The Deceivers (34 page)

“You have to get me out. Help me into your car and take me across the border. An American woman can't go missing without questions being asked. People in New York will know why she came here.”

“That's
your
problem.”

“
Our
problem. Ranar isn't going to kill an American woman and a museum curator without cleaning house afterward. He'll make sure there's no leaks back to him and that means we'll join Rim and the woman in a croc's belly.”

He reached up and grabbed hold of Kirk's shirt.

“He'll get you, don't think he won't. Ranar will have his military and police friends kill us both and frame us for the woman's death. We have to get out of the country. Now. Help me up.”

“Why should I help you?”

“Because I'll have your ass burned. I make a call to Ranar and you'll be the first to go.”

Kirk shook his head as he drew the knife from his hip sheath. “I can stand working with a thief, maybe even a murderer, but you're a sick pervert. I've always wanted to strap a land mine to your ass and set it off.”

Bullock croaked. “Too late to cut my throat, your fucking bitch did it already. Look, I have more pieces, better ones than you know about. I kept some aside, I'll share them with you. You don't want to kill me. I'll make you rich. I have money—”

“I'm just going to make sure you don't bother any more kids.”

The scream was smothered by a group of chanting Buddhist monks walking outside with their clanging cymbals.

40

I woke up when I fell off the crate sideways and the crate skidded on the floor and moved away from me. I quickly got back on the crate, breathless.

It was dark in the cabin, too damn dark to see a dark green snake but I didn't see anything moving. In a low voice, I asked, “Are you still in there?”

I almost went off again, this time falling forward as the boat started moving. I looked out the porthole. Dawn was breaking and we were moving away from land, heading upriver. The sound of the engines and horns of other boats came through the porthole.

From what Kirk had told me, the river had sandbars and floating hazards. That was probably why we didn't move last night.

Morning and I was still alive. My watch had stopped working. It couldn't take the heat and humidity, either.

The cabin was unbearably hot and stifling. Little air came through the small porthole. Ironically, my skin felt dry and inflamed. I had sweated all night but had nothing to replenish the moisture. I'd drink river water if I had it. Or at least soak in it.

I hung on to the porthole to keep my balance. A queasy feeling hit me again as the boat rocked. I sucked in gulps of air hoping that would help but I couldn't stay upright. I was going to pass out.

I sat back down on the crate but I couldn't take that either. When the boat rolled in the wakes of other boats, I swayed back and forth, ready to fade. My throat and body were parched. What I needed was fresh cool air and water.

I managed to get myself off the crate and collapse on the bunk. I didn't care about the dirty blanket or the damn snake. If the snake was strong enough to lift the crate, it would still have to climb up to the bunk. I wondered if snakes could climb. Did they go up trees? I didn't know and couldn't figure it out.

As I lay feeling miserable, it finally occurred to me that there might be liquids in the tin cans.

I willed myself upright and looked down. The empty crate was still upside down. I guess the snake was still under there since I didn't see it wiggling around anywhere.

I rummaged through a case of cans. Damn. Leave it up to the Russians. Not a single lid with a pop top. And no can opener.

I picked a can that showed small potatoes on the label. They had to be canned in water. I banged the lid on the corner of a crate until I popped a hole and liquid shot out. Just like breaking a hole in a coconut.

Pretty starchy liquid, but it tasted like chilled Dom Pérignon champagne to me.

Juice from a can of peas was next. Then diced carrots.

I felt a little revitalized, but still miserable.

Looking out the window as the hours passed, I saw mostly brown water and green foliage. We passed an occasional fishing boat and larger boats that I took to be ferries, and houses on stilts near the riverbank. Finally I couldn't see a shoreline and I assumed we had been on the river called Tonle Sab and now were on the big lake called Tonle Sap. Chantrea had said the lake was huge, the largest in Southeast Asia. When it's so wide you can't see a shoreline, it might as well be an ocean.

The ferry landing for Siem Reap and the Angkor site was near the north end of the lake.

Was I being taken back to Angkor?

Heat and stifling air in the cabin put me in a stupor. I lay in a daze, dragging myself up occasionally to break a hole in a can for the liquid, then lying back down, hot and miserable. It was late afternoon when I felt the boat slowing down.

We were heading for land. All I could see was a shoreline of green foliage. At first I thought I saw logs lying on shore, but I realized they were crocs. Common enough on TV and in movies, but up close in real life they were savage, brutal, prehistoric-looking creatures. My line of vision out the porthole was limited. When the boat stopped, it rubbed against what I assumed was a pier.

I knew some of my questions were about to be answered. And also some of my fears. I had no weapons and no way out. Resigned that the devil would soon be knocking on my door, I sat back on the bunk with my arms wrapped around my knees.

*   *   *

I WAS DOZING
again when I heard the knock on the door.

“Open the door.” The command was in English with a heavy Cambodian accent. “Miss, open the door or I will put tear gas through the porthole.” He spoke the words slowly.

I could close the porthole, but the glass could be easily broken.

Pushing aside the crates, I opened the door. The man confronting me wore a neatly pressed military uniform. As I stepped out, I started to black out and the man gave me his arm to steady me.

He let me sit on a chair and gave me a drink from a plastic bottle. I downed it eagerly.

“Can you walk?”

I nodded.

He helped me up. I was in the galley and dining area. He guided me to a sink and I washed my face and soaked my head with cold water. I'm sure I looked like hell and I felt even worse.

When the officer led me to the companionway ladder to the top, the toothless bastard who tortured me came down and grinned at me as I stepped by him.

“He tried to kill me with a snake,” I said.

The officer shrugged. “It belongs to the boat. Eats rats. It is just a little poisonous.”

“Oh, good, then I'd only be a little dead if it had bitten me.”

Out on deck I stopped to get my balance. I was still faint and queasy, but the fresh air, as hot and wet as it was, felt like a cool breeze after life in a hot tin can. Clouds were roiling overhead, getting ready to dump an impromptu downpour.

A makeshift pier of bamboo poles strapped to empty fifty-gallon petrol cans ran a hundred feet to the shore. I saw nothing on shore except a small opening in dense jungle foliage. An army truck was backed up to the pier. Cases of supplies were already being unloaded.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To the general.”

“What general?”

“General Chep.”

“What's he general of?”

The officer waved at the jungle.

“All this. Very powerful.”

Which told me nothing. “You're not regular army.”

“We are patriotic army.”

“Why has your general kidnapped me?”

He took my arm. “We go now.”

“I called the American embassy.”

I wanted to threaten them with something and that flew out of my mouth.

He ignored me.

We crossed the pier and made our way around the truck to a jeep. The rain started by the time he got the jeep moving. It didn't have a top and the downpour soaked us, mercifully giving me a drenching that my hot, sticky body and stinking clothes sorely needed.

Warlord was the first thing that came to my mind about General Chep. Both Kirk and Chantrea said generals, most of whom were once officers going back to the days of the Khmer Rouge, were still entrenched in rural areas, ruling the regions like old-time warlords.

The warlords were involved in the smuggling trade of both Khmer art and drugs. It gave them cash for arms and for paying their armies. But what did one want with me?

In my own mind, I had thought of Ranar as a white-collar criminal, the type of wealthy bastard who could buy himself out of a mess or spend a short time in prison for having ripped off tens of millions. Now that I had fought to the death with Bullock and had been kidnapped by a Khmer warlord and transported to a jungle realm by thugs in uniforms, I realized I had stepped on some very dangerous toes. I needed to reappraise my image of Ranar and the situation.

The downpour stopped Cambodian style after a brief deluge but it had felt good. I was strangely calm.

I wondered whether this general might be Bullock's supplier and if so, was he going to burn my feet over a hot fire for killing the bastard.

There were many possibilities and all were bad.

We came into an armed camp and what drew my attention at first wasn't the soldiers and equipment but an incredible structure from the great age of Khmer art: an enormous temple.

Chantrea had said there were thousands of temples and other sites of antiquity in Cambodia, many of them still covered by jungle. The one before me was a behemoth, an enormous edifice erupting from the jungle floor and soaring up to the height of a four- or five-story building and half the length of a football field.

A great stone face, like the dramatic faces at Bayon, the temple complex with Mount Rushmore–type faces, peered solemnly from the structure. The temple had been battered, corroded, and blackened by time, with vines and roots breaking and cracking sections.

The face had the grave countenance of a Buddhist priest rather than the commanding presence of a king.

Unlike the main structures at Angkor, this temple was still mostly covered by the invading jungle. Even the face was partly covered by vines. Only the lower third had been cleared of choking growth. A great strangler fig, similar to the one at Ta Prohm, was mounted at the top of the structure, its canopy top spread over the stonework like an umbrella.

The ancient temple would be hard to spot from an airplane. No doubt the warlord Chep knew that.

The army camp finally drew my attention: bamboo huts, tents, stoves made from split fifty-gallon petrol drums, generators producing electricity with cables running to tents shouldering the bottom of the temple.

Jeeps, civilian cars and compact pickups, artillery pieces, tarps over piles of supplies and equipment, stacks of crates … and the soldiers, some old, some young, wearing mismatched uniforms but all in battle dress, some with boots, others wearing sandals, some with ancient faces, boys packing guns that actually kill people when they shouldn't be handling anything more serious than a computer game.

I stared fascinated at the young boys. It was one thing to see grinning twelve- and fourteen-year-olds packing murderous rifles on TV news about terrible events in faraway places and another to have them staring at me as I was driven into the camp.

Once again there was an ambiance about the men, their irregularity of uniforms and lack of discipline that inferred the soldiers were not part of an official army.

I expected to pull up in front of the big tent set against the temple but we drove by it and continued on through the camp and onto a dirt path cut out under a canopy of vines and trees.

A couple hundred yards down the road we came into a clearing. A large, rambling old house that looked half French and half traditional Cambodian sat on a hillock next to a small lake. The house, falling into ruin from age and neglect, was one story with a high-peaked roof and a wide covered porch that appeared to wrap around the entire structure. It looked similar to an old plantation house Chanthra pointed out during our trip to Angkor.

Poles with flags hung from the porch.

The officer pointed at trees. “Rubber when French was here.” What was once a rubber plantation was now the headquarters for a warlord.

I thought about Nadia's comment that Illya had acquired his art pieces as part of a deal to finance a revolution. The twenty-two million that the Siva sold for in New York would certainly buy a load of weapons for a rebel group in a small country like Cambodia.

As we pulled up in front of the house, Prince Ranar and a man in a military uniform came out on the porch. The military man was short and well fed with a wrinkled face and some gray in his hair. His uniform appeared much more elaborate than the officer who had driven me. He had a fat cigar in his mouth and small, piercing black eyes. Definitely not an empathetic-looking type.

“General Chep,” the officer said, snapping to attention and saluting.

Other than eyes that bore into you, the general's features remained deadpan. Ranar, however, looked like he had eaten something that didn't agree with him.

I pursed my lips and gave Ranar an ugly look. He stared at me like he'd never seen me before.

The officer hurried around and took my arm to steer me toward the porch. It wasn't necessary—I was too mad and scared to keep my mouth shut.

“I'll have you know I called the American embassy and asked for their protection. I've called my contacts in New York. All you're doing by kidnapping me is digging a deeper hole for yourself.”

“American embassy?” the general said. He gave Ranar a questioning look.

I didn't know how much English the general understood, but like most educated Cambodians he had probably picked up some out of necessity.

Ranar rattled off something in Cambodian but the general still didn't look happy. I heard him say “American embassy” again. No doubt whatever truce the general had with the government didn't include him offending any foreign governments that were a prime source of economic and military aid to the country.