2. Truth or Consequences
The command compound was not at all what I'd expected despite a couple years monitoring the arms trade for the Congressman. Instead of slovenly guerillas lounging around smashed up jeeps and tricked up Humvees's, I counted a half dozen FV101 Scorpions, a British APV offered to the less fortunate at bargains that usually hovered around a quarter million American. Fronting the gate were two M41's, a little but well-armed American MPV, packing a 76 mm cannon. We hadn't used it in sometime although the Thai Army did. Rounding out the United Nations look were three Chinese-built Type 531 personnel carriers, their former Thai Army markings still apparent under a fresh paint over, prowling toward the gate. They could be on the way to anywhere near -- they were fully amphibious. Altogether, gas/rubber/oil added, there were several million of assets casually draped across the yard.
Apart from the hardware, it looked like a small but high-tech corporate office campus, roofs bristling with dishes, antennae and arrays. Security cameras were everywhere. Armed, uniformed soldiers were everywhere but they kept to their stations, quiet and disciplined. The little staging camp outside Kamphaeng Phet where I'd been choppered from Bangkok had nothing on this place at all, K-Phet's CIA & NSA assets notwithstanding.
Somehow this frightened me much more than if I'd wound up in a rowdy pirate's cove. Still, I was rather calm, and wondered if the water I'd been given by at the clearing had contained a bit of alcohol or something, as I also felt slightly numbed since drinking it.
We went inside one of the larger buildings, entering beneath a sign that said in several languages, including English: "Police." The wooden floor was smooth to my bare feet. The soldiers had taken my boots and socks off on the way over with grins all around and the taunting admonition: "No running!" I had the impression they thought this would inhibit me in some way, but I grew up in a modest middle class Angelino Latino neighborhood that was like a little village, where all us kids ran barefoot from house to house all day long, mock stern abuelas shushing us.
Now I was told to sit on a plain wooden chair in a very barren room whose only other contents were a couple of other chairs and a smashed-up Gameboy on the floor. I was pretty sure this was not the greeting room for honored guests, especially after they strapped a heavy leather collar around my throat. Not that I'd worn one before, but the collar seemed thick, laden with things sewn into it. I was relieved to sit, at least. Since drinking that tin-tasting water in the truck, my mind had been drifting a bit dizzy, a bit dreamy.
All sorts of horrible movie images of interrogation flashed through my mind. In between the imagined crack of rubber hoses and sickly sweet sizzle of electro-shock, I was trying to figure out how to lie.
Seriously.
Like the song says, it don't come easy. Not to me. I am a cop's daughter from a strict Mexican family, a good Catholic school girl who grew up believing in following the rules, telling the truth and obeying authority above all.
I know, I know; what the hell was I doing in politics? The truth is I thought America was too important to leave to the crooks. I thought good people could make a difference. That's why I joined my Congressman's staff -- he was a rock-ribbed conservative, an elder in his church, a leader of his party and scion of the Southern Baptist Convention. Even if he seemed a bit uncomfortable with Catholics, he was absolutely hell on sinners. He was against crime, corruption, and Cadillac liberals. Unlike socialists, Democrats, movie stars and other drug addicts, he truly loved freedom. True freedom. He understood what freedom truly was -- the right to behave the way you're supposed to behave. No more; no less.
It was why I was willing to climb into a little helicopter, fly over an Asian jungle and try to get him information he could use against dope peddlers and skin merchants. He was for the truth, and I was there to get it for him, so that he could fight against those who hated freedom. People like his Democratic opponent in the current election -- a man funded, we believed, in part by the drug-runners who originated in this place.
But now I was their captive, and thus came the paradox. I needed to lie to protect good people. My boss had said he had inside sources placed with the local warlords. I didn't want those people hurt, which they might be if I said anything to tip off that an investigation was underway. And it occurred to me, no-one had thought to school me a bit on how to do that, how to get through interrogation without giving up too much. My friends in the State Department got some hostage training to be diplomats. Couldn't someone have schooled me a bit for this job?
Just a little bit?
And for whatever reason, right now obeying authority -- any authority -- seemed especially compelling. Fish out of water, I told myself. Reaching for new rules with the old ones gone. Stay focused, I thought, but my thoughts seemed to drag up through mud.
I had fifty different terrifying notions of who might enter the room next, and not one of them came close to the scholarly young Anglo who did. Not that he was milquetoast. He was buff with a rock edged jaw. But he wore wire frame glasses like that Beatle that was killed back before I was born. Although they hadn't carried a good CZ knock-off like the Israeli forty mill he had strapped to his thigh, nor the Russian Bizon sub he slung off his shoulder and lowered carefully to the floor -- well, apart from those details, he might have been matriculating in the English department with a thesis on Lord Byron. He had a thoughtful expression as he began flipping through the pages in a manila file, and he reminded me of fellow grad students I'd known at Stanford.
The three guys with AK-47s who filed in behind him, however, were from central casting, whistled up for one of the 70's chicks-in-chains Third World prison flicks. Bad-ass, ill-tempered, and mean-spirited toughs in fatigues who sent my stomach twisting in on itself as they eyed my body up and down with such intensity I wondered if there was a test later.
"I'm Special Agent Roger Stephens," the scholar said, closing the file and staring hard into my eyes. "I'm an investigator for the Republic of Sop Ruak. I'm going to ask you a few questions. You will want to tell the truth. For each lie, there will be consequences."
"What's Sop Ruak?" I blurted out, voice shaking.
He didn't answer immediately, looking me over starting at my bare feet on up to my tousled black hair, his eyes warming with each inch. "We are a sovereign national state centered around the confluence of the Sop Ruak and Mekong rivers."
"I've never heard of it."
"Hardly surprising. You're an American. The United Nations refuses to recognize us. Your national media refuses to cover us. Your nation says we don't exist. We occupy a key niche in the world economy, but no one in the world likes to acknowledge that. But as you're learning, that doesn't mean we don't exist." He drew a chair to a point directly in front of me and sat down. "And we do intend to defend our sovereignty from espionage."
Espionage? I was the good guy here! I was the investigator. I was investigating him! "This is ridiculous. You're saying you run the Triangle? This -- Sap Rock?"
"Sop Ruak. And yes, this is our sovereign territory."
"I see. So, I guess, what? The Kuomintang is just gone? SUA -- they got nothing to say about it?"
He shrugged. "We've reached a power share agreement with both the Nationalist Chinese and with the Shan Burmese."
"We? You sound American."
"Don't be insulting," Stephens smiled. "I'm Canadian. I immigrated two years ago to the Republic of Sop Ruak."
"So from a country that barely exists," I said. "You've gone to one that doesn't exist at all."
"You're going to find we're very real, indeed." He leaned forward, his eyes like lasers. He had an air of authority to him so strong it seemed to succeed out of its own assumption of power. "What's your name?"
I hesitated -- but what could that hurt? "Anita." His stare kept burning until I added. "Anita Rosales."
He smiled, nodding. "Good girl," he purred. "Very good."
My collar buzzed pleasantly, and after a quick but relatively painless prick of my neck beneath it I sensed a little tide of endorphins surfing through my blood. Mild, but sweet; nice. Maybe this wasn't going to be so bad, after all.
