Turner blinked. "Well, what? Tell me, then. Don't let it come between us."
"You're better off not knowing. We came here for a reason, Turner. It's a plan of Brooke's."
"That old fraud?" Turner said, smiling. "You're too romantic about Westerners, Seria. He looks like hot stuff to you, but he's just a burnt-out crackpot."
She shook her head. "You don't understand. It's different in your West." She hugged her slim legs and rested her chin on her knee. "Someday I will get out."
"No," Turner said, "it's here that it's different. In the West families disintegrate, money pries into everything. People don't belong to each other there, they belong to money and their institutions.... Here at least people really care and watch over each other...."
She gritted her teeth. "Watching. Yes, always. You're right, I have to go."
He crept back through the mosquito netting of his tent on deck, and sat in the darkness for hours, savoring his misery. Tomorrow the prince's helicopter would arrive to take the prince and his sister back to the city. Soon Turner would return as well, and finish the last details, and leave. He played out a fantasy: cruising back from Vane with a fat cashier's check. Tea with the sultan. Er, look, Your Highness, my granddad made it big in the heroin trade, so here's two mill, just pack the girl up in excelsior, she'll love it as an engineer's wife, believe me....
He heard the faint shuffle of footsteps against the deck. He peered through the tent flap, saw the shine of a flashlight. It was Brooke. He was carrying a valise.
The old man looked around surreptitiously and crept down over the side, to the dock. Weakened by hours of brooding, Turner was instantly inflamed by Brooke's deviousness. Turner sat still for a moment, while curiosity and misplaced fury rapidly devoured his common sense. Common sense said Brunei's secrets were none of his business, but common sense was making his life hell. Anything was better than staying awake all night wondering. He struggled quickly into his shirt and boots.
He crept over the side, spotted Brooke's white suit in a patch of moonlight, and followed him. Brooke skirted the edge of the ruins and took a trail into the jungle, full of ominous vines and the promise of snakes. Beneath a spongy litter of leaves and moss, the trail was asphalt. It had been a highway, once.
Turner shadowed Brooke closely, realizing gratefully that the deaf old man couldn't hear the crunching of his boots. The trail led uphill, into the interior. Brooke cursed good-naturedly as a group of grunting hogs burst across the trail. Half a mile later he rested for ten lone minutes in the rusting hulk of a Land-Rover, while vicious gnats feasted on Turner's exposed neck and hands.
They rounded a hill and came across an encampment. Faint moonlight glittered off twelve- foot barbed wire and four dark watchtowers. The undergrowth had been burned back for yards around. There were barracks inside.
Brooke walked nonchalantly to the gate. The place looked dead. Turner crept nearer, sheltered by darkness.
The gate opened. Turner crawled forward between two bushes, craning his neck.
A watchtower spotlight clacked on and framed him in dazzling light from forty yards away.
Someone shouted at him through a bullhorn, in Malay. Turner lurched to his feet, blinded, and put his hands high. "Don't shoot!" he yelled, his voice cracking. "Hold your fire!"
The light flickered out. Turner stood blinking in darkness, then watched four little red fireflies crawling across his chest. He realized what they were and reached higher, his spine icy. Those little red fireflies were laser sights for automatic rifles.
The guards were on him before his eyesight cleared. Dim forms in jungle camo. He saw the wicked angular magazines of their rifles, leveled at his chest. Their heads were bulky: they wore night-sight goggles.
They handcuffed him and hustled him forward toward the camp. "You guys speak English?" Turner said. No answer. "I'm a Canadian, okay?"
Brooke waited, startled, beyond the gate. "Oh," he said. "It's you. What sort of dumbshit idea was this, Turner?"
"A really bad one," Turner said sincerely. Brooke spoke to the guards in Malay. They lowered their guns; one freed his hands. They stalked off unerringly back into the darkness.
"What is this place?" Turner said.
Brooke turned his flashlight on Turner's face. "What does it look like, jerk? It's a political prison." His voice was so cold from behind glare that Turner saw, in his mind's eye, the sudden flash of a telegram: DEAR MADAM CHOI, REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON STEPPED ON A VIPER IN THE JUNGLES OF BORNEO AND YOUR BOOTS DIDN'T SAVE HIM....
Brooke spoke quietly. "Did you think Brunei was all sweetness and light? It's a nation, damn it, not your toy train set. All right, stick by me and keep your mouth shut."
Brooke waved his flashlight. A guard emerged from the darkness and led them around the corner of the wooden barracks, which was set above the damp ground on concrete blocks. They walked up a short flight of steps. The guard flicked an exterior switch, and the cell inside flashed into harsh light. The guard peered through close-set bars in the heavy ironbound door, then unlocked it with a creak of hinges.
Brooke murmured thanks and carefully shook the guard's hand. The guard smiled below the ugly goggles and slipped his hand inside his camo jacket.
"Come on," Brooke said. They stepped into the cell. The door clanked shut behind them.
A dark-skinned old man was blinking wearily in the sudden light. He sat up in his iron cot and brushed aside yellowed mosquito netting, reaching for a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles on the floor. He wore gray-striped prison canvas: drawstring trousers and a rough, buttoned blouse. He slipped the spectacles carefully over his ears and looked up. "Ah," he said. "Jimmy."
It was a bare celclass="underline" wooden floor, a chamber pot, a battered aluminum pitcher and basin. Two wire shelves above the bed held books in English and a curlicued alphabet Turner didn't recognize.
"This is Dr. Vikram Moratuwa," Brooke said. "The founder of the Partai Ekolojasi. This is Turner Choi, a prying young idiot."
"Ah," said Moratuwa. "Are we to be cell mates, young man?"
"He's not under arrest," Brooke said. "Yet." He opened his valise. "I brought you the books."
"Excellent," said Moratuwa, yawning. He had lost most of his teeth. "Ah, Mumford, Florman, and Levi-Strauss. Thank you, Jimmy."
"I think it's okay," Brooke said, noticing Turner's stricken look.
"The sultan winks at these little charity visits, if I'm discreet. I think I can talk you out of trouble, even though you put your foot in it."
"Jimmy is my oldest friend in Brunei," said Moratuwa. "There is no harm in two old men talking."
"Don't you believe it," Brooke said. "This man is a dangerous radical. He wanted to dissolve the monarchy. And him a privy councilor, too."
"Jimmy, we did not come here to be aristocrats. That is not Right Action."
Turner recognized the term. "You're a Buddhist?"
"Yes. I was with Sarvodaya Shramadana, the Buddhist technological movement. Jimmy and I met in Sri Lanka, where the Sarvodaya was born."
"Sri Lanka's a nice place to do videos," Brooke said. "I was still in the rock biz then, doing production work. Finance. But it was getting stale. Then I dropped in on a Sarvodaya rally, heard him speak. It was damned exciting!" Brooke grinned at the memory. "He was in trouble there, too. Even thirty years ago, his preaching was a little too pure for anyone's comfort."
"We were not put on this earth to make things comfortable for ourselves," Moratuwa chided. He glanced at Turner. "Brunei flourishes now, young man. We have the techniques, the expertise, the experience. It is time to fling open the doors and let Right Action spread to the whole earth! Brunei was our greenhouse, but the fields are the greater world outside."