Black Heart, page 32
'But, Dad' - Tracy reached out for his father's hand - 'you did everything you could.'
Louis Richter gripped his son's strong hand and hung on. 'Yes,' he whispered. 'Everything. I'm too disciplined a man and ... well, there was your mother to think of. In Corfu, away from it all, I realized that that act of vengeance was for myself; your mother hated violence. And, well, you know, I always believed in the two of us.' He began to shake and Tracy got up, hugged his father to him. 'That's why it's so damned hard now.'
The wail of desperation in his father's voice chilled Tracy and he stroked his thin back. 'I'm here, now, Dad,' he said softly. 'We're together.'
After a time, Louis Richter pulled away. He was in control again. 'This bug,' he said, 'how important is it?'
'I think that whoever planted it murdered John Holmgren. John was my friend,' Tracy said, leaning forward. 'I won't leave him to the dogs. I'm going to find whoever killed him.'
'And then?' Louis Richter cocked his head. 'You sound just
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like me, Tracy.' He shook his head sadly. 'It's back to the war then.'
'The war was necessary, Dad. So is this.'
'Killing's necessary?' the old man said. 'Is that what you're telling me?'
'That could be funny, coming from you.' Louis Richter put a hand over his eyes and he sank back into the sofa with a deep sigh. Tm old, Tracy. I feel worn down, like time was gravity and I'm sinking down into it.'
'You don't want to die, Dad,' Tracy said. 'Don't give me that.'
'To die, no.' Louis Richter smiled. 'But comes this time in life and something changes. You feel closer to' he shrugged 'I don't know. Something else.' He put his bony hands together and Tracy saw the thick tracery of blue veins pulsing just beneath the surface. 'God, maybe. Oh, not in the religious sense. You know I never believed. But sometimes I feel near to a kind of life force ... the centre of things.' He shrugged again. 'It's changed my thinking, maybe. I'm certainly not the man who made all those miniaturized explosives for the foundation.'
'You can't expect me to feel the same way.'
The old man took Tracy's hand in his own. He stroked the palm with his fingertips. 'Trace, I realize now that that's all I've ever wanted from you. If God wanted us made in his image, I wanted you made in mine. I saw my immortality in you.' He waved a hand. 'Oh, I know. All fathers must feel the same way. But I wanted it perfect and complete. I wanted you to think, to do the same things I did. And when you inevitably didn't, well, I guess I blamed you.
'It was an unfair thing to do. I tried to live my life as fairly as I knew how.' He paused, looked into his son's eyes. 'I guess I just didn't know enough.'
'That's all over with now, Dad,' Tracy said. He kissed his father on the cheek. It felt cool and dry.
Louis Richter got up slowly, went over to the rosewood hutch, poured them both a drink, brought them back. 'Now about that bug. What can I do?'
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Tracy dropped it back into his father's palm. 'Is it possible to get a line back on the receiver?'
Louis Richter smiled as he sipped at his whisky. 'Now you sound just like my son. I can do many things,' he said, pleased. 'But magic unfortunately isn't one of them.'
'Then how do we go about finding out who built it?'
'It's more a matter of who didn't build it.' Louis Richter put his glass down. 'Now we know it's not one of the experts. They're all world-renowned, at least in my circle. And all of them have a distinctive style. The bug you gave me doesn't fit anyone I know. There are some Japanese-manufactured parts in it but that only means the person who made it knows what he's about.' He lifted a ringer. 'At first I thought Mizo might've been involved because a number of delicate elements are hand-tooled, the way he goes about this kind of stuff. But on closer inspection it turned out not to be his.'
'Then that's a dead end.'
'Not quite.' Louis Richter's eyes were sparkling. 'Mizo is one of the few masters who teach.'
'Are you saying that the bug might've been built by one of Mizo's students?'
His father nodded. 'It's a possibility but I don't know how far that'll take us. Mizo's properly close-mouthed about who he trains and, anyway, this person if he was Mizo's disciple must've been one some time ago. That bug's no work of a student. The builder's a full-fledged genius. All I can say is I hope he's working for us, otherwise, God help us all.'
'Come on, Dad. It can't be as bad as that.'
'Worse, maybe. This guy's on the verge of revolutionizing the electronic surveillance field. I don't have to tell you what that could mean.'
'No,' Tracy said morosely, 'you don't.' He stood up. 'Where's this Mizo work?'
'Hong Kong,' his father said. 'But it's no good my talking to him. He hates my guts. We were both bidding for the foundation's work once a long time ago and I won.'
'Don't worry about that,' Tracy said. There was a faraway look on his face that his father had seen before.
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'I don't think I much care for that expression, Trace. I remember the last time I saw you look like that. You almost blew up this apartment trying to circumvent the three basic laws of electronic surveillance I taught you.'
Tracy nodded. 'Yeah but that was when I was just a kid. Don't worry about it.' He smiled. 'Just make me up one of your Care packages.'
'But Mizo'll never talk to you. I'd better devise something extraordinary for you to take.'
Tracy was no longer listening. He walked over to the window, stood looking blindly out at the city. 'He'll talk,' he said softly. 'And he won't even know he's doing it.'
Khieu had picked up the movement out of the corner of his eye as he had emerged from Macomber's house. He was instantly alert but he did nothing out of the ordinary. He continued his movement, knowing that any deviation would alert the watching figure.
He turned and walked away, in his usual strong stride. All the while his mind was going through the ritual of picking apart the diverse data that his senses were flooding it with. He knew the approximate height of the individual in the shadows some thousand yards away because he was familiar with the doorway and, without thinking, his mind had already calculated the differences in height, had come up with a measurement of five foot-seven inches which was, in fact, less than an inch off.
He did not, however, know whether the watcher was a man or a woman. For one thing, a newspaper blocked most of the head and all of the face. For another, shrubbery partially blocked his view.
He cut across the street. He was already out of sight of the watcher and he began to double back. He saw Eliott emerging from the house and melted back into a doorway. It was a brownstone and he reached behind him, opening the outer door, fading himself inside.
He pushed aside a wedge of the curtains on the outer door just in time to see Eliott pass by on the opposite side of the street.
And, a moment later, a woman passed also, closer because she
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was on Khieu's side of the street. There was no paper to hide her features this time; he got a good look.
Breath hissed and his hand curled up into a fist. What had gone wrong? he thought. How had Atherton Gottschalk's woman latched on to Eliott?
Khieu followed them as far as the restaurant. He left them there, went down the block to the first pay phone he came to. That one was broken and he had had to cross the street. He phoned Macomber, spoke for some time.
'She's made contact,' he said at length. 'There's no doubt about it.' There was silence on the line. Khieu felt nothing. He was an empty vessel waiting to be filled up. 'I don't like it.' 'Neither do I.' Macomber's voice boomed down the line at him. 'Atherton's obviously made some kind of blunder. For all I know, he had her in the house when he called Eliott. That doesn't concern me right now.'
To take a life - any life - was a sin. So his thought of Malis. To protect himself he began working on the catechism Preah Moha Panditto had instilled in him as instinctively as he had once fed at his mother's breast. His hand ached and he turned his mind away.
'Something will have to be done,' Macomber said. There was no indecision in his voice; nothing at all but firm resolve. 'Our security has been breached and we must assume the worst. Do you agree, Khieu? You are my son, after all.'
'Yes, Father,' Khieu. It was part of the ritual. Khieu would never have thought to disagree with one of his father's dictums. 'Miss Christian obviously knows something. How much, we have no way of knowing unless they get back to his apartment and who knows if they will do that.'
'You have the portable receiver with you?'
'Yes,' Khieu answered. 'No matter where they are in the apartment, I will hear every sound.'
Trn glad I told you to keep an eye on Eliott,' Macomber said. Khieu thought he could discern some emotion in the voice now. 'I had hoped to be proven wrong.' The voice paused for a moment. 'Why doesn't he love me, Khieu?'
'I don't know, Father."
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'A son should love his father, shouldn't he?'
'It is his duty.'
'I love him. Doesn't he know that? I really love him.'
'I know,' Khieu said, and did not catch the sadness in his own voice. 'He is your only flesh and blood.'
'My flesh and blood, yes. But I can't trust him the way I trust you.'
'Thank you, Father.'
A singing on the line, jumble of ghost voices all talking at once. At last they died away. Silence. 'She must be stopped, Khieu,' Macomber said after a time. 'We have absolutely no choice. Terminate her with extreme prejudice.' He could not or, more likely, would not give up the military term. The first time he had said it, Khieu had had to have it explained to him.
Khieu turned to watch the entrance of the restaurant a block away. 'Yes, Father,' he said and bowed his head.
Kathleen was making a high wailing noise. She was a gibbering idiot, dancing on the end of a string held by the owner of those demonic eyes.
In the long moment when she stared into them, she had time to see impossible things. In their depths, she thought she could see evil, capering nightmares, gleaming skulls, corpses vomiting blood. She saw children burning and mothers hurling themselves into infernos. She saw rape and vicious sadism, the entire panoply of horrors.
She knew now who had hold of her, facts finally overriding the blind animal fright that had invaded, paralysing her mind. It was the Cambodian. There was no mistaking the face, those features. She wondered how she could ever have felt that strong sexual attraction for him. For now she felt only revulsion. It was as if she were staring into the face of death itself.
It was hideous. She shivered and cried out, saw at the corner of her vision, the bright flash of an expanding steel bar as it passed through a glade of sunlight. For an instant it seemed beautiful to her and then the terror came welling up, washing over her in a wave so strong that she began to gag.
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Her sphincter muscle gave way and she defecated, the stink unholy. But at least it's me, she thought. I'm still alive.
The bar passed into darkness. Light again like a sun, burning, and then the darkness like an eclipse. It was her entire world now, all her senses contracted to monitor its passage.
It came at last to her flesh and she felt a burning unlike anything she had ever experienced before. It was as if she had been hurled into the heart of the sun.
She gave way, peeling back, then raw flesh and blood gurgling. Her blood. And now her mouth opened and she gave up the nourishment she no longer needed. But still the burning went on and on, increasing in intensity until her mind could no longer accept what was happening to her and one by one it sealed off the synapses of the nerves. Now nothing was left except in a grey floating speck whirling in the vastness of airless pace, away and away, fading with infinite slowness.
Thus did Kathleen give up the life she so coveted, holding on, grasping and fighting until the last instant.
'No!' Eliott was screaming. 'Oh God, no!' He was sobbing, tears rolling down his cheeks. He was backed up against an ice green wall, sweat trickling down the indentation of his spine. His brain felt as if he had been invaded. An army of ants was crawling around inside.
His hands were claws, scraping across his scalp, pulling at his sodden hair. He thought, drunkenly, that he must turn away from the horror being enacted in front of him. But he did not. He could not even get his eyes to blink. It was as if they were stapled open.
This is my punishment, he thought, for going against my father's orders. He never thought to question Khieu's presence let alone his actions. Death made a terrible kind of sense to his half-hysterical mind.
To Eliott it seemed as if Khieu was God's messenger, doing his will. I should be whipped for this, he thought, wildly. Beaten. But another part of him felt as if his very soul had been sliced open; that the essence that made him an individual, different from everyone else, was leaching away through his fingers like
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water. Nothing he had been before Kathleen had walked into his life and nothing was what he was again.
Shrinking away from the fearful act taking its course before him, he felt no anger, no sadness. He understood that nothingness was his lot in life. There was no point in struggling against it. He had tried, this one time, and he had seen the outcome. Death rained across the bedsheets, drowned.
Khieu, arms rigid, knelt on the bed, holding Kathleen upright. He was drenched in blood and bits of skin, gore. The place stank but he was used to that.
Blood dripped like the tick of a clock from somewhere. He looked down. Blood spattered him; blood coated the woman. Her head lay unnaturally on one side, the mouth opened, a black yawning cavity. Khieu smelled the stench of eternity, a wind from the dead depths of the corpse.
But her arms still reached across the gulf between them, her taloned fingers gripping him, seeming to pull at him. She had struggled, clawing him, raking her nails, pounding his hard flesh even as she was dying, as if to take him with her.
Khieu shook his head, pried her stiffening fingers, one by one, from his shirt. Beneath, he saw the tears her sharp nails had made, a small tattoo of crescents, and the pink of his own blood, seeping slowly. He pushed her from him, let out a long slow breath.
Eliott screamed, pressed back against the wall as Kathleen's head fell in his lap. Khieu looked up, lunged out viciously, pulled him across the steaming slippery corpse atop the bed.
'Come here, you!' He took Eliott up by his shoulders. He was frightened by how close his brother had come to blowing the angka. 'Do you know what you were doing?' he cried. 'Do you!'
For an instant, a light burned far back in Eliott's. He remembered all the girls Khieu had taken from him; girls who were rightfully his. 'Yes,' he said defiantly. 'I knew just what I was doing. She made me feel alive; she wanted to be with mel'
Khieu hit him then, hard across the face. Eliott's head spun and he gurgled in surprise. Khieu's face was a tightly controlled mask, hard and pale as if devoid of blood. 'No. She made you forget your responsibilities. Your duty to the angka.' This time
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a backhand blow. 'You have no respect tor your father.' Slap. 'You understand nothing. You are deserving of nothing.'
And Eliott, cowering, crying like an infant, drooling blood, heard that word resounding in his skull, echoing on and on until it seemed devoid, even of thought. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
'Yes,' he whispered in a piteous tone. 'I know.'
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March-April 1969 Area 350, Cambodia
Three years fighting in the jungles of Kampuchea could feel like three centuries. Especially if events surrounding the fighting appeared to have changed not at all.
True, the Khmer Rouge were now a force to be reckoned with in the struggle for liberation. Their numbers had swelled considerably and their supply of weaponry had increased fourfold.
But the Kampuchean government was still in power. The hated Sihanouk still reigned though the Khmer Rouge had long ago vowed to destroy him. His prime minister, Lon Nol, had been in a car accident in the countryside, while reviewing firsthand some of the fighting. He had severely injured his shoulder and in 1968 had resigned his post to fly to France for recuperation. But now, a year later, he was back in his old job and it seemed oddly as if they had all been thrown backward in time.
Except for one thing: Musashi Murano had died.
That event, above all others, seemed to mark the passing of time for Sok. The memory of his dead family was already a cold black ember encysted within his heart. He could no longer remember the month of the year of their burning. The jungle and the constant fighting had seared that out of him, leached away into the bloodsoaked earth beneath his feet.
But Murano's death was still fresh in his mind. It had been he who had helped dig the grave, who handed down the corpse, so oddly light in death, he who had shovelled the dirt back over the body with the butt of his M-i, he who had cried in the middle of the night when no one else - not even Sam could see him.
Sam had neither liked nor understood the sensei. That kind of discipline was not for him. He was a man like Rene Evan: an architect of the revolution's philosophical progress. He fought side by side with the other members of the cadre but all
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knew he lacked the fervour for it. Rather, he had gradually become one of the elite officers involved in policy and manoeuvre coordination, at times liaising with other cadres in the Khmer Rouge's long march towards ultimate victory. It was even rumoured throughout the encampment that he had met with members of Angka Leu. Though no one could find the courage to ask him directly.
