The Bangkok Asset: A novel (26 page)

Now I turn my attention back to the
leuk kreung.
When he gives me his card, I see he is legal counsel to the American embassy here. I remember that legal attachés are invariably FBI, which doesn’t have a great relationship with the CIA. The lawyer’s name is Matthew Hadley-Chan.

Matthew Hadley-Chan sits to Vikorn’s right. Krom and I take up the seats farther down the table.

“Well?” Vikorn says, looking at Goldman, then at the FBI.

Goldman is not looking well; indeed, he is seriously haggard. “The first thing I want to say is how sincerely my government and I regret any misperception that may have arisen—”

“Cut to the chase, Goldman,” the lawyer Hadley-Chan snaps like a man who has been waiting to pounce. “You bugged a friendly power on whom the U.S. depends for support and intelligence in a region which grows strategically more critical every week as tensions rise. You have abused one of our most important relationships in Southeast Asia. If you want the Bureau to help clean up your shit, stop pretending you are capable of regret or sincerity. In this room we all know what you are. Let’s start from there.”

Goldman stares at him, incandescent with rage, then controls himself as military programming intervenes. “You want to take that line, okay.” For once he is nonplussed. He stares at the lawyer as if there’s something about him he has trouble coming to grips with. “So, okay, you want straight talk, this is it. Yes, we did a little eavesdropping, and guess what we found out?” He sticks out his jaw and glares at Krom, me, and Vikorn in that order. Then he addresses himself to the FBI. “It’s true we did not find any activity against American interests in Southeast Asia. What we found was a massive conspiracy to control the Afghani heroin trade in alliance with Russian and Pakistani kingpins.” He glares triumphantly and folds his arms as if to say,
Okay, so go public with that.

Matthew Hadley-Chan scratches his jaw and speaks a few words to Krom, who picks up her laptop case from the floor, opens the case, and takes out the laptop. It is a roomy kind of case, though, and it is clear that it holds more than the shiny Apple MacBook Pro, which now sits gleaming on the table.

“These are not U.S. government offices, Mr. Goldman,” the lawyer says. “And we don’t plant bugs on our closest allies anymore. You should have retired twenty years ago, Goldman, while the world was still going your way. Your worst offense, though, speaking off the record, is to underestimate our hosts.”

Now Goldman starts to lose what is left of his self-control. “Don’t bug our allies? What the fuck do you think the NSA spends half its time—”

He stops speaking because Krom has taken something else out of her laptop case. We all acquire mystic concentration. Goldman is ashen. It is an extraordinary-looking machine about one inch long with both wheels and feet, a short antenna, and what must be a miniature camera on a swivel. She matches it with three more of the same from the briefcase while Goldman’s ashen turns to purple. Now she takes out a glassine bag filled not with an illegal substance but illegal gadgets; at least, that’s what I assume they are: tiny black oblongs about an eighth of an inch in diameter and half an inch long, more than a dozen of them. Inserted in a hole in a wall or door they would look like nails. Goldman is swivel-eyed trying to read each of our faces in turn.

Krom attacks her laptop, manipulating keyboard and mouse at great speed, looking every bit the supersmart ambitious Asian female police officer with those black spectacles on her tiny nose. The spiderlike contraption on wheels starts to stir. Now that she has mastered the controls she can make it shoot off in any direction. At the edge of the table it breaks out a set of tentacles with miniature suction pads that allow it to run down the table leg like a mouse, straight across the floor, and up again until it is sitting in front of Goldman, pointing its camera at him. Now on the giant LED screen we have Goldman’s head, about two feet tall, staring at a miniature mobile covert surveillance device, or MMCSD as the jargon has it.

“It’s a very old tactic, Goldman,” the lawyer says. “Didn’t you attend that class at Langley? I believe they call it
turning the bug.
”

Now Krom uses the sound system to air part of a recorded conversation.

“How long have they been bugging us for?”
It is Vikorn’s voice.

“I don’t know. We’ve found about twenty devices so far.”

“Who’s doing it?”

“There’s a character called Goldman at the center of it. He’s CIA.”

“Are they allowed to?”

“No way. Interference in the policing of a friendly power—that’s strictly no-no.”

“We wouldn’t want to offend them, though, would we?”

“No. They might come looking for weapons of mass destruction and destroy our country.”
Krom giggles.

“We’ll do a recording using my voice. Make like we’re thinking of moving into the Afghanistan trade soon as the Americans have left that country. Then we embarrass them by proving it’s not true and get them off our backs—hopefully forever.”

“Yessir,”
Krom says.

“Where is Afghanistan, by the way?”

“Somewhere west of northern India,”
Krom says.

I watch a smile bloom and fade on Vikorn’s face as Krom replays the recording, just in case someone missed the point.

Goldman, slumped in his chair and staring at Krom, is not embarrassed by the double-shuffle; he is fixated on something else. “You broke the codes to work an M245X? You may be brilliant, but not that brilliant.”

“Of course not. It would take a supercomputer and twenty skilled operators to break those codes.”

“So, how did you do it?”

“We sent one of the M245Xs you let loose on us to China. They used a supercomputer and twenty skilled operators. Took them a week. The Colonel has excellent contacts in the highest ranks of the PRC. They kept the original model for research and development.” Krom offers him a girlish smile.

Goldman is bothered by the sight of his huge head on the screen and the surveillance device on the desk. He figures if he swats the M245X the problem will be solved. He is a big man with a big hand. Naturally, he would not come down on the metallic object from a vertical direction, but why not just sweep the damn thing off the desk?

I guess he was in the field when the capabilities of the M245X were demonstrated to Company officers. He passes the back of his hand across the desk with some vigor, and now the iron spider has snapped open a pair of pincers with which it is clinging to his hand. He doesn’t want to show how much it hurts, so he flies into a rage, which is inarticulate at first, with the blood turning to crimson under his fat cheeks. He wants to be rid of the gadget without providing us with the spectacle of a six-foot-four, three-hundred-and-fifty-pound man in a fight to the death with what looks like a child’s toy, but those pincers are mean. Now the floodgates of articulated rage open wide, the politically incorrect resentment of five decades or more going back to the first tightening of lips, swallowing of rebellion when, as a cadet, he found that even in those days Company rules imperfectly expressed his own idea of the America he had volunteered to defend with his life. He stands up.

“Now you listen to me,” he says, “and you listen good. I’m no slick lawyer but I have leverage here. So, they screwed us by turning the bug—that’s a damn sideshow and you know it.” He is addressing the FBI lawyer. “I don’t give a shit if I seem like something from ancient history, what I have nobody else has in the whole of American covert operations. I have the most special product in the world. So cut me a little respect, okay?”

Matthew Hadley-Chan snorts. This is no ordinary spat between two giant American egos; this is a battle between the divorced hemispheres of the American mind. Now Goldman really lets go.

“I don’t give a shit what it takes, my program gets priority. I’m not interested in any bleeding-heart liberal crap about democracy, civil fucking liberty—” He has shifted the pincers from the end of a pinkie; now they are buried in the soft flesh of his palm near the thumb; blood drips from two puncture marks like a cobra bite; his frustration is reaching ballistic level. “From World War Two onward we have been and are the only true guardians of civilization in our time, the greatest country the world has ever known, that has brought the highest standards of living to the ends of the earth—and who was it who created, fought for, developed all this?
The white man,
of course.”

Like most Thais, Krom has an inbuilt reflex in times of rage. She goes very quiet and attacks her laptop with some rapid keywork. Goldman is too far into his tantrum to notice until the other M245Xs have crossed the floor and run up the legs of his pants. Whether they reach the apex simultaneously or one by one is unclear. Certain it is that the meeting ends with Goldman staring at Krom and Krom staring back with her finger poised above one of the keys.

“Adam and Eve were niggers,” Krom explains. “From Africa.”

Goldman blinks and nods in submission. Krom releases the devices, which fall down his pants to the floor. He thinks about stamping on them, but decides discretion may be the better part of valor and storms out, slamming the door.

Now I realize there is one vital element to the meeting that has quite passed me by. Maybe you saw it coming yourself, R, but frankly, my mind has been boggled enough recently and I must have blocked out the clues. There is no denying it, though, that very special thing between Matthew Hadley-Chan and Krom, which has nothing to do with sex or lonely hearts, even though the glance they share can only be called intimate. And there is something else, too: the FBI dealt with Goldman’s outburst by switching off entirely and retreating deep within. Once you’ve seen a TH do it once, you never forget.

My jaw hangs open:
They’ve infiltrated the FBI already?
The Eurasian lawyer coughs. “Sorry about that,” he says, and adds, looking Vikorn in the eye, “I don’t think we’ll be bothered by him anymore. He won’t be bugging anything for a while.” He turns to Krom. “You got all that on video?”

“Sure,” Krom says.

“I’ll make sure it reaches the right levels,” he says, nods again at Vikorn, and leaves.

I notice that Krom, also, is in a hurry to leave the room. When she has packed up her laptop and the surveillance gadgets she makes hurried apologies to Vikorn and me and also leaves. I decide to give her a couple of minutes before I follow.

Neither she nor the FBI are anywhere to be seen in the corridor. The obvious place to look for them would be in the smaller interview room next door. It is locked from the inside. When I put my ear against the door I am able to hear a conversation between the two of them. I cannot understand a word of it; it is in Mandarin. Perhaps one of them has attended an enhanced hearing class, though, because suddenly the door opens and Krom and the FBI are staring at me. They exchange a glance. The lawyer seems to be waiting for Krom to speak.

“Can we let him in?” she asks.

“Certainly,” Matthew Hadley-Chan says. “The Messiah has given his half brother full clearance, even up to the highest level.”

He pronounces the word
Messiah
in exactly the cringe-making way of any evangelist. I am shocked, but not so shocked that I lose curiosity in Krom’s reaction. As usual, I have no intuitive understanding of her mind: I just never seem to know where she is coming from. I am fascinated by the unforced reverence in her face.

“You’ve been with the Messiah recently?” she asks with naked awe.

“He has done me the extreme honor of including me in the next step of the project,” he says with nauseating piety. He turns to me. “Here,” he says, dipping into his jacket pocket and taking out a thumb drive. “All you need to know is on this drive. The files will self-destruct within the next six hours—and cannot be copied. I think the matter speaks for itself.”

I see from the body language of the two of them that it is time for me to leave. The point, apparently, is the thumb drive. I shake my head. That cannot be sexual attraction filling Krom’s eyes when she looks at the FBI; it’s an awe more radical than that. I exit and close the door as quietly as I can. In my pocket I carry the thumb drive.
Six hours,
I think,
six hours.
I better take it home. If Chanya’s working I can listen to it on earphones.

It is the FBI legal attaché who fuels my speculation as I make my way back to the hovel. In my mind’s eye I trace his probable life path. A smart Eurasian born, perhaps, in disadvantaged or lower-middle-class circumstances to a mixed couple, the Chinese half probably his father with the traditional Asian immigrant’s drive to succeed in a society more mobile and fairer than the one he was born into, which is not necessarily saying very much. His dutiful son passes exams at or near the top of his class, absorbs law at Harvard or Yale with relentless ambition, then joins the great benefactor, Uncle Sam, to serve honorably as living proof of the loyalty and dedication of a
leuk kreung
who knows all about the sneering racist forces ranged against him and is forever grateful for the protection built into the system. Like me, though, he suffers from an internal contradiction: the rootless
I
needs more than status to be sure it exists. Then a fateful meeting occurs: as in the book of Luke, Christ shows up at the lawyer’s office one fine day, whether in Bangkok or Washington, and the lawyer turns evangelist. My mind boggles.

A
t night when I’m working on a heavy case I switch to the vibrate function on the smart phone before I sleep. I leave the ringtone on, but turn it down low so as not to disturb Chanya. Even so, when it goes off it makes quite a display, lights flashing, the vibrations sending it on a circular navigation of the floor and, of course, the subdued ringtone (the Stones: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”). I block it before it vibrates its way over to the bookshelves, then I pick it up. I am only one-third awake. The screen tells me it is two twenty-four in the morning and that the caller is anonymous—except that the freshly washed voice is familiar to me.

“A car will be outside your house in three minutes. It will wait thirty seconds. Do
not
bring your gun, you will be protected.” He hangs up.

Three minutes, as it happens, is exactly how long it takes to pull on some shorts, grab a T-shirt that I hold in my hand, slip on some flip-flops, leave the house, remembering to bring my wallet, keys, smart phone, and police ID, and walk to the road. The car is rolling up to our front door as I’m pulling on the T-shirt.

The driver is none other than Matthew Hadley-Chan of the FBI, looking very fit in shorts and sweatshirt as if he has been jogging. He owns a gun, a large combat rifle made of high-tech materials lying across the backseat. I sit in the front. We do not speak but drive off at high speed toward the police station at District 8. We do not stop there, though, but penetrate farther into the market area. I am aware that we are only one street away from where the Asset wrenched the head off Nong X, so that I am casting more and more glances at my driver.

“Can’t tell you anything, sorry,” he says. “Looks like they’re gonna bag the big one tonight. The Captain will explain soon as you’re there.”

“Captain?” I say.

“Yeah. The bright shining star himself.”

I am puzzled by the casual reference made in the offhand American style. “You don’t mean the
Messiah,
do you?”

His expression turns serious. He puts a finger to his lips.

The market is not open at night, but the framework of iron poles that provides support for tarps during the day is left intact, along with the bare wood boards. As I look I see that there are men and women with blackened faces under some of these stands, all with combat rifles, all lying very still on their stomachs. As I pass I count eight humans—some are Caucasian, some are black, a couple are Thai, three are female. The FBI leads me quickly to a corner where an alley leads onto the square. It is quite dark. At the same time as the FBI whispers, “Here he is, Captain,” a fine, slim hand reaches out, grasps my upper arm with unexpected strength, and pulls me into the darkness.

“We’re about to catch me this time,” he whispers. “I’m two minutes away,” he adds with a giggle. “Watch.” In the darkness I can just make out those perfect teeth when he smiles. “You do still think it was me who killed that poor girl and wrote your name on a mirror in blood?”

“Yes,” I say. Then, looking around at the carefully laid trap: “Okay, no.” I must be confused, because then I say “Yes” again.

“Watch. The perp will be heading for a specific building about thirty feet from where we stand, where the bait is waiting.”

Bait? I want to know if the bait is a professional and a volunteer—or not? Now that fine manicured hand grasps my arm again and a faint nod causes me to look across the silent market. A tall figure has appeared, a
farang
with hair so blond it could almost be white. He is young, springy on his legs, at an unusually high level of physical fitness. His face is obscured by a baseball cap. I think,
Two? There are two of them?
Two Assets? Identical twins? Why didn’t I think of that?
Asset II sniffs the air a lot, sometimes bending down, sometimes reaching up nose first to catch whatever olfactory information is hanging around.

“He’s had the olfactory App,” my half brother explains with a sneer. “Guides himself through his nose, like a dog. Disgusting.”

We watch while the intruder works swiftly, moving from side to side but always heading toward one particular front door. He tries it, it is not locked. He turns the handle. I feel an urge to rush him, but a hand restrains me. He is allowed to enter the building. Seconds later there are two bangs that are too loud and too special to be shots from an ordinary gun. A child or young woman screams. We all move in a rush toward the building. A
farang
woman in combat dungarees emerges running with a young Thai girl in her arms, about twelve years old, horror in her eyes. The woman takes her to a van parked on the other side of the market. Everyone else makes for the front door. There are about ten of us now, entering one by one.

Inside, it is a typical local shop house, with cheap electrical and household goods for sale on the ground floor, family accommodation upstairs. I am thinking this is not like any rescue I can remember. Everyone is focused on the body of the perp.

Two shots from marksmen waiting in ambush inside the house have brought him down. Their guns are propped up against a wall, high-tech and capable of firing exotic shells. The body on the floor with two big holes in it has everyone’s attention, but no one wants to preempt the
Captain.
He is behind me as we enter; I am aware of everyone looking toward us.

“Listen up,” the Asset commands. “The three scientists—using our color coding that’s Drs. White, Black, and Pink—will have exclusive use of the body for exactly eight minutes for preliminary research. Sergeants Purple and Violet, you did the shooting, you stay with the doctors in case they have questions. During that time, the women lieutenants, that is, Gray and Cream, will form the first line of resistance: anyone coming within fifty yards of ground zero is warned off. Use polite feminine firmness on local people, any nonlocals are to be treated with suspicion. Your line is:
Please accept our apologies, we are protecting American government property for the moment, and we will release the area in less than ten minutes.
Soldiers Brown, Blue, and Charcoal, you are the second line of defense.
No outsider gets to look at this body.
Lethal force is authorized as a last resort. At the end of eight minutes an old black Toyota covered van will arrive. Do
not
shoot at it. It will be traveling fast. If you keep to the timing, at the moment when the body is being rolled up in the tarp, the van will arrive, and the body will be placed in the back of the van, which will drive off. There will be no American personnel within a hundred yards of ground zero after two minutes of the van being gone. Understood?”

The Asset in this mode has a natural authority. Everyone holds him in awe; at the same time, he is polite and friendly. I cannot tell if this group has worked with him before or if they have come together for this case alone. He is so polished in his performance, so much the highly trained pro, that his people simply follow his orders. The three scientists do not wait but instantly start on an examination of the body. I’m left wondering if this
Captain
really is the crazy I had lunch with only days ago. I think the Asset tonight is neither acting a part nor being himself; I think transhumans learn to select personalities to fit with the moment and cover the void that way. Like humans, only more so.

Blood-splatter patterns and large dark deposits on the floor show how the perp was shot twice before he could reach the girl: I think the first shot was a hollow-nose bullet of large caliber, and the second an exploding bullet that destroyed his chest. He lies facedown with arms and legs spread in classic shot-man position, his face pointed away covered by a forearm and invisible to me, his bright blond hair catching the light.

Sorry, R, it looks as if I’ve misled you: I’ve been wrong all along.
He
didn’t do it after all. I turn to the Asset and say in disbelief, “It really wasn’t you who killed Nong X here in the market ten days ago?” Not the most elegant question I’ve ever asked; he graciously ignores it.

“Let’s get this straight,” Dr. Pink, a woman, says to the gunmen. “You shot him through the gut with a hollow-nose round?”

“A JHP, ma’am, jacketed hollow-point forty-five with high-velocity propellant. Right through, hit his spine round about L1 or 2, but he kept coming on. No point giving him a warning. Something like that, you don’t give margin, you just shoot while you’re still alive. Sergeant Violet then hit him with an HE, ma’am.”

“HE?”

“High Explosive, ma’am.”

“I had no choice,” the other shooter said. “Never seen anyone recover from a JHP before.”

“I’m not interested in legality, soldier,” Dr. Pink says in a gravel voice. “It’s the technology that’s sending green balls down my pants leg.”

“Me, too, ma’am,” Dr. Black says. “He was still walking after you cut his spine in half?”

“Still running.”

The three scientists kneel over the body. “Damn it, will you look at this.”

“It’s a graphene sheath,” Dr. Pink says. “I saw it right off.”

“They’ve learned how to encase the nerves in graphene?”

“Might be worse than that,” Dr. Black says.

“Yeah, that thought crossed my mind too,” Dr. White says.

“How’s that? What could be worse than that they’ve worked out how to encase nerve fibers in graphene sheaths?”

“That they’ve worked out how to make the nerve fibers
out of
graphene rods,” Dr. Pink says. “That they’re about a decade ahead in nanotechnology.”

“Oh,” Black says. “Oh no. That is bad news, if it’s true. That puts us way behind.”

“Of course we’re way behind,” Pink says. “They get to do vivisection on humans. If they let us do that, we’d be ruling over America’s second empire by now with the world at our feet. It would be 1945 all over again.”

“Yes, but with that kind of progress they must suffer a failure rate of two in three.”

“Either you have Darwinian capitalism or you don’t,” Dr. Pink says, probing around inside the carcass. “I bet ol’ Polonium doesn’t lose any sleep over his casualties. He would probably use Chechens anyway.”

“Is it true that Polonium himself has been enhanced?”

“I heard that. I don’t know if it’s an urban myth or not. All that superman junk he’s into, though…maybe.”

“And if Polonium is in deep now, you can bet the rest of the world apart from the U.S. and Western Europe will be doing it in ten years’ time.”

“So we find ourselves at the end of the food chain and have to play catch-up. So we have to break the rules in the end anyway and everyone gets to call us hypocrites.”

“Our people do some cheating too,” White says as he examines the abdominal cavity. “On the quiet. You know that. What the Corporation won’t allow is vivisection on human children, because the scandal if it broke would close them down. Comparisons would be made with Hitler and Mengele. That’s where these guys beat us every time. They don’t worry about a free media.”

“I know that,” Dr. Pink says. “We have this taboo, but we’ll have to break it sooner or later. Kids don’t necessarily suffer as a result of the research. Anyway, who in hell would ever find out? This program is SECRET, in capitals. I had to go through five hoops, they tapped my phone, talked to my friends and colleagues and everyone who’s known me since high school, followed me around for six months—and that was just to get on the consultancy list. I’ve had five different identities in as many days, and tonight I am Dr. Pink. No, no, nobody is ever going to bust us. Not only does the President not know about what we do, ninety-nine percent of the CIA have never heard of it.”

“Well, they put us all through the same rigor. The military isn’t subtle, but the money’s good.”

“You got that right. Why do you think I’m here? I earn more in three days than I get in a year on civil research projects.”

“Anyway, going back to what you were saying, you’re right, the kids don’t suffer at all for the most part. You start to put synthetic cable in a kid’s spine at age about seven, by age seventeen you have a superman with an unbreakable back. Where’s the suffering?”

“Like this one,” Black says. “Shot through the spine with a hollow-nose and he was still walking. We’re gonna have fun with the reverse engineering here. I’d sure like to know how they did it.”

“Running,” the gunman says, as if he has an inner need to keep repeating the story. “Running at full speed. I guess he was about a yard from me when I hit him with an exploder full in the chest and he finally went down. I was sweating it, I can tell you.”

“Well, let’s turn him over, let’s see how well they’ve done here.”

The body it seems is quite heavy. It takes the three of them to turn it over so the face is staring at the ceiling. We all groan, myself more loudly than anyone. I cannot believe it.

“Wow!” Pink says.

“They’re winning,” White says. “As good as won, I would say.”

“Will you look at that?”

Everyone in the room is constantly switching their attention between the creature on the floor and Captain Asset.

“Damn it!”

“Can you believe it?”

Dr. White is so shocked he wants to check with me, as if I am a fellow scientist. “Have you ever seen anything like that?” he asks, stabbing his finger toward the Asset then back again at the creature on the floor.

“No,” I say. “Never.”

The Asset also is transfixed. The face of the perp is a perfect replica of his own, as is the near-white hair and the crew cut. “Does it come off?”

“It must,” Dr. Pink says. “He sure wasn’t born like that.”

“It probably fits by suction or glue,” Black says.

The Asset kneels beside it. “I’m going to touch it,” he says.

“No gloves?”

“No. I did a program. I can tell what material it is, skin to skin. Yes, a graphene trellis,” he says, caressing the dead one’s cheek. “I think they’ve grown skin and hair follicles on top of it.”

Dr. Black examines further, wearing surgical gloves. “I think you’re right, Captain.”

Pink shakes her head. “If they’ve gotten that far, they’ve as good as won the contract,” she says. “We can only do masks using the living original. We can’t copy or imitate like this in graphene—they must have done it from photographs. Probably thousands of pictures fed into a software program to get this kind of accuracy. We can’t model this material at all except on a living face, that’s way beyond our capabilities at this point in time.”