Читать книгу The Supernotes Affair - Agent Kasper - Страница 16

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.