Spy Mom (12 page)

“You saw me in the cage?”

“I was all prepared to free you when you fell in the river,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Which actually worked out quite nicely, don't you think?”

I tried to stand up, my legs wobbly. “I killed someone,” I said. Simon caught me under the arm. I could see the dirt jump hungrily from my body to his clean white cuff. He made a face.

“Yes. But I expect that whomever you killed would have killed you first, given the chance. The ends justify the means. Almost always.”

“Shouldn't we be getting out of here?” I asked. Simon studied his watch, as if the answers to all the universe's most perplexing questions were provided there. He looked left and right like he was waiting for someone.

“Well, this has turned out to be a complete loss. But on the positive side, I'd say we have about half an hour before the Blind Monk figures out you killed one of his men and escaped. So we have time for some curry if we eat quickly. I'm starved.” He let go of my arm and marched away down the street. I sank back to my knees.

“Come on, Sally! Time's a-wasting!”

On my knees in the dust, I suddenly understood something very clearly. This was not about the Blind Monk. If it had been, we would have stormed into his massage parlor like we were serious. But we didn't. Because the man we were really after was Ian Blackford. Simon Still expected that Blackford would show up to save me, drawn like a moth to a flame. Did Simon Still himself tip off the Blind Monk to my arrival? Did my own boss give me up? I pushed that thought out of my head as fast as I could. I couldn't let it be possible and survive.

So that was the first time Simon attempted to use me as bait to draw out Blackford. Which might help you understand why I am not all that excited to try it again.

Theo, exhausted from building forts and knocking them down, is sleeping in my arms as I move slowly back and forth in an antique rocking chair. He smells like sunshine and strawberry yogurt. I bury my nose in his hair and inhale. It is times like these that I can forget the boredom of motherhood, the longing for something exciting to happen, the little voice in my head that wants to know if I did the right thing all those years ago. Right now none of that matters. Right now I am happy.

I run my fingers down the soft, pale skin of his arm. He stirs slightly and changes position, muttering something about cats. I should put him in his bed, go downstairs, and fold laundry. I should go downstairs and figure out what's for dinner. I should go downstairs and work out how to fix this mess I'm in. But I can't let go of him yet. We continue to rock slowly, back and forth. When he does wake up, I'll take him to the playground for another hour. He'll run around until he's sweaty and red-cheeked. And I'll sit on the benches, chatting with the other moms and nannies, pretending that what they all see is really my life.

Another fifteen minutes pass. Finally, I lift Theo gently into his bed. He rolls over, sighs, and slips back into a deep sleep. I stand in his doorway and float again into the past.

The fifth time I went to Cambodia for the Agency, it was to follow a man named Sovann who was suspected of acquiring too much black market nuclear materials for his own good. Your average global citizen was allowed a certain amount of what we called “restricted” materials, but if you got to stockpiling the stuff in your backyard we got interested. It's only fair. To make things worse, it looked like Sovann intended to sell his stockpile to the Blind Monk, and that was making everyone a little uncomfortable.

By the time I crossed into Cambodia we were at a fairly high level of discomfort. Intelligence told us the Blind Monk all but had his shopping bags out, ready to fill them with uranium and plutonium and switches and detonators and all the other goodies Sovann had for sale. This was usually a pretty good sign that a transaction was in the cards. Money was going to change hands and really bad stuff would be transferred really bad people.

My mission, loosely defined as always by Simon, was to watch Sovann. Basically, I was to confirm that Sovann was indeed going to make a deal with the Blind Monk, after which we'd move in and take down the lot of them. Or so I thought.

You might wonder, as I did, why they would send me, being as the Blind Monk had expressed an interest in killing me the last time we met.

“Sally, who else am I going to send? Glenn?”

“He's dead,” I said.

“Exactly. Now stop asking questions to which you already know the answer.” I didn't know the answer but assumed I was not to seek further clarification.

My train ride from Thailand to Cambodia came to an end in a Thai town called Aranyaprathet. I stood up, feeling all the vertebrae in my spine pop and crack. I rolled my shoulders a few times, grabbed my knapsack, and followed the streams of people off of the train. Outside, the air was hot and wet but the smell of this place, so foreign and yet so familiar, was always a thrill. I took a deep breath and started toward the band of idling tuk-tuks, one of which would gladly shuttle me the three or four miles from the train station to the actual border crossing. I chose an older man as a driver, a man who didn't look like his eyesight was too great. Not so good for driving but excellent for not remembering my face. As I settled myself in the little trailer attached to his motorbike, a man the size of a mountain hauled himself into the small remaining space next to me.

“Hello there. Name's Roger. Mind if I join you?” he said in a crisp British accent.

I shrugged, not sure of the proper etiquette for kicking this intruder out of my tuk-tuk.

“Great.” He wiggled into the narrow spot, popping me up out of my seat and onto the edge of the cab in the process.

“Thanks. Great,” he repeated. “You are headed to the border, aren't you?”

I gave him a tight smile. “Yes.” I could feel the heat radiating off his enormous bulk. The sweat began to run freely down my face and back, but my arms were trapped. I blinked my eyes to clear the salty water from my field of vision. This was not starting out well.

We bounced along slowly for about ten minutes until the Thai border stations were visible, all sound drowned out by the roaring of our driver's motorbike. Roger made a great show of handing the driver 100 baht although I'd negotiated a rate of half that, and then refusing my offer of half the fare. I slipped it to the driver as Roger turned away. The driver rewarded me with a condescending shake of the head.

Now while Aranyaprathet is relatively civilized, Poipet on the Cambodian side is not. The air there even tastes different, slightly wild and acidic. Behind Roger, I marched through the Thai border station. The guards barely looked up as they stamped my fake passport and handed it back to me.

On the other side, in the no-man's-land between the two border stations, was a strip of run-down hotels and casinos. Outside the ramshackle hotels, the touts shouted and called to me, promising me riches beyond compare. A chance at another chance, they said. I kept my head down and kept walking. My new friend Roger fell in beside me.

“Quite a place,” he said, swabbing his face with a crusty red bandana. He was breathing hard, the thick air causing a slight wheeze on his exhale.

“Give it a few years and it will be a mall anchored by Target on one end and Home Depot on the other,” I said. My companion laughed.

“Thanks for sharing your ride back there,” he said, offering me his hand while we continued to walk. I shook it briefly. It was damp with sweat.

“Camilla. Nice to meet you. On holiday?”

“Yes. Well, no actually. I'm a scientist. I'm looking for some … particular … flowers.”

Up went my radar. He was having trouble with his cover story.

“What sort of flowers?” I asked.

“Purple ones, actually. Actually, yes, purple ones might be the best way to describe them.”

“Wow. Good for you,” I said. “I'm going to the temples to have a transcendental experience myself.”

He laughed before he realized I might be serious. We arrived at the Cambodian crossing. On the other side, I could see Rangsey waiting patiently for me atop a rusted minibike. I, of course, had a plan for crossing the border. It did not include Roger. I gave Rangsey a small shrug, telling him this might take a few minutes. He went back to tapping away on his cell phone.

The border guards were sitting at a table, faces buried in huge bowls of hot soup, one hour into their four-hour lunch break, all border traffic at a standstill. Tiny Cambodian women and girls were running back and forth to a makeshift kitchen at the back of the guards' shack, bearing big steaming bowls of kuyteav and platters of banh chiao accompanied by bottles of cold beer. You'd think these guys did something other than sit in a booth and accept bribes from people all day.

“I am always bothered by this sort of thing in developing countries,” Roger said. He took a seat outside the shack to wait with all the others.

“Maybe I'll see you in Siem Reap,” I said, continuing to walk toward the guards.

“Wait,” Roger called after me. “Where are you going?”

The pile of American dollars I deposited among the soup bowls was not insignificant, the sort of wad of cash that even these corrupt guards could appreciate. Underneath the cash was my passport with a photo that looked like me, but actually wasn't, and an official vaccination record that may or may not have been real.

“Something for after lunch,” I said in Cambodian, without looking directly at any of them. I gestured to my passport, open to the fake visa, ripe for stamping. A few grunts and slurps and mutterings among the group. One of them put down his spoon long enough to attend to my passport. He slid it back toward me, slick with soup and oil from his meaty hands.

“Proceed.”

I nodded, adjusted my backpack, and walked around the small sawhorse blocking the official way into Cambodia. I wanted to look back at Roger, but I didn't dare. Calling attention to myself was stupid, but I was in a rush.

The drivers of the new minibuses and bikes, the tuk-tuks, and the broken-down cars swarmed around me like bees, offering up the world. I pushed through them to where Rangsey was waiting.

Without a word, I hopped on the back of the bike and he took off.

Easy, right? Sometimes having the United States as my personal banker made my job less difficult. Other times throwing money around did nothing more than piss off the very person I intended to bribe.

Rangsey took off at full speed down the Khao San Road, which is taking some poetic license with the word “road.” Deep gullies and potholes the size of pickup trucks scarred the hard-packed earth. You would think a driver, at least one with any sense of self-preservation, would navigate slowly and carefully, like the captain of a ship moving through a shallow reef system at night. But to my dismay, I discovered that in Cambodia there are two speeds: stop or “pedal to the metal” as my driver Rangsey informed me the first time we met. I clung to his thin chest for dear life.

I met Rangsey during my first mission to Cambodia. I was as green as an agent could be but I had my pride. When one of the notorious Phnom Penh child pickpockets took a whack at me, I gave chase as if my life depended on it. Rangsey was fast but not quite fast enough. When I caught him, he was clutching one of my many fake passports, panting.

“This is useless,” I said quietly, taking the passport from his small hands.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I can sell it. Food for my sister, for Ary.”

“Do you really have a sister?”

He nodded. “She's sick. Land mine.” From his pocket he pulled out a mangled photo of a girl, missing an arm. I had no idea at the time if he was trying to con me, but something in his eyes made me want to find out.

“How old are you?”

“Ten.”

“Take me to where you live.”

His eyes grew wide with fear. “You're not in trouble,” I reassured him. “I want to meet your sister.”

Keeping up with him wasn't easy as he sped through the labyrinth of dusty streets in his bare feet. His house was a few flimsy pieces of plywood tied with string. A tattered tarp covered the dirt floor. In one corner was a girl missing an arm, sleeping on a straw mat. Ary was a little older than Rangsey. When she saw me, her face went dark with suspicion.

“Who have you brought here, Rangsey?” Ary whispered. He shrugged and looked down at his feet.

“It's okay,” I said. “He's done nothing wrong.”

“You speak Cambodian?” the girl asked.

“Some,” I said. And she smiled, a huge grin, full of life in this depressing shantytown on the outskirts of a wild city.

I sat down on the dirty tarp and learned that both parents were dead, one of gunshots and one of what sounded like AIDS. A land mine took her arm during a desperate attempt to steal rice from a nearby field.

I drew a decent salary from the USAWMD, and other than the rent on an apartment with no furniture, I spent none of it. It sat there in my bank waiting for a rainy day. Maybe this was my rainy day.

“If I help you, maybe you can help me,” I said. They glanced briefly at each other and settled their eyes on me, keeping them deliberately blank. Offers of help in their world usually came with strings attached.

“I'm going to have to visit here from time to time for my work and will need someone reliable to drive me around. Do you drive, Rangsey?”

An indignant look from the young boy. Everyone drives here, even the toddlers.

“If I buy you a motorbike, you can taxi for people when I'm not here but use it for me when I am here. I'll arrange for money so you can keep the bike in decent shape. How does that sound?”

Ary's face hardened at the offer. “Why do you do this?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said, honestly. “I guess I just want to. You can trust me.”

I could see her at that moment making a deal with fate, deciding to believe me when all her experience to this point had been to the contrary. Rangsey, thoughts of his own motorbike clouding his vision, looked desperately from Ary to me and back again.