The Bangkok Asset: A novel Read Free

was about a hundred yards away, invisible in the dense mist. When he saw us her driver opened the sliding door. The Sergeant and I held back for her to enter first, but she shook her head to make us precede her. We obeyed.
    Inside a van rocked by gusts we introduced ourselves. Her name was Krom, Inspector Krom. When she pulled back the hood I saw how close-cropped was her spiky black hair. I told her what I had just seen on the river, half hoping she would have some happy explanation, although I couldn’t think of one myself.
    “I know,” she snapped. She jerked her head at the front bench of the vehicle where her driver was sitting and called my attention to the outsize gadget clamped onto the dashboard. I’d already stored the impression that it was bigger and stranger than any GPS or satellite navigation instrument I’d seen in a police van before, but technology rules by outpacing us a little more each day. Now that I examined it more carefully I saw it had some unusual black buttons with Chinese characters stamped on them in white.
    Inspector Krom ordered the driver to join us in the back. He got out and reemerged at the rear door, soaked from the ten-second exposure to the storm. Then the Inspector beckoned the Sergeant and me to move forward to the front bench with her, while she sat dripping in the driver’s seat. Now she was manipulating the buttons.
    “We have it on the hard disk,” she said. “About five minutes ago, right? When the mist cleared. This machine automatically switches between radar and video. The video is in color, quadruple HD, with about a thousand dots per inch, that’s nearly double the pixel density of the most advanced screens and cameras commercially available. They’re keeping the technology secret for the moment.”
    “Radar, too? I didn’t know satellites used it.”
    She jerked her chin at the gadget. “Synthetic aperture radar: SAR. It can penetrate cloud, even the earth up to about six inches. The Chinese were allowed to steal it from the U.S.”
    She cast me a glance, aware, I suppose, of how odd the phrase
allowed to steal
sounded. Also, how was I to react to the information that we were using the “borrowed” Chinese version of the gadget?
    “Intelligence is complicated. Actually, it’s a mess. The most overgoverned democracy in the world privatizes government so they can pretend they’re not overgoverned. The most crowded nation juggles about fifty local governments with the population of large countries. Of course it’s all out of control.” I thought I detected genuine irritation when she added, “And everything they say, everything they do, is said and done in a spirit of absolute denial of the truth. We’re screwed. There!”
    She had mastered the controls and now we were looking at a replay of what I had just witnessed on the river. Perhaps the clever machine had a way of enhancing its own video, or perhaps the weird clarity of that fleeting moment had made the scene unusually photogenic; either way, the definition, detail, and color were amazing as I watched a replay of the double murder by drowning.
    “You know who these people are?” I asked.
    “Yes. The two Thai men are low-grade thugs.” She paused the video and turned to stare at me. “You just saw the older one throw his wife overboard, mother of his three kids. The younger one drowned his own mother.”
    “WHAT?” I glared at her, refusing to believe what I had heard.
    Sergeant Ruamsantiah stiffened on the bench next to me. We exchanged a glance. I shivered. “Could you say that again?” the Sergeant asked.
    “No. You heard it right.”
    “Play it one more time,” he said. He didn’t care that she was superior in rank to him; that was an order. She replayed the video: there was no doubt about it, a Thai man about thirty years old threw a woman his own age into the raging torrent. At the same time a young man in his twenties drowned a middle-aged woman. The Sergeant was still not