The Bangkok Asset: A novel (25 page)

I
f another child dies at that monster’s hands it will be my fault. Fear of future guilt drives me now. At the market I stand among a confusion of people, wild-eyed and mad. Fruits, vegetables, and cheap clothes from China and Vietnam are everywhere for sale along with downmarket cell phones and a lot of plastic covers for iPhone and Samsung products. There is a phone repair stall at one corner, a knife sharpener at another, a seller of red and yellow plastic buckets at a third, and dozens of cheap clothing and shoe stalls in between. The stalls being lawless, no one has the authority to impose order, so that every last inch of the disputed land is occupied rent free. I am wondering how, exactly, I might try to protect every kid in sight. I am sweating in the morning heat.
This is stress. Oh, yes, this is stress.
I am thinking how much I hate transhumans when my cell phone bleeps:
Shit hits fan, Goldman ballistic, meet KKM, food stall now.

There are no customers at the
khao kha moo
stall, except one who is staring into space. When I draw up a chair at her table she flashes me a momentary glance then continues to gaze. I am instantly irritated. I cough: no reaction. Wearily and shaking my head I pull out my phone and read the SMS aloud:
“Shit hits fan, Goldman ballistic, meet KKM, food stall now.”

Krom remains staring dull-eyed into the distance. I try to remember from my teens what gambit works best in reply to this opening. I get up to leave. As I do so, she finally speaks: “She told you I made a pass at her and she rejected me and we didn’t have sex—didn’t she?”

I scratch my beard, stunned, for the moment, at the disconnect with the SMS and my mood. “Yes.”

“You believe her?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t even know if I care.”

“Really? That’s unusual, a man generally cares very much what a rival does with his wife. When the rival is a dyke it makes men crazy.”

She takes out her smart phone and shows me a video that lasts less than a minute. The naked woman on her back is certainly Krom, that is obvious from the full-body tattoo. But as for the tongue that elegantly begins its homage at her feet and leads us up the
tom’s
right leg all the way to the moist, parted, and panting labia—the identity of its owner is less clear. All I see is some jet-black hair from behind that could be Chanya’s but might just as well belong to another Asian woman. True, there is a momentary quarter profile in which I catch a glimpse of a cheek and nose that look familiar—but there is no certainty. I study the clip with some intensity, though, and replay it a couple of times before handing it back.

“Who was holding the camera?” I ask. Krom looks away. “Chanya never mentioned a third person.”

Krom takes back the smart phone. “Do you want to see the whole video? I’ll e-mail it to you if you like.”

As she speaks she is flashing me little sly glances full of schadenfreude.

“No,” I say. “If you had a clip of Chanya that was recognizable you would have it on your phone. You’re bluffing.” Then another word comes to mind, one that has acquired a special significance recently. “
Feeding,
aren’t you?” I say.

It is an unusual word to use, but accuracy can startle. Krom blinks several times, and for a moment looks confused, as if she has been called out doing something everyone does.
Don’t we all love to see the emotional pain of others? Aren’t we all voyeurs at heart?
her look says. Then she sees that I disagree.
No, not everyone gets off on that,
I signal back,
not everyone is a predator of the heart.
And now she does that special thing I’ve come to associate with the enhanced: she snaps out of it, goes deep within herself, and in a few seconds she has changed mood and personality. Now she gives me the big welcoming smile. She wants to ignore completely the last few minutes—not to mention the evening she spent with Chanya—so we can be buddies again, quite as if she has not seduced, or tried to seduce, my wife. It seems like a good moment to strike.

“So, Krom, tell me more about being enhanced, how did it happen in your case?”

“Can’t tell you. Classified, for the moment. You’re not ready yet.”

“Something happens, doesn’t it, to people, those very lucky special people who belong to the club?”

“What club?”

“The only one that matters anymore—at least, that’s the sense of the story so far. The club of the enhanced.”

I don’t think it is a particularly brilliant question, so I am surprised when it has the effect of changing Krom’s posture. For a moment I think she is finally going to open up.

“Yes, I guess you could say that.
Special
is a dangerous word. Different, though. I’d go along with that.” She smiles. “We humans all have a distant folk memory of a time when we could fly. You could say this memory makes all of us miserable, but some more than others: we are the species that fell to earth and lost its wings out of sheer stupidity. But if something happens and by some incredible piece of luck you get your wings back—yes, then when you look at other people you’re looking at what you used to be—”

“A lower form of life?” She purses her lips. “You have the same relish for the sufferings of others as
him,
don’t you? You are the new aristocracy, you transhumans. Inwardly you are the billionaires in your limos driving through a slum and despising everyone and everything you see.”

She seems to think hard about that. “Yes,” she says brightly. “Yes, that’s quite true. How clever of you to see it so clearly.”

“But you also have the fatal weakness of all winners. You need to feed off emotions you no longer feel, to which you no longer have any right. You are no longer in the human family—love is shut off for you. All that’s left is to despise and destroy the happiness of others. You are a vampire.”

She snorts. “Love? You and Chanya are bored to death with each other. I brought you both fun, danger, knowledge. And I found out about your father’s buddy, da Silva.”

“Yes. Why exactly did you do that? Because you knew how much pain lay down that road?”

“I try to help you when I can—we’re friends, aren’t we?” She lets a few beats pass, gives a bright smile. I think,
Feelings have no currency in this community.
Then she says, “So, have we had the catharsis already? Can we be friends again now?” She giggles. “Maybe vampire isn’t such a bad rap. With seven billion humans full of blood, it’s a smart choice of food source. Let me be your very special tame vampire, I’ll protect you from the competition.”

“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.