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  “We met again in Thailand.”

  “Good, let’s start from there. From Thailand.”

  “You’re asking too much. It’s like making me talk about another life. You understand what I mean? About another person.”

  About a man who believed in what he was doing, who believed in the institutions of the state. In certain people within those institutions. A man who no longer exists.

  “Listen, Christmas is just a few days away.” Lanna smiles. “Let’s say you give me a Christmas present. Come on.” He stops and puts a hand on Kasper’s shoulder. “Merry Christmas, Agent Kasper.”

  19

  Same-Same but Different

  Pansea Beach, Phuket, Thailand

  June 1997

  He’s a wreck.

  He lets himself sink underwater and stays down a few seconds. When he resurfaces, Elizabeth is there. She’s looking at him and smiling, but there’s more irony than sweetness in her expression. He can read it in her eyes, the winner’s complacency, as if to say, “Didn’t think the little girl could do it, did you?” Then, like a mischievous child, she splashes water on him with one hand, saying something in her Australian accent, something more or less like “Poor puppy, you’re in bad shape….”

  I’ll show you the puppy, Kasper thinks.

  And his thought must be evident on his face, because she opens her emerald-green eyes very wide and makes a frightened face. With a little squeal, she starts to flee toward the shore.

  Kasper lunges after her, grunting in his best Jurassic animal style.

  He hurts everywhere. Almost everywhere. Elizabeth trips, or pretends to trip. He catches up with her and grabs her by the shoulders, then wraps her up and holds her close. Those few seconds of contact suffice to make her understand that although the afternoon training session was very hard, in fact grueling, the man still has reserves of energy whose special purpose is to help him forget, at least for a while, the ring, the gloves, the kicks.

  And now it’s official: the practice of Muay Thai is not detrimental to sex.

  These days Elizabeth, a gorgeous girl from a well-to-do Sydney family, is busy making money in Southeast Asia working with her father in the large-scale retail trade. She loves painting more than anything and travels to art shows and auctions all over the world. She has a good eye and a taste for beautiful things. “I spend a bit, but judiciously,” she says of herself. She’d like Kasper to accompany her on her frequent trips. That, however, would entail sharing their projects, their travel plans, and their time. A great deal of time.

  “Wouldn’t that be a lot like being married?” Kasper asked her once, tongue firmly in cheek.

  “So what?” she replied.

  Right, so what?

  She and Kasper see each other whenever the opportunity arises. Recently it’s been arising a lot.

  Now she looks around warily, because mutual groping in the water, in the midst of the other bathers, is not the height of elegance. But there are no other bathers. In a radius of half a kilometer, they’re alone. Nevertheless, emulating Spielberg’s shark, he hauls her farther away from the shore. “Your shark pup has a plan for you, just watch,” Kasper whispers in her ear.

  That’s all he manages to say to her, because she darts away from him like an eel and disappears into the bright water off Pansea Beach. Until he feels her hands on him, practically tearing off his bathing trunks. She has accurately assessed the situation.

  There are always lovely moments, as they say in Tuscany.

  —

  The dinner is elegant and informal at the same time.

  Around twenty guests, a tuxedo-wearing pianist playing classical pieces, and a menu that offers the best of Thai cuisine with some additional options for fans of sushi. The lady of the house is a fascinating woman from northern Thailand, her eleven-year-old son is a model child who attends the most exclusive school in Bangkok, and her villa overlooking Pansea Bay is resplendent under an immense, starry sky.

  As is his custom, the host, Mr. Gordon, looks meticulously put together. He could be anything but a global drug trafficker.

  Kasper eyes him and lowers his voice, teasing him. “Shit, Michael, those loafers remind me of my old history and philosophy teacher in high school. He never took them off his feet, just like you.”

  Michael Savage shrugs his shoulders, and his blue eyes, set amid his freckles, turn into two reflectors. “Are you saying people can tell from my shoes I wasn’t born rich? Well, that’s exactly the effect I want.”

  “But now you are. Rich, I mean.”

  “And therefore I can host dinners like this one, bad-mouth the Americans in front of American guests, and drink the best French wine. I recommend the Château Lafite. It’s from 1985, an excellent year. You drink wine, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” Kasper says, smiling. “But if you offered me a ’77 Biondi Santi Brunello, I’d think more highly of you.”

  Michael rocks his head a little. “I love Tuscany, as you know, but French wines…”

  “What about French wines?”

  Kasper doesn’t exactly know why, but something’s telling him not to let it drop. “I’m going to explain a couple of things to you, Gordon,” he says.

  In the minutes that follow, Kasper makes a display of enological knowledge. He talks about vine cultivation, soils, techniques. He’s improvising, but not that much. After all, he comes from a family with longstanding ties to the land and its products.

  Michael Savage listens to him attentively. He looks genuinely interested. Even amused. “You know, for someone who’s allergic to alcohol…”

  “Allergic to alcohol?” Kasper says, surprised. “The only allergy I have is to your Colombian friends.”

  It’s just a quip, and the moment he says it he wonders if he shouldn’t bite his tongue. But his words produce the best possible effect. Michael grimaces and hisses, “Those shits.” He laughs and raises his glass.

  Then Michael mimes another toast. But this time there’s a different light in his eyes. A new, demanding intensity. “You’re pretty smart, Kasper,” he says.

  “So are you, Gordon.”

  “We’re very similar, us two. I’d say almost alike.” He pauses. “Almost alike, but not completely.”

  “Same-same but different,” Kasper suggests, using an expression typical of Indochinese English.

  “Same-same but different,” Michael repeats.

  Gordon gestures in the direction of the swimming pool. “Let’s walk a little, all right?”

  They amble among the palms that surround the villa, discreetly observed by the host’s security guards. It’s a splendid night; the full moon seems to want to take a dip in the bay. In the distance, the lights of a ship.

  “Cargo ship,” Michael says, pointing his right index finger at the horizon. “Transporting arms and ammunition to the Malaysian coast.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  Gordon sighs and then turns around. In the moonlight, Kasper can make out the Irish hoodlum’s twisted smile. “I don’t know,” he answers. “But I wanted to see the look on your face. Every now and then I like to spout bullshit too.”

  They laugh like two idiots.

  “But look,” Kasper insists. “My little wine lecture wasn’t bullshit. You should have been taking notes. Seriously…”

  “Sure, sure,” Michael sneers. Suddenly he stops and points again at the lights on the sea. “We’ll have to do the first trip by sea. No airplane.”

  Kasper sees he’s not kidding. The joking around is over. “My Colombian associates are divided,” Michael explains. “Some of them still don’t trust the big plan. So we’ll do our first shipment by sea, from Venezuela to Italy, and if it goes well, we’ll move up to the next level.”

  “How much stuff?”

  “About a thousand kilos. In a container. We need a safe port. It should still be in Tuscany, if possible. The Colombians have a base in Florence, and they want to be present when the shipment arrives. Yo
u think you can organize this thing, even though there won’t be any airplane?”

  “I think so,” Kasper murmurs. The script has changed. He must notify the colonel. And the colonel will have to work through a good number of snags. “A flight sure would have been easier,” he points out. “Faster and—”

  “It’s not possible,” Savage says, cutting him off. “Not now, anyway.”

  “Not now.”

  “No, not now,” Michael says, stressing each syllable. “And we have to speed up the process.”

  “All right. In a few days—”

  “Make it very few. There’s an Israeli container ship we could use, and it sails within a week. It’s leaving Venezuela, bound for Italy. Livorno, to be exact. How does Livorno strike you?”

  Kasper says Livorno sounds fine. After all, he reminds Michael, he would have landed the plane in Pisa, which is just a couple of dozen kilometers away. He’s got some things to figure out, and he’s got to organize the ship’s arrival in port.

  “If Livorno’s good, then you have all the time you need to organize things,” Michael says. “The ship will take about twenty days to make the crossing. And I’m sending you some help. Next week, one of my guys is flying to Italy. He’ll set up a base in Rome. You’ll be working with him.”

  “You don’t need to send anyone.”

  “I have to.” He stops, clears his throat, and repeats, “I have to.” He gazes at Kasper with his usual smile and then raises his eyes to heaven. He sighs. “We’ll do big things together, Kasper, my friend. But you know better than I do that once you’re in the ring, the fight is long, and your opponent can hurt you. Even when he looks little…” He lets the words hang for a moment and goes back to scrutinizing Kasper. “Take that guy today. He was half your size, but he thumped you pretty good…”

  “He’s a professional Muay Thai fighter, that guy. And I still held my own.”

  “He kicked your arse the first two rounds.”

  “Don’t listen to Elizabeth’s accounts,” Kasper says with a smile.

  “Elizabeth’s got nothing to do with it. I was there.”

  Kasper’s incredulous expression amuses Michael vastly. “Sure, I was in the gym. You never saw me. You were too busy dodging blows.”

  “What an asshole.”

  “I went as a fan.”

  “And rooted for the Thai guy, I’ll bet. What made you want to come?”

  “Watching a man fight is like spying on him while he’s making love. Pleasure and pain produce moments of absolute truth.”

  “And what truths did you learn today?”

  “That we’re the same, the two of us. And different. Same-same but different.”

  They start to walk again, heading toward the lights and sounds of the house.

  “You can’t imagine how comforting your expertise in wine is to me,” Michael resumes.

  “Comforting.”

  “If you’re here this evening and not planted in the ground somewhere, you owe it to alcohol.”

  “Interesting.”

  “See, there was one thing the Colombians told me about that pilot who turned out to be an undercover agent, the bastard they’re still talking about in Medellín. He was allergic to alcohol. The fucker couldn’t touch wine or beer, couldn’t even sniff them. If you know Colombians at all, you can understand how they couldn’t get over this detail. For them, a man allergic to alcohol is like a man allergic to pussy. And then I thought about you and me…I remembered the times we’d seen each other, in Bangkok for example, and it seemed to me we’d had some discreetly alcoholic beverages—but I wasn’t completely sure. And so, on the train from Geneva to Zurich, I offered you a beer. You remember? Some German crap, but you sucked it down in about a minute.”

  “You mean that if I had said no thanks, I don’t drink…”

  “Right.”

  “You were testing me.”

  “A little test, yes.”

  “With a beer.”

  —

  The Thai Airways flight from Phuket to Phnom Penh is more taxing than usual. The weather is filthy. Monsoon storms. The plane lands two hours late. Clancy’s waiting for him at the airport.

  Instead of turning onto the road that leads to the city, the driver takes another one.

  “Where are we going?” Kasper asks.

  “To the shooting range. I promised Victor Chao we’d pass there and see him.”

  Kasper’s bad mood suffuses his objections….He’s tired; he doesn’t see the need for undue haste. Clancy nods slyly, all the while checking the rearview mirror to make sure they’re not being followed. He does it automatically; he always has. He might get shot one of these days, but it’s not going to happen because he didn’t notice someone tailing him.

  The shooting range is close to the airport. Perilously close. But that’s normal in this part of the world, where soldiers training with heavy antiaircraft equipment have a good chance of finding themselves operating along an airline’s approach route. Clancy has their ammunition cache in the trunk of the Mercedes. When you go to the Phnom Penh shooting range, you carry your own personal arsenal with you. All weapons allowed.

  Victor Chao is waiting for them. They can’t disappoint him, Clancy insists. “Help him with his little project and then we’ll all be happier.”

  —

  Victor Chao owns Phnom Penh’s famous Marksmen Club shooting range. He’s also the proprietor of the Manhattan Club, the only licensed casino in the capital (and in the country), a gambling establishment enhanced by a restaurant and a mega-disco. He can be found there in the evening, passionately engaged in his favorite activity: playing the drums with a cowboy hat on his head.

  Victor is also, and most important, the leader of Eagle Force, a paramilitary special unit under the direct command of Hun Sen. The men of Eagle Force handle “security,” a concept that has always been extremely vague in Cambodia. These mercenaries have rather broad powers, allowing them to intervene in any critical situation, and they don’t generally pull any punches. Many are foreign nationals, including several Frenchmen, some Russians, a few Tamils, various Nepalese Gurkhas, and a miscellany of other “characters” fished out of who knows what cracks and crevices of recent history. Cambodians, for whom Victor has little regard, work on the periphery of the unit as unskilled laborers.

  He’s from Taiwan, the son of a Kuomintang general. He arrived in Phnom Penh in 1993 as a representative of one of the Chinese Triads, not much over thirty years old, loaded with money, and acting on a very precise mandate: to enter into arrangements with the people running the country. Very slender and elegant, and flashing a smile that looks photoshopped, he has the right physique for the work he does. He speaks five languages, among them impeccable English. According to rumor, during his very first days in the capital, Victor managed to get a meeting with Hun Sen and as a first gesture of courtesy placed a million dollars in cash on the prime minister’s table. This may be a legend, but one thing is certain: within a few years, Victor Chao had organized Hun Sen’s praetorians, obtained permits for the only casino in the country, and successfully constructed a giant shooting range on an otherwise unusable piece of land: a mass grave left behind by Hun Sen’s Khmer Rouge pals.

  Over the course of not many years, Victor became one of the most powerful men in Cambodia. His greatest coup was having an old container ship sent down from China and tied up at a wharf on the Tonlé Sap, not far from the Royal Palace and the neighborhoods where the people who matter live.

  This he transformed into Naga, the pleasure ship, a floating casino and brothel.

  But synthetic drugs—the “substances,” as he calls them—and money laundering are Victor Chao’s real businesses, and to that end the Naga is crucial. The “substances” are floated on the various manufacturers’ barges and transferred to her hold, ready for distribution. On Sunday mornings, in a room on the main deck, calculations are made to determine the amount of the prime minister’s weekly kickback. The money usually
changes hands in his private residence, a villa of French origin that stands next to the North Korean embassy.

  —

  The sign on the right indicates that they’ve arrived at the Marksmen Club.

  They pass through the gate of the shooting range and head up the long drive bordered by lavish flowerbeds and perfect lawns. It would be like entering the park of one of the Palladian villas of the Veneto, were it not for the Russian antiaircraft tank parked not far from the gate and the large, circular pool inhabited by half a dozen crocodiles.

  Victor Chao comes to meet them, thin and sinewy in his black uniform. He embraces Kasper and immediately reminds him of his promise to help with his pet project. “Stop with the globe-trotting, you Italian asshole,” Victor says. “Stay here in Phnom Penh and work for me.” He laughs and winks at Clancy, who nods placidly.

  They go to the conference room. For this meeting, Victor Chao has called together some collaborators—who look like clones of himself—and an extremely young female assistant who assiduously takes notes. There’s also a special guest: Ian Travis, a New Zealander, an ex-colonel in the Twenty-second SAS (Special Air Services) regiment, and a frequent visitor to the shooting range. Ian’s the owner of the DMZ bar in Phnom Penh. After spending some time as a military consultant, he became involved in the most reckless kind of financial dealing. He’s always very well informed about large movements of money, and he runs a “boiler room” in Bangkok. Kasper and Clancy see him frequently at Sharky’s.

  “You’ve got the floor,” declares Victor Chao, and Kasper begins detailing a complex training simulator known as a Killing House. It’s a mini urban environment comprising one or more buildings with rooms, windows, and hallways. Every detail is a hidden danger; an enemy can be lurking around every corner.

  Kasper emphasizes the need to operate while avoiding both enemy and friendly fire. The norms to be followed, he specifies, have been established at the international level. He expatiates on the necessity of building walls that include staggered double layers of sand-filled truck tires—a long, costly process, but one that facilitates training with high-caliber assault rifles and live ammunition. He demonstrates some of the possible courses an operation may take, sketches the structures the training requires, discusses hypothetical scenarios with tactical variables involving paper and metal cutouts.