“So he killed Mitch Turner, died in the bomb blast, came back to kill Stephen,” Hudson says.
I’m not totally convinced of an ironic intention. The conversation, in the CIA’s suite at the Sheraton, possesses the surreal quality of a rehearsal. These two officers will be filing their own individual reports, of course; this is a practice session.
“So you narrow down the possibilities. One, Achmad Yona had nothing to do with any of the slayings. He distributed hair from his beard and two of his fingers to colleagues in order to create a red herring and/or to enhance his reputation. Two, Yona did both killings and the DNA evidence found at the Indonesian bomb blast was a plant.”
“The way to handle it,” Hudson declares, straightening his back (he has miraculously mutated into Paper Warrior First Class), “is to play down the Indonesia thing. So they found DNA belonging to him in that bomb blast-so what? They burned all the other remains before we could get to them, so we don’t know for sure what they actually found, if anything. We can’t rely on the Indonesians to play totally straight with us. They’re Muslim, after all-under the skin they’re not totally unsympathetic to the radical cause.”
“That’s it,” agrees Elizabeth. “We finesse the Indonesia thing into a footnote.”
“That’s the way to play it,” from Hudson.
The two suddenly remember my presence. “Oh, we brought you over here because we wanted to make sure we’re all singing from the same hymnbook.” Elizabeth smiles. “Anything we’ve said so far inconsistent with your understanding of what went on?”
Tired of lying for Vikorn and suddenly haunted by an image of Mustafa and his father, I experience a reckless, liberating, and profoundly Buddhist compulsion to tell the truth. “Actually, Mitch Turner and Stephen Bright were killed by a mad Japanese, a tattooist with a terrible personality problem who confessed before he died. The killings had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.”
I am more than a little curious at the effect this bombshell will have on these two professionals. Which only goes to show I’m not so smart; I should have remembered that farang inhabit a parallel universe. The two suffer from a moment of collective deafness. Or are they embarrassed? Third-world cops do come out with the most ridiculous crap after all.
“Well, that’s great,” says Elizabeth after a long moment when no one looks me in the eye. “We can report that local law enforcement agrees with our initial report.” She gives me one of her superior-librarian looks as I make for the exit. “I know his Colonel sees it our way, too.”
When I glance back from the door, Hudson mouths an apologetic explanation: “GS Eleven.”
The Sheraton is only a short walk from our primitive love nest. We should probably have moved out by now, Chanya and I, but we’ve both got used to being what we really are: a couple of third-world peasants grabbing a sweet moment, favoring quality of life above standard of living. We’re both particularly fond of the big water trough in the backyard, where we wash each other down like elephants. She has to cook in the yard, too, and I’ve become fond of watching her pounding chiles with the mortar and pestle wearing nothing but a sarong. A couple of beers, the odd spliff, the sounds of the street at night while we cuddle up under the fan-what more could a sane man want?
Well, there is just one gigantic loose end that troubles me. I wait for the moment-we’ve just made love, and Chanya, who has morphed into traditional Thai wife, goes to bring the beer from the cooler. I clear my throat. She glances at me. I’m tilting my head in the cutest possible imitation of a question mark. She’s way too smart not to get the point. She puts the bottle down next to my arm, goes to rummage in one of her bags that she dumped in a corner of the room, and returns with a late-model IBM ThinkPad. My eyes turn to saucers while she expertly switches it on, connects the modem to our landline, and types in a code.
In a sweet tone: “What is your question, exactly?”
I stare at the screen while Windows XP Edition radiates its deep blue glow and those stupid Windows icons spread like a virus. “Vikorn. Why exactly was he so keen to protect you after Mitch’s death? I’ve never seen him like that before. He even flew to Indonesia. Did you sleep with him?”
She scowls. “Of course not. He was just terrified that if the CIA interrogated me, I’d spill the beans and Zinna would have him run out of town.”
“How did you get this?” I tap the IBM.
“Mitch checked it into a safe box in the hotel he was staying at when Ishy killed him. I took the key when I left the room because I knew he would have some opium in the safe box. I took the ThinkPad at the same time.”
“You better tell me what really happened, just in case there’s something I need to finesse with the CIA.”
“Sure,” she says as she works the keys. Now we’re out of Windows, into a dire warning of how the U.S. government will systematically hunt down and wreck the lives of anyone and everyone entering this supersecret database without authority.
“It goes like this,” Chanya says.
The scene is Mitch’s apartment in Songai Kolok in the early days, quite some time before Ishy arrived to complicate their lives, the time of day about three in the afternoon. After watching Mitch slip into opium heaven-much to her relief, since he had been particularly tense on this visit-Chanya had pottered contentedly around. No doubt about it, there was something rather special about their relationship, particularly when the White Tornado was deeply opiated. He was stark naked on the bed, and she liked to have his amazing body in the best perspective. Once, wickedly, she placed a cotton towel over his head and imagined what his face would have been like if it had mirrored the beauty of his body. She found a tiny American flag in one of his drawers and stuck it in his hand, spending some time on getting the fist to clench. Out of curiosity she tried working his penis; the erectile tissue was off chasing dragons.
Growing bored after a while, though, and allowing that she wouldn’t have minded if he’d said a word or two, or even simply moved a finger, she wandered into the room he used as an office. He had been particularly voracious for his opium that day when she had arrived, and smoked a pipe as soon as she had handed him the black viscous package. In his haste he had forgotten to turn off his laptop, the screen of which was now swimming with a particularly banal screen saver. A mere jog of the mouse, though, took her directly into the much-vaunted secret world, for he had forgotten to turn off his Internet connection, too.
Which turned out to be as boring as the screen saver. An apparently mindless chatter of international gossip came through on the incessant e-maiclass="underline" American woman almost raped in Durbar Square in Kathmandu; gang of teenage American cannabis traffickers caught in Singapore; China cracking down on American businessman because he was making too much profit, now accused of being a spy (actually he was spying, the e-mail confided), State Department outrage recommended. Tip-off for the DEA: big shipment of heroin believed to be moving out of the Golden Triangle, down to Udon Thani. Obviously headed for Bangkok.