by Barry Eisler
“Protect the weapon and control the distance. Escape and create more distance. Draw and three-sixty,” the women said in unison.
“Correct. And when was my best opportunity to do that?”
“When you tripped him,” Moore said.
“Correct again. A perfect opportunity. Now, I didn’t take it because Special Agent Little here had a point he was trying to make, and I wanted to respond in a way I knew he’d understand.”
There were some light chuckles, including from Little himself, and Livia continued. “But let’s not confuse what sometimes happens on the mat with proper tactics on the street. Agent Little just did us all a favor—by showing how fast you can get body-slammed from the guard, especially by a bigger, stronger attacker. You know I love grappling, but the ground is not where you want to be, it’s where you want to get up from. So today, let’s drill the guard to the body-slam lift, to the heel hook, to the escape. Agent Little, you up for that?”
Little half smiled, half winced. “As long as it’s the escape and not the arm bar, I’d be honored to be of continued assistance.”
For the next hour, he was the perfect training partner, with a nice sense of how hard to push depending on the skill levels of his partners. And from the way he moved, Livia saw again that she’d been right in thinking he had some training—more, it seemed, than the standard hand-to-hand offered in military basic or to law-enforcement cadets. At one point, Moore tried to arm bar him, despite Livia’s admonition that the point was escape, not further entanglement, but her technique was less refined than Livia’s, and Little’s counter had been sound, saving his arm from further injury.
When the hour was done, Little’s stunt had been largely forgotten, replaced by a certain level of mutual respect and appreciation. The women collected their weapons, picked up bottles of water, and filed past him, shaking his hand and exchanging a few bluff courtesies. Moore was last. As she shook Little’s hand, she nodded and said, “You’re lucky my girl was in a good mood today.”
Little smiled. “Yeah, that much I figured out on my own.”
Moore returned the smile. “Okay. Now you know.” She paused, then added, “Thanks for being a good training partner.”
Little flexed his arm, which Livia knew would be sore for days. “My pleasure. Or at least it will be once I get some ice on this elbow.”
Moore laughed and moved off, the squeak of her shoes on the polished wood floor echoing off the high ceiling. The basketball game was done and disbanded, the weightlifters departed, and once Moore had gone through the swinging doors, the only sound was the hum of an overhead air-conditioning unit.
Little flexed his arm again. His shirt was soaked. “She tried to finish what you’d started. I was lucky to get out of it.”
Livia shrugged and handed him a bottled water. “One of my mentors. She’s protective.”
He nodded his thanks at the water, unscrewed the cap, and drained it, exhaling deeply when he was finished. “I don’t think you need it.”
“Anyway. It wasn’t just luck. You’ve had some training.”
“Not as much as I’d like. Mostly high-school wrestling. I should come by more often. Take your class.”
“All the way from DC?”
“Why do you think I’m based in DC?”
“Just a guess. Homeland Security, right?”
“Other than the FBI, HSI is the largest criminal-investigative agency in the US government, with over four hundred domestic field offices and sixty overseas attaché offices. You know the work we do against human trafficking.”
She certainly did. And Special Agent Little, it seemed, was too smart for her to play dumb with.
“Okay,” she said. “Then where are you based?”
He smiled. “Oh, I move around a lot.”
She didn’t respond. Apparently he liked games, and there was no way to win this one. The best move was just not to play.
“I’m sorry about rushing you on the mat earlier,” he said.
“Of course you are.”
He laughed. “I mean, apart from you making me sorry. I’ve just heard so much about you, and I wanted to see for myself.”
“I don’t know what you heard. Or what you saw.”
“What I’ve heard is, you can handle yourself and then some. And I saw that was true. I also hear you prefer to operate alone. Most of all, that you close cases.”
“Who’ve you been talking to?”
“Lieutenant Strangeland, for one. She says you’re the best sex-crimes detective she’s ever seen. Of course, I wasn’t supposed to quote her on that.”
She knew from her own fitness reports how highly the lieutenant thought of her. So maybe Strangeland had praised her to Little. Or maybe he was bullshitting, to distract from other sources.
“What’s your interest, Special Agent Little?”
“Please, call me B. D. And my interest is why I’m here. Is there someplace we could sit for a while?” He flexed the injured arm and smiled. “Hopefully with a nearby ice machine?”
2
Dox knew he needed to get the hell out of Phnom Penh. Probably out of Cambodia entirely. He’d told himself in the heat of the moment that Gant was nothing but a pissant, but he had to acknowledge now that he might have been rationalizing because he’d wanted to kill the man so damn much. With the benefit of hindsight, though, he was starting to realize that when word went out about Gant’s head getting turned into a fine pink mist, and likely by the very guy Gant had hired to do the same to someone else, there might possibly be a bit of blowback.
So he walked south—skirting wide of the US embassy because said blowback would likely be coming from exactly there—and bought a cell phone for cash from a street vendor, then continued southwest toward the Olympic Market, armadas of tuk-tuks and motor scooters buzzing all around him.
It was eleven in the morning in Cambodia, so midnight in Langley, but he knew Kanezaki kept late hours. Hell, that boy worked harder than anyone Dox had ever known at the Agency—they ought to give him a damn medal. Though if they knew he was not above the occasional dispatch of a former marine sniper with considerable charm but a bit of a shady past, they’d as likely reward him with a prison cell.
He wandered, sweating in the tropical humidity even in his cargo shorts and loose tee shirt, periodically checking the phone’s Wi-Fi settings for an unprotected Internet connection. When he found one, on the sidewalk in front of a dilapidated coffee shop, he paused to download the Signal app from Open Whisper Systems, then configured it for the call he wanted to make, looking up from time to time to check his surroundings. The Olympic Market was popular with tourists, and there were clots of foreigners among the crowds of locals, which made it a bit easier to blend. At near six feet and a solid 225, though, he would always draw a certain amount of attention—especially in Asia, where his sandy-colored hair and goatee were also conspicuous. Sometimes he liked to hide in plain sight by being ostentatiously loud and Texas friendly. But he also had the sniper’s knack for retracting his energy, his presence, when he needed to, so that despite his size and whatever his surroundings, people tended not to take much notice of him.
When he was done with the configurations, he moved to the shade under a nearby palm tree and put the call through. The phone rang only once—either Kanezaki kept it by the bed or, more likely, he wasn’t even sleeping. Then the familiar voice, crisp and professional: “Kanezaki here.”
A second-generation Japanese American, Kanezaki’s first name was Tomohisa, but he went by Tom. “Buenas noches, amigo,” Dox said. “It’s fine to hear your voice.”
There was a pause. “It’s fine to hear yours, too.”
“Read me the ID?”
At the outset of the encrypted call, Signal provided each user with a unique number. If the numbers didn’t match, it meant someone was listening in. Kanezaki read the number aloud.
“All right,” Dox told him. “We’re good to go. Nice to know there are still a few means of pr
ivacy left in this brave new world of ours.”
“Why do I get the sense you’re not calling with good news?”
“Well, now you’ve gone and hurt my feelings. I thought just hearing from me was good news.”
“Aside from that,” he said, and Dox could imagine him smiling. “What can I do for you?”
“Okay, I’ll get right to the point. Especially because you already have. I’m calling from Phnom Penh—”
“Oh, God.”
That didn’t sound promising. “What, you don’t like Cambodia? The food is great and the women are beautiful.”
“I should have known you’d be mixed up in this.”
“Oh, hell. What have you heard?”
“We got a cable this morning from the embassy in Phnom Penh. Some guy got his head blown off at a restaurant alongside the Mekong River, and the UN official he was having dinner with says the guy claimed to be US intelligence. But according to this official, the guy never specified what agency, and there was no ID on his body. So the embassy cabled every member organization in the entire US intelligence community, asking if anyone could take ownership of the dead guy. So far, no one has.”
“I think it’s nice that y’all have your own community.”
“You going to make jokes, or do you want to exchange some information here?”
“I don’t see why it has to be one or the other.”
“Okay, you’ve done the one. Now where’s the other?”
For Kanezaki, intel was always the coin of the realm. And his greed for it was usually something exploitable. But only for something in return.
“All right, all right. I happen to know that the deceased called himself Gant. First name unknown.”
“And you know this how?”
“Well, that’s how he introduced himself when he hired me—he said to kill a guy named Sorm, Rithisak Sorm, who, he gave me to understand, is a notorious Cambodian child trafficker. But then I showed up and saw who this ‘Sorm’ really was—a guy I’d seen that very morning at the Raffles Hotel, surrounded by a bunch of foreign dignitaries, who looked like the damn Dalai Lama and I could tell was a decent man.”
“You can tell that just by looking?”
A motorbike with high-output pipes went by, drowning out the background din of people and traffic. Dox waited until it had passed.
“Sometimes I can. Always had a good feeling about you, son, and I still do despite your suspect professional affiliations. Are you going to tell me I’m wrong?”
“Never.”
“Anyway, once I saw the target I knew for sure there was something rotten in Denmark. Then old Gant came clean, told me actually the target wasn’t Sorm, the target was a UN guy who was trying to prosecute Sorm for his crimes. And that Gant had to protect Sorm despite his shady dealings because he was some kind of US intelligence asset. I said fuck all that and sayonara, went back to my motorcycle ready for a clean getaway, and lo and behold, three Cambodian ne’er-do-wells are waiting for me in the darkness with knives. But luckily for me and unluckily for them, being a careful man, I took an unexpected route to the motorbike, so the element of surprise was mine. Plus there was the matter of I had night vision and they didn’t. So our encounter ended happily for our hero and less happily for the villains of the story.”
“Those were the bodies the police described? All shot with a high-powered rifle?”
“Barring a hell of a coincidence, I’d call it a match. There was a fourth, too—just a kid who they’d hired for five bucks as a lookout. I let him go.”
“And then you went back and did Gant.”
“Hell yes, I did. Fraudulent inducement I’m mature enough to just walk away from. I’ll never do business with you again, but okay, I’ll figure nice try and we can just live and let live. Fixing to kill me on top of the fraud, though? Well, that kind of rudeness I cannot abide. Anyway, I just thought I’d check in and see what you might tell me. I’m hoping I haven’t done something that could stir up undue animosity regarding the late and hopefully unlamented Mr. Gant.”
“Understood. But like I said, as far as I know, no one’s claimed him yet.”
“Son, we’ve known each other long enough for me to recognize when you’re trying to make something sound harder than it really is.”
“Why would I do that?” Kanezaki said, and Dox could hear the smile behind it.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe to extract concessions in return. So look, don’t exhaust yourself or anything, but maybe you could do just a little discreet digging? This UN official—the Dalai Lama—Gant told me his name is Vannak Vann. Though I expect you already know that.”
“Why do you expect that?” Kanezaki said, and again Dox could hear the smile.
“Because Vann’s a material witness to a homicide, and the Cambodian police would have taken his name and shared it with the embassy. Look, I don’t mean to be unkind, but I’m really not in the mood for too many games here.”
There was a pause. Then Kanezaki said, “You’re right. His name is Vann. He’s the head of a UN task force called the Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking—GIFT. I know him.”
“You know him how?”
“Come on, sources and methods. You know that.”
Dox considered. If Vann were some kind of covert CIA asset, Kanezaki would never have let on anything at all. It must have been something more casual. An access agent, maybe. Or just a professional acquaintance.
“Fine. Well, I reckon Mr. Vann is still in danger, and I’d like to warn him.”
“I’m not objecting, but . . . are you sure you want to get further involved in this, whatever it is?”
“Hell, how much further involved could I get than I already am? Besides, it wouldn’t sit right with me to learn a week from now that someone finished the job and I could have done something about it and didn’t. Think about it—the poor son of a bitch probably doesn’t even realize he was the target, he probably thinks old Gant was. He won’t think to watch his back, not even now. But look, it’s not just what I have to tell him. Aren’t you curious about what he might tell me? Don’t you want to know more about what the US ‘intelligence community’—of which you are a part—is up to with this? Not to mention what your tax dollars are funding.”
He paused to let that sink in. Kanezaki was no greenhorn anymore, and part of his rise in the “community” was surely due to his knack for developing off-the-books sources of information like Dox—and sources of action, when action was called for. He was less able to resist a morsel of secret insight than Dox was able to resist a beautiful woman. Which was to say, not able at all.
“What are you trying to find out, exactly?” Kanezaki said.
“Who was behind Gant, for one thing. If I know that, maybe I can bury the hatchet.”
“How do you mean? If you’re going to bury the hatchet in someone’s head, I can’t help you.”
“Where I bury it is up to them. Somebody made a dumb play that got old Gant killed. If they’ll leave it at that, so will I. If not, they’re going to have themselves a problem.”
“But so will you.”
“I’m assuming I already do. It’s why I called you.”
There was a pause. Then Kanezaki said, “It’s interesting that this was about Sorm, or at least ostensibly about him. Because he used to be one of ours.”
“What do you mean, ‘ours’? And what do you mean, ‘used to’? And you sure waited a long time to tell me the name Sorm meant something to you, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“Sorry about that. I just wanted a little more context first.”
Dox let that go. He’d talked too much and elicited too little, and Kanezaki had taken temporary advantage, which was his training and probably his nature, too. You couldn’t fairly blame a man for acting in accordance with his nature. You could only remember your own mistake so as not to repeat it next time.
He waited, and after a moment, Kanezaki continued. “Sorm is former Khmer Rouge. Started
working with the Agency in 1979, right after Vietnam invaded Cambodia and the US started secretly arming the Khmer Rouge in response.”
Gant had told Dox that Sorm was Khmer Rouge. The man sure seemed to have mixed in a lot of truth with his lies, which was generally the right way to go in these matters.
But as welcome as the confirmation was, he decided to act surprised. Kanezaki was a good man, but could sometimes be professionally slippery. “Khmer Rouge?” Dox said. “How old is this guy?”
“He was the nephew of Kang Kek Iew, nom de guerre Comrade Duch—the Khmer Rouge leader in charge of their prison and interrogation network.”
“Interrogation . . . you mean torture.”
“That’s right. Sorm was only fifteen in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took power. And nineteen when the Vietnamese invaded. He spoke fluent French—a lot of the Khmer Rouge leadership studied in Paris, and Sorm was born there. The Agency didn’t have a lot of Khmer speakers at the time, and the Khmer Rouge promoted Sorm as the conduit for arms supplies, both because of his family ties to the leadership and because of his language skills.”
“I thought the Khmer Rouge killed all the Cambodians who could speak other languages.”
“They did. Apparently they weren’t particularly attuned to irony.”
“I’d call it hypocrisy, but yeah. So Sorm was your guy. But why ‘used to be’?”
“We cut him loose after Vietnam withdrew its forces from the country.”
“Why cut him loose? Didn’t need him anymore?”
“More or less. We wanted to inflict some payback on the Vietnamese so badly after they beat us that we were willing to work with a genocidal regime to do it. But after they withdrew, that rationale was done. Simple cost-benefit.”
“Come on, a guy like Sorm would still have lots of intel value, even after the Vietnamese withdrew. And yeah, sure, there’s some public-relations risk in getting in bed with the Khmer Rouge, but you’d already done that for a whole decade, which is what I believe fancy economists call a ‘sunk cost.’ You’re not telling me the whole story.”
“You’re not giving me a chance. You’re right, it wasn’t just the Khmer Rouge connection in general. I told you, Sorm was the nephew of Comrade Duch, who became the first Khmer Rouge leader to be tried by the UN-Cambodia tribunal on crimes against humanity and genocide for his role in administering the Khmer Rouge prison system. Sorm himself was in charge of the most notorious of those prisons—Tuol Sleng, where all but seven of twenty thousand prisoners were executed.”
