'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.
Pringle had followed us down and was standing just inside the door, hands behind his back in a posture deferential, I thought, to his master's presence. A short wispy-bearded Cambodian stood on the other side, in a dark blue sampong and sandals.
'This is our good host,' Flockhart told me, 'Sophan Sann.' The man came forward and shook hands, his eyes lively in the lamplight as he appraised me; it was an honour for him to meet anyone introduced by Mr Flockhart — this was my impression. But for a formal rendezvous like this I could have done without a stranger here, however good a host he was said to be.
Some bottles of soda on the table, a litre of Evian and a plate of quartered lemons; incense was burning somewhere, uncharacteristically, perhaps as a gesture of welcome to Sophan's guests. A salamander clung to the plaster near a bamboo grille set high on the wall, the only means of ventilation that I could see.
'How was the flight from Kuwait?' I asked Flockhart. I wanted him to know that until we were alone he'd get nothing from me but small talk.
'Too long,' he said and took one of the bamboo chairs. 'But then any flight's too long when time is of the essence, don't you agree?'
Talking about the deadline.
I sat down and Pringle followed, putting a thin worn briefcase on the table in front of him. We were here for the executive's debriefing to Control.
'I'm told,' Flockhart said, 'that you suffered a snake bite.'
'Yes.'
'A nasty experience, I can imagine.' He looked at me for the first time since we'd come down here, his eyes concerned. When I'd talked to him in the Cellar Steps, his eyes had been full of rage, barely concealed. I wondered what had happened to it. 'Are you still feeling any ill effects?' he asked me.
'I'm a hundred op.' A hundred per cent operational, which was what he really needed to know. If I had to go into anything difficult I could do it fast and successfully, given a clear field and not too much shooting.
'Splendid.' He brought out a black notebook and put it carefully onto the bamboo table. 'Splendid.'
'If we're going to do any business,' I said, 'I'd rather — '
'Sann,' Flockhart said straight away, looking up at the Cambodian, 'we've kept you long enough.'
Sophan gave a brief bow and looked down at me. 'It was a pleasure to meet you.' Absolutely no accent, possibly Oxford.
'The pleasure was all mine.'
His sandals flapped up the steps and we heard him close the door at the top. From habit I listened for it to open again quietly but it didn't. Call it paranoia, but when Control flies out from London without warning to debrief the executive in the field himself it means the mission has either started running very hot indeed or it's hit a wall, and I would have felt much easier debriefing somewhere with better security, say the top of a mountain.
'Don't worry,' Flockhart said gently. 'This was actually to have been your safe-house. Sophan Sann affords us total security here.'
'He's Bureau?'
'No. But I enjoy his unqualified loyalty. I once had the opportunity of saving his life.'
'Out here?'
'During what they call the holocaust — I was observing for the British Mission at the time. He was a young man then, of course, and so was I, and together we dug out this room as a concealed chamber to shelter whole families.'
The Cambodian connection. At our first meeting I'd asked Pringle what was really behind this mission — Is it something personal, with Flockhart? And Pringle had said, I don't know. Perhaps he simply wants to save Cambodia.
'But tell me,' Flockhart was saying, 'why didn't you accept this place as your safe-house?' To Pringle: 'I'm sure it was offered?'
'Of course, sir.'
Control's head swung back to me.
'I didn't trust you,' I said.
He nodded briefly. 'So Pringle informed me, after your first contact in Phnom Penh.'
'I didn't express my feelings.'
'But of course not, my dear fellow — he was simply aware of the undercurrents.'
I was warned by the 'dear fellow' bit: Pringle had been stroking me tenderly ever since the mission had started running, and now Control had come all the way out here to help him. But there is nothing your control can't ask of you in perfectly plain terms, however dangerous, even suicidal, knowing that you've got the right to refuse. When he chooses to steal up on you with quiet charm instead then you'd better make bloody sure you stay awake because once the trap springs shut you're done for.
Holmes, and I quote: Remember that one must handle Mr Flockhart with the tender care demanded by — shall we say — a tarantula.