Slash and Burn

stop,” Chin pleaded, but Bpoo merely shrugged as if the process were irreversible.
    “You were trying to be too clever there,” Siri told her. “I don’t know what type of relationship you have with the senator—”
    “He’s a respected United States rep—”
    “And I don’t really want to know. But I get a creeping feeling at the back of my neck when I imagine you two in the major’s room late that night. It’s as if you took delight in it. Your victim is unconscious. You strip him. You both drag him to the door and tie him up. I wonder how it is your boss knows so much about tying a noose with an escape knot. It isn’t something you learn in the boy scouts. And then the two of you go about the degradation; the underwear, the lipstick, and, as the pièce de résistance, the beauty spot. One detail too many. If a man has a late night hobby of making himself look like a woman, he’s going to know better than to use indelible ink.”
    “It’s true,” said Bpoo.
    “I took the liberty of stealing one of the pens you and the senator have been using on your flow charts. The one we found in the room was the same make and the fingerprints on it were identical.”
    As he hadn’t sampled his wife’s tea, it was impossible for Siri to know exactly what was happening in Ethel Chin’s mind during all this. But it appeared her logical self was vying for equity. She laughed haughtily and rudely into the face of Bpoo.
    “I’m a law graduate, you know?” she said. ‘Top five percentile at Yale. That’s pretty shit-hot lawyering, don’t you think? And you know what? Not one single thing you’ve told me would get you past a preliminary hearing in a court of law. You tell your coroner here he’s got nothing. He can go take a hike.”
    Both Siri and Bpoo smiled as she passed on this regrettable news.
    “I’m a medical graduate, you know?” said Siri. “Bottom ten percentile at Hôtel de Ville hospital in Paris. Not particularly hot, not even lukewarm, I admit. But I do know where to insert a common sewing needle in the spinal cord to cause permanent paralysis.”
    Bpoo positively squealed with delight before translating.
    “Which should serve to remind you of where you are. It’s irrelevant whether our evidence will make it through a court of law because we only have the one judge and he’s an idiot. And we don’t have any laws. And you’re in the deep deep wilds of Indochina with no friends, surrounded by hostiles. And you could scream injustice till your lungs popped out and nobody would hear you.”
    Once she’d passed all this on, Bpoo sighed like a nail puncture in a tractor tyre. She took Siri by the hand.
    “If you weren’t married….”
    But Siri retrieved his hand. He hadn’t finished yet.
    “I don’t know what this is all about,” he said. “Not yet. I haven’t worked out why you’re really here or what your boss’s real relationship with Bowrys senior and junior is, but I do know that Potter was on to him back in Ho Chi Minh. I’ve seen Potter’s notes about Vogal abusing his position at the embassy. I’ve also seen evidence that it was Vogal who got Potter kicked out of the war. There’s a copy of a letter from Vogal to the State Department citing Potter’s excesses. It recommends he be asked to step down. I don’t doubt Potter was a drunk or that he had issues. But the very fact that he was here heading this mission tells me how driven he was. And he’d have to have friends in high places who shared his convictions or he wouldn’t have been offered the position.
    “So, the question is, what’s everybody doing here? According to the missing pages of Sebastian’s interview, there was a briefcase. Captain Boyd kept it with him in the cockpit at all times. He told his mechanic it was his insurance policy. He claimed it contained evidence enough to incriminate all the bad guys. If that briefcase survived the crash I’m sure there are a lot of people who’d like to get their hands on it. Well worth funding an MIA mission for. Well worth the senator flying in to prevent its contents being leaked. Well worth killing a few people for. I bet Potter was delighted to see the senator’s name on the shortlist, but it looks like he underestimated just how evil your employer is.”
    Ethel Chin was crying now because she deserved to be. She was undone. Siri looked across at the wispy-haired senator, still high on his marijuana tea, still entertaining, still oblivious. In no