by John Burdett
But Hudson, of course, is a different kettle of fish. Talk about many-layered (and multifaceted). I have to be humble here and admit I don’t know any Asian who could keep a column of oiled billiard balls in the air from day to day the way he does—or who would want to. In the finer points of mental self-abuse, farang lead the world. He does it all by remaining close-lipped and secretive, of course, which provided a challenge for my mother, the courting of whom has been so unobtrusive—and secretive—that no one knows if they’ve actually done it yet—or even if he is actually courting her or not. (Nong turns uncharacteristically coy whenever I challenge her on the point, which is more than academic to me considering how close we are now to the visit from Superman. I wouldn’t put it past her to use Hudson in order to get back in form for Dad—or vice versa, depending on what sort of shape Dad is in after all these years. She hasn’t resumed her diet yet, which is certainly a clue of some kind, if indecipherable at the time of writing.) No, my mother has been no use at all in the Hudson study, and I have had to build on what I’ve been able to glean during those very brief and few moments when he has let his guard down. See if you can work it out, farang. He:
1. Brightened once when he heard Wan and Pat talking in their native tongue, which is Lao;
2. Spared a glance which was neither negative nor judgmental when one of the old codgers inadvertently flashed a large bag of dope in the bar one night;
3. Has found it necessary to interview Vikorn unaccompanied by Bright or any interpreter on numerous occasions, which seemed to leave both he and Vikorn in good spirits;
4. Is fifty-six years old;
5. Joined the CIA in his early twenties and was sent to Laos after graduating from the academy.
Oh, and there’s a sixth point. In a quiet moment in the bar one evening, when I was forlornly checking the e-mail for signs of Superman, he leaned over my shoulder.
“Want to do a deal? I’ll tell you something you need to know if you put in a good word for me with your mum.”
“Fuck off. I don’t pimp for my mother.”
“Sorry, that’s not at all what I meant. I admire her, I respect her. She makes me tingle in places I thought were dead. So I’ll tell you anyway. Listen. D’you really think Mitch Turner sat twiddling his thumbs all day down there in Songai Kolok without making any contribution at all to our glorious Agency?”
“I did wonder about that.”
“Of course you did, you’re a first-class cop in your own very unique way. So think about it. What do all members of the secret world have in common? We’re compulsive gossips, that’s what. And who can we gossip to? Only each other. Security clearance can be a pain in the ass. You’ve no idea what total junk most so-called intelligence really is. Now with encryption and e-mail, a guy with Turner’s clearance can listen in to every damn piece of trivia that our bugs and agents pick up all over Asia. An American woman mugged in Nepal, a dumb Yank gets into a brawl in downtown Tokyo, an American child abducted in Shanghai—stuff that shouldn’t be part of our work at all but still flashes across our screens.”
“Turner sat reading that junk? It doesn’t sound like him.”
“He had no choice. Intelligence sifting was part of his job. He would have to give an opinion on it all: valuable or not, if valuable how many stars? The whole game is basically as dumb as that. Because of the need for security clearance, guys with Ph.D.’s do stuff a schoolkid wouldn’t find challenging.” That thin smile of his starts to build. “Drugs too, of course. We still have to do a lot of narcotics work, the DEA are such dummies.”
I stare at him, not having the faintest idea where he’s going here.
He leans a little closer. “What the hell do you think she was doing with herself while he was stoned out of his brain on the opium she brought him? All she needed was his log-in code. He probably told her the number himself when he was on the dope. Opium can do that—you see the world from a whole different perspective, one hundred and eighty degrees different. Yes, I’ve had my moments.” I’ve stopped working the mouse. “She’s a very very smart lady. For supersmart street sense, Chanya’s the finest I’ve ever seen.” He lets the smile spread some more. “Put in a good word for me, and I’ll tell you more.”
“I don’t care.”
A chuckle as he grasps my shoulder in a manly grip. “You’re a lousy liar, and I love you for it.”
With the CIA apparently on my side, I take the opportunity to ask that question that never seems to go away: “Does the name Don Buri mean anything to you?” He looks convincingly blank and shakes his head.
Later that night, with Hudson gone and the bar almost empty, Su emerges from one of the upstairs rooms with something in her hand.
“Know what this is?” Su asks when I’m half in, half out of the bar, fishing something out of her handbag. Instantly I step back in, breaking into a sweat of excitement and relief, for it is none other than the Super Secret Sony Micro Vault. You wondered about that, didn’t you, farang? You said to yourself: where is that damned Micro Vault he made such a fuss about chapters and chapters ago, surely that was a Road Sign if ever there was one? Well, the embarrassing truth is that I lost the damned thing, and I’ve been searching all over for it ever since. Of course Hudson and Bright have been grinding on at me daily forever (nag, nag, nag: Has he found it yet? Nah: how typical, dah dumb third-world cop lost dah Micro Vault), but I wasn’t going to put that on record out of sheer shame. I’ve practically turned the club upside down—now our laziest whore is holding it in the palm of her hand.
“The john was humping me so hard in room five a couple of hours ago, I had to hold on to the mattress, and this thing dropped out. I thought maybe it would vibrate, but it doesn’t.”
“No,” I say, taking it and stepping behind the bar, “it doesn’t.”
“So what is it?”
“It’s a Micro Vault.”
“Oh.”
She leans over me while I slot it into the computer and double-click with bated breath. Su and I exchange an astounded glance.
“It’s a man’s back,” she explains, drawing on deep experience.
“I can see that.”
“Pretty muscular, damned good bod, actually. What are all those green lines?”
“It’s a kind of grid.”
I click and click, but there really is nothing more to it.
31
One night, after the two a.m. curfew, the bar is empty save for Hudson and me. He is drunker than I’ve seen before, though still more or less in control. Sitting on a stool, he starts to talk, as if continuing a conversation, probably with himself.
“Freedom? What kind of dumb all-purpose Band-Aid is that?” With pleading eyes: “I mean, what are we selling exactly? Money is the state religion of the West. We pray to it every waking minute—and we’re gonna make damned sure every last human on earth gets down on their knees with us. All our wars are wars of religion.” A pause. “Want to know why I’m still here, at my age? I’m just a few hundred miles away from where I was thirty years ago in Laos. Look, I’ve made no progress at all, not financially, professionally not much, romantically not at all, not even geographically. Why am I still here?”
I shrug.
“Same reason the other guys couldn’t go back. All over Southeast Asia there are American men who never go home. We simply can’t. Because when we look into the eyes of your people, we see something, call it what you like. Soul? The human mind before fragmentation? Something sacred we farang habitually amputate like tonsils because we don’t understand its function? Maybe it’s your damned Buddhism. But we see something. Now tell me this, Detective. When you look into the eyes of farang, what do you see?”
When I fail to reply, he sniggers. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Three days after this conversation, everything changed. Hudson and Bright arrived at the bar that evening, looking gloomy. They ordered a couple of beers, which they took to a corner table, where they whispered together. Finally,
Hudson came over to the bar with his news.
“Your Colonel’s little game worked too well. Maybe he’s a kind of a genius. Well, we’ll see. They’re sending the Boss.”
32
I’ve been summoned to the police station, and I’m on the back of a motorbike listening to Pisit, who is on the warpath over a Hollywood film star who headed a campaign to stop a factory in the north of Thailand from employing underage children. She put pressure on a certain sportswear retailer, who canceled orders to the factory, which had to close down. Now the parents of the newly unemployed kids are having to sell their daughters into sex slavery in Malaysia because of lost revenue from the factory:
Anyone out there with information on those algorithms in the English language that make its native speakers so self-righteous, or indeed on the psychopathology of crusading in general, give me a ring on soon nung nung soon soon nung nung soon soon.
I pull off the headphones as we near the station. There was something in Vikorn’s tone when he told me about this meeting last night. Apparently yet another CIA has arrived, supposedly to kick ass. The alleged Al Qaeda connection has got Langley salivating. Things are not looking so good today.
She is tall, close to six feet, slim with a military bearing, a fit and handsome fortysomething, although her face and neck suffer from that drawn quality characteristic of those beset by the vice of jogging. Her hair is very short, gray and spiky: I wonder if she and Hudson share a barber? She does not waste time or money on cosmetics; her hygienic odor includes carbolic references. The suit is iron gray with baggy pants. We are in Vikorn’s office, but it might as well be hers.
Vikorn, diminished, has let her take over, at least for now. A woman was the last thing he expected. (But I think he’s working on a plan.) She keeps her hands in her trouser pockets, thoughtfully pacing up and down as she talks. There is about her the restrained superiority of a senior librarian with access to secret catalogs. Hudson sits uncomfortably, perhaps even resentfully. Bright has not been invited. Nobody interrupts. I translate for Vikorn in a whisper, so as not to disturb her concentration. She has been trained to smile frequently—and inexplicably—perhaps on the same course where she learned unarmed combat?
“This is serious intelligence. Detective, I want to thank you and your Colonel for bringing this evidence to us. This is a new direction for Al Qaeda, and a surprising one. We’ve never seen a castration theme before, but it makes a lot of sense from their point of view.” She pauses, frowns fussily, continues. “And of course there might be a revenge theme from the Abu Ghraib fiasco. How does the world perceive America, especially the Muslim developing world? As some kind of Superman caricature—with emphasis on man—an overmasculine society obsessed with its power and virility. If they start cutting off our male organs, it will send one of those crude, potent messages that the young, ignorant, and fanatical tend to embrace. Actually, exactly the same technique of intimidation was used by the Ching emperors, who invariably cut off the testicles of prisoners of war, which certainly wore down the enemy’s morale. It’s smart. Very smart. We cannot let it go unanswered.”
Hudson grunts. She pauses, leans her butt against a wall, and gives Hudson a cool but collegial nod before turning to me. “Did that all get translated? Am I going too fast? I’m sorry I don’t speak Thai. Standard Arabic, Spanish, and Russian are my only foreign languages.”
I pass the question on to Vikorn, who looks her in the eye for the first time, then turns to me. “Ask her where she is on the U.S. Army pay scale.”
She allows a quick, patronizing smile at this typical third-world question. “Tell your Colonel I’m not in the army.”
“I know she’s not in the fucking army,” Vikorn retorts. “They’re paid on the same scale. What is her equivalent rank? That’s what they never stopped talking about in Laos. Has she gotten above the warrant officer grades? Is she on the O scale or not?”
She flicks a glacial glance at Hudson. “It’s quicker to just answer the question,” Hudson advises, staring at the floor.
“It doesn’t work like that anymore,” she explains to me. Slowing her speech and with still more careful deliberation: “Your Colonel is referring to thirty years ago, when the Agency was running a secret war, so the pay scale was roughly equivalent to the military pay scale. Nowadays we tend to be paid according to the Federal Government General Schedule.”
“Okay, the GS,” Vikorn says, fishing in his desk drawer. “The military scale is based on that anyway. What grade is she?” He takes a sheet of paper out and studies it.
She absorbs this covert attack effortlessly, as a professional boxer might absorb a punch from an amateur, and raises her eyebrows to Hudson as the man on the ground who understands the local peasants.
“He didn’t like the way you were walking up and down his office. He’s checking that you understand the rules of trade. Best give him what he wants.”
“I see,” she says with a decisive nod. To me: “You can tell him I’m Grade Eleven if that will help.”
I translate. Vikorn checks with his sheet of paper. “What Step?”
“Grade Eleven Step One.” Horizontal wrinkles appear in her upper forehead while he traces her position on the scale with his fingers. “But the GS can be misleading,” she adds, taking control by appearing to help, in accordance with the manual. “You get extras for locality, risk, that kind of thing.”
Vikorn raises his eyebrows at Hudson. “Grade Eight Step Ten,” Hudson confesses.
“So she starts at a base of $42,976 before locality, while he starts at $41,808. There’s hardly any difference.” Vikorn is beaming.
When I translate, she shakes her head, then closes her eyes to enforce patience. In a somnambulant voice (the subject may be close to her heart despite its spectacular irrelevance): “There’s a drive to change the whole package, make it more result-oriented, more competitive, more like the private sector.”
“There’s a lot of resistance to the proposed changes though,” says Hudson. “The BENS report is not so popular.”
“You read it cover to cover?”
“Yeah, there are some practical challenges, like how do you measure results in the intelligence community? The greatest successes are things that didn’t go wrong. How do you give credit for that?”
She shakes her head. “It’s a problem.”
“You see,” Vikorn says when I’ve translated, “nothing has changed. They were moaning about the same stuff in Laos, until they learned how to make deals with the Kuomintang and the Hmong. They only took a ten percent cut for transporting the dope, though, in their Air America transport planes, which the Hmong thought was terrific considering what the Chiu Chow Chinese and the Vietnamese and the French used to take. It was the increase in revenue thanks to the CIA that enabled the Hmong to go on fighting for as long as they did. That was one of the most successful CIA operations. Capitalism at its best. Actually, the only successful operation in that theater.” I translate.
She smiles with glacial grace. “Let’s take the excesses of Laos as read. I’d like to get back to the matter in hand. Does the Colonel have any questions about that?”
“Ask her if Mitch Turner was the deceased’s real name.”
After a pause: “It was one of them.”
Vikorn smiles and nods. “Now ask her who he was.”
Slowly, deliberately, politely: “Classified.”
Vikorn nods again. Inexplicable silence. She turns to Hudson.
“People can be subtle in this part of the world,” Hudson explains. “He has just pointed out that in his scheme of things, which you might call feudal capitalism or realpolitik depending on your point of view, we are both underpaid slaves whom he could buy twenty times over without noticing, who are engaged in an investigation into the death of someone who probably entered the country on a false name and who, for the purposes of police investigation, may not even have existed. In other words, we may not have a lot of leverage.”
I have t
o admire her lightning adaptation to the situation on the ground: she finds a chair, pulls it up to Vikorn’s desk, and sits on it. Leaning forward with a half-smile: “Mitch Turner was one of the names used by a nonofficial cover operator, a NOC, who was based in the south of this country who was murdered in a hotel room and who was somehow found by the detective here. I never met him myself.” A glance at Hudson.
“Me, either. He was too new. They threw him at me while I was stateside. I was supposed to meet him for the first time the week he died.”
“From what I’ve been able to understand, he was a brilliant officer, maybe too brilliant. There are remarks in his file to suggest he would have been better used in research. He had zero resistance to alcohol, which could be a security risk, and a tendency to confuse his cover stories. I’ve been sent over here not because he was murdered but because of the Al Qaeda connection, which your Colonel so effectively demonstrated with those fingers and black hairs.”
“He confused his cover stories? I didn’t know that.” From Hudson.
“I’m afraid so.” To me, as if I matter (but at least I speak English): “It’s an occupational hazard, especially for people with a precarious sense of identity. You stay under cover long enough, you become the cover. There are some research papers on it. Sometimes a previous cover intrudes into the present cover—after all, identity is just a repetition of cultural triggers. He also had a dysfunctional personal life, but so does every NOC. They crave intimacy, but how can one have intimacy when one is a state secret? Some of the sacrifices we require are too much for our less stable officers. And then he had an intermittent religious streak, which didn’t help. I am told we took him on because of his Japanese and his high IQ, but he wasn’t going anywhere in the Agency. He was seen as a potential liability and a candidate for early retirement. The kindest thing to say is that his mind was too broad, he was an intellectual, a born liberal, he probably joined us as part of his romantic search for self. Speaking off the record, his death at the hands of Al Qaeda is more important than he was. Can we get back to that now?”