Читать книгу The Supernotes Affair - Agent Kasper - Страница 8

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373 Days Ago: The Capture

Koh Kong, Cambodia-Thailand BorderWednesday, March 26, 2008

Clancy checks the outside mirror and the rearview mirror and wants to know how much farther they have to go.

“That’s the third time you’ve asked me that,” Kasper replies. “The third in an hour.” He passes a truck and gets back in his lane.

“So we’re getting closer all the time.”

“About twenty kilometers.”

Clancy takes off his sunglasses, blows on them, cleans them. “Nobody’s following us anyway.”

Good. With any luck, the whole thing’s bullshit, Kasper thinks. Nothing but a false alarm. Or maybe some stupid fucking April Fool’s joke, a few days early. But Bun Sareun’s voice on the telephone sounded serious. The Cambodian senator wasn’t joking.

“Leave town now.”

Not one word more. Only those three, repeated several times, in the tone of someone giving Life Advice.

Leave town now.

When Kasper hung up and told his American friend Clancy, he called the senator back. Not many words, zero doubts. “We have to get out of here. We can try to figure out what the fuck’s happening later.”

They filled two bags, grabbed two pistols, and took all the cash they kept in the safe in their house, roughly seventy thousand dollars. Now this nest egg is lying with Kasper’s change of underwear at the bottom of his black bag. Clancy’s bag is the same military duffel he’s had ever since he was an energetic young CIA analyst. It probably reminds him of years that won’t come again.

They left Phnom Penh hoping the whole thing was a crock; nevertheless, they’ve avoided airports, seaports, train stations, and any other potential checkpoints. They’re familiar with the Cambodian military. They know how its forces work. They’re especially familiar with the paramilitaries, the men in charge of the country’s internal “security.”

Which is why they had turned their Mercedes over to their driver, instructing him to take it for a long drive around the city. If he was stopped, he was to say he’d dropped them off a short time before near the Manhattan Club, Victor Chao’s casino-discotheque. They were careful not to pass by Sharky’s, the bar and restaurant they own together, but they called one of their employees and asked him to rent, in his own name, a sport utility vehicle. This machine turned out to be a Honda CR-V. They flung their bags into the back and left.

It was six in the evening. Darkness was starting to fall.

Their goal was the Thai border, just beyond a small town named Koh Kong. A meeting place for smugglers and whores. Six hours’ drive away.

Kasper called Patty, his Italian girlfriend. She’d been with him in Phnom Penh up until a few days before and had only just returned to Rome. Her leaving when she did was a piece of luck. On the phone, he stated only the essential facts of the matter. In a few words, without hesitations that could be interpreted or pauses to allow questions.

“We have to leave the city and probably the country.” His tone was unnaturally calm. “There are problems. We don’t know what they are. I think we’ll find out there’s been a mistake, but we want to be prudent. Don’t be worried. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

She asked no questions. And even if she had, the only response would have been a dial tone.

This isn’t the first time Kasper has found himself obliged to cut all ties with some place in the world. But it’s the first time he’s had trouble understanding why. And Clancy doesn’t seem to have things figured out any better than he does.

And so they start thinking about how their security was compromised. In Cambodia, it’s not hard to become a target, that goes without saying, but what could have happened?

The road to the border enters a harsh, suddenly hostile landscape that slowly wraps itself in its evening cloak. Kasper and Clancy talk over the past few weeks. Who or what could have put them in danger?

Maybe they stepped on somebody’s toes at Sharky’s. The bar’s clientele includes a lot of touchy people—something could have happened there. But what? Something to do with women? Or debts? Certainly not. Some blunder? Some injury this was payback for? Unlikely. Or maybe Kasper’s military expertise ruffled the sensibilities of some security boss working for Hun Sen and his government. Possible, but he would have known it already.

Theories. They’re not good for much except clarifying the horizon, thinning out the possibilities. They move you closer to the truth.

For example, suppose it was Kasper’s North Korean investigation—a mission he’d undertaken at the behest of the Americans—that had put them in danger. It seemed like a job well done. It seemed perfect. But maybe something had gone wrong.

Very wrong.

Kasper can feel it.

It’s a doubt that’s been churning around in his head from the start. Now he understands that it’s much more than a doubt. It’s a premonition. And it’s getting stronger and stronger.

Suppose it was that job I did for Clancy’s friends? he wonders under his breath. The question goes unanswered.

Kasper’s positive he made all the right moves. He used maximum discretion and followed orders. No one except his only contact with “the Company” knows about his mission. And, of course, Clancy. But even Clancy knows very little about it.

Kasper did a good, clean job. He did what he’d been asked to do.

Leave town now.

The Cambodian senator knows nothing about Kasper’s investigation. But the senator knows a lot about a lot of other things. It wasn’t clear from his telephone call where the danger was coming from. He didn’t specify whether they should be wary of “round-eyes” or “slant-eyes,” Westerners or Cambodians—or maybe even North Koreans.

Kasper decides to tell Clancy about his persistent doubt. His American friend listens to him in silence. They’ve known each other for twenty years, and they’ve been through a lot together. In Cambodia they share a house, they’re business partners in Sharky’s, and they collaborate in all things, each contributing his own particular set of skills.

Clancy’s sixty years old and not very talkative. He’s reticent and cautious. And smart. He’s someone who listens, first of all, and then discusses, basing his reasoning on his background as an organizer and an analyst. As for experience, he’s had a lot. He’s an American who has passed—not totally unscathed—through some of the pages of recent history.

“The thing with the North Koreans,” Clancy says, stroking his white beard. He ponders a bit. “Well, it just seems strange to me. I don’t know much about it, but . . .” He clears his throat and sighs. “But if that’s what it is, we’re in deep shit.”

“You know the Company people better than I do. Do you think that’s what it is?”

Clancy stays quiet for a few seconds. Then he shakes his head and says, “No, not unless you fucked up in some major way.”

“I didn’t fuck up. I followed their guidelines. I kept them informed about everything.”

“Everything?”

“Every fucking thing.”

“Did you do anything on your own initiative?”

“Nada.”

“Or talk to other—”

“Never.”

Clancy nods. “So no fuckups on your end,” he recaps.

“No, my friend. No fuckups.”

“Then that job has nothing to do with this. I don’t think it has anything to do with this at all.”

—

The bridge between Cambodia and Thailand is about a hundred meters long. Shortly after midnight, Kasper and Clancy arrive within sight of the border. They decide to spend the night in Koh Kong and cross the bridge the following morning. After getting two rooms in a trashy motel that offers hourly rates for the benefit of whores and their clients, they eat something in a fast-food joint nearby. Next morning they’ll leave the SUV in the motel parking lot and cross over on foot.

Separately.

That’s their plan.

They have to pass through two border checkpoints, the first Cambodian and the second Thai. But only the first one presents some risk.

Some risk? Kasper wonders. Or a huge risk?

That’s the crucial point, the Cambodian guard post. Once they’re in Thailand, all they have to do is to head for Trat, the nearest town.

Kasper would have preferred to avoid crossing the bridge altogether. He was for getting across the border at once, while it was still night, without wasting time. “Being afraid of trouble is better than seeking it out,” he said, reciting a Tuscan proverb. As a good Florentine, he’d repeated this wisdom to Clancy on several other occasions.

Kasper’s proposal: to ford the little river under cover of darkness and climb up the bank on the Thai side. Had he been alone, he wouldn’t have thought about it for a minute. But he was with Clancy.

Uncle Clancy.

His white beard, that pensive air.

“Are you crazy?” was the American’s response. “Didn’t you say the riverbank is mined?”

“There may be a mine or two, yes. You just have to pay attention. I talked to a smuggler friend of mine. He showed me where we should cross.”

“You cross through the mines. I’m strolling over the bridge tomorrow morning. It’ll be like taking a walk. Then we can swim in the sea off Phuket Island instead of this stinking gutter.”

They arise at dawn. From a public telephone, they call their employee and explain where he can pick up the CR-V. They tell him how to get rid of the guns they’ve hidden in it. Then they have breakfast, exchange a few words. Just the indispensable ones. They say their good-byes.

“Until we meet on the other side,” says Kasper.

“See you soon,” says Clancy with a nod.

—

Looked at from the Cambodian riverbank, the bridge seemed like a joke. See how perspective alters things, Kasper thinks. A few meters, and everything’s totally changed.

His passport passes from hand to hand. Four or five times. Back and forth, like a game. Then the first border guard points his pistol at Kasper’s face. Behind him, other guards have their weapons leveled.

They bring him to an office with a table, three chairs, and a poster displaying medical and health information.

Kasper tries hard not to assign blame, but without success. Swimming in the sea off Phuket Island. Fuck you, Clancy, he thinks, while the Cambodian soldiers search him and take everything he has. They lead him to another room in the guard post. This one’s empty except for a couple of plastic chairs. The soldiers tell him, “You wait here.”

After less than an hour, the door opens again and in he comes, the optimistic American. They detained him the same way: passport, two pissy questions, and a pistol aimed at his face.

Clancy sits down on a chair next to Kasper and plays the role of the red, white, and blue veteran. He says, “Maybe it’s better this way. We’ll clear up everything and go back to Phnom Penh.”

“Is that a hope or a prediction?” Kasper asks.

“It’s a prediction. You’ll see.”

“A prediction. Right.”

Kasper knows that the “predictions” Americans make sometimes get into ugly collisions with reality. The optimistic approach is endearing; unfortunately, however, it doesn’t pay. But that’s how the Americans are. They take on enemies they consider undersized weaklings who turn out to be rather more difficult than they figured.

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 me?

And there it is, the acid taste; it fills his mouth, fills his throat. His nose too. Suddenly, unmistakably. The body has instinctive responses. The animal that’s about to die secretes fluids and smells that have nothing spiritual about them. Fear accompanies us from birth and knows when its moment has come.

If he’s going to die, he’s got only a few seconds left.

Kasper can’t hear the sound the CID officer makes when he dials a number on his cell phone, but he hears him talking. In English: “So we proceed?” There’s a pause, then he says “Okay” two or three times, and then, “Okay, listen.”

The burst of fire from a Kalashnikov is a sound Kasper has never heard from the perspective of the person being slaughtered. He flinches as the 7.62-caliber rounds whiz by, a meter over his head. Fear and the force of the blast push him down. He ends up face-first on the ground. The bullets fly through the darkness.

“Let’s go,” Darrha says, putting the cell phone back in its holder.

They put Kasper back in the automobile and start off again. Now the five Cambodian Blues Brothers are laughing. They’re all happy. Much happier than before.