“¡Puta!”
“Wasn’t a woman, Tony,” McKenna, who was sitting in the front seat, said.
“Drove like one.”
Normally, Pearson would have had a retort for Munoz’s chauvinism, knowing his statements were meant good-naturedly. Today, she didn’t have one. She was still coming down from her self-recrimination high.
They crossed an intersection so jammed with vehicles that McKenna suggested bailing out and walking, but Munoz finally got them through it, then turned left at the next intersection and followed a street that paralleled the Tonle Sap River, north of its junction with the Mekong.
The maze of streets, many of them unmarked, was so confusing that, once again, she was glad to have the two men with her. They had both been here before.
“How close do we want to get?” Munoz asked.
“Not too close with the car,” Pearson told hint.
“You happen to see somethin’ looks like a parkin’ place, hit me in the head, will you?”
“Try the next alley,” McKenna said.
Munoz whipped a hard right, bounced over the sidewalk, and slid to a stop next to a plaster-walled building. Overflowing garbage cans swarmed with flies. Washing was hung out to dry on lines strung high over the alley. Small children rushed to greet them, hands out.
Pearson couldn’t open the door on the right because the wall of the building was four inches away. They all got out on the left, locked the car, and McKenna gave four kids a handful of riels to watch the car.
“They’ll watch it until we’re gone, jefe, then steal the hubcaps.”
“You like those hubcaps?” McKenna asked.
“Hell, no.”
“So we won’t buy them back.”
The stench of urine and excrement in the alley was almost overpowering, and when they reached the street, the smell was simply overlaid with an aroma of herbs and spices offered for sale in an open-fronted kiosk. The sidewalk was composed of broken slabs resting at odd angles. Parts of the curbing had disintegrated, allowing weeds to grow in compacted dirt. A few scrawny sugar palms were spaced along the street.
They walked for almost a mile, Pearson becoming aware of sore muscles in her thighs and calves, before McKenna said, “There you go, Amy, across the street.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
All she could see was a plaster wall, painted cream, about twenty feet high, that extended for perhaps a block.
“How do we see inside?”
“Let’s walk around it.”
She wasn’t looking forward to more walking, but stayed between the two men as they jostled through the crowds. They turned left and crossed the street at the next corner.
Halfway down the north side of the compound was a massive wrought iron gate as tall as the walls. There were two heavyset Asians guarding it from the inside.
The interior looked a lot more inviting than the outside. Gravel and shrubs and trees appeared to have been placed by design. She saw a few doors to houses half-hidden by the landscaping. She didn’t see anyone out and about except for the guards.
“Don’t stare, Amy,” McKenna said.
“What?”
“Spies don’t stare.”
They kept walking down the cracked sidewalk and turned left at the next corner.
Turned left again at the next block and crossed along the southern boundary of the compound back toward the street on which they had parked the car. There was another wrought iron gate in the wall.
And nothing to be seen.
“What now, Amy?” McKenna asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What would you like to find?”
“A connection of some kind.”
“To?”
“To something.”
“You’ve got a list of the businesses?”
“Yes.” She had to dig around in her purse — she hadn’t carried a purse in months — to find it.
McKenna took a long look at the handwritten roster, then passed it to Munoz.
“Can you find those addresses, Tiger?”
“Most of ’em, maybe. It’s been awhile.”
They walked back to the car, found it intact, and McKenna passed out more riels to the squealing kids. Most of them looked malnourished, and Pearson felt guilty about it.
The afternoon passed, without lunch, and without learning much more. The businesses they examined from a distance all appeared legitimate. There was a chemical factory, a tire plant, a couple pharmacies, a furniture factory and attached store, a welding and fabrication shop, a car dealership, and several restaurants.
By six o’clock, they had covered every enterprise on her list with a Phnom Penh address.
“Is that it, enamorada?” Munoz asked.
“There are probably more, but that’s all I have. Except for the children’s hospital.”
“Well, let’s check it out before it starts gettin’ dark,” Munoz said.
“It’s not here. Somewhere to the north, by the Tonle Sap Lake.”
“Well, then,” McKenna said, “let’s find a place to sleep for the night and get some dinner. We’ll work up a cover story and go see the hospital in the morning.”
Pearson wasn’t eager to spend the night in the same hotel with McKenna, but she couldn’t think of a logical reason to do anything else. It had been her idea to start this goose chase, after all.
“We can probably find somethin’ spicy to eat,” Munoz said, “and somethin’ cold and alcoholic to drink.”
“Dimatta would trade places with you,” McKenna said. “He’s not finding much in the way of exotic food in Chad.”
“We deserve it. After all, compadre, it’s his aerospace craft we’re lookin’ for.”
“In the middle of Phnom Penh,” McKenna observed.
“It’s gotta be somewhere. Might as well be here.”
Wilbur Conover was so rested he was restless. While he waited for his turn to relieve Lynn Haggar on what they were calling Really High Combat Air Patrol (HICAP), he went to the Command Center, borrowed McKenna’s office cubicle, and had Val Arguento collect copies of the last twenty-four-hour’s worth of satellite infrared coverage.
There was one Rhyolite and one Teal Ruby satellite each in geosynchronous orbits 22,370 miles above the equator, and their sensors had been aimed toward the southern Asian mass. Conover ran their tapes at high speed, using the computer to give him a beep and stop the tape if an anomalous infrared emission appeared. All he found was the retro bum of Delta Blue reentering the atmosphere and, several times, the orbit track of Themis. The space station had a number of hot spots generated by the nuclear reactor, the warm side of the satellite, and the solar collectors. Since she moved in the sensor’s eye, she was an anomaly. Once, the Soyuz Fifty, which was in an orbit of different altitude and characteristics than Themis, passed through the sensors. Each time the tape stopped, Conover automatically glanced at the green lettering in the upper right corner which denoted the time and location of the shot.
Lower, at the Earth’s surface, the cities, towns, and villages generating heat didn’t move much. The tiny pinpricks of heat emitted by vehicles and ships at sea had been filtered out of the image.
It was a boring exercise, but he managed to waste a couple hours.
Conover hit the intercom button for the radio shack.
“Val, what else have we got in the vicinity?”
“Hold on, Major. The NSA gave us an updated celestial map a few hours ago… here we are. The closest thing is a KH-11, but she’s way north, covering China and Korea.”
“See if you can get a copy of her tape for me, will you? Maybe I’ll watch a Ping-Pong game in Beijing.”
It took twenty minutes to retrieve the tape and transmit it from the National Security Agency’s complex at Fort Meade, Maryland.