'Only at the source, and even if you found it and blew it up, the KR would simply go to any one of a hundred other sources and start again.'
In a moment Pringle tilted his head down again and said, 'We don't seem to have many options, do we?'
'I told you, we'd need a battalion.'
'Do you believe Pol Pot would actually turn Phnom Penh into a fireball?'
'He likes to kill, and by the million. So I think that's what he'll do, yes, if the king ignores his ultimatum.'
Shots came, a burst this time and more distantly, no return fire. I thought of Gabrielle.
Pringle folded his topographic map, his pale hands deft with the creases. 'I need to know where you are,' he said without looking up.
I told him. I didn't trust either him or Flockhart, but they wouldn't blow me to the opposition: I was working for them.
'I'll signal Control again,' he said, 'on the debriefing. After he's taken whatever action seems indicated, he'll get back to me. At that time it's possible he'll want to speak to you personally, and I'll send a contact to fetch you. But it won't be at least until morning. Suppose, then' — looking up now — 'you make yourself available at your safe-house from nine o'clock onward?'
'Will do.'
'I'll be taking the call here in this office.' He stood up, tucking the map into his pocket.
'Code designation for the contact?'
He suggested one, and at the door I said, 'Perhaps you ought to put a peep on Slavsky, see if he goes anywhere interesting. But it'd have to be someone very good. If he sniffs any smoke he'll go to ground.'
'There are two people in Phnom Penh I could use, if — '
'No one local; we need a real pro.'
'Symes is in Bangkok.'
'If you want to fly him over, yes, he's first class.'
'I'll do that.' He opened the door and waited for me to go out first, but I held back.
'I need to make sure you're clear.'
'Oh yes, of course.' As if he'd forgotten. He hadn't. It had just been another subtle gesture of deference to the executive they couldn't afford to lose, and I noted it, I noted it well.
Someone was screaming in the distance, the sound shrilling in the heat of the night; perhaps there'd be another little red dot for the map tomorrow. I stood watching Pringle's thin figure receding as he walked away, his shadow trailing him and then moving ahead as he passed under a lamp, and the unnerving thought flashed into my mind that if he were suddenly attacked I might not feel inclined to save him.
'I shot first, you see,' Gabrielle said.
She watched me from the low bamboo couch, perched on her haunches, naked, her arms across her knees, her body lit and shadowed by the lamp, the wide bandage around her like a sash. I wondered if she always made love like that, so desperately, despite her wound, or whether it had been because she'd thought it might be for the last time, life in this place being so cheap. I'd come to the mission to thank her for helping me with Slavsky, that was all, but she'd asked me to stay.
I pressed the plunger of the big plastic water dispenser and poured her a glass of Kristal Kleer from Michigan, Illinois.
'Then he shot back?' I asked her.
'Yes. Then it was my turn again.' She took the water and drank, her face silvered with moisture, her lashes casting shadows on her ivory cheekbones, the surface of the water sending reflections flashing softly across her forehead and the wall behind. She lowered the foam cup at last and I took it from her.
'And you made a hit?'
She nodded. 'Yes.'
So those were the three shots I'd heard when I'd been debriefing to Pringle in the burned-out bus. 'How long have you been doing this?'
She turned her head, watching the stars through the open window, faint in the heat haze. The moon had swung down towards the west by now: it had bathed us in its light as we'd made love, less gently than I'd wanted to because of her wound, but I'd been unable to calm her.
'Oh,' she said, 'for quite a while. He was the seventh.'
I drank some water and went back to the couch to be with her, and the bamboo creaked. God knew what Sister Hortense must have thought, earlier; she'd been the nun who'd let me into the mission, as Gabrielle had asked her to if I came by at whatever time.
'Seven,' I said, 'isn't a bad score.' I realized now why she hadn't shown any particular emotion when she'd told me at the hospital that the man who had wounded her was dead.
'That's a man's way of killing, isn't it? Keeping score, treating it like a game; I never thought I'd understand that. The thing is, I'm going to go on doing it until there aren't any left, or they kill me.'
'How did it start?'
'Oh, I happened to see one of them actually setting a mine, under the arched gate of a school — this was in Phnom Penh. I reported it to the nearest Mine Action unit, and started thinking. I knew where most of the mines were being set, so I bought a rifle in the black market and started hanging out at night near the schools and the temples and the other target points, anywhere with just enough light to see by. I called out quietly to the first one, and I think the second, I don't remember, so that he'd turn in my direction and see the gun and know he was going to die; then I stopped doing that — I wasn't killing these people out of vengeance, I didn't want to play God, I just wanted them dead, so they couldn't hurt any more children.' I watched a tear creeping on her cheek, jewelled in the light; she didn't lift a hand to wipe it away. 'When I was quite small,' she said softly, 'I started learning flower painting from a Japanese in my father's consulate, and it quite consumed me — I knew I'd never want to do anything else but paint flowers, all my life long.' She turned her head to look at me, smiling now. 'I'm thirsty again.'
I fetched more water for her, and didn't ask her any more about the Khmer Rouge she was killing off by night, didn't need to tell her how dangerous it was: she knew that, and must have found solace in it. Taking pictures of crippled children for her editors in Paris hadn't been enough, in the end, and she'd needed to get involved.
'I don't want to talk about it any more,' she said.
'Then we won't.'
'I want to make love again, while there's still time.'
We slept, afterward, with her head buried against me and her knees drawn up, and sometimes a nightmare jerked her awake and she had to get her breath before she pulled me tightly and fiercely against her and slept again, sighing like a child.
Soon after dawn there was thunder in the hills, and by eight o'clock, rain. I was soaked by the time I'd walked to the safe house, and so was the contact who came for me soon afterward, telling me I was needed at the place of the pig, the code designation Pringle and I had agreed on.
17: ZERO
'You did rather well.'
'Apparently not,' I said.
Flockhart favoured me with one of his pauses. The line was full of squelch: this was coming through Moscow's Intersputnik — Pringle had told me the Australian satellite was on overload.
'How so?'
'My friend here,' I told him, 'feels you might not agree I've produced anything all that conclusive.' 12°3′N x 103°l0'E.
Pringle was watching me attentively, silhouetted against the rain-slashed window.
'That is to be seen,' Flockhart said. 'But I'd prefer not to pass it on to our people or Washington at this stage, or for that matter the crowned head.'
'Our people' presumably being the UK Ministry of Defence, who would brief the prime minister; 'Washington' presumably being the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who would brief the president; and the 'crowned head' being King Sihanouk. Because this was the only possible action anyone could be expected to take if they were ready to rely on Boris Slavsky's map: an air strike.