The Angkor Abduction

By Austin I Pullé

When sex-traffickers kidnap a beautiful Eurasian teenager when she is on a school trip to the famous Angkor Wat complex in Cambodia, Alex reluctantly agrees to join in the search but then finds himself fighting a ruthless former Khmer Rouge warlord to rescue the beautiful Imogen and reunite her with her mother.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669844891

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Copyright © 2022 by Austin I Pullé.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 08/26/2022

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Prologue

Chapter 2 Singapore—Alex

Chapter 3 Ta Prohm Temple, Angor Wat, Cambodia

Chapter 4 Nalini—Singapore

Chapter 5 Sonn Sam—Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Chapter 6 The Kuan Yin Temple, Singapore

Chapter 7 The Geomancer—Chinatown Point, Singapore

Chapter 8 Four Seasons Hotel, Singapore

Chapter 9 Julius Polignac Offices, Singapore

Chapter 10 Caledonian-Chinese International School, Singapore

Chapter 11 Botanic Garden, Singapore

Chapter 12 Boat Quay, Singapore

Chapter 13 Trinh—Fort Canning, Singapore

Chapter 14 Alex—Geylang Red Light District, Singapore

Chapter 15 Silk Air

Chapter 16 Imogen—Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Chapter 17 Hotel Apsara Diamond, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Chapter 18 The Bayon Imperial, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Chapter 19 The Night Aquarium Restaurant, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Chapter 20 Mong La, Myanmar

Chapter 21 The Apsara Café, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Chapter 22 Imogen Photoshoot—Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Chapter 23 Sapphire Buddha Temple, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Chapter 24 The Foundation for Innocents, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Chapter 25 The Apostles’ Club, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Chapter 26 Sisters of Mercy Hospital, Phnom Penh

Chapter 27 Phnom Penh International Airport, Cambodia

Chapter 28 Sonn’s House Mansion, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Chapter 29 Sisters of Mercy Hospital, Phnom Penh

Chapter 30 Trinh—Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Chapter 31 Nalini, Arul, Lakshmi—Pasir Ris, Singapore

Chapter 32 Ta Prohm Temple, Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Chapter 33 Blue Elephant Inn, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Chapter 34 Breakfast Garden, Blue Elephant Inn, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Chapter 35 Alex—Siem Reap, Cambodia

Chapter 36 Imogen—Ton Lé Sap Lake, Cambodia

Chapter 37 Rice Fields, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Chapter 38 Villa Frangipani Auction, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Chapter 39 Bidding—Vila Frangipani, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Chapter 40 Winning Bid—Villa Frangipani, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Chapter 41 Farewells—Siem Reap International Airport, Cambodia

CHAPTER 1

Prologue

Blossom—Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Stuck in traffic and irritated, Siray looked up from her phone and watched a scrawny urchin sprinting on the muddy sidewalk strewn with plastic straws, broken glass bottles, and food waste. Siray felt ashamed of her country. In Singapore, she told her driver, Mother go jail for making daughter beg.

Yes, madam, the driver replied, even though he had never left Cambodia. Singapore no allow beggar.

Siray rechecked her iPhone for the umpteenth time. Glad that she was protected from the violent thundershower pelting down rain like hailstones outside, she could not understand how beggar children enjoyed splashing in the mud in the middle of torrential rain instead of sheltering in a wayside drinks kiosk. Having arrived at the Phnom Penh International Airport an hour earlier from a shopping trip in Singapore, she was eager to get home. Her father’s driver greeted her in the special VIP’s arrival luxury lounge reserved for diplomats and ministers although neither she nor her father was eligible to use the lounge. She had rewarded the customs official with ten American dollars for bringing her checked-in bags to the enclosure without daring to inspect them much less asking her to pay the mandatory customs duties on the Birkin bags, Hermes scarves, and Chanel suits neatly packed in her Louis Vuitton luggage ensemble. Leaving a half-finished glass of chardonnay on the bar counter of the VIP lounge and popping a few salted peanuts into her mouth, Siray had followed the driver out of the lounge, who carried her bags to her father’s brand-new red Lamborghini Urus. Even though there was a slight drizzle, Siray did not mind waiting. Protocol required that the driver should open the door for her to get in. It was only when the driver had slid open the door and bowed to her that she got in, and the driver slid the door shut with what she thought was unnecessary force. The driver left the airport parking lot without paying the parking fee, a privilege of the powerful who signaled power by not deigning to display a license plate, having vehicle windows tinted beyond their allowable limit, and tearing up parking tickets.

Siray already missed Klaus and the gleaming malls of Singapore that she had reluctantly left but a few hours ago. Her father had ordered her to return for his mother’s birthday party. Family is everything, he had lectured her. It’s all you’ve got. Angry with her father for cutting short her shopping trip, she had wanted to blurt out that she knew that her father was fucking her best friend but had held back at the last moment. She knew that her father had paid for the Jimmy Choos flaunted by her friend. But Siray had upstaged the bitch by buying two sets of Christian Louboutins and three blood-red, blue, and purple Birkin bags in Singapore, charging these to the black American Express card that her father had given her. The gentle drizzle that had greeted her at the airport turned itself into a raging thunderstorm with flashes of lightning followed by deafening claps of thunder that seemed too close for comfort. Siray shivered in the Lamborghini and told the driver to turn down the air conditioner although the freezing interior pleasantly reminded her of the luxury shopping malls in that to her Singapore were heaven on earth. She had bought several dresses from the Chanel shop at the Ion Shopping Mall and then visited Prada at the Paragon Shopping Mall. She purred at the prospect of posting pictures of her purchases on Instagram and Facebook to be envied by her clubbing friends.

Still stuck in traffic, Siray to the driver to join the other drivers by leading on the horn. She checked her iPhone XI for any messages. Her German lover—who had romanced her at the Ion Mall and had then spent some passionate hours with her at a Hotel 81, a short happy-time hotel—had not replied to the dozen messages, each with different emoticons, that she had sent him from Changi Airport. She sighed in pleasure remembering the blond pubic hairs that had engulfed her when she had gone down on him and his grunts of appreciation in German, especially when he reached orgasm and released his essence into her mouth, which she swallowed in one gulp. After this bout of passion, as she nestled in his arm, Klaus stroked her hair and said, I need a loan of ten thousand dollars to finish my app. It’s a killer app. When they exited the short happy-time motel, they walked, arms entwined like a soon-to-be-married couple, to an ATM. She told Klaus, who was wearing aviator sunglasses, that he looked like Brad Pitt. Thwarted by the withdrawal limits at the machine, Klaus disguised his annoyance and persuaded Siray to take a taxi to the Maybank branch at Holland Village, where Siray withdrew the money from the joint account she had with her father. Siray stood on the tips of her high-heeled shoes, nearly tumbling to kiss Klaus after giving him the money, and said she would WhatsApp him when she would return to Singapore. Klaus, who was reading a text from a teenage Filipina waitress from Hooters at Clarke Quay that he would meet later that night, rolled his eyes behind his glasses but told Siray that he could hardly wait.

The traffic began to move slowly. Siray looked through the rain-splattered window. The urchin was not to be seen. The rain was pounding the sidewalk and the roof of the Lamborghini like bullets from a souped-up Uzi. Siray hated the rain. Unlike Singapore, Phnom Penh didn’t have shelters built for thundershowers. She hoped that, when she went out clubbing in Phnom Penh, the iconic red heels of the Louboutines would not be damaged by the uneven sidewalks or be coated with mud which damage that she knew would cheer her clubbing friends.

The thundershower had drenched the little girl’s clothes. She shivered. It was not the wet rain and the drenched rayon fabric that clung to her body that made the little girl shiver. This tiny girl was soaked to the skin but did not care about the drenching thundershower interspersed with bolts of lightning. She was terrified, but she also had hope. The same hope that an antelope or a wildebeest had that it could outrun the cheetah or cheat a hungry lion of its lunch. Escape was not a question of thinking. There was no time for that. Instead, every nerve in the little girl screamed run, run, fast, faster. She did not have to think. She had to run and run fast—very fast—if she wanted to stay alive.

Asian children in Indochina are small. Some had naturally small frames. Others, and of these there are tens of millions, it was chronic malnutrition that stunted their growth. Girls were especially malnourished because they were allowed to eat only what remained on the table after their brothers and father had eaten their fill. The little girl dashing through the sludge on the street was slightly older than ten years, but she looked about eight. That was an advantage when it came to enrolling in school. But what could have been a blessing turns out to be a curse. If a girl looked like a young child, there is a ready-made market of old men who would pay a fortune to have sex with a child. Once, she was called Peach Blossom in her native Vietnam or Blossom, and that was what her baby brother had called her when they teased the puppy they both found in a ditch and had adopted as their own in that village near Hanoi. Often, she remembered the puppy that always seemed to forgive them for the mean tricks they played on it and bound up to them with its black pig-like curly tail wagging furiously, inviting more roughhousing.

She had been playing with her brother and the puppy when the men in the funeral truck billowing thick black diesel fumes had turned up at their crumbling tin shack. A gentle shower of rain had stopped, and the earth smelled fresh. The sun had begun to set; and a murder of crows, which had finally ceased to quarrel over the pieces of a cat that was roadkill, were busy tearing bits of flesh from the furry mess. The scent of mango blossoms was in the air. Her mother was in the kitchen cooking a dish of river fish, with the okra and greens plucked from the small vegetable plot that she tended. Blossom felt hungry as she smelled fried river fish and fried green plantains. The ash-faced man who climbed down from the truck belching black fumes had several scars on his face already pocked with angry-red acne. The wifebeater vest that he wore did not cover the red dragon tattooed on his chest, with the head of the dragon reaching above his collarbones. The man had come to collect a gambling debt; and Blossom’s father, who managed to hide from these debt collectors in the past, was passed out on a couch, drunk from the moonshine that he had bought from the mayor’s son. So many sorrows had he, and the cheap moonshine helped him forget his sorrows and the humiliations that he had endured from being rejected that day by the foreman at the construction site of the luxury condominium complex near Hanoi. The enforcer had pulled up Blossom’s snoring father and pounded his face and broke several teeth till her father was a whimpering mess on the floor, wiping his blood-splattered face. The children screamed. The man looked at them and kicked the ribs of their groaning father. Their mother rushed out from the kitchen with a knife only to be slapped and kicked by the man who wrestled the knife from her. Her baby brother ran back into the shack. Blossom shouted angry words that she did not understand but which her father had used on her mother when he was drunk, which were most nights. Sometimes her father would beat Blossom, saying that all his misfortunes was because of her since she was a girl child born in the Year of the Tiger. Tiger girls brought nothing but bad luck for the parents. The man resumed his battering. Blood was pouring out of the nose and mouth of her father’s face. The father, who was on the floor holding his bloodied face, tried to protect his ribs from the repeated kicking by the man shouting questions at the fallen man. Her father, his face a bloody mess, spit out two yellowed teeth, murmured something, and pointed to Blossom. The enforcer looked at her for a moment or two. Then in one fluid motion, he scooped Blossom up and sprinted to the truck, carrying her on his hip. Blossom screamed; and her mother, who was attending to her father and sheltering her brother, became more hysterical. Blossom kicked her tiny legs, pushing at the man’s body at the same time. She tried to escape to no avail. Her brother was screaming, not knowing what was going on with all the yelling. Something terrible was happening, but he could not know what. When the truck began to move, her mother, screaming like a banshee, raced after the accelerating truck. The enforcer, holding Blossom in his lap, laughed and nodded to the driver, who stepped on the gas. The enforcer began exploring Blossom’s crotch while she wept. The man said something to the driver, and they both laughed. Blossom’s life in hell had just begun.

A journey on the Mekong River in a creaky fishing boat on a moonless night; a transfer to a larger boat in Long Xuyen, where she was tied with nylon rope to another young girl and then bundled into a creaky truck; a drive across bumpy roads; and finally an arrival to a shop house in Phnom Penh followed. A woman, Siew Hoon, whom she later found that the customers of the brothel called Pig’s Arse, but not to her face, inspected her, raising her dress, and explored her crotch with a gnarled finger. When Blossom tried to hold her little skirt down, Hoon slapped her. Negotiations took place. American money, a dozen Benjamins, changed hands, and her life in a Cambodian brothel began.

A man from Kowloon had been the first to take her. Hoon had taken Blossom, her hair plaited in pigtails adorned with pink plastic flowers and dressed in a demure school uniform, to a hotel in Monivong Boulevard. She had collected the ten thousand American dollars from the man from Hong Kong. The sex tourists from Hong Kong had the reputation for paying top price to enter a virgin child. But of late, they were getting competition from the Saudis, Emiratis, and Nigerians; and business was booming. Nightmares would shatter the sleep of Blossom as she would wake up in a cold sweat when this man would appear in her nightmares, his flabby sweaty body almost crushing her and his foul breath spreading like an evil cloud over her.

As she fled, Blossom slipped on the sidewalk covered with liquid slime, a mixture of dog shit, rotting garbage, glass, and pieces of plastic.

She pulled herself up and saw the Wat, the Buddhist temple, in the distance. Like the towers of heaven, its golden spires would have gleamed—if there ever was heaven. If she could make it there, she would be saved. She prayed to the Buddha and tried to run faster. She looked back. The streets were not as crowded as usual. This was when Cambodians celebrated the Water Festival, the day when the Mekong River changed course and flowed upriver. A stampede during a previous festival had dampened celebrations, but Blossom was not celebrating. Surviving was her urgent need. Let me live was her desperate prayer to the Buddha.

Just two hours ago, Blossom had been on her knees before the crotch of a man from Beijing sodomizing her. She was on display in a glass tank with seven other girls wearing a no. 13 decal and dressed in a nurse’s uniform. The man had chosen another girl but suddenly changed his mind and told Hoon that he wanted Blossom. He took her to the room upstairs, and the man attempted an anal entry but was too flaccid and slapped her in disgust. The trickle of blood from her nose stopped, and the man forced her to dry the bloodstain on his dirty underwear. He thrust his flaccid dick into his mouth and then got bored. He commanded her to get dressed and took her downstairs. He passed the fish tank, looking at the dozen young girls who avoided eye contact. Angry with Blossom, he argued with Hoon, resulting in Hoon collecting more American dollars. She went upstairs and ordered Blossom to put on a hotel-going dress from the brothel’s wardrobe. Another little girl in the room, Ling, watched while Hoon wagged her finger fiercely at Blossom while she smeared a heavy coating of lipstick on Blossom and dusted her cheeks with rouge.

The man hustled Blossom—her lips coated in the garish red lipstick, her body dressed in a frilly red frock and plastic shoes—into a taxi and took her to the open-air dinner garden. This was the first time that Blossom had been taken to an open-air dining restaurant. Blossom looked around in a daze. Loud Cambodian music, crowds of diners, and mounds of food on tables were all around her. Her diet at the brothel was instant noodles and, if Hoon was in a generous mood, a bottle of Coke and a piece of an overripe banana. The man cut off a couple headed for a table, dragging Blossom behind him, and sat on a chair before the couple could reach the table. He ignored their angry looks and barked at a waitress nearby who had jumped to attention. The man said, Tiger, and the waitress returned with one bottle of Tiger Beer. He swigged several mouthfuls and passed the bottle to Blossom. He pinched her arm when she shook her head, leaving an angry-red welt on her arm. Suppressing tears, Blossom put the bottle to her mouth and forced herself to take a few gulps of beer. The waitress watched, trying to look impassive. She figured that the man was Chinese and would become violent if she intervened. The man summoned the waitress with the crook of his finger and pointed to some items on the menu. The waitress pointed to a tank, inviting the man to choose live seafood, but the man did not trust aquarium restaurants with fish stunned into capture by tiny amounts of cyanide used by Filipino fishermen. He shook his head.

Ten minutes went by as the man looked at Blossom, who avoided his eyes before two demure waitresses in blue uniforms brought an entire roasted duck to their table. Blossom’s eyes almost popped out when she saw the head and beak of the caramel-colored duck. One waitress picked up a wicked-looking knife from the tray and began to slice the duck like an expert chef. Her companion left her but soon brought a large plate with mounds of braised cabbage, carrots, and cauliflower swimming in crab-meat gravy. Blossom had not seen such a feast before and was almost delirious by the delicious smells of the dishes. She felt a lot of saliva build in her mouth. Two sea-blue bowls full of shimmering white rice were then placed on the table, and the waitress ripped the wrappings of two sets of chopsticks and handed a set each to the man and Blossom. The man deftly picked the choicest pieces of the roasted duck for himself and started shoveling rice and duck meat into his mouth. He looked up and saw Blossom’s empty plate and her hungry eyes. His gaze softened, and he took her plate and transferred some slices of the duck that he knew he would not eat and vegetables to her plate. Blossom stared at the food, but only when the man nodded did she tear the covering of the chopsticks. The duck tasted heavenly, and Blossom imagined she was back at home. But even though she had taken hardly a mouthful of the beer, it made Blossom dizzy; and she felt as if her bladder would burst. She stood up, and the man pulled her down. Blossom tried to signal that she had to go to the toilet by pointing to an area next to the kitchen that was obviously a toilet. The man nodded to a nearby waitress and gestured toward the toilet.

The puzzled waitress held Blossom’s hand and led her away. As he watched Blossom accompany the waitress, the man began to poke at the dish of duck meat with his chopsticks and picked more pieces that he shoveled into his mouth. He finished his beer, belched loudly, scratched his crotch, and ordered another. As he masticated the stringy meat of the duck, his teeth hit a piece of bone. He spit it out, and a mangy cat darted out from the bushes and pounced on the bone. The man’s phone rang; his caller ID displayed a private number message. He swallowed the duck meat in his mouth and answered.

Not yet time, the man said, looking at his watch. I have another forty-five minutes. He had difficulty hearing, and Hoon’s Mandarin Chinese was bad, so he put his index finger to the other ear to shut out the noise of the screeching music. His finger dug out some wax from his ear, and the man looked at it and flicked it onto the ground as he ended the call. He saw Blossom returning from the toilet, and the man rechecked his watch. He noticed that other men were looking at Blossom, and he felt proud that she was his, or at least that they would think so. He came from a culture where the face and the appearance of wealth were the most important things that a human could have. If it was necessary to counterfeit life-saving medicines by replacing the required ingredients with a mixture of soya and talcum powder or add melamine to infant formula that the babies of his people would drink and be poisoned to brandish the Rolexes and flaunt the Rolls, so be it. As Blossom sat down, the man felt the urge to fart. His stomach was churning with fermented soya beans, beer, roasted duck, and braised cabbage. Normally, he would have farted in public, but even he was restrained from this. His farts smelled of rotten eggs, and his table was close to another where some big men in wifebeater vests, their arms covered with tattoos, enjoyed their Tiger Beer and slices of suckling pig. He saw another man looking at Blossom with scarcely concealed lust. He met the eyes of the diner who had lusted after Blossom, but that man continued to stare at Blossom. After all, it was a matter of face that had paid extra to have Blossom as his dinner companion. He did not want to dine alone, and he could not afford a Hong Kong starlet, but Blossom was better than nothing. He was not a lonely loser. Or so he thought. Flushed with triumph, he got up, gesturing to Blossom to stay put while he went to the toilet. He stumbled a little as he got up—maybe he was drinking too much recently—but he steadied himself and hurried to the toilet, cursing his flatulence and prostate that had been acting up recently.

Blossom picked at her food and looked around. She saw a little boy on the sidewalk with a piece of twine tied around a mongrel puppy. He was trying to walk the frisky thing, which kept pulling back. The sight of the puppy reminded her of her last day at her home. She kept watching and then looked around at the tables near her. Most of the tables were occupied by men who had brought hookers. Some of these hookers looked like wilted frangipani flowers, and all the lipstick, bright-pink rouge, and overdone mascara could not conceal the ravages visited on them by the cruelties of their existence. Some of them would laugh and pretend to be merry to their customers; but their real feelings would show on their faces, however fleetingly, feelings of unrelieved sorrow and desperation. Soon, many of them would be over the hill; and then they would be reduced to human debris, flotsam tossed into the uncaring whitewater rush of life unless they were lucky to get a job like Hoon’s.

Blossom heard a roar outside and saw some diners leave their tables and rush out to join a small crowd on the street. There were shouts and cheers. Reluctant to leave their dinner, some diners stood up, while others stood on plastic chairs to rubberneck. Drunken fights were common in Cambodia, although Blossom had never seen one before. Since these fights usually involved some savage kickboxing, an eager audience was available anywhere and anytime for free entertainment, especially when violence was involved. Blossom, always curious, got up and walked to the fence and then through the gate and found herself on the sidewalk. People were all around her. No one seemed to notice her. All eyes were on the two men, one of whom resembled the man who abducted her and the other, a fellow barely out of his teens. The older man had produced a meat cleaver; but the younger man parried his frenzied charge, put his foot out, and tripped the older man. The youth snatched the meat cleaver from him and kicked the man in his ribs. The crowd roared its approval and, thrilled with anticipation, encouraged the young man to slice the balls of the older man. The crowd cheered as more people from the restaurant ground left their tables and joined the spectators.

It was then that Blossom decided to make her break for freedom. On their way to the restaurant, they had passed a Buddhist temple, a Wat; and she believed that she could make a run for it. At least the monks there would take her in and protect her out of compassion. She remembered the shrine to the Buddha and her mother telling her that he was the Compassionate One. She smiled at the memory. How she would surprise her mother when she returned to her home and hugged her mom. Her baby brother would not recognize her, but she would resume playing with him, and all would be well. The puppy would now be a big mongrel. Her father, she hoped, would be dead.

Then the heavens opened, and the torrential downpour began. Like in all tropical storms, fierce streaks of lightning and deafening claps of thunder accompanied this downpour. People screamed in mock terror and ran for shelter laughing. The fight outside continued, and the rain did not deter the audience, starved of cheap thrills and free entertainment. Waitresses hurried to some tables and provided umbrellas to the diners. Blossom looked back and began to walk quickly. She did not want to draw attention to herself. No one would have noticed, and no one would care, but she did not know that. The buckets of rain had turned the mounds of garbage and dog shit into a thick slush. Blossom removed her red plastic shoes and threw them away. She started to run. She hoped that people who saw her would think she was just another street urchin wallowing in the dirt like a pig or one running to escape the rain and make it to her shack in the slum to eat what little there was left for dinner. The cheering of the crowd grew fainter.

The Beijing man returned from the toilet where he had held his breath until he felt dizzy, grossed out by the overpowering smell of shit and piss in a squatting toilet encircled by swarms of fat black flies and the lack of toilet paper—not surprising in this country of barbarians, he thought. He had nearly slipped and fallen in the mud. As he made his way back, he noticed that some diners were returning to their tables. He wondered why they had got up in the first place. He slipped in the mud but righted himself before falling and cursed the rain silently. His view was obscured by the many umbrellas being used by other diners. He finally made his way to the table and found no Blossom there. He shouted at a waitress and pointed to the empty chair. He angrily pointed to the vacant chair and tried to convey his question with a look. The waitress pointed to the crowd who had congregated outside. The man looked at the table where the man who had aggressively eyed Blossom had sat. The table was empty. He picked up an umbrella left on the table and went out to the pavement. He saw a police car; a young man lay bleeding on the sidewalk, and his groans were becoming whimpers. The first stirrings of panic made themselves felt in the man’s drunken breast. He pulled out his phone and called Hoon.

Send Angelina back to me now, old bitch, the man urgently whispered in Mandarin into his phone.

Old man! You mad? Angelina not here! Hoon screamed. She do fuck movie with black man tomorrow. She lost? Bring back now, so boss man don’t kill you.

This terrified the man. He had heard about the boss who owned the brothel. Hoon had frequently boasted to him that the boss had several top cops and army colonels in his pocket and that he killed those who crossed him. The Beijing man cursed himself for picking this young bitch. He chose her over Madonna, Beyoncé, and Katy because she was fairer than them.

I go find her, the man said, his voice scarcely concealing the fear that made him tremble. He grabbed an umbrella lying on the ground by an empty table.

Bring little bitch back. Otherwise, my boss, he kill you, Hoon said, struggling to keep the fear out of her voice. Her tone scared the man ever further. Sweat poured out of all the man’s pores, and he grabbed some paper tissue and wiped his face. Outside, the rain was beating down, and fork lightning speared the night sky, followed by a burst of thunder. The ribs of the man’s stolen umbrella were broken, and he hated getting wet, but he had to get that little bitch. Maybe she’s already in bed with the man who had envied him, he thought. His ignorance of Cambodian frustrated him. He looked around again, and the man was missing. The bastard had taken Angelina. He hoped that they were still around waiting for a tut-tut, the three-wheeler taxis found in most of Asia, so that he could cut the bastard’s throat and kick the little bitch. But the three-wheelers that were all around normally were nowhere on this festival night. Lazy fucks forgoing money for fun, the man thought. If only this were back in Beijing, he would have been picked up in seconds.

Hoon put down her phone and tried to steady her trembling hand without success. The Boss was bad, but the Big Boss was the very devil. The Boss never visited the brothel but had her once brought to one of his safe houses and branded her on her back for indiscretion. A powerful minister then, one of those do-gooder American organizations that fight child prostitution, had asked to take action against Hoon’s brothel. Naturally, he had pretended outrage that child prostitution could be going on in Phnom Penh and promised that he would send the army to crush the evil devils. The Boss had sent his bodyguards to do a show raid, which he had videotaped. Of course, they found nothing but a warehouse for garments. He reported his findings to the interfering American women and told them that a fraudulent tipster had cheated them. The embarrassed women had insisted on selfies taken with him, which they posted on their foundation’s website, and showered him with praise for his dedication to fighting pedophilia. They invited the Boss if only he could take time off his schedule to take an all-expenses-paid visit to Washington to accept their Protector of the Child Annual Award and promised to have CNN and Fox News cover the event. The Boss had said that he was not worthy of that honor, but they protested that he was being too modest. Pretending reluctance, he said he would be honored to consider their invitation. The two American women had finally left but not before they promised to send him a certificate honoring him as a protector of innocent children. After this charade, which he had enjoyed, he had Hoon brought to him, where he submerged her hand in a pot of boiling water and had heated a knife and put it up her skirt. She had screamed in pain, and he had hit her. The Boss—she saw his picture in his newspaper almost every month—did not need to remind her of what was in store if she flunked a test again. Hoon did not dare think what would happen to her if the little bitch escaped and her story made it to the newspapers. The Boss would not hesitate for a moment before sending her off to meet the Big Boss, who would feed her to the crocodiles that he bred for their leather. Her flesh might be part of the skin that would make a handbag of a posh lady somewhere.

A police captain was a regular nonpaying patron. She scrolled through her address book on her phone and punched his number. A few rings, and he picked up. She knew he would help her because he wanted the new girls when they were brought in, and she gave him the first choice of the new crop. Captain Darsol was grateful, loyal, and reliable.

Even the street dogs had begun to creep under any available shelter, braving the bottle caps of stall holders who flung them at the mongrels in a vain attempt to chase them away. The sharp needles of rain were pounding Blossom’s skin. A thunderclap that seemed so close made Blossom tremble in terror. She was soaked in water and terrified; but a flash of lightning illuminated for an instant the golden spires of the Wat, which seemed to shout to her to sprint faster. Soon she would get there, and the monks would give her refuge. Her life in hell would soon be over so she would be going home. Although drenched, she felt the temple pull her toward itself, toward freedom, and the eventual liberation that was the goal of all Buddhists. She vowed she would live the rest of her life as a nun to burn her horrible karma and atone for the awful things she must have done in her past lives. The past ten months in Hoon’s brothel—the succession of men, some of whom had genital warts as big as prunes and had infected her, and the beatings by Hoon after complaints by men not satisfied by the listless way she sucked—seemed like some mad nightmare, not real. In the distance, she could hear the hypnotic chanting of the monks in the temple. Buddan Saranan Gachchami, a chant that her mother taught her that meant I go to the Buddha for refuge. Soon she would be enfolded by the love of the Enlightened and Compassionate One and be surrounded by the calming smell of jasmine incense, the gentle lights of the coconut oil temple lamps, and the chanting of monks as she prostrated herself before the Buddha statue, thanking him from all her little heart for her escape from hell.

A loud shout made her look back. What she saw terrified her. There was Captain Darsol, the man who visited the brothel when new girls were brought in and before they were given numbers and put in the fish tank. He shouted at her. He was dressed in his police uniform. She thought of stopping to recover her breath, but the temple seemed so near. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started. She prayed and ran faster. Her tiny heart strained itself when she ran, her wet clothes making it difficult for her to run as fast as she wanted. The golden gates of the temple were just ahead of her. Blossom felt the effects of the beer. She should have spit it out. She could see the temple lamps, and the serenity of the compound seemed to reach out to her. She even glimpsed a saffron-robed monk walking under the canopy by the side of the large bo tree in the temple compound.

Just a few miles away, the red Lamborghini Urus approached the large compound where the driver, using a remote, opened the gates. It stopped at the entrance to a three-story house with large mahogany doors. Two Tibetan mastiffs in the garden bounded to the door and barked enthusiastic greetings to Siray. She checked her iPhone for the twentieth time since she arrived. No message yet from Klaus. He must be very busy putting the finishing touches to the app, she thought. A manservant quickly approached the car, opened the door, and bowed when she stepped out.

Be careful with those bags, you idiot, Siray told the driver. They’re worth more than you and your miserable family. The driver giggled, holding his palm over his mouth, not knowing whether to be embarrassed or be scared. In another part of town, the Beijing man hurriedly checked out of the hotel three days before his prepaid stay was over to return to China. He asked the receptionist to call for a taxi to the airport. It was urgent, he said. He could not delay, he said, as he looked over his shoulder.

The lightning and thunder had resumed on the street near the temple. Blossom felt relieved as she approached the Wat, but she turned back to look and lost some precious seconds. She was about to reach the temple when a shard of broken glass on the sidewalk pierced the sole of her foot. She cried out in agony as she stumbled. Suddenly, an arm clutched her soaked blouse and pulled her up. She looked up in terror to see the cruel eyes of Captain Darsol. Blossom screamed and thrashed as blood gushed out of her foot. Quickly, she unbuttoned her blouse and slipped from the captain’s grasp. The golden gates of the temple beckoned to her like the gates of heaven.

CHAPTER 2

Singapore—Alex

The Arctic air caused goose bumps on his naked body. Alex awoke groggily. He was shivering, rubbing his eyes, not sure whether it was yet another nightmare in which he was imprisoned in a freezer. He massaged the goose bumps and flinched when he felt some scratches on his arm. He reached for the thin cotton blanket at his feet and covered himself. He still shivered, but he heard the gentlest of sounds: an air conditioner triggered by a thermostat. He had tossed and turned in bed and finally fallen asleep. He pulled the blanket up to his neck and looked at the luminous green numerals on the clock by his bed. The clock read 5:00 a.m. This reading made him more disoriented. Where was he? He looked around in the dim light at the plush but strange surroundings. A crumpled duvet lay at the foot of the king-sized bed. Alex pulled the duvet up and covered himself with the blanket and the duvet, but these did not stop the shivering. In disgust, he stumbled out of his bed and stood, listening and looking around, hoping to get his bearings. A sliver of light drew him to a window, and he parted the heavy drapes. He looked out. What! It looked like Manhattan. Manhattan? What the fuck was he doing in Manhattan? He resisted the urge to unpack the high-powered binoculars he used to watch cricket games. He blinked, and it took him a few more seconds to figure out that jet lag was screwing with his body clock. He was looking down at downtown Singapore, and the three towers topped by what seemed to be a large Polynesian boat were the Marina Bay Sands Casino. He recognized the building, one of the most expensive in the world, from the pictures he had seen in his briefing papers.

The late Sheldon Adelson—a casino mogul and a devoted supporter of Donald Trump, whom his father admired—had owned the company that was the owner of Singapore’s iconic building. The infinity pool of the building graced the cover of the thick file of his briefing papers. Recollecting his earlier panic, Alex smiled, shrugged, went to the high-tech bathroom, and triggered a sensor that lit up the room. He found the thermostat in the bathroom and knocked off the air-conditioning. He blinked before the clear mirror and noticed the bowl of purple Vanda orchids placed on the counter. The bathroom was all marble, glass, and chrome. A Bose docking station for iPods and a Bose Bluetooth speaker were placed on the bathroom counter. He took in the heady scent of the little Crabtree & Evelyn soaps and cream containers that lay in a small wicker basket on the counter. The bathroom was pleasurably warm. Alex opened the gold-plated cold-water tap, splashed his face with icy water, wiped his face with a thick hand towel, and wrapped himself in the heavy cotton robe hanging by the side of the sink. He reached for a vial of coconut oil in his toilet case and then went through his oil-pulling routine that his father had trained him to do first thing in the morning. After spitting out the coconut oil, he rinsed his mouth with warm water three times and went in search of the kitchen. Slowly his mind rewound time, and he remembered how he had spent his last twenty-four hours.

Seven hours ago, he had landed at Terminal 3 at Singapore’s Changi Airport. Traveling first class on the Singapore Airlines A380 had been an experience he would remember for a long time. The nonstop flight from London Heathrow was one of the longest flights he had taken and the most pleasant when he was awake. He had fallen asleep after talking with an ethereally beautiful flight attendant but had not been able to keep the bad stuff away from his dreams.

Normally, he would have flirted with this enchanting woman, but things were different now. Most of his thoughts were of her and bittersweet memories of a love that went nowhere. He hoped he was leaving them behind in London. The last thing he wanted, the last thing he needed, was another roller coaster of a love affair that would end disastrously. You need a change, a break, a break from your so-called friends and London. Angela’s husband has created the ideal job for you. Take it, his mother had said. For my sake, she had added, holding his hand. Alex had shaken his head. But she finally persuaded him to take up Julius’s offer to open the Singapore office that would involve work on environment, governance, and corruption because she knew these were his passionate interests. He had agreed but only on the condition that she would have one of his doctor friends visit and try to get under control her blood sugar readings going off the charts. Lady Anabella Cavendish-Sharma, separated but not divorced despite Alex’s pleas to his mother to hire Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer and take the bastard to the cleaners. His mother was unsuccessfully coping with depression and neglected her health. The diabetes medication that she had taken for more than five years had been withdrawn from the market as dangerous. Alex had researched this medication on the net and had tried to get his mother to replace it; but her physician, a snotty bastard in Harley Street whom Alex suspected was getting kickbacks from the pharma, had insisted that she remain on the medication. Alex was worried. His doctor friend from Cambridge, Alawi Mumtad, had told him that her kidneys could fail or that she might have to undergo an amputation of her feet if her blood sugar was not radically controlled. His father, who thought that easy access to the UK National Health Service encouraged Britons to overeat junk food like pigs in a trough, reacted to the news of his mother’s worsening health with a shrug, claiming that each person was responsible for their health. Alex sensed that his mother lived for him, and it was his duty to keep her safe from the ravaging effects of diabetes.

As Alex wiped his face with a wet face towel, memories of his father made him clench his fists, even when he was thinking about other matters. The ambitious celebrity surgeon Sir Aurobindo Sharma—a champion of Brexit, a discreet but livid foe of Muslims, especially Arabs and Pakistanis, a fan of Trump, and an avid donor to the coffers of the British Conservative Party—was, it was rumored, in line for a peerage. Regularly featured in Hello and OK magazines with a trophy blonde on his arm, Sir Aurobindo was billed as a ladies’ man who had persuaded some of Belgravia’s most beautiful women to beg him to fuck them. But to Alex, he was just a brash, unkind bully who had betrayed and humiliated his mother. Sir Aurobindo had once bragged that his son would be one day captain the English cricket team and be the custodian of the Ashes, the trophy of the centuries-old contest between Australia and England, to his friends at the Athenæum Club in England. The barely concealed smirks of the English snobs around him had not gone unnoticed by him; but he pretended to ignore these, remembering the Spanish proverb about revenge being a dish best eaten cold. Maybe in about ten years, he would forgive Alex for not becoming a professional cricketer and captaining the England cricket team but not now. Soon after Alex graduated from Cambridge and was head-hunted by McKinsey, the blue-chip consulting company, his frantic father had tried to dissuade him. Sir Aurobindo had told Alex that his genes were the reason for Alex’s good looks and that if he took to international cricket, his talents and looks would make Imran Khan look like Freddy Krueger in his heyday. Alex had thought the old man was bonkers when he heard this. Sir Aurobindo had ranted about corruption in Indian cricket. He claimed that if it weren’t for corrupt selectors who overlooked him, he would have been the Bradman of India and the hero to the Indian masses. Tendulkar, his father had claimed, would have been nothing but a boring middle-order batsman. Alex had thought his father was dreaming when he badgered him about taking to professional cricket. Being a Cambridge blue in cricket did not mean he was good enough to play for England, much less captain the team and beat Bradman’s records. But the old man was insistent, waxing eloquence about the character-building aspects of the game and how it would cure Alex of his indecisiveness. You cannot win a test at Lords against those criminals and yobs from the fatal shore if you remain a Hamlet. You will learn what it takes to be a leader and a victor in battle, he had ranted. Pummel those yobs, and they will stick their sledging where the sun don’t shine. Alex smiled, recalling this encounter because he enjoyed seeing his father lose control of his stiff upper lip that he had tried to master. Maybe in Singapore, his father would let him get on with his life and leave him alone, Alex believed. Maybe, he had once thought, that this was his real secret wish, to be left alone. Always to be left alone with his thoughts of her and what might have been.

Alex staggered to the modern kitchen in what he now realized was his service apartment. He increased the brightness of the lighting. He saw a gleaming De’Longhi coffee machine with an unopened bag of Ethiopian coffee beans next to it. This was like the machine in her modern kitchen in Hampstead. He poured some coffee beans and pressed the chrome buttons in proper sequence. Alex took in the details of the ultramodern kitchen. The firm was paying an arm and a leg for this service apartment. His deputy, Stephanie Chng, had met him at the airport and, while driving him along the expressway, had told him that the cost to buy a freehold mansion in Hampstead or Kensington would be enough—but only enough—to buy a micro-apartment in the more desirable districts in Singapore. Alex had shaken his head in disbelief. In Hong Kong, a parking space costs more than a quarter of a million American dollars, and the real estate value of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo is more valuable than California, Steph had added. The big spenders who drove up property values were Chinese officials who, though on a monthly three-hundred-dollar salary, turned up in the city-state with suitcases stuffed with Benjamins and paid for the multimillion-dollar houses in Sentosa Cove with cold hard cash. Then there were the Indonesian timber barons who sold illegally felled hardwoods, Burmese generals, Cambodian gangsters, and Malaysian palm oil magnates who had illegally cleared virgin forests, killing hundreds of primates, all buying property in safe, secure Singapore; and property prices had gone through the roof. Affordable rentals were difficult to find. So Alex would have to remain in the service apartment until he found a flat or a house good for entertaining. She had mentioned Emerald Hill Road as a desirable locality.

As the coffee machine began to gurgle and hiss, Alex’s thoughts turned to Stephanie. Once, he had gone with her to see a movie about a geisha at the Curzon Cinema in London. Step reminded Alex of the older Chinese actress with the straight eyelashes and cheekbones that a model would kill for. He could not understand why Stephanie was not a top model, but that was not his business. As they were in the underwater tunnel leading to the AYE road, she had asked him to call her Steph and had told him that she was married but had no children. She was now his colleague because of an international headhunter firm’s search for someone who would meet Julius’s demanding criteria. She had graduated with a degree in business from Wharton and then worked in an investment bank before joining her friend as a Singapore Airlines flight attendant. On a flight to Los Angeles, one of the passengers in the first-class cabin had invited her to join his merchant bank as a director of the overseas project division in the branch in Dubai. She had accepted the offer but did not remain in the job long. Disgusted with the corrupt payments that she had been ordered to authorize but hide, she had resigned without much fuss. The managing director of the bank’s head office in Zurich had recommended her to Julius, who had passed on her résumé to the headhunters. Alex had seen the one-page summary of her résumé and had noted that she was a good project supervisor. The binder contained photographs, and Alex noticed that Steph’s husband, Michael Suwardi, was photographed on yachts and by the side of his personal Lear jet.

The coffee machine beeped. Alex took the small latte and went back to his bed. Keeping the steaming cup by the bedside table, he reached for his iPad mini and checked his mail. The first message was from his best friend, or so he thought until reality ripped off the illusion: Michael Sedley. The message wished Alex all success in his new venture. At the Knight and the Unicorn back in Hampstead, Mike had warned Alex that Singapore was full of beautiful women who would offer themselves to him and warned him not to make any permanent commitments. They go crazy over foreign guys from our part of the world, especially us white ones, but you can pass yourself as Italian. So enjoy the pickings, but don’t do anything silly like saying I love you too while you’re fucking them. Mike had ended his five-line message with P sends her love, thinking of you, as always. The message saddened Alex as he imagined her by Michael’s side on his bed as he tossed this throwaway line, which probably was a figment of Michael’s imagination. He wondered whether he had burned his bridges with her by leaving London, but wasn’t that just what he had wanted to do?

Alex closed the iPad and buried his head in his knees. He was not doing a variation of a sit-up. He had come here to Singapore hoping to start a new life and help Asian companies adopt good environmental practices, stop cutting down rainforests and releasing batik dye into streams, help governments reduce corruption, and provide investment advice to a hedge fund owned by his employer. He wanted to do his job and be left alone, hoping that his badly bruised heart, bruised by her, would be healed. It was ridiculous, he thought, of Michael advising him to play the field. Michael enjoyed doing that but not Alex, and he would not. He needed another commitment like a hole in the head. His mother had told him that he must not try to save the world. He must look after himself first. Otherwise, you will get hurt. People will use you. Don’t make my mistake. Don’t let them, she said when she hugged him when he had gone to say goodbye. Her advice reminded him of his old tutor at Trinity College, who had emphasized that the great Immanuel Kant had said that not only should one not use others solely as a means but also oneself. Allowing others to use you as a means was a violation of the duty to oneself, the old deontology codger had warned him. He only understood the context of this cryptic and unsolicited advice when Michael later told him that the old codger knew about Sir Aurobindo’s badgering plans for his son; and the don, fond of a favorite student, was giving him an indirect warning.

In his briefing with Julius, the great man, as usual, dispensed with niceties and got down to business. Pausing to admire the Bentleys and Rolls in the showroom in Berkley Square, Alex arrived a few minutes late. The big man kept him waiting for twenty minutes as a punishment. He sat in Julius’s London office in Berkley Square across from the little man seated behind the polished oak desk, supposedly once owned by the Iron Duke. A large portrait of Winston Churchill, commissioned by Julius, dominated the room. A reproduction of the Magna Charta hung beside the picture. The oak bookcases were filled with books about the Battle of Waterloo, books by Roger Scruton, and all the history volumes by David Starkey. This was not for show because Alex knew that Julius was an Anglophile and history buff who often tested Alex’s knowledge of European history. Julius admired Napoleon, the Iron Duke, Frederick the Great, and the Iron Chancellor. He admired Chinese civilization but only grudgingly, frequently wondering how these strange-looking Mongoloids could have surpassed the West with such breathtaking achievements and were poised yet again to seize the mantle of the most advanced civilization but savage it like Genghis Khan, a marauder from that part of the world. Trinh had once told Julius, slyly winking at Alex, Maybe Chinese are really aliens from a superior civilization posing as humans, just waiting to destroy humanity with a virus and take over the planet. Julius looked at them, unsure whether she was serious.

Be assured, Alex, Julius said, pointing his finger at Alex like Uncle Sam in the recruitment poster, "you now are family. As Trinh is a daughter to me, you will be a son to me but only if you prove yourself worthy. I will be much better at the job than your