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  To my sister Orathai, who always does the right thing through thick and thin.

  PROLOGUE

  If you’re reading this, I might be dead.

  Well, hopefully not. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but you never know. This is the third book I’m about to fill. That much has happened in the last three years. This one is about how everything finally went to shit.

  Julia is checking this. Sometimes she writes some of it, fills in the gaps I left out.

  So. Where to start?

  Oh yes.

  I could still see gods. They weren’t going away. They were a part of me and they always showed up to watch whatever I’d gotten myself into and comment on it.

  I was still working at Golden Sentinels Private Investigations and Security Agency. My colleagues were a bunch of brilliant, dangerous fuckups with nowhere else to go. My annus horribilis could be attributed almost entirely to them. Or rather, what our boss Roger Golden had us getting up to.

  Yes, “annus horribilis.” The poncy Latin term for “shit year,” and there’s no other description for what I just had. You can thank the Queen for introducing it into common use. Julia and everyone at the firm have said it put me in a dark mood for months, but I don’t know how else to react to nearly getting murdered for no good reason by a bunch of idiots. If you can think of a better way to react and go about one’s life after that kind of unnecessary trauma, I will make you my life coach.

  This made both Julia and me decide it was more necessary than ever to have a record of everything we’d been doing in our job as investigators at the firm. We consulted with a lawyer and everything. Actually, we consulted with my friend David Okri, my old mate from university who got me this job at the firm in the first place, and he wouldn’t stop nodding and saying “Absolutely! Record everything Roger made you do!” before recommending another lawyer to keep on retainer to avoid conflict of interest since he was Golden Sentinel’s legal counsel. Then he told us he was getting a lawyer himself for when the shit hits the fan, not “if” but “when.” It says something when your lawyer decides he needs a lawyer. Thanks, Roger.

  Don’t get me wrong. My colleagues and I were a fairly tight team. There were Ken and Clive, the ex-coppers and old-school bruisers, though their tendency to drop bodies and then try to hide them really bit me in the arse this past year. Mark Oldham, the melancholy genius investigator who was self-medicating his existential despair with all manner of psychoactive substances, both natural and man-made, added to my troubles. Benjamin Lee and his obsession with mischief and surveillance both nearly got me killed and saved my skin. Olivia Wong, our resident hacker and cybersecurity expert, was the only one who didn’t land me in any shit, though she had plenty of her own shit to deal with. She’s a banking heiress whose tycoon dad blacklisted her from the banking industry for hacking into the family business’s security system years ago to prove it was insecure. Then of course there was our resident American, Marcie Holder, bringing in contract work from the CIA that always put us within a hairsbreadth of total fucking doom.

  And did Roger, our boss, care? Did he hell. We came to realize that everything he did, everything he had us doing was to further his agenda of getting more money and power. Even Cheryl Hughes, who founded Golden Sentinels with him, was starting to get fed up with him and his various plots. This was already a tense year going in. David was certainly bearing all the stress from that.

  The goddess Kali is sitting on the sofa and laughing at me right now. My patron goddess, not my choice, and I’m stuck with her. The other gods tend to follow when something happening to me interests them and they show up to be a Greek chorus to my predicaments. Shiva is always not far behind. He’s the head of them all, so of course he comes along.

  Oh, and I married Julia. That was a drama and a half. We’d come a long way since we first met. She was part of a case I was investigating, and became my girlfriend, then she became the case because of her sex addiction. Next thing I knew, Roger had hired her as an investigator because her English Rose looks gave her cover for getting into places and asking people questions, and for being the perfect honey trap. That made me worry because having a sex addict pose as a femme fatale was like locking an alcoholic in a brewery, but she actually avoided sleeping with any of her marks because she had substituted the dangerous thrill-seeking stuff for sex. She saved emotional intimacy and actual sex for me. What a pair we made, a sex addict with a literature degree and a former religious scholar who hallucinated gods. When we decided to tie the knot, we told our parents, and Julia’s parents immediately took the reins to plan the wedding. My parents were actually relieved that it fell to her parents to deal with the wedding ceremony, so no need for us to have a big fuck-off Indian wedding, since none of us wanted to spend over twenty grand and invite more than a hundred relatives over from India. We made my mother promise she was not going to borrow money for the wedding gifts since that was what had put me in the service of Mrs. Dhewan. Mrs. Dhewan was the neighborhood Asian housewife/mafia boss who had me doing the odd job for her and her mostly benign gang. Even so, planning the wedding was its own drama with Julia’s mother doing it. At least getting married was the one good thing out of this fucked up year.

  Julia is telling me I’m rambling on and we should really get back to writing down what went down in the past year, so that’s what I will now do.

  No, the gods didn’t put me up to this. The gods don’t force me to do anything, yet I seem to end up doing whatever they want anyway, or whatever they find most amusing. It’s all win-win for them, one big funny reality TV show they’re bingeing on in real time. If I get killed, I don’t think they’ll even be sorry. They’ll probably just go find some other poor bastard to follow. I’m just another puppet playing out a cosmic joke that’s my life.

  Julia is telling me I’m getting morbid again. Mental illness is no fun. Julia doesn’t believe I’m mentally ill. She agrees with Mark, who thinks the gods are really here, that they’re really some kind of consciousness from someplace else trying to communicate with us and I’m the conduit. My father says I might be a shaman. What good are shamans in the modern day with all that noise from the media and the Internet and no one will really believe you, eh? Honestly.

  All right, all right. Sorry, Julia. Let’s get on with it.

  So, onwards and upwards.

  I really hope I’m still alive as you read this . . .

  FACE ON, FACE OFF, KARMA

  ONE

  We’d settled into a groove at Golden Sentinels Private Investigations.

  The usual cases clearing up messes for celebrities and rich clients. The uptick in revenge porn had actually been very lucrative for us, since we were getting more and more female clients whose exes had posted intimate photos and videos of them out of spite. Ken and Clive were very happy because it gave them an excuse to go after awful bastards and beat the shit out of them.

  “This is Ravi.” Marcie Holder brought the client to me. “He’ll be coordinating the team on your case.”

  Bella Hasterley (I’ve changed her name because we’re supposed to protect our clients’ privacy) was that rare TV star and model that did not have on her phone any naked selfies or videos of her having sex with her boyfriend, which was
a minor miracle for celebrities in this day and age. She also had two-factor authentication and additional PINs that had kept her phone and social media accounts from getting hacked. I might not have been a fan of her movies or TV roles, but I could at least respect her security conscientiousness. Given the number of celebrity clients who came to us because their photos and videos had been stolen and shared, Bella was a rare case. Yet she had discovered a video posted online of her having loud, noisy, messy, violent sex. One of her fans on social media told her about it. As she pointed out when Marcie brought her to Golden Sentinels, she never filmed herself having sex or allowed any of her boyfriends to do it, so where the hell did this video come from?

  She showed us the video, posted on free porn sites on the Internet. That was her, eyes blinking, face contorting, mouth moving and uttering the sounds on the video. But her body in the video had tattoos she didn’t have.

  “It’s AI mapping,” Olivia said.

  This was the new form of revenge porn that was going to bring in even more lucrative business for us. It used a computer program to graft someone’s face onto a porn video. The program was released to open source tech forums that let anyone with a bit of coding know-how study the face of a person from the videos they appeared in and map that face into any other video. What the script kiddie punters liked to do was take their favorite celebrities’ faces and put them onto the bodies of porn stars fucking in videos. This wasn’t a simple bit of Photoshop cutting and pasting, but a more sophisticated product that allowed the face grafted into the video to turn and change expressions naturally over the original face. You needed lots of preexisting videos of the face you wanted in order to have the AI map it from as many angles and movements as possible. After the face was grafted into the new video, there was still a lot of fixing needed to make the transition look seamless. It was tedious work that only the truly dedicated or obsessed would bother with, and there were plenty of those buggers out there for this stuff. Only an experienced coder could make the face look better than a grotesque distorting blob out of a Francis Bacon painting, though it was still far from perfect. If you couldn’t tell if it was real, there were already programs and AIs out there that detected any alterations in videos.

  I wasn’t any kind of hacker or expert in that sort of thing. Roger had put me on this because I was a pretty face for the female client to feel comfortable with. He encouraged me to flirt with such clients, but I refused. For some clients, merely smiling and saying something reassuring was already considered flirtation. The whole office looked like a womb-like tech start-up here in Farringdon, designed with the best feng shui principles, the brightest colors and components, to make visitors feel as comfortable as possible. I was one of those components. Roger had said that I worked well as the face of an investigation like this one since I would present a façade of normality, because everyone else working on it was mad as a bag of hammers. Marcie would use her experience as a PR agent—this case had come via her contacts in the business, after all—to play best friend to the client. Marcie and I were basically there to hold Bella’s hand while Benjamin and Olivia set to work, with Ken and Clive standing by in case they were needed for old-school footwork. Mark was off helping the Mexican ambassador on a personal matter since he was on retainer. They were probably off somewhere sharing a spliff together. Julia was spending the afternoon at her weekly group therapy. Cheryl sat at her desk, quietly keeping an eye on everything to keep it from spinning out of control.

  Basically, I was the investigator wrangler here.

  “My tits look better than that!” Bella said. “And this girl has way more cellulite than me! It’s an insult that whoever made this couldn’t even pick a better body substitute!”

  Then Olivia and Benjamin broke the video down into its component code and looked over it, which is painstaking work to those of us not used to scanning lines of numbers and symbols.

  “See that watermark in the video code?” Benjamin said. “It’s in a lot of these fake celeb sex vids lately. It’s the work of one bloke. Like an artist signin’ his paintings.”

  Of course Benjamin had seen enough porn videos to recognize individual watermark codes. He’d probably catalogued them all by now. And not just for work.

  TWO

  It was a piece of piss for Olivia to just trace the ISP of the account that posted the video, then get the email addresses linked to that ISP so we could review them and find where he—for it was usually a “he”—got the video from. Then Olivia traced the source of the video to another email address, then another; the video passed between dozens of collectors. We also looked on the Dark Web and found the email address for a coder who created fake porn videos for hire, and whose videos bore the watermark Benjamin recognized. He advertised that he used the new algorithm to create those fake porn videos using the faces of celebrities and offered to put anyone’s face on a porn video for commission. We then reviewed his email correspondence to cross-reference the email addresses of his customers. Unsurprisingly, Olivia found with the coder Bella’s ex-boyfriend’s emails where they negotiated the fee for the fake video. The coder programmed the AI to study Bella’s face from footage of her various television shows, talk show appearances, and spots on the red carpet at premieres. Then the coder had the AI map her face from those videos and graft it onto the face of the porn actress in the sex video. We presented the trail to our client, in case she wished to take this to the police.

  “I knew it was him!” Bella said. “Spiteful git with a steroid problem and cocaine habit! Failed wannabe reality TV show contestant!”

  She could bring formal charges against him since this fell under UK revenge porn laws, harassment laws, and altered image laws. David would later get together with Bella’s lawyer to go through the ins and outs of the laws and what was prosecutable and help them draft their briefs. One more service for Cheryl to put on Bella’s bill. Whether the ex could be successfully prosecuted was another issue, though. Marcie, who was friends with Bella’s PR people, advised them on the best statements they could make to the press.

  “Talk about it as being like sexual assault and how a woman’s right to control her privacy and sexuality now has to include her right to control her own images,” Marcie said. It was all about optics these days, often quite literally. We were in the business of helping our clients control their narratives, after all.

  Bella’s lawyer could send injunctions to all the websites that hosted the video to have them taken down, so within a day, copies of the video disappeared from all the known streaming sites. We explained to Bella that anything posted on the Internet was forever, so while her lawyers could continue to make websites take the video down, it was never going to completely disappear from the Internet. It would still be shared on forums and pirate download sites, but no longer in the mainstream, a digital collector’s item amongst Internet arseholes. We had driven the video underground. This would not be the last time we did this for a client this year.

  We accomplished all this in less than three days without even needing to leave the office. No footwork, no knocking on doors, no making phone calls. All done online. This was what a lot of investigation work consisted of nowadays.

  When we presented Bella with our findings, she was surprisingly calm as she said she still wanted her ex to pay in some way. That was Ken and Clive’s cue, which they jumped at happily. They took it upon themselves to drive out to visit him. I should add that this was not officially part of the service we provided at Golden Sentinels. This was something Ken and Clive volunteered to do. Everyone needed a hobby, and this was theirs.

  When they came back to the office the next day, they were in an awfully good mood.

  “Arsehole said he was just being funny,” Clive said.

  “So we told him we were being funny, too, when we knocked his teeth out and smashed up his computer gear,” Ken said.

  Bella’s ex wasn’t going to report his assault to the police since he was beaten up for posting revenge
porn, which was already against the law. Ken and Clive shared a hearty laugh over that. Little chance of them getting arrested because they still had mates in the police force, who often turned a blind eye to what they got up to at this firm. Marcie smiled at them indulgently. I often wondered what went through her mind. I always suspected she harbored a bit of bloodlust under all that superficial friendliness of hers. Bella’s ex would try to sell his story about getting beaten up to the tabloids, but since he wasn’t famous without her, and didn’t have anything new about her to sell, they didn’t bite. And anyway, the story would be that he was beaten up for posting a fake porn video of her, which just made him look like another newly toothless dickhead not even interesting enough for the tabloids. I’m not naming him here because he doesn’t deserve any attention. We didn’t have to tell Bella about the extra perk Ken and Clive performed for her as part of the Golden Sentinels package. She could guess perfectly well on her own. She was slightly horrified but didn’t lose sleep over it.

  Olivia decided as a bonus, and to put in some coding practice, to muck about with the face-mapping program. She found the original source code for the face-swapping algorithm—it was easy enough to find it on sites like PasteBin and GitHub—and rewrote it slightly with a bit of malware embedded in it. She proceeded to post it in all the usual places it could be found, with the claim that this was an update to patch out some bugs and make the swapped faces in the videos run more smoothly. She also spoofed the email address of a friend of the enterprising programmer, a fellow script kiddie, and sent him the new code saying it was a patch. The worm the code unleashed would bury itself in the computers of whoever downloaded it, install a program at the root, and delete the entire drive. We went on the Dark Web as a follow-up and saw that the friend’s email and solicitation had been removed. We saw posts on the face-mapping fake video forums that he had to shut down his business because he got an extremely nasty worm that wrecked his entire computer setup. There were many panicked posts about Olivia’s corrupt code messing up people’s computers, warning users not to download the program. Even if anyone tried to go back and remove Olivia’s malware, it would take them ages to unpick the code and rewrite it, which would require lots more testing to remove new bugs and glitches that came about, turning it into a full-time job. Probably too much hassle. Digital scorched earth.