The Deceivers

by Harold Robbins

  She drove us away from the plantation house, staying on the dirt road that led in the opposite direction from the encampment.

  The rain was violent. Lightning cracked and lit up the guard shack as we drove by. I didn’t see anyone in it. My mind was spinning. I was confused, a state I had been in now for days.

  “How did you know we were here?”

  “Kirk found out from Bullock.”

  “Bullock’s alive? The bastard!”

  Chantrea shot me a look. “Not anymore. Kirk finished what you had started.”

  “Where’s Kirk?”

  “He’ll meet us later. He started explosions on the other side of the camp and he’s going to set land mines up on the road behind us in case we’re pursued.”

  Random thoughts seemed to collide in my head. How could Chantrea just breeze into the warlord’s lair and whisk us away?

  “How did you get us out so easily?”

  She shot me another look. “You’re out, aren’t you?”

  Taksin was quiet in the backseat. I wondered what was going on in his head, too.

  I looked back and caught his eye. His facial features were passive but his dark eyes were alive. He had the same thought that I had: We were not out of the woods yet.

  She put on the headlights. The rain turned the road into a shallow river. She drove mostly with her headlights off, turning them on just for a second occasionally when she couldn’t see. To be able to see through the rain and dark night, she must have had the eyes of a cat.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “The main road’s up ahead, the same one we took to Siem Reap. Kirk left a car there. I’ll use it to go back to Phnom Penh. You and Taksin take this car and go onto the airport at Siem Reap. It’s not that far, less than an hour’s drive.”

  “If it’s not that far, can’t we just drive there with you? I don’t know how Taksin and I will—”

  “I can’t go with you. I may be followed. Or they might call ahead and have my car stopped on the road. I can’t go to Angkor. I have to get back to the capital where I can get protection from the Minister of Culture.”

  “I know how they did it,” I said. “Taksin’s forgeries aren’t all being sold. Some are in the Royal Museum, being substituted for the real pieces.”

  “I learned that, too.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Kirk. He’s been involved in it.”

  I hesitated. “Chantrea … some things don’t make sense to me. Have you been involved, too? In the art scheme?”

  She didn’t react to the question, at least not that I could see. She drove on for a moment before she answered.

  “No. Ranar wanted me to be involved because of my position at Angkor. I knew something was wrong, but not exactly what was going on.”

  “Ranar is financing a revolution with his scheme.”

  “You learned a great deal,” she said.

  “He’s Khmer Rouge, some sort of modern version of it.”

  She shook her head. “No, the Khmer Rouge tried to turn back the clock. Ranar’s an idealist. He believes the country needs a strong hand to bring it into the modern world.” She glanced at me. “I’m sympathetic to Ranar’s plan for a revolution that would reform our corrupt government. We’re a poor country and what wealth we have doesn’t reach most of the people. Neither does political power. We’re working for the good of the people.”

  “But isn’t Ranar part of the problem? Rich and privileged?”

  “He has money because he has a connection to royalty, but he’s always been left out of real power. His father was a distant cousin to the king but the royals look down on him because of his mother. They say she came from an old French plantation family, but there are claims she was a just a bar girl, a prostitute. He hates the royals and wants to bring them down.”

  Ranar didn’t strike me as a democratic idealist.

  I still wasn’t satisfied with her answers. “The night I was at Angkor, you arranged for us to sleep in tents. That made it very convenient for Kirk and Bullock to steal Angkor pieces.” I didn’t add that those antiquities were part of her job to protect.

  So far Taksin hadn’t said a word since we got into the car. I didn’t know how much of this he was following.

  “I admit I haven’t been perfect,” she said. “I’ve never forgotten what happened to my family during Pol Pot’s era. I’ve never forgotten that the leaders who were supposed to protect us didn’t.” She took her eyes off the road to meet my eyes. “The Khmer Rouge leaders haven’t controlled the central government for about three decades, yet they still haven’t been brought to justice. Does that tell you who is really in power?

  “So, yes. Khmer artifacts have been taken and used to raise money for a political movement to change the government so the Khmer Rouge leaders would be brought to justice. Kirk’s work with land mines gave him freedom to travel anywhere in the country and made him a familiar face everywhere. He was able to transport the pieces.”

  “And Bullock marketed them.”

  “Yes.” She grinned. “Kirk said you did a good job of cutting up Bullock. You should be happy he finished the job.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Not about Bullock, the bastard could rot in hell as far as I was concerned. It was her story that was leaving me confused.

  Was she admitting to being part of Ranar’s plot? Sometimes it sounded like she was … other times it almost sounded like she was making excuses for being involved.

  She stared intensely into the rearview mirror and then twisted in the seat and looked to the rear.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. I turned and followed her look.

  “I thought I saw a car back there.”

  “I don’t see headlights. Maybe it was lightning flashing.”

  What I did see was Taksin’s face. He looked like he wanted to tell me something, that he was alarmed at what was coming down. But he either didn’t have the words or wasn’t sure of his thoughts. I understood completely. I was also suffering a sense of dread—the sense of the other shoe dropping after something bad had already happened.

  “Rim Nol is dead,” I said.

  No reaction.

  “He killed himself because he was being tortured.”

  She nodded. “Yes, so many of us wanted to end our lives because of what we suffered. It’s really not right under our beliefs, you know. Suicide. One is not to end their life to escape agony, but must find inner peace in order to carry harmony into the next life.”

  “He left in harmony,” I said. “He beat the bastards torturing him. They wanted him to reveal who else knew what they were doing.”

  “If he left this life in harmony,” she said, “he’ll find peace in his next life.”

  She was just rambling on. And I was getting more worried. What was going on? I didn’t want to keep talking. We had been rescued. Grabbed from the jaws of death. I didn’t want to open my mouth and create some sort of bad karma and run into a roadblock of General Chep’s thugs. But my mouth often didn’t obey my brain, so it kept going.

  “Why are you helping us?”

  “You’re a friend.”

  “But I know things.”

  What a big mouth I have.

  She glanced at me again.

  “I trust you. As they say in your movies, you wouldn’t rat out a friend.” She giggled.

  She appeared hyper. I didn’t know if she was frightened, or on something. Nothing she was saying sounded like the woman I’d driven a couple hundred miles with. Chantrea was a very cultured Cambodian with a little French education thrown in … not someone who would quote a dumb line from American gangster movies. It struck me as role playing … or a cover for nervousness. Of course, she had good reason for being nervous. She had just roared into a military encampment, thrown open a barred door, rescued two prisoners, and calmly driven out.

  My right knee began to shake.

  She turned off the dirt road we were on and onto another unpave
d road. “This leads to the Siem Reap highway. The car for me is up ahead. We’re about a mile from the main road. When you get there, you turn left and stay on it until Seim Reap and the airport. Take the first flight out, wherever it’s going.” She giggled again.

  Chantrea pulled to the side of the road across from a parked car. She squeezed my arm. “Good luck.”

  I stared at her through the blurred passenger side window as she ran to the parked car. She got in the passenger side. So someone had not just dropped off a car for her … they were waiting.

  Why had she bothered to lie? Was she so high on something that she didn’t even realize she had lied?

  Who was in the car? Kirk? But he was supposed to be back at the army camp. Or behind us if he had finished creating the diversion at the camp.

  Taksin babbled something in Thai and then said, “I am scared. No trust her.”

  “Srangapen,” I said. He didn’t understand and kept talking, but I tuned him out as I stared hypnotically ahead. When I met Nol that first time at the museum, he had told me about srangapen, the Cambodian method of execution during which the killing blow comes from an unexpected source.

  Chantrea had introduced me to Nol.

  She was the one that Nol had been trying to warn me about.

  That hard fist of fear in my gut that had been there so long started aching.

  I couldn’t just sit there and wait for the next shoe to drop. I scooted over and got behind the wheel. She left the car running with the lights off. I couldn’t see a thing in front of me with rain blurring the windshield and darkness. I reached to turn on the headlights and stopped, remembering she had kept the headlights off so we wouldn’t be followed.

  Lightning flashed and I saw something in the road ahead. I strained to see what it was through the blur of water washing out my vision through the windshield. It looked like a flat metallic piece that extended most of the way across the narrow road.

  The horn blared in the car next to me and my foot hit the gas, the tires spinning in the mud. The rear of the car moved sideways, but we didn’t go forward more than a foot.

  Something was terribly wrong but my mind wasn’t functioning properly. Then it struck me—the car waiting for Chantrea was the same sports car Ranar drove when he had picked me up at the airport.

  The road suddenly lit up as a vehicle coming from the rear turned on its headlights. It came by me in a flash, a big white SUV with a heavy black push bar mounted in front of the grill. The SUV struck the rear of the sports car Chantrea had gotten in, pushing it ahead.

  When the sports car’s front tires hit the object lying across the road, an explosion erupted, lifting the car from the road. The SUV reversed and shot backward as a second explosion erupted when flames hit the sports car’s gas tank.

  The SUV pulled up beside me and I could see the faded lettering of a United Nations emblem on the side of the door.

  44

  “Plan to stay at the Hanoi Hilton?” Kirk asked.

  We were at the airport in Siem Reap waiting to board a plane for Ho Chi Minh City. Taksin and I got tickets for the first plane out. Just as I had at the Phnom Penh whorehouse, I kept looking down the corridor expecting police officers to come charging for me in any moment.

  Kirk was amazingly calm. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. What would it take to make a guy who defuses land mines and bombs nervous?

  “Is it a good hotel?” I asked.

  Both Kirk and Taksin cracked up. An American businessman who overheard the question and answer walked away, shaking his head. Okay, the joke was on me, but at the moment I was more worried about being arrested than some stupid witticism.

  “Very funny.” I didn’t want to appear not to get the joke. Maybe it had something to do with Paris Hilton.

  “You keep looking down the corridor as if you expect to see the police at any moment. Stop worrying.”

  I sighed. “Stop worrying” had been Kirk’s mantra ever since we got into his SUV after he blew up the sports car. Ranar had been the one behind the driver’s wheel.

  Two human beings had died and I was cold inside about their passing. I wasn’t glad they were dead. I was just happy I wasn’t.

  Kirk had not caused a “diversion” at General Chep’s camp. He had set off the explosions, but they had been made with Ranar and Chep’s cooperation. The explosions had been a ploy to back up Chantrea’s story that she was rescuing us.

  The “rescue” had been set up so Taksin and I would be killed when we ran over a strip land mine that Kirk had laid across the road at Ranar’s request. Ranar thought Kirk would kill me to protect himself. He was wrong. Kirk killed Ranar and protected both of us.

  Killing two foreigners would cause infinitely more political and investigative heat than the death of Rim Nol. For Taksin and I to join the thousands of victims of land mines was pure genius. Getting lost on a back road and hitting a land mine while driving toward Angkor would be an easy sell to foreign embassies, especially with an inference that Taksin and I would have been looting artifacts, considering our reputations.

  Rim Nol was also part of the scenario.

  Kirk told me his body had been put in the trunk of the car that Taksin and I were in. He never mentioned Bullock’s name. I didn’t bring him up, either. He promised to give Nol a proper burial. I asked him to scatter Nol’s ashes on the Killing Fields so he could be with his family.

  Kirk had been battered and bruised and got some facial cuts after he rammed the sports car with his SUV so their tires tripped the land mine. The facial injuries only added to his sexy masculine appeal.

  We survived because Kirk was simply an old-fashioned soldier of fortune. He didn’t want to be king like Ranar, wasn’t a fanatic like Chantrea, wasn’t impossibly greedy and perverted like Bullock, wasn’t a murderer. He was also much too independent to take orders from Ranar that went against his grain.

  I was eternally grateful to Kirk. Someday I would repay him, but right now I just wanted to get out of this damn country before I was stuck here for the rest of my life—literally.

  During the drive to the airport Kirk had told me not to worry. “Ranar has fallen. It’s a small country, news spreads fast. Right now anyone who had anything to do with Ranar is taking cover. General Chep is on the phone making deals and distributing some of his ill-gotten gains to politicians to make sure he doesn’t have repercussions from the fallout.

  “Tomorrow it will be the talk of the capital. Rumor and innuendo will rage, conspiracies hinted at. In a week it won’t even be coffee break talk. Ranar and his plot will fade away because the next political plot will take its place.”

  I glanced down the corridor again. No SWAT team was storming toward me in battle gear. Yet.

  An announcement came across the PA system that it was time for boarding. I hugged Kirk and kissed him good-bye.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked. “You’ll be in danger.”

  He grinned and shook his head. “Not really. Land mine hunters are hard to come by. It’s not a real popular job. Or one with a future and a pension check. Besides, I’m a foreigner. No one will care about me. I’ll spread a little money around and just keep doing what I do.”

  What he did included smuggling antiquities, but it wasn’t the right time to give him a lecture.

  “I’ll never forget what you did for me and Taksin,” I said.

  His grin widened. “Yes, you will. Everything will be back to normal when you get back to New York and—”

  “No, you’re wrong. You don’t understand. It’s not just Cambodia and Bangkok. It all goes back to New York.” I grimaced. “It’s not over, Kirk. There’s a big score to settle back home.”

  VIETNAM

  45

  Ho Chi Minh City

  I checked into the Caravelle Hotel in the Vietnamese capital. No flights were available for several hours for a connection to New York for me or to Bangkok for Taksin, which actually worked to our advantage because we both needed to c
lean up and rest.

  The tickets and hotel rooms came in just under the limit on my charge card, so I would arrive home broke with no priceless treasures or even a finder’s fee. It would be a cold day in hell before I got compensated for anything I’d done for Cambodia. I would be lucky if they didn’t try to extradite me for high crimes and misdemeanors.

  Both of us were exhausted. A few hours of rest at a hotel would be reviving. Taksin grinned and told me he could find a place where he could treat me to a cobra cocktail but I turned down the offer. I couldn’t even imagine what snake blood tasted like. Or why someone would drink it. Or, as he inferred rather graphically, why it would be an aphrodisiac.

  I ordered separate rooms.

  Out of curiosity, I asked at the front desk about the Hanoi Hilton and just got a blank stare. I’d have to check out the joke after I got home. I was still sure it must have something to do with Paris Hilton.

  It’s not over until it’s over, ran through my head as I lay on the bed. It had started in New York and it had to end there. Not just because it was home but to finish what had begun there with a knock on my door from Sammy, the delivery guy.

  A piece to the puzzle was still missing and it wasn’t in Southeast Asia.

  Chantrea had been on my mind since I crossed the border. I felt sorry for her. I don’t think she really ever had a chance. Things were just too messed up during her lifetime in Cambodia for her to think straight. I believed that she really was trying to help her people. Even when she tried to kill me.

  Ranar could rot in hell as far as I was concerned for what he did to me, to Chantrea, and to the deserving people of his country.

  Rim Nol was different. I would light a candle for him when I got home. The Cambodians were great human beings because only people with incredible courage and resolve could have survived all the horrors and deprivations that they had to endure. Nol was of that caliber. A light went out in the world when he died.

  Leaving Kirk at the Siem Reap airport had been emotional for me. We had been lovers, if only for a short time. He had saved my life. But, of course, he was still a bastard. I was certain he didn’t come with us because he had some nefarious dealings to conclude and/or get his loot out. We would not ride off into the sunset together—he was still a smuggler, drawn to the dark side of the art world. Maybe he saved me because he simply drew the line at murdering people he liked.