The Deceivers (36 page)

I leaned back against the wall. It was hopeless. We were prisoners of a warlord with an entire army. The thought exhausted me. All three of us were about to die.

Taksin met my eyes and nodded, sweat dripping off his chin. “Fucked,” he said.

I almost laughed. “Exactly the way I feel.”

It began to rain again, Cambodian style … a torrent as if an ocean in the sky just opened up.

The downpour hit the roof and found many holes. I was under one of them. I didn't move. I stayed next to Nol as he shut his eyes and put back his head.

I shut my own eyes and tried to focus on listening to the falling rain.

*   *   *

I WOKE UP
and saw Taksin kneeling beside Nol, giving him something.

“What's going on?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

The sound of the door being unbarred cut off a response. I froze in sudden terror. Were they coming for me?

Two guards came in shouting. I couldn't understand what they said but they went for Nol, not me.

My good sense snapped and I got to my feet and pushed at them, screaming, “Leave him alone. Leave him alone.”

They grabbed me, each by one arm, and flung me back, slamming me against the wall. The air burst from my lungs and I stood stock-still, stunned.

Nol rolled over from his sitting position against the wall onto his chest. As he did he gave out a cry. His whole body trembled, his legs shaking violently, pounding the floor. He suddenly gave a great sigh, then his body went limp.

A guard grabbed him and rolled him over.

The wood handle of a steel chisel protruded from his chest.

43

The guards didn't bother washing the blood off the floor after they took away Nol's body.

I sat on the floor and stared at it until Taksin came over and helped me to my feet. He led me across the room to a mattress on the floor and told me to lay down.

“He asked you for the chisel,” I said.

Taksin nodded. “So much pain. He sought peace.”

I laid down and closed my eyes again. The rains came back, this time with wind that lashed the deluge against the hut. I stared up at the dark ceiling and listened to the rain and the gentle tapping of Taksin's hammer on a chisel as he worked a piece of sandstone.

I hoped that Nol did find peace and would be reunited with his family.

I thought again about what a strange world it was. Most of us were caring and humane people, but there were always two-legged beasts living among us that were sick and cruel.

I was still on the mattress, dozing off and on, when I heard the explosions and jerked awake. Taksin had fallen asleep with his head down and his arms folded on the table. He propped his head up and looked at me.

We just stared at each other. Nothing we could do. We couldn't see out or get out. Rain was still coming down.

“Sounded like it came from the camp area where the soldiers are,” I said.

The bar rattled again and both Taksin and I stood up as the door swung open. A woman wearing a dark raincoat came in.

“Hurry.”

“Chantrea! What—what's going on?” I stammered.

“I'm getting you out of here. Come on.”

Another explosion sounded.

“That's Kirk setting off explosions to divert Chep's men. Come on, both of you, before we're spotted.”

I hustled Taksin out with me. For a moment I thought of grabbing the museum piece on the table but left it behind, deciding I should keep both hands free.

Chantrea's station wagon was outside, lights off, its motor running. I got in the passenger side and Taksin slipped into the backseat.

She drove us away from the plantation house, staying on the dirt road that led in the opposite direction from the encampment.

The rain was violent. Lightning cracked and lit up the guard shack as we drove by. I didn't see anyone in it. My mind was spinning. I was confused, a state I had been in now for days.

“How did you know we were here?”

“Kirk found out from Bullock.”

“Bullock's alive? The bastard!”

Chantrea shot me a look. “Not anymore. Kirk finished what you had started.”

“Where's Kirk?”

“He'll meet us later. He started explosions on the other side of the camp and he's going to set land mines up on the road behind us in case we're pursued.”

Random thoughts seemed to collide in my head. How could Chantrea just breeze into the warlord's lair and whisk us away?

“How did you get us out so easily?”

She shot me another look. “You're out, aren't you?”

Taksin was quiet in the backseat. I wondered what was going on in his head, too.

I looked back and caught his eye. His facial features were passive but his dark eyes were alive. He had the same thought that I had: We were not out of the woods yet.

She put on the headlights. The rain turned the road into a shallow river. She drove mostly with her headlights off, turning them on just for a second occasionally when she couldn't see. To be able to see through the rain and dark night, she must have had the eyes of a cat.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“The main road's up ahead, the same one we took to Siem Reap. Kirk left a car there. I'll use it to go back to Phnom Penh. You and Taksin take this car and go onto the airport at Siem Reap. It's not that far, less than an hour's drive.”

“If it's not that far, can't we just drive there with you? I don't know how Taksin and I will—”

“I can't go with you. I may be followed. Or they might call ahead and have my car stopped on the road. I can't go to Angkor. I have to get back to the capital where I can get protection from the Minister of Culture.”

“I know how they did it,” I said. “Taksin's forgeries aren't all being sold. Some are in the Royal Museum, being substituted for the real pieces.”

“I learned that, too.”

“How did you find out?”

“Kirk. He's been involved in it.”

I hesitated. “Chantrea … some things don't make sense to me. Have you been involved, too? In the art scheme?”

She didn't react to the question, at least not that I could see. She drove on for a moment before she answered.

“No. Ranar wanted me to be involved because of my position at Angkor. I knew something was wrong, but not exactly what was going on.”

“Ranar is financing a revolution with his scheme.”

“You learned a great deal,” she said.

“He's Khmer Rouge, some sort of modern version of it.”

She shook her head. “No, the Khmer Rouge tried to turn back the clock. Ranar's an idealist. He believes the country needs a strong hand to bring it into the modern world.” She glanced at me. “I'm sympathetic to Ranar's plan for a revolution that would reform our corrupt government. We're a poor country and what wealth we have doesn't reach most of the people. Neither does political power. We're working for the good of the people.”

“But isn't Ranar part of the problem? Rich and privileged?”

“He has money because he has a connection to royalty, but he's always been left out of real power. His father was a distant cousin to the king but the royals look down on him because of his mother. They say she came from an old French plantation family, but there are claims she was a just a bar girl, a prostitute. He hates the royals and wants to bring them down.”

Ranar didn't strike me as a democratic idealist.

I still wasn't satisfied with her answers. “The night I was at Angkor, you arranged for us to sleep in tents. That made it very convenient for Kirk and Bullock to steal Angkor pieces.” I didn't add that those antiquities were part of her job to protect.

So far Taksin hadn't said a word since we got into the car. I didn't know how much of this he was following.

“I admit I haven't been perfect,” she said. “I've never forgotten what happened to my family during Pol Pot's era. I've never forgotten that the leaders who were supposed to protect us didn't.” She took her eyes off the road to meet my eyes. “The Khmer Rouge leaders haven't controlled the central government for about three decades, yet they still haven't been brought to justice. Does that tell you who is really in power?

“So, yes. Khmer artifacts have been taken and used to raise money for a political movement to change the government so the Khmer Rouge leaders would be brought to justice. Kirk's work with land mines gave him freedom to travel anywhere in the country and made him a familiar face everywhere. He was able to transport the pieces.”

“And Bullock marketed them.”

“Yes.” She grinned. “Kirk said you did a good job of cutting up Bullock. You should be happy he finished the job.”

I didn't know what to say. Not about Bullock, the bastard could rot in hell as far as I was concerned. It was her story that was leaving me confused.

Was she admitting to being part of Ranar's plot? Sometimes it sounded like she was … other times it almost sounded like she was making excuses for being involved.

She stared intensely into the rearview mirror and then twisted in the seat and looked to the rear.

“What's the matter?” I asked. I turned and followed her look.

“I thought I saw a car back there.”

“I don't see headlights. Maybe it was lightning flashing.”

What I did see was Taksin's face. He looked like he wanted to tell me something, that he was alarmed at what was coming down. But he either didn't have the words or wasn't sure of his thoughts. I understood completely. I was also suffering a sense of dread—the sense of the other shoe dropping after something bad had already happened.

“Rim Nol is dead,” I said.

No reaction.

“He killed himself because he was being tortured.”

She nodded. “Yes, so many of us wanted to end our lives because of what we suffered. It's really not right under our beliefs, you know. Suicide. One is not to end their life to escape agony, but must find inner peace in order to carry harmony into the next life.”

“He left in harmony,” I said. “He beat the bastards torturing him. They wanted him to reveal who else knew what they were doing.”

“If he left this life in harmony,” she said, “he'll find peace in his next life.”

She was just rambling on. And I was getting more worried. What was going on? I didn't want to keep talking. We had been rescued. Grabbed from the jaws of death. I didn't want to open my mouth and create some sort of bad karma and run into a roadblock of General Chep's thugs. But my mouth often didn't obey my brain, so it kept going.

“Why are you helping us?”

“You're a friend.”

“But I know things.”

What a big mouth I have.

She glanced at me again.

“I trust you. As they say in your movies, you wouldn't rat out a friend.” She giggled.

She appeared hyper. I didn't know if she was frightened, or on something. Nothing she was saying sounded like the woman I'd driven a couple hundred miles with. Chantrea was a very cultured Cambodian with a little French education thrown in … not someone who would quote a dumb line from American gangster movies. It struck me as role playing … or a cover for nervousness. Of course, she had good reason for being nervous. She had just roared into a military encampment, thrown open a barred door, rescued two prisoners, and calmly driven out.

My right knee began to shake.

She turned off the dirt road we were on and onto another unpaved road. “This leads to the Siem Reap highway. The car for me is up ahead. We're about a mile from the main road. When you get there, you turn left and stay on it until Seim Reap and the airport. Take the first flight out, wherever it's going.” She giggled again.

Chantrea pulled to the side of the road across from a parked car. She squeezed my arm. “Good luck.”

I stared at her through the blurred passenger side window as she ran to the parked car. She got in the passenger side. So someone had not just dropped off a car for her … they were waiting.

Why had she bothered to lie? Was she so high on something that she didn't even realize she had lied?

Who was in the car? Kirk? But he was supposed to be back at the army camp. Or behind us if he had finished creating the diversion at the camp.

Taksin babbled something in Thai and then said, “I am scared. No trust her.”

“
Srangapen,
” I said. He didn't understand and kept talking, but I tuned him out as I stared hypnotically ahead. When I met Nol that first time at the museum, he had told me about
srangapen,
the Cambodian method of execution during which the killing blow comes from an unexpected source.

Chantrea had introduced me to Nol.

She was the one that Nol had been trying to warn me about.

That hard fist of fear in my gut that had been there so long started aching.

I couldn't just sit there and wait for the next shoe to drop. I scooted over and got behind the wheel. She left the car running with the lights off. I couldn't see a thing in front of me with rain blurring the windshield and darkness. I reached to turn on the headlights and stopped, remembering she had kept the headlights off so we wouldn't be followed.

Lightning flashed and I saw something in the road ahead. I strained to see what it was through the blur of water washing out my vision through the windshield. It looked like a flat metallic piece that extended most of the way across the narrow road.

The horn blared in the car next to me and my foot hit the gas, the tires spinning in the mud. The rear of the car moved sideways, but we didn't go forward more than a foot.

Something was terribly wrong but my mind wasn't functioning properly. Then it struck me—the car waiting for Chantrea was the same sports car Ranar drove when he had picked me up at the airport.

The road suddenly lit up as a vehicle coming from the rear turned on its headlights. It came by me in a flash, a big white SUV with a heavy black push bar mounted in front of the grill. The SUV struck the rear of the sports car Chantrea had gotten in, pushing it ahead.