The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller Page 24

  As they sped past the Phnom Penh High School he shuddered inwardly. He had built it to educate. The Khmer Rouge had used it to re-educate. Such an innocent word to describe the torture and murder that raged inside S.21, the Tuol Sleng extermination centre. All in the name of a people who had been brutalized just as savagely. The madness, he knew, had no parallel. Even Hitler had not enslaved and destroyed his own people.

  At the top of the street, the car turned north towards the airport where they would catch the last flight out to Peking. A movement caught the Cambodian’s eye, and he turned with amazement to see the naked figure of a small boy pushing a bicycle and running away down a side street. Their driver braked hard, slamming the car to a halt with a squeal of tyres.

  ‘What are you doing!’ Prince Sihanouk demanded.

  ‘Deserter!’ spat the driver, and swung himself out of the car. He drew his pistol, steadied it at arm’s length on the roof, and levelled it at the back of the running boy.

  ‘Leave it!’ snapped one of the Chinese. ‘There is no time!’

  The driver cursed. The boy was out of range anyway. He holstered his pistol and jumped back into the driver’s seat, his lips curled in annoyance.

  ‘Go,’ said the Chinese. ‘We are already late.’

  As the car screeched away with spinning tyres, Sihanouk saw the naked boy turn safely out of view to be swallowed up by the doomed city. It was to be the Prince’s last sight, he knew, of his beloved Phnom Penh. And it filled him with a deep despair.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Serey and Ny squatted on facing bunks by the light of a small oil lamp, gorging on large bowls of steaming rice. Outside, the rumble of thunder sounded ominously in the black night sky, and warm rain battered on the deck above. Ny glanced nervously at her mother. They had not spoken in the hours since the shooting on the boat. The initial tears had dried up. The warmth of their embrace, as Serey clung to her daughter in the moments after the shooting, had turned cold, and that brief vulnerability had dissipated, leaving her brittle and aloof. Ny’s burden of guilt seemed greater now than ever.

  She looked at the frail, shrunken figure in peasant pyjamas and longed simply to hold her. Through all the silent years, when family loyalties and affections had been dangerous, banished by the higher demands of Angkar, they had grown apart. Confidences had become almost as rare as conversation. Increasingly, all that had tied them was the umbilical cord of the past, memories, how they had once been. Mother and daughter. They were like strangers now, embarrassed by the knowledge of what each had done, what each had become. They had no secrets. Whatever Hau had done or become, only he knew. And he knew nothing of their shame. Perhaps Hau would be their only salvation. I have done things. They made me do things, he had told her that night beneath the hut at the commune. She hadn’t wanted to know then, didn’t now. She wanted never to know. She remembered his small, boyish face with its old eyes, and the tears that had run down his cheeks as he left. I will go to our home in Phnom Penh. If our country is freed tell my mother to look for me there.

  ‘Do you think Hau will be in Phnom Penh?’ she asked suddenly.

  Her mother’s sad eyes flickered slowly up to meet hers. ‘There is no point in asking questions that cannot be answered.’

  It was like a slap in the face, and the old woman turned back to the last of her rice, unaware of the tears that filled her daughter’s eyes, blinking hard to hide her own.

  Directly above them, in the cabin, Elliot was slumped in a fixed swivel seat by the wheel watching the rain run down the windows. His cigarette glowed in the dark as he sucked deeply at the hot burning tobacco. Along with the sacks of rice in the galley, they had found other provisions: tinned foods, cartons of cigarettes, a crate of beer. They had eaten their fill, then taken a course south across the deserted wastes of the Great Lake. As the sun set, they had reached the southern end of the lake and navigated slowly through numerous waterways before debouching into the wide, chocolate-brown waters of the slow-moving Mekong. These had been tense moments, exposed as they were to attack from either bank. But they had seen nothing, no sign of human activity or habitation. An eerie calm blanketed the land, unnatural in its stillness.

  ‘Where is everyone – anyone?’ McCue had muttered under his breath. He was unsettled by the pall of silence, broken only by the gentle put-put of their engine, that hung over them.

  With the ending of the day, the heat and humidity had intensified, great dark clouds rolling in from the west to blot out the sky before night fell to cloak them in darkness. Elliot reckoned they were less than an hour upriver from Phnom Penh itself, and they had decided to drop anchor in the lee of the west bank and wait until just before dawn to make their final approach to the city. The rain had started not long after.

  Elliot took a slug of beer and checked his watch. Almost half-past ten. It would be a long night, through which the fear of tomorrow would deny him sleep. He was annoyed by the fear that knotted in his stomach and held all the muscles of his body hard and tense. It was unaccountable. Less than eight hours earlier he had accepted, without fear, that death was inevitable. And now, the hope that glimmered feebly in the promised light of dawn had made him fear again. Perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t death he was afraid of, but life.

  The sound of bare feet slithered across the roof and McCue dropped lightly down in the open doorway. Elliot could see his dark form faintly silhouetted against the sky beyond. The American stepped in out of the rain, dripping on to the dry boards. ‘No point in keeping watch. We can’t see and we can’t be seen in this rain.’ He spoke quietly, but his voice seemed very close.

  ‘Sure,’ Elliot said.

  ‘D’you get anything on the radio?’

  ‘Voice of America, Radio Moscow, World Service.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The Brits and the Yanks say the situation is confused. Moscow says the Khmer Rouge have abandoned the city and are fleeing north. The Vietnamese are expected to take Phnom Penh tomorrow.’

  McCue shifted uneasily in the dark. ‘What do you think?’

  Elliot took another draw on his cigarette. ‘I think things are bound to look confusing from a Bangkok massage parlour, which is where most of the American and British correspondents will be right now. The Russians’ll be getting their briefing from the front line.’

  ‘You still plan to go in before dawn?’

  ‘Have you got a better idea?’ The tension between them crackled like electricity in the dark.

  ‘You know the kid won’t be there.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So what then?’

  Elliot sighed and brushed the sweat from his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’ He sounded weary. ‘The woman and the girl shouldn’t have anything to fear from the Vietnamese.’

  ‘You ain’t suggesting we give ourselves up?’

  Elliot raised a bottle to his lips and let warm flat beer run back over his throat. ‘Can’t say I particularly fancy an extended stay at the Hanoi Hilton.’

  The Hanoi Hilton was the name given to the re-education centres in Hanoi where hundreds of American servicemen captured during the Vietnam war had been imprisoned and tortured, brainwashed into making public denouncements of their country’s involvement in the war. Many had eventually been released, but it was rumoured that many more still languished there.

  ‘So what are you suggesting?’ McCue’s voice was cold.

  ‘Seems to me,’ Elliot said, pulling the last lungful of smoke from his cigarette, ‘that our best hope is to reach the coast, try and get across the Gulf of Thailand.’

  ‘Shit, man! How are we gonna do that with an old lady and a young girl in tow?’

  Elliot shook his head. ‘We can’t.’

  There was a long silence. When at last he spoke, McCue’s voice was brittle and flinty. ‘You’re saying we dump them.’

  ‘Even if we could take them wi
th us, they wouldn’t go. Not without the boy.’ Elliot’s voice was calm and even. There was no hint of defensiveness in it. He was simply stating the facts as he saw them. He wasn’t prepared for McCue’s lunge across the cabin, the hands that grabbed him in the dark. Hot breath hissed in his face.

  ‘You bastard, Elliot! If you were ready to dump them, what the fuck are we doing here? What did Mikey die for?’

  For the first time in many hours all Elliot’s tension fell away. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I really don’t.’ And somehow the words relieved him of the burden. ‘Things just didn’t work out the way I planned.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ McCue raised his eyes to the ceiling in frustration and he let go of Elliot to slump back into the chair. He thought about Lotus, and his baby who would be asleep now on the rush mat in the back room of his klong house. Tears welled in his eyes with the realization that the boy would never know his real father, that Lotus would probably take another husband. That he was, after all, going to die. He sat limp, his arms dangling loose at his sides. ‘When I don’t need you any more, Elliot,’ he said softly, ‘you’re a dead man.’

  Elliot’s face glowed red, briefly, in the flare of the match he struck to light another cigarette. ‘You’re too late Billy,’ he said, his voice tight with emotion. ‘I died a long time ago.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ‘Have you known La Mère Grace long?’ The fat smiling face of the General leaned closer beside her at the table, a confidential air in his voice. His attentive eyes twinkled into hers.

  ‘No, not long at all,’ Lisa said. ‘Less than a week, in fact.’

  ‘Ah,’ the General said, as if this was deeply significant and he was being made privy to a secret. ‘She is a fine woman,’ he added.

  Lisa nodded. ‘Yes, she’s been very good to me.’

  The General was a large man, tall by Asian standards, overweight but impressive in his army dress uniform. He had a fine head of thick steel-grey hair and black, bushy eyebrows above smiling eyes. His lips were a little too thick, purplish and wet. In his mid-fifties, he was not an attractive man, but full of charm, Lisa thought. He had been particularly attentive and put her at her ease in this gathering of strangers. She heard the sound of Grace’s voice raised in laughter and she glanced down the table to see her in animated conversation with a small, ugly man in an expensive-looking grey silk suit. There were twenty round the long table, silver cutlery and cut crystal glasses sparkling in the candlelight. Much wine had been consumed with the meal and the conversation was lively, punctuated by frequent bursts of laughter.

  Most of the men were middle-aged or elderly; politicians, high-ranking army officers and senior policemen, Grace had told Lisa. Influential friends. Their female companions were all very young, Lisa’s age and a little older. Dazzlingly beautiful, delicate oriental girls, demure in traditional costumes of patterned Thai silk, or in long figure-hugging Vietnamese ao dai.

  Lisa’s dress, when it had been delivered that morning, had delighted her, the deep crimson complementing the hint of strawberry in her rich blonde hair, the daring cut exposing a wide slash of creamy white skin across the swell of her breasts. Grace had regarded her with obvious pleasure, nodding, satisfied, and said, ‘You’ll be the belle of the ball, my dear.’

  But when she first arrived at the club, Lisa had felt very conspicuous, tall and big-boned and rather clumsy beside these sylph-like Thai girls. Her skin, she thought, seemed an ugly, blue-veined white compared with the smooth golden brown of these lovely creatures. She felt very unattractive. So she had been surprised, and then flattered, when very quickly she had become the centre of attention, eyes dwelling on her with undisguised admiration. She had caught the jealous glances of several Thai girls and felt her confidence returning, taking a heady delight in the attentions of such important people. Once or twice she had caught Grace’s eye, and Grace had nodded, smiling encouragement.

  The General introduced himself early, fetching her a drink and telling her that she must sit beside him at dinner. A young white girl, particularly one as beautiful as Lisa, must take great care in a city like Bangkok to choose carefully the company she keeps, he had told her. His mischievous smile had instantly endeared him to her. She had laughed. But still she remembered Sivara.

  The meal was served discreetly by white-jacketed waiters who flitted soundlessly among the guests like ghosts. Seafood platters on beds of rice, tender beef curry and coconut in scooped-out pineapple shells, cellophane noodle salad and sticky rice with coconut cream. For the most part the men drank Thai whisky and the women sipped at glasses of expensive French wine. At the other side of a small, dimly lit dance floor, a quartet of musicians played lazy American jazz music that drifted across the conversation.

  Lisa felt warm and relaxed, and was gently tipsy from too much soft, fruity, red wine.

  ‘Grace tells me your father is in Cambodia.’ The General’s simple statement startled her. In the days she had spent lying around reading, lazily flipping through Grace’s huge collection of books on erotic art, accompanying Grace on occasional shopping trips, she had almost forgotten why she was here. The nightmare of the attack by Sivara had retreated from her memory like a bad dream, and for the first time since her mother’s death she had begun to relax, succumbing to the warm somnambulant comforts of Grace’s sumptuous villa with its pretty maidservants and good food.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, and she felt her face flush with guilt. Why did it seem so much less important now that she find her father than it had only a week ago?

  The General shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a bad business.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ A stab of fear pierced Lisa’s complacency.

  ‘Have you not read the newspapers? Refugees from Cambodia and many deserting Khmer Rouge are flooding over the Thai border in their thousands. The Khmers have been well beaten in the south and are retreating north into country which, by all accounts, is now ravaged by famine. And the Vietnamese seem poised to take Phnom Penh any day.’

  ‘But what does that mean for my father?’

  The General put a comforting hand over hers. ‘I’m afraid, my dear, that any Westerner caught up in events south of the border has little or no chance of surviving them.’

  ‘It will be a difficult time, too, for Thailand.’ A dapper, middle-aged member of the government sitting opposite poured himself another whisky. ‘Just when we thought we had the communists under control at home, there could be anything up to half a million of them flooding over the border.’

  ‘Frankly,’ an earnest middle-aged journalist cut in, ‘I see a bigger threat from having the Vietnamese along our border. At least the Khmer Rouge kept themselves to themselves. The Vietnamese are well known for their territorial ambitions.’

  The General lit a fat Havana cigar. ‘There are already several divisions of our troops on their way to stiffen border security, Lat, as you well know. It would be very unhelpful of you to print such scaremongering speculation in your newspaper.’

  The politician added, ‘We also have the full financial and political backing of the Americans.’

  The journalist curled his lips in a sardonic smile. ‘A lot of good that did Thieu in Saigon or Lon Nol in Cambodia.’

  ‘You mean there could be a war?’ Lisa felt nonplussed by this exchange on a subject of which she had so little grasp.

  ‘Oh, I doubt that,’ the General smiled. ‘A little sabre-rattling, perhaps.’ He patted her hand reassuringly. ‘I’m sorry to alarm you about your father, my dear. Perhaps he will survive. He is a soldier, after all, is he not?’ Lisa was shocked by how much he seemed to know. He leaned closer and whispered, ‘La Mère Grace has told me everything. She thought I might be able to help.’ She smelt the whisky and cigar smoke on his breath.

  ‘And can you?’ Her voice seemed very tiny.

  ‘I will certainly do whatever I can. My people on the border hav
e been well briefed. If your father succeeds in crossing back into Thailand he will be in safe hands.’

  If she’d had a little less to drink, Lisa might just have detected the subtly ambiguous stress placed by the General on the word safe. She might also have noticed the envy in the eyes of his companions across the table. But as it was, she felt nothing but gratitude towards this benevolent father figure who had steered her with such gentle assurance through the evening. He pushed his chair back and rose to his feet, holding out a hand towards her. ‘Dance?’

  Startled out of her reverie, brief thoughts about her father and why she was here, Lisa glanced towards the dance floor and saw that several other couples were already dancing. ‘Yes, of course.’ She took his hand and he led her on to the floor. He held her firmly, but formally, not too close, and guided her in a slow shuffle around the floor to the dreamy music of the small jazz band. Lisa noticed that most of the other couples danced with bodies pressed close, hands and arms entwined, and felt that she and the General seemed very out of place.

  ‘Are you not married?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I was married for nearly twenty-five years. My wife died eighteen months ago. Cancer of the throat.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

  The General smiled sadly. ‘We had not been close for many years. It was important to me that she give me sons. We tried for a long time. Then the doctor told us she could not have children and gradually we grew apart.’ He stared off somewhere over her shoulder, eyes glazed. ‘My fault really. I suppose I blamed her. As I blamed her for dying and leaving me, finally, on my own.’

  It was a sentiment Lisa understood only too well, and she gave the General’s hand a squeeze of sympathy. ‘But if you weren’t close . . .’