Research and development of humans: only a nerdy dyke could come out with a phrase like that and make it sound humdrum.
“And you are what? How come you know so much? How did you know who the players were yesterday, and why were you there right on the spot and right on time? D’you work wholly for the Chinese or just part-time?”
“Can we do me later? I’m sort of classified. Look, you could call this an American Age, or you could call it a Chinese Age, but either way it’s a Pacific Age-and Thailand, politically, is Asia Pac.”
“So where does that leave me?”
“It leaves you working for a boss who is owned body and soul, head to feet, by certain ministries in Beijing. When Vikorn heard the details of the Market Murder he totally freaked. I was with him. He shook like a leaf.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s brokering the biggest deal of his life and Beijing is forcing him to guarantee the product. If there’s a problem, they take him down for all he’s got. He’s a very big player for you and me, but to the government that runs the lives of one-and-a-half billion people he’s nothing, nothing at all.”
“But, yesterday, on the river, that was all American.”
“Correct. And the spies behind the cameras were Chinese.”
“Americans selling military programs to the Chinese on Thai soil? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yesterday was not a demo, that was the point. Goldman and the Asset chose that terrible weather as cover-they didn’t think the Chinese had the technology to penetrate the storm. They were experimenting-what you saw was a dress rehearsal.”
“Experimenting? With murder by mind control?”
She looked away, turned her gaze to the street. Beyond the cooked-food stalls where people were sitting and standing, chatting, as on any other day, a knife cutter was calling out from his cyclo on which he had installed a revolving whetstone, another man in long blue shorts and a singlet was peddling brooms and mops from his tuk-tuk, mothers were taking their kids to the local nursery school. It was a very ordinary morning.
“You’ve never met a cop like me before, have you?” Krom asked.
“No.”
She paused as if deciding what to say next. “Very few people know it, but the fact is, we’re living in a transhuman age.” She glanced at my face to see if I’d understood. I hadn’t. In an epoch of constantly expanding vocabulary, I’d never heard the expression before.
She ate some of her somtam salad. I sipped my coffee and waited.
“The West is bankrupt in every sense, on every level,” she said. “Money is out of control and so are people’s heads. Over the next decade technologically empowered civil unrest will force most countries to militarize their police forces even more-much more-than they have already. And when the West goes, the myth of democracy goes with it. It will be dictatorship or chaos, and humans prefer order to freedom when it comes to the crunch. A lot of us feel like slaves anyway: where’s the freedom if you’re working three miserable jobs to pay off your debts to keep bankers rich? The secret technology we witnessed yesterday is tomorrow’s law enforcement, worldwide. It will be every government’s must-have, with the blessing of a paranoid population. Those who own it will be billionaires, automatically. Just like the Internet moguls of yesteryear.”
“Okay, so Vikorn is a go-between for sale and purchase of highly classified military programs. I got that.”
“An unwilling go-between. But who better to use for background checks than the most powerful cop in Bangkok, together with his best detective? If the Chinese were to go through with the deal and the product found faulty-well, they call in the Colonel’s guarantee, don’t they?”
She gave me a couple of minutes to think it through. “If the product proved faulty, how? You mean, if the product is given to the spectacular murder of young virgins? Yes, I can see that might cause the masters of Beijing to start frothing at the mouth. They would be forced to claim American sabotage, even if it wasn’t.”
She grunted, then said, “You didn’t hear that from me.”
She stood up to pay with a hundred-baht note. So far the short sleeves of her uniform had been long enough to cover her arms down to the elbow; now I saw there was a sharp border between the light tan flesh of the forearm and the dense blue of some serious damascene inkings.
“You have full-body?”
The question shocked her for a moment; she hurriedly lowered her hand and pulled her sleeve down.
“It’s when you stand up to pay like a man that you give the game away,” I said with a smirk.
She threw me a glare and sat down again. “Yes. Full-body.” She shook her head, angry at herself for being careless and giving her secret away.
She frowned, laid the hundred-baht note on the table for a moment, and reached into a pocket. She took out a thumb drive. “I knew we were going to be working together, so I brought this in case our conversation went well. A moment ago I thought I’d wait a while. Now you’ve seen the tat, though, you may as well have it. Just so you know.” She handed over the thumb drive. “Share it with your wife. If she needs any reassurance about you and me working together, this will give it to her-big time.”
I looked her in the eye as I took it. Then she held out a hand that, I suspect, she would have liked to be bigger and more masculine. As a matter of fact, it was small, slim, and very elegant; no rings, though. I shook it. Now she had one more shock for me.
“Ah, just so you know I know-your little weakness for weed-do I need to say more?”
“What weakness?”
“C’mon, Detective, everyone knows.”
“Knows what?”
“Your Achilles’ heel, man. Yes, you are straight, honest, compassionate, never take money unless Vikorn forces you, and even then you never keep any for yourself. You are notorious for not being on the take. But that sets up quite a psychological strain that’s hard to handle without help. Then there’s your permanent search for your biological father. Everyone knows about that.”
“They do?”
“Yep.”
I scratched my ear. “So?”
“So I have something for you.”
She dug into a pocket and took out a vial like a test tube filled with a golden-green liquid. “I made some up, just for you, as a token of our new friendship.”
I stared at the test tube, then at her. “What is it?”
“Oil,” she said.
“THC?”
“What else? Do you know how to use it? You dip a cigarette in it then warm the cigarette in an oven at not more than a hundred degrees Celsius until it’s dry-any hotter and you’ll kill the THC.”
I shook my head. THC: of course, what else? I slipped it into my pants pocket.
–
Back at the station I sat at my post in the open-plan office, checked e-mail, checked the news again, went through the usual kind of distractions while another part of my mind scratched incessantly at a couple of key phrases Inspector Krom had inserted into our conversation: weakness for weed; your Achilles’ heel, man; search for your biological father.
I slapped the top of my desk, causing the cop at the desk nearby to look up and scowl. I rose to my feet.
“If anyone wants to know, I’ve gone to see Dr. Supatra, the pathologist,” I told him. He scowled again and went back to his screen. I had interrupted his game of Angry Birds.
–
To know you are a little odd, that you do not possess the full complement of antecedents, complications, traps, and habits that constitute normal-that is one thing. To be told by a stranger that your own strangeness is obvious, to have it explained to you that you are one of those with a gaping wound, moreover, that is talked about openly behind your back-that is quite another number to crunch on. My nerves did not begin to relax until I was a good few hundred yards from the station, on the way to the pathologist’s laboratory. I liked the anonymity of the street. I always had. Even as a kid I’d been addicted to long walks late at night in the city that never sleeps. In the small hours of the morning it was possible to imagine that those who were still awake were of my own kind: pariahs. I liked Inspector Krom’s tattoo. I admired her courage. I feared her ruthlessness.