Supernotes

by Agent Kasper

  But before calling Bauer, Kasper needs to have another exchange with Senator Hok Bun Sareun.

  “The building’s located near Pyongsong,” the senator tells him. “A city to the northeast of the capital, Pyongyang. Population about a hundred thousand. It’s called ‘the closed city.’ Foreigners aren’t allowed to enter it. The building’s part of what’s called Room 39, or Division 39, of the North Korean secret service. That’s where the dollars are printed, dollars like the ones you saw in the embassy basement.”

  Pyongsong.

  Where has he heard that name before?

  All at once, Kasper remembers. Pyongsong, the closed city: a few years before, in Bangkok. At dinner one evening, with Ian Travis and others. The Watchmaker. He mentioned there are Americans who can stay in Pyongsong as long as they like.

  Now everything’s a little clearer. Everything makes sense.

  The senator can’t understand Kasper’s sudden agitation. Nor does he like it.

  “Why all these questions? What’s bothering you?”

  “Nothing’s bothering me,” Kasper replies. “But I could have pictured anything except Americans and North Koreans printing supernotes together.”

  Bun Sareun smiles and shakes his head. “You know nothing about politics, obviously. International politics has many faces, my friend. The North Korean dictator threatens the United States and its allies with nuclear innuendo. He causes a big ruckus, the whole world talks about it, and in the meantime he’s raking in a healthy percentage of the supernotes production. For their part, the CIA, the NSA, and the other American agencies get to finance their own activities with funds the federal budget could never guarantee.”

  “Does that happen in Iran and Pakistan too?”

  “Maybe. I only know about North Korea. But you should have understood by now. Wherever there’s a great enemy, there is, potentially, an excellent business partner.”

  —

  The telephone rings only twice. John Bauer’s sleepy voice answers.

  “I think I’ve discovered something very serious,” Kasper tells him. “Something we didn’t exactly anticipate.”

  “Wait a minute. I’ll call you back.”

  Two minutes pass.

  “Let’s hear it. Just the facts.”

  Kasper gives him a summary of what he thinks he’s found out.

  “Have you talked about this with anyone else?”

  “Of course not. You were the one who gave me this assignment, so I—”

  “Can you come to Bangkok?”

  “I’d need time to get organized.”

  “I’ll have the legal counsel at our embassy in Phnom Penh call you tomorrow morning. We’ll arrange a meeting. Don’t do anything. Good night.”

  —

  Kasper has just finished his morning exercises; Clancy has made breakfast and is reading the newspapers. They’re at home. Kasper’s waiting for the phone call from the American embassy’s legal attaché.

  It’s Wednesday, March 26, 2008. A day he’ll remember for a long time.

  The telephone rings. A number he doesn’t recognize. It’s not in his address book.

  Here we go, he says to himself, figuring he knows who the caller is.

  The voice at the other end of the line barely gives him time to say, “Hello?”

  “Leave town now,” the voice says.

  “Sorry? What did you say?”

  “Leave town now!”

  It sounds like Senator Bun Sareun. But Kasper’s not sure it’s him. He asks for an explanation.

  “Leave town now!” the voice repeats.

  Then there’s silence. The call’s cut off.

  “What’s going on?” Clancy’s staring at him like someone seeing a face he doesn’t like.

  Kasper explains.

  Clancy calls Bun Sareun from his telephone. They exchange few words, just the bare minimum. The senator repeats his injunction: “Leave Phnom Penh as soon as possible.” Then nothing.

  “What did he tell you? What’s happening?” Kasper asks.

  Clancy shakes his head. “He didn’t tell me anything else. But we’d better do what he says. We have to get out of here. We can try to figure out what the fuck’s happening later.”

  33

  The Open Bottle

  Prey Sar Correctional Center, near Phnom Penh, Cambodia

  Thursday, April 2, 2009

  “ ‘Leave town now,’ ” Louis Bastien repeats. “And the next day they detained you.”

  “That was where it all started,” Kasper says. “Three hundred and seventy-one days ago.”

  The French diplomat has listened to Kasper’s account without interruptions or comments, every now and then writing something down in his little notebook. As for where the supernotes end up, he seems to have no doubts. “The Chinese aren’t interested in inflating the dollar. They’re already holding the U.S. public debt, so what else do they need? If anything—and if they haven’t done it already—they’ll gear up to duplicate euros. But it’s different for the Americans,” he says. “If they don’t print money, how can they sustain their extensive operations? The U.S. intelligence budget, covering all agencies, is eighty-five billion dollars. But it’s estimated that the CIA alone spends at least fifty percent more than that. We know the CIA and the NSA are spreading their surveillance net over most of the planet. Phone calls, text messages, e-mails…Restaurants and sports centers, big hotels, brothels: wherever politicians and diplomats go, there are stations intercepting and recording their calls. Thanks to cell phones, they can even track people’s movements. Do you have any idea how much all that costs?”

  “Billions…billions and billions.”

  “Exactly. And their little financial games with the drug trade aren’t enough anymore. The day is coming when the United States will withdraw from Afghanistan, and when it does, the opium pipeline’s going to get a lot narrower. Costs are rising and revenue’s falling.”

  “But it’s a great big world out there,” Kasper says with a smile. “They’ll find other countries to democratize.”

  “On the contrary, the world’s getting smaller all the time and changing fast,” Bastien retorts. “Your friend John Bauer wasn’t wrong about that. Wherever Americans go to flex their muscles, there’s a good chance they’ll run into the Chinese. And besides, drug trafficking’s getting more and more problematical. Ever since those Air America flights in Vietnam in the ’70s, Congress has had the CIA in their crosshairs, and public opinion hasn’t been so favorable either. Think about the CIA’s pal Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan heroin lord. Or their relationship with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president’s brother, who’s suspected of being a big drug boss. And we won’t even mention South American cocaine….But can’t you see how much better it would be to have at your disposal a duplicating machine that prints out perfect hundred-dollar bills? And to set up that machine in a small city in North Korea, where nobody can go snooping around? Voilà.”

  “Room 39. Sounds like a nice place to visit…”

  “Some people believe the director of Room 39 is Kim Dong-un, a former entrepreneur,” the Frenchman goes on. “Supposedly, he also handles the dictator’s bank deposits, the billions he’s got in Switzerland. Other people say that the real head is General O Kuk-ryol. They say his collaborators are his son Se-won and another relative, a diplomat stationed at the NK embassy in Ethiopia. And they say there’s heavy courier traffic these days between that embassy and Room 39. North Korea works like that. Voilà.”

  “And that’s the Americans’ supernotes partner,” Kasper mutters.

  “Senator Bun Sareun and his North Korean friends must have been quite disappointed,” Bastien remarks. “No agreement, no planes. What happened after you were arrested?”

  “I imagine the Americans intervened and did what they normally do in cases like this….”

  “Pick up the pieces and toss ’em out.”

  “Or sweep ’em under the rug.”

  Bastien close
s his notebook and stares at Kasper with the expression of a man who has pretty much made up his mind. “Why did John Bauer assign this investigation to you? I suppose you’ve asked yourself that question.”

  “Daily, for the past year.”

  “What answers do you get?”

  “I have a different one every day.”

  “Too many. Which is the same as none.”

  “Right…How about you? What’s your feeling?”

  “You remember the story about the girl who asks her girlfriend to make a pass at her boyfriend to see if he’s faithful?”

  “Not my kind of movie.”

  The Frenchman smiles. “Well, in any case, it’s something like that,” he tells Kasper. “There’s a colloquial saying too: ‘Let’s make sure the bottle’s closed tight.’ ”

  “They used me as a guinea pig,” Kasper murmurs. His memory of the aborted mission in Paraguay is only the first in a rather long series.

  “It was a kind of road test,” Bastien explains. “And that’s not unique to the Americans. They all do it. The Russians are specialists in such tests. They call them counterintelligence operations. In this specific case, the Americans—those Americans—wanted to put their North Korean partners’ reliability and impenetrability to the test. Is the bottle closed tight or not? Let’s see what our nosy Italian friend can discover. If someone gets himself killed, well, that’s part of the game.”

  “So far I’m with you. But it’s the part that comes afterward I don’t get.”

  “Afterward?” The diplomat holds out his arms. “Plus on remue la merde, plus elle pue. You need me to translate that?”

  “No, Monsieur Bastien,” Kasper mutters. “It’s pretty clear.”

  Kasper runs his hands over his very short hair and then joins them in a plainly impatient gesture. “Maybe I went in too far and too deep, maybe that’s true. But then something else happened. External factors came into play. Things I still don’t get.”

  “Because you’re a man of action.” Bastien shrugs his shoulders, as if to say, it’s not that important. And he adds, “You’re not taking the overall scenario into account. In politics, rules and balances change. Alliances flip. Your investigation lasted about a year. Not very long in absolute terms, but in relation to certain events, not an insignificant amount of time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about what happened in that span of time. About how the reference scenario changed.”

  The Frenchman’s reasoning is simple, following a logical chain of events. But one that Kasper, in fact, has never considered.

  In February 2007, while Kasper was in Bangkok to receive his assignment from John Bauer, George W. Bush was still president. In far-off Illinois, Barack Obama announced his candidacy for that office. To many, the young African American senator was still very much an outsider, a long shot in the presidential game. But in the following months, Obama’s odds steadily improved, until in the summer of 2008 he obtained the Democratic nomination and a few months later won the election.

  “Things change, and people do too,” says Bastien, summing up. “What do you think has been the reaction of people like your friend John Bauer, people whose hearts and wallets are devoted to the American right wing? How and how much has the balance of power shifted? And consequently, how many scores have been settled in the offices of the U.S. intelligence services?”

  The Visitors.

  Kasper sees them again in his mind’s eye. He thinks about their questioning him, about their pressuring him to accept a transfer to the United States.

  “That would explain the presence of FBI agents here in Prey Sar,” Kasper says. “They’re Americans, sure, but they may not be the same Americans as the ones who had Darrha and his men detain me. Actually, they could be playing for a totally different team….”

  Bastien nods vigorously. “Some of them can now take what you found out about the supernotes and use it against others. You could be the pistol pointed at someone’s head, the unconscious instrument used for settling old and new scores.”

  “A witness against John Bauer and his CIA pals.”

  “Maybe. Or it could be that John Bauer was playing for someone else, and his job was simply to take advantage of your sense of smell. To use you the way a dog’s used to sniff out a boar.”

  “This isn’t a forest; it’s a swamp.”

  “C’est très juste. Quicksand and alligators.”

  “Fuck the swamp,” mutters Kasper. “Clancy should be here now.”

  The Frenchman studies him with a restrained snigger. He lets a few seconds pass, just enough time to make the transition to a more serious, almost solemn, tone. Then he says, “If he were here now, the mysterious Clancy, he’d be a big help to us. How long was it before his American colleagues got him out?”

  “A couple of weeks. Maybe a month…I’m not really sure.”

  “You told me they took him back home. So what’s your friend Whitebeard doing now?”

  “I haven’t heard from him. It could be he isn’t free either.”

  “You think not? I don’t know why, but man, I just can’t picture your old partner Clancy as a prisoner at Guantánamo. Or locked up in some federal penitentiary. And if you want to know the whole truth, I can’t even see him under house arrest.”

  Kasper doesn’t take his cue. He avoids responding.

  “He didn’t like the whole supernotes business,” the Frenchman goes on. “Clancy wanted nothing to do with it, you told me so yourself. But I think it’s obvious that he did indeed play some real part in all this.”

  “He arranged the contact with Bauer, that’s all,” Kasper says, downplaying Clancy’s role.

  “What made him run away from Phnom Penh with you?”

  “He was scared. Believe me, it wasn’t easy to interpret what Bun Sareun told us over the phone. The senator never mentioned supernotes, and he could have had a thousand other reasons for advising us to disappear.”

  “I can imagine,” Bastien says softly. “So Clancy went with you to the Thai border. Now, you and I both know that border region: crossing clandestinely from one side to the other isn’t very hard. Smugglers do it every day. But Clancy refused to try. And the following morning, the Cambodians were waiting for you and arrested you. Voilà.”

  Kasper shakes his head. But he can feel doubts and questions he’s been suppressing for months rising up in him.

  Clancy knew all about supernotes. He’d known for years. Because for years, Kasper’s investigations into Mafia money laundering have inevitably come into contact with the traffic in counterfeit dollars.

  Who introduced him to Ian Travis? Clancy. And it was Clancy who telephoned him with the news that Ian Travis had been killed.

  Who put Kasper in touch with Zelger? Clancy again.

  And who arranged his meeting with Bauer in Bangkok?

  Be careful of the people closest to you.

  Now Sylvain Vogel’s words sound very different from how they sounded more than a year ago, when the professor warned Kasper to be on his guard. Now they come back to his mind like a message to be reread. And reinterpreted.

  It can’t be. He cannot have been so wrong. Not about Clancy. He can see the two of them again, beating a retreat from Phnom Penh. He can hear Clancy telling him that if he hasn’t fucked up, then their American friends can’t be angry at them.

  And Kasper had believed him.

  And yet, it wasn’t so hard to figure out where the danger was coming from. Its source could only be them: the “American friends.” But Kasper had listened to Clancy. One more time.

  Uncle Clancy.

  Kasper raises his eyes and meets Louis Bastien’s gaze. “We can’t suspect Clancy.”

  “I’m just looking at the facts. Qui doute ne se trompe pas, my friend.”

  Kasper snorts. He can have doubts about anyone but Clancy. Clancy’s surely the person in the world with whom he’s shared the most. They’re not just partners and friends. They’ve lived
through unique experiences together. Plans and disappointments. Mortal risks and international capers. They complement each other in their work and share each other’s passions. Some of them, at least. And they’ve always helped each other out.

  “No, not Clancy,” Kasper says, shaking his head obstinately. “I refuse to even think about it.”

  “You have to admit that what you’re saying is totally illogical.”

  “Oh, really? And if it’s not logical, then what is it?”

  “An act of faith.” Bastien smiles. “But that’s all right. It’s fine. At a moment like this, faith can only help us.”

  34

  A Prayer for Kasper

  Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome

  Friday, April 3, 2009

  She’s furious.

  She knows it won’t do her any good. With certain people, getting pissed off is useless. However, now that she’s got her in front of her, Barbara would like to tell her what she thinks of her and her shifty way of doing things. Her slipperiness. Her empty, unfulfilled promises.

  On the telephone, Manuela Sanchez had assured her they’d meet soon, but instead she’d let more than a week pass. Barbara had managed only to coax a few messages out of her, messages of the “I’ll call you soon” type. And based on this promise Barbara had thrown away a round-trip airline ticket to Cambodia and wasted a lot of precious time.

  “I’d like to know, once and for all, what’s happening,” she says to Manuela, condensing her bad humor into a single question.

  Manuela nods and smiles wanly. She points to the illuminated portico of the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere and asks Barbara, “Okay with you if we sit in there?”

  “In the church?”

  “Why not?”

  Right, why not, Barbara thinks, wading behind Manuela into the Saturday night crowd that floods Trastevere. They push their way through a party of Poles and a group of South American nuns, enter the church, and sit in one of the rear pews.

  “I went to Nettuno this morning,” Manuela says, all of a sudden.

  “Lovely. Nice beach in Nettuno,” Barbara hisses.