“Okay, the GS,” Vikorn says, fishing in his desk drawer. “The military scale is based on that anyway. What grade is she?” He takes a sheet of paper out and studies it.
She absorbs this covert attack effortlessly, as a professional boxer might absorb a punch from an amateur, and raises her eyebrows to Hudson as the man on the ground who understands the local peasants.
“He didn’t like the way you were walking up and down his office. He’s checking that you understand the rules of trade. Best give him what he wants.”
“I see,” she says with a decisive nod. To me: “You can tell him I’m Grade Eleven if that will help.”
I translate. Vikorn checks with his sheet of paper. “What Step?”
“Grade Eleven Step One.” Horizontal wrinkles appear in her upper forehead while he traces her position on the scale with his fingers. “But the GS can be misleading,” she adds, taking control by appearing to help, in accordance with the manual. “You get extras for locality, risk, that kind of thing.”
Vikorn raises his eyebrows at Hudson. “Grade Eight Step Ten,” Hudson confesses.
“So she starts at a base of $42,976 before locality, while he starts at $41,808. There’s hardly any difference.” Vikorn is beaming.
When I translate, she shakes her head, then closes her eyes to enforce patience. In a somnambulant voice (the subject may be close to her heart despite its spectacular irrelevance): “There’s a drive to change the whole package, make it more result-oriented, more competitive, more like the private sector.”
“There’s a lot of resistance to the proposed changes though,” says Hudson. “The BENS report is not so popular.”
“You read it cover to cover?”
“Yeah, there are some practical challenges, like how do you measure results in the intelligence community? The greatest successes are things that didn’t go wrong. How do you give credit for that?”
She shakes her head. “It’s a problem.”
“You see,” Vikorn says when I’ve translated, “nothing has changed. They were moaning about the same stuff in Laos, until they learned how to make deals with the Kuomintang and the Hmong. They only took a ten percent cut for transporting the dope, though, in their Air America transport planes, which the Hmong thought was terrific considering what the Chiu Chow Chinese and the Vietnamese and the French used to take. It was the increase in revenue thanks to the CIA that enabled the Hmong to go on fighting for as long as they did. That was one of the most successful CIA operations. Capitalism at its best. Actually, the only successful operation in that theater.” I translate.
She smiles with glacial grace. “Let’s take the excesses of Laos as read. I’d like to get back to the matter in hand. Does the Colonel have any questions about that?”
“Ask her if Mitch Turner was the deceased’s real name.”
After a pause: “It was one of them.”
Vikorn smiles and nods. “Now ask her who he was.”
Slowly, deliberately, politely: “Classified.”
Vikorn nods again. Inexplicable silence. She turns to Hudson.
“People can be subtle in this part of the world,” Hudson explains. “He has just pointed out that in his scheme of things, which you might call feudal capitalism or realpolitik depending on your point of view, we are both underpaid slaves whom he could buy twenty times over without noticing, who are engaged in an investigation into the death of someone who probably entered the country on a false name and who, for the purposes of police investigation, may not even have existed. In other words, we may not have a lot of leverage.”
I have to admire her lightning adaptation to the situation on the ground: she finds a chair, pulls it up to Vikorn’s desk, and sits on it. Leaning forward with a half-smile: “Mitch Turner was one of the names used by a nonofficial cover operator, a NOC, who was based in the south of this country who was murdered in a hotel room and who was somehow found by the detective here. I never met him myself.” A glance at Hudson.
“Me, either. He was too new. They threw him at me while I was stateside. I was supposed to meet him for the first time the week he died.”
“From what I’ve been able to understand, he was a brilliant officer, maybe too brilliant. There are remarks in his file to suggest he would have been better used in research. He had zero resistance to alcohol, which could be a security risk, and a tendency to confuse his cover stories. I’ve been sent over here not because he was murdered but because of the Al Qaeda connection, which your Colonel so effectively demonstrated with those fingers and black hairs.”
“He confused his cover stories? I didn’t know that.” From Hudson.
“I’m afraid so.” To me, as if I matter (but at least I speak English): “It’s an occupational hazard, especially for people with a precarious sense of identity. You stay under cover long enough, you become the cover. There are some research papers on it. Sometimes a previous cover intrudes into the present cover-after all, identity is just a repetition of cultural triggers. He also had a dysfunctional personal life, but so does every NOC. They crave intimacy, but how can one have intimacy when one is a state secret? Some of the sacrifices we require are too much for our less stable officers. And then he had an intermittent religious streak, which didn’t help. I am told we took him on because of his Japanese and his high IQ, but he wasn’t going anywhere in the Agency. He was seen as a potential liability and a candidate for early retirement. The kindest thing to say is that his mind was too broad, he was an intellectual, a born liberal, he probably joined us as part of his romantic search for self. Speaking off the record, his death at the hands of Al Qaeda is more important than he was. Can we get back to that now?”
“Of course,” Vikorn says with a patronizing smile.
The CIA woman-she told me her name is Elizabeth Hatch, but who knows?-nods a thank you. “Al Qaeda killed Mitch Turner because they knew what he was, but we don’t have any record of him contacting them. His few attempts at recruiting down there seem to have been futile. Are we looking at a kidnapping or a recruitment attempt that went wrong? Or are we looking at a sincere attempt to join them, which they didn’t believe in? We were eavesdropping on his communications. He was going through a personal crisis. We need to know what he was thinking, what his true intentions were, minute to minute. You’re the only one we have who might be able to help. And there’s this.”
With marvelous cool she takes a photograph out of her pocket to show to me. I jump, show it to Vikorn, who also jumps. It is Mitch Turner’s corpse, taken after they turned him over, clearly showing the bloody mass of skinless flesh where someone flayed him.
She’s played her trump card with considerable finesse, without a touch of triumphalism. In a level, glacial tone: “Don’t ask me how I obtained it, and I won’t ask you why you suppressed it.” She looks at the pic curiously. “I don’t know why you did that, exactly. It does rather complicate the whole thing doesn’t it?” Nodding at me. “Perhaps that will do for now. You are our man in the field, I think you’ll be wanting to go south again soon. Would a written report be feasible this time? If your Colonel doesn’t mind, I would like you to report to me directly.”
“Do I have to do this?” I ask Vikorn.
He nods reluctantly. “It’s a deal. They’ve promised to leave Chanya alone, so long as we play ball.”
That night, before going to bed, I smoke a big fat spliff, kneel before the Buddha image that I keep on a shelf in my hovel, and form an intention to contact my dead soul brother Pichai. Everyone’s personal rituals are hedged about with idiosyncrasies and customized talismans, which I won’t go into. Casting aside all padding, my appeal to Pichai’s superior forensic insight could be translated: Where the fuck do I go from here?