The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

  “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.”

  6

  “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?”

  “Transhumans? 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 min
ute 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, look
ed 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?”

  The lawyer recovered and bounced back; it was part of his professional bag of tricks. “I never spent much time with them, how do I know? I simply gave you a passing impression to help—under coercion, I might add. Can I go now, or am I still under threat of blackmail?”

  He pronounced the B word heavily, giving it full emotional and forensic dignity. I looked at Vikorn for an answer.

  “Why has all this come up now, Lord Sakagorn?”

  “Because everything has changed. There aren’t going to be any more big, expensive, symmetrical wars with tank battles that take place over thousands of square miles. That’s all over. How to deal with asymmetrical threats from dispossessed young men and women half-crazed with frustration in one’s own country—that is the military/law-and-order problem of the present and future. Everyone knows it can only get worse.”

  “Why should it get worse?”

  “Because the development of a semi-slave class is the only way our species can survive. You see it all over the world, even in the U.S. Some would say especially in the U.S. And even in liberal Europe. Social security costs too much, makes the country uncompetitive, leads to more unemployment. France is the example not to follow. But without it, you end up with slaves by another name.” He paused. “Why d’you think the U.K. boasts one CCTV camera for every twenty-five citizens? Why have they suspended due process in the United States? I mix with the movers and shakers. They know what’s coming next. To be a young or youngish person in a secret service these days is to see Armageddon as a logical likelihood within your lifetime. Now take Western Europe and America and multiply by two—you get China.” He paused. “You control sheep with dogs and dogs with humans. Who controls the humans? Transhumans, perhaps.”