Supernotes (14 page)

“So you know.”

“It would be strange if he weren't.” He inhales the steam rising from his plate and looks convinced. “Supernotes,” he repeats. “I can't tell you much about that subject. The information is confusing and contradictory. They come from Asia. There are traces of them in Iran and North Korea—so-called rogue states. There may also be some in Pakistan, which is in theory a U.S. ally. If anyone were to acquire the means of printing supernotes, they'd have immense power. Government agencies with such power would have the resources to make war on one another in every possible way. And it's unlikely that anyone who got caught in the middle would live to tell the tale. Unless, at the last minute, they joined the side with the most ammunition. But Kasper doesn't appear to have done that.”

The professor turns back to his rabbit. He cuts a piece and puts it in his mouth, but before swallowing it, he allows himself another flinty snigger. “May I tell you something? I have a feeling your client won't be paying your fee. He just won't get that far.”

Prey Sar Correctional Center, near Phnom Penh, Cambodia

January 2009

They arrived unexpectedly, but they're people who don't need to have themselves announced. Besides, they knew they'd find him at home.

Kasper calls them the Visitors, these Americans who want to take him out of Cambodia. Direct flight to the United States. Free ticket, one way only.

He has no doubts they'd package him up immediately if they could. “Extraordinary rendition.” But it's been too long since his abduction, and by this time many people, too many, know he's in Prey Sar.

Now he'd have to give his consent before taking that little trip. That's why they keep pressing him for his signature. To sign papers explicitly requesting them to take him away.

Kasper will never sign. He hasn't considered accepting their “proposal” for even a minute. He no longer trusts anyone, especially not his American ex-friends.

He has other plans for his immediate future.

This time, one of the Visitors is a woman. Blonde and slender. Her presence in there is dazzling, a flash that hurts his eyes. And his stomach.

Eau de Toilette Christian Dior.

Kasper's certain. The same scent that women he knew and loved wore. It's incredible how a stupid detail can plunge us back into the anguish of loss, how it can make us feel irretrievably removed from the world of elegance and decorum. Of respect and rules.

Her name is Rose.

Jeans and a sky-blue jacket, a string of pearls over a white top, and barely a hint of makeup. Her gathered hair offers glimpses of subtle gold earrings. Rather more conspicuous is the diamond wedding band.

She too says she's from the FBI. Sometimes she gazes at Kasper and smiles at him with one corner of her mouth, if such an expression can be called a smile. But more often she scrutinizes him like someone who'd like to have him at her disposal in a different location. Certainly not in bed.

The Americans want to know if he's reconsidered.

“What are you offering me?” Kasper asks.

“You sign, and then in a few days you're out of this shit.” It's the dark, squat American, the one he calls “Grumpy,” who summarizes the situation so tersely.

“So you've come to save me.”

“Something like that.”

“Like you did with my friend Clancy.”

“You've heard about that? Whitebeard spent Christmas with his family.”

Christmas wasn't so bad in here either, he'd like to reply. But he calls himself to heel. No swaggering, no Tuscan cockiness. There's a wall to climb over outside, a bamboo ladder waiting for him.

Low profile, he orders himself. Close to the ground.

“I'm very tired,” he murmurs.

“I believe you,” says the blond guy who claims to be from Homeland Security. “You've been in here for months. I wonder how you manage to stay alive.”

“You don't know?” the woman intervenes. “The Italian has made some friends.”

Kasper's heart skips a beat. It's not just the malice; it's the feeling that these words are scalpels. And that this first cut will be followed by many more.

The surgery has only just begun. If they know about the weapons, he's finished.

“How many have you bought yourself so far?” Grumpy sniggers. “There was that half-breed lieutenant, what's his name? Darrha, I think…well, anyway, he misses you a lot. When he talks about you, you know who he reminds me of? He reminds me of my brother, telling me about his first girlfriend.”

“It's true, we had a good relationship,” Kasper replies.

“So who are you engaged to in here?”

“I haven't found Mr. Right. Not yet.”

“But you've got yourself a couple of little buddies,” the woman says. “We know you get lots of nice things from outside….A bit expensive, apparently, but they help keep you going.”

Grumpy interjects, “Listen, my dear Italian colleague—I can call you that, can't I? You're not offended?—well, colleague: we're offering you the opportunity to come away with us and to cooperate with the United States government. If you stay in here, sooner or later you're going to croak.”

“Take me back to Italy. I'll cooperate from there.”

“I'm afraid that's impossible. We'll give you a few more days to think about it. We'd really like to be going home soon. What do they say in Italy?
Teniamo famiglia,
right? You'll be able to talk to your poor sick mamma. Just think, you'll be able to call her every day. You'll be able to call your Patty whenever you want—”

“Bastards,” Kasper mutters.

“Did you say something?”

“I said I have to think about it. Give me a few days.”

The ladder's where he figured it would be. His calculations are accurate.

Just a few more hours. He must make sure to keep a discreet eye on the “worksite.” Then he'll go into action. Best to wait until sunset, until after the workers take the ladder down, lay it on the ground, and leave.

But first he must go fishing.

He has to retrieve the pistol and the hand grenade from the bottom of the big earthenware jar, take them out of their waterproof wrapping, and hide them somewhere else for a few hours. He's dug a little hole on the edge of the vegetable garden and camouflaged the spot with paper, soil, and grass. A hidden hole, like the ones he used to dig as a boy on the beach to make the grown-ups stumble.

And all that's the easy part. Then fate comes into play.

Kasper has to hope those weapons that have cost him so much actually work. He has to hope Chou Chet hasn't supplied him with a couple of museum pieces. Once he's eliminated the man in the watchtower and climbed up there, the music will change. The Kalashnikov will be in his hands, and everything will become simpler.

Escape or die.

In Prey Sar, you can lose your life for crimes much less serious than killing a prison guard. Blowing one away and then failing to escape would mean consigning yourself to the most indecent excesses of Cambodian torture. Much better to take matters into your own hands.

Memo to himself regarding tomorrow: save at least one round for you.

He hasn't told Chou Chet anything.

He can only advise Chou Chet to be careful. It's not a given that the Americans know anything about him. The money Kasper's mother sends from Italy goes straight to the prison director and to the collaborators Mong Kim Heng chooses to reward in the course of his systematic corruption. Chou Chet is on another line of payment, one handled entirely by Brady.

The irreplaceable Brady. The only one he can really trust.

His mechanic friend is ready. He needs to be in the vicinity of the prison by noon. You never know when you may have to take off early. Kasper will send him a text message when the operation begins, and Brady will respond by repeating exactly the same text. If he should write “OK” or some other type of message, that will mean there are problems, better postpone.

It's like being back at the controls of a jet plane. Ready on the runway. The flight controller's voice in his headphones. His aircraft aligned with the center line below him. His eyes on the instruments, with their quivering needles, with their LEDs and warning lights going on and off.

He's ready to surge into the final stage of the takeoff, his engines thrusting all the way up to V
₁
, the speed beyond which there's no turning back.

This will be the most difficult takeoff of Kasper's life.

“We weren't supposed to see each other anymore, right?”

“Our intentions don't always coincide with reality.” Marco Lanna smiles. “As you ought to know.”

Kasper sees that the honorary consul is not there to waste time. Or even to do him a favor. Someone has asked him to return to Prey Sar. Someone with very specific reasons.

“So why this visit?”

“I have to ask you a question. How much do you know about supernotes?”

“Enough to wind up in here, I think.”

“Who's involved besides you?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Someone who can help you.”

“Right…” Kasper smiles. “My next mysterious benefactor. Well, you can tell him for me that I'm finished talking about supernotes. I've said everything I know. I've described what I saw.”

“And what did you see?”

“Things you wouldn't believe.”

Lanna slowly shakes his head. He doesn't approve. He continues to see in Kasper an inextricable tangle of obvious truths and truths destined to remain in the dark.

“You had already come across supernotes, hadn't you? Back in 2005. The arrest in Milan. Isn't that right?”

“You've done your homework.”

“But a few years later, you end up in jail again. Why?”

Kasper's sigh is long. Long and modulated.

“The supernotes story doesn't start in 2005. It starts in 2000. Maybe 2001. It was around then that I first heard them talked about explicitly and clearly. And it was in 2001 that I realized that supernotes could become a direct focus of my work….” He stops and observes Lanna's expression. Then he asks, “Do you remember what my original assignment in Cambodia was?”

“The ROS station in Phnom Penh…”

“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.”

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.