have to have a good understanding of the case. I have to get into it a little more. I’ll need some further details. . . .”
“I don’t think there’s much else,” the young woman murmurs, shaking her head.
“We’ve told you all we know,” says the older lady, summing up.
“Let’s go over it again.” Barbara’s gaze settles on the younger woman’s black eyes. Two wells of authentic trepidation. They can’t lie. “A little more than a month ago, you receive a telephone call from your boyfriend. He’s in Phnom Penh, right?”
“Right.” The young woman nods and sweeps her dark hair from her forehead. “Cambodia.”
“And he tells you . . . can you repeat it to me?”
“He tells me he’s leaving the city because there might be some problems.”
“Problems. What kind of problems?”
“He didn’t give details. He said he’d call again as soon as he could and told me not to worry.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes. He’s never been much for talking on the phone.”
“Your boyfriend owns a place in Phnom Penh, a bar called Sharky’s, right? His co-owners are two American friends, one of whom—a certain Clancy—supposedly left the city with him. Do you know this Clancy? Is that his real name?”
“Clancy’s his nickname, but everybody has called him that forever,” the young woman