by John Burdett
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because you have this little problem with me—aren’t you leaving out a crucial piece of evidence?”
“How’s that?”
“Your own brother, man. Sonchai, you are closely related to the biggest vampire of all. You must know that?”
I let my frustration reach a kind of head, then I exhale. When I inhale again I am able to say slowly, “Krom, just tell me as much as you can for now. Just so I can at least start to get a grip.”
She nods, as if I have at last pressed the right button with the right attitude. “I was recruited. It was like a mutual search. It was as though I was tunneling from underground, trying to reach the surface, and someone else was tunneling down from the surface, trying to save me. The kind of thing people used to associate with religious experience, but there was nothing religious about it. Except I finally found the guts to have the tattoo I’d been dreaming about since age twelve—that was a religious experience.” She flashes me a glance. “When I think about it now, it seems obvious, even ordinary.”
“What does?”
“At the jungle camp you visited, very few of the kids had any Asian blood. Maybe three, four at the most, fathered by Vietcong who had been forced to participate in MKUltra. The Chinese needed Asian genes in their products. They couldn’t very well have a super police force of blond blue-eyed Caucasians. So, they were looking for volunteers. Naturally, the program I entered had to be adjusted to accommodate my age and background. They didn’t have me from birth, so I was never going to be as advanced as Goldman’s children. I spent two years at a special facility in Qinghai. We shared it with some kids who were going to be the next generation of Olympic athletes. It was entirely voluntary for the first few months, then I had to make a decision: leave or commit for life. There was someone there I related to, someone I wanted to stay close to, so I committed for life. In return they made certain adjustments to my brain. Very minor compared to what you’ve seen from Goldman’s program, but enough to make a difference. Here, there’s something I’ve been waiting to show you, when you started to ask the right questions.”
She takes out her phone again, swipes a few times, then shows me a photograph. At first I cannot see the relevance. I have to flick from it to her and back again quite a few times. “That’s really you?” She smiles. The more I look at the photo the more I understand. The young woman on the tiny screen is exactly what I might have expected from someone of Krom’s background. There is the obvious intelligence in her eyes, but she wears the sullen, resentful face of any young person who has no intention of adjusting to or participating in her society. She is unkempt, her hair an orange-and-green mess, her T-shirt looks as if she has picked it up off the floor, her head droops and she is scowling. An unhappy, even tragic outsider: lost, utterly lost, and about to tip into something sad. There is no direction in that soul, none at all. I am stunned at the then-and-now comparison and find myself nodding while I try to take it all in.
“How many…I mean, how many of you are there?”
“On the Chinese side, only a few hundred. But each one of us will train at least ten, so you get an exponential curve. The program takes decades to complete, but a recruit can return to society and operate within five years. It wasn’t difficult for them to pull a few strings to plant me in the Thai police. The Americans have fewer trainees, at the moment. They went too far too fast—you can see the results. The Chinese have been less ambitious in the talents they’ve implanted in us.” A pause. “With a few exceptions. As with any advanced technology, it’s generally more efficient to buy, borrow, or steal the other guy’s research than work it all out from scratch. But you must always be on guard against double-bluffs: maybe the technology you’re buying is flawed, even deliberately sabotaged. Basically, that’s what your case is all about.” She gazes at me. “The Market Murder with your name on it.” She takes her phone back, gives the photo a quick glance, and deletes it. I wonder if she’s kept it there just for me. “Like any applied science, once it’s seen to work it can’t be stopped. It becomes inevitable.”
“A new kind of human race?”
“Why not? Once we were mere Homo sapiens: apes who could think. Now we’re Homo sapien sapiens: apes who can think about thinking.”
“And the next phase—your phase? How would you define that?”
She thinks about it. “Depends. The Americans learned a lot. They started to think of it as a return.”
“A return?”
“Something weird happened in Cambodia, in Angkor, while Goldman was there.”
“A return to what?”
“Exactly. That’s the question, isn’t it?”
She takes a few bites of her food, chews thoughtfully, then says, “Be ready, my friend. I know you hate me right now, but I’m still your friend and my advice is be ready. I don’t know exactly when or where, someone will call you. All I can tell you is that the intelligence is pretty good this week and the listeners are picking up signals of intense activity. Someone is going to make a risky move, because they’re desperate. Sorry to be mysterious—but I really, sincerely, lovingly recommend you stay alert. And get some sleep, you look awful.”
“But your SMS…You said Goldman has gone ballistic? Was that just a ploy to get me out here?”
“No. Actually we are talking about a sideshow, but he has been caught bugging the station.” All of a sudden she starts to cackle. “He had devices all over the building, he bribed the tea lady because she serves rooms on every floor. You’ll see.” She consults her watch. “Vikorn has called a meeting. The FBI legal attaché will be there. I would like you to meet him. If there’s no chance to talk with him before the meeting, we’ll do it after.”
“FBI?”
“The Chinese made a sophisticated sweep yesterday, using the latest antisurveillance technology. It was just a gambit, though, because we’ve known about the CIA listening to us for months. The evidence is overwhelming, however, and therefore very embarrassing. The CIA decided to let Goldman take the flak. They’ve washed their hands of him and left everything to the FBI attaché at the embassy.” She spoons up the thick brown sauce and skillfully includes the half of the boiled egg, chews, swallows, and smiles. “But like I say, it’s a sideshow.”
“How’s that?”
“The Chinese are creating a smokescreen to cover the fact they’ve finally broken one of the CIA’s most challenging telephonic encryption systems.” Now she allows a crooked grin to build as she stares at me. “We have some of Goldman’s most intimate conversations with his controller at Langley. So, time to raise hell about CIA bugs at the station.” She shrugs. “Apparently it’s basic diplomacy—not my field.”
When she stands up I notice her laptop case, which she hoists over her shoulder. While I have her in a communicative mood, I decide to ask something I have been curious about for some time. “Krom, tell me, why is your name Krom? Isn’t that Cambodian?”
She cocks her head. “The Krom are a Cambodian tribe, from the south.” She grins. “Full marks for asking, Detective. It’s sheer coincidence, though. My father called me that because I was conceived over there, when they were on their honeymoon.”
—
In the couple of minutes it takes to reach the station and walk up to the big conference room, Krom morphs into the super-efficient police inspector for the day, hardly looking me in the eye. When we enter I see that the high-tech monitor is switched on and showing a screen saver with fractals of narcotic color and intensity. Goldman, that giant, is already seated and gives us a look of aggressive curiosity as we enter. There are two other men waiting: Colonel Vikorn slouched at the head of the table, and a pale slim man with jet-black hair about five ten in dark suit and tie, in his late thirties or early forties. He interests me because he is a leuk kreung: a half-caste like me. The non-farang half of him is not Thai, though: I would guess his Chinese genes originate in the north where people are pale and tall. I give Vikorn a high wai,
which he acknowledges with a nod.
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.