“Go on.”
“Naturally, I promised on my honor not to participate in or in any way become involved with that particularly despicable form of private enterprise that so desecrated the bodies of the fallen. And I promised never to talk about your father and MKUltra.”
“In return, it seems they left you alone?”
“Yes. I would have preferred they hadn’t gone and lost me my legs in the first place.” He makes a gesture to include the whole penthouse. “This is just a consolation prize. There were quite a few vets who took the same route. At one time half the bars on Pat Pong were part-owned by vets. Some of them are still around.”
“You said they ‘inserted’ the name of my father into the conversation.”
“Yeah.”
“What was that name?”
“Jack.”
“Jack what?”
He stares at me. “You’re kidding, right? Or are you deaf?”
“He’s my father, I have a right to know.”
“And I have a right to go on living in crippled luxury. If and when you report this conversation, there’s only one conclusion that matters: I refused to tell you the name of your father. End of story.” He stares at me. “Maybe you are desperate, but how am I supposed to test that? You could be working for them, trying to set me up.”
“Why would they want to do that?”
He shrugs. “If I knew why the CIA do things I would have detailed knowledge of why the world is so fucked, wouldn’t I?”
“But why would my father’s name be an issue? When you knew him you were both FNGs, hanging out together, doing R amp;R in Bangkok. You must have known his family name? You must have heard it every day at roll call.”
He swings his chair around to stare at the distant river. Now he has his back to me and seems to be talking as much to himself as to me.
“He called you Sonchai. Is that still your name?”
“Yes.”
He gives a dry chuckle. “It took me five years of learning Thai before I realized he’d screwed up. The standard name is Somchai-with an m. Sonchai means to think or dream. It kind of symbolized everything, that little mistake of his. Like no matter how hard we tried, we were bound to screw up out of sheer ignorance.” He swings the chair around again to face me. “I cannot tell you his family name because they disappeared him, airbrushed him out-with his consent.”
He is not without compassion. He has to take a deep breath before he is able to say, “He doesn’t exist, Sonchai, except as a ghost, a memory. That was the deal he made when he volunteered, and they expect it to stay that way.”
I stand still, frozen. He turns away from my gaze. “Think it through, Detective. You leave this building knowing the family name of someone who was volunteered for Ultra. Now you or someone working for you starts to make inquiries over the Net, using that name. Within hours I receive a visit. Maybe this time they’ll come with local law enforcement and a file full of evidence, real or false, it doesn’t really matter.”
“Linking you with the smuggling of heroin in the body bags?”
He stares at me until I break eye contact. “You’re smart, but maybe a little naïve, and that leads you to miss the point.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re living in a giant Ponzi scheme. The Fed buys Treasury bonds without spending money because it doesn’t have any. Currency is created on a computer-it’s totally notional. There is nothing at all to back it up. The system was never designed that way, we’re in a virtual universe.”
“What the hell has that got to do with anything?”
“The black hole is massive and it’s eating the world. Even ordinary Americans have started to feel it. Government has come to mean papering over the abyss with fairy tales. Politicians know those fairy tales are the only things people are still willing to vote for. But it’s very fragile. Anything can pop the balloon at any moment. There’s no morality in government service, except the duty to keep covering up. No one wants to be the whistle-blower who destroyed the world. Even sleeping scandals from long ago have the power to bring down the seawall. So what do you think the intelligence services of the planet are really planning for? Not sabotage by a foreign power, but massive civil unrest. A super police force manned by supermen and superwomen is the only way to go.” He stares at me as if sorely tempted to say more. Then he shuts up and turns away. I think, Black hole, that phrase again.
I give it one last shot. “He must have come to see you after he was in the Ultra program. At least once, or you wouldn’t know all this.”
He looks me in the eye. “He wasn’t the same man, Sonchai, he really wasn’t the same man.”
31
Next day I’m at the cooked-food stall opposite the station, my gun jammed down the back of my pants, eating khao kha moo and continuing to absorb my meeting with Roberto da Silva, who looms in my memory like a crippled hero from a time of giants. Then my phone vibrates and I pull it out of my pants pocket. The message from Chanya is simple enough: HE’S HERE. FOR BUDDHA’S SAKE HELP.
For a long moment I blink at the phone, unable to take it in. Now I realize who he is and I’m trying to get her on the phone. No answer. I’m sweating, I can feel my face twitching with fear and rage. I put money on the table for the food, stand in the street to stop a cab that already has a passenger, a farang. I flash my police ID: “Emergency.” The farang gets out grudgingly at first, then speeds up when he sees my face. He starts to say, “I’m not paying-”
I cut him off, push him out of the way, tell the cab driver to ignore the rules, just get me there. I sit beside him, frantically trying to get someone on the phone, anyone who knows her: my mother, her mother, her closest friends. Finally, I have the brilliant idea of calling our next-door neighbor.
“Someone came about half an hour ago, I happened to be looking out the window.”
“Man or woman?”
“Man.”
“So what did he look like?”
“No need to shout. He was tall, young, a farang.” A snicker. “Very good-looking, blond, a real pinup.”
“Is he still there?”
“I don’t know. I only looked out for a moment. I’m not a nosey person.” She adds, “Don’t worry, she’s a good girl, you know, very kind and devout, I’m sure-”
I cut her off.
–
At the hovel I throw some twenty-baht bills at the cab driver, run to the front door, knock, ring, and fumble with my keys at the same time. It doesn’t help that someone has closed the drapes so I cannot see inside. When I enter it’s quite dark. I switch on the lights. A flood of relief: Chanya is there, sitting on her chair by her computer. A flood of terror: she isn’t moving. A flood of relief: I can see she is breathing. There is something strange about her, though. She is rigid. When I touch her I feel a vibration. She is shivering in a way I’ve never seen before: a constant shaking of her whole body, but high-frequency shortwaves as if she is plugged into some machine. I turn her face to look at her. Her eyes are open windows to the terror within. I tap her gently on the shoulder, grab a bottle of red wine I’ve been meaning to drink one happy evening when this damned case is over, open it, pour her a mugful. She opens her mouth, allows me to pour some in. When it starts to drip down her chin she snaps out of her coma, swallows, reaches for the mug, downs it. I pour some more.
“He was here,” she gasps. “That thing of yours. He came.”
“What did he do?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing. Sonchai, that’s what is so incredibly scary. He didn’t need to do anything. He just stood there. Oh, Buddha, I’ve never known anything like it. This big, slim, gorgeous man with the most beautiful hands and Hollywood good looks simply stood there and scared the living shit out of me. He’s not human. Whatever it is he gives off, it’s not human. You can’t be around him. I saw that at the fight, but I was too far away to understand. I thought he was just some super soldier the CIA had created-I had no idea what it really meant, that something like that could actually exist. His eyes.” She gulps some more wine.