“They talk well, though. They talk very well. Just like you and me. Actually, with the right programming they talk better than normal humans, no pauses for self-doubt and considered reflection. And they are made of flesh and bone, too. They have normal human bodies-sort of. You can’t say they are robots-it would be so much easier if they were. It’s hard to get your head around it. Hard to find the words. The more you see of it, the more confused you become.” He stared into my face, but seemed not to see me. “They have charm, too. Great charm. That’s not part of the programming either. This incredible charm. It’s serendipitous. Did you ever meet a really smart person? I’m not talking about computing power or IQ particularly, I mean someone whose mind worked so well they could do just about anything? Sometimes politicians, certain judges-”
“And a certain kind of crook?” I asked.
His mood turned black. He sat heavily on the nearest chair. “Yes. That’s what I mean, a certain kind of highly gifted personality can use their gift to charm lesser mortals. When you find some poor sucker whose brain doesn’t work as well as yours, you only have to blind him with your superior cognitive abilities and he’s putty in your hands. He might say you charmed him, but basically you took over his mind. Made him in awe of you.” He paused to gaze at the ceiling. “When he’s in the mood he can make you feel like you can’t refuse him anything.”
“You’re talking about the Asset?”
“Yes.”
“No matter how badly he behaves?” I said.
“Yes.” Another frown and pause. “But not all the time, that’s the thing. One minute you’re dealing with an Einstein, the next minute with a sociopath. And there’s no warning, no way of knowing which bit of him is working from moment to moment.” He groaned and sighed. “I suppose they’ll fix the glitch sooner or later.” He shook his head. “Or maybe they won’t. Sometimes, there’s a look on his face, as if to say, Forget it, I program myself from now on.”
“On the face of the Asset?”
“Yes, of course.”
“But Goldman himself-he still runs his ‘Asset’? He’s in charge?”
Sakagorn shook his head and frowned. The question troubled him so deeply that for once words failed him. Finally he said, “Their relationship has been deteriorating. Sometimes Goldman looks downright terrified.” He would not say more on the subject.
I cough. “Lord Sakagorn, I have only one case at the moment and it has nothing to do with geopolitics or the PRC, so far as I know. It is a very local little tragedy, I’m afraid. But it was I who asked the Colonel to invite you to come talk to us…” I let the barrister snort at that and make a face, then carried on. “The media have named it the Market Murder; we are calling the victim Nong X. A local Thai girl, twelve years old, murdered in the market just behind this station.” Sakagorn looked as if he was about to yawn: typical of an undeveloped peasant mind like mine to suddenly descend to the squalid and irrelevant. “Someone pulled her head off with his bare hands,” I said with a smile. “I wonder if you could help?”
Sakagorn was startled but not particularly shocked. “I don’t know. I heard about the murder, but I’m sure I would have remembered if any of the reports mentioned a decapitation.”
“We’re keeping the details quiet for the purpose of investigation.”
The barrister seemed more curious than disturbed. “No other molestation?”
“No. No sexual abuse, no visible signs of struggle, no damage to other parts of the body. Somebody of superhuman strength simply twisted and wrenched her head from her shoulders, probably in seconds, before she had time even to be terrified. I don’t have to tell you that simply doesn’t happen in homicide cases. Killers do not unemotionally remove the heads of their victims with their bare hands while being careful not to do any other damage or take sexual advantage in any way.”
Sakagorn did not disguise his surprise. He stared at me for a moment, thought about it, then shrugged. “Superhuman strength, lack of emotional involvement, a weird combination of extreme violence and total self-control-sure, it’s him, Goldman’s Asset. Who else could it be? I know nothing about it, however, nothing at all. I wasn’t there, didn’t know, wasn’t invited, this is the first I’m hearing of it.”
Now we had an awkward pause in the interrogation. Vikorn changed the subject.
“Tell us more about the background. Goldman and his Asset arrived in Bangkok only last month, you say? What about before that? Give us the history as you know it.”
“Goldman ran a CIA program in Vietnam nearly half a century ago. It was basic zombie mind-control stuff that went wrong. There was a big scandal, they pretended to shut it down, Goldman pleaded for them to let him continue in secret. He did some kind of deal and moved the operation to Angkor, in Cambodia.”
“Angkor? But the Khmer Rouge were there, they used it as a base.”
“Yes, soon after Goldman moved there. He had to move on. But the few years he spent in Angkor were crucial, somehow.”
The barrister turned cagey. Perhaps it was embarrassment: he was finding it difficult to come clean. Vikorn and I stared at him relentlessly. Finally he buckled. “I may have been brought up in this country, but until I met Goldman I didn’t think I had a superstitious bone in my body. However, I would never visit Angkor again, never.” He shook his head. “I went many times as a tourist, loved the huge trees embracing the great stone Buddhas-so romantic. It was a great place to take a girl for a long weekend, in the old days. And so close, about forty minutes by plane door to door.”
He looked up. “Goldman got drunk one night and started raving about it. It seems he had the use of one of the lesser temples, not the Wat itself-you know, Angkor was a great city, fifty years ago eighty percent of it had yet to be excavated. He kept ranting about some shrink, some Englishman, some crazy British psychiatrist with a ridiculous British name. I couldn’t make out if this Brit was on the team, or running some other team, or what. The whole thing was garbled, he was horribly drunk-scary, a man that size, drunk and crazy. It seemed this British shrink with a weird name I can’t remember had persuaded the CIA shrinks to try an experiment. It was the Brit shrink’s idea that the Americans were all wrong in thinking that enhancement was a matter of drugs and neurons. The argument was the usual Old World organic versus New World scientific. Basically, he was talking about magic. Black magic.” He scanned us. “I don’t have to tell you about Cambodia and magic? There isn’t a mordu, a local clairvoyant or witch doctor in Krung Thep who doesn’t claim to belong to some Khmer lineage-it’s like the best perfume comes from Paris, the best beef from Argentina, the best sorcery from Cambodia. So the CIA people agreed to try the experiment the British doctor with the crazy name was urging on them. And it worked. Except that it didn’t just work on the assets they were trying to develop. It worked on the whole crew. Including Goldman and the British shrink himself.”
Sakagorn shrugged. “That’s all I can tell you. It came out once only when he was drunk, and he never mentioned it again. I thought it was merely the ranting of a man who had spent too much time in the jungle. Perhaps it was. But something must have sunk in, because there’s no way I could bring myself to visit Angkor again. No way. I started to see the whole place in a different light. That huge dark rotting Wat the size of a city block, those hideous stone pyramids like Aztec architecture, that sinister little shrine right in the middle, the whole atmosphere of the thing…” He shuddered.
“When you say it worked, what worked?”
“Unclear.”
Vikorn and I both grunted. “What else?”
“Nothing. That’s all he let slip. They only had a few years, then Pol Pot turned up with his gang of brutes and Goldman had to get out. They went up to Laos.” He stared into our eyes, one after another, then shrugged.