The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

  “Right. Then something happens to change his head around? Fall in love with a local girl, for example?”

  He looks at me with the curiosity of a man who expects little of life but can still enjoy the thrill of busting a fool’s naiveté. “Well, that might do it, temporarily. But it’s as easy to fall out of love as it is to fall into it. Very often we fall out of love as a defense against threats to our core identity. I doubt such a boy as I’ve described could be in love with a communist, for example, for very long. No, I’m thinking of a more radical experience.”

  “Death? The death or mutilation of a close friend?”

  “Certainly, the presence of death is the essential factor in any initiation of depth. But what I’m talking about is something that blows the whole shooting match out of the water. Something so radical it really can break down all that tribal programming in one fourteen-hour period.”

  I can guess where he’s going so I shrug and stare in expectation.

  “Lysergic acid diethylamide.” He chuckles. “Oh, they were so right to be scared of it, with that uncanny instinct of theirs. Of course, it never came close to screwing up as many lives as alcohol, but it was infinitely more threatening to WASPs.” He shakes his head. “I’m not a religious man—as you correctly pointed out, acid helped me kill God—but there was something quite uncanny about the way it appeared at exactly that time.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean just when it was so desperately needed.” He catches my eye. “You know what I’m talking about of course?”

  “I have an idea, but please tell me.”

  “Omega Unit 197 of the MKUltra project, to be precise. LSD was my specialization. They were pretty much forced to recruit me, because no one had done as much research on it as had I. Mostly on myself. Acid was universally available in Vietnam, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of the men took it. For many it was simply a psychedelic trip experienced purely at the level of sensory distortion. For others, though, who happened to take it at exactly the wrong, or, according to my perspective, the right moment—particularly those who volunteered for Ultra, or were volunteered by Ultra, so to speak—you ended up with an absolutely fascinating case of psychic nudity. A human soul stripped to its very variable essentials. A cloud of consciousness that suddenly sees. All too frequently, American servicemen who received such sudden wisdom could no longer function.”

  “As soldiers?”

  “As people. It was a terrible scandal. The military and the silent majority can only tolerate demons they are familiar with. The tribal programming allowed for all the usual battlefield psychoses and could even tolerate the extremely high incidence of heroin addiction among the men, not to mention alcoholism and suicide. But when the hippie movement threatened to spread to ’Nam, the idea of sending boys out there who would have their heads totally turned around by LSD supplied to them not by Charlie but by subversives straight out of Haight-Ashbury—what would be next, love-ins with the Vietcong?”

  He pauses and rubs his chin. “But there was a parallel narrative. The CIA maintained a low profile because they were the ones who inadvertently caused the acid craze to spread by experimenting with it on human guinea pigs, most of them military personnel and not always volunteers. The public got the truth in tiny drops that precluded scandal, and all was going well until the news of the murder by the CIA of Dr. Frank Olson, more than twenty years after the event, hit the fans. Olson was a bacteriologist and CIA officer involved in the Company’s LSD experiments. Hell broke loose.”

  He smiles. “You see, I was famous professionally, because of dozens of papers I had written on the subject of LSD. Famous, too, in the subculture, for singing its praises. They needed me even more than they hated me.” He frowns, takes out another Camel, and lights up. “I think it was my long hair they most resented. Their in-house shrinks were all gray men in suits with crew cuts. I was psychedelic, big time.”

  “Why did they need you so much?”

  “Collateral damage.” He taps his head. “Right here. And we’re talking thousands of souls. Uncle Sam doesn’t screw up by halves.” He sighs. “It really is a miracle drug. D’you see, it acts like an electron microscope—and that’s the problem. The teeniest, weeniest neurosis is magnified ten thousand times—and that’s merely with recreational use in favorable circumstances among friends. Imagine how it might affect one—” He stops to stare at me, as if unsure of the wisdom of continuing.

  “What?”

  “If some bastard is butchering a child in front of you, for example, as part of the experiment? Or ordering you to do so?”

  I stare at him. Blood has drained from my face. I feel gray.

  He remains quiet, giving me space. When he thinks I’ve recovered, he continues. “All their own shrinks wanted out pronto. The thing had gone horribly—and I mean horribly—wrong. The reputations of upward of a hundred psychiatrists was on the line. Not to mention the Company itself. I was an ideal scapegoat, a grinning clown with a doctorate in hallucinogens. Confident, too. Stupid, I suppose. But not so stupid that I didn’t realize how much they needed me. This was my moment. As it turned out, my nationality worked in my favor. They could blame everything on an alien—as usual.”

  He looks at me as he coolly takes a toke. “I told them I needed a very big space where no one could find us. They said, ‘Not U.S. territory.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ They said, ‘How about Cambodia, we’ll buy a chunk through a shell company. We’ll do a secret protocol with the government so they leave you alone.’ Usual thing. I said, ‘Okay, but I need money.’ They said, ‘Money is no problem.’ I said, ‘I mean funding for the next twenty years. You don’t fix heads the way you fix broken legs.’ They said, ‘Funding for the next twenty, okay.’ They weren’t so sharp when it came to bargaining. They’d let me see how desperate they were, so I said, ‘No, funding for the next forty.’ They said, ‘Look, just make the problem go away. Whatever you need, you’ve got it.’ I said, ‘Seclusion. Absolute seclusion. Most of these guys and gals are never going back to the world. They need a special space to live and die in.’ That made them very happy. They even smiled. ‘How about dense jungle, twenty acres, only one way in and out, land mines all around?’ They were particularly generous with land mines. I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘We’ll send in the engineers to do the earthworks for you. Army huts good enough?’ I said, ‘Water? Electricity?’ They said, ‘No problem. As many army generators as you need. Wells as deep as you need. Pumps and pipes.’ I said, ‘Fuel?’ They said, ‘We’ll bury linked ten-thousand-gallon tanks for diesel, you’ll be self-sufficient for decades.’ I said, ‘Food? Cooking?’ They said, ‘Your problem. No normal person is allowed in. It’s you and the crazies. Grow what you need.’ ”

  Bride draws another long toke on the Camel. “Of course, I saw what they were up to. They thought I’d never last more than a few years, but that was enough to pass the buck. They’d find a way of saying it was all the fault of this crazy Brit shrink: ‘Only have to look at him to see how mad he is. Don’t know how he got away with it for so long, trying to build some kind of LSD utopia in the middle of the Cambodian jungle.’ ” He smiles. “Actually, they were quite right. The man I was then would never have lasted. I had to become someone else, didn’t I? I had to go further with the LSD initiation. Further than anyone ever went. Much further than Leary would have dreamed possible.” He gives a wan smile. “Poor Timothy—I knew him well—so much talent, but he fell prey to the vice of evangelism.” He closes his eyes for a moment and allows a sardonic smile to bloom. “I’m talking about the early negotiations. Once we were settled they found reasons to take a deeper interest in us. But we’ll save that story for later if you don’t mind.”

  Now he gazes over the river: mostly wet-look black with some reflection of city lights. “Most of them died, of course. Beautiful boys and some girls too—the women who had volunteered at Langley. Heads all fucked up. Know that poem ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg? ‘I saw the be
st minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix’? It was worse than that by a thousandfold. Make that a million.” He is quiet for a long moment. “Suicide usually. I knew it would happen. What you will see tomorrow are the survivors. The best of the bunch. The toughest, anyway. The remnants.”

  I am put in mind of a weekend seminar where the first evening is spent on introduction of the topic, prior to more serious learning the next day. After a few more minutes it becomes clear the Doctor has delivered his welcoming talk and now descends to entertaining anecdotes about life in Southeast Asia over the past forty years, how much has changed and how much has not. It seems he survived Pol Pot’s brutal regime, but he does not explain how. He is a gifted raconteur, though, and keeps me fascinated until it is time to go to bed.

  20

  I’m still at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Doc Bride called just now to say he has checked out already and is downstairs with a car and driver. He is impatient because the journey into the bush is long and slow at the other end and he wants to arrive at our destination by early afternoon. I’m throwing my toothbrush and shaving gear into my overnight bag, checking my money belt for passport and cash, dashing down to reception, paying in baht at a ruinous exchange rate, humping my bag out to the white Toyota four-by-four with a Khmer driver that is waiting at the curb. The Doctor and I sit in the middle seats, but at opposite windows. He issues an instruction to the driver in Khmer without saying hello to me.

  —

  Phnom Penh is a small town and it takes only a few minutes to reach the suburbs, which quickly degenerate into shantytowns with dirt roads between shacks with tin roofs. Quite often there are homemade elevated walkways to enable people to keep out of the mud during the rainy season. Kids have fun in tin cities like this; I catch sight of big, round, mischievous faces, small gangs with monkeylike mastery of the maze in which they live. On the other side of the glass it is already hot, of course, but not yet unbearable. I know these slums will be asleep before noon and stay that way until sunset. I have a feeling that where we are going may not have great satellite cover, so I make my early-morning call to Chanya.

  “Hello, darling,” I say.

  She grunts sleepily. “Where are you?”

  “Phnom Penh, we’re in a van on our way to the jungle.”

  “We?”

  “I’m with Dr. Christmas Bride.”

  I thought the name would amuse her, as it did the first time, but she merely grunts again.

  “You okay?” I say.

  “Yes. Except that I’m suffering from event starvation, Action Man.”

  “See you in a day or so. There might not be any satellite cover where we’re going.”

  “Take care,” she says.

  I turn to look out of the window: scrappy bits of land, some huts, a brand-new part of a highway that says foreign investment all over it, some brush and paddy fields, a boy following a buffalo with a switch. I try to work out where this Englishman is coming from. In repose, when he is not making full use of his mobile features, there is much of the gargoyle in the way he stares malevolently into space.

  At about noon the driver turns off the road, which is now bare concrete, onto the shoulder, which is an outreach of jungle remains. There are no tall growths and the scrubby bush looks unhealthy and primitive, as if something has poisoned such advanced life as trees and flowers, leaving only primeval vegetation that hugs the ground and crawls like something cowed and persecuted. I know that we have been traveling steadily east since we left the suburbs of Phnom Penh and that it was in the east that Nixon dumped his thousands of tons of bombs in a secret operation that was supposed to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but succeeded only in destroying Cambodia. I suppose we cannot be in that area yet; even so, the suspicion adds a kind of poison to the moment. When the driver opens the back I see a wicker basket piled up with sandwiches and two bottles of wine. The driver finds a collapsible table and even a tablecloth, wineglasses. The Doc and I sit opposite each other on folding chairs.

  The sandwiches are well made, with enough of the juice from the tomatoes softening the white of the bread without compromising the craquant of the crust; the cheese, a buffalo mozzarella, makes, with the olive oil—and the hint of basil— a delicious soft multitone motif in the mouth, and the authority of the ham completes the symphony. The wine adds the frisson of narcotic essential for a complete culinary experience. This is all thanks to French influence in Cambodia. We eat in silence.

  —

  A couple of hours later the road turns into a mud track, then stops at a wall of jungle. Now we are staring at those huge exotic Asian hardwoods of the same kind that embrace giant stone Buddhas at Angkor. The only gap in the overwhelming vegetation is filled by a truck with a wheelbase at least five feet off the ground, with giant tires. Without a word Doc Bride gets out of the van and gestures for me to follow him to the truck, leaving the Khmer driver to turn around and go home.

  We approach the truck from behind and it is from the passenger side that I first catch a glimpse of the man in the driver’s seat, a silhouette that reveals a mop of negroid hair so huge it is like an exotic bush. I would have expected it to belong to a lithe young fellow from the ’burbs, circa 1968, except that it is gray. When he turns around to acknowledge me, I see he is in his early seventies. Bride climbs in before me and the three of us share the bench seat.

  “This is Amos,” Bride says. Amos and I exchange greetings. “Tell him about your hair, Amos. He needs to start to understand.”

  “The development of a young person is very delicate,” Amos says. “Interrupt it violently with a powerful mind drug, and that young person will return to certain events again and again throughout their life. Some part of them will fixate for the duration. I was a good black boy in the sixties, never grew my hair long, did drugs, or got into trouble. My dad was obsessed with keeping my hair short, those hippie blacks disgusted him, like they were betraying their Negro Christian identity. But I wanted to grow my hair long. Then I volunteered for MKUltra.” He gives a huge, heaving sigh with a glance at Bride. “Don’t make no difference knowing what the problem is. The passengers on the Titanic knew the problem was a huge rip in the hull, but they still drowned. That’s why the great religion of psychology failed utterly.” He gives me a quick look, turning his vast gray bush to do so, then says, “Right, Doc?”

  “Amen,” Bride says.

  “I can’t do nothin’ about this obsession.” He turns again to stare at me intensely for a moment as if his personal history has absolved him from normal social restraints. Dr. Bride waits patiently while Amos loses himself in some kind of inner speculation that continues for about five minutes and involves gazing at me in clinical fascination. Only then does he start the truck and we move off.

  —

  Once we’re on our way I see why we need a truck like this. Huge ruts in the track from the wet season would destroy any other kind of vehicle. And the jungle is so dense, you’d probably need a gallon of napalm for each square foot to clear it. Progress is slow, therefore, and nobody speaks for an hour or so. Little by little the mood of both my companions changes. Mine changes, too, but in the opposite direction. They relax somewhat and Amos shares his chore by saying things like, Damn close, wow that weren’t here last year. Doc Bride grunts back in a friendly tone. I, on the other hand, feel the oppression of the jungle just as if I were bouncing around on the bottom of a green ocean on an alien planet with extraterrestrials as companions.

  21

  Finally the truck stops at the end of the track. An iron arc forms a vault over an entrance and carries the legend:

  I AM IS THE PRISON THAT MAKES YOU FREE

  I look at the Doc, who looks embarrassed. “ ‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,’ ” he quotes.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  Amos j
umps out to open two heavy iron gates while we wait with the engine running. “The gates used to open automatically, but that was before the last generator packed up,” Bride explains. “Somehow the natural evolution of our community caused us to give up on fixing things.” He points to a water tower on iron scaffolding. “We used to have an electric pump, now they use the emergency hand pump that’s been repaired a dozen times. A lot of work, but it’s something to do.”

  Once inside the compound I see there are no walls or fences other than the impenetrable jungle. The three of us jump out and the Doc helps Amos close the gates behind us. Now that we have entered the camp this wizened old man takes center stage like a king who has returned to his castle.

  We are inside a large flat space comprising a closed village of long single-story wood huts on concrete pillars to keep them off the jungle floor. Many have been joined together longitudinally to make a kind of railway carriage fifty yards long or more. Streets are formed between them with overhead awnings to protect from rain and sun, and there are elevated boardwalks to keep people above the mud during the wet season. The compound suffers from a sense of neglect and decay; jungle grass has sprouted around most of the huts, gravel pathways are overrun with weeds. Only a few of the huts have the appearance of habitations; the others are run-down to the point of collapse. One near the jungle wall has succumbed to creepers and the roof has caved in the grip of a vegetable boa constrictor. There doesn’t seem to be any people around.

  “They’ll arrive one by one,” Bride whispers, scanning the compound. I am put in mind of a nature documentary where the wildlife expert whispers into the camera with religious reverence. “They’ve seen you, that’s what’s holding them back. It’s not fear, exactly.”

  “What, then?”

  “Shyness. Very few strangers come here, we lost the knack of talking to outsiders pretty soon after we started. Naturally, now I live in Saigon I’ve retrieved my social body.” He checks my face to see how I react to the phrase social body, which is a Buddhist concept, used mostly by Tibetans. “Also”—he scratches his face—“we’re all conscious of being weird. You can be sure they’re watching you. They won’t come out until they’re sure you’re okay.”