Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

Five astonishing years followed. The aim of our squad was to identify, harass and psychologically destroy the world’s top criminals. These were our “target nominals”. They included South American drug dealers, Mafia capi, Eastern European oligarchs, Chinese Triad bosses, white-collar fraudsters, coordinators of paedophile rings, gangster paramilitaries, death squads, and more many more. There were no jurisdictional rules; we could operate in America, Europe, Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa – anywhere. There were no rules of fair play either; once we had targeted a top criminal, we used all the means at our disposal to subvert and shatter them.

Hate mail.

Random tax audits.

Psychological game playing.

And, most commonly of all… Mental warfare. The art of mind-fucking.

For instance, Wong-Kei, the Chinese Triad boss, worked out of Beijing and came from a long dynasty of gangsters, people traders and pimps. One hot March morning Tom briefed us on his history. We watched videos of his victims. We studied flowcharts of his criminal empire. And we made our plans.

First, Michiyo went deep undercover in his organisation. She became a drug mule, carrying heroin in condoms that she swallowed and carried in her colon for days on end. It was a horrendously dangerous assignment, and we had a team of paramedics constantly trailing her. But as a result of her courage, we were able to get access to the inner reaches of Wong-Kei’s organisation. Michiyo never met the boss himself, but she met his underlings, and she visited all the hangouts and bars used by members of his crew. And, everywhere she went, Michiyo sprinkled microscopic self-replicating bugging devices. Every hand she shook, every cheek she kissed, she left behind a trail of molecule-sized radio transmitters that could only be removed from the subject’s skin by intensive steam jets and chemical baths.

Before long we had an audio bank giving us the ability to instantly eavesdrop on the conversations of all Wong-Kei’s henchlings. Michiyo herself was rushed to hospital to have an enema treatment that flushed out the deadly condoms. For the next six months, she walked with a stagger and slightly bowed legs.

Meanwhile Tosh and Rachel coordinated a surveillance operation that allowed us to create a compellingly detailed psychological portrait of Wong-Kei and his family and his many lovers and illegitimate children. Blacks coordinated the whole affair, creating computer patterns of bewildering complexity that uncovered hidden connections between the smallest facts.

And then I went to work. I read the phone-tap transcripts, I studied the photographs of his daily movements. I read his emails, I scrolled through photocopies of his private coded diary. I learned the life stories of his former lovers, his present lovers, his friends, his employees, his children. I psychoanalysed his parents and his brothers and sisters and childhood friends.

And I converted all my data into complex emergence equations, and came up with a game plan to destroy him.

My tack was to play on the fact that Wong-Kei was deeply superstitious. So we haunted his daily life with bad omens. We poisoned his meals with psychotropic drugs, to induce hallucinations and panic attacks. We forged apocalyptically bad horoscopes and smuggled them into his home. We trained black cats to walk across his path. We installed a mirror in his favourite restaurant that did not show his reflection. (But then removed it before other diners noticed.) We stole the bones of his grandparents and crushed them into ash and sprinkled them on him as he slept. (Later, during a routine police DNA test, Wong-Kei was stunned to learn that the skin of his face was tainted with the DNA of his long-dead grandmother.)

Then we moved to stage 2. We spread rumours that he was a sexual pervert who had abused his grandchildren; and we watched his marriage shrivel.

I knew this would happen. I knew his wife was already suspicious of him, and feared he was sleeping with under-age prostitutes. And I knew also that Wong-Kei was haunted by sexually explicit paedophile dreams that made him deeply anxious about his own sexuality. (This was on the basis of an employment questionnaire he completed at the age of twenty-three, together with a conversation with a man he had just met in a bar in Beijing when he was thirty-nine and had just consumed three large Remy Martin brandies, together with my deep psychoanalytic reading of a short story he wrote as a nineteen-year-old at university.) And I knew that Wong-Kei would never be able to sit down with his wife and honestly discuss the lies being told about him. His pride would not allow it. His father had always told him, “Never discuss your personal affairs with your wife. Merely tell her what you are going to do.” And those instincts, so deeply ingrained, made him deeply vulnerable – at a time when the constant bad omens he was encountering made him fearful of everything.

And thus, at every stage of our campaign, I was guided by a knowledge of the man so intense, so detailed, I felt at times like his God, meticulously assessing him at the Last Judgement. I knew his favourite colours, the flowers that annoyed him, the words that grated on him, the fact that he loathed having people sneeze in his presence. I knew his every psychological blip and blemish.

Our slow campaign of persecution worked. Wong-Kei became forgetful, bad-tempered. He neglected his ageing mother. He slapped and brutalised his younger sister, then abased himself in remorse. He started to forget vital facts – on several occasions, he struggled to recall his own favourite beer. And he found his libido dipping dangerously.

And, as Wong-Kei’s mind slowly unravelled, so his judgement started to slip. His normally tight security measures became more slapdash. He began to feud and bicker with other Triad bosses. He accused a close associate of being a queer. Dissension sprang up in the ranks.

This is when our Pick Up team came into action. They launched a conventional “sting” operation against Wong-Kei and allowed him to implicate himself. Bereft of his usually astute judgement, Wong-Kei blundered and floundered and was easily suckered by the crudest of police set-ups. And when enough video and forensic evidence had been gathered, Wong-Kei was arrested and charged by officials working for the World Police Federation. Our people weren’t involved, we were never seen, never gave evidence in court. We did not exist.

And even Wong-Kei himself had no idea that his personal failures and weaknesses had been induced. He blamed himself. He assumed that he had been going through a mid-life crisis. Half-way through his trial, he committed suicide, and his organisation was taken over by his nearest descendant, Billy Shen. Billy we knew of old. He was one of our best informants. And so we ran him, and through him we ran the biggest Triad gang in the Far East, for two whole years. And then we made some more arrests, let Billy go, and started up a massive surveillance operation. Slowly his empire crumbled – thanks chiefly to information supplied to us directly by Billy himself, the supposed gang boss.

A power vacuum was created; other gangsters began taking over Wong-Kei’s wrecked empire. New maggots replaced the maggots we had killed. But never again did a Triad boss have the unfettered power and authority once enjoyed by Wong-Kei.

And our work continued… and with each new assignment, I grew in confidence and expertise. I became a pioneer of a new kind of criminal investigation. I was the master of computer systems which could describe and collate every character flaw and foible in even the most complex individual. I would study witness statements and learn the target’s fears, his or her favourite fantasy during masturbation, the content of the websites the target had visited in the preceding ten years, the clothes the target wore, the target’s love affairs and friendships and secret dreams and aspirations.