Supernotes

by Agent Kasper

  “Exactly. The flow of Mafia money coming from Italy. One of their financier connections was Rakesh Saxena.”

  “The Indian tycoon?”

  “That’s him. The circle also included a New Zealander I knew well, Ian Travis, a man with a military past. He’d been a colonel in the SAS, and later he worked with the Karen insurgency and the Sri Lankan rebels. A real soldier, but with the spirit and the ambitions of a small-time corporate raider. He was the first person to talk to me explicitly about supernotes.”

  “Ian Travis. Why does his name sound familiar?”

  “He was also the owner of the DMZ bar in Phnom Penh.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever been there.”

  “In that case, maybe you heard his name because he got whacked, in public. He and I had arranged to meet right around that time. Unfortunately, I arrived too late. Two hit men shot him down. It was March 1, 2002. We were in Bangkok.”

  24

  Boiler Room

  Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok, Thailand

  Friday, March 1, 2002

  Kasper has passed the evening swimming in the pool at the Grand Millennium Hotel. He hasn’t been in Bangkok for many hours, and he’s trying to relax ahead of tomorrow’s meetings. Out of the pool, he heads for the sauna.

  He notices the three missed calls only when he starts to get dressed again. All three from Clancy. He calls him back.

  His friend speaks in the formal tone he uses to deliver bad news. “Ian Travis has been shot. He’s in a hospital. I think he’s already dead.”

  Kasper calls one of the errand boys from Travis’s boiler room. The young man, a Thai, tells him the facts in a few words of broken English: Ian had stopped breathing before he got to the hospital. According to the police, the killers were two locals. “Nonprofessionals” is the initial version. No clue about anything else.

  Kasper turns on the TV and looks for the news. His search isn’t difficult. The story’s on every channel in the country.

  At first the authorities tried to pass off the attack as a robbery, but Travis was carrying at least $30,000, and his killers didn’t even try to open one of his car doors. And so there’s a new explanation: revenge. Score settling. Ian was a dynamic broker who trafficked in derivatives and fake securities. He’d pissed off a great many people, among them two American ex-partners. Eventually, in these parts, you can always find someone who’ll shoot you in the face.

  That’s the version that gets served up to the media.

  Meanwhile, Kasper tries to call Rakesh Saxena. The Indian financier doesn’t answer. Nor do his men. Kasper doesn’t like that. He calls one of the Sicilian emissaries who regularly do business with Saxena and who’ve been laundering money through Ian for the past few months. At the usual number, a voice Kasper doesn’t recognize answers: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

  Half an hour later, Rosario Meli, the man who deals with Rakesh Saxena, is on the telephone. He already knows all about Travis. But, he makes clear to Kasper, it wasn’t them. His implication is that someone felt cheated and presented the bill. The New Zealander paid for his tendency toward reckless expansion. He had recently widened his sphere of activity to include selling inflated bonds and shares in nonexistent or futureless companies, and he’d run those scams quite unscrupulously.

  But no, Kasper thinks, Ian didn’t get wasted for that. His intuition tells him it was the brazen way Ian circulated supernotes. The way he went about recycling them.

  “Recycling” is the key word.

  They’d talked about it for the first time, he and Ian, several months earlier, at Victor Chao’s shooting range. Ian was excited. Adrenalized. “I’m on the inside at last,” he announced. “I’m at the big dance. The turnover is huge, and there’s enough for everybody. If you make the right moves. It’s a river of money that just needs channeling. These guys are geniuses. They manufacture wealth, see. Supernotes make the world go round, but the world doesn’t know it yet.”

  Travis’s “geniuses” were the Asian counterfeiters, perhaps better known for their designer dresses and purses. Apparently now they could make $100 bills.

  Kasper and Ian had known each other for a number of years, ever since Travis had dealings with Michael Savage about a certain matter involving mercenaries in Sri Lanka. Travis, like Savage, ran after money. Big, easy money. Unlike the Irishman, however, Ian didn’t like drugs. He liked supernotes, though. A lot.

  Kasper didn’t have much to say as Ian carried on, but he did show enough interest to act like a person who wants a seat at the table. Ian promised Kasper his participation would gradually increase, on the condition that Kasper put him in touch with some of the Italians who were doing business between Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

  It wouldn’t be complicated, Ian had said. It would be easy to come to a mutual understanding.

  In the following months, Kasper’s network of associations had grown. There had been meetings, dinners, convivial drinks. Kasper now had a clear picture. And at one of those meetings, Ian introduced him to the Watchmaker.

  “Watchmaker in what sense?” Kasper had asked beforehand.

  “A fellow who knows his business. But watches have nothing to do with it,” Ian had said, laughing.

  The Watchmaker was a fortyish North Korean who lived in Germany, an engineer who specialized in typographic machines, among them the famous German-made banknote printers. Periodically—usually every time he returned to Europe from Pyongyang—the Watchmaker was Travis’s guest.

  “Actually, all I manage to see of Pyongyang is the airport and not much else,” the Watchmaker had explained. “When I arrive in North Korea, my destination is Pyongsong, the ‘closed city.’ I work there, but only as long as is strictly necessary. My name and face are North Korean, I still have relatives in the country, but as far as they’re concerned I’m a Westerner now, and my visits must be as brief as possible. Not like these Americans who can stay there as long as they like.”

  “Americans in Pyongsong? I don’t believe it,” Kasper had said, probing for more information. But the Watchmaker hadn’t heard him; Ian Travis had already moved the conversation along to more entertaining topics. The Watchmaker’s stop in Bangkok was chiefly a time for fun. He liked his lovers male, very young, and never fewer than two at a time.

  The circles Ian Travis moved in were full of interesting characters. People like the Watchmaker. People used to swimming in a river of money. All Kasper had to do was to discover the primary source of that river.

  He and Ian were supposed to meet again in Bangkok in early March. The missing piece of the puzzle was almost in Kasper’s hands. But two Thai killers had cut him off.

  25

  In the Heart of the ROS

  Villa Ada, Rome

  January 2009

  The general’s climbing up to the Belvedere.

  He’s almost sixty but he runs like he’s on drugs, Barbara thinks. And maybe he is. She stays on his trail, or at least tries to. She wills herself on. She doesn’t want to lose sight of him. Mario De Paoli told her about this regular route—“The comandante is a creature of habit.” This is her only chance to reach him. A risky “blitz” as Mario called it.

  They descend toward the Villa Reale, skirt the riding school, and take the well-appointed course that runs down through the woods. Then to the little lake, a quick lap around it, and back they go.

  How many kilometers does this guy want to cover? Barbara wonders. He’s got to stop sooner or later. But meanwhile, it’s the longest forty-five minutes of her life. He reenters the woods. She’s behind him.

  They run around the ancient archeological site, the Roman ruins. The general accelerates.

  I can’t believe this, thinks Barbara.

  Now he’s sprinting. She wants to accelerate too, but her legs don’t respond. A sharp curve to the right, another climb. Jesus, send me a zip line.

  She trips and falls.

  Headfirst. Luckily, instinct makes her put her hands out.
With a shout, she hits the grassy slope and starts rolling down. After several meters, she stops, eyes on the sky and arms outspread. Unconditional surrender.

  I am indeed nuts, she thinks. What a fall.

  “Are you hurt, ma’am?” a voice above her asks.

  The young man, wearing a sky-blue tracksuit, is completely bald. He’s making an effort to put on the face of a concerned rescuer, but the amusement in his eyes wins out over courtesy. Barbara can see it very well, that little fucking glint, the unbearable superiority complex of the typical Italian male. On the other hand, her fall must have been fairly comical.

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Nothing broken?”

  “Just my dignity.”

  The young man bursts out laughing. She nods and smiles. He offers her his hand; she takes it and tries to stand up. And that’s when she sees him. The general. Standing on top of the little hill. Like an Apache chief waiting for a signal. Which young Bald Eagle duly gives him, raising his right thumb. As if to say, everything’s okay, we can go now.

  So that’s what was happening. She was following the general, someone was following her.

  He says, “Lucky you didn’t hurt yourself.”

  “Can you tell your commander I need to speak to him?”

  The glint in the young man’s eyes goes out at once, replaced by martial severity. “Excuse me?”

  “Please,” she says imploringly. “Tell the general I must speak to him. Otherwise I’m going to keep on running after him. I swear. All the way to his office.”

  —

  Her close-fitting tracksuit is ripped at both knees. She must have a bruise the size of a porkchop on her butt. Barbara stretches out her legs, one at a time, and leans back on the bench with a sigh.

  The general remains on his feet, observing her. Typical military, Barbara thinks. Now he’ll ask how I am and what the hell I want from him. She gets ready.

  “You used to play basketball, didn’t you?”

  Barbara gazes at him in surprise. “How do you know that?”

  “It shows in the way you run.”

  “And you look like you’re training for a marathon,” she replies.

  “I’ve run a few, in fact,” the general says with a smile. And, still smiling, he asks, “What is it you want, counselor?”

  “You know who I am, apparently.”

  “It would be a bad thing if I didn’t.”

  Barbara waits for two cyclists to pass and then says, with emphasis, “Kasper.”

  “Right.” He nods. “Kasper.”

  “You know where he is.”

  “Yes, I know.” He pauses and adds, “He wrote me a letter from Prey Sar. Just a few lines. Clear and succinct. Showed composure—”

  “Oh, right, composure!” Barbara interrupts him. “You people in the ROS, that’s all you care about. One of your men is being tortured to death, and nobody in Italy wants to talk about it, but the really important thing is for him to croak with composure.”

  The general observes her without moving a muscle. Then he makes a sign to his man, who’s standing about ten meters away. Bald Eagle raises one hand and withdraws.

  “Counselor Belli, there’s a famous barracks joke that explains pretty well why, in certain situations, the less agitated you get, the better off you are.”

  “I know that joke. It gets told a lot in courtrooms too.”

  “There you go. Kasper’s been in some very critical situations before this, and he’s always come out all right. He knows he’s in our hearts—”

  “Because you ROS men have such big hearts.”

  “I’ll say we do. But at the moment, there’s not much we can do for him.”

  “So how will you reply to his letter?”

  “I won’t.”

  “Excellent,” she sneers. “Don’t strain yourself.”

  “Counselor Belli, maybe things still aren’t clear to you. Kasper’s involved in something so complicated, so incredible, that our only hope of getting him out of there is to maintain an extremely low profile and trust that someone or something operates in his favor.”

  “Help me get this straight. This is your strategy? We don’t lift a finger and we pray for a miracle?”

  “Sorry, but I don’t have a strategy,” the general says with a smile. “As you’ve probably heard, I’ve got some problems at the moment. A most unpleasant business, but I have faith in the justice system. Sooner or later, things will get cleared up, but in the meantime I must defend myself.”

  The senatore had told her the general was under investigation. Charges of crimes and abuses in his fight against drug traffickers. Typical Roman politics.

  “As for Kasper, someone will take care of him. It’s inevitable.”

  “Inevitable.”

  “Listen to me. When they took him into custody, he was in serious danger of dying. Fortunately, it didn’t happen. And whoever wanted to make him disappear then will have many more problems getting rid of him now. The matter he was investigating doesn’t concern us. Italy’s got no claim on it; it’s entirely an American affair—”

  “I wouldn’t say that at all,” Barbara interrupts him. “If I’m not mistaken, he was arrested in 2005 in Milan for the same reason: supernotes. Don’t tell me the ROS had nothing to do with it.”

  “I will tell you that, because we didn’t,” the general retorts. “An American gave Kasper the assignment. He had full autonomy. But what’s most interesting is that the same man who asked him to meet Bischoff in Milan in 2005 contacted him again in 2007 and asked him to conduct an investigation in Phnom Penh.”

  “Supernotes again.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Who is this man?”

  “I don’t know. All I can tell you is he made contact with Kasper in Bangkok, and Kasper’s partner set up the meeting.”

  “Clancy.”

  “As you know, Bush is on his way out, the Republicans don’t stand a chance, and a Democrat moves into the White House in a few days. These are delicate moments in the intelligence community. The CIA—and not only the CIA—has certain little games going on that they won’t be able to play so casually anymore. There’s a great deal of housecleaning to be done. And you know how it is, in such a rush something can easily go missing.”

  “Are you alluding to supernotes?”

  “Counselor, I never allude. I reflect, and sometimes I talk. Now, however, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to finish my hour of jogging.”

  “One more thing, General.”

  He takes a couple of steps and pauses.

  “If you were in my place, what would you do to get Kasper out of that hellhole?”

  “I’d talk to the Americans. The right ones.”

  “The problem is figuring out which Americans are the right ones,” Barbara objects.

  “That’s a problem for us all, believe me. Always has been.”

  26

  The Storm

  Prey Sar Correctional Center, near Phnom Penh, Cambodia

  January 2009

  Kasper hasn’t slept. He hasn’t even closed his eyes.

  And so he heard it coming. Shut up in the big room, packed in there amid dozens of other bodies, he listened to the sound of the storm, which suddenly sprang up in the middle of the night and shattered the silence of the curfew.

  The din is so loud it covers everything.

  The rain’s been coming down for hours. It’s a water bomb that submerges Prey Sar and the surrounding area, transforming the world around him into a stifling swamp. A downpour like this isn’t normal for the end of January, one of the least rainy periods of the year. But the climate’s really going crazy, Kasper thinks. Or maybe someone up there has finally had it with the human race.

  When the rain finally slows down, the prisoners get ready to go out. They throng at the doors, waiting for the kapos to give them a chance at some fresh air. The temperature is climbing rapidly. The equatorial climate offers no compromises. In a few minutes, the sun wi
ll emerge from the fog, everything will start boiling again in the unbearable heat, and the humidity will reach about a thousand percent.

  Kasper heads outside with the others. The prison yard is one giant puddle. He’s carrying his cell phone, which he hid in his clothes during the night. He wants to warn Brady to get ready.

  Today’s his day.

  But first he has to retrieve the pistol and the hand grenade.

  He heads to where he’s dug the hole for them. Chou Chet spots him from a distance and comes over to him. “What you doing?” he asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “You have face like man about to do something. Not good. Face like that bring you trouble in here.”

  Kasper dodges around him and proceeds on his way. There’s water everywhere, and this makes him anxious. If his package is buried in the mud, he’ll still be able to find it, but if the hole has been washed away, then he’s in deep shit.

  “Tell me where you going,” Chou Chet says again.

  “The gun and the grenade. They’re over there, near the garden.”

  “I get them for you. You don’t get excited.”

  “I’m not excited.”

  “They watching us,” says Chou Chet.

  Kasper ignores him, but his prison guard “friend” is right. The Kapo—with whom Kasper has unfinished business—is less than twenty meters behind him, his eyes fixed on Kasper’s every move. Two guards hover nearby, observing the scene. A few prisoners are standing around, among them Mr. T, a Cambodian of Nigerian origin serving a hundred-year sentence who looks exactly like the actor from The A-Team. He’s a black mountain of a man, exuding violence from every pore. He hates whites, so Kasper’s not exactly his favorite prison mate.

  In short, the audience isn’t on his side.

  But Kasper doesn’t give a damn about that. He has to retrieve his weapons. That’s the only thing that matters now.

  Too much haste. Too much excitement.

  “I get them for you,” Chou Chet repeats.

  “They’re over there,” Kasper mutters, praying they haven’t disappeared. Because the moment has come. Jump and takeoff are near at hand. Now he’ll call Brady, and then he’ll go to where the ladder is…