Stoppkotte, Senior Intelligence Officer at the United States embassy in Phnom Penh. The square clock on the wall opposite his desk indicates 8:54 PM and most of the regular staff left hours ago. Still present are security personnel, a few marines, and the odd overzealous Khmer desk worker. But to the 46-year-old lone intelligence staffer, the past couple of hours have provided the ideal time to study the two reports lying on his desk undisturbed. The frown lining his forehead hints at the frantic contortions going on inside his tired brain. William H. Stoppkotte, a.k.a. Billy, looks into the middle-distance: he’s having great difficulty suppressing the excitement driving through his body. His left hand is absentmindedly caressing the cover of one of the reports. It is marked ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ and arrived this morning from the FBI Counterterrorism Division in Washington. The other report, no more than a couple of pages long, is marked with the same stamp and was put on his desk this afternoon by one of his Cambodian assistants.
