The Burma Effect

by Michael E. Rose

  It was late morning, in fact, before Delaney was able to call Kate. He woke at 10 a.m. fantastically hung over, suffering for his sins. The scalding shower was penance. He could not look at food. His head was still spinning ever so slightly as he dialled Kate at home.

  There was no answer. There was no way to avoid the mobile number any longer. She answered after two rings. She was clearly outside. He heard the sound of something like a chain saw far off in the background.

  “Frank,” she said. The mobile screen had told her.

  “I’ve been trying to call you,” he said.

  “Not on this phone.”

  “I left a message for you at work.”

  “I took a couple of extra days off. I’m up at Sue’s cottage.” “How is it?”

  “You and I refuse to indulge in small talk at such times, remember Frank?” “At which times?”

  “Times crucial to the future of our relationship.”

  “Ah.” His head was aching horribly. “Are hangovers an excuse?” he asked.

  “Now we are sharing details from our private lives. How interesting,” she said. “The man is actually telling me what he does in his private times.”

  “I’m going to London tomorrow. Then Bangkok.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Good, he thought.

  “Oh,” she said. “What’s come up?”

  “Assignment.” She knew nothing of his CSIS work.

  “I see. How long?”

  “A week or so, probably.”

  “I see.”

  “I called to say good-bye.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Are you?” he asked.

  A pause.

  “Of course, Frank.”

  A pause.

  “We’ll sort something out when I get back,” he said.

  “Will we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like what?”

  “We’ll come up with something. OK?”

  “Are you my lover boy again, Frank?” He could sense the wry smile all the way down the phone line. “Something like that,” he said.

  RCMP Officer Kate Hunter did not consider herself a sentimental woman. She did not normally fall under the spell of just any man she met along life’s way. She did not consider herself, in fact, to be under the spell of one Francis Delaney, journalist at large. Or, more accurately, she did not allow herself to believe that to be the case. However, as she put down the telephone after her last conversation with Delaney before he left for Europe and Asia, she felt the unmistakable tug, what she would in another mood have called the adolescent tug, of longing.

  Delaney, to be sure, was a most infuriating man. Kate knew this, had known this from the first minute they had been introduced at an overcrowded, overheated party almost a year earlier. There had been the requisite drunken heart-to-heart on a rainy balcony, the escape for a late-night meal, the return to a downtown apartment, the fumbling for belts and buttons in the early hours, the drawing together and the moving apart.

  Then, this infuriating, months-long stasis. This now so Delaney-like reluctance to fall in love, his reluctance to give up ghosts of the past, to give up on one female ghost in particular. Kate Hunter did not normally allow herself to waste time like this on conflicted males of the species. Certainly never with police males of the species nor, until now, media males.

  So why, she asked herself as she pretended to read magazines in a friend’s sunny cottage backyard, was she compelled to think again and again about this infuriating journalist at large, to wonder if he by now was packing a bag for his latest assignment, what he might usually bring along on such a journey, what he was actually going to do while away.

  Instead of simply reading and drinking summer lemonades, instead of relaxing as planned from the rigours of her police work, she found herself imagining what sort of person Delaney would be while abroad, what he would be like as he did his journalist’s work, how he might look at a desk somewhere in some hotel, writing up the day’s events somewhere in the world.

  She very much looked forward to his return. Kate Hunter did not usually allow herself to indulge in such adolescent musings. It was unsettling and, she told herself sternly, unbecoming to a usually sensible, usually two-feet-on-the-ground member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police financial and high-tech crime squad. Not a job for hopelessly sentimental daydreamers.

  Better, she thought, far better, to stop all this nonsense at once.

  PART 3

  London and Bangkok

  Chapter 4

  London swallows up a visitor faster than almost any other European city. The maelstrom begins at Heathrow Airport, where masses of travellers and family members and airline staff and cleaners and security personnel and police stream endlessly across each other’s paths in a fantastic unchoreographed dance of travel.

  There is no let-up on the roads outside the airport or on the aging mass transit system that thunders cityward from there. Fleets of buses and taxis sweep in and out of all four terminal areas at all hours of the day. Private cars letting off and picking up passengers queue in gigantic metal snakes. Baggage carts lie abandoned everywhere. Haggard police in yellow reflector vests try in vain to restore order, with rare success.

  The only respite comes, and this for precisely 15 minutes, on the fast, quiet, direct and highly overpriced ride on the Paddington Express train from the airport to West London. Unlike most British trains, this one usually runs regularly and on time. Delaney, a veteran of too many London traffic jams and Tube disruptions and taxi shortages, always went downtown this way.

  He had learned as well to always stay at the Four Seasons Hotel on Park Lane, convenient to most places he would want to go, but more importantly not so close to Paddington Station that Cockney cab drivers would grumble about setting out for too little return, and not so far that the fare would give even a veteran traveller a nasty jolt.

  London was chaotic, crowded, faded and maddening, but Delaney loved it all the same.

  He was not someone who needed hours of recuperation time after a long flight. His routine for dealing with fatigue and jet lag was to rest after arrival for 20 minutes on an expertly made hotel bed, then to shave and shower and plunge directly into the business at hand.

  Kellner’s section editor at Defence Monthly was Jeremy Winton. He didn’t want to meet Delaney in the magazine’s office at the lower end of Regent Street. On the telephone he suggested the Groucho Club, in Soho, the trendy private hideaway for a certain monied media elite. Delaney knew there was very little chance of private conversation anytime at the Groucho, and suggested the Foreign Press Association’s stately Georgian building in a square near Piccadilly instead. Winton said he would be there by noon.

  Delaney walked to the club along Piccadilly and then down streets past shops selling absurdly expensive handbags, pipes, tableware, designer draperies, wine. Miraculously it was not raining, but in London in April this did not mean the sun would shine. The sky remained steely grey, refusing to give up either moisture or any decent light.

  Winton climbed out of one of London’s rotund black cabs just as Delaney arrived. Leaning through a half-opened window in front to pay the driver from the street, Winton was short, bespectacled, very intense, very Oxford or Cambridge and, Delaney soon learned, hungry and very thirsty. They shook hands on the club steps.

  “Nice to meet you, Delaney, so glad we could do this,” Winton said. “They serve a nice lamb couscous here at lunchtime.The chap who does the catering is from Tunisia, his whole family seems to be with him at lunch. I would suggest we avoid the FPA wine at all costs. I suggest we stick to the beer.”

  The small dining area on the main floor was still empty. They chose a table near the door. A couple of what appeared to be superannuated foreign correspondent types sat at the small bar, nursing pints of bitter. Winton ordered a bottle o
f Beck’s, Delaney a local pale ale. The couscous idea was confirmed. The menu was not large.

  “We have been doing everything we possibly can to locate Kellner, you must understand that straightaway,” Winton said after the waiter had poured his beer. “British embassy involved, the Canadians as well. The local police over there are useless, of course.”

  Delaney decided to let him roll.

  “But now perhaps with you going over there, a friend of Kellner’s on the case, as it were, we might have some better luck. The editor-in-chief says to thank you very much for your efforts in this, by the way. He says to give you his best regards.”

  Winton raised his glass, drank deeply. Delaney thought it would be interesting to time how long that first beer would last.

  “We’re very worried about him, of course. All of us at this end,” Winton said. He blinked at Delaney through his round glasses. “Gravely worried now. More than a month has gone by.”

  “Long even for Kellner, I would imagine,” Delaney said.

  “Quite,” said Winton, looking intently at Delaney. “Exactly so.”

  “Shall we assume we both know Kellner and his idiosyncrasies well enough to talk frankly, Jeremy?” Delaney said. “That would save us a bit of time.”

  “It would, yes, I quite agree,” Winton said.

  “We both know he is a bit of a wild man, can be a bit of a wild man, at times,” Delaney said.

  “Not quite how I would have put it, but, yes, I do know what you’re getting at,” Winton said. “A firstrate correspondent, however. First rate. Amazing contacts. He has done some very fine work for us over the years. Very good stuff.”

  Defence Monthly was, essentially, a trade magazine. Its trade was war, and particularly arms. Who wanted them, who was buying them, who was supplying them and how, who would buy advertising space for at least some of them in Defence Monthly magazine. This required people in the field who knew that world very well indeed.

  “Tell me something, Jeremy, just so we can eliminate possibilities right away,” Delaney said. “Do your people think Kellner has just gone off on some jaunt to abuse substances or that he is in some kind of serious trouble?”

  Winton looked uncomfortable with this. “I don’t think it would be right for me to start speculating about what Kellner does on his own time,” Winton said. “Much as we would all like to help. It’s true he sometimes worked to what I suppose you could say is an unusual schedule. Of course he did take rather more time off than most of our correspondents and sometimes he wouldn’t tell us exactly when he was going and when he was coming back. But it has never been like this. A day or so, maybe, and then he would call in from somewhere or other or he would be back in Bangkok. And when he was on assignment we might not hear from him for a while but he would often be in obscure places, where the mobile network was not good, for example, or where he might simply have not wanted to be seen to be calling. So we were used to that, to a certain extent. But now, this time, it’s different, I would say.Too long. Far too long this time. His girlfriend is very worried too. That tells you something. She calls us from time to time. Asking what we have been trying to do.”

  The food came and they started to eat. “What was he working on lately?” Delaney asked.

  “For us? Anything he liked, really. We gave him a lot of leeway. He would sometimes work on several things at once, for weeks at a time, and then suddenly something would come to fruition and he would file a solid piece,” Winton said. “He assigned himself, most of the time.”

  “Was he particularly interested in anything lately?”

  “Well, Thailand of course. The Thai military. The border situation, refugee movements, people trafficking, what that means to arms movements, people who need guns—regular army, militias, others. He was keenly interested in Burma lately as well, for similar reasons. Myanmar they officially call it these days, as you know.There’s lots to interest a foreign correspondent there. Warlords, the drug trade, a huge drug trade. Opium for heroin, lots of that, amphetamines more recently. And timber, gems, construction contracts, trading of all sorts across the border with China, casinos on the Chinese border, prostitution, forced labour, forced relocations up in the Shan State. Hundreds of democracy campaigners and dissidents are in jail. Aung San Suu Kyi is still under house arrest in Rangoon, as you know. There are all sorts of quite unpleasant things going on in Burma as we speak, and that means a lot of very good stories. Investors, those who can stomach doing business with the generals, want to know what’s going on, so they want to read as much as they can. There is money to be made in Burma, Delaney, enormous amounts of money, but the regime is vicious, absolutely corrupt. It runs on drug proceeds, mostly, but also on big bribes and kickbacks from foreign businessmen. The government has an awful lot of cash to spend on guns and equipment as a result. So do the various militias up north. Kellner was interested in all of that. Very much so.” “Was he in Burma lately?”

  “Not lately. But he was going to try to go in, I think. It’s very hard to get visas for journalists to go in. The regime is very careful who it lets in. They were not too happy a few years ago with some of the stuff we were running, some of it was Kellner’s stuff, about the regime.They made that very clear through their embassy here.” Winton paused for a minute, looking slightly ill at ease for some reason. “I’m not at all sure they would let Kellner in again if he tried to go. There’s a rather large blacklist, as you know. An Australian reporter was banned for life not too long ago. A TV man.”

  “Would Kellner have bothered to tell you if he was trying to go in?”

  “On something like that, yes, he would have to. He would need letters from us here in London to get a visa. Their embassy would be involved. He couldn’t just go in. Unless he didn’t bother with a visa at all. Which would be very, very unwise. Some correspondents have been treated rather unkindly if they are found inside the country illegally. Insein Prison is a nasty place, I’m told. Not the most attractive address in Rangoon, I’m afraid. Some of them have ended up in there for a while before they get thrown out of the country.”

  Winton was onto his third Beck’s, couscous finished. The dining room was now almost full, people well on their way through lunches and the dubious wine.

  They ate for a while in silence. Winton looked around the room, apparently checking for people he might know. He smiled at Delaney from time to time.

  “Do you know if anyone would want to harm Kellner?” Delaney asked suddenly.

  “I’ve told you I don’t feel comfortable delving into Kellner’s personal life or that of any of our correspondents,” Winton said, ever so slightly aggressive now. The small British smile was not enough to conceal that.

  “Maybe you should sometimes,” Delaney said.

  “We have nothing to apologize for in the way we deal with our people in the field, Delaney,” Winton said.

  “How do you know that, if you don’t try to keep up with what they are doing?”

  “I’m not sure I see where this is going,” Winton said.

  “Well, it’s so much easier, isn’t it, for the magazine to always be able to say you had no idea what sort of things a reporter was up to in his personal life than to address that before something came up.”

  “Like what?” Winton had started looking at his watch.

  “Like if they disappear on you, for example. Like if they piss someone off badly, for example.”

  “If it has to do with their work for us, we want to know about it,” Winton said. “We would want to know, for example, if they piss someone off, as you put it. But if it has to do with their personal lifestyles, that is certainly not our business at all.”

  “Convenient for everyone,” Delaney said. “If you ignore someone’s lifestyle you can’t be expected to intervene if it gets risky or complicated.”

  He realized this would have to apply equally to how CSIS dealt with
its freelancers in the field. How they dealt with Kellner, for example.

  “What would you have us do, Delaney?” Winton said, looking at his watch again. “Trail after our people in the field as they go into various press clubs around the world, and count their drinks? Choose their friends and girlfriends for them? These people are adults, professionals.” “Most of the time,” Delaney said.

  “I don’t want to have conflict with you on this, Delaney,” Winton said. “We all want to find out if Kellner is all right.”

  “I want to find out if he is all right and what it is that might have made him not all right,” Delaney said. “Do you want to find out both of these things too?”

  “Of course,” Winton said.“We want precisely the same things. We are working toward the same goal.”

  Lunch ended somewhat more abruptly than Delaney would have wanted. Winton waved for the waiter and paid for the meal with an American Express Corporate card. They shook hands again on the steps.

  “Good of you to come over and try to help out, Delaney,” Winton said. “Much appreciated. Do call us from over there if you need anything at our end.”

  He set off down the steps past Carleton House walking quickly in the direction of Green Park. Delaney watched him go, and then headed back up the way he had come, on foot along Piccadilly to the hotel.