Chemda looked his way: “You OK?”
“No.”
“Me neither,” she said, and she squeezed his hand.
Chemda’s uncle snapped some Khmer at the driver. The tuk-tuk swiveled onto the road and they began the journey to the great temples of Angkor, the Bayon, Angkor Thom, Angkor Wat, Banteay Srei, the East Mebon.
Jake gazed ahead, trying to remember. He had visited Angkor in his first year in Cambodia. Like any tourist, he’d wandered the miles of tumbledown sandstone shrines and palaces, the gopuras and lingams and terraces of garudas slowly being swallowed by the orchids and lianas and strangler figs of the jungle — he had walked around gawking.
It was, as he recalled, a truly stupendous place. Even Jake’s godless soul had been stirred by the majestic mystery of it all, this city of monuments, a thousand years old, where once a million people lived and worshipped; a city that was left to the poisonous millipedes and jumping spiders — and the busloads of Japanese tourists queuing for sunset photos beside the bodhis of Phnom Bakheng.
This was a very different journey. Fretful, disquieting, dangerous. The air was cool with the promise of heat as the tuk-tuk puttered north on the long straight road to Angkor. Monkeys played by the road between the fallen green husks of coconuts; stall holders cycled their coolers of cold drinks to work; villagers in blue-checkered kramas washed naked toddlers under pumps of gushing water.
Chemda said to Sonisoy: “Uncle, could you tell Jake what we discussed last night?”
Sonisoy’s nod was terse.
“About a year ago we found a Frenchman, Marcel Barnier, wandering around the temple. Looking specifically in Preah Kahn, where we were researching. We asked him to talk with us.”
“Us?”
“Our consortium. Samsara. We have an office in Siem and we are restoring the temples, with EU and Chinese help. Angkor is a World Heritage Centre.”
They were passing a vast new concrete hotel, as yet unfinished. A vendor was selling coils of dried snake in the parking lot, and buckets of boiled eggs. The vendor gazed at their tuk-tuk, unsmiling, unfrowning, just blank.
“This man was quite old. Sixty-five, maybe seventy.”
“What was he doing there?”
“Apparently, in 1976, a team of scientists and thinkers, all of them left-wing radicals, was invited from Paris to Cambodia. Their mission was to help the Chinese and the Khmer Rouge to create a perfect Communist, a soldier for communism.”
“With brain surgery?”
Sonisoy shrugged. his T-shirt was old and clean, with a discreet little picture of a young Elvis Presley on the breast pocket. He glanced along the road ahead, which was almost empty. Jake also scanned ahead: for police, soldiers, danger. Nothing. The road was ominously deserted.
Sonisoy continued: “Barnier did not know that aspect of the story, but after hearing from you and Chemda, I think yes, that must have been one technique used by the Khmer Rouge. Experiments on the brain.”
“How did Barnier know nothing about the surgery, if he was part of this same team?”
“Barnier’s speciality was hybridization, between species. Men and monkeys. That was another avenue explored by the Communists. It started in the 1920s in Russia. However…” Sonisoy looked over Jake’s shoulder, at a car that was approaching fast from behind. His face tautened. Jake spun around.
“Relax,” said Sonisoy. “Park rangers. We are just approaching the gates. Relax.”
But Jake could not relax, not after what Tyrone had said. Indeed, he had an urgent need to express himself, to explain his fears; he needed to share and dilute his paranoia. Leaning forward, he informed Chemda and Sonisoy of what he had been told by Tyrone. The manhunt. The tension in Phnom Penh. The price on his head.
When he had finished, Chemda was pale and her expression tremulous. Even Sonisoy’s monastic serenity was ruffled.
“OK,” Sonisoy said. “This is not good. But I know a way to get you to Anlong Veng, it’s through Angkor anyway. And we are safe in Angkor behind the fences. For a short while. We must be quick. Here.”
He gestured. They were approaching a large wall. The entire fifty square miles of Angkorian remains were surrounded by guards and fences and walls and toll booths, making sure all those tourist dollars and euros and yuan poured into the coffers of Phnom Penh.
Sonisoy alighted from the tuk-tuk, flashed the gatekeepers a badge, and gestured at Chemda and Jake. Jake shrank from the inquisitive stares of the gatekeepers. If these officials had seen a Phnom Penh paper this morning, then he could be spotted, recognized. But maybe it was too early for the news to have made it here?
The tension was an insistent pop song from a tinny radio, repetitive and stressing. The gatekeeper yawned, stared again at Jake — and then shrugged an uncaring smile. Sonisoy climbed back in, the driver gunned the little engine, and the tuk-tuk trundled on, with painful slowness.
“So, let me finish.” Sonisoy sighed, curtly. “This Frenchman, Barnier, explained that he had been invited to Phnom Penh but in the end was not closely involved in the process. He wasn’t in the loop. Other specialists and scientists, neurologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, were more favored. Perhaps the Communists decided brain surgery was a better route to their goal. Barnier went home to Lyon virtually as mystified as when he arrived.”
“But why did he come to you? Why would he return at all?”
“Guilt.”
Sonisoy turned and snapped an order at the driver, giving him directions. He turned back:
“Barnier has a conscience. Since that trip to Cambodia and China so long ago, he has renounced his communism. He sees it as a terrible historical error, and he is ashamed of giving succor to the Khmer Rouge by supporting their regime from the West. A lot of Maoists and leftists in Europe and America tried to justify the Khmer Rouge. Some of them are still serious academics, writers, and politicians. I’m not sure how many have apologized for what they helped to do to my country.” Sonisoy stared, unblinking, at Jake. The stare of accusation? Jake twisted in discomfort, physical and mental. The heat was already rising. The tension had topped out hours ago. Days ago.
He thought back to that fateful evening in Vang Vieng. Then he was just a happy, sad, guilt-ridden, cheerful, boozy photojournalist; now he was a hunted man. A prey animal.
Sonisoy was still talking: “Barnier wanted to, I suppose, absolve himself. And he wanted to find out how and why he was used by the Khmer Rouge. So he came to Angkor.”
“Why Angkor?”
“What Barnier did discover during his trip was that the KR and the Chinese were also obsessed with history, with some historical foundation to their experiments. And they did many explorations of Angkor. And from what you guys have told me of the Plain of Jars… Now I see how it all fits.”
“Go on.”
“Following Barnier’s visit, I began my own excavations based on his scant but tantalizing information. After all, I too am a Khmer, I want to know what happened to my people, why we did what we did. We were the insane country. We had a national psychosis. What happened and why? I want the past uncovered. I want to know.” He leaned across the tuk-tuk. “And we have unearthed some materials at Angkor in the past few weeks that may fit these pieces together, especially with this new information from you. And so I am going to show you. And then—” He looked for the first time in a while at Chemda, then back at Jake, “You go north. At once, as fast as possible, across the border at Chong Sa.”