The Bangkok Asset: A novel

by John Burdett

  “Once a shrink always a shrink,” Amos says, shaking his head.

  He leads away from the camp, along a well-worn path that brings us to some karst formations that perhaps once amounted to small limestone hills, but have been eroded so that the mineral outcrops are no higher than the trees. The karst, though, has produced a cave system with an entrance at ground level behind a Bodhi tree. We pause for a moment.

  “Caves are where we started. We must put ourselves in the bodies of our most distant ancestors. Imagine a brain just as efficient as our own, probably more so since it had to be more alert to survive. Now consider how this brain developed expertise in cave management and technology over more than fifty thousand years. According to some, as long as two hundred thousand—that’s a hundred and ninety-six thousand years before recorded history. What were we doing all that time, with those marvelous big brains of ours?” Bride stares at me, waiting for a response.

  “I guess we got pretty good on caves.”

  “They’re in our DNA. If we’re honest and relaxed, merely entering a cave does something to our heads. I’m not talking mysticism, just the basic law of programming. There’s no way caves don’t evoke something from deep within. Right, Amos?”

  Amos nods and moves his gaze from Bride to the mouth of the cave, then back to me. “He’s right. It really started with the cave.”

  “But before the rituals could be established, there was work to be done. Hard work.”

  “Had to shovel shit for six months before we reached the end,” Amos said.

  The black man shares a glance with the Doc, who nods. Amos leads us into the shadows. Once we cross a certain line, though, I see there is illumination.

  The cave is so deep we cannot see to the end. Indeed, it gives the impression of infinity because there are oil lamps set at about ten yards apart that form a double line like the lights on a landing strip; the lamps seem to continue, endlessly, into the bowels of the earth. My mind flicks through available references and produces a memory of the caves of Cu Chi, dug mostly by women.

  “Did the women also work here? You said some of the casualties of MKUltra were female?”

  A strange look comes over Bride’s face. “Yes,” he says gently, as if he feels sorry for me. “But not much. You see, most of them fell pregnant within the first year. They were keen to work, they were good American stock with the Puritan ethic still operating, somehow, but we couldn’t allow them to risk the babies, could we?”

  While I look at him I am aware of my lips forming words, then discarding the words, because no sound comes. Are you ready for this? his expression asks. No, I’m not ready for this, I signal back. Something in me carefully covers up the reference to the women and their babies.

  When Amos hands me an oil lamp so I can explore for myself, I discover paintings. I think of the cave paintings at Lascaux, which had so impressed one of my mother’s French clients that he insisted on taking us there. These paintings are fresh, though, and do not depict animals. They are more in the tradition of urban graffiti, with stylized fighter planes, begging Southeast Asian kids, barrels labeled Napalm and Agent Orange, even a street of brothels that could be Soi Cowboy.

  Amos leads us a dozen or so paces forward before we are joined by someone who emerges out of the shadows. It is Ben, the Special Forces vet who showed me around the museum. I guess he must have slipped over here after he ran out of the museum. He exchanges a few words with Amos in that language I do not understand. Bride joins in the conversation, speaking the strange dialect in that plummy accent of his. Now we continue.

  One by one the other vets emerge from the shadows to greet us. After a few minutes, they have all arrived: Ben, Casey, Herman, Jason, Jerry, Frank, Mario. There is a feeling of a religious procession as we move in a group slowly down into the earth. The cave narrows after about a hundred yards and seems to be tapering before it ends altogether. The frescoes have changed their character; instead of recognizable objects from the modern world, they have become more abstract: serpentine coils twist in and out of each other in ayahuasque patterns. Deeper still, and the snakes grow wings.

  —

  I am wrong about the cave coming to an end. It narrows to less than the width of a door in a house, so that we have to turn and squeeze past, but it immediately widens again into a spherical space with a ceiling so high it remains invisible. This is the end of the journey into the center of the earth. A sheer wall of limestone faces us across a space in which a single naked male human body lies on a slab. I’m fighting the need to vomit and staring at the Doc, speechless.

  “Mat Hawkins,” Amos says. “He died two days ago.” He turns to let Bride speak.

  “As I said,” Bride continues, “I had to go back to basics.” He coughs. “We all did it, of course. I mean Homo sapiens. Cannibalism is our primary loss of innocence and at the same time our primary sacrifice and the food supplement that saved us from annihilation in times of famine. Not one early society of humans did not practice it, especially when in pioneer and pilgrim mode. Without it there would be no human race. Naturally, if one is to rebuild the psyche from scratch, one has to return to that moment.”

  “Naturally.” I stare at the part-eaten cadaver. “You only ate bits of him?”

  “The purpose is sacred and ritualistic—that’s how you purge necessary sin, d’you see? Like eating the body of Christ—a relatively modern and ersatz imitation of the real thing such as we have here. We ingest the dead flesh, give it life again in our own bodies.”

  Bride is using a quite different personality as vehicle to convey his mood. He is beyond solemn; it is as if the gargoyle I saw in the van had found its voice.

  “Right,” I say, “right,” unable to take my eyes off the long wounds where someone has carved steaks out of Mat Hawkins’s thighs.

  Amos has come closer to me and seems to represent the group, who is staring hard at me. Does he get it or not, their eyes demand to know.

  Now my mind slips back again to the women and their kids. Were the children brought up here, to this? Something in me doesn’t want to know the answer. I close my mouth.

  Bride speaks in a slow priestly tone. “You could say it was a kind of sorcery, one might as well use that word. As the great Carl Jung pointed out, the material world might yield to reason, but the human psyche does not. We are hardwired by the laws of magic, which we desecrate with every logical thought we entertain. Hence the agony of modern man. It was reason got us into this mess, reason that sent half a million to serve as psychopaths over here in Southeast Asia. What could have been more reasonable: We are right, they are wrong, the President is facing an election, our people love war and it makes us rich, so let’s kill them all the way we did the Indians. Only a return to the most basic, magical, reverential springs of human consciousness could heal my damaged band of brothers.”

  “Radical,” I say, trying hard not to sound like a reason-crazed modern. “Radical.”

  “Yes,” Bride agrees. “Quite right.”

  He is still waiting for something to click in my brain. I am still bewildered. What more could there possibly be?

  Bride coughs, I think to hide his frustration with me. “It was always a ritual carried out with the utmost respect, a consecration and a sacrament, a literal sharing of our brothers who having given their lives to the community ended by sharing their flesh—the ultimate in selflessness, you might say. The very opposite of narcissism.” I nod. “And to a large extent, it worked—did it not?” The question is addressed to the group.

  “Sure did,” Amos says. “We might not look like humanity’s finest, but we’re sure as hell a lot more straightened out now. If it weren’t for all those man steaks, I don’t think we’d all be able to walk and talk at the same time.” A chorus of agreement from the old men. And still the message conveyed by stares and tightening of the lips tells me that I’m just not getting it.

  “That’s always the final question, then as now. Does the magic work or not?” Br
ide is insisting, coming closer to me and towering above me in his need for me to understand. “Even the most reasonable men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency would agree with that. After all, they are in the business of being effective: whatever works has always been their secret motto.”

  “Goldman,” I say.

  “Correct.” Everyone seems to sigh with relief. For some reason I had to be the first to utter that name.

  “Goldman—he followed what you were doing. He got it. But he had no scruples?”

  “Keep going,” Bride says.

  “The children.” I’ve finally said it, but feel no catharsis, no relief. Neither does Bride or his men. Now that I’ve burst the balloon they look at the floor in shame.

  “We had no facilities to bring up kids,” Amos says, his voice sad and angry. “How could we? We were cavemen struggling for survival. You need first-class hygiene for a newborn infant. You need drugs. Not every mother can breast-feed. In conditions like this, in ancient times, only a small percentage of kids survived the first three years.”

  “We didn’t want to see the children get sick and die. That wasn’t going to help the therapy,” Bride says. “We’d silenced enough villages where children once played.”

  “Goldman took them,” I snap. Amos turns away and Ben begins to whimper. Even the Doc cannot look me in the eye. “You were like a Nazi stud farm, breeding humans for war purposes. How else was the CIA to get its zombies, now the program was in deep cover?” I blow out my cheeks; I am red-faced as the revelation sinks further in. “I think he encouraged you. I think he wanted you all to screw yourselves silly. What a gift for his program: babies no one knows about, with no social identity, invisible kids growing up in a totally controlled environment. Militarily controlled, with guidance from military shrinks.”

  Dr. Bride looks up at the ceiling of the cave. “He promised our girls first-class health care, prenatal and postnatal, he brought in military doctors who had practiced obstetrics—there weren’t many of those, naturally.”

  “You have to remember these girls already had their heads turned upside down,” Amos says.

  “Marilyn Loren,” Ben sobs, “she was the best, the most beautiful—and the most fucked-up.”

  “A certain kind of mental breakdown makes women especially voracious,” Bride says. “It’s quite well known. Vivien Leigh had it. Used to pop out to the park for quickies. A lot of the girls were like that. And at the end of the day, if the girl wants a baby, she gets one.”

  “No way they could have taken care of the babies, though,” Amos says.

  “They were taken away from their mothers—at birth?” I ask. “Soon after? They never knew maternal love?”

  “He wanted to start with clean slates,” Bride says. “And he got them.” He shakes his head. “What could we do? As Amos said, no way the girls could have stayed here and taken care of their own kids, and neither could we. We were all already crazy.”

  I nod. Once you enter into the logic, things fall into place. “A dozen or so young women horny as hell among more than a hundred men—and no contraception?”

  “The women didn’t want it. Most of them wanted to give birth at least once. The instinct doesn’t respect difficulties like jungle locations—not with women like that whose heads have been tampered with. And they knew their lives were over. Giving birth was the one remaining human thing they could do.” He sighs. “Giving birth is a woman’s trump card, you have to let her play it, you really have no choice in the matter.”

  “It must have been one big baby factory.”

  As I cast my eye over the huge vault of the cave, the slab with the half-eaten cadaver, the ragged faces of the old men, I see ancient connections. It is as if we had all been in this space before, many thousands of years ago.

  “I need to get out of here,” I say.

  The journey back to the light is all uphill. A romantic streak in me expects catharsis; what I experience when we emerge from the cave is an attack of depression. Bride seems to understand. He even seems worried about me.

  “I don’t want you to get sick,” he says. “That’s always a risk at moments like this. Let’s go back to the future.”

  —

  “So where did it happen, the other side of the experiment, the indoctrination, the black magic?” I asked, trying to sound casual, as we made our way back to the camp.

  “Where do you think?” Bride said.

  “Not Angkor?”

  “Why not? For a brief but sufficient moment Goldman was able to grab what he needed. Pol Pot didn’t take it over until the mid-seventies—by then Goldman had refined his technique. He could reproduce the conditions elsewhere.”

  “I still find it hard to understand, a modern American military man like him delving into superstition.”

  “Sorcery works. Human sacrifice is behind all great powers. Look at the U.S.: twelve million native Americans slaughtered, that’s more than Hitler or Stalin—and look how well they’ve done. The entire nation is testimony to the efficacy of the practice.” He throws me a glance. “It’s simply a matter of dumping the delusion of reason and seeing the human condition for what it is. In reality there is nothing reasonable about us at all—and very little that is humane. One would have thought two world wars proved that. We dream we are rich, happy, and good while the economy is healthy. It only takes a terrorist bomb or two to pop the bubble, however, and we’re back to cave mentality.”

  I began to speak. Perhaps it was a reflex of shock, because I was mumbling mostly to myself, working it out: “The Asset, that’s why he kills and terrorizes. It’s not an unfortunate by-product of his programming, it’s built into his training—from birth. Goldman overcame the zombie effect by creating a voracious psychopath. He has to have his red meat. That’s what Goldman was doing on the river that day. It wasn’t a mere demonstration, it was feeding time for his tiger. That’s why they needed Sakagorn—someone with that kind of authority and charm, an aristocrat who commands deference in a feudal society, and with tons of slush money to keep people quiet.”

  24

  “There were two hundred and thirty-three of us at the peak,” Dr. Christmas Bride says as the truck trundles slowly through the jungle tunnel with Amos at the wheel. “Including a dozen American women, all of them white.”

  His somber mood has quite dissipated; he is a scientist again, fascinated by his life’s work. Now the plight of the women and their children doesn’t seem so sad to him. On the contrary, the circumstance was serendipitous, looked at from a scientific point of view.

  “It was before your time, of course, a distant epoch when men were men and women were women.” He smiles. “I have nothing against gender equality, nothing at all, but as a psychiatrist I have to say that if you go about it by degrading the sexual identity of both male and female, you end up with infantilism. After all, in nature the only humans without developed gender identity are infants. Haven’t you noticed how childish the West has become? Just when it most needs men and women of mature judgment it seems there aren’t any. Such a society is vulnerable to the most radical manipulation.”

  “Why so?”

  “Think about it, what do dissatisfied children do? They complain, they cry—but it never occurs to them to rebel effectively. In the end they grumble and obey. Infantilism and slavery go hand in hand. It is almost as if the West has been softened up for that very purpose by forces beyond its control.”

  “You got that right,” Amos says, at the wheel and concentrating on the track.

  “So what about the others, the GIs in your care? Where did they all go? You surely didn’t eat them all?”

  “ ‘Some flew east, some flew west, some flew over the cuckoo’s nest,’ ” he quotes. “Natural wastage—people without hope die young. Many were too far gone for anyone to save them. One used whatever drugs would keep them calm, if that was what they wanted. I never discouraged them from taking their own lives, once I was sure that’s what they intended. The
simple truth is that mental pain may be as unendurable as the physical kind—indeed, it may be much worse. I was working in uncharted waters, I had to take each case as it came and after a year or so make a decision. Some simply wandered off into the jungle. One assumes they died, but not necessarily—after all, many of them were skilled jungle survivors. One heard rumors from time to time about crazed vets wandering the jungle and using crossbows to hunt for food.”

  “So now there are eight?”

  He hesitates, then looks at me, waiting for something. “Eight plus three.”

  “Those three derelicts living in Klong Toey Slum?”

  Dr. Bride sighs. “It’s really very simple. The man who believes he is your father led two of his chums to Bangkok. It was a kind of last adventure before death, and a bid to reach back to his personal history before Ultra. For him you exist on the far shore of the sea of madness.” He stares at me, then looks away. “Someone had brought news of a Eurasian detective in Bangkok, just the right age, with a mother named Nong.” His eyes examine me again for a second. “He took Willie J. Schwartz and Larry Krank, to use their official names, who were the three most able to appear normal in public, and they all went off to see if they could find a way of making a living in the world. They wound up doing a little trafficking in Bangkok, in the slum of Klong Toey. They kept very little for themselves, sent most of what they made back to their brothers in the compound. Jack was shy about contacting you, though. He was biding his time. He found out where you worked and spied on you there. He asked about you, but you have to understand he was like a jungle animal: cautious, shy, given to scuttling away at the first sign of psychic danger. He took a few pictures of you, I’m told, on a cell phone, and stared at them for hours on end.”

  “Which cell phone? There were two,” I ask. Bride seems not to understand the question. He shrugs. “So who planted the bomb? Why?”

  “To be frank, I’m not sure. It is certain that Goldman saw a security threat to his program just when it was gaining commercial traction. On that theory the bomb was intended to send them scuttling back—remember how fragile are their mental states. They weren’t supposed to be in the hut when it went off.”