Phnom Penh Express (9 page)

My body is steaming, out of control, my mind is led astray
.

Thinking of Merrilee all the time, wondering how she feels and what she sees
,

Finally the cool moon appears into the night, bringing me rest, sleep, peace
.

My bed is warm, I turn around, but who is suddenly lying by me?

I can’t believe my eyes, the gods must be with me, for it is Merrilee!

The soft air of her breath warms my neck, I admire her body, wholly naked
,

Speechless, I’m struck by her beauty, she’s like a pure lotus, so sacred
.

Her straight hair shines black, a perfect night without a moon
,

Playful eyes so brown like a young forest before the bloom
.

Not bad, not bad at all, Phirun praises himself: he likes what he’s managed to produce so far. He reads the last two lines he wrote.

Pretty little nose, carried by lips in a sensual smile, I’m enchanted, I’m in trance, I cannot breathe for a while
.

“Excellent!” he exclaims with a smile. I’m a good liar, he thinks, because I wasn’t really in a breathless trance. Instead, he had been so drunk he couldn’t get it up the next morning. How poetic is that? Anyway, it doesn’t matter, he thinks, the artistry is there.

He pours himself a mug of steaming hot coffee, black, without sugar, and takes a sip. Enjoying the feeling of the caffeine kicking in on his body’s system, he takes another gulp and for a moment is undecided on how to continue from here. When his mind’s eye settles on Merrilee again he picks up his pen.

My eyes caress her seductive breasts, two plum blossoms in Spring
,

The button of her belly goes up and down, breathing fast, exciting
.

“It’s coming along really well...” he mumbles to himself.

Feminine hips, beautifully curved, uncover the secret chamber of jade
,

She moves gently, I become restless, it’s not of stone that I am made
.

Phirun rereads the last verse. Then he crosses out ‘beautifully’ and writes ‘perfectly’ above it.
Feminine hips, perfectly curved...
Yes, that’s closer to the truth. He half downs the coffee. His pen is now scratching away. He loves the sound it makes.

Yin chases Yang, Yang wants Yin, I’m full of passion, mad with desire
,

The magical spell is broken, I breathe in deep, can no longer hold my fire
.

“Yes, it’s true, I can’t hold my fire any longer!” he shouts into his empty kitchen. He takes one last sip and the mug is empty. Sitting on the wooden chair, Phirun’s legs are jiggling left to right, back and forth, like an impatient schoolboy waiting for playtime.

I reach out for Merrilee but find only thin air, astonishment followed by a scream!

Phirun almost gnaws off the end of the pen in furious concentration. He wracks his brain over the final line. The kissoff.

The sheets are cold and my eyes are moist, holy shit, it was just a dream...!

He reflects upon that last sentence. Perhaps he should take out the curse at the end, it jars with the rest of the poem. He crosses out
holy shit
and writes
for
underneath it.

The sheets are cold and my eyes are moist, for it was just a dream...

He looks up the time and sighs — 10:45
PM
. He rereads the whole thing once again and is astonished. He never realised he had such powerful literary talents. He simply can’t wait to give it to Merrilee and see her melt with every word she reads.

IT’S DEATHLY QUIET in the office of William H. Stoppkotte, Senior Intelligence Officer at the United States embassy in Phnom Penh. The square clock on the wall opposite his desk indicates 8:54
PM
and most of the regular staff left hours ago. Still present are security personnel, a few marines, and the odd overzealous Khmer desk worker. But to the 46-year-old lone intelligence staffer, the past couple of hours have provided the ideal time to study the two reports lying on his desk undisturbed. The frown lining his forehead hints at the frantic contortions going on inside his tired brain.

William H. Stoppkotte, a.k.a. Billy, looks into the middle-distance: he’s having great difficulty suppressing the excitement driving through his body. His left hand is absentmindedly caressing the cover of one of the reports. It is marked ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ and arrived this morning from the FBI Counterterrorism Division in Washington. The other report, no more than a couple of pages long, is marked with the same stamp and was put on his desk this afternoon by one of his Cambodian assistants.

Billy rubs his tired eyes and looks pensively at the map of the world mounted on the wall beneath the clock. Could it be coincidence? he wonders. He has spent two and a half hours reading the seventy-page-thick document analysing the link between U.S. public enemy number one al Qaeda, and the global trade in smuggled diamonds. It has been difficult reading. Despite his current calling, in truth he’s not the most analytical man: he detests situations where you can’t easily tell the good guys from the bad. There’s too many analysts in the Bureau, he reckons, and too few men of action. He wonders if that’s why his father, the veteran Senator Stoppkotte, had recommended him to the FBI’s Chief Personnel Recruitment Officer all those years ago. Did he know that his favourite organisation could use some go-getters like Billy? Billy doesn’t like to think that his father’s influence with the Senate where it came to getting a controversial new bill pushed through — legislation that would increase the Bureau’s annual budget by eighty-five per cent — had played any part in his nomination. But then again even if it had, so what?

His eyes rest on the framed pictures on his desk. Billy always looks to them when in need of inspiration. The first one is of the Stars and Stripes and bears the slogan ‘You are either with us or against us.’ He loves this line. It sums up everything he stands for — clarity, determination, action. The second, smaller picture is of Agent Jack Bauer from the TV series
‘24’
. Yes, it’s fiction, but maybe not as removed from reality as people realise, he thinks. To him Agent Bauer is a role model — ruthless, determined, never asking too many questions, a true go-getter, just like himself.

Billy stares at the TV character’s face and deeply regrets being disqualified from attaining a Special Agent designation himself. In his world, everything is simple: good or bad, black or white. Metaphorically speaking and literally. It had come as a surprise to him that colour-blindness is a disqualifying factor in the FBI’s physical assessments.

He sighs and flicks his colour-blind eyes towards the third picture frame, a little smaller in size than the previous one. It contains a photograph of Leo, his American pit bull terrier, staring aggressively into the camera’s lens. Billy is still pissed off when he thinks of how he had to leave Leo behind with his brother in Alabama. Even as Chief Intelligence Officer, he had not been allowed to ship Leo over. Those bureaucratic pussies consider pitbulls a threat, believe it or not, Billy recalls the incident. It won’t kill any human unless I command it to, had been his argument, but it had fallen on deaf ears. He ignores the fourth, smallest frame, a picture of his wife, and turns back to the first report.

A note accompanying it explains that it’s being circulated to all senior officers to underline the Bureau’s commitment to the issue of ‘terror diamonds’. The executive summary told Billy what it was all about because, frankly, the report itself was a whole load of complex bull, more confusing than clarifying. Nevertheless, he has grasped the main issue.

Al Qaeda is hoarding its wealth in diamonds to avoid legitimate banking systems. After 9/11, the terrorist organisation’s worldwide bank accounts were frozen, and transferring money became increasingly difficult for them. But the ease with which stones can be concealed and transported, and their high value per gram, makes them a convenient diversion from the legitimate channels. The accompanying note also stated that the rival Central Intelligence Agency had known about this threat for several years — there had even been a groundbreaking article in
The Washington Post
as early as November 2001. But powerful interests in the American diamond industry had managed to prevent the organisation from taking any meaningful action.

Billy scratches his head pensively. Jack Bauer would not have put up with this shit, he thinks. In the end it always comes down to the same problem. There ain’t enough go-getters around. Apparently, in addition to using diamonds to transfer funds across international borders, al Qaeda has also started trading them in order to create new capital. The profit margins between the different stages of trading are huge, especially in Africa, the report stated. And a novice attending a three-week crammer’s course on precious stones could gain sufficient expertise to accurately value diamonds to market prices.

To Billy it’s all unusually crystal clear, especially after rereading the last paragraph which he had underlined:

As this report has demonstrated, al Qaeda has already shown its willingness and ability to take advantage of weak states, corrupt institutions, existing criminal networks as well as the lack of transparency and the insularity of the trade in diamonds to fund its terrorist operations
.

Billy snaps the file closed and tosses it back down on his desk with a thud. He then looks at the second file. This is no coincidence, he thinks again, this feels more like destiny. The document had arrived within a few hours of the first one. In just a couple of pages, one of his local operatives reports the emergence of diamonds as a corruption commodity in the Cambodian administration. This in itself is hardly revelatory, but it’s the transparency with which it’s taking place that is more surprising. Six days ago the diamonds were handed out almost indiscriminately to high-ranking officials, and in a novel way: concealed in Belgian chocolates without the officials’ foreknowledge. It appeared that the head of Cambodian customs had even swallowed one of the diamonds and spent over thirty minutes rummaging through his own excrement for the little stone worth half the extension he was planning to add to his illegally built villa on Sihanoukville coast.

The second report concludes that a new criminal gang might be entering the Cambodian market. It could not yet confirm the specific nature of the gang’s activities, but speculates that it must be related to smuggling precious stones, the kind used to bribe the authorities.

Billy stares at the framed picture of the Stars and Stripes.
You are either with us or against us
, he reiterates to himself. It’s one of George W’s favourite lines, the best goddamn president we ever had, he thinks.

“I’m with you, George, I’m with you,” he mumbles.

There ain’t gonna be no al Qaeda infiltrating
this
goddamn country, Billy thinks, not as long as William H. Stoppkotte is running U.S. intelligence here, no sir! But it won’t be easy, he realises. His office lacks the authority to make local arrests or even officially track leads in Cambodia, and going through the official channels is a definite no-no. By the time the authorities had finished their usual bickering and dawdling on the way to making a decision, al Qaeda would have had time to establish itself here ten times over, doubtless buying off half of the officials in the process. Moreover, if Billy wants to play an active part in busting this new threat, he can’t be monitored by the locals. He needs to do things
his
way. Billy owes it to his great country to neutralise the threat of al Qaeda, even if it means bending a few rules, the old-fashioned way. After all, this is war. The war against global terror. And when at war, different rules apply.

Agent Bauer would have approved of his decision. William H. Stoppkotte will form his own secret taskforce to combat evil in Cambodia. He will call it ‘Taskforce War Against Terror — Cambodian Unit’. He pauses for a moment, reflecting. No, that’s not it, the acronym would be TWAT-CU, Billy realises. He’ll be the laughing stock of the Bureau. After a minute of contemplation he decides to simply reverse the word order — ‘War Against Terror Taskforce’ or WATT. That’s much better, he nods in silent approval. For the time being, Billy will be the sole member until he has gathered enough intelligence to call it into action.

Where should he start? he wonders. He scans the names in the report marked by him in red — Phirun, The House, Street 240. Maybe that’s their headquarters, he speculates, or at least one of their covers. He will soon pay a visit to that place — maybe have breakfast in there. But before starting with the field work, he would review the Bureau’s intelligence on Cambodia.

Billy logs onto the system on his personal computer. After several minutes of passing clearing procedures, he establishes a secure satellite link providing him with a direct connection to the FBI’s database in Quantico, Virginia. He types in some keywords and waits. Less than ten seconds later, links to numerous files appear on screen. He types a few more keywords, narrowing the search. This time the result is far more limited. At the top of the list of results is a file marked ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Peeters, Belgium. Status: active.’ He clicks on it and is granted access to thirteen pages. He sighs. Why so many? Who the hell is this Belgian baboon anyway?

Billy starts reading, learning that the Colonel started his career with the Belgian paramilitary
gendarmerie
, and how he quickly rose to become Lieutenant-Colonel. By then the restructured
gendarmerie
had obtained civilian status. The file then quickly moves towards Peeters’ criminal drug trafficking business: he’s using Antwerp international seaport as his main gateway for Afghan drugs into the Benelux countries and, later on, also France.

Billy looks at the Colonel’s file photo: the stern visage of a military man through and through, well-groomed black moustache and all, stares impassively back at him. Looks like a go-getter himself, he thinks. The shot is dated December 2006, nearly two years ago. Despite the Colonel’s standard-issue crew cut, at age forty-eight his hairline was hardly receding.