Vikorn, diminished, has let her take over, at least for now. A woman was the last thing he expected. (But I think he’s working on a plan.) She keeps her hands in her trouser pockets, thoughtfully pacing up and down as she talks. There is about her the restrained superiority of a senior librarian with access to secret catalogs. Hudson sits uncomfortably, perhaps even resentfully. Bright has not been invited. Nobody interrupts. I translate for Vikorn in a whisper, so as not to disturb her concentration. She has been trained to smile frequently-and inexplicably-perhaps on the same course where she learned unarmed combat?
“This is serious intelligence. Detective, I want to thank you and your Colonel for bringing this evidence to us. This is a new direction for Al Qaeda, and a surprising one. We’ve never seen a castration theme before, but it makes a lot of sense from their point of view.” She pauses, frowns fussily, continues. “And of course there might be a revenge theme from the Abu Ghraib fiasco. How does the world perceive America, especially the Muslim developing world? As some kind of Superman caricature-with emphasis on man-an overmasculine society obsessed with its power and virility. If they start cutting off our male organs, it will send one of those crude, potent messages that the young, ignorant, and fanatical tend to embrace. Actually, exactly the same technique of intimidation was used by the Ching emperors, who invariably cut off the testicles of prisoners of war, which certainly wore down the enemy’s morale. It’s smart. Very smart. We cannot let it go unanswered.”
Hudson grunts. She pauses, leans her butt against a wall, and gives Hudson a cool but collegial nod before turning to me. “Did that all get translated? Am I going too fast? I’m sorry I don’t speak Thai. Standard Arabic, Spanish, and Russian are my only foreign languages.”
I pass the question on to Vikorn, who looks her in the eye for the first time, then turns to me. “Ask her where she is on the U.S. Army pay scale.”
She allows a quick, patronizing smile at this typical third-world question. “Tell your Colonel I’m not in the army.”
“I know she’s not in the fucking army,” Vikorn retorts. “They’re paid on the same scale. What is her equivalent rank? That’s what they never stopped talking about in Laos. Has she gotten above the warrant officer grades? Is she on the O scale or not?”
She flicks a glacial glance at Hudson. “It’s quicker to just answer the question,” Hudson advises, staring at the floor.
“It doesn’t work like that anymore,” she explains to me. Slowing her speech and with still more careful deliberation: “Your Colonel is referring to thirty years ago, when the Agency was running a secret war, so the pay scale was roughly equivalent to the military pay scale. Nowadays we tend to be paid according to the Federal Government General Schedule.”
“Okay, the GS,” Vikorn says, fishing in his desk drawer. “The military scale is based on that anyway. What grade is she?” He takes a sheet of paper out and studies it.
She absorbs this covert attack effortlessly, as a professional boxer might absorb a punch from an amateur, and raises her eyebrows to Hudson as the man on the ground who understands the local peasants.
“He didn’t like the way you were walking up and down his office. He’s checking that you understand the rules of trade. Best give him what he wants.”
“I see,” she says with a decisive nod. To me: “You can tell him I’m Grade Eleven if that will help.”
I translate. Vikorn checks with his sheet of paper. “What Step?”
“Grade Eleven Step One.” Horizontal wrinkles appear in her upper forehead while he traces her position on the scale with his fingers. “But the GS can be misleading,” she adds, taking control by appearing to help, in accordance with the manual. “You get extras for locality, risk, that kind of thing.”
Vikorn raises his eyebrows at Hudson. “Grade Eight Step Ten,” Hudson confesses.
“So she starts at a base of $42,976 before locality, while he starts at $41,808. There’s hardly any difference.” Vikorn is beaming.
When I translate, she shakes her head, then closes her eyes to enforce patience. In a somnambulant voice (the subject may be close to her heart despite its spectacular irrelevance): “There’s a drive to change the whole package, make it more result-oriented, more competitive, more like the private sector.”
“There’s a lot of resistance to the proposed changes though,” says Hudson. “The BENS report is not so popular.”
“You read it cover to cover?”
“Yeah, there are some practical challenges, like how do you measure results in the intelligence community? The greatest successes are things that didn’t go wrong. How do you give credit for that?”
She shakes her head. “It’s a problem.”
“You see,” Vikorn says when I’ve translated, “nothing has changed. They were moaning about the same stuff in Laos, until they learned how to make deals with the Kuomintang and the Hmong. They only took a ten percent cut for transporting the dope, though, in their Air America transport planes, which the Hmong thought was terrific considering what the Chiu Chow Chinese and the Vietnamese and the French used to take. It was the increase in revenue thanks to the CIA that enabled the Hmong to go on fighting for as long as they did. That was one of the most successful CIA operations. Capitalism at its best. Actually, the only successful operation in that theater.” I translate.
She smiles with glacial grace. “Let’s take the excesses of Laos as read. I’d like to get back to the matter in hand. Does the Colonel have any questions about that?”
“Ask her if Mitch Turner was the deceased’s real name.”
After a pause: “It was one of them.”
Vikorn smiles and nods. “Now ask her who he was.”
Slowly, deliberately, politely: “Classified.”
Vikorn nods again. Inexplicable silence. She turns to Hudson.
“People can be subtle in this part of the world,” Hudson explains. “He has just pointed out that in his scheme of things, which you might call feudal capitalism or realpolitik depending on your point of view, we are both underpaid slaves whom he could buy twenty times over without noticing, who are engaged in an investigation into the death of someone who probably entered the country on a false name and who, for the purposes of police investigation, may not even have existed. In other words, we may not have a lot of leverage.”
I have to admire her lightning adaptation to the situation on the ground: she finds a chair, pulls it up to Vikorn’s desk, and sits on it. Leaning forward with a half-smile: “Mitch Turner was one of the names used by a nonofficial cover operator, a NOC, who was based in the south of this country who was murdered in a hotel room and who was somehow found by the detective here. I never met him myself.” A glance at Hudson.