The Khmer Kill: A Dox Short Story (Kindle Single) (2 page)

She looked at the money. “Why?” she said again, making no move to take it.

“Were you telling me the truth last night, about your family?”

She nodded.

He reached out and took one of her small hands and folded the bills into it. “Then take the money. I told you, I’m only in town for a few days and then I have to go. In the meantime, I’d like to see you again. And I’d like to help you and your family out a little. I’m not asking for any quid pro quo.”

“Quid pro quo?”

“An exchange. Reciprocity. You know, payback.”

She shook her head. “I shouldn’t take your money. I didn’t even… We didn’t…”

“That’s fine. I enjoyed your conversation. We can do it again, if you give me a phone number.”

She did. And since then, he’d seen her every day after class, and she’d stayed with him at the hotel every night. The second evening was a little awkward. He could tell she was willing, but he wasn’t sure if she really wanted to. And he was concerned that by giving her the money, he’d made her feel obligated, which hadn’t been his intention. So they’d talked for a while, and then he read a book while she studied, and in the end they’d cuddled but that was all. They fell asleep spooned together, with her in front, and he knew she could feel his hard-on against her ass right through his jeans. He was glad she knew he wanted her but that he was holding back. He’d given her another hundred when she left in the morning, and the second time seemed to establish a comfortable pattern. Maybe he’d make love to her before he left the country, maybe he wouldn’t. He wasn’t overly concerned either way.

He’d told her he had a meeting today. She didn’t inquire what about; she just asked if he wanted to see her in the afternoon, the way they’d been doing. He told her yes. He wondered what she made of him. A rich foreigner could be her ticket out—hell, her whole family’s ticket. But she never pressed. Maybe she wasn’t sure whether to trust him. Maybe she was afraid he would make her a bunch of promises, buy her off with some cash, leave without saying goodbye. Maybe she had decided sometimes you have to act as if something was true even if you couldn’t be sure, the way he had. It bothered him some, that she might have those kinds of doubts about him. It bothered him more that she had some reason. But he didn’t see what he could do about it.

He stretched and cracked his knuckles over his head. Still no sign of the broker, but that was all right, it was only ten minutes to noon. He didn’t even know what the man looked like, only that he went by the name Gant and that a former Marine buddy had vouched for him. “Some kind of spook,” his buddy had assured him. “Agency is my guess. But could be Homeland Security, or maybe even NSA outsourcing the dirty work. Whoever he’s with, he’s got juice—ask for whatever hardware and logistics you want, he’ll get it for you pronto. And his money’s green.”

He thumbed through his Lonely Planet guide, periodically lifting his eyes for a casual sweep of the approach to where he sat. Some Japanese tourists, clicking cameras at the Angkor-era statues in contravention of signs prohibiting photos of the exhibits. A Khmer mother and two small kids, making a picnic in the coolness of the veranda shadows. He couldn’t have seen more than a few dozen people since he’d arrived, and it occurred to him that the museum seemed to boast more artifacts than it did visitors. The place had a slightly strange feel—sleepy; half-forgotten; somehow provisional, as though the curators expected that any day they might suddenly have to crate up everything and move it underground. Habits of war, he decided. It’s not just the warriors who keep them after the conflict has ended. Civilians do, too, and maybe even more so.

He liked Cambodia. He’d never been anywhere in Southeast Asia that didn’t agree with him, and it was no coincidence he made his home in Bali. Phnom Penh was seedy and hot and shit-poor, with colonial buildings stoically crumbling in the tropical humidity, and sidewalks so dilapidated they looked like they’d been bombed. There were pockets of construction—hotels and office complexes and such—but these only seemed to emphasize the parlous state of everything else. Families economized by riding three and sometimes four at a time on legions of motor scooters, there were beggars everywhere, and food was apparently dear enough that an overweight Khmer was nowhere to be seen. But despite all this, the place thrummed with optimism and hope. The Cambodians had been sodomized for centuries—the Vietnamese, the French, and most of all, the homegrown Khmer Rouge—but no matter how life beat them down, they kept getting back up. They hustled at work, strolled with their children along the river quay, and never stopped smiling. He’d read somewhere how a wild thing never felt sorry for itself, no matter how bad its circumstances, and that seemed to describe Cambodia, too. Certainly it described Chantrea.

Gant showed at twelve o’clock sharp, a novice move. Either he wasn’t particularly tactical, or he wasn’t particularly concerned. Hard to know on short acquaintance. The man was unremarkable in every way: Caucasian; thinning brown hair, neatly cut; average size and build; a crisply pressed shirt, khaki pants, canvas shoes; expensive-looking sunglasses; a camera hanging around his neck. Dox looked more closely, and saw the camera was an older model digital Olympus, which he’d been told to watch for.

Dox stood as the man approached—for courtesy, of course, but also because he preferred to be on his feet and mobile when greeting a stranger like this one. Gant’s hands were empty and his shirt was tucked, but Dox knew plenty of places a man could conceal a weapon besides around his waist.

“This wouldn’t be Wat Phnom, would it?” the man said, the bona fides Dox had been told to expect.

“No, you’ll probably want to get a tuk-tuk for that,” Dox replied, the other half of the prearranged exchange.

The man held out his hand. “Dox?”

They shook. Dox noted a reasonably firm grip that told him little about the man on the other end of it. “And you would be…?”

The man smiled, apparently in amusement at the additional precaution. “Gant,” he said. “Why don’t we sit?”

They did. Dox kept his tactical seat and Gant made no protest about having his back put toward the approach to the table. Again, Dox was struck by the man’s confidence. Whoever this guy was, he must have been exceptionally connected to carry himself like no one would ever dare make a run at him.

“Enjoying Phnom Penh?” Gant asked, pleasantly enough.

Dox couldn’t place his accent. American, and not from anywhere in Texas, where Dox had grown up, and nowhere else in the south, either. But beyond that, it could have been from anywhere, much like Gant himself.

“Sure, I like it fine. How about you?”

Gant waved an insect away. “I get tired of these third-world pissholes. I keep waiting for a problem to crop up in London, or the Côte d’Azur. Someplace where the tap water won’t kill you and they know how to make a proper martini.”

Not that a proper martini wasn’t important, but Dox thought the guy sounded like a dipshit. “Well, you’ve got your priorities,” he said, wanting to stay noncommittal.

Gant raised his eyebrows. “What about you?”

“How do you mean?”

“Your priorities.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Paid and laid, and I’m usually pretty happy.”

Gant smiled. “A simple man.”

Dox smiled back. “That’s what people say.” He could have added,
That’s what I like them to think.

“In Phnom Penh, I doubt you’ll need my help getting laid. As for getting paid, you’ve received the deposit?”

Dox nodded. “Twenty percent, plus travel expenses.”

“Good. Now let’s talk about getting you the balance. What do you need from me?”

“Well, unless you’re carrying a thumb drive or something, I assume you’ve uploaded the file to the secure site?”

“I don’t think you’ll need a file.”

“How am I going to find the subject?”

“I can tell you exactly where he’ll be, and when he’ll be there.”

“How am I going to recognize him?”

“It shouldn’t be hard. He’ll be sitting next to me.”

Dox looked at Gant, wondering if he was serious. “You want to be sitting right next to this guy when it goes down?”

“It seems the surest and most uncomplicated way of doing things, don’t you think?”

Dox considered suggesting,
I think you don’t know a damn thing about what it’s like to be talking to a guy one moment and having his brains all over you the next.

Instead, he said, “Well, who is the guy?”

Gant frowned. “Is that… something you ordinarily need to know?”

Dox didn’t answer right away. The truth was, ordinarily he didn’t need to know much: a name; known locations, acquaintances, and habits; a photograph. The people who hired him didn’t want him to know more than necessary, and that suited him, too. Learning too much could make the target become too human. The more human the target became, the harder the job got. “If it inhabits your mind, it will inhibit your trigger finger,” an instructor had once told him, and he’d found the admonition to be true.

Still, he’d never been brought onto a job and been told flat-out nothing. It was disconcerting, and he realized that until now he’d always been relying on some minimum amount of information about the target to feel comfortable taking the job. Maybe it was a rationalization, but the people he killed, one way or another, they were all in the game. If you wanted to be in the game, you had to accept the risks. An ordinary bare-bones target file was always enough to confirm, however incidentally, that the target fit the “in the game, knew the risks” profile. But killing some guy he didn’t know the first thing about… that just didn’t feel right.

“Mister Gant—”

“Call me Mike if you like.”

“Whatever. The point is, I don’t even know you. I’ve got a buddy who vouched for you, and okay, that’s worth a lot, but I don’t know what outfit you’re with and I don’t know shit about what you’re mixed up in. For all I know, the guy you’re having a problem with is the damn prime minister of Cambodia.”

“What if he were?”

Dox smiled. “Well, then I priced the job too low and we’d need to fix that.”

There was a long silence. If Gant thought the silence was working on Dox, making him want to talk more, he was wrong. Silence and patience were some of Dox’s best friends.

Finally, Gant said, “How much do you know about this country?”

“I know the tap water can kill you and they can’t make a proper martini.”

Gant laughed. “All right, let me fill you in. Our man is named Rithisak Sorm. He’s former Khmer Rouge—”

“Those folks are still running around?”

“Oh, yes. Many of them make their home in Pailin province. Our man included, in fact. Though he’d be harder to get to there because outsiders are more conspicuous than in the capital.”

“You’re looking to take him down for war crimes?”

“Nobody cares what atrocities he committed in his youthful exuberance, though I can tell you he committed plenty. No, this is about something more contemporary. You might know that Cambodia is one of the world’s major hubs for human trafficking. Labor and sex slaves; men, women, and children; to and from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Macao, and Taiwan… they all pass through Cambodia. Or come to rest here.”

Dox did know all that, and plenty more, but he’d gotten far in life having people think he was a hick. Partly it was the accent. Fooled ‘em every time. “Okay,” he said.

“Sorm is a key facilitator of the trade. He has a talent for connections. Gang bosses. Politicians. Cops. He knows every customs and border official along the length of the Mekong. He makes sure everyone gets a cut of whatever they have a taste for—cash for the greedy, opium for the dope fiends, children for the degenerates.”

Whatever reluctance Dox had been feeling a few moments earlier instantly evaporated. Bribery and dope-running put this Sorm character squarely in the game. And children? Sorm sounded like more than just a legitimate target. He sounded like someone who flat-out needed killing.

But still, there were aspects of Gant’s story that didn’t figure. “So your problem is that by ‘connections,’ you also mean ‘protection.’”

“That is exactly right. You know why Sorm will be in Phnom Penh this week?”

Of course he didn’t know, so he just waited for Gant to continue.

“There’s a meeting of a UN GIFT task force—that’s the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking. Sorm always comes to town for these—they’re opportunities for him to fete existing customers and to meet potential new ones. Client relations and business development, all without even having to get on a plane. And you know what? I don’t even blame the people he corrupts. They know nothing ever changes, so why fight the system? Why not profit from it, while you can?”

“This is why you don’t just arrest him?”

Gant nodded. “The White House has been trying for years to get the Cambodian government to crack down on Sorm. It’s like running into a brick wall.”

“So you’ve decided to turn to alternative means of law enforcement.”

“That’s a nice way to put it, and it does seem to be the trend. I’m sure you’ve noticed the military is gradually being repurposed, right? Soldiers being deployed as cops, Military Commissions instead of civilian courts… And it’s no more than bipartisan consensus that the president has the inherent power to order the indefinite imprisonment, even the execution, of terrorist suspects, including American citizens. This isn’t so terribly different, if you think about it. The same principle, just a bit… broader.”

“A bit.”

Gant shrugged. “The public has proven itself comfortable with drone attacks on terrorists. We don’t think the market is quite ready for the acknowledged assassination of human traffickers, too. But Sorm is no less a problem because of that.”

“Pardon me for saying so, but I don’t think this all sounds like a long-term strategy for success.”

“I’m sure it’s not. But if I may utter the unutterable? Long-term success… that’s over. The empire is in its twilight. The goal here isn’t long-term health, it’s just to give the patient a few more comfortable years.” He smiled. “Of course, don’t quote me on that.”