Now I turn my attention back to the leuk kreung. When he gives me his card, I see he is legal counsel to the American embassy here. I remember that legal attachés are invariably FBI, which doesn’t have a great relationship with the CIA. The lawyer’s name is Matthew Hadley-Chan.
Matthew Hadley-Chan sits to Vikorn’s right. Krom and I take up the seats farther down the table.
“Well?” Vikorn says, looking at Goldman, then at the FBI.
Goldman is not looking well; indeed, he is seriously haggard. “The first thing I want to say is how sincerely my government and I regret any misperception that may have arisen-”
“Cut to the chase, Goldman,” the lawyer Hadley-Chan snaps like a man who has been waiting to pounce. “You bugged a friendly power on whom the U.S. depends for support and intelligence in a region which grows strategically more critical every week as tensions rise. You have abused one of our most important relationships in Southeast Asia. If you want the Bureau to help clean up your shit, stop pretending you are capable of regret or sincerity. In this room we all know what you are. Let’s start from there.”
Goldman stares at him, incandescent with rage, then controls himself as military programming intervenes. “You want to take that line, okay.” For once he is nonplussed. He stares at the lawyer as if there’s something about him he has trouble coming to grips with. “So, okay, you want straight talk, this is it. Yes, we did a little eavesdropping, and guess what we found out?” He sticks out his jaw and glares at Krom, me, and Vikorn in that order. Then he addresses himself to the FBI. “It’s true we did not find any activity against American interests in Southeast Asia. What we found was a massive conspiracy to control the Afghani heroin trade in alliance with Russian and Pakistani kingpins.” He glares triumphantly and folds his arms as if to say, Okay, so go public with that.
Matthew Hadley-Chan scratches his jaw and speaks a few words to Krom, who picks up her laptop case from the floor, opens the case, and takes out the laptop. It is a roomy kind of case, though, and it is clear that it holds more than the shiny Apple MacBook Pro, which now sits gleaming on the table.
“These are not U.S. government offices, Mr. Goldman,” the lawyer says. “And we don’t plant bugs on our closest allies anymore. You should have retired twenty years ago, Goldman, while the world was still going your way. Your worst offense, though, speaking off the record, is to underestimate our hosts.”
Now Goldman starts to lose what is left of his self-control. “Don’t bug our allies? What the fuck do you think the NSA spends half its time-”
He stops speaking because Krom has taken something else out of her laptop case. We all acquire mystic concentration. Goldman is ashen. It is an extraordinary-looking machine about one inch long with both wheels and feet, a short antenna, and what must be a miniature camera on a swivel. She matches it with three more of the same from the briefcase while Goldman’s ashen turns to purple. Now she takes out a glassine bag filled not with an illegal substance but illegal gadgets; at least, that’s what I assume they are: tiny black oblongs about an eighth of an inch in diameter and half an inch long, more than a dozen of them. Inserted in a hole in a wall or door they would look like nails. Goldman is swivel-eyed trying to read each of our faces in turn.
Krom attacks her laptop, manipulating keyboard and mouse at great speed, looking every bit the supersmart ambitious Asian female police officer with those black spectacles on her tiny nose. The spiderlike contraption on wheels starts to stir. Now that she has mastered the controls she can make it shoot off in any direction. At the edge of the table it breaks out a set of tentacles with miniature suction pads that allow it to run down the table leg like a mouse, straight across the floor, and up again until it is sitting in front of Goldman, pointing its camera at him. Now on the giant LED screen we have Goldman’s head, about two feet tall, staring at a miniature mobile covert surveillance device, or MMCSD as the jargon has it.
“It’s a very old tactic, Goldman,” the lawyer says. “Didn’t you attend that class at Langley? I believe they call it turning the bug.”
Now Krom uses the sound system to air part of a recorded conversation.
“How long have they been bugging us for?” It is Vikorn’s voice.
“I don’t know. We’ve found about twenty devices so far.”
“Who’s doing it?”
“There’s a character called Goldman at the center of it. He’s CIA.”
“Are they allowed to?”
“No way. Interference in the policing of a friendly power-that’s strictly no-no.”
“We wouldn’t want to offend them, though, would we?”
“No. They might come looking for weapons of mass destruction and destroy our country.” Krom giggles.
“We’ll do a recording using my voice. Make like we’re thinking of moving into the Afghanistan trade soon as the Americans have left that country. Then we embarrass them by proving it’s not true and get them off our backs-hopefully forever.”
“Yessir,” Krom says.
“Where is Afghanistan, by the way?”
“Somewhere west of northern India,” Krom says.
I watch a smile bloom and fade on Vikorn’s face as Krom replays the recording, just in case someone missed the point.
Goldman, slumped in his chair and staring at Krom, is not embarrassed by the double-shuffle; he is fixated on something else. “You broke the codes to work an M245X? You may be brilliant, but not that brilliant.”
“Of course not. It would take a supercomputer and twenty skilled operators to break those codes.”
“So, how did you do it?”
“We sent one of the M245Xs you let loose on us to China. They used a supercomputer and twenty skilled operators. Took them a week. The Colonel has excellent contacts in the highest ranks of the PRC. They kept the original model for research and development.” Krom offers him a girlish smile.
Goldman is bothered by the sight of his huge head on the screen and the surveillance device on the desk. He figures if he swats the M245X the problem will be solved. He is a big man with a big hand. Naturally, he would not come down on the metallic object from a vertical direction, but why not just sweep the damn thing off the desk?
I guess he was in the field when the capabilities of the M245X were demonstrated to Company officers. He passes the back of his hand across the desk with some vigor, and now the iron spider has snapped open a pair of pincers with which it is clinging to his hand. He doesn’t want to show how much it hurts, so he flies into a rage, which is inarticulate at first, with the blood turning to crimson under his fat cheeks. He wants to be rid of the gadget without providing us with the spectacle of a six-foot-four, three-hundred-and-fifty-pound man in a fight to the death with what looks like a child’s toy, but those pincers are mean. Now the floodgates of articulated rage open wide, the politically incorrect resentment of five decades or more going back to the first tightening of lips, swallowing of rebellion when, as a cadet, he found that even in those days Company rules imperfectly expressed his own idea of the America he had volunteered to defend with his life. He stands up.