Supernotes

by Agent Kasper

Kasper decides to trust him. After all, what has he got to lose? He says, “I’m planning an escape.”

  Thomas stares at him with tight lips.

  “You heard me right,” Kasper murmurs. “I’ve got a plan.”

  He begins with Brady Ellensworth, whom Rolfe had met the day before.

  Brady had been informed of Kasper’s plight by Jan van Veen, and when he heard what the Dutchman had to tell him, at first he couldn’t believe his ears. Then he got busy, requesting and obtaining permission to visit his friend.

  “What…what the hell have they done to you?” Brady whispered.

  “They’re killing me,” Kasper said.

  “Shit, I can see that.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “Whatever you want me to do, I’m there for you.”

  “You have to take me away from here,” Kasper said. Then he explained how.

  And now he explains the plan to Thomas.

  During the daily hour in the courtyard, while someone distracts the guards, Kasper will climb over the gate and launch himself onto the pyramid of garbage. He’ll roll down from there, run to the opposite wall, jump over it, and drop onto Boulevard Pasteur.

  Brady will be easy to spot. Helmet, leather jacket, his best bike. They’ll make for the Cardamom Mountains, on the border with Thailand. There they’ll separate, and Kasper will try to get across the border on foot.

  “The Cardamom Mountains?” Thomas stammers. “I’ve heard about them, but Jesus…It’s madness, there are tigers up there, and bears…and…and the locals are genuine savages.”

  “Brady will bring me the right shoes.”

  “Shoes…Ah, right, in that case there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Well, as for that, the area’s also full of antipersonnel mines,” says Kasper, smiling. “But if you asked me what I’d give to be there right now, I’d tell you: anything at all.”

  “Anything at all,” Thomas repeats.

  “Because the big problem is getting there. It won’t be simple.”

  Kasper gestures toward the guards. At the moment there are five of them, distracted by their own noisy chatter. The gate’s about twenty meters from them, and climbing it will not be a piece of cake. Not so long ago, he could have done it easily—it’s only about two and a half meters high—but now he feels like an old man, plus he’s got mashed hands and feet. Two and a half meters look like two hundred.

  But he has to make it.

  All he needs is someone to distract the guards.

  He looks at Thomas.

  Thomas looks at him. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You have to feel very sick.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning. If you’re still here.”

  —

  The next day Thomas Rolfe has a visitor, an official from the American embassy. The guards allow them to step out of the ward for a private talk.

  Kasper watches them go and thinks about how, once again, he’s rolling the dice. Challenges are fraught with possibilities, he tells himself, with the fatalism of one who’s swaying on a cord suspended over the void.

  First possibility: the embassy official’s here to spring Thomas. He comes back into the ward, bids Kasper farewell, and goes away forever. Or maybe he doesn’t even come back in. End of story.

  Second possibility: Thomas spills the beans to the official and tells him what Kasper has planned for this very day. Well, if that’s the case, he’ll see the effects soon enough.

  Third possibility: Thomas comes back in, helps him to dump his dose of Ritalin, helps him to escape, and then God will provide. For him and also for Thomas, he hopes.

  Kasper assigns the probabilities.

  First hypothesis: 45 percent.

  Second hypothesis: another 45 percent.

  Third hypothesis: 5 percent.

  Other eventualities: the remaining 5 percent.

  From which he deduces that, realistically speaking, all hope is lost.

  Thomas returns and goes over to him. Kasper’s IV has been hooked up and the Ritalin drip has just begun. Kasper thinks that today a double dose might not be so bad, given how things are probably going to turn out. But the American screens him and helps him disconnect the tubing. Once again, the Ritalin will go to relaxing the rats.

  “I asked permission to leave tomorrow afternoon instead of tomorrow morning.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Kasper asks.

  “I made up a story. I told the embassy guy I have to talk to the doctors and nurses tomorrow morning. I said that as an American citizen, I want to ask them to treat the people I’ve met in here better. More humanely. I made a long speech about American values. The guy from the embassy looked touched. He’s from Boston, seems like a nice kid.”

  “You were supposed to get out tomorrow morning….”

  “A few hours later won’t make any difference.”

  “The guy from the embassy must have thought you were crazy.”

  “So did I,” says Rolfe with a smile.

  —

  Phnom Penh’s rumbling more loudly than usual. It’s out there, practically around the corner. One hundred meters away. Maybe less.

  Kasper looks up at the sky and thinks this is a good day for escaping. Maybe also for dying. Be that as it may, he has no intention of dying in here.

  He considers the guards on this hot morning. There are four of them at the moment, engaged in the usual distracted chattering while the zombie-prisoners are taking the air and smoking. Near the guards, a single Kalashnikov stands propped against the wall.

  Thomas is worried. Very worried. But he’s just guaranteed Kasper that he won’t back out. “It shouldn’t be hard for me to act like I feel sick. I feel sick already. Seriously.”

  Kasper looks at him. His greenish complexion confirms what he said. His liver’s working overtime. Luckily, there are still Americans like this, Kasper thinks. Americans like Thomas Rolfe and Brady Ellensworth. Men who help others. Who, when their country has committed an injustice, can admit it.

  At his signal, Thomas will walk toward the guards and collapse to the ground in convulsions. That will be the moment.

  The difficult part will be the jump. One single jump. Once he’s over the gate, he’ll simply have to make a dash for the street.

  Simply.

  The street’s where Brady, astride his Yamaha, will be waiting. They’ll take a carefully planned route, down side roads and over terrain inaccessible to automobiles, a route that will be difficult for their pursuers to follow.

  “Are you ready?”

  “I’m ready,” Thomas whispers.

  “Okay, let’s get started….”

  “Listen, pilot,” says Thomas with a wink and a daredevil smile. “If something goes wrong, we’ll meet in the next life.”

  “Everything’s going to be all right. All you have to do is feel sick.”

  Thomas staggers off in the direction of the guards. Nobody notices him. In Preah Monivong, everyone staggers, more or less. It’s a scene that Kasper has imagined dozens of times. The American will crumple and fall, the guards will surround him, so will the other prisoners. No one will pay any attention to Kasper, and he’ll do what he has to do.

  That’s exactly how the scene will play out.

  But at that precise moment, Kasper sees him.

  The man in the blue shirt.

  Kasper recognizes him at once. He’s one of the political prisoners, one of the most respected. He can’t be forty yet, skinny as a rail, his face so hollow it looks like a skull, his expression that of a man possessed. He emerges from a small group of Cambodians that opens like the corolla of a flower when it lets the insect inside fly away. And this insect flies. A blue blur, he heads straight for the gate, throws himself on it, and starts to climb.

  But slowly. Too slowly, Kasper thinks. He wonders if he would have been as slow as that.

  The prisoner hauls himself up to the top of the gate and swings one leg over
it.

  Now he’s got a chance. All he needs to do is jump.

  The burst of rifle fire sends everyone sprawling. Everyone except the fugitive. He remains where he is, straddling the gate as though nailed to it. Then, slowly bending from the waist, he falls forward onto the top rail. His hands clutch the metal, and then the strength seems to drain from his arms. They dangle in the wind. But he’s not dead. Not yet. His body jerks; he tries to move, barely raises his chest off the gate, leans to one side. He holds that position for a few seconds before plummeting back into the prisoners’ courtyard.

  The guard with the Kalashnikov walks over to him and turns him over with his foot. He points his rifle at the fallen man’s head and fires a single shot, blowing out his brains.

  —

  Thomas has been vomiting for a long time. Kasper watches him and at the same time observes the other prisoners as they writhe in their beds.

  The escape attempt seems to have driven the guards mad. They ordered everyone back inside. They kicked and punched the Cambodians, singling out the political prisoners for blows with sticks and rifle butts. They restored order.

  Kasper and the American have been spared. The officer who inspects the prisoners goes over to Thomas and says, “They come for fetch you. You free to go.”

  Then he goes over to Kasper and reveals his future: “Prey Sar.”

  10

  The Prophecy

  On the Way to Prey Sar, near Phnom Penh, Cambodia

  September 2008

  The Toyota SUV taking him away from Preah Monivong Hospital has left the last suburbs of Phnom Penh behind. Now the big 4X4 is driving through a rural landscape composed of rice paddies and a few green areas not yet destroyed by uncontrolled deforestation. They pass somnolent villages united by the torpor of poverty, and then more paddy fields.

  Kasper’s chained hand and foot. The smells of earth and suffocating heat mingle with the reek of sweat. The three soldiers escorting him will unload their prisoner at Prey Sar and drive away.

  Prey Sar is the place of no return. It’s the place that’s spoken of as little as possible, and always very softly. Even the Westerners who live in Cambodia have learned that.

  Prey Sar is hell. Kasper knows what’s waiting for him there.

  He’s done a lot to deserve it.

  He’s committed at least three mortal sins.

  First sin: he trusted the wrong people. Second sin: he underestimated the risk. But the most grievous of his sins, the one that’s worse than everything else, is that he overestimated himself.

  Not for the first time.

  Now he realizes there’s something more serious than irresponsibility and cockiness behind his tendency to tempt fate. Something seriously pathological. Crazy, like he said. Also kind of stupid, the way he persists in behavior that endangers his health. Such as landing airplanes in extremely adverse conditions. Such as opening his parachute only four hundred meters from the ground. Such as handling explosives.

  He’s spent thirty years like that, in a constant bath of foaming adrenaline.

  These months in prison have given him time to think about his capture. Again and again he’s asked himself: if he and Clancy hadn’t been alone, if Patty had still been in Phnom Penh, what would have happened to her?

  The answer is obvious.

  Darrha and his thugs wouldn’t have hesitated. There would have been no negotiations and no witnesses. The prisoners would have disappeared. Devoured, swallowed up by Cambodia, by the land that for decades has done nothing but chew up human bodies.

  Kasper has decided—has vowed—never again to put other people’s lives in danger.

  Now he’s fifty years old, and he feels the weight of every one of those years. His deepest wrinkles aren’t the ones visible on his face; they’re the ones time has inexorably inscribed inside him. Maturity is pain, pain that can stretch you out on the ground, emptied of strength and filled with remorse. There are words, promises, and looks that Kasper can’t forget. He’d like to, but he can’t. There are pledges he hasn’t kept. And there are, above all, people who have trusted him.

  The SUV heads for Prey Sar, bouncing along secondary roads.

  Kasper observes his surroundings but retains nothing. Memories of his friend Sylvain Vogel cover the noise of the engine and cancel out all other sounds.

  “The will to power. That’s your greatest pitfall. Because it leads you to follow the childish impulses engendered by the myth you believe about yourself. It’s a dangerous myth. Around here, it can cause you a lot of damage. It can get you killed.”

  A prophecy. Delivered with a smile and a raised glass of red wine, as though for a toast between European gentlemen. But a prophecy, all the same.

  Sylvain Vogel is a French professor at the Royal University of Phnom Penh. He’s harsh and wise, the wisest man Kasper’s ever met. Now that Vogel’s prophecy has almost come true, Kasper can’t help going back in his mind to their last meeting, a few weeks before his capture.

  —

  The conversation ranges far and wide, as usual. Patty’s fascinated by Sylvain, but so is Kasper. It’s hard not to be captivated by the breadth of the man’s intellect. Besides French and German, he’s a fluent speaker of English, Portuguese, Persian, Pashto, Khmer, and various other languages of Southeast Asia. “I’m not a polyglot. I’m a linguist,” he likes to point out. He’s a scholar who is totally immersed in the work he loves: the study of how language develops as the result of a culture, of a history, of a way of life.

  Sylvain’s alert and cautious, but also determined. He’s like a cat, a shrewd old puma, capable like few others of moving in a world littered with snares. He spends long periods of time between Afghanistan and Pakistan. With his opportunely neglected beard, the right clothes, and his mastery of languages, such comings and goings seem to be no problem for him. His hobbies hint at a military past. He goes to the shooting range and frequents the same gym as Kasper, where he trains in Muay Thai and Brazilian jiujitsu.

  The professor feels a rough fondness for Kasper. Maybe Sylvain sees in him weaknesses he himself has come to terms with in the past. Maybe he intuits Kasper’s demons. He seems familiar with Kasper’s history and probably knows much more than he lets on. They’ve never talked openly about it, but people with experience in the field can smell that sort of thing. Therefore, when Kasper urges Sylvain to talk about his trips between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the professor doesn’t hold back. He accepts Kasper’s questions. He smiles at his provocations. He doesn’t try to wriggle away.

  Not even tonight, when they talk about the great quantities of drugs that make the journey to the West.

  Not even when that word comes up: supernotes. The currency of choice for opium, heroin, and much else.

  At this point in the conversation Kasper tries to raise the bar. He proposes to Vogel that they travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan together. “Just so I can understand a bit more about them,” he says. “You know the language, you know how to move around. I’ll accompany you without speaking. I’ll just look. Look and learn.”

  The professor gazes at Kasper with great indulgence. He seems to be weighing the proposal, but in reality he’s only trying to judge how best to steer Kasper away from that path.

  “Do you remember the colonel?” he asks, as if talking about an old mutual friend they haven’t seen for some time.

  “Colonel…You’re talking about Ian—”

  “Ian Travis, exactly. The former SAS colonel.”

  Kasper nods. “Of course. I remember him well.”

  “That’s good. Keep remembering him. And take your foot off the gas.”

  Vogel pauses and studies him. He seems amused by the scowl on Kasper’s face. “There are more important things you can do for your country,” the professor continues. “Al-Qaeda’s setting up bases everywhere. Koranic schools and foundations, that’s where you have to look. Rome and Milan aren’t out of their range.”

  Kasper acknowledges this point; for
some time now, he’s been doing some investigating in that area too. But then he returns to the topic he’s most interested in.

  “I can’t tell you much more about supernotes,” Sylvain Vogel says, cutting him short. “Apart from the fact that there’s an enormous quantity of them in circulation in this part of the world. In countries like these, where Westerners don’t have easy access, it’s hard to figure out who’s turning the crank of the money printing machine.”

  “That’s just what I’d like to figure out.”

  Vogel shakes his head. “Maybe you don’t realize what risks you’re running. Be careful of the people closest to you.”

  “I know my limits,” Kasper says in self-defense.

  The professor closes the discussion with a few smiling words that sound like a warning. “What you buy with supernotes is a ticket to hell. One way only.”

  —

  The SUV stops in front of the entrance to Prey Sar.

  Sylvain Vogel’s face dissolves.

  One of the soldiers points at the car door, which opens slowly as he says, in mangled English, “You home now, Italian.”

  11

  Welcome, Italian

  Prey Sar Correctional Center, near Phnom Penh, Cambodia

  October 2008

  During Pol Pot’s regime, Prey Sar was a concentration camp. Afterward, it was renovated with funding from the United Nations and became a “correctional center.” Which is only a different way to define what it has always been. There are two separate complexes, one for men and the other for women and minors. With a few exceptions, everyone wears a blue prison suit similar to pajamas. Kasper, the only Westerner, doesn’t wear this uniform.

  Instead of traditional cells, the men’s quarters are “modernized.” Inmates live in large rooms that have a narrow central aisle with a low masonry wall running along either side. At one end of the aisle, a little cubicle with two holes in the floor serves as a latrine. There’s no running water. Plastic jerry cans of water are delivered twice a day by the “slaves,” the lowest inmates in the prison hierarchy.

  In each large room, between seventy and eighty wretches spend their miserable lives, packed into a space twenty people would crowd.