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In the Cambodian hinterlands, a lone Western prisoner suffers through a hot, muddy, interminable sentence. Wasted by repeated torture, lack of sleep, malnutrition, and psychotropic drugs, he has been abandoned. His years of exemplary service to his government mean nothing. No one is coming for him.
This is Agent Kasper, a man with a staggering résumé: commercial airline pilot, firearms expert, highly accomplished practitioner of several of the martial arts, a secret agent par excellence. It is this incredible competence that will be his undoing. While investigating Mafia money laundering in Phnom Penh, Kasper is approached by the CIA to track down the source of the so-called supernotes—illegal U.S. banknotes counterfeited so perfectly that they are undetectable, even by sophisticated machines—that are flooding Southeast Asia. With patience, skill, and courage, Kasper uncovers the explosive secret behind them and is badly burned by the truth.
Meanwhile, back in Rome, a sharp, scrappy lawyer named Barbara Belli has been hired by Kasper’s family to work for his release. She has contacts in the foreign ministry, and while officials make sweeping claims about moving heaven and earth, nothing happens. It’s more than just creaking bureaucracy. Kasper has really pissed off the wrong people.
Based on true events in the life of a former spy, Kasper’s journey makes for a shocking and spellbinding page-turner of petty corruption, high-level betrayal, and state secrets so powerful that governments will protect them by any means.
- Sales Rank: #3018386 in Books
- Published on: 2016-01-12
- Released on: 2016-01-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.10" w x 5.90" l, 1.10 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
Review
"A fast, exciting read inspired by a real agent who risked his life combatting the problem of counterfeiting on an international scale."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Provides a fascinating peek behind the curtain of today’s global intelligence community."
—Publishers Weekly
"The main appeal here is the tantalizing premise."
—Booklist
About the Author
AGENT KASPER is a former operative for both the Italian intelligence services and the American CIA. LUIGI CARLETTI is a prize-winning veteran investigative journalist and the author of several novels. Translated by John Cullen.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Escape or Die
Prey Sar Correctional Center, near Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Saturday, April 4, 2009
“Italian! You come here right now!”
The prisoner obeys. But he obeys slowly. A little too slowly.
He’s called Kasper. He’s an Italian prisoner. Kasper has been his code name for a long time, his battle name in a life filled with battles.
Now his only battle is to stay alive.
The Kapo shouts again. He has a hoarse voice. Among his powers, barking is the least dangerous. He narrows his eyes and growls out orders that split the silence of the already sweltering early morning.
“The Kapo” is the name Kasper has given him because he acts exactly like the kapos in the Nazi concentration camps. His Cambodian name is of course different. And unpronounceable.
He’s a prisoner too, the Kapo is, but of a higher category. He helps the guards manage the camp. The job offers some satisfactions. For example, he’s allowed to beat lower ranking prisoners and does so regularly. With pleasure. And he can get money from them in exchange for protection and favors.
He tried that with Kasper.
One night he and some other kapos and an armed guard came to teach Kasper a lesson. They’d done this before, during his first days in the prison, by way of “welcoming” him to Prey Sar. At the time, Kasper was still in bad shape, hardly able to stand up. They used rubber-coated iron pipes, which cause great pain but no open wounds. As part of the “welcome,” they broke his nose and mauled his left ear. They looked satisfied. “Bravo, Italian,” someone said. Two more kicks. They were laughing.
Having learned how things worked in the prison, Kasper had prepared himself accordingly. When the men who had beaten him that first night came back, he was ready. The match was brief. They gathered up their injured and withdrew. But that was certainly not the end of it. The following day, they tossed him into solitary confinement, into a “tiger cage.”
A tiger cage is a ten-foot-deep hole, closed at the top with a metal grate through which they pass you shitty food and shitty water. When it rains, the hole floods, and then you must swim, along with the rats and cockroaches. Eventually you have to press your face against the grate and hope the water doesn’t rise any higher. A real nightmare for any prisoner, and the worst possible nightmare for someone who suffers from claustrophobia.
They left him in there for days, but ever since they let him out, they’ve steered clear of him. According to Chou Chet, the guard who’s been protecting him for some time, they’ve nicknamed Kasper “the Animal.” Chou Chet has explained that the money Kasper receives from his family in Italy will soon enable him, Chou Chet, to change his life for the better. “We’re friends,” he tells Kasper, in English.
“Friends, for sure,” Kasper repeats.
Kasper doesn’t want to die. He wants to walk away from Prey Sar on his own two feet and forget everything about it. Including the brute who barks at him.
The Kapo knows a few words of English, enough to communicate with the non-Cambodian prisoners, who constitute a tiny minority: a few Thais, two Chinese, a small group of Vietnamese. Among five hundred poor wretches, Kasper’s the only Westerner.
“Go to entrance.” The Kapo’s already pointing in the proper direction. “News for you.”
Kasper looks him straight in the eyes. Only for a moment. He doesn’t want a confrontation. Not today, of all days. Today everything has to go smoothly.
They’re both naked from the waist up. Both sweating, given the temperature in the 100s and the humidity that crawls under your skin. The Kapo’s checkered krama scarf is wrapped around his head. He stares at Kasper. His mouth barely moves when he repeats, “Go, Italian.”
Kasper heads for his “news.” He believes he knows what the news will be.
So here we are. Maybe it’s really going to happen. It is happening, on this Saturday morning in April, and he can scarcely believe it. He drags his Ho Chi Minh sandals and keeps a tight hold, both hands, on a precious nylon sack, hiding it as best he can. It’s camouflaged, wrapped up in a T-shirt.
He tries to put on his best mask. The time has come. He’s got to make it.
He’s got to.
He doesn’t want to end up like the others. Like the ones he’s seen in the past months and months. The tortured. The stomped- shattered-mangled. The drowned wretches facedown in the ricefields.
Kasper doesn’t want his life to end that way; he wants to go home to Italy. Today’s stakes are all or nothing.
But if he’s never to leave Prey Sar, if that’s his fate, then he’ll meet it like a soldier.
He squeezes the camouflaged bundle in his hands. Yes indeed, he will cause some shit before they take him out. Because, on this Saturday, April 4, 2009, dying seems preferable to the hell he’s been thrown into.
Whatever happens, one way or the other, Kasper’s leaving by the main door. Today and forever.
2
373 Days Ago: The Capture
Koh Kong, Cambodia-Thailand Border
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Clancy checks the outside mirror and the rearview mirror and wants to know how much farther they have to go.
“That’s the third time you’ve asked me that,” Kasper replies. “The third in an hour.” He passes a truck and gets back in his lane.
“So we’re getting closer all the time.”
“About twenty kilometers.”
Clancy takes off his sunglasses, blows on them, cleans them. “Nobody’s following us anyway.”
Good. With any luck, the whole thing’s bullshit, Kasper thinks. Nothing but a false alarm. Or maybe some stupid fucking April Fool’s joke, a few days early. But Bun Sareun’s voice on the telephone sounded serious. The Cambodian senator wasn’t joking.
“Leave town now.”
Not one word more. Only those three, repeated several times, in the tone of someone giving Life Advice.
Leave town now.
When Kasper hung up and told his American friend Clancy, he called the senator back. Not many words, zero doubts. “We have to get out of here. We can try to figure out what the fuck’s happening later.”
They filled two bags, grabbed two pistols, and took all the cash they kept in the safe in their house, roughly seventy thousand dollars. Now this nest egg is lying with Kasper’s change of underwear at the bottom of his black bag. Clancy’s bag is the same military duffel he’s had ever since he was an energetic young CIA analyst. It probably reminds him of years that won’t come again.
They left Phnom Penh hoping the whole thing was a crock; nevertheless, they’ve avoided airports, seaports, train stations, and any other potential checkpoints. They’re familiar with the Cambodian military. They know how its forces work. They’re especially familiar with the paramilitaries, the men in charge of the country’s internal “security.”
Which is why they had turned their Mercedes over to their driver, instructing him to take it for a long drive around the city. If he was stopped, he was to say he’d dropped them off a short time before near the Manhattan Club, Victor Chao’s casino-discotheque. They were careful not to pass by Sharky’s, the bar and restaurant they own together, but they called one of their employees and asked him to rent, in his own name, a sport utility vehicle. This machine turned out to be a Honda CR-V. They flung their bags into the back and left.
It was six in the evening. Darkness was starting to fall.
Their goal was the Thai border, just beyond a small town named Koh Kong. A meeting place for smugglers and whores. Six hours’ drive away.
Kasper called Patty, his Italian girlfriend. She’d been with him in Phnom Penh up until a few days before and had only just returned to Rome. Her leaving when she did was a piece of luck. On the phone, he stated only the essential facts of the matter. In a few words, without hesitations that could be interpreted or pauses to allow questions.
“We have to leave the city and probably the country.” His tone was unnaturally calm. “There are problems. We don’t know what they are. I think we’ll find out there’s been a mistake, but we want to be prudent. Don’t be worried. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”
She asked no questions. And even if she had, the only response would have been a dial tone.
This isn’t the first time Kasper has found himself obliged to cut all ties with some place in the world. But it’s the first time he’s had trouble understanding why. And Clancy doesn’t seem to have things figured out any better than he does.
And so they start thinking about how their security was compromised. In Cambodia, it’s not hard to become a target, that goes without saying, but what could have happened?
The road to the border enters a harsh, suddenly hostile landscape that slowly wraps itself in its evening cloak. Kasper and Clancy talk over the past few weeks. Who or what could have put them in danger?
Maybe they stepped on somebody’s toes at Sharky’s. The bar’s clientele includes a lot of touchy people—something could have happened there. But what? Something to do with women? Or debts? Certainly not. Some blunder? Some injury this was payback for? Unlikely. Or maybe Kasper’s military expertise ruffled the sensibilities of some security boss working for Hun Sen and his government. Possible, but he would have known it already.
Theories. They’re not good for much except clarifying the horizon, thinning out the possibilities. They move you closer to the truth.
For example, suppose it was Kasper’s North Korean investigation—a mission he’d undertaken at the behest of the Americans—that had put them in danger. It seemed like a job well done. It seemed perfect. But maybe something had gone wrong.
Very wrong.
Kasper can feel it.
It’s a doubt that’s been churning around in his head from the start. Now he understands that it’s much more than a doubt. It’s a premonition. And it’s getting stronger and stronger.
Suppose it was that job I did for Clancy’s friends? he wonders under his breath. The question goes unanswered.
Kasper’s positive he made all the right moves. He used maximum discretion and followed orders. No one except his only contact with “the Company” knows about his mission. And, of course, Clancy. But even Clancy knows very little about it.
Kasper did a good, clean job. He did what he’d been asked to do.
Leave town now.
The Cambodian senator knows nothing about Kasper’s investigation. But the senator knows a lot about a lot of other things. It wasn’t clear from his telephone call where the danger was coming from. He didn’t specify whether they should be wary of “round-eyes” or “slant-eyes,” Westerners or Cambodians—or maybe even North Koreans.
Kasper decides to tell Clancy about his persistent doubt. His American friend listens to him in silence. They’ve known each other for twenty years, and they’ve been through a lot together. In Cambodia they share a house, they’re business partners in Sharky’s, and they collaborate in all things, each contributing his own particular set of skills.
Clancy’s sixty years old and not very talkative. He’s reticent and cautious. And smart. He’s someone who listens, first of all, and then discusses, basing his reasoning on his background as an organizer and an analyst. As for experience, he’s had a lot. He’s an American who has passed—not totally unscathed—through some of the pages of recent history.
“The thing with the North Koreans,” Clancy says, stroking his white beard. He ponders a bit. “Well, it just seems strange to me. I don’t know much about it, but . . .” He clears his throat and sighs. “But if that’s what it is, we’re in deep shit.”
“You know the Company people better than I do. Do you think that’s what it is?”
Clancy stays quiet for a few seconds. Then he shakes his head and says, “No, not unless you fucked up in some major way.”
“I didn’t fuck up. I followed their guidelines. I kept them informed about everything.”
“Everything?”
“Every fucking thing.”
“Did you do anything on your own initiative?”
“Nada.”
“Or talk to other—”
“Never.”
Clancy nods. “So no fuckups on your end,” he recaps.
“No, my friend. No fuckups.”
“Then that job has nothing to do with this. I don’t think it has anything to do with this at all.”
—
The bridge between Cambodia and Thailand is about a hundred meters long. Shortly after midnight, Kasper and Clancy arrive within sight of the border. They decide to spend the night in Koh Kong and cross the bridge the following morning. After getting two rooms in a trashy motel that offers hourly rates for the benefit of whores and their clients, they eat something in a fast-food joint nearby. Next morning they’ll leave the SUV in the motel parking lot and cross over on foot.
Separately.
That’s their plan.
They have to pass through two border checkpoints, the first Cambodian and the second Thai. But only the first one presents some risk.
Some risk? Kasper wonders. Or a huge risk?
That’s the crucial point, the Cambodian guard post. Once they’re in Thailand, all they have to do is to head for Trat, the nearest town.
Kasper would have preferred to avoid crossing the bridge altogether. He was for getting across the border at once, while it was still night, without wasting time. “Being afraid of trouble is better than seeking it out,” he said, reciting a Tuscan proverb. As a good Florentine, he’d repeated this wisdom to Clancy on several other occasions.
Kasper’s proposal: to ford the little river under cover of darkness and climb up the bank on the Thai side. Had he been alone, he wouldn’t have thought about it for a minute. But he was with Clancy.
Uncle Clancy.
His white beard, that pensive air.
“Are you crazy?” was the American’s response. “Didn’t you say the riverbank is mined?”
“There may be a mine or two, yes. You just have to pay attention. I talked to a smuggler friend of mine. He showed me where wes hould cross.”
“You cross through the mines. I’m strolling over the bridge tomorrow morning. It’ll be like taking a walk. Then we can swim in the sea off Phuket Island instead of this stinking gutter.”
They arise at dawn. From a public telephone, they call their employee and explain where he can pick up the CR-V. They tell him how to get rid of the guns they’ve hidden in it. Then they have breakfast, exchange a few words. Just the indispensable ones. They say their good-byes.
“Until we meet on the other side,” says Kasper.
“See you soon,” says Clancy with a nod.
—
Looked at from the Cambodian riverbank, the bridge seemed like a joke. See how perspective alters things, Kasper thinks. A few meters, and everything’s totally changed.
His passport passes from hand to hand. Four or five times. Back and forth, like a game. Then the first border guard points his pistol at Kasper’s face. Behind him, other guards have their weapons leveled.
They bring him to an office with a table, three chairs, and a poster displaying medical and health information.
Kasper tries hard not to assign blame, but without success. Swimming in the sea off Phuket Island. Fuck you, Clancy, he thinks, while the Cambodian soldiers search him and take everything he has. They lead him to another room in the guard post. This one’s empty except for a couple of plastic chairs. The soldiers tell him, “You wait here.”
After less than an hour, the door opens again and in he comes, the optimistic American. They detained him the same way: passport, two pissy questions, and a pistol aimed at his face.
Clancy sits down on a chair next to Kasper and plays the role of the red, white, and blue veteran. He says, “Maybe it’s better this way. We’ll clear up everything and go back to Phnom Penh.”
“Is that a hope or a prediction?” Kasper asks.
“It’s a prediction. You’ll see.”
“A prediction. Right.”
Kasper knows that the “predictions” Americans make sometimes get into ugly collisions with reality. The optimistic approach is endearing; unfortunately, however, it doesn’t pay. But that’s how the Americans are. They take on enemies they consider undersized weaklings who turn out to be rather more difficult than they figured.
Kasper knows Americans well. His father’s a half-American Tuscan born in Memphis, Tennessee. Half of Kasper’s family lives in St. Louis; most of his military and pilot training took place in the States. He loves everything about America, or almost everything. Therefore his old friend Clancy’s optimism really pisses him off.
Suppose they’re in real trouble—the worst kind of trouble, the definitive kind?
They sit for a few hours in the stifling little room with its barred windows and its reek of smoke and frontier. It’s a hole, this post on the Thai border. The Cambodian guards keeping an eye on them chat among themselves. And wait.
Three in the afternoon. The door of the room swings open and five men in civilian clothes come in. They’re Cambodians, and they’re armed. They know perfectly well who they’re dealing with. Kasper’s immobilized at once. No martial arts or any of the rest of his repertoire. With Clancy, things are easier.
They sit Kasper and Clancy down and bind them. Chains around ankles and arms, wrists tied tightly behind their backs.
These five are professionals.
Kasper recognizes a couple of them from the Marksmen Club, the Phnom Penh shooting range where he habitually spends a lot of his time. Now he realizes that he and Clancy are not in deep shit.
It’s worse than that.
The five men are from the Combat Intelligence Division, or CID, a very special task force that takes on some very special assignments. These are people who don’t waste time. Five sons of bitches ready for anything. There are probably five more of them outside this room.
The unit’s veterans are all former Khmer Rouge. The younger guys live on myths of the past, of a ferocious competence that’s earned the CID a pretty grim reputation over the years. In many cases, they operate in close collaboration with the American embassy, which is to say the CIA’s Indochinese field office.
Leave town now.
Too late, dear Senator Bun Sareun.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Supernotes
By Alla S.
"Supernotes"--a fictionalized retelling of the real-life story of an Italian intelligence agent who also worked for the CIA and was drawn into their investigation of supernotes or fake dollar bills, only to be punished and jailed--seems like an interesting story, but even as a fan of books about espionage and spying, I just couldn't get into it. The story keeps switching back and forth between Agent Kasper's time as an agent, his time at a Cambodian jail, and his lawyer. The story is told in a third-person impersonal way, and any tension is minimized because of the non-chronological storytelling. Right off the bat, we know that Kasper is in jail and even though we don't know the why, we already know what happened to him even before his story is recounted. Furthermore, Kasper doesn't come across as a sympathetic guy that the reader can root for. The reader learns what happens to him, but not necessarily how he feels about it. A chronological re-telling of the events, from a first-person narrative (especially since Kasper worked with the writer in crafting the story and was therefore an available source to be used) that also included a more detailed version of Kasper's reaction to the events and shady characters around him would have made a more interesting read.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Hero, victim, or liar?
By TChris
Since Supernotes is based on a true story, it doesn’t have all the twists and turns and action and suspense that a traditional spy novel delivers. Real life just isn’t as exciting as fiction. On the other hand, if the story is more-or-less true, an intriguing series of events can be a good substitute for an action-packed plot. Unfortunately, Supernotes delivers too little intrigue while telling a story that isn’t entirely convincing.
Kasper is an Italian, although his father was born in Memphis and much of his family lives in St. Louis. He is a former member of Italy’s national police who became an airline pilot and did some shady consulting work for the national police. The work involved playing an undercover role in large drug deals and money laundering operations. According to the Italian government, he has “a right-wing past and dangerous friends.” In Cambodia, he owned a bar with a former CIA agent and engaged in vaguely-described contract espionage.
We learn of Kasper’s history in flashbacks. The story begins with a Cambodian official warning Kasper and the former CIA agent to leave Phnom Penh. Kasper makes it as far as the Thai border, where he is arrested.
The story focuses on Kasper’s detention. Americans who identify themselves as Homeland Security and FBI agents play a dark role. Kasper’s mother and girlfriend have enlisted the help of Italian lawyer named Barbara Belli, who tries to win Kasper’s release. A variety of other people also drop in on the imprisoned Kasper, who is apparently being kept alive only because his mother pays bribes on his behalf.
One problem with writing a novel from a single character’s perspective, at least when the book is based on that character’s real world experience, is the question of credibility. The reader must believe that Kasper is telling the truth and, if he is, that his perception of reality is accurate. Kasper isn’t the kind of person I would trust under the best of circumstances, and given the temptation to use this book to repair his reputation, I have little reason to believe that it is entirely honest.
Even if Kasper is telling his story in good faith, I suspect that other players would have quite a different perspective on the events that Kasper describes. Supernotes would probably be a fascinating work of nonfiction if written by an objective outsider who interviewed, not just Kasper, but all the relevant people in his life. As it stands, we have only Kasper’s word that he was “disavowed” while acting as an undercover agent for the Italian police, that Americans offered to secure his release from prison for nefarious reasons, and that he was acting in anyone’s interest other than his own when he tried to get his hands on more than a hundred million dollars in supernotes.
The story bobs and weaves around the topic of supernotes -- the book’s title and presumably its intended theme -- but only as it nears its end do supernotes play any significant role in the plot. Maybe China and North Korea really are flooding Asia with undetectable counterfeit American currency. Maybe Kasper’s theory about who is really backing the counterfeit money machine (a doubtful conspiracy theory that has been around for several years) is correct. But Kasper’s assertion that he was imprisoned because he “knew too much” about supernotes strikes me as being just a little too convenient.
This is a work of fiction so the story doesn’t need to be true, but it does need to be believable. Some of the book -- the brutality in Prey Sar prison, political corruption in Cambodia, the money extorted from Kasper’s family -- is easy to believe. It is Kasper, casting himself in a heroic role, I doubted. Fictional characters are credible when they show their warts, but the character of Kasper is ambiguous. We are told that Kasper was “investigated” for certain crimes, but did he commit them? We are told that as a young man, he sympathized with fascism, but did he sympathize with right wing terrorists? Kasper isn’t telling. Kasper blames his problems on a host of people other than himself, but are they really to blame? Kasper rejects his portrayal as a radical “loose cannon” by the press, but maybe the press got it right and Kasper is using the book to rewrite his legacy. Who knows?
Some parts of the novel -- primarily flashbacks that take place outside of the prison setting -- are quite good. A scene in Zurich evokes the kind of tension that a spy novel fan expects. Most of the story, however, is less than riveting. The final chapters make an obvious but unsuccessful attempt to create suspense. Again, I might excuse those failings that if the story had the feel of reality, but Supernotes didn’t persuade me to view Kasper as either a hero or a victim, despite his intense desire to play both roles.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
I wanted to like it but couldn't get invested in the character or the story
By Sandy Kay
I wanted to love this book. I enjoy spy thrillers and financial thrillers and thought a spy novel about supernotes would be really interesting. For a variety of reasons, I just couldn't get into it and ended up skimming through most of the book. Even then I'd rather have that time back and just have skipped it altogether.
Part of the reason I think I didn't enjoy it was that it is not a typical spy thriller with the agent racing to carry out a mission for his or her country. In this book, the main character Kasper is in one Cambodian prison or another for nearly all the book. His battle is to try to get released and also figure out who is responsible for his arrest. Another of the main characters is an Italian attorney who is working for his family to try to get him released.
Another reason I couldn't get into the book is that the story was not linear. It starts just short of the ending then jumps to Kasper's arrest and bounces between the "present" in the prisons and events that happened years or even decades earlier. If done well, this kind of bouncing around between the past and present isn't an issue, but it didn't keep me engaged in the story. More importantly, despite this novel apparently being based on a true story, I never felt like Kasper was a character I could relate to or care about. Through the descriptions of brutal treatment, I just wasn't invested enough in Kasper to hope for him to be released.
A lot of the lack of caring comes down to the writing style. Through most of the book, I felt like the author was telling the story rather than drawing me into the story.
American readers should be aware that our country and American characters are not the heroes of this book. I don't want to spoil the plot for anyone who wants to read it, but just be aware that the white hats are not sitting on a lot of American heads.
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