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Growing bored after a while, though, and allowing that she wouldn’t have minded if he’d said a word or two, or even simply moved a finger, she wandered into the room he used as an office. He had been particularly voracious for his opium that day when she had arrived, and smoked a pipe as soon as she had handed him the black viscous package. In his haste he had forgotten to turn off his laptop, the screen of which was now swimming with a particularly banal screen saver. A mere jog of the mouse, though, took her directly into the much-vaunted secret world, for he had forgotten to turn off his Internet co
Which turned out to be as boring as the screen saver. An apparently mindless chatter of international gossip came through on the incessant e-mail: American woman almost raped in Durbar Square in Kathmandu; gang of teenage American ca
Interested now, she traced the sequence of messages back through time. Relay teams of CIA, FBI, DEA, Thai customs, and Thai drug enforcement police were chuckling while they secretly followed the shipment from northern Laos, across the border into Thailand; like a snowball it collected more perps the more it rolled. The plan was to wait until it reached Bangkok, so the kingpin would be revealed. As she watched, they lost the shipment, however. Somehow on the outskirts of Krung Thep the van, surreptitiously followed by a great motorcade (of Japanese four-by-fours, so beloved of foreign government agencies), disappeared. Sighs, groans, and moans over the instant messaging. The Americans suspected the Thais of pulling a fast one. So did most of the Thais, who salivated at the probable size of the bribe someone had extorted.
“We think it’s General Zi
“Really?”
“Yeah really.”
“You really think it was him?”
“Yeah, that’s what I think, that it was him, yeah.”
“Well, you don’t know it was him?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It could have been someone else.”
“Yes, it could. But it wasn’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know that. I just know it.”
“Like a hunch or something?”
“Like a hunch, but not really a hunch. A kind of-”
“What?”
“A kind of faux hunch.”
“What’s a faux hunch?”
“Like a hunch but it’s not? I get them from time to time.”
“I’ve never heard of a faux hunch before. I have a conceptual problem with that.”
“I understand that.”
“But cutting to the chase, you’ve got one now?”
“Yeah. Right now. That it was him, yes.”
“Zi
“Yeah. Zi
“I’m bored out of my friggin’ mind. You?”
“If I wasn’t, like, catatonic with boredom I wouldn’t be talking to you like this. You’re my last link with humanity. It’s like, I’m that spaceship captain in that David Bowie song from way back? Thousands of years ago they launched me into cyberspace, and this is all I’ve known-if it wasn’t for this dim, tenuous link with you, I’d be like a cipher by now-a shade. I guess that’s all I am. I’m like those Japanese kids who can only communicate via computers.”
“You need to get laid.”
“Or smoke some dope.”
“Yeah. That’s kind of fu
Chanya saw an intermittent cure for boredom in the future: there was something homely and warm about this faceless American conversation-it reminded her of those people in the States who had been good to her. It so happened that Mitch was slowly coming out of his trance, although still a long way from sobriety. He glanced up at her as she entered the bedroom, but his eyes immediately switched back to the ceiling. “Marge, I saw it, Marge.”
Chanya, doing her very best Marge Simpson impersonation: “Saw what, Homer?”
Ecstatically: “I saw the begi
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Crestfallen: “Then I saw the end of it.”
“Did the Company send messages again?”
“Yeah. That’s how I saw the begi
“Homer, honey, remind me again of the secret code for accessing encrypted messages from the Company over the Net.”
“AQ82860136574X-Halifax nineteen [lowercase] Oklahoma twenty-2 BLUE WHALE [all uppercase] Amerika stop 783.”
48
After Chanya left him that day, she thought about the heroin shipment that had disappeared, and Zi
Not enough zeros in the world. Chanya going to the stars this time.
She could hardly believe the brilliance of her idea, or the great waves of relief that were rolling over her. She felt cleansed already, and during the journey she experienced repeated pleasurable shudders, the very shudders that the books associate with the first true experience of samadhi-your mind just ca
She covered her mouth to stifle laughs of joy, kept gri
As often happens, though, with grandiose plots to dramatically improve one’s karma, the idea soon began to diminish in her mind. She wondered if she had not spent too much time alone with that madman Mitch: how could an insignificant girl, a whore, hope to pull off something like that?
Her devastation at the ma