by Agent Kasper
The rest of his reply is from the standard anthology, directly from the brawls of his youth. “You see, you big bastard, the thing is, every now and then I do your wife. Because it turns out you have no balls, you ugly piece of shit, and get this: the news has spread all the way to Italy.”
What Mr. T makes is not so much a movement as a cyclonic displacement. Howling a curse, gripping his machete in one hand, he hurls himself at Kasper. He shouts again, but this time it’s an incomprehensible, cavernous roar.
A warrior’s death. That’s as good as it gets, here and now, Kasper thinks.
The man advancing on him at the moment is certainly the proper opponent. And so Kasper awaits him unmoving. He’ll be able to put up a respectable fight against this war machine before succumbing to it.
The other prisoners are still trying to get out of the way, pressing themselves against the walls of the room, which is about to turn into a slaughterhouse. Nothing and no one can prevent the imminent impact.
No one except Victor Chao.
The Chinaman is slender and extremely agile. He jumps at Mr. T and grabs his machete arm with both hands. A twig clinging to a monster in motion. Victor manages to stop him momentarily but winds up on the floor himself. And in his homicidal fury, the monster no longer makes distinctions. He swings his machete down at Victor Chao, missing him by inches and putting a gash in the concrete. He yanks the machete up again immediately. He won’t miss a second time.
And that’s no good, Kasper thinks.
Something lights up again in him. A broken circuit is repaired. A flame reignites. And his resignation dissolves into rage.
Kasper charges at Mr. T, fakes a blow to the face, bends down, spins, and delivers a roundhouse kick to the inside of his right knee. It’s like kicking a bronze column. Kasper feels a stabbing pain in his bare foot. But the giant staggers, shouts. His balance has suddenly become precarious.
Kasper grabs the communal wok, which still contains vegetable scraps, and brings it down on the arm wielding the machete. Three blows with the side of the wok, until the weapon falls to the floor. Victor Chao darts out and quickly recovers it.
Mr. T yells in pain and makes a ferocious effort to start over. The other inmates are shouting, calling the guards. Kasper howls too, a primeval force within him that can no longer be contained.
The wok crashes down on his opponent’s head. Repeatedly. Spurts of blood and fragments of skull fly in all directions, spattering the ceiling and the walls, until Mr. T lands facedown on the concrete floor.
The guards who burst into the room find a bloody hulk, barely breathing. Not far from him, there’s a highly strung man with a wok in his hands who looks like he’s just stepped out of a horror movie.
The other prisoners ask only to be allowed out of there as quickly as possible.
The only one who doesn’t leave the scene is Victor Chao. “The Italian,” he says, indicating Kasper, “saved us from that madman and his machete. I’m a witness.”
Later he helps Kasper wash up and tries to make him sit down. Kasper shakes his head. He’s panting, his lips are quivering unstoppably, and the rest of him is shaking too.
Victor Chao gives him a joint to smoke. “Inhale this, don’t talk,” he orders. “Don’t say anything.”
“Why did you jump in?” Kasper asks him with the remnants of his voice.
“There are two situations where you can find out who your real friends are. When you’re sick in bed, and when you’re confined in prison.”
“What the fuck is that?”
“A Chinese proverb. It isn’t mine. Not yet, at least.”
“You saved me….”
“This world’s a disgusting place, brother. You would have done the same for me.”
29
Fair Swap
Prey Sar Correctional Center, near Phnom Penh, Cambodia
March 2009
The French diplomat can’t be found.
Disappeared.
Kasper has tried various avenues, including Brady. He sent his mechanic friend directly to the French embassy, but all he got was some funny looks. They never heard of any Louis Bastien. They had Brady write out in detail the reasons for his request and leave his telephone numbers. You never know, a Monsieur Bastien might eventually pop out of some office or other.
The French, Kasper thinks. “The premier people in the universe,” said Flaubert, with the humility typical of our snail-eating cousins.
Maybe Louis Bastien is simply a ghost, one more clever little trick played on Kasper by whoever dragged him into this trap.
Then again, the Americans lack the imagination to invent a phony French diplomat who introduces himself and then says, first thing, “I play the guitar, and I’m even pretty good.” They don’t waste time on niceties, as a rule.
If Bastien exists, and if he really is what he says he is, Kasper feels this is a chance he can’t afford to miss. You can talk to the French. And Kasper’s got something to offer. His story.
Kasper has also sent out feelers for Sylvain Vogel, but the professor’s traveling. Between Pakistan and Afghanistan, as usual. When Sylvain will return to Phnom Penh, and whether he’ll be able to help him when he does, is difficult to say.
Theoretically, the best person to put Kasper in touch with Louis Bastien would be Marco Lanna, so Kasper asked Brady to try to find him too. But the Italian honorary consul, it turns out, is in Italy. He’ll be back in a matter of days.
“Why don’t we try to reach him by phone?” Kasper’s mechanic friend suggested.
Terrible idea, Kasper thought. Lanna’s surely being spied on. The Americans spy on everybody these days. I have to wait until he comes back to Phnom Penh and talk to him in a safe place.
Meanwhile, Kasper has been anything but short on company.
On a recent Saturday morning he received a visit from Darrha. The CID lieutenant had taken advantage of the prison director’s absence and forced Kasper to meet with him. Their interview was brief but intense.
“Fifty thousand dollars and I get you out of here,” Darrha said.
“I don’t have any more money. Finito.”
“Bullshit. And don’t play smart with me, motherfucker. I heard you nearly killed the big black stud. I like you like that, the fucking tough guy. You remember our little games with the pistol? I always knew you had balls, motherfucker. But…now they’re going to make you pay. You can’t go around beating the shit out of Cambodians like that, even if they’re half-African. You’re gonna croak in here, my friend.”
Kasper didn’t respond. He let him talk. And when Darrha threatened him and promised to return soon, Kasper just listened.
A few hours later, he was called to another interview.
With the Visitors, this time.
Grumpy and friend had found out he’d placed himself under Victor Chao’s protection.
That won’t last long, the Americans warned him. “Your Chinese pal’s dirty,” they said. “He traffics in bad luck. Sooner or later, someone’s going to come and get him, and then what will you do, poor little orphan, all alone?”
They reminded him that nobody in Italy cares very much about what happens to him. That his elderly mother’s on her way out, and that his girlfriend has dumped him. Other choice items from their repertoire followed.
Kasper listened to them in silence. No reaction.
He stared through them as though they were transparent, and beyond them he could see a totally different world. Less fake, less depressing, more normal. A place he wants to be.
Because he doesn’t want to die. Not anymore.
That’s what he realized in the days following his fight with Mr. T. Mr. T, it seems, has been useful for something.
Kasper’s victory promoted him from “the Animal” to “the Beast.” The looks he gets are downright fearful. The kind of fear that cements alliances.
He’s the ferocious brute prowling around the village. A danger.
And a future trophy.
Mr. T’s friends are waiting.
They won’t let Kasper get away with beating a fellow Cambodian half to death. Even one with black skin. Especially one with money on the outside.
Sooner or later, it’ll happen. Darrha’s right. He won’t always have a shield. Victor Chao’s protection won’t last long.
The Americans warned him they’d be back to attend his autopsy if he didn’t accept their offer to get him out. They’re right too.
They’re all right.
Including the Comboni Fathers, who returned to tell him that only the Lord can help him. They’d pray for him, they said, in their beautiful church in Phnom Penh.
Amen, brothers.
Kasper sleeps on it. Or at least he tries.
—
“I want to go home.”
“Vouloir, c’est pouvoir,” Louis Bastien says with a smile. Then, switching to Italian, “Bene. A quanto vedo stiamo facendo progressi.”
No way this guy’s not secret service, Kasper thinks.
Bastien has reappeared unexpectedly, just when Kasper had lost hope of contacting him. He doesn’t say whether he received the message Brady left for him at the embassy. He says only that he’s just returned to Phnom Penh.
He was out of the country, he explains. On tour.
“On tour?”
“With my group…my band, voilà. Musicians. We’re two Europeans, an American, and two Cambodians. We do rock and pop covers. Our repertoire’s mostly songs from the ’80s—still very popular in these parts. And so we have to go on the road a bit. We have a good time.”
“What do you play?”
“Mostly Queen, Genesis, some Toto, some Dire Straits…”
A rock ’n’ roll diplomat with a repertoire of old favorites. That’s all I’ve got at this point, thinks Kasper.
But despite himself he likes Bastien. They’re pretty much alike, Kasper believes, transalpine counterparts. In fact, Bastien reminds him of a colleague from his IFF days in Paris in the ’80s.
A business lunch in a Montparnasse brasserie. The first in a long series of such encounters. Kasper and the director collaborated on a unique scenario: the physical elimination of a South African enemy of NATO who was planning terrorist attacks. The performance was to take place in Paris. Nonfiction. Real weapons, a few involuntary extras. An authentic setting.
“I believe that was all a little before my time,” Bastien says, stroking his dark mustache when Kasper mentions the resemblance. “In those days I was thinking seriously about becoming a musician. I sang in a band, I wanted to go to the U.S., and I had girls on the brain. I was going to school and studying, too.”
The ’80s, Kasper thinks, laughing. The crazy stuff he used to do in those days. Every now and then, they come back to him in his dreams. He tells Bastien about a nightmare he had a couple of nights ago. The epic bender, the Montreal–Turin flight, the little nap at 30,000 feet. With Dire Straits in his headphones.
“Incredible,” Bastien declares. “If you hadn’t heard that radio call…”
“We would have crashed. Or British fighter jets would have shot us down, more likely.”
“So it was a flight controller who woke you up?” he asks.
“No way! It was the captain of a Boeing, a TWA jet on a flight to Europe, several thousand feet above us. I thanked him and blamed it on instrument failure. I don’t know how, but we managed to land. In Reykjavík. Completely out of fuel.”
“Always living on the edge,” the French diplomat says.
“Yeah…But now I want to go home,” Kasper repeats.
“You didn’t seem to feel that way two weeks ago.”
“I almost killed a man. Sooner or later, somebody’s going to kill me.”
Bastien nods. He’s heard about the prisoner who ended up in the hospital. He’s heard that the other prisoners defended the Italian, bore witness on his behalf. “You’ve made a friend or two in here,” he says.
“Out there is where I’m a little short of friends,” Kasper says, smiling. “You know how it is. For friends you need radar.”
“Which means you’d like to know whether I’m your friend. And if so, how much of a friend.”
“Marco Lanna asked me for some information he could pass on to someone who might help me. If you really are that someone—”
“The stories I got from Lanna weren’t all that helpful,” Bastien interrupts him. “I already knew most of the things he told me.”
“So what is it you want?”
“All I needed was to know who you are. Who you really are.”
“And you think you’ve figured it out now?”
“Let’s say I’ve made some progress recently. I’ll try to help you get out of here. Assuming you want me to, naturally.”
“You get me out of here, and I’ll tell you everything. Fair swap.”
“I’ll try. It won’t be easy, but I have a few ideas….Although I wouldn’t call it a swap.”
“So why are you doing it?”
“Because we’re Europeans, we’re cousins, no?” Bastien asks. He’s smiling, but then he suddenly turns serious: “Because I was asked to do it. Voilà.”
“It wasn’t Lanna who asked you. The consul’s only a link.”
Bastien allows himself another brief laugh. “But naturally you’re experienced enough not to ask me who it was. I would have told you already if I could have.”
Kasper nods. “Have you got a plan?”
“I’ve always got a plan. But I’m not completely convinced it’s a good one. Not yet, at least. We’ll talk about it soon.”
“I’ll tell you what happened to me,” Kasper says insistently. “And why.”
“It isn’t necessary.”
“I have to. Someone has to know. If I don’t make it…if I don’t get back home…I just don’t want to think I’m taking it to the grave. What I saw, I mean. What I uncovered.”
“As you wish,” Bastien assents. He stands up and tells Kasper good-bye. “I’ll see you tomorrow. In the meantime, watch your back. Not one word to your friends. And…I’m curious. What’s your favorite Dire Straits song?”
“ ‘Brothers in Arms.’ ”
“Mine too.”
30
License to Kill
Leonardo da Vinci Airport, Rome
March 2009
Barbara’s already at her gate.
Her Thai Airways flight is delayed by half an hour, or so they say.
In Bangkok she’ll board a flight to Cambodia.
She sits down and takes in her surroundings. This area in the terminal is full of Asian faces. Very few Westerners. She’ll have to get used to that for at least a week.
As soon as Giulia confirmed Barbara’s worst fears about Kasper, she knew she had to make this trip herself. Despite his influence, even Giulia’s husband couldn’t cut through the competing interests keeping Kasper in jail.
Barbara hates flying. She objects to completely relinquishing control over her own fate. When you’re up there, you’re totally dependent on other people, human beings with their limitations and their weaknesses.
With their secrets.
Men like Kasper.
Barbara was able to obtain his Alitalia service record.
Extremely high grades on his periodic tests and numerous contributions to the improvement of security measures: reports, proposals, ideas. An acclaimed role as an instructor. A great many votes of confidence.
Also frequent, prolonged leaves of absence sanctioned directly by the airline’s top management.
She doesn’t know why, but imagining him in his Alitalia uniform makes her smile. She may even have encountered him at some point in some airport. Well-ironed, finicky, spick-and-span, like his colleagues, who can be seen heading for the boarding area with their identical wheeled suitcases, their topcoats carefully draped over one arm, and the look of men who feel that they’re in flight even when they’re simply walking.
But unlike the rest of those men
, Kasper is a man who has killed. A man who cohabits with death by contract. The same contract that requires such men to risk, to dare. To push their luck to the breaking point.
And not to notice that there’s a trap a step away.
In the days preceding her imminent departure for Phnom Penh, the lawyer has reviewed all the documents in her client’s case file one more time. And she’s realized that Kasper has spent his life not so much escaping death as escaping the traps set by his enemies.
And by his friends.
The first trap landed Kasper in jail in 1993. A magistrate investigating a small group of alleged antigovernment conspirators thought Kasper had joined them, so he had Kasper arrested. The magistrate accused him of being the helicopter pilot in a planned chemical attack on the RAI’s citadel in Saxa Rubra. This charge went well beyond science fiction, but the magistrate was looking for front-page headlines, and so he chose the quickest route.
In reality, Kasper was monitoring the aspiring coup leaders to assess exactly how much of a danger they posed. He’d already become convinced that they were unrealistic fools when he found himself in a jail cell in the Roman suburb of Rebibbia. He didn’t get upset. He patiently awaited orders.
But instead of getting him released, which would have meant revealing his role as an undercover agent, the ROS took advantage of his imprisonment and capitalized on the mad pilot reputation he’d acquired among his fellow inmates. And that was how Kasper infiltrated a group of Colombian drug traffickers who were also being held in Rebibbia and who, just at that moment, were looking for a good “narco-aviator” to fly drugs between South America and Europe.
This in turn gave birth to Operation Pilot.
Following Kasper from one trap to another, Barbara comes to the year 2005. That’s the year she dwells on most. Kasper’s arrest in Milan just doesn’t make sense. Why not also detain Bischoff and his suitcase full of supernotes?
Nobody talks about the supernotes; that’s where the trail goes cold.
She’s read and reread the documents and the minutes of the proceedings. She’s gone over Kasper’s depositions yet again. And then, just when it seemed she’d viewed and reviewed everything, she noticed a name.
