Her Beautiful Monster

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  To my sister, Orathai, who gets things done no matter how hard it is, with love and respect

  THE HUSTLE OF THE GODS

  ONE

  Pack of racists in bomber jackets called me a “fucking Paki” on the street the other day. The usual stuff about going back to where I came from. Racists never need facts or accuracy, and I wasn’t going to correct them and say I was actually Hindu, of Indian ancestry, not Pakistani-Muslim, and born and raised in Parsons Green in West London. I wasn’t going to break cover since I was on the job.

  Buddha used to say there was no need to take revenge. If you waited long enough, the bodies of your enemies would eventually float by in the river. In my case, I had Ken and Clive to beat them up for me. Two violent, trained ex-coppers built like brick shithouses against four gangly racists in tracksuits? No contest. And did I say Clive used to be in the army before he became a copper? Soldiers were taught to kill people with their thumbs, if necessary. It had been a few weeks since Ken and Clive last fed their bloodlust.

  “The fat one looks like a human version of a boil,” Julia said.

  “He’s like everyone’s cartoon of what a British racist looks like,” I said. “I didn’t think that look actually existed.”

  The blob of a man hit the ground. He wasn’t getting up again for a bit. He made me think of the Millennium Dome.

  Two broken noses, one fractured jaw, and at least one concussion later, Ken and Clive walked back to us, happily sated. Their grins did not make me comfortable anymore.

  Ken and Clive didn’t do it for me, of course. They just wanted any excuse to kick off and fuck someone up. It had been three weeks since they had gotten to quench their lust for violence, and these idiots fit the bill. The violence also reinforced their cover as my bodyguards.

  Julia squeezed my arm as we continued on our way, Ken and Clive falling in line alongside us. Mark just nodded in approval.

  This aggressive show of power seemed to impress our mark. Tarquin Gaskell-Bridger. I was a tycoon from Mumbai here to see his pitch for his dodgy anti-drone technology. He watched in awe at the short work my “bodyguards” made of those unfortunate dickheads. I was a prospective investor in his dodgy venture, and this was the kind of power at my command. Having Ken and Clive with me meant I was not to be fucked with.

  “A perfect snapshot of the dystopian Dickensian nightmare that Britain is becoming,” Mark Oldham declared cheerfully.

  He would say that. Mark was our disillusioned poet at Golden Sentinels Private Investigations and Security Agency. He looked upon the world through a haze of marijuana smoke and saw it broken and sad, and he could only laugh and make jokes. We were here because of him, and he wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

  TWO

  And so, from the street to a posh office, from street violence to boardroom jiggery-pokery in Canary Wharf. Snapshot of Britain, indeed.

  Tarquin Gaskell-Bridger, the founder of Advanced Drone Defence Technologies (ADDT), laid it on thick for us. The speech he gave in his boardroom (on whose rent he was behind—we’d checked) was largely the same as the prospectus for his company, only this time the speech was presented with PowerPoint.

  This particular wheeze was Mark’s idea, an undercover sting to schmooze a dodgy entrepreneur and get the goods on him.

  To summarize: Golden Sentinels Investigations, our agency, had been hired by the shareholders of Advanced Drone Defence Incorporated to look into dodgy dealings in the company. They suspected that their money was being misspent and that the share price of the company was being massaged. Olivia Wong, our resident forensic financial analyst, had hacked into the company’s financial accounts and found that it was operating a pyramid scheme. No money was actually being earned from the shares. Gaskell-Bridger, the supposed inventor of the device, was paying himself a nice fat salary while funneling the shareholders’ money back and forth to make it look like the shares were paying off.

  Unfortunately, this information had been obtained through hacking, which made it illegal and thus inadmissible in court, but it gave us a result from which to work backwards. So Mark Oldham went up on the roof of our office, smoked a couple of joints, and came up with a social engineering hack with which we could get close enough to catch Tarquin Gaskell-Bridger. That was how Mark rolled.

  So here I was, “Sunny Rajaratnam,” a reclusive telecoms billionaire from Mumbai in town on a company-buying spree, complete with Julia posing as my personal assistant, Ken and Clive as my burly and extremely violent bodyguards, and Mark as our liaison with ADDT. Olivia had created an entire history for Rajaratnam’s many deals and acquisitions in India and across Asia, from starting out as a humble seller of cheap mobile phones to handling tens of millions of pounds and euros at a time, investing in various start-ups and humanitarian ventures, building ashrams and spiritual healing centers, with an interest in charities for victims of war. That made him surely an easy target for Gaskell-Bridger’s supposed drone defense technology. For Gaskell-Bridger, Rajaratnam was the ideal mark: the foreign lunatic with too much money. Mark had made sure that Gaskell-Bridger heard Rajaratnam was a bit touched. He was deeply preoccupied with his karma and claimed to have a very personal relationship with the gods.

  The clients were paying full whack for this job, so we were offering the complete service. It wasn’t just the odd millionaire who had bought stocks in ADDT, but pensioners as well. Gaskell-Bridger had printed up impressive brochures boasting of the drone detectors his company was producing to make it safer for civilians in war zones to avoid becoming collateral damage. With code written by expert programmers who had previously worked for the government, he had set up the company to own the lifesaving software they were writing. He claimed he was talking to drone manufacturers about collaborating with them to make his proposed AI compatible with the drones’ friend or foe recognition systems—in an international cooperative bid to make drone warfare more humane so that only terrorists and not children would get blown up. He was in line for government military contracts worth tens of millions, which would shore up the company’s share prices. He’d had charts printed up and everything. After the initial investments were paid in, he had videos produced of the first units of the ADDT coming off the factory: sleek black boxes the size of footballs with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled. There was a very professional-looking video of a prototype of the unit being tested in an open field in Hertfordshire: a noncombat drone flew while a laptop computer was operating the anti-drone unit to communicate with the drone’s recognition software. The computer displayed an interface that showed the drone sending back a signal acknowledging the unit’s signal and not targeting the dummies set up on the field. There was additional footage of the units being packed into boxes and being shipped to the Middle East.

  Of course, all of this was complete bollocks.

  As Benjamin Lee, our resident techie, had explained back at the office, “First of all, how would they be able to communicate with a drone’s operating system? Those are bloody classified, otherwise every enemy soldier and terrorist would hack them while they’re airborne. Second of all, that drone in their demo video is CGI. They just put extra grain in the footage to hide that.”

  We did our search and found that yes, Gas
kell-Bridger was selling units to Iraq, but there was no record of any anti-drone technology in the area. Marcie Holder even used her CIA contacts to confirm this for us. Yet Gaskell-Bridger had sold a hundred units to the Iraqi government at thirty grand a pop. Olivia checked with her hacker contacts and found that no one had written any code or program that had succeeded in interacting with the combat drones currently in operation anywhere. Benjamin reckoned anyone could make sleek little black boxes with some motherboards stuck in them to look like serious tech.

  We were well aware of all this as we sat in Gaskell-Bridger’s boardroom listening to his effusive speech about wanting to expand the company and make the ADDT more accessible to countries that really needed it. And how Sunny Rajaratnam was the perfect partner to do it.

  THREE

  In the corner of my eye, a goddess watched.

  She was enjoying the show we were putting on, as if it was all for her. If only my colleagues could see her . . . No, thank God my colleagues couldn’t see her.

  O Bagalamukhi, I see you and know why you are here. My job is always a good show for you, isn’t it? We deal in truth and deceit, as you do. You might as well be the patron god of our business.

  The gods were looking awfully flash these days. Whenever they showed up, I could recognize them by their blue skin and the symbols of their power—the headdresses, the weapons, the scepters, the lotuses in their hands—but they wore what everyone was wearing on the streets of London. Ganesha, watching over us from on high in his infinite patience and wisdom, wore a baseball cap and bomber jacket. Shiva had taken to nice suits. Kali seemed to like to mix it up on the streets and wear a leather jacket and jeans. And Bagalamukhi—today she was wearing an expensive tracksuit, texting the other gods about what we were up to and having a laugh.

  We locked eyes (something I usually avoided) and she winked, giving me the thumbs-up.

  I supposed they approved. I seemed to be an endless source of entertainment for them. Such was my lot. #Myownpersonalholyfool

  She was texting now. I knew what would come next. She was telling her mates the show was about to start and they should come watch. It would be a giggle.

  Social engineering was all about performance, of course, and it was my turn. I was wearing an expensive silver silk suit and tie with an Armani scarf and overcoat, my eyes hidden behind a ludicrous pair of large sunglasses, all the more to make me look so incredibly rich that I could look and say whatever the hell I wanted without being told off.

  I nodded sagely at everything Gaskell-Bridger said and waited for him to finish talking.

  “Any questions?” he asked, eagerly, nervously.

  I looked at him, his middle-aged paunch, his respectable suit far less expensive than mine, the desperate gleam in his eye, the type I used to see in my secondary school students when I knew they were lying and they were afraid I would call them on it.

  “The gods are here with us,” I said, trying not to oversell the thick stereotypical accent that would have made Peter Sellers cringe.

  Julia and Mark nodded sagely. Ken and Clive stifled giggles. Gaskell-Bridger smiled, uncertainty creeping across his face.

  “The gods are always with us,” I continued. “In fact, they’re standing in the room with us now!”

  Gaskell-Bridger looked to the corner of the room where I pointed, a bit alarmed. He didn’t see anyone there. Only I did. Bagalamukhi had texted the family to come and see the show. Sure enough, Shiva, Kali, Vishnu, even Ganesha with his sage elephant head—the lot of them that bothered with our petty dealings—were there.

  “They watch in judgment, and everything we do adds to our tally. So what we do today is of great importance.”

  “Amen,” said Mark.

  Am I entertaining you, my lords and ladies of the sky? Am I showing you a good time? I hope so, since I’m here making an utter prat of myself and blowing off a bit of steam, a bit of on-the-job catharsis.

  So yes, Mark was well into my bringing the gods into this op. My colleagues by now all knew I saw gods. A few months ago, Mark had noticed I was glancing off to the side of the office and reacting to Kali hanging around my desk again, then asked me about it when we were up on the roof sharing a spliff. He’d suspected for a while, ever since I bought some pills off him to try to stop the visions. I came clean there, and decided to tell both Roger and Cheryl about it, telling them they had every right to sack me if they thought I was too mentally unstable and risked compromising my work.

  And they were all right with it.

  My boss Roger had been perfectly happy with my work for the past year. His reasoning was that given the crazy shit we put up with in our cases, my condition, if anything, helped me do the job better, so who was he to judge?

  “You’re the sanest bugger in the room, in fact,” he said. “So more power to the gods, I say.”

  Mark found it terribly exciting. He envied me seeing gods without the need for psychoactive drugs. In fact, he was appalled when I tried to get pills from him to stop seeing them. As far as he was concerned, I should carry on, “the more the merrier.” Olivia thought it was interesting, and it wasn’t unusual for her since she prayed to Chinese deities and consulted a fortune-teller in Chinatown. Marcie had always known because she’d secretly vetted me back when Roger hired me, and had seen my medical records. Benjamin just thought it was fun. Ken and Clive could take or leave the gods, as long as they got to fuck someone up along the way. Julia continued to monitor my condition, but she was my girlfriend, so she was more privy to my worries about my sanity than the rest of them. Cheryl didn’t offer any opinion beyond occasionally asking me how I was doing. God knows what she really thought of it, but she made it clear she didn’t have a problem with me at all.

  Back to the present:

  I spoke of gods to Gaskell-Bridger in the most matter-of-fact manner, as if I were just discussing the weather. That was the best way to sell madness. (I didn’t speak in tongues. That would have been overcooking it. I drew the line at speaking in tongues.)

  “Mr. Rajaratnam is a great man,” Julia said without a trace of irony, putting her palms together in supplication. Somehow, we’d all decided there was no such thing as laying it on too thick here.

  “A great man, indeed.” Mark jumped in, following suit with his palms and bowing. “This is why your company is a good fit for his plans.”

  “We all do our part to create Nirvana on Earth,” I said sagely. “You, Mr. Gaskell-Bridger, are securing your place in paradise.”

  Gaskell-Bridger nodded eagerly. I was sure he didn’t give a toss about any of this, as long as he got Rajaratnam’s money. Ken and Clive stood at the back of the room and settled into stone-faced stoicism. They would much rather have been dragging Gaskell-Bridger into an alley and kicking the shit out of him.

  We were all wearing pin-cameras on our lapels, recording Gaskell-Bridger and every detail of his speech and his office, the footage streaming back to our servers at Golden Sentinels, where Marcie, Benjamin, and Olivia sat watching at their computers and recording every second.

  “I have heard enough. My people will draw up plans,” I said.

  And with that, we were out of there. Gaskell-Bridger even came down to wave good-bye as we drove away in our big, black Mercedes.

  The next thing to do was to lead him on with a sense of momentum. We followed up with phone calls reiterating interest in buying a controlling interest in Gaskell-Bridger’s company and expanding it, opening a factory in India to manufacture more of the ADDT units. Plans were being drawn up by Rajaratnam’s team, which was really Benjamin indulging in some amateur engineering and architectural design. Julia promised to send Rajaratnam’s bank details, an elite private establishment that was really a dummy account created by Olivia, with the plan to open an escrow account for depositing the first payments. Mark asked Gaskell-Bridger to start transferring his company’s funds to the escrow account so that Rajaratnam’s money people could start properly budgeting and allocating the
funds.

  Contracts were duly drawn up. Gaskell-Bridger signed them. Eagerly. He did everything eagerly. But who wouldn’t be eager if they were being given nearly a hundred million pounds? He didn’t know that the hundred million pounds was vapor. The forty-five million he transferred into the escrow account, however, were very real. The investors’ money, in fact. What was left after Gaskell-Bridger spent it on champagne parties, holidays in Monte Carlo, and expensive furs for his wife and call girls? Marcie and Mark had drawn a detailed psychological profile for Gaskell-Bridger once we started researching him. We shadowed him for weeks, noting his routines, his watering holes, his favorite shops, his sports clubs. We knew whom he played squash with, how average he was, how long he liked to stay in the sauna.

  That was how we knew which buttons to push by the time Mark contacted him posing as “financial advisor to Sunny Rajaratnam.”

  Julia kept Gaskell-Bridger on the hook with regular phone calls where I would get on the line to talk about karma and the gods and our great work again. Sunny Rajaratnam was back in Mumbai running his telecoms company but taking time out to inspect the sites where the new ADDT factory was being built. All this to distract Gaskell-Bridger while Olivia tallied up the money and set to work.

  FOUR

  I haven’t mentioned my friend David Okri yet. David and I were close back in university. David was the one who got me this job at Golden Sentinels. David was the agency’s lawyer and had been approached by one of his other solicitor friends to see if the agency might be able to help Gaskell-Bridger’s investors. David was the one who introduced the investors to Roger and Cheryl, who in turn gave it to Mark Oldham as primary since he was good with the complicated cases. Marcie Holder was probably qualified, too, but she insisted on sticking to her chosen area of expertise, which was celebrity clients’ needs. David was a very good lawyer and would never suggest anything criminal. That was why he insisted on client confidentiality and usually recused himself from hearing anything that might constitute a crime.