13: DEBRIEFING

'And your wife?' I asked the man with no teeth.

He looked down. 'She dead,' he said in halting French.

So I didn't ask directly about his sons, his other daughters.

'I'm sorry. There's just you and Cham?' It was short for Chamnan.

I had followed her home through the streets this morning, walking slowly. She was perhaps fifteen, though she looked more, hunger and shock and grief having wasted her small sharp-boned face. She was watching me now from the cramped little kitchen, her crutch leaning against the wall. By her eyes I saw she wasn't sure she wanted to share her home with a round-eye and his odd manners. I'd followed her because I needed a safe-house, and if she had a father or a mother they wouldn't favour the Khmer Rouge, wouldn't be informers. We'd had to pause several times, Cham and I, on our way here, because this one had gone off not long ago, maybe near her school, and she was still trying to get used to the crutch — it was rubbing under her arm, and the rag she was using to cushion it kept shifting.

'Yes,' her father said — there was just himself and Cham here in the house. It was on stilts and made of mud and bamboo, and he'd told me there were two rooms to spare and I could take either one. His sons, I supposed, or his two other daughters wouldn't be needing them any more.

'I don't want,' I told him, 'to be talked about. Do you understand that?'

He looked surprised. All the round-eyes he'd seen hadn't minded in the least being talked about; they'd come into his country with their good new clothes and stout boots and loud voices and treated him and his neighbours rather like children. I thought I'd better spell it out for him.

'I don't want anyone in the Khmer Rouge to know where I am.'

He frowned, then nodded quickly, looking across at Chain and saying something in Khmer, his tone emphatic. 'She understands?' I asked him.

'Yes. We not talk about you. She can keep secrets. All my people know how to keep secrets.'

'Of course.' I offered him 2,000 riel per day for my board, and he was pleased, glancing quickly around the room as if he'd never realized its value.

I slept through the heat of the day on the bamboo bed in the room I'd chosen; there was no other furniture in it except for a chest of drawers made from packing cases still with their Oxfam labels on them. This had been another daughter's room; there were long black hairs still caught in the split ends of the bamboo behind the straw-filled pillow, and even though I'd been awake all night, sleep didn't come easily, or soon. In none of the missions I'd so far worked had I felt anything in particular about the opposition: they had simply represented the target, the objective. The Khmer Rouge was different, and when the first wave of sleep came over me it was borne on a dark, tugging undertow of rage.

On a patch of waste-ground near the railway station there was a bombed-out bus with Kanipong Chhnang still readable on the side, and I stood in the shadows watching it. The streetlamp on the corner was flickering the whole time as the power station struggled to cope with the load. Voices came from the cafe down the street, and a Mine Action van turned the corner and came past, its lights throwing the rubble on the waste-ground into sharp relief. Then Pringle arrived, dead on the minute, not looking around him as he skirted the building on foot and got into the bus, experienced enough to rely on me to have screened the area beforehand.

'So we've got something now,' he said when I'd finished debriefing, 'for London.'

'Oh really?'

He didn't answer for a moment, hearing the acid tone. The streetlamp flickered again and this time went out, and we could see nothing now through the filth-covered windows of the bus. That was all right: it worked both ways. It's always a strain when the local director and his executive are holed up at a rendezvous, and tonight I was a distinct risk to Pringle: I'd been seen at the Khmer Rouge camp yesterday and was recognizable, even though my two executioners manques were no longer a threat. I couldn't show myself at the Hotel Lafayette or invite Pringle to my safe-house either, and the bus was the best place I could find; it was in deep shadow and didn't interest anybody at night, though in the daytime it was a playground for children: there was a small rubber flip-flop in the gangway, and a broken toy gun — of course, we must train them young — on one of the ripped stained seats.

'You located the opposition's base,' Pringle said in a moment, 'and infiltrated it, bringing out valuable information as to personnel and equipment. In addition — ' he broke off as three shots sounded in the distance from two different guns, some kind of shoot-out, par for the course in exotic Pouthisat. 'In addition,' Pringle went on, 'you confronted a high-ranking officer of the Khmer Rouge and can recognize him again. I think Mr Flockhart would certainly wish me to signal him.'

An apple for the teacher — he sounded just like that bastard Loman. 'I found the camp,' I said, 'but I'd imagine quite a few people in this town know it's there, other than the Khmer Rouge. They know how to keep secrets in this place.'

'Possibly so,' Pringle's voice came from beside me — we were sitting in the pitch dark now — 'but despite their ability to keep secrets, we know the camp is there now, and that's rather more important.'

Had a point but I wasn't in the mood to admit it; he was so bloody reasonable, wouldn't give me a chance to spill my guts — some directors are like that, they don't realize the shadow needs to debrief what's on his mind as well as the information he's picked up.

'Then tell Flockhart,' I said, 'make his day. You'd also better tell him there are two more down.' I hadn't said anything in my debriefing about getting clear of the camp: it wasn't usable information; but we're always expected to report it if we put someone down.

'Very well,' Pringle said, and I heard him move, crossing his legs or something. 'This was in self-defence?'

'Call it that.'

In a moment, 'Was it? Or was it not? I'm sorry to — '

'The first one, yes, I couldn't have done anything if I hadn't put him down right away — they both had loaded assault rifles. I could have got away from the second one by knocking him cold, but I'm not sure he would've thanked me — with no surgeons in this place his legs would've been paralyzed for life.'

'I see. But during the confrontation, he had been attempting to kill you, is that right?'

'Yes.'

'Then London will be perfectly satisfied.'

It was no big deal, but the hierarchy upstairs starts worrying if any particular shadow reports too many people down during the course of his mission: for some among us the taste of blood can become addictive, though I've never fancied it myself.

'Well and good,' I said.

'And I understand perfectly.' He didn't.

'Look, they were soldiers, weren't they? Aren't soldiers expected to give their lives for the cause?' My voice hadn't got louder; it just had an undertone and I couldn't do anything about it.

Pringle shifted slightly on the seat towards me. 'Mr Flockhart — not to mention the Minister of Defence in London and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington — would be delighted if you were to put down the entire Khmer Rouge army in Cambodia, so I wouldn't fret too much about the two you dealt with yesterday.'

So he did understand — he'd looked at my profile on the files in London rather carefully. Even in this most inhuman of all trades I've never taken a man's life without feeling another scar forming on the psyche, and this time I'd been able to sleep only because of the long black hairs caught in the bamboo, guilt relieved by rage.