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.
Interested now, she traced the sequence of messages back through time. Relay teams of CIA, FBI, DEA, Thai customs, and Thai drug enforcement police were chuckling while they secretly followed the shipment from northern Laos, across the border into Thailand; like a snowball it collected more perps the more it rolled. The plan was to wait until it reached Bangkok, so the kingpin would be revealed. As she watched, they lost the shipment, however. Somehow on the outskirts of Krung Thep the van, surreptitiously followed by a great motorcade (of Japanese four-by-fours, so beloved of foreign government agencies), disappeared. Sighs, groans, and moans over the instant messaging. The Americans suspected the Thais of pulling a fast one. So did most of the Thais, who salivated at the probable size of the bribe someone had extorted.
“We think it’s General Zinna again,” one of the real-time dialogues revealed.
“Really?”
“Yeah really.”
“You really think it was him?”
“Yeah, that’s what I think, that it was him, yeah.”
“Well, you don’t know it was him?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It could have been someone else.”
“Yes, it could. But it wasn’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know that. I just know it.”
“Like a hunch or something?”
“Like a hunch, but not really a hunch. A kind of-”
“What?”
“A kind of faux hunch.”
“What’s a faux hunch?”
“Like a hunch but it’s not? I get them from time to time.”
“I’ve never heard of a faux hunch before. I have a conceptual problem with that.”
“I understand that.”
“But cutting to the chase, you’ve got one now?”
“Yeah. Right now. That it was him, yes.”
“Zinna?”
“Yeah. Zinna.”
“I’m bored out of my friggin’ mind. You?”
“If I wasn’t, like, catatonic with boredom I wouldn’t be talking to you like this. You’re my last link with humanity. It’s like, I’m that spaceship captain in that David Bowie song from way back? Thousands of years ago they launched me into cyberspace, and this is all I’ve known-if it wasn’t for this dim, tenuous link with you, I’d be like a cipher by now-a shade. I guess that’s all I am. I’m like those Japanese kids who can only communicate via computers.”
“You need to get laid.”
“Or smoke some dope.”
“Yeah. That’s kind of funny.”
Chanya saw an intermittent cure for boredom in the future: there was something homely and warm about this faceless American conversation-it reminded her of those people in the States who had been good to her. It so happened that Mitch was slowly coming out of his trance, although still a long way from sobriety. He glanced up at her as she entered the bedroom, but his eyes immediately switched back to the ceiling. “Marge, I saw it, Marge.”
Chanya, doing her very best Marge Simpson impersonation: “Saw what, Homer?”
Ecstatically: “I saw the beginning of the world, Marge.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Crestfallen: “Then I saw the end of it.”
“Did the Company send messages again?”
“Yeah. That’s how I saw the beginning and the end of the world, Marge. The Company knows everything.”
“Homer, honey, remind me again of the secret code for accessing encrypted messages from the Company over the Net.”
“AQ82860136574X-Halifax nineteen [lowercase] Oklahoma twenty-2 BLUE WHALE [all uppercase] Amerika stop 783.”
48
After Chanya left him that day, she thought about the heroin shipment that had disappeared, and Zinna. In no time at all, she fashioned a plan. She bought a large calculator that coped with more than twenty digits on the screen, but it didn’t come close to telling her how dramatically her karma was about to be improved.