LET ME START by saying to my boss: 'I'm innocent'. You see, I may or may not have stolen $10,000 from my employer - according, that is, to the multi-coloured Himalayan squiggles conjured from a controversial contraption called the polygraph.
'Now, you see this red line at the bottom?' Daniel Grove gestures at the computer screen. 'That's your heartbeat. The green line is your galvanic skin response [a change in the electrical resistance of the skin caused by emotional stress]. And the two blue lines are your breathing.'
I'm sitting in the office of 'risk mitigators' Hill and Associates, feeling like Frankenstein's monster. Coiled wires loop around my chest, a blood pressure cuff is making my arm ache and two of my fingers are outstretched, ET-like, making contact with some hi-tech sweat detectors. Sundry cords and wires feed into a little gold box, which in turn feeds into a computer.
This is the polygraph, the feared lie detector, familiar perhaps from the movies, where shifty-eyed suspects stammer their prevarications and evasions as the needles ominously dip and wobble.
Grove is about to give me a mock grilling, and despite his avuncular manner, there's no disguising his experience in the interrogation business, gleaned during 25 years with the FBI and another five as director of investigation firm Pink-erton in Hong Kong.
He was also chief of Asia-Pacific security for Levi-Strauss, and is a recognised China specialist and fluent Putonghua speaker. Now, late in his career, he has become Hill and Associates' maestro of mis-truths.
The company's glossy, gilt-embossed brochure proclaims him as a 'Forensic Psycho Physiologist', which sounds like someone who would stab you in the shower and then conduct the autopsy, but in fact is a fancy name for a polygraph operator.