Jake gazed across the room.
“The professors in Laos?”
“They were pressured, and how. By Sen. Khmer Rouge people in Phnom Penh. The Lao. All of them together. And when Samnang topped himself, Sen thought that would be it, that Chemda would quit, yet he could tell from her phone calls that she was determined to continue.”
“So her mother got the witch to arrange the kun krak. To scare her off. I know that.”
Tyrone nodded empathetically.
“Yeah, that bit we know all about, right? Madame Tek was aware that Chemda shared her irrational superstitions. The mother hired the spider queen. To do the embryo juju.”
“And it worked—”
“But when she got back Chemda was the same girl! Mmm? Right? Still convinced of the need to confront the past. She just didn’t realize that confronting the past meant… unmasking her own grandfather. And you know how Chemda thinks. She reveres Papa Sen. Father Number One. Sen was like her real dad and Chemda was Daddy’s little girl.”
Tyrone abruptly stood. He walked to the other side of the room and gazed at a wall chart. A picture of the human brain.
“She loved and revered her grandfather. It would rip her open to know that Grandfather Sen was a friend of the Butcher. Of Ieng Sary. Pol Pot. And Sen in turn, apparently, rather likes his granddaughter’s love and respect, so he did not want Chemda’s hatred. He needed her out of the country, away from these mysteries. And they had another reason for her to leave.”
On the horizon, the truth was rising, like a sickening moon.
Jake asked, “Which was? This reason?”
“People were being killed. Scientists across the West. People who had helped in the experiments they did in Phnom Penh, the experiments that have continued here. Sen knew that danger approached. In desperation he thought maybe you would take her to England or America. She loves you, Jake. She would follow you, if no one else, right? You were their best hope. As a final inducement, Sen arranged for your apartment to be fired—”
“Sen? It was him? How the hell was that meant to persuade me?”
“Seems you left the Sovirom compound too soon that morning. You weren’t meant to see the actual fire bombs, you were meant to agree to the marriage and then go home and see the already gutted apartment and realize your life was in real danger. You would marry Chemda nice and easy — and take her far away out of harm’s reach, away from the terrible truth. And then papa-san would deal with the threat as best he could. But it went wrong. You escaped — eloped, even — and then Sen got angry and decided to take more drastic action. In Anlong Veng. Kill you, seize Chemda. He felt you already knew too much. I saved your ass.”
“But what are you doing now, Ty? You saved me then? But what are you doing now? We have to save Chem, get her out of here, away from Sen—”
Tyrone sighed.
“I’m coming to that. You are my friend, Jake, really. I really did save you in Anlong Veng. I was rooting for you, dude, but then a couple of weeks ago…”
He paused.
“Tell you what. Maybe you need some visuals.” Tyrone walked to the door, pulled it open, and signaled to someone beyond.
Sovirom Sen stepped through; his smile at Jake was halfway between delicate pity and pure condescension. His smile at Tyrone was entirely civilized.
42
Tyrone nodded at Sen and turned to Jake.
“Two weeks ago Sen came to me in Phnom Penh and told me all of this, and he persuaded me that there was a solution to everyone’s problems.”
Jake was floundering and frightened. He gazed at Sen’s untroubled smile; he stammered.
“No — this — no—”
Tyrone tutted. “Hey. Shape up. You are missing one key piece of information. I’m surprised you haven’t asked the crucial question. The crucial part of the story is… Have a guess. Go on, just try.”
“What? What is it?” Jake could hear the needy tone in his own voice. He didn’t care. He was desperate. “Tyrone, just fucking tell me.”
“OK.” The American smiled. He was leaning sideways against the blank white wall, arms folded.
“The experiments were all Sen’s idea, it was his project. He conceived and directed the project. He and a couple of others, back in the seventies.”
The grandfather spoke. His bespoke shoes were truly incongruous in the utilitarian concrete room.
“Of course it was me. However, Jacob, it goes rhapsodically further than you have guessed. And here is why I have invited Tyrone into our… conspiration. It is a truly astonishing story, and Tyrone is a teller of stories. This is how I persuaded Mr. McKenna, by giving him the story — what we are really doing up here, in the wilds.”
“It’s crazy, Jake, a total mind-fuck, if you will forgive the expression.”
Helpless, Jake asked the only question: “What are you doing?”
Sen answered: “Recall, Jacob, how we discussed my loathing of irrationality, of superstition. Khmer legends, Chinese astrology, feng shui, geomancy. You remember our dialogue, Jacob? And remember how I affirmed the lucidity of Japanese Zen Buddhism, the nothingness. The taking away. The beautiful withered garden; the absence of God.”
“No,” said Jake, struggling with the concept, with the terror in his mind, the sense of something wicked approaching. “I still don’t get it.”
“So I will illuminate.” Sen came forward and tapped the end of Jake’s bed, almost paternally. “You deduced that we were trying to neurosection guilt and conscience, and that we failed. Well, in the years since then, the science has moved on.”
“How?”
“The original theory, Ghislaine Quoinelle’s elegant theory, was that the specifically human sense of guilt and remorse was the price we paid for our sudden leap forward in cognition, for the biological evolution in our neurology, changes that probably happened in the frontal cortex, the most advanced, recently evolved area of the brain. But during our conferences in Cambodia we deduced that the birth of guilt also meant the birth of religious faith, the birth of God. Because, when there is guilt, then God is not far behind. Only a god can punish or forgive — and therefore heal the guilt. Heal the species shame of Homo sapiens.”
His smile was polite, diplomatic.
“Since the 1980s your bold Western scientists have, not uncoincidentally, theorized that there may actually be a God module, a God spot, in the brain. A part of the brain responsible, as it were, for religious belief. People like Persinger in Canada, and Ramachandran, and Zohar, have specified areas of the cerebral cortex that are activated when we have religious experiences, epiphanies, conversions. Do you see the connections now? The brain, they say, is hard-wired for belief.”
He paused for effect.
“Of course I — and my friends in the Chinese elite, the Chinese military — we regarded the genesis of these theories with great interest. Because the speculations tie in so neatly with Ghislaine Quoinelles’s grand thesis, his ideas about the evolution of the human mind in the Paleolithic, the evolution of guilt and conscience in the cortex, in those…” Sen tapped the top of his forehead with a finger “… those younger neural pathways.”
Jake felt as if he were watching some speeded up film of a terrible organic process, a beautiful and terrible process. Narcosis, or decomposition.