This could of course be their secret base, the one they'd moved to when they'd gone underground. In the normal run of things a hit man is low in the echelon, but a hit man ordered to target a government minister would rank higher, and his brother might be persona grata at headquarters. Or he could simply have come here on orders to debrief, as the driver of the Russian Zhiguli on the night of the attempted assassination.
Two of the voices were women's, sharp and shrill, the voices of fanatics. In a culture where female citizens were looked upon as cattle and female soldiers as whores they had done well, these two, to have risen this far in the ranks.
I put one ear against the wall and listened. The volume was increased but it still wasn't good enough: I'd be wasting my time. I felt in the darkness for the French doors to the balcony and found them and turned the oval handle, drawing the vertical bolts clear at the top and bottom, taking time, keeping pressure against the doors with one shoulder to stop the bolts springing free with a bang — I couldn't afford to make a sound, the slightest sound during the brief silences that came from the next room.
As I inched open the doors the night air came softly in, humid after the rain but cooler than in here. But it was the light that stopped my movements dead, the light and the sound of their voices. Through the slats of the shutters I could see the floor of the balcony in the light that came from the other room: they'd opened the shutters there and the French windows as well, possibly to let the smoke out or cool the air or both. I hadn't expected that.
The options were unattractive: their voices were clear now and I could set the recorder going and leave it running for thirty minutes and turn the tape over and run it for another thirty but there was the distinct risk that during the hour someone would come into this room and raise a shout when he saw me and before I could reach him, call it a hornets' nest.
Or I could open these windows wider and ease the shutters hack and move onto the balcony, but it ran past both rooms and I'd risk being seen and if that happened there'd be no point in going back through the room and down the stairs because there wouldn't be time before they pulled their guns and put out a fusillade, finis.
Or I could abort the operation now, get out of this room and go back down the stairs while I had time, the risk factor zero unless that door opened onto the landing and someone came out within the next twenty seconds, the time it would take me to reach the ground floor.
I stood listening to the voices coming through the shutters.
There was no laughter, not even occasional. That wasn't a party they had going in there. One of their hit men had been killed and they'd be debriefing his brother on that; they would also be discussing other business, and that was why I'd bought a Sony 309 compact cassette recorder at the Marche Olympique yesterday on the chance that when I went to the funeral it would give me a lead. The objective for Salamander was information, and all I needed was to hear people talk.
Their voices rose and fell.
I was terribly disinclined to abort.
You'll get yourself killed if you don't.
Shuddup.
I didn't like the idea of the staircase as an escape route. I was already this side of the ninth stair, the point of no return, and even if I ignored that, the scene projected for me in the imagination was unpleasant: the shadow executive for the mission crashing down the stairs with his hands flung out and the steel-nosed slugs from the Chinese rifles going into his spine before he could even start counting. The space was too confined and once on the staircase I wouldn't be able to dodge or turn or break for covet, I'd be like a dog in a drainpipe.
Discount staircase.
One of the women was speaking, using a lot of emphasis, her eyes watching the moon for the first time not so long ago, the round white toy in the sky, while her mother told her its ancient name, the name of a goddess, told her it was much too far to touch as the tiny hands reached out for it, using a lot of emphasis now as she pulled herself to her full height with her eyes brighter than the moon and burning with the light of the crusader, her small breasts flattened under the battledress and the bandolier and her small hands calloused by the long hours at the firing range, a lot of emphasis, her voice chopping at the air as she spoke of the things she had learned in these few years, how to bring bloodshed back to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek in the cause of Communism for Kampuchea.
Try the last option next, then, get it out of the way: abort the operation.
Yes, because if you don't
Oh for Christ's sake shuddup.
I'd come here for information and it could be a breakthrough if I got it, a breakthrough within three days of coming into the field, so the only option I was prepared to take was going out onto that balcony and hitting the record button and letting this thing go on running until we had a bit of bad luck and one of them saw me there or heard me there and I had to use the balcony itself as the escape route, make a controlled drop, and that wouldn't be anything new because -
You'll kill yourself
God's sake piss off will you, because I'd already allowed for it in my original plans, to make the drop and get to the corner of the building and out of the gunsights and get clear. The balcony faced west and I'd left the Mazda on the east side of the villa and that made the whole thing possible: I'd have time to get as far as the car and take it away before they set up the fusillade, it could work, let's put it like that, if things went wrong it wouldn't be a certain death.
And that was as much as I would ask: to know that the risk was calculated.
Kheng was barking again, if that was his voice in there, General Kheng San's, and silence fell and I didn't touch the right-hand shutter until the voices came in again and provided sound cover. I chose the right-hand shutter because it opened away from the other room instead of towards it and would reflect less light from the angled slats on the floor of the balcony.
As the shutter swung back by a millimetre at a time I sighted along the balcony with one eye in the gap. The other room was open to the night as I'd thought, but all I could see were a few inches of the wall inside and a rifle leaning in the corner. They weren't troubled, these people, by the thought of being overlooked, overheard, shot at by a sniper: the villa stood in its own grounds and there was no traffic on the muddy track we'd taken here tonight, the agent and I.
The night air came against my face as I pushed open the shutter far enough to let me through in the prone position, with the Sony 309 held in front of me. Then I began crawling.
On my left, the wall of the villa, with the open doors twelve feet away; on my right, the balcony rail with the sheer drop beyond it. My world had become narrowed, together with the margin of error. If one of those people came onto the balcony now it would simply be a question of my luck having run out; but on top of the chance factor, mistakes could also be made, and as I pushed the record button on the little Sony I noted the dark crescent of tape under the transparent window as it began running, because in thirty minutes the automatic shutoff would be triggered and would produce a definite click, and if that happened during one of those silences in there they'd hear it, no question. Luck was out of my control, but mistakes would need to be avoided.
Crawling.
The Sony wasn't big; I'd chosen a micro because I might have to make a run with it: there'd been no choice. But it made things trickier, because the microphone wouldn't pick up distant sound, and I had to get as close as I could to the source — the voices that rose and fell in there, punctuated by the top dog's bark and lightened by the shrill tones of the women.