The Bangkok Asset: A novel (6 page)

I tell him. He stares at me and shakes his head.

“What?” I say.

“
What? You ask what?
You’re a detective, you told me. Has anything ever been so obvious?”

I take a deep breath. This guy is a master of trying your patience. Maybe it is his teaching method; at this moment it seems like a serious personality defect. “I am very sorry to be so stupid,” I say with a smile. “Clearly my modest capacity is so far behind yours it is difficult for you to relate to me. Would you graciously explain what the…” I take another breath. “What the hell you are talking about?” I say softly.

He hums tunelessly. Never before has humming filled me with rage. Little by little words emerge from the hum. Finally I realize what he is saying over and over again: “Someone has you on a hook, my friend. Someone has you on a hook.” He smiles. “Congratulations. If you survive this karma, you will be close to enlightenment. I almost envy you.” Then he frowns. “Take a look at this,” he says, using a dramatic gesture to sweep around his unbelievably squalid abode with the leaking roof, the dirt floor, a mean little brazier, one pot, a plastic bottle of water, a bamboo mat for a bed, a crude Buddha image on a high shelf. “You think this is tough? This is easy.” He points to his head. I get the message. He has tranquillity, I have the opposite. When I make to leave he grabs my arm and stares into my eyes. “You smoke weed, don’t you?”

“Ah, a little.”

“No, a lot. But probably not enough. Next time you smoke, get really, really stoned, then meditate on desolation. Concentrate on the most unpleasant death you can think of, then how it will be at the end, when you realize there never was a heaven or a morality and every single little thing you did to make your life and the world better was a total waste of time.”

“Why are you so hung up on desolation?”

“It’s where the treasure is hidden.”

So much for my brush with the saint. When I emerge from his shack I am surprised to find the woman from my previous visit outside staring at the river. She looks away when she sees me, as if she understands what I am going through. Maybe he puts everyone through it.

A
fter I’d given myself time to think about it, I realized there was a reason why Vikorn might be happy to nail the HiSo lawyer Lord Sakagorn, he of the sky-blue Rolls-Royce and the trademark ponytail. The Colonel was from a dirt-poor subsistence farming family in Isaan and no matter how high he rose he carried with him the smoldering resentment of a people bled white by a snotty Bangkok elite who treated them like subhumans, because that’s what they honestly believe us to be. Vikorn loved skewering representatives of that class, and although he probably had nothing particular against Sakagorn, there could hardly be a more emblematic child of privilege and exploiter of deference to crucify.

“So how do we do it, Chief?” I asked.

“If you bring his lordship in, you have to justify it. He’ll come down on you like a truck, flatten you with the law.” He shook his head. “No, you don’t bring Sakagorn in without a perfect case.”

“Of what?”

The Colonel smiled as he looked down at the street. “He gambles on Colonel Ransorn’s patch. There’s an illegal casino in the car park area of a condominium block—they’ve enlarged the security hut to take over the whole of one floor of the underground car park. Inside it’s very plush, a Monte Carlo–type setup.” Vikorn checked his watch. “He’s there most evenings—starts early, after the courts close. His game is roulette. The main point for you is to take pictures. Do it ostentatiously, not only with phone cameras. Have someone with a big old-style camera with a nice bright flash. Little touches like that have an impact on the HiSo mind.”

“But there must be a lot of security. Someone like Sakagorn isn’t going to use an illegal casino unless it’s totally safe.”

“Correct,” Vikorn said. “But the casino is owned by Colonel Ransorn, who needed quite a lot of help to set it up. I charge only a minimum of interest—but of course, if Ransorn became unhelpful, I would have to charge more—or ask for a return of the loan.” He turned to face me. “Leave it with me. I’ll tell you when the security at the casino has been suspended. Probably tonight, late.”

The operation turned out to be simpler than I expected. At exactly eleven p.m. the casino that lies under the thirty stories of the Shambhala Palace condominium building found itself raided by a small contingent of police who behaved as if they belonged to Ransorn’s district but in fact owed their main allegiance to Sergeant Ruamsantiah. Everyone escaped except for the famous, high-flying, brilliant legal counsel Lord Sakagorn. He of the long black shiny hair, the flamboyant lemon waistcoat, the silk bow tie, dinner jacket, and smooth jowls. I sat with him in the back of the car when we returned to District 8. During the ride Sakagorn regained his composure and started throwing out a few forensic hints about how much this was going to cost me, Vikorn, and the police in general, once he got the case off the ground.

“You don’t have a chance of making anything stick. You’re not even the right crew for the district.”

I decided not to cuff Sakagorn when we took him away—after all, he is not the type to make a desperate bid for freedom in the middle of traffic, it would be inelegant. As a result, he was free to gesticulate. His performance was all the more dramatic because somehow in the scuffle he lost his silver hair clip so that his enraged face was now framed by a chaos of long, shiny hair that he smoothed back with histrionic care while he demanded to see Vikorn immediately. This was a matter to be sorted out by money and power—I had neither.

I myself felt the need for a heavy hitter to deal with Sakagorn, so I called the Colonel, who happened to be carousing at one of his clubs. His mood swung from irritation to amusement when I told him about the bust. He especially liked the detail of the lost hair clip. When we arrived at reception they told me the Colonel was waiting in the main conference room, the one with the giant LED screen.

In addition to the thumb drive for the large camera, I had my own phone pictures of Sakagorn at the casino, and also those that Ruamsantiah took. All in all I suppose there were a total of more than a hundred pictures on each of the two smart phones plus the memory card from the SLR camera.

All the time Lord Sakagorn ranted, even citing Aristotle’s
The Constitution of the Athenians,
while Vikorn said nothing but merely sat at the head of the table playing with the smart phones until he decided to pick one up and plug it into a cable under the giant monitor. Little by little Sakagorn stopped advocating as the photo gallery appeared in outsize pictures on the screen. After a few minutes of experimentation, which he seemed to enjoy, Vikorn found what he was looking for.

She was in her early twenties, owned the pure white skin of northern Chinese genes, held herself with the grace and simplicity of a virgin protected by power and money, turned to smile at Sakagorn now and then with the respect of a loyal daughter for a father figure, and became confused every time the middle-aged barrister rested a hand on her butt. Her dinner gown was midnight-black, her jewelry silver, her experience limited. Part of her wanted to look on the roulette as a child’s game; on the other hand, she would allow Sakagorn to have his way with her sooner or later—perhaps that was why he had made the rather reckless decision to take her to the casino, so that she would be excited, impressed, and perhaps a little drunk when he made his move. Her expression held the question of all young people at a certain point:
Is this what I have to do to be an adult? To have arrived in the world? To be a part of it?

I have not mentioned her before, because I paid her no attention, assuming she was simply part of the casino’s entertainment. Vikorn, though, knew who she was. When he found a photo where her face was snapped at the moment Sakagorn fondled the nates of her ass, he stopped the show and left the picture on the screen. He still had not said a word to either of us, not even a “hello” to Sakagorn, who was technically his superior in the national protocol by a huge margin. Now the Colonel stared at Sakagorn.

“She is over the age of consent,” Sakagorn said in a cracked voice that could be a wail of fear or indignation—he perhaps had not decided which.

“By a day or so, perhaps,” Vikorn said. “But that’s not the point, is it?” Sakagorn stared at Vikorn for a moment, then looked away. “Are you going to tell me her father knows you intended to corrupt her at the casino, maybe slip her something to mellow her, before taking her up to the penthouse? There’s a private lift, isn’t there, from the casino all the way up to the top of the building?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Sakagorn snapped.

Vikorn shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? Her father is in Washington, according to the news. Comes back at the end of the week. I doubt he’ll go the legal route to punish you—what d’you think? He can hardly turn a blind eye, with all these photos all over YouTube and Facebook.” Sakagorn had paled. Vikorn sighed. “I suppose you took such a risk because you are in love, Lord Sakagorn?”

The idea that Sakagorn could be in love with anyone other than himself caused me to smile, which caused Sakagorn to turn on me in a rage, which caused Vikorn to smile. Little by little, though, the eyes of we three men were seduced back to the screen. That was a very beautiful and very charming young aristocrat. Vikorn cleared his throat. “You haven’t had her yet, have you?”

“No,” Sakagorn admitted.

“That might just save your life. How did you intend to keep it secret?”

“I don’t know. She drives me crazy. She’s perfect, perfect. If her father gets heavy, I’ll marry her.”

“But you are already married, Lord Sakagorn.”

“If she doesn’t want to be a minor wife, I would divorce for her.”

“Tonight was supposed to be the night?”

“Can we talk about something else?” Sakagorn said. He shrugged. “Okay, it’s a deal. You keep quiet about tonight, erase all those pictures—I’ll give you what you want.” He was channeling a quite different persona when he muttered, “It won’t make an atom of difference, even
you
don’t have leverage in this. It’s a lot bigger than you, Colonel. Bigger than the police altogether.”

Vikorn seemed pleased that Sakagorn saw sense so quickly and took no notice of the implied threat. The lawyer cleared the hair from his face with both hands and stood in front of the video screen to block the view. Then he had a better idea. “Can you switch that damn thing off?”

Vikorn switched the screen off.

“Goldman,” the Senior Counsel said. “Goldman and his Asset.”

“I
didn’t particularly want him for a client,” Sakagorn explained, pacing up and down. “
Farang
are always a problem. Either they can’t understand that a system can be different to theirs, or they do understand and cannot stop telling you what’s wrong with it. They compare an idealized description of their own catastrophe with a brutally accurate description of ours. In the end one just grows angry and keeps quiet.”

“So why did you take him on?”

“I was asked to by a senior member of government. Goldman was doing the high-society circuit and looking for a lawyer. A good friend who is a high-ranking civil servant wanted to know what kind of legal advice a retired CIA officer could possibly need in our country. He suggested I find out.”

“You’re spying on your client?”

“Who doesn’t spy, now we have the gadgets? It’s the pandemic nobody talks about.”

“But Goldman was special—why?”

“Because he was here before. During the Vietnam War. He was young, but not too young. That’s why his Thai is so good—he’s been using it on and off for half a century. He’s clever, good at languages. The kind of Company man who came into his own during ’Nam. Who was given a super-secret project called MKUltra to oversee in the field.”

At the name
MKUltra,
Vikorn raised his eyes for a moment, then dropped them.

“Who became an embarrassment later on. A Cold Warrior from the espionage community of yesteryear. Usually they retired early or took desk jobs at Langley. But there were a few like Goldman who were field men to their marrows, who could not function well stateside—and who could still be useful when run by the right supervisor, someone who knows how to use such men.”

“This is the brief you received from…someone senior in the Thai government?”

“Yes. That was it. A long lunch with someone very senior—at the Oriental—and someone else. We got through two and a half bottles of Cheval Blanc. It was a good lunch.”

I expected Vikorn to pick up on the casual reference to
someone else.
He didn’t.

“But even in the context of American wild men from ’Nam, this was a little extravagant, wasn’t it? To use our best-connected Senior Counsel to spy on his own client? There must have been something specific.”

“A lot of his stuff was done here, in Thailand,” Sakagorn said, looking away. “Remember, this goes back half a century. Go back only a little further, to World War Two, and you come to the embarrassing incident when Thailand declared war on the United States. We had reasons to cooperate with Uncle Sam.”

“You mean MKUltra happened here?”

“The setup, the drugs, the preparation—a lot of it happened here. The actual violations of human rights happened in Vietnam or stateside. Goldman ran the operation here and in ’Nam.”

“But there had to be a specific reason for anyone that senior in the Thai government to be interested in Goldman. Interested enough to involve you.”

“The Chinese were keen for us to service Goldman.”

Vikorn did not blink at the mention of PRC interests. “You report back to them?”

“Classified,” Sakagorn said.

Vikorn had come to the end of his preliminary questions, designed to set the scene. Now he nodded at me.

“And the advice he needed from you—was what?” I asked.

Lord Sakagorn frowned. “One day it will be a question for every jurisdiction: what do you do with transhumans? How does the law apply to them?”

“
Trans
humans? I’ve only recently heard that term for the first time,” I said. “Who are they?”

“They are what we’re talking about. What everyone will soon be talking about.”

“Why should the law be any different for them?” I asked.

“Because
they
are different. In some ways they are like children. In some ways like animals. Do you expect a four-year-old or an ape to obey the law? To even understand what law is? On the other hand, their cognition skills are more advanced—electrical circuits surgically inserted give them amazing speed of thought. Amazing.” He paused to frown again. “Except it’s not thought. Not what we normally call thought.”

Sakagorn looked miserable, as if it was not the bust at the casino that had ruined his evening so much as having to talk about this new beast, this transhuman.

“They talk well, though. They talk very well. Just like you and me. Actually, with the right programming they talk better than normal humans, no pauses for self-doubt and considered reflection. And they are made of flesh and bone, too. They have normal human bodies—sort of. You can’t say they are robots—it would be so much easier if they were. It’s hard to get your head around it. Hard to find the words. The more you see of it, the more confused you become.” He stared into my face, but seemed not to see me. “They have charm, too. Great charm. That’s not part of the programming either. This incredible charm. It’s serendipitous. Did you ever meet a really smart person? I’m not talking about computing power or IQ particularly, I mean someone whose mind worked so well they could do just about anything? Sometimes politicians, certain judges—”

“And a certain kind of crook?” I asked.

His mood turned black. He sat heavily on the nearest chair. “Yes. That’s what I mean, a certain kind of highly gifted personality can use their gift to charm lesser mortals. When you find some poor sucker whose brain doesn’t work as well as yours, you only have to blind him with your superior cognitive abilities and he’s putty in your hands. He might say you charmed him, but basically you took over his mind. Made him in awe of you.” He paused to gaze at the ceiling. “When he’s in the mood he can make you feel like you can’t refuse him anything.”

“You’re talking about the Asset?”

“Yes.”

“No matter how badly he behaves?” I said.

“Yes.” Another frown and pause. “But not all the time, that’s the thing. One minute you’re dealing with an Einstein, the next minute with a sociopath. And there’s no warning, no way of knowing which bit of him is working from moment to moment.” He groaned and sighed. “I suppose they’ll fix the glitch sooner or later.” He shook his head. “Or maybe they won’t. Sometimes, there’s a look on his face, as if to say,
Forget it, I program myself from now on.
”

“On the face of the Asset?”

“Yes, of course.”

“But Goldman himself—he still runs his ‘Asset’? He’s in charge?”

Sakagorn shook his head and frowned. The question troubled him so deeply that for once words failed him. Finally he said, “Their relationship has been deteriorating. Sometimes Goldman looks downright terrified.” He would not say more on the subject.

I cough. “Lord Sakagorn, I have only one case at the moment and it has nothing to do with geopolitics or the PRC, so far as I know. It is a very local little tragedy, I’m afraid. But it was I who asked the Colonel to invite you to come talk to us…” I let the barrister snort at that and make a face, then carried on. “The media have named it the
Market Murder;
we are calling the victim
Nong X.
A local Thai girl, twelve years old, murdered in the market just behind this station.” Sakagorn looked as if he was about to yawn: typical of an undeveloped peasant mind like mine to suddenly descend to the squalid and irrelevant. “Someone pulled her head off with his bare hands,” I said with a smile. “I wonder if you could help?”

Sakagorn was startled but not particularly shocked. “I don’t know. I heard about the murder, but I’m sure I would have remembered if any of the reports mentioned a decapitation.”

“We’re keeping the details quiet for the purpose of investigation.”

The barrister seemed more curious than disturbed. “No other molestation?”

“No. No sexual abuse, no visible signs of struggle, no damage to other parts of the body. Somebody of superhuman strength simply twisted and wrenched her head from her shoulders, probably in seconds, before she had time even to be terrified. I don’t have to tell you that simply doesn’t happen in homicide cases. Killers do not unemotionally remove the heads of their victims with their bare hands while being careful not to do any other damage or take sexual advantage in any way.”

Sakagorn did not disguise his surprise. He stared at me for a moment, thought about it, then shrugged. “Superhuman strength, lack of emotional involvement, a weird combination of extreme violence and total self-control—sure, it’s him, Goldman’s Asset. Who else could it be? I know nothing about it, however, nothing at all. I wasn’t there, didn’t know, wasn’t invited, this is the first I’m hearing of it.”

Now we had an awkward pause in the interrogation. Vikorn changed the subject.

“Tell us more about the background. Goldman and his Asset arrived in Bangkok only last month, you say? What about before that? Give us the history as you know it.”

“Goldman ran a CIA program in Vietnam nearly half a century ago. It was basic zombie mind-control stuff that went wrong. There was a big scandal, they pretended to shut it down, Goldman pleaded for them to let him continue in secret. He did some kind of deal and moved the operation to Angkor, in Cambodia.”

“Angkor? But the Khmer Rouge were there, they used it as a base.”

“Yes, soon after Goldman moved there. He had to move on. But the few years he spent in Angkor were crucial, somehow.”

The barrister turned cagey. Perhaps it was embarrassment: he was finding it difficult to come clean. Vikorn and I stared at him relentlessly. Finally he buckled. “I may have been brought up in this country, but until I met Goldman I didn’t think I had a superstitious bone in my body. However, I would never visit Angkor again, never.” He shook his head. “I went many times as a tourist, loved the huge trees embracing the great stone Buddhas—so romantic. It was a great place to take a girl for a long weekend, in the old days. And so close, about forty minutes by plane door to door.”

He looked up. “Goldman got drunk one night and started raving about it. It seems he had the use of one of the lesser temples, not the Wat itself—you know, Angkor was a great city, fifty years ago eighty percent of it had yet to be excavated. He kept ranting about some shrink, some Englishman, some crazy British psychiatrist with a ridiculous British name. I couldn’t make out if this Brit was on the team, or running some other team, or what. The whole thing was garbled, he was horribly drunk—scary, a man that size, drunk and crazy. It seemed this British shrink with a weird name I can’t remember had persuaded the CIA shrinks to try an experiment. It was the Brit shrink’s idea that the Americans were all wrong in thinking that enhancement was a matter of drugs and neurons. The argument was the usual Old World organic versus New World scientific. Basically, he was talking about magic. Black magic.” He scanned us. “I don’t have to tell you about Cambodia and magic? There isn’t a
mordu,
a local clairvoyant or witch doctor in Krung Thep who doesn’t claim to belong to some Khmer lineage—it’s like the best perfume comes from Paris, the best beef from Argentina, the best sorcery from Cambodia. So the CIA people agreed to try the experiment the British doctor with the crazy name was urging on them. And it worked. Except that it didn’t just work on the assets they were trying to develop. It worked on the whole crew. Including Goldman and the British shrink himself.”

Sakagorn shrugged. “That’s all I can tell you. It came out once only when he was drunk, and he never mentioned it again. I thought it was merely the ranting of a man who had spent too much time in the jungle. Perhaps it was. But something must have sunk in, because there’s no way I could bring myself to visit Angkor again. No way. I started to see the whole place in a different light. That huge dark rotting Wat the size of a city block, those hideous stone pyramids like Aztec architecture, that sinister little shrine right in the middle, the whole atmosphere of the thing…” He shuddered.

“When you say it worked, what worked?”

“Unclear.”

Vikorn and I both grunted. “What else?”

“Nothing. That’s all he let slip. They only had a few years, then Pol Pot turned up with his gang of brutes and Goldman had to get out. They went up to Laos.” He stared into our eyes, one after another, then shrugged.

I changed tack. “You have spent much time alone with the Asset, Lord Sakagorn?”

“No. Never. Goldman is always there.”

“So how are they together? Do they lounge around on sofas watching football and drinking beer?”

Sakagorn shook his head. “No. Not at all. The Asset cannot be without his toy for long.”

“What toy?”

“A gaming headset with a screen. Goldman takes it away for the demonstrations. It’s like depriving a hunting animal of food—it makes him fierce.” He paused again, too lost in his own dread to lie, or to help much either. “You would go round to Goldman’s luxury condo off Sukhumvit, and Goldman would be there scheming and brooding, and the Asset would be there in a corner like a troubled teenager totally absorbed in whatever he was playing on the headset.”

“Why was that so weird?”

“Because you knew what he could do with that amazing body, that enhanced cognition—all the stuff they’d done to him to make him superhuman—and there he was, like a dumb teen with emotional problems and no social skills.”

“But you said he had charm?”

The barrister lost patience. “We’re not talking about a human,” he grumbled. “Change one strand of DNA in a fruit fly, and you get a different-color fruit fly.” He let a couple of beats pass. “But this is not simple genetic engineering. That Asset has received accelerated learning enhancements: ALE in the jargon. Everything I’m telling you now relates to the last time I was with them at Goldman’s apartment. That was two weeks ago. Two weeks is a long time in the evolution of a transhuman. His personality is probably quite changed by now.”

“But these changes are at Goldman’s command?” I was not trying to be provocative. Only now I realized from the lawyer’s face what a hot topic that was. Sakagorn stared at me, looked away.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

I decided to pounce. “You said Goldman seems terrified.” His hooded eyes conveyed the response:
So?
“Are you saying that Frankenstein has broken free—or knows how to? That sometimes Goldman is the slave and his Asset the master?”