Free The Bangkok Asset: A novel by John Burdett

undeveloped peasant mind like mine to suddenly descend to the squalid and irrelevant. “Someone pulled her head off with his bare hands,” I said with a smile. “I wonder if you could help?”
    Sakagorn was startled but not particularly shocked. “I don’t know. I heard about the murder, but I’m sure I would have remembered if any of the reports mentioned a decapitation.”
    “We’re keeping the details quiet for the purpose of investigation.”
    The barrister seemed more curious than disturbed. “No other molestation?”
    “No. No sexual abuse, no visible signs of struggle, no damage to other parts of the body. Somebody of superhuman strength simply twisted and wrenched her head from her shoulders, probably in seconds, before she had time even to be terrified. I don’t have to tell you that simply doesn’t happen in homicide cases. Killers do not unemotionally remove the heads of their victims with their bare hands while being careful not to do any other damage or take sexual advantage in any way.”
    Sakagorn did not disguise his surprise. He stared at me for a moment, thought about it, then shrugged. “Superhuman strength, lack of emotional involvement, a weird combination of extreme violence and total self-control—sure, it’s him, Goldman’s Asset. Who else could it be? I know nothing about it, however, nothing at all. I wasn’t there, didn’t know, wasn’t invited, this is the first I’m hearing of it.”
    Now we had an awkward pause in the interrogation. Vikorn changed the subject.
    “Tell us more about the background. Goldman and his Asset arrived in Bangkok only last month, you say? What about before that? Give us the history as you know it.”
    “Goldman ran a CIA program in Vietnam nearly half a century ago. It was basic zombie mind-control stuff that went wrong. There was a big scandal, they pretended to shut it down, Goldman pleaded for them to let him continue in secret. He did some kind of deal and moved the operation to Angkor, in Cambodia.”
    “Angkor? But the Khmer Rouge were there, they used it as a base.”
    “Yes, soon after Goldman moved there. He had to move on. But the few years he spent in Angkor were crucial, somehow.”
    The barrister turned cagey. Perhaps it was embarrassment: he was finding it difficult to come clean. Vikorn and I stared at him relentlessly. Finally he buckled. “I may have been brought up in this country, but until I met Goldman I didn’t think I had a superstitious bone in my body. However, I would never visit Angkor again, never.” He shook his head. “I went many times as a tourist, loved the huge trees embracing the great stone Buddhas—so romantic. It was a great place to take a girl for a long weekend, in the old days. And so close, about forty minutes by plane door to door.”
    He looked up. “Goldman got drunk one night and started raving about it. It seems he had the use of one of the lesser temples, not the Wat itself—you know, Angkor was a great city, fifty years ago eighty percent of it had yet to be excavated. He kept ranting about some shrink, some Englishman, some crazy British psychiatrist with a ridiculous British name. I couldn’t make out if this Brit was on the team, or running some other team, or what. The whole thing was garbled, he was horribly drunk—scary, a man that size, drunk and crazy. It seemed this British shrink with a weird name I can’t remember had persuaded the CIA shrinks to try an experiment. It was the Brit shrink’s idea that the Americans were all wrong in thinking that enhancement was a matter of drugs and neurons. The argument was the usual Old World organic versus New World scientific. Basically, he was talking about magic. Black magic.” He scanned us. “I don’t have to tell you about Cambodia and magic? There isn’t a
mordu,
a local clairvoyant or witch doctor in Krung Thep who doesn’t claim to belong to some Khmer lineage—it’s like the best perfume comes from Paris, the best beef from