Supernotes

by Agent Kasper

  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.

  3

  Americans

  CID Barracks, Preah Norodom Boulevard, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

  Monday, April 7, 2008

  He has identified the target.

  The military column is moving slowly along the unpaved road. Jeeps and armored vehicles, some trucks carrying troops. He makes a sweeping turn and settles in with the sun behind him. The column hasn’t spotted him yet. He goes into a sudden dive, 300 knots, speed brake extended. He gets the target in his sights, arms the 68 mm. underwing rockets and the two nose cannons of his Aermacchi MB-326 Impala. The strafing run will begin in a few seconds.

  But he knows he won’t fire his weapons.

  He’s not going to complete his mission.

  He’s dreaming.

  It’s a strange sensation, a feeling of clearheaded, fully aware unconsciousness. It’s like when he was a little boy and he’d have long, long, convoluted nightmares, and he’d think, all right, now I’m waking up. But he wouldn’t wake up at all. Wrapped in a placenta of viscid, suffocating inertia, he’d remain in his nightmare, weltering among specters until someone or something finally dragged him out of the night.

  Now the situation is reversed. Now he’d like to stay where he is, in his dream of a past war, and avoid the horrors of his waking present. The nightmare’s waiting for him after his sleeping is done, out there in the real world. Here he’s a fighter pilot in the sky over Africa. The armored column is flying Angolan colors, but its armament is Soviet. Kasper’s fighting for South Africa, and his weapons are Italian, French, and naturally American. He finds himself in one of the many “dirty little wars” the two great power blocs are waging against each other, moves on the global chessboard. He wants to complete his mission. To keep flying and never come back.

  The sounds he hears aren’t antiaircraft fire. They’re his dream ending.

  He’s a light sleeper. There’s not enough time to turn back and attempt a landing. The airplane dissolves. So does his dream.

  He reenters the nightmare.

  —

  His cell door opens suddenly. The guard makes a minimal gesture: “Get up and walk.” It’s an order that Kasper follows slowly, the only way the pain he feels in every part of his body allows. His feet have been wrecked by blows from a rifle butt. A couple of ribs are probably cracked, and he’s got a hematoma on his face.

  He steps out into the corridor, where five men, all Cambodians, are waiting for him.

  He sets himself in motion. Two guards in front of him, three behind. He passes other cells. The walk seems interminable. He crosses a courtyard.

  Meat and onions. It’s a stew.

  The smell of the kitchens reaches him. The sickly sweet and spicy air reminds him of the food stalls on the streets of Bangkok. A lifetime ago.

  The guards take him up two flights of stairs, enter another lugubrious corridor, and finally stand him in front of a steel door. One of the guards knocks twice. A peephole opens for an instant and then closes again.

  Kasper is brought inside. The first face he sees is the one he fears the most.

  Darrha.

  The lieutenant shows him where to go.

  The room looks like a doctor’s office: gray plastered walls, white ceiling, fluorescent lights. High up on one wall, two windows, grated and barred. Another torture room, he imagines.

  The seated man facing him—blue suit, dark tie—is a Westerner. So is the one standing behind him, but he’s not wearing a tie.

  Kasper has never seen them before.

  The seated man says to him in English, “Good morning. Have a seat.”

  He’s an American. Kasper recognizes a southern accent.

  A guard moves a plastic chair closer to him. Two guards seize his arms and handcuff his wrists behind the chair. He offers no resistance. Wasting his strength won’t help him. In the past week, he’s eaten very little and drunk very little. Suffered a great deal.

  “Are they treating you badly?” the American asks.

  Kasper looks at him, sizes him up. Latin features, dark eyes and hair, short, squat, grumpy. A bulldog that came out bad. Forty years old, maybe somewhat older. The one leaning on the wall is younger, thirty-five or so, blond and apparently in good shape. An American like his colleague, probably. But for the moment, he’s not opening his mouth.

  “Did you hear me? Are they treating you badly?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you don’t look all that great.”

  “I’ve seen worse.”

  “Right,” the grumpy fellow says with a sneer. “I’ve heard you’re a man of the world.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Let’s say we’re people in a position to help you.”

  If he needed confirmation, now he’s got it. So it’s just as he thought. And exactly what he was afraid of. The Cambodians are the muscle, the Americans the brains.

  “People who can get you out of here,” the grumpy American elaborates. “All you have to do—”

  “You’re the people who got me detained,” Kasper interrupts him. “You’ve committed a crime. A very serious crime. Where’s my friend?”

  “He’s fine,” says the one leaning on the wall. “Whitebeard’s doing better than you.” This one’s an American too, as predicted. Surely from the same Company.

  “You two are charged
with tax crimes and money laundering. If you stay in their custody, you’re finished. If instead you ask for protection from the U.S. government, then this nightmare will be over. Immediately. Your friend has already agreed—”

  “Sure he has.”

  “Believe me. He’s smart. He understands—”

  “He doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with any of this.”

  “So much the better. Now it’s your turn. Come on. Sign the documents and pack your bags. They won’t lay another hand on you.”

  Kasper laughs in his face. “They, huh?” He glances over at Darrha, standing impassively in his corner. “They don’t even take a dump without your permission. The Cambodians just follow your orders. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? And you want me to sign something for you? You’re crazy. What you’ve done is a disgrace. You dishonor the country my father was born in.”

  The grouch looks amused, but then he scowls like one who, were it up to him, wouldn’t devote quite so much time to mutual ball-busting with some smart-ass Italian. He says, “You’re telling us our offer doesn’t interest you?”

  “I’m telling you to go fuck yourselves.”

  The one leaning against the wall changes position but stays where he is. He says, “We’re not the same people you worked for. They fucked you over. We’re the good guys.”

  “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.