I could have operated alone tonight, moving from one potential hot zone to another, but I knew only a few words of Cambodian and unless the target spoke French or English I would have drawn blank.
The jeep neared, moaning in low gear. I couldn't see it from where I was, had only its sound to go by.
Carbon monoxide drifted on the air; tyres crackled over stones; and now the canvas top of the jeep was visible, sliding beyond the dry-stone wall. Then it stopped, and the engine idled for a moment, was switched off.
There were no voices.
Smell of tobacco smoke.
Then movement, and I went on waiting. The ring of a spade as he unstrapped it from the rear of the jeep: I could see the top of his head. Only one man, then.
If only one man gets out of the vehicle, he's yours until you signal me.
The gate swung open.
He was carrying the spade and a small wooden crate. He was carrying the crate carefully.
I expected him to start digging a hollow below the archway, but perhaps people were used to that now and either put the main entrances to schools out of bounds or had them swept every morning by one of the mine-detection services, because the man was coming into the playground without stopping, and when he was four or five feet away from me I moved and closed the distance and took him down with a knee sweep and a sword-hand to the carotid artery, a medium strike to stun while I looked after the crate. The spade clattered onto the ground and I left it there and checked his belt for a weapon, found none: these people were more comfortable with submachine guns and assault rifles, and he'd left his in the jeep, hadn't expected to find anyone here.
He was young, strong, snapped out of the syncope within seconds.
'Parles-toi francais?'
He didn't answer, didn't want to stand here talking, swung a routine kindergarten-level fist and I blocked it and paralyzed his arm with a centre-knuckle strike and followed with a pulled hammer-blow to the temple to get his attention. 'Parles-toi francais?' I asked him again.
Some Cambodian came out, sounded ungracious.
'Do you speak English?'
Worked on his arm, the median nerve.
More Cambodian, so I whistled twice and Gabrielle came trotting across the road with her gun and began talking to him instead.
'He's just cursing,' she said.
'Then make him afraid.'
She raised the Remington and held the muzzle against the middle of the man's forehead and spoke to him again, getting something out of him this time.
'He's just asking me not to shoot him.'
'Then start a count-down. What does he know about Pol Pot?'
I waited. The man stank worse than the pig in the mine-detection place — garlic, tobacco smoke and now sweat.
'He knows nothing,' Gabrielle told me.
At least it was an answer, of sorts. 'How far did you come down to?'
'Six.'
That was quite good: he was breaking early.
'Keep going. I want to know if Pol Pot is in good health, and also where he is now.' The intelligence the monk had passed on to me could have been simply rumour.
The barrel of the gun ran silver in the monlight as she shifted it a little as a reminder, prodding the man's brow, talking to him again, her tone quiet, professionaclass="underline" she understood that a raised voice shows lack of confidence, would have lessened the authority of the gun.
The man was starting to shake as Gabrielle brought the count lower, perhaps as far as three. A snuffling sound was coming from him: with the muzzle of the gun against his head, against his brains, he'd started thinking of his mother. Then as she went on counting he broke into sudden, jerky speech.
'Pol Pot is a sick man,' Gabrielle said.
'Is he still in command of the Khmer Rouge?'
'No.'
'Who's in command?'
'He doesn't know.'
'Tell him he knows, and you're going to shoot on a count of two.'
She prodded with the gun.
'General Kheng is in command.'
'Where is he now?'
'He doesn't know.'
'On a count of one.'
The man brought his hands together in prayer, shaking badly again, speech of a kind coming out of him.
'He still says he doesn't know. He's begging for mercy.'
I looked at Gabrielle in the starlight, saw the sheen of sweat on her face, her narrowed eyes.
'Give him his last chance,' I told her, 'on a count of one.' A snuffling sound again, some words in it, his hands together. 'He swears in the name of the Lord Buddha he doesn't know where General Kheng is now.'
'Ask him what's going to happen on the nineteenth.' It took time, and she had to repeat the question. 'There will be bloodshed in Phnom Penh.'
'A palace coup, or what?'
She prodded with the gun. 'The revolution.'
'Led by General Kheng?'
'Yes.'
'How will it be launched?'
He didn't know, stood shaking, his eyes squeezed shut. Gabrielle asked him again, and again he said he didn't know. I thought this was possible: security on the subject of the nineteenth would be tight, and this man had no rank, was simply a saboteur, hiding his little toys for the children to find in the sacred name of the cause.
'Try once more.'
His voice became light, like a woman's, a soft scream, desperate for us to understand that he couldn't answer the question.
'That's all,' I told Gabrielle.
'No more questions?'
'No.'
She spoke to him tersely, made him turn round, goaded him through the archway with the gun at his spine, steered him to his jeep, made him find his flashlight. I followed them, bringing the little crate.
There were four mines, crude, flat, pressure-sensitive models, sitting there like toads. Gabrielle spoke to the man, pointing to them, asking him something, her voice low, expressionless, a monotone.
I stood off a little. He was hers now; this had been agreed. She got some rope from the back of the jeep and lashed him to the steering-wheel, dipped a rag into the fuel tank, came up with nothing, tied another one to it and pulled it out streaming.
She looked at me in the bleak pale radiance of the flashlight.
'Will you wait for me over there?'
I walked across the road to our Rambler and got in, starting the engine. After a little while there was a single shot, too good for him, I thought, for the toy-hider, but I suppose her manners were better than mine. As she came walking slowly across the road, tripping once on a stone, the flames took hold inside the jeep, but she didn't turn round, just kept on coming. The silhouette of her slight figure against the blaze was slack with despair, and she walked with her head down as if she didn't want to know where she was going, or where she'd been. The explosions began as I turned the Rambler, and the glare fanned against the side of the barn as we drove clear with Gabrielle curled up on the seat beside me, her eyes closed and her face wet, like a child who had cried herself to sleep.
23: DEADLINE
'How's London?'
'Rather pleasant,' Flockhart said, 'or it was when I left. The twilights are drawing out.' He looked carefully round the room, the way a dog makes a couple of circles on strange ground before it will lie down.
The place was palatial by average Cambodian standards: four or five bamboo chairs and a round table, a couple of Chinese rugs, an ornate brass lamp hanging from the ceiling, a chart of the seven major chakras on the wall, but no window — this was the basement of the house, and we'd come down a flight of steps cut into the bare earth and supported with redwood boards. There was no fan, either, and the early-morning air was already sticky in here. But there were two telephones, a scrambler and a Grundig short-wave transceiver.