The Bangkok Asset: A novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

underestimate Beijing. Since they never lifted a finger to stop him, he assumed either they didn’t know or they were getting kickbacks from the regional bosses. Being a cop and a crook, he didn’t quite have the sweep and depth to figure out what Beijing was up to. Now it’s too late.”
    “So what is Beijing up to?”
    “Research and development. Of humans. But they’re way behind.”
    Research and development of humans:
only a nerdy dyke could come out with a phrase like that and make it sound humdrum.
    “And you are what? How come you know so much? How did you know who the players were yesterday, and why were you there right on the spot and right on time? D’you work wholly for the Chinese or just part-time?”
    “Can we do me later? I’m sort of classified. Look, you could call this an American Age, or you could call it a Chinese Age, but either way it’s a Pacific Age—and Thailand, politically, is Asia Pac.”
    “So where does that leave me?”
    “It leaves you working for a boss who is owned body and soul, head to feet, by certain ministries in Beijing. When Vikorn heard the details of the Market Murder he totally freaked. I was with him. He shook like a leaf.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he’s brokering the biggest deal of his life and Beijing is forcing him to guarantee the product. If there’s a problem, they take him down for all he’s got. He’s a very big player for you and me, but to the government that runs the lives of one-and-a-half billion people he’s nothing, nothing at all.”
    “But, yesterday, on the river, that was all American.”
    “Correct. And the spies behind the cameras were Chinese.”
    “Americans selling military programs to the Chinese on Thai soil? Is that what you’re saying?”
    “Yesterday was not a demo, that was the point. Goldman and the Asset chose that terrible weather as cover—they didn’t think the Chinese had the technology to penetrate the storm. They were experimenting—what you saw was a dress rehearsal.”
    “Experimenting? With murder by mind control?”
    She looked away, turned her gaze to the street. Beyond the cooked-food stalls where people were sitting and standing, chatting, as on any other day, a knife cutter was calling out from his cyclo on which he had installed a revolving whetstone, another man in long blue shorts and a singlet was peddling brooms and mops from his tuk-tuk, mothers were taking their kids to the local nursery school. It was a very ordinary morning.
    “You’ve never met a cop like me before, have you?” Krom asked.
    “No.”
    She paused as if deciding what to say next. “Very few people know it, but the fact is, we’re living in a transhuman age.” She glanced at my face to see if I’d understood. I hadn’t. In an epoch of constantly expanding vocabulary, I’d never heard the expression before.
    She ate some of her
somtam
salad. I sipped my coffee and waited.
    “The West is bankrupt in every sense, on every level,” she said. “Money is out of control and so are people’s heads. Over the next decade technologically empowered civil unrest will force most countries to militarize their police forces even more—much more—than they have already. And when the West goes, the myth of democracy goes with it. It will be dictatorship or chaos, and humans prefer order to freedom when it comes to the crunch. A lot of us feel like slaves anyway: where’s the freedom if you’re working three miserable jobs to pay off your debts to keep bankers rich? The secret technology we witnessed yesterday is tomorrow’s law enforcement, worldwide. It will be every government’s must-have, with the blessing of a paranoid population. Those who own it will be billionaires, automatically. Just like the Internet moguls of yesteryear.”
    “Okay, so Vikorn is a go-between for sale and purchase of highly classified military programs. I got that.”
    “An unwilling go-between. But who better to use for background checks than the most