John Burdett - The Bangkok Asset

“Shitless, frankly. How can anyone look on that and still find meaning in life?”

“But you took control perfectly.”

He nods. “That’s the programming, they drummed it into us, the military mind. But I always feel bad after a performance like that. It’s such a violation of higher intelligence, all those straight lines and sharp corners it plants in your skull. Doc Bride warned me about it. We discussed it a lot.”

“You discussed with Dr. Bride the future structure of your mind, your personality?”

“Certainly. I was the building site and the junior architect both. Almost from the start. He warned me, you see, that a clash would come between the stuff he’d crammed into my head and the stuff the military would cram in. But he was sure the chemicals and the inserts would cause an acceleration of development that would lead me to drop the military side eventually and become a world spiritual leader. Play your Gandhi against their Stalin, he advised me.” He smiles. “He said I would have to be Christ to survive.” He shrugs. “He would have preferred Apollo or Zeus or Zoroastrer or Krishna, and frankly so would I, but he felt compelled to take revenge on his mother by manufacturing his own Jesus…Complicated fellow, the Doc. He trained as a Freudian, you know, before he switched to Jung.”

He gives me a smile oozing with kindness, fondness, spiritual goodwill, preparedness to die for me, a fraternal adoration that will last an eternity, an utterly convincing beam of divine love; then he turns it off. “Christ is as good as any, I guess, and there’s very good product recognition. We can build on that. It’s a lot easier than starting from scratch, and I’ll only have to flash a few miracles, just like two thousand years ago, and most of the seven billion suckers on the planet will fall for it.”

“I see. What will you use for corporate identity? Will you stick with the Cross?”

“Oh, no. Just like two thousand years ago, we’ll take a universal symbol, something with total worldwide recognition as had the Cross in its day-and tweak it a bit.”

“What symbol would that be?”

“An S with two vertical strokes, of course.” I gasp. “Shall I tell you why you gasped just then, dear brother? Because at that very moment you saw that our little project is not only possible but inevitable. Indeed, it has already started. Is it not so?”

I shake my head in wonder. “You’re really going to start a new world religion, take over the earth?”

“Depends.” He grins. “I might hate the paperwork. But I’m not going to hang around in the CIA’s program any longer, that’s for sure. I’m bored with it even if there are oodles of dough to be made. They’ll have to find some other mutant to sell to the Chinese. Anyway, like I said, it’s still basically Doctor’s orders. He’s not greedy, all he wants is world dominance before he dies.”

–

We get out at Sakagorn’s mansion and the Asset leads me to the large garden at the back. There is a long covered swing that kids and adults alike might use to relax in the shade. We sit in it together and he plays a game of using one arm to pull and push the double swing to its limits, holding us out almost horizontally for a full five minutes before slowly letting the seat come down again with total control. He gives me a sheepish look.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t show off, should I?”

“Do you need to?”

He gives me the divine smile. “It’s all your fault, for being such a perfect elder sibling, it makes me a little giggly. But we are still not fully bonded, are we? I’m not sure. From time to time you look bewildered, my brother. Sometimes you have an expression on your face that tells me I’m violating some cultural rule of intimacy they never told me about. I wouldn’t know, we didn’t do a lot of love training at the camp. There were tons of torchlight processions down into the depths of the cave, with cannibalism as a kind of ultimate consummation. That was the big event: eating someone else.”

He pauses and rebuilds the adoring smile. “Shall I tell you a secret? I first saw you from a distance some time ago-more than a month. Goldman pointed you out. We were in Soi Cowboy and you were about to enter your mother’s bar. The minute I saw you I knew that you were my brother. I was stunned. I knew you immediately. It was my baptism in the Jordan, that’s when I became the Messiah of this age. After that I couldn’t stop myself, every few days I would slip back to the soi to take pictures of you. I must have taken over a hundred on that iPhone. It was such fun spying on you like that. And then making sure you received the phone-and the Doc’s number in Contacts. I was in agony for days wondering when you’d finally get through to him. The old fool turns his phone off when he wants to think about something. Or when he’s on one of his opium binges. Or when he’s on acid-especially when he’s on acid and…Well, he’s a different man. I expect he struck you as a wonderful, eccentric, brilliant, charming, highly polished old English gent, did he not? Those are merely relics of a personality he used to own, before Angkor. He needs opium to keep up the pretense. Acid reveals the truth.”

The Asset gives a grandfatherly smile and folds his arms over his stomach. “Then, when you did call him, he had to call me right away because I hadn’t told him about you and he didn’t know where you were coming from at all. What a laugh-he was mad as hell, but he forgave me. Poor old Doc. And I was the one who insisted he take you to the camp, because I wanted you to know everything, you are my only living blood relation on this earth, aside from that old guy in the hospital.”

“Tell me about the opium. It’s terribly injurious, especially for a man his age. Why doesn’t he use LSD all the time?”

The Asset gives me a shrewd look, as if I’ve stumbled on an inconvenient truth. “He takes the Spirit only rarely these days. Very rarely. You could even say he uses opium to avoid acid.”

“Why?”

“Because when he’s on LSD his demon takes over completely. That’s really what all this is about, you know.” The Asset lets this bomb drop with a yawn. “He sold his soul to the great demon of Angkor forty years ago on a ten-day acid binge, but he’ll never admit it.” He checks my face. “That doesn’t mean the project won’t succeed. The opposite. With a demon like that backing us, how can we lose? The Khmer spirits are taking over the world again, using the weapon they know best: magic.” He smiles conspiratorially: “It’s quite fun, isn’t it?”

I realize that, outlandish though it seems, this is as sincere as the Asset is able to be. He really means that he is the Messiah. Frankly, R, I am experiencing the original policeman’s hell here: stuck with a perp who won’t stop confessing and no power of arrest.

“But Jesus, you are not Jesus,” I say. “You murder, you intimidate, you mutilate, you hypnotize men into killing their nearest and dearest, you scared my wife half to death, you are a war machine-” I stop, ashamed of my own exasperation.

“Hmm, the military lobby does keep cropping up, doesn’t it? It’s a concession we had to make. The Doc says I’ll grow out of the boy-soldier stuff pretty soon now. I’m sorry I scared your wife, it’s a kind of reflex they taught us.”

“What is?”

“Scaring the shit out of people: psychic dominance, to give it its military title. It’s quite clever, it involves all sorts of subtle factors like standing at a certain distance, control over facial features, total physical superiority, posture, and something you do with your eyes that isn’t mystical but looks it, then you call attention to the very sensitive area around the mark’s navel, which is a terrific fear center-and basically you convince the mark that you have killed many times before and might be about to do so again, which isn’t difficult when it’s true. It’s part of riot-control training. You pick a pack leader and reduce him to a whimpering wreck without even touching him. Very effective.”