by Andy Maslen
“Poor Vinnie. All he wanted to do was help the kids here. And you’re right. He did find something out. I put him onto it, so in a way his blood is on my hands.”
Gabriel leaned forwards.
“What happened? What did he discover?”
Instead of answering, Visna got up. He filled a tin kettle from a tap and set it to heat on a gas ring. He turned to speak over his shoulder as he prepared a teapot.
“Tom Boh is not the only charity for orphans in Cambodia. There are many others. It has become something of a market, if you know what I mean.”
“Not really.”
“Well then, I shall explain. Tell me, to run a charity, what do you need?”
“People? Money?”
“Yes, you need those two things. And of the two, money is the most important. For food, for water, for clothing. For bedding, schoolbooks, electricity. Vinnie was a wonderful man and a very skilled electrician. He could speak to electricity like I am speaking to you. But without money, there would not be any electricity for him to talk to. So, we need to raise money. Funds, in the parlance. Tom Boh is small. We have many donors who give a little and a very few who give a lot. But even in the world of charity, there is competition.”
“Who are your competitors?”
“Oh, the big global outfits are all here. World Vision. Christian Aid. Oxfam. But in this part of Cambodia, there is one charity that reigns over all the rest: Flowers of Hope. The director is French. Her name is Marie-Louise Hubert. On the outside, she is the white queen. Smiling for the media. Tousling the hair of the kids in her care. But listen to me carefully, Gabriel. The woman is pure evil. If there is a racket, she sits at its centre like a black widow spider.”
Gabriel had not been expecting such a fierce denunciation and pulled his chin down as he tried to recalibrate his response to what he was hearing.
“And when you say rackets …”
“Let me spell it out for you. Trafficking. Prostitution. Pornography. Slavery.”
“But surely you could stop her? Publicise what she’s up to and get her arrested?”
Visna exchanged looks with Lina. Part humour, part pity, Gabriel thought, catching their shared glance.
“Remember what I told you on the way over?” Lina asked.
“She has protection?”
“Of course! She’s part of the whole shitty gangster culture. She has powerful friends in the Royal Gendarmerie, the government, everywhere. She has made herself rich. And she has been clever enough to make her friends rich too.”
Gabriel scrubbed his scalp with his fingertips.
“Don’t get me wrong, because what she’s doing makes me sick. But it’s really that profitable?”
Visna answered.
“I’m saving the best,” air quotes, “until last. The kids she ships off to families in the Gulf states or Thailand and Vietnam, they take drugs with them. Nobody’s going to search a Cambodian orphan on their way to a new and better life. Imagine! Pretty little ride-on suitcases on wheels painted like ladybirds or elephants, packed with heroin. That’s where the real money is.”
“And Vinnie was, what, surveiling her? Gathering evidence?”
Visna nodded.
“He was going to take the whole lot back to the US and release it to the media. Then we stumbled on something else. Something that put even sex trafficking into the background.”
“What could be worse than that?”
“I don’t know. Vinnie texted me one night and said he found something he needed to investigate back in America. Immediately. He never came back. The next time I heard of Vinnie was when Lina contacted me saying an Englishman wanted to see me to talk about him.”
Gabriel took a deep breath and let it out in a rush.
“I think that whatever he found out had to do with a US company called Orton Biotech.”
He carried on, telling her of his suspicions about Orton Biotech, and only stopped when Visna reappeared clutching a three-inch thick ring-binder enclosing a wad of documents.
39
Orton, Ambushed
MOK told Orton that the drive from his palatial jungle residence to the airbase would take just under three hours. The Chinese-made 4x4 Orton was driving was a brute, but it coped without complaint as he powered southwest along roads that ranged in quality from weed-strewn concrete to rutted tracks little better than the open country to each side. He’d planned to hire something a little more luxurious, but Mok had advised against it. Orton, he’d said, would be safe as far as Mok’s writ ran, which was roughly twenty-five miles in all directions from his village. Once beyond his protection, Orton would be in bandit country, literally. Mok explained it was a free-for-all among local gangs, many of them ex-Khmer Rouge like himself, who patrolled the roads looking for westerners to rob. Spotting anything on four wheels with a German, British or Japanese badge, they would erect an instant roadblock or else simply stand in the road brandishing Kalashnikovs. Then they would deliver a species of authentic experience way beyond that for which the luckless tourists or expats were searching.
Unlike his countrymen and women, Orton had no problem with the idea of meeting a few tooled-up bandits. Looked for it, in fact. He drew a great measure of his confidence from the Colt at his waist, a gift from Mok, who maintained a small but significant armoury in the backroom of his house. And from an M16 propped up against the passenger seat. The rifle was Orton’s own: he kept it in a self-storage locker in Phnom Penh.
Rounding a bend, Orton saw the road was blocked with a couple of fallen trees. He slowed the 4x4 down, swung the wheel over and crashed through the thick brush to avoid them. Back on the concrete, he looked ahead and immediately understood what was going on. Two hundred yards away a pickup truck straddled the road, blocking it completely. Three men stood in the loadbay, and even at this distance he could see they carried rifles.
“Good,” he murmured. “You just made my trip even more interesting.”
He stopped the car and reached over for the M16. He set the four-way fire selector switch to BURST then pulled the charging lever back.
Closing the distance between them to a hundred yards, he waved then swung the car in a circle that took it off the roadway and into the scrub before bouncing back onto the road facing in the other direction. Checking that they were preparing to give chase he trundled off back round the bend, pulled off, parked behind a stand of bamboo, and climbed out. He jogged into the jungle, tracking out and behind the car. He could hear the pickup roaring closer and looked for a decent firing position. He found one. A lightning-struck tree that had keeled over before hitting a neighbouring trunk and forming a rough capital A. He scrambled into the lower branches, M16 on his back held by its webbing sling, then climbed steadily until he was twenty feet above ground and commanded an uninterrupted view of his abandoned car. It was simply a matter of waiting after that.
Seconds later, the pickup hurtled round the bend and skidded to a stop by the 4x4. Shouting to each other in Khmer, the three men dismounted from the load bay, leaving the driver behind the wheel. As they approached the front of the 4x4, Orton opened fire.
His initial three-round burst caught one of the bandits in the shoulder, spinning him round so that the blood jetting from the wound sprayed over his comrades’ faces. While he screamed in pain, Orton loosed off three more bursts. Bandits two and three fell backwards, one with a shattered skull, the other with his heart and lungs smashed by the 5.56 rounds.
Orton switched the selector to SEMI, took careful aim along the iron sights, and fired a single shot through the rear window of the pickup. The driver’s head exploded, coating the inside of the windscreen with a red mess of blood and brain matter.
He climbed down from the tree and wandered out onto the road, holding the M16 by its pistol grip. The man he’d wounded in the shoulder was lying jammed up against the side of the pickup, his face pale from shock. Blood was pumping out of his upper arm and soaking the black cotton of his shirt. He looked up
as Orton approached and held his hands out in front of him, palms up.
“You want to surrender, is that it?” Orton asked, with a smile as he reached the man.
“Surrender! Yes, surrender,” the man said in English. “Prisoner. You take me to hospital.”
“Sorry, friend. I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way. The Geneva Conventions don’t quite stretch this far out into the jungle.” He watched as the man struggled to understand what he was saying. Squatting so their faces were level, he spoke again. “I tell you what. How about I stop your suffering altogether, how would that be? Stop the pain, yes?”
The man nodded, bobbing his head up and down while clutching the ruined flesh of his arm.
“Yes. Stop pain. Morphine, yes?”
Orton stood.
“Better.”
Then he drew the Colt and shot the man through the right eye.
Driving round the pickup and not bothering to avoid the bodies, he smiled as he left the carnage behind.
“Orton six, Cambodians nil,” he said, then started singing as he floored the throttle towards the airbase.
He arrived at five minutes past six that evening. The fuel gauge needle had been trembling just above the E for the last few miles, and it was with a sigh of relief that he killed the engine and climbed out onto the pale concrete of the apron. The base was a relic of the civil war, originally built by the North Vietnamese and then, when they’d pulled out, taken over by a Thai drug gang who used it to transport heroin. A year earlier, Orton had struck a deal with the Thais to use the base.
He opened the tailgate and removed an elastic cargo net from hooks screwed into the sides of the loadspace. Under the black mesh was a plain wooden crate. Its lid was nailed shut and sealed with large blobs of black wax. He pulled the crate towards him until it was flush with the rear bumper then went to hunt down his pilot.
The pilot, a native of Paris who’d burned out flying commercial jets, lay in a hammock slung between two palm trees behind the airbase’s offices. He was listening to records on an old-fashioned portable machine powered from a cable snaking inside the building. As Elvis’s mournful voice asked, “Are you lonesome tonight?” the man turned at Orton’s step.
“Ah, Monsieur Orton. You are here.”
Orton took in the man’s pinned pupils, little more than black dots in the pale-blue irises.
“Having fun at my expense, Perec?” he asked.
The pilot shrugged lazily and pursed his lips.
“What else is a man to do out here in this fucking place? Waltz?”
“I could send you a whore to dance with if you like?”
“Non, merci. I am quite happy with Elvis and my habit.”
“Come and help me unload the EboMal.”
Together they lifted the heavy crate onto a trolley. Orton steered it into a low hangar, painted in jungle greens and further disguised with crude camouflage netting made from thin rope and shredded fabric.
The Thais having moved their planes to another location, the hangar currently housed a single aircraft. A Soviet-made Yakovlev Yak-18. The plane was a single-prop military trainer, a relic of the Vietnam War, and an antique even then. It still wore faded green paint with white call sign and red insignia of the North Vietnamese Army. Beneath the port wing sat a second trolley, on which a pair of olive-green cylinders lay in curved supports like wine racks. Each cylinder had four tail fins and a jointed nose that appeared to have been slit like an orange made ready for peeling. They were unused cluster bombs, procured for a few hundred dollars each by Orton on a previous trip to Cambodia and modified in his absence to take a new payload.
Using a cross-head screwdriver, Perec unscrewed the outer casings of the bombs. While he worked, Orton fetched a second screwdriver, a flat-head, and used it as a mini-prybar to lever the lid off the wooden crate. The interior of the crate was densely packed with straw. He pulled out handfuls of the stuff, which still smelled of cows, until the contents of the crate were revealed.
40
Postman
CHRISTIE field-stripped the Makarov, beginning with the magazine and proceeding to the grip, the slide, the sear spring and finally the recoil spring. He tipped a few drops of light mineral oil onto a square of cloth he’d slit from a bedsheet. Then he began methodically lubricating every moving part. As he worked, he whistled an old movie tune. He’d taken enough flak from friends and colleagues for his love of old musicals but he didn’t care. In the early days, some of the ragging had gone on too long, and then the perpetrator had discovered the precise length of Christie’s fuse.
His hotel room was sparsely furnished, just a bed, a chair and a table. In an attempt to justify the ‘en suite’ sign outside, someone had inexpertly erected a shower stall in a corner, screened off behind a right-angle of plywood painted a bright orange that burnt the retinas. No air conditioning, but Christie didn’t mind. He’d been in hotter places.
With a series of economical movements of his large, blunt-ended fingers, he reassembled the pistol, which now smelled the way a gun should. He racked the slide a few times, then flicked the slide-mounted safety catch on and off a few times to work the oil into the mechanism. Using a clean corner of the cloth he wiped surplus oil from the pistol. He thumbed eight rounds into the magazine and pushed it home into the butt with a soft click. Christie stuck the gun in the waistband of his trousers. He was ready.
He picked up his phone and launched an audio app. It took him a few seconds to call up the recording he wanted. He pressed play, wanting to hear the conversation again. Needing to be sure. The voices were clear, if quiet. He boosted the volume, closed his eyes and held the phone to his ear, separating out the speakers and mentally adding their names.
WOLFE: “I think that whatever he found out had to do with a US company called Orton Biotech. Vinnie got a job with them as head of security. I guess so he could gather intelligence from the inside. Whatever he was doing, it got him killed.”
CHEY: “And now you are here, investigating his death.”
WOLFE: “Do you have any information on this Marie-Louise Hubert and Flowers of Hope?”
CHEY: “Wait there.”
WOLFE: “You’ve not written any stories about this yet, I’m guessing.”
LY: “I would love to disagree. To tell you I am a one-woman journalistic crusade against corruption. But you know a little of our country’s history, Gabriel. How long do you think I would last against the people protecting her? I would be under the ground before the presses stopped rolling.”
WOLFE: “Then I’m going to pick up where Vinnie left off. Maybe I can get a little closer and figure out what happened to him into the bargain.”
LY: “I hope you can.”
CHEY: “This is everything I have on Marie-Louise Hubert and Flowers of Hope. Take it, read it, then let me know what you plan to do. I’ll help any way I can.”
He closed the app and pocketed his phone. Sitting at the desk, he pulled a sheet of paper from a spiral-bound notebook, took a ballpoint pen from his bag and wrote a note in a careful, printed hand.
Dear Mr Wolfe,
I am a freelance journalist. Based here, but working for a major US media outlet. I know you are investigating Flowers of Hope. So am I.
I have information about Marie-Louise Hubert that you need to see. I am being watched. Phnom Penh is not safe for me.
Meet me at 10.00 a.m. tomorrow at Lenh Bat Nam village. 15KM out of PP on National Highway 5. There is a paddy field north of the village with a Russian tank sunk up to its axles. I’ll be waiting.
Brian Cray.
He folded the sheet in half and enclosed it in an envelope, wrote GABRIEL WOLFE, PERSONAL on the outside, and stuck it in an inside pocket.
Fifteen minutes’ fast walking through the darkening streets later, he arrived at Wolfe’s hotel. The receptionist, a slim-built young man in a white shirt and red-and-blue striped tie, smiled at Christie as he approached the desk, then faltered as he neared the polished wood
en counter. He knew he had this effect on people. He didn’t care. Liked it, in fact.
“Welcome to the Hotel de Loi, sir,” the receptionist said in lightly accented English, regaining his composure and his smile. “Checking in?”
Christie shook his head. He produced the envelope and held it out between thumb and forefinger.
“You have a Gabriel Wolfe staying here.”
“Let me check, sir,” the receptionist man said, pulling a keyboard towards him.
“No. It wasn’t a question. I’m telling you that you do. I want you to take this message to him.”
Flustered once more, the young man reached for the envelope.
“Of course, sir. I’ll put it in his pigeonhole and—”
Christie didn’t release the envelope. To a casual observer it would appear as if the two men were trying to prevent it from dropping to the counter.
“You misunderstand me. I want you,” he pushed lightly on his end of the envelope so it bent upwards in the middle, “to take this envelope,” another subtle push, “to Gabriel Wolfe,” push, “right now,” push, “in person.” He let go of his end of the envelope leaving it in the receptionist’s grip.
The man’s eyes were wide with anxiety. Christie could read him like one of the billboards outside. He was clearly torn between the desire to help, probably enshrined in some dumbass corporate rulebook, and the need to remain at his post.
“The desk, sir. I’m not supposed to leave it unattended.”
Christie leaned forwards, baring his teeth in what might have passed for a smile of encouragement in a smaller and less stone-faced individual.
“I tell you what …” he peered at the name badge, vibrating in tiny jumps in time with the heart thrumming beneath the shirt front, “… Dan. You take this to my friend and either hand it to him or slide it under his door, and I will man the front desk. I have a lot of experience in the hospitality industry.”
