by John Burdett
“I can’t figure out how to turn off that damned music. There must be hidden cables with an independent power source. We can’t just smash the speakers. Do you know what it is?”
“Yes,” I say, for I’ve remembered. I am no kind of classical music buff, but the memory goes back to Fritz, who was the first of my mother’s customers to become a full-fledged person to me, rather than mere food source. He loved the work of some crazy Renaissance prince called Gesualdo, told a story of a genius who murdered his wife and her lover then shut himself up in his castle where he had his servants whip him for the rest of his life. The off-key music he produced was a direct expression of his spiritual death, his private hell. Is the Asset finally saying something real here?
“It’s composed by an Italian murderer.”
“It’s so creepy.”
I raise my eyes. She jerks her chin toward the bathroom where the forensic team has finished with the video sweep and is now kneeling to take still photos of minute details that might or might not be useful. They’ve left Sakagorn where they found him, naked in the bath. I stare and stare.
The tableau is very famous, so famous I have come across it often in my endless travels through time and space on the Net. Now I realize who David is in this context. I open my smart phone, key in French Revolution, David, Marat, death of, and there they are: the picture on the phone and the still life, so to speak, in the bathroom. I show it to Krom. Her eyes flick from the miniature image of David’s masterpiece to the dead lawyer in the bath over and over again, perhaps as many as a dozen times.
“Amazing,” she murmurs. There is something quite strange in her tone, as if she is admiring a triumph of classified technology. “How he set him up like that…I don’t know. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen.” She glances at me. “Murder as art? The final farang decadence?”
She is referring to the way the cadaver has been arranged to perfectly imitate the painting of the revolutionary Marat, with a few differences. For example, instead of a letter, Sakagorn is holding a barrister’s brief in his left hand. Instead of a cloth around his head the perp has wrapped his long hair up into a bun. Instead of an ink pot on a side stool, my half brother has wittily replaced it with an Apple laptop. But, as in the painting, one arm hangs out over the side of the bath, there is a light-colored towel with bloodstains under the armpit and a green towel also draped over the bath, and he is lurched to one side with his head almost resting on his right shoulder, his mouth slightly open and the fatal wound in his upper chest. As in the painting, the body has been dead just long enough to acquire a greenish tinge.
“Let’s go,” I say, and tell her about the Asset’s e-mail and the reference to Bully Boy Goldman.
There is a rear entrance to Sakagorn’s mansion, which we slip out of and hail a cab. I snatch glances of Krom from time to time as we race to Goldman’s apartment. I myself am still sufficiently human to be shocked by the lawyer’s death. I cannot say I liked him much or respected him, but it was not difficult to relate to his all-too-human weaknesses. Krom, though, I can tell, sees only a technical and cultural marvel in his murder and can hardly stop smirking. She has been enhanced, after all, she is no longer one of us. Now I watch carefully as she does that special thing with her mind. Krom closes her eyes and seems to retreat deeply into herself until the world is entirely blocked out. It takes only a few seconds, then, when she opens her eyes again she is a different person. There is a new, steely strength in the atmosphere around her and even a slightly metallic timbre to her voice.
“How many…I mean, how long before the revolution?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Good question. A lot depends on your half brother, actually.” She smiles. “Like any applied science, once it’s seen to work it can’t be stopped. That’s why I gave in—you can’t fight the future.”
“Which is what?”
“Exactly. That’s the question, isn’t it? Maybe a replay of the fifties when the world and Superman were young and no one in the USA had heard of Vietnam.”
The cab turns into the driveway of Goldman’s apartment building and our conversation ends.
—
Are you familiar with the work of the baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, R? I myself was not and had to fish out my iPhone again to consult the Wiki. It seems he was another Italian murderer, on the run from Rome with a price on his head, literally: anyone who brought his head in a basket to the Pope could expect to receive the reward immediately in gold. In an attempt to express penance by painting his way out of the fix, he did a David with the Head of Goliath in which he features not as the triumphant David but as the head in the basket. For this reason our Asset has given Goldman a false black beard and a long black wig. He must have shaved the head and used strong glue for the wig, because it is hanging by some strands from a bronze statue of—well, you guessed. Where he found a man-size copy of Michelangelo’s David in Bangkok I cannot say. In any event, he was unable to imitate the painting exactly and had to hang the head around David’s neck and so arranged the piece to face us immediately on our opening the front door to Goldman’s apartment. Beheadings are, of course, notorious for the mess they make. The floor is slick with blood pooling in hollows. It is still liquid, though. He must have done Goldman quite recently. Now my iPhone bleeps.
Let us go see our father together, Dear Brother, I would like that and I’m sure he would too. BTW as a professional I do hope you don’t find my work too fussy? I’m feeling just a touch of stage fright.
I show the message to Krom, whose eyes glitter. It must be the drugs she takes that give her a weakness for heroic madness. She shrugs. “Go, you can’t arrest him, he has diplomatic immunity, and anyway the Americans would never allow it, he knows that, he won’t hurt you.”
“But why murder the two people in the world who were closest to him?”
“Ask him when you see him.”
38
I sulked. I hate it that I cannot arrest the Asset; it disgusts me that some kind of elitism is already at work regarding transhumans. It enrages me that he can walk around free; this is Bangkok, not Baghdad. I tell you, R, you only have to come from a semifeudal society to develop an extreme aversion to a future where the whole planet will be under the heel of an aristocracy of Enhanced Ones. Take it from the third world: you really don’t want to go down that road, you’ve forgotten what it’s like, cast your mind back, why did your ancestors get on the Mayflower in the first place? Oh, never mind, I know it’s too late. Anyway, I have to see him, don’t I? I replied to his message with a taciturn OK.
In the meantime the results from the swab tests didn’t come. Instead I received a letter from the Trustee for the Bankruptcy Court of the Eastern District of Kentucky who regretted that the Know the Father Corporation, now in receivership, was being investigated by the FBI, who suspected the KTF of fraud, money laundering, blackmail, conspiracy and intimidation within the meaning of the RICO provisions, and employment of unqualified personnel who posed as technicians: in brief, my swabs would not be processed, and it was unlikely I would get my money back.
I could try again, of course, with another DNA tester, but I don’t think I will. What difference would it make? The search for self is a continuum, what closure can an old man in a coma offer? Of course, I’ve known that forever and chose to ignore it up to now: continuums, you never see them until it’s too late.
—
So Jesus Christ arrives to pick me up at the station in the late Sakagorn’s sky-blue Rolls-Royce, with the deceased lawyer’s driver in livery, of course. It seems that the Asset was already living at Sakagorn’s mansion while the lawyer spent most of his time at a luxury apartment a few miles away. Now the Asset, aka Messiah, treats the mansion, the car, and the driver as his own. I am tight-lipped and cool when I get in the back with him; but he’s the Asset, he’s enhanced, a master of moods. He also speaks Thai perfectly. I want to believe he has been studying it for years; the possibility that he might hav
e become fluent in a month or less is too awful to contemplate. But I remember what Sergeant Lotus Bud said: only a couple of weeks ago the Asset had only basic Thai and they had to communicate in Khmer.
At first I refuse to react to his small talk, but when he makes a pun in Thai that turns the driver to Jell-O (puns are a chronic national weakness: hard men collapse in giggles; we’re not as bad as the Cantonese, but we’re close) I find myself seduced. Why not sit back and enjoy the company of a multiple killer who carves up his long-term workmates to intrigue and charm his elder sibling? After all, he’s Superman. Clearly, he approves of my change of mood.
“You see, my dear, you cannot be angry with me for long. That’s what I always wanted, a blood relation who would forgive my foibles. Even Doc Bride could not foresee that. Do you feel the same way, now we have bonded?”
I decide to check his commitment to our blood brotherhood with a forensic question. “Why did you do them in, Jesus? Exactly, why?”
“Ah! You mean—”
“Goldman and Sakagorn. Surely you haven’t forgotten already?”
“Doctor’s orders. They were about to double-cross the Old Man with a secret deal with China—they were scared the Doc was double-crossing them, so they planned to double-cross him: basic intelligence community stuff. They even tried to buy my compliance—a truckload of dough they offered. How dumb can you get? Couldn’t they figure out that the first programming the Old Man inserted in my brain was loyalty to him? I told him what they were up to and he gave the word. You don’t betray your own creator. I’m not sure he was expecting anything so ornate, though, that was all for you. I have the younger sibling’s need to impress the elder.”
I stare at him. “Killing humans means nothing at all to you, does it? Is that because you do not see us as part of your species?”
He thinks about it. “I do believe you are looking at it the wrong way, dear one. Who on earth gives a damn that Goldman and Sakagorn are dead? My vengeance is just. Their families are much better off now, and Sakagorn’s new young mistress is financially independent—he left her millions in his will. Broaden your view somewhat to include, let’s say, all life on earth, except man. Then broaden it further to include all the life in whatever spiritual spheres you believe in, if any. Then broaden it to include ghosts of the dead, if they exist. Then broaden it to include all the extraterrestrials on all the viable planets in all the cosmos—”
“Yes?”
“So, in none of those areas of research will you find anyone or thing who gives a fuck or a fart for human life. That’s it, you see, the last enhancement is the broadest: humans have no use or importance except insofar as they may one day produce transhumans. There’s no other excuse for their confused and pathetic existence. Fecundity in the production of lab rats aside, there’s nothing humans have that the universe wants. The best they can hope for is a global system presided over by THs who will make the earth run smoothly.” He casts me a glance. “If you don’t agree, name one moral advancement by humanity in the past ten thousand years. The social order and moral code of Stone Age man was far more rigorous and demanding than anything today. Neanderthals would consider a modern human as a psychopathic monkey with gadgets.”
The Asset tells the driver to let us out at the hospital entrance, where everyone stares at the sky-blue limo and the irresistible hunk who gets out. I lead him to the lift that takes us to the head department, which is quiet with dimmed lighting. Jack’s two buddies have already been discharged and it seems they left him there in permanent bliss in accordance with their jungle customs. We stand by the bed of our primogenitor. I have no words for the occasion and neither does the Asset, who stares at the old vet in a state of confusion. I think this could be the first time he’s seen him since childhood and is not prepared for the devastation that time has wrought on that body and face. I think, also, he finds it difficult to imagine that he originates from such stock, for it is as Krom foretold: this Asset has entered a phase of rapid change, his responses are faster, more commanding, more godlike by the day.
“This is the Doc’s gift to me, brother. I asked him to arrange it. Our father will be in a state of bliss now until he dies. Are you pleased with me?”
“Ah, yes.”
“Let’s go,” he says, bored after a few minutes.
Back in the limo he tells the driver to take us to the mansion of the late Lord Sakagorn. Now I realize the meeting with our father has tripped some fuse in him; anything from the soft, mediocre, human zone puzzles and disturbs him. Me, for example, I puzzle and disturb him considerably.
“How was I the other night?” he asks. “Not too military, I hope?”
“At the shooting of the HZ? You were perfect, efficient, brilliant, commanding, responsible with terrific leadership.”
“I was sweating it, I can tell you. It would only have needed one more HZ to beat us. No way we could have coped with two or more, they would have torn us apart. I was seriously intimidated. Did you see the teeth on that thing?” He casts me a regretful look. “I’m being frank here, they’re better than me. Stronger, faster, more ruthless. They could beat me to a pulp with one hand tied behind their backs—naturally that was always the sales line the Russians used with the Chinese.”
“You’ve met HZs socially—the enemy?”
“Sure. It’s not like you think. The transhuman community is…eccentric. Sometimes there are mutant conventions in remote places that I attend along with HZs. It’s quite jolly, the HZs play chess all the time.”
“HZs play chess?”
“They’re fanatics, you can’t keep them away from the board. They allow less than one second per move, the games play at lightning speed, and they can hold an intelligent conversation at the same time, except when they get drunk on vodka and start singing. That can really drive you to suicide, when they try to sing—those barbarians didn’t even try to produce vocal cords capable of basic harmony. Their bodies are unbelievably strong, though—they would have won the contract years ago except that the Chinese learned of a serious flaw. They start to go into decline after about five years—and there’s no way of telling exactly when or how. They tried to convince the Chinese that we had the same problem, that’s why they had one impersonate me like that.”
“What do they do with them after five years?”
“Unclear. Probably Polonium has them shot and they salvage the high-tech parts for recycling.”
I take a couple of beats to process the implications. I guess it won’t be long before artificial organs leave the dead bodies automatically and make their way to the nearest depot. “You were really scared that night?”
“Shitless, frankly. How can anyone look on that and still find meaning in life?”
“But you took control perfectly.”
He nods. “That’s the programming, they drummed it into us, the military mind. But I always feel bad after a performance like that. It’s such a violation of higher intelligence, all those straight lines and sharp corners it plants in your skull. Doc Bride warned me about it. We discussed it a lot.”
“You discussed with Dr. Bride the future structure of your mind, your personality?”
“Certainly. I was the building site and the junior architect both. Almost from the start. He warned me, you see, that a clash would come between the stuff he’d crammed into my head and the stuff the military would cram in. But he was sure the chemicals and the inserts would cause an acceleration of development that would lead me to drop the military side eventually and become a world spiritual leader. Play your Gandhi against their Stalin, he advised me.” He smiles. “He said I would have to be Christ to survive.” He shrugs. “He would have preferred Apollo or Zeus or Zoroastrer or Krishna, and frankly so would I, but he felt compelled to take revenge on his mother by manufacturing his own Jesus…Complicated fellow, the Doc. He trained as a Freudian, you know, before he switched to Jung.”
He gives me a smile oozing with kindness, fondness, spiritual goodwill, pr
eparedness to die for me, a fraternal adoration that will last an eternity, an utterly convincing beam of divine love; then he turns it off. “Christ is as good as any, I guess, and there’s very good product recognition. We can build on that. It’s a lot easier than starting from scratch, and I’ll only have to flash a few miracles, just like two thousand years ago, and most of the seven billion suckers on the planet will fall for it.”
“I see. What will you use for corporate identity? Will you stick with the Cross?”
“Oh, no. Just like two thousand years ago, we’ll take a universal symbol, something with total worldwide recognition as had the Cross in its day—and tweak it a bit.”
“What symbol would that be?”
“An S with two vertical strokes, of course.” I gasp. “Shall I tell you why you gasped just then, dear brother? Because at that very moment you saw that our little project is not only possible but inevitable. Indeed, it has already started. Is it not so?”
I shake my head in wonder. “You’re really going to start a new world religion, take over the earth?”
“Depends.” He grins. “I might hate the paperwork. But I’m not going to hang around in the CIA’s program any longer, that’s for sure. I’m bored with it even if there are oodles of dough to be made. They’ll have to find some other mutant to sell to the Chinese. Anyway, like I said, it’s still basically Doctor’s orders. He’s not greedy, all he wants is world dominance before he dies.”
—
We get out at Sakagorn’s mansion and the Asset leads me to the large garden at the back. There is a long covered swing that kids and adults alike might use to relax in the shade. We sit in it together and he plays a game of using one arm to pull and push the double swing to its limits, holding us out almost horizontally for a full five minutes before slowly letting the seat come down again with total control. He gives me a sheepish look.