So I didn't want Stern to see me and I didn't want to go into this room so I made the decision because the time was short: I had no practical data concerning this key or this door and if Stern or another man came out of Suite 9 I would turn my key and go inside before they saw me. It was a one way situation because there wouldn't be time to reach the nearest alcove or the emergency stairs when their voices reached the pitch when it was certain one of them or both of them was coming out.
Control new hazard.
And concentrate on the immediate threat: the assumed danger of opening this door. Cover every aspect, analyse, and calculate the risk. Most of the necessary thinking had already been done and it had presented close to zero.
Make a guess but don't make it wild.
During my absence someone had conceivably raided Room 91 and searched it or bugged it. Unlikely because security stood at one hundred per cent.
Or: the lock had been tampered with and therefore the key had felt different when I'd inserted it. More likely because it would explain the sensory alarm-reaction when I'd done that.
Or: nerves. Not totally discountable because my arguments against this theory could be based on pride.
There were several other theories and I covered them and discounted them. The voices seemed progressively louder from the other end of the corridor but I waited because I could still use every available second for exploring the situation: once the door of Suite 9 opened I could get in here faster than they would be coming out.
The key was still under my fingers and I hadn't moved. Thought process is electronically quick and no more than nine or ten seconds had passed since I'd pushed the key into the lock.
Recapitulate.
But there wasn't time because the voices became suddenly clear and I heard the click of the latch along the passage and acted on the decision I'd made and turned the key and opened the 'door and the whole of the wall blew out and hurled me into the dark.
Chapter Eight: FOXTROT
'Cheers.'
'Cheers.'
He drank up.
'Which one are you down for, old boy?'
'Foxtrot,' I said.
'Same as me. Cheers.'
He gave a gusty laugh.
His group had been here since dawn, he'd told me.
There were thirty or forty of them in the breakfast-room and they were making a lot of noise and my present threshold of stress was close to zero and in another minute the whole place began swinging round and round and I shut my eyes and leaned my head back against the banquette.
'You all right, old boy?'
'Yes.'
'Look a bit shot-up.'
'That's my affair.'
'No offence,' he said.
The thing was to keep still. Keep perfectly still.
And do something about the anger. Control it 'Who are you with?'
'Agency,' I said. It was no good saying Europress: he worked for Reuters and knew it didn't exist.
The anger was getting in the way of recovery and I thought up a few excuses but they didn't really work because there was no excuse for doing what I'd done: none whatsoever. I'd been warned by mission-feel and ignored it and they'd put me into an ambulance and sent me to one of the foreign-national casualty groups at the US Embassy compound for early evacuation and I'd finished up at Pochentong Airport before I came to and found what was happening. That was an hour ago, at noon.
They'd wanted to ship me out in one of die helicopters because I was down as a concussion case with possible complications but I said there was someone I'd left behind and I had to go and get them and they didn't argue: these were the last planes out of Phnom Penh and they could fill them ten times over.
A lot of the telephone lines were still intact and I rang the Royal Cambodian Hotel and asked for Mr Erich Stern and they said that Mr Erich Stern had checked out early this morning and that was why I had so much anger to control because I'd put myself out of commission for nearly eighteen hours and lost the objective.
'Weren't you in Warsaw, old boy? For the talks?'
'Not me,' I said, but that was where he'd seen me. I'd been using a second cover, journalist, working for Der Urheber.
'Seeing doubles.' He laughed again.
I went on sitting still. Perfectly still.
Four zero Alpha. This is D Donald.
The head of each evacuation group had been issued with a walkie-talkie. Considering the proximity of the Khmer Rouge batteries the whole thing was incredibly well organized.
Assemble your group at my location please.
I opened my eyes. Fifteen or twenty of them were putting down their drinks and moving towards the hotel foyer, hitching their cameras and recorders.
'Christ,' said Burroughs, 'when's our turn going to be?'
He went to get another drink. He'd been on foreign assignments for years but I assumed this was the first time he'd got mixed up in a last-plane-out situation and it was getting on his nerves.
I finished my glass of pineapple juice and shut my eyes again and tried to put some of the pieces together. There were quite a lot of questions but the answers to a few of them were obvious.
The booby-trap had been set ineffectively: it should have been triggered to go off when i was going through the doorway and not when I opened the door. The work was probably done by a European because the Asians are subtle technicians: they invented explosives and know how to handle them.
Erich Stern hadn't known about the booby-trap: if he were running a cell or a hit-man and wanted me wiped out he would have ordered the work to be done in the open, as in the case of Chepstow. Stern wouldn't have wanted an explosion taking place so close to Suite 9: it could conceivably have damaged his own person and/or caused a fire that could have spread to Suite 9 before he'd had time to get out with his belongings. The kind of operator who sells freedom for a price when the buyer is desperate is a discreet man, working with one foot in the bank-vault and the other in the stirrup.
He doesn't like loud noises or any kind of confusion to disturb his quiet activities.
The question of mission-feel was also answered in part: I still didn't know which precise sense had alerted me but that was now academic. The door of Room 91 was no longer a normal door: it had been tampered with and rigged with an alien device and this had produced subtle changes, one of which had been noted at the level where the conscious merges with the subliminal — the slight movement of the door as I had pushed the key in, or the faint scent of the explosive material, recalling associations with similar devices I'd handled m the past.
I couldn't find any obvious answers to the other questions: M Erich Stern hadn't ordered the killing, who had? If Stern had left Phnom Penh, where had he gone? Had he been 'be objective of a single phase in the Kobra mission like Heinrich Fogel or was he the objective for the whole mission?; Put it another way: had I blown a local fuse or the whole [assignment?