‘What the major democratic powers want to avoid, in fine, is the potential destruction of a further million Cambodians in new and improved killing fields, and the potential risk of Pol Pot’s subsequent invasion of North Vietnam, which is at present militarily vulnerable, with the blessing and support - in terms of bargain-price material - of China, creating a Communist bloc.’

  I gave it some thought for a moment and Pringle left me to it, shifting slightly away in a symbolic gesture of withdrawal. Through the filthy window I watched a dog crossing the waste-ground, dragging something heavy, some kind of food it had seized from somewhere, perhaps, and wanted to hide, its ribs showing and its legs buckling sometimes, forcing it to rest, its jaws still locked on the trophy, the means of maintaining life for a few more days. I couldn’t see exactly what it was but it was angled like a human foot, deep crimson, almost black in the acid light of the streetlamp as the dog got up and went on again, dragging its spoils through the rubble.

  ‘Is the prime minister,’ I asked Pringle when I was ready, ‘being kept informed?’ The Bureau is directly and exclusively responsible to the PM in all its activities. Hence its ability not, virtually, to exist.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Pringle said.

  ‘You mean you don’t know? Or you think so, but you’re not sure?’ It was important. If the PM was already aware of Salamander then we were operating close to the ‘highest military authority’ Pringle had mentioned.

  ‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. But let me put it this way: the moment you achieve any kind of breakthrough, the prime minister will indeed be informed that we have a mission running, and told the nature of the objective.’

  ‘And will you let me know when that happens?’

  ‘You have my word.’

  ‘I want assurance,’ I told him, ‘that I can eventually get support on an effective scale if I need it, since I’m taking on an army.’

  ‘And with the prime minister in the picture, that would of course be guaranteed. I understand.’

  He was very understanding, was our Mr Pringle, and he wore kid gloves and was stroking me with them. Why in God’s name couldn’t Flockhart have given me Ferris? Ferris or Pepperidge or even that bastard Loman, who at least has the grace to return my disregard. I don’t like people who help me gently up the steps to the guillotine.

  Pringle uncrossed his legs. ‘Questions?’

  ‘No. But you can get a couple of things for me. A Mine Action van and some field-glasses, 10 x 50s if possible, nothing less than 7.’ He had a connection with Mine Action: they’d flown me out here from Phnom Penh.

  ‘When do you need them by?’

  ‘First light tomorrow.’ I got off the seat and started down the aisle, and Pringle followed.

  ‘May I ask what you have in mind?’

  ‘I want to get close to Colonel Choen again - at the moment he’s the only lead I’ve got. But this one’s a long shot.’ Pringle was waiting for me to tell him more, but I wasn’t in the mood, didn’t trust him yet.

  As we dropped from the twisted step of the bus and kept to the shadow along the wall I heard him saying, ‘Gabrielle Bouchard is in Pouthisat, did you know?’

  I told him I didn’t, and kept on walking. ‘She’s at the French Catholic Mission.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Pretty well.’

  I stopped just before the shadow of the wall came to an end.

  ‘We break off here.’

  ‘All right. So when do I expect a signal?’

  ‘God knows,’ I told him. ‘As soon as I’ve got anything for you, that’s all I can say.’ Then I gave him the Church of Christ pamphlet the Caucasian woman had slipped through the open window of the Mazda. ‘Get it to London for me. Wherever it can do the most good.’

  Pringle looked at it briefly in the poor light. ‘Oh, yes, we’ve all seen these. Unfortunately, it takes a political dissident’s arrest to outrage the human rights groups. Driving children into brothels by the thousand doesn’t worry them. But – ‘ he shrugged, putting the pamphlet away ‘– I’ll see it reaches London, of course.’ He melted into the night.

  I would pass close to the French Catholic Mission on my way back to the safe-house, so I made a detour by a couple of turnings and found the place and knocked at the door and asked if Gabrielle was there, but the nun said no, she’d been shot in the street half an hour ago.

  14 : SNAKESKIN

  ‘It could have been worse,’ the black American nurse said. ‘The bullet passed within a couple of inches of the liver, and this place ain’t Bellevue, honey, there would have been nothing we could’ve done. C’mon in, this is what we call the intensive care unit, mostly for gunshot wounds and crashes and stuff, excuse the packing cases, we have to have something to sit on when our feet ache.’

  An electric fan turned slowly overhead, fly-encrusted, wobbling, stirring the smells of blood, antiseptic and tobacco smoke. A young Vietnamese lay propped up on a dirty straw pillow, smoking - he was dying of tuberculosis, the nurse told me, so he was allowed two cigarettes a day to keep him from going crazy, and it smelled better anyway than most of the other things in this place. Her name was Leonora, she said, and she was from the Bronx.

  ‘Fancy meeting you here,’ I heard Gabrielle saying. She was in the end bed, half in shadow, her dark eyes luminous in her pale face, reflecting the kerosene lamp. She didn’t smile, maybe couldn’t.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ Leonora told her as she tried to sit up. ‘You can shake hands just the way you are, or kiss or whatever you have in mind.’

  So I leaned down and kissed Gabrielle; her mouth was hot, moist, feverish. The nurse pushed a packing case across for me.

  ‘I don’t want you sitting on the bed, which is what you’re dying to do. She has to keep still, you with me, honey?’

  ‘Got it. How much blood did she lose?’

  ‘Maybe a pint; we didn’t have to give her any - not that we could have, none she would’ve wanted in her.’

  ‘Did it go through?’

  ‘How’s that again?’

  ‘The bullet.’

  ‘Oh, right, yeah, clean through, which made it a whole lot simpler for me.’

  ‘You’re the surgeon?’

  ‘RN. The only doc we got here is out on a mine accident. Jesus, did I say accident? But I sew real good, don’t I, honey?’

  ‘Real good,’ Gabrielle said. She still didn’t smile.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ I asked her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You bet your sweet ass she’s in pain,’ Leonora said, ‘but she refused anything, don’t go for drugs, well okay, that’s pretty smart so long as you can take it. Thing is, it keeps the fever going longer than I’d like.’ She put a hand on Gabrielle’s forehead, then looked at me again. ‘I’m going to give you five minutes, honey, then she has to sleep if she can, you wanna cuss me out, I ain’t listening.’ She went down the aisle to talk to the dying Vietnamese.

  ‘Was it the KR?’ I asked Gabrielle.

  ‘Yes.’ She didn’t sound angry. I would have expected her to.

  ‘D’you want to talk about it?’

  ‘I’d rather hear what you’ve been doing.’

  ‘Nothing terribly interesting. Pringle told me you were in Pouthisat.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Half an hour ago.’

  ‘You went to the Mission?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was nice.’ She reached for my hand. ‘You remembered where I said I’d be.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We could have had dinner somewhere.’ She watched me steadily, her eyes deep in the faint light. ‘I’ll be out of here in the morning.’

  ‘Not if it’s up to Leonora.’

  ‘It’s up to me. There’s so much infection here - tuberculosis, diphtheria, dengue fever; I don’t want to take anything back to the Mission. And anyway it’s only a flesh wound.’

  ‘I can’t be here in the morning. Do you want me to ask one of the nuns to come and fetch you?’

  ‘They know,’ she said. ‘I’ve already asked them.’ She tilted her head. ‘How did you bruise your face?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  She watched me in silence, then left it. ‘I don’t know where I can find you, and you wouldn’t want me to.’

  ‘I’ll make contact when I can. I can’t say when.’

  ‘As long as it’s sometime.’

  ‘It will be.’ I pressed her hand. ‘I’m going now, so that you can sleep.’

  ‘All right.’

  I rested my mouth on hers again, this time for longer, and we didn’t close our eyes, so that all I could see was the deep indigo blue, with her soul floating somewhere in its shadows, and I found myself wanting, very much, not to leave her.

  ‘Until soon,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Until soon.’

  Then as I pushed the packing case back against the wall I remembered the sounds we’d heard, Pringle and I, from the bus not long ago, the sudden exchange of fire in the night.

  ‘The man who shot you,’ I asked Gabrielle, ‘did you see him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well enough to recognize?’

  ‘I won’t be seeing him again,’ she said. ‘He’s dead.’

  The sun was behind me when it lifted from the earth’s rim, and I watched my shadow growing across the stones.

  The Mine Action van was standing on the east side of a rock, concealed from the track that led at right-angles from the major north-south road. This was the turning I’d missed when I’d been tracking Colonel Choen to the camp. Any traffic from there would have to come past where I was lying face down among the smaller rocks; I’d chosen a gap I could sight through, and when I had to lift the field-glasses their lenses would be in shadow.

  It was a long shot, as I’d told Pringle, because I was relying simply on the feeling I had that Choen wasn’t quartered at the camp, had only been paying a visit, just as he’d paid a visit to the villa in Phnom Penh. But even so, he could have left the camp yesterday, for Pouthisat and the airfield.

  By 1000 hours the sun was too hot on my back and I had to shift to the next position I’d worked out; it was less satisfactory because this gap was narrower and the rocks blurred the sides of the vision field through the lenses, but I was in shade now as the sun began reaching towards noon.

  Three vehicles had left the camp since I’d arrived: a battered Landcruiser and two jeeps, all camouflaged and all turning north for the town. I didn’t think Choen was in any of them, but couldn’t be certain, didn’t expect to be certain: a long shot is uncertain by nature. A man in faded battledress and checked krama had come south on a motorbike and turned towards the camp, an AK-47 slung from his shoulder.

  I had seen the leopard again: that was his territory down there where I’d seen him before. And ten minutes ago I’d watched two cobras weaving slowly out of a cleft in the rocks a few feet away, presumably a mated pair, one larger than the other, their scales shimmering in the sunlight. They had sensed me, and for a while had become still, their tongues flicking to analyze my odours and my body-heat; had I been a vole or a muskrat I wouldn’t have lived.

  At noon I drank some of the water I’d bought in the market on my way from the safe-house; it was warm and unrefreshing but I took in half a litre to prevent dehydration.

  Three shots. … There’d been a lot of time for thinking today, though none of it, in this heat, had been very structured. But the three shots had interested me because they’d been from two different guns, and Gabrielle had told me the KR was dead. I hadn’t asked her any more about it when I was leaving the hospital because she’d been in pain and needed sleep, so all I had was a handful of scenarios: Gabrielle had got in the way of a stray bullet when a KR and someone else had exchanged shots, and she’d seen the KR killed; a KR had seen her with her camera and decided to shoot her as an undesirable foreign journalist, and someone else had killed him in her defence; for some reason she herself had been carrying a gun and had used it when she’d been fired on.

  The shots had been exchanged in a definite sequence: replaying the sound of them in my mind I remembered that Gun A had fired twice and Gun B only once, in the sequence A-B-A, which would match two of those scenarios. But anyway she would tell me what had happened, the next time we met. Or perhaps she wouldn’t … I knew so little about Gabrielle Bouchard, except that in her face I had come to recognize, even with those blue Caucasian eyes, the face of Cambodia, of courage, endurance, and suffering. I would have been attracted to her by her looks and her nature alone, but there was this extra dimension: seeing the bullet-scarred walls and the riven palm-trees and the legless children in the streets I had begun to ache for this small, tormented country, and also for Gabrielle.

  High noon and the heat poured from the molten heights of the sky and my bush shirt was dark with sweat, the second water bottle empty and the field-glasses hot to the touch, and then movement came again and I shifted onto my elbows and got into focus and watched the camouflaged staff car as it climbed the mountain track from the camp through the shimmering heat waves, the glass of its headlamps flashing as it bounced over rough ground, stones flying from under the tyres. It looked like the one I’d tracked here from the town.

  Two men, both sitting in the front, their faces blurring as the vehicle neared and I over-corrected the focus and then got the sharpness back, the driver’s face unfamiliar, the other man’s recognizable, I thought, as Colonel Choen’s, the eyes not quite balanced, the mouth drawn down, censuring all mankind. Then as the staff car turned off the track onto the major road I saw the emblem pinned to the side of his red checked krama; from this distance I couldn’t make out if it were the one I’d seen before in the detention cell, but I decided the odds were good enough, and within a kilometre I was keeping station in the Mine Action van, half that distance behind.

  The target drove straight through Pouthisat, crossing the railway and turning east, passing the Hotel Lafayette, not stopping at the building where Choen had stopped before, and when the airfield sign came up I knew there wasn’t going to be any information for Pringle, other than that I was right: Colonel Choen had been visiting the KR camp and was now flying out again. There might have been a chance for me to get close to him again if I could have caught him somewhere distanced from his escort, and that was why I’d spent half the bloody day lying on my stomach watching the local fauna: we’d got nothing for London so far, in spite of what Pringle said, and I was looking for a breakthrough, just one small bloody breakthrough was all I asked, for God’s sake, chopper in the sky, there was a chopper lifting above the sugar palms in the east, and as the staff car turned into the freight area the Kamov KA-26 made its descent, the same aircraft that had brought Choen here two days ago, standard military camouflage, the Khmer Rouge shuttle from Phnom Penh.

  I rolled the Mine Action van between two hangars facing away from the apron and pulled up and switched off and watched the outside mirrors, waiting for the final scrap of information that would soon become available: would Colonel Choen be flying south-east towards the capital or west towards the main guerrilla base across the mountains?

  He was out of the staff car now, standing with his escort and waiting for the chopper to land, dust and heat waves blowing across the apron in the draught from the rotors, a foam cup bowling along the ground as the undercarriage took the shock and the pilot cut the engine and Choen went on standing there, not going towards the chopper even when the door swung open.

  A man showed there, looking around him for a moment and then dropping to the apron, seeing Colonel Choen and going across to him in a crouching walk through the draught from the rotors, smoothing his hair back and hitching his briefcase higher under his arm, fairly tall, a light grey European suit with an inch of white cuff showing and a pocket handkerchief displayed, a pair of handsome tan-coloured brogues - and now a smile for Choen as the colonel came forward to meet him, both men giving a perfunctory bow as they shook hands, the pilot coming across to the staff car with a suitcase, presumably the visitor’s.

  Flying, then, neither south-east to the capital nor west to the guerrilla camp across the mountains, no information on that. Information, instead, on this.

  I waited until the staff car was through the gates to the perimeter track before I started up, the chopping of the Kamov’s rotors echoing from the hangars as it took off again and I moved the van to within a hundred yards of the target vehicle on the curving track and then dropped back to keep station.

  The town was dead now as we drove through it; the heat at this hour filled the streets. Bicycles leaned at doorways; a dog sprawled asleep in a patch of damp earth below a water pump; the remains of a chicken coloured the ground, its blood marking the track of the wheel that had crushed it.

  They were both sitting in the back of the staff car, Choen and his visitor: I could see their heads through the rear window, leaning together in conversation until they reached the Hotel du Lac, where the car pulled in.

  I was in the lobby by the time the colonel’s escort was bringing in the visitor’s baggage. There was good cover here: the balustrade of the staircase, three potted palms and a fluted column, and I was within earshot of the two men as they took the stairs to the next floor, the visitor with the briefcase still under his arm and Choen carrying a worn leather attache case. Both were talking in French, the colonel haltingly, the visitor more easily but with a Russian accent, so that I knew that in waiting out the hot, jading and seemingly unprofitable hours of this day we had arrived at a breakthrough.

  15 : FOOTSTEPS

  It was just after six in the evening when the Russian came down the stairs and looked around him and walked across the lobby to the bar.

  I got up from the table in the corner and went over to him.

  ‘Boris Slavsky!’ I said. He turned to look at me. I was holding my drink, to let him know he wasn’t expected to shake hands. ‘Voss,’ I told him, ‘Andrei Voss.’ In Russian I said, ‘You don’t know me, but I’ve heard of you, of course.’ He watched me with great attention, a touch of suspicion in his pale clear eyes, which didn’t surprise me. He wasn’t a man who liked to be heard of by strangers. He smelled strongly of a mediocre cologne; I’d caught it when he and Colonel Choen had gone up the staircase earlier in the day, and that was why I hadn’t come here alone this evening.